In January, 1831, Charlotte, now fourteen and a half, was sent to school again. Like Branwell, she was small for her age, and, as her schoolfriends told Mrs Gaskell later, ‘anything but pretty, her naturally beautiful hair of soft silky brown being then dry and frizzy-looking, screwed up in tight little curls; and so short-sighted she always appeared to be seeking something. She was very shy and nervous, and she wore a dark, rusty-green stuff dress of old fashioned make, detracting still more from her appearance.’
The new school was Roe Head, near Mirfield, not twenty miles from Haworth, standing back from the high road between Leeds and Huddersfield, and the headmistress was Miss Margaret Wooler, who ran the school in association with her sisters, Miss Catherine, Miss Marianne and Miss Eliza. Not two miles away lived an old friend of Charlotte’s father, the Reverend Hammond Roberson, who, with Mrs Franks of Huddersfield, a friend of Thornton days, had probably recommended Roe Head as being excellent in every respect, and quite unlike the former Cowan Bridge.
There seemed no reason for the decision to send Charlotte to school. She had grown beyond her aunt’s rather moderate instruction, but she could, and no doubt did, share Branwell’s lessons with their father. Teaching two clever children would not have put too heavy a burden on Mr Brontë’s shoulders; indeed, competition between the pair would have spurred the boy to greater achievement.
Possibly the intensity of the writing upstairs in the old nursery had become a puzzle to both father and aunt. The children were trying their eyes and becoming round-shouldered, and the cramped, minute script would affect the legibility of their handwriting later. Besides, the very secrecy of the game could be unhealthy. The adults could not but be aware of all the strange names and places mentioned between the two as if they existed in reality, what with nods and smiles and innuendoes, a sly allusion from Charlotte, a dramatic gesture from Branwell. It would do Charlotte good to mix with other girls of her own age—all this make-believe was not ‘fitty’, the aunt may have declared, using an apt Cornish expression.
She may have suggested that Branwell should go to school also. But Mr Brontë was adamant. Charlotte, yes; not the boy. Highly strung as he was, he would never survive the rough treatment of boarding school. The excitability of his nature would be misunderstood; and who, in a dormitory filled with mocking play-fellows, would distinguish between dream and nightmare or, worse still, those occasional nerve tremors which were perilously like convulsions? The boy was best at home, supervised by his father.
So Charlotte departed for Roe Head. The break in companionship came hardest upon Branwell. He and Charlotte were inseparable, and now, just as their ‘play’ had reached a new high peak of interest, she was to be taken from him. Emily and Anne made sorry substitutes, preferring to begin a ‘play’ of their own—largely copied from his invention, even using the same names for their paltry characters. He consoled himself as best he could by continuing the saga of Letters from an Englishman, which he would send his sister every week throughout the term, thus keeping her abreast of African news.
If Aunt Branwell and Mr Brontë hoped that separation would mean a break-up of the nonsense between brother and sister, and that Charlotte, with the wider interests of school life, would put away childish things, they were mistaken. A year and a half at Roe Head gave the young authoress, who had already written as many stories and edited as many magazines as her brother, a grounding in English grammar and geography. In these, it appeared, she was woefully ignorant, in spite of having helped to colonize the Guinea coast. She also improved her knowledge of French and history, and squeezed into her retentive mind every scrap of knowledge the Miss Woolers could impart to her. Nevertheless, the ‘play’ was going as strong as ever. The thought of it had been her solace through many a weary school day, and, what was more, the very persons of her school-fellows and teachers could be transformed into characters in it—unknown to themselves, very naturally.
Branwell could now add considerably to his list of characters, introducing not only the inhabitants of Haworth, whom he saw every day, but also the Miss Woolers of Roe Head, who could become the wives of his commanders. Miss Margaret, Charlotte’s headmistress, whose ‘long hair, plaited, formed a coronet, and whose long large ringlets fell from head to shoulders’, surely made an excellent Lady Zenobia Ellrington, future bride to Alexander Rogue. And Charlotte’s two friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, the first dark and quiet and gentle, the second fair, intelligent, and so pretty that the headmistress used to say she was ‘too pretty to live’, were ready-made heroines, only waiting to take their place upon the African shore.
They must never know, of course. Secrecy must be maintained. If anyone should ever discover about the play, read the hidden books, identify a living figure in one of their fictitious beings… there would be catastrophe. Charlotte impressed this upon her brother, less discreet than herself in conversation; and with a curious, half-conscious feeling that what they were inventing was somehow wrong, would be disapproved of and condemned by everyone but themselves, they called their creation ‘the infernal world’, as if Satan himself were Lord High Instigator.
By midsummer of 1832 Miss Branwell began to find the education of the two younger girls beyond her. The simplest, and indeed the most inexpensive solution in the pinched household was for Charlotte to return home and put her newfound knowledge to the teaching of her sisters. This she did. The four were reunited once again. The ‘play’ proceeded. There was still no question of Branwell going to school. His godfather and his mother’s cousin by marriage, the Reverend William Morgan, vicar of Bradford, may have suggested it, Mr Sunderland, the schoolmaster at Stanbury, may have urged it too—Mr Brontë remained firm. His son’s temperament would not permit of public school. Physically, the boy was healthy. His constitution was stronger than that of his sisters. Just as there is mystery in the illness of the little girls at Cowan Bridge, so is there something unexplained in the matter of Branwell’s schooling. No father, however fond, could have been quite so obstinate without some good reason which he preferred to keep as private as possible. Can the explanation be that Branwell had already begun to show symptoms of the fits which were to torment him, with ever-increasing frequency, towards the end of his life? Epilepsy, in the nineteenth-century mind associated with insanity, was a hardly mentionable affliction, one to be disguised at all costs: boarding-school, to such a boy, would be out of the question. Mr Brontë, blamed by many for indulging his only son, may have kept proud silence about an affliction which he hoped time would cure.
Meanwhile the wooden soldier Sneaky, alias Young Man Naughty, alias Alexander Rogue the rebel and pirate, was slowly developing into Alexander Percy, future Viscount Ellrington and Earl of Northangerland, the sinister and embittered individual whose many love affairs and changes of fortune were so unlike anything that could ever have happened, or was likely to happen, to a boy of sixteen. This character can only have been founded on Branwell’s ideal of the heroic figure he must himself have longed to be. This Branwell was not diminutive, bespectacled, home-taught, scribbling poems and stories with his left hand: he was over six feet high, auburn-haired and handsome, leading revolutions, felling rivals with a strong right hand.
The coming of adolescence brought a change not only to the style but to the subject matter of the two secret writers. Adventure gave place to romance. War was no longer of paramount importance. Love and intrigue—illicit love, especially—brought zest to those who wrote and those who listened. Moore’s Life of Byron opened new vistas, and old numbers of Blackwood’s were doubtless thumbed for the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, where matters which had hitherto been absorbed for the sheer delight of reading for reading’s sake took on suggestive meaning. What were the ‘bad things’ done by Lord Byron, and referred to—presumably with a shake of the head—by Professor John Wilson of Blackwood’s in the character of Christopher North? Just as fruitful, in a different way, were the snatches of gossip around Haworth itself, which, involving the local gentry and manufacturers, suddenly became fraught with possibility.
Charlotte, who had experienced the fever of schoolgirl passion for each of her friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor in turn, delighted to see them in the roles of anguished heroines, desperate for the passion of her own Byronic self—for the plain, intensely shy, seventeen-year-old ex-schoolgirl was none other than Arthur Wellesley, Marquis of Douro, soon to be Duke of Zamorna; though these same friends, to whom she wrote constantly from home, telling them how she taught her sisters and passed the days in a ‘delightful though somewhat monotonous course’, had not the slightest idea that they had changed identities not once but twice, that both had died and been revived, and one of them would perhaps become a Duchess.
Branwell, without the memory of school to whet his fancy, brought twisted touches to the collaboration—and the fact that, though most of the manuscripts are signed with Charlotte’s name, much of the handwriting is Branwell’s proves how close that collaboration was. Words half-digested and half-understood now scattered the pages. African maidens, seduced by colonist nobles, gave birth to monsters; heroes were no longer their fathers’ sons but the result of shameful passion; illegitimacy was rife in Africa—or Angria, as the largest kingdom was now called—and not only illegitimacy but incest too. The theme that occurred frequently, both now and in later stories, was that of a married man’s infatuation for his wife’s younger sister. That the theme had its origin, neither in Blackwood’s nor in Byronic literature, but in their own moorland parish, was admitted many years later by Charlotte herself, speaking to Mrs Gaskell in a moment of indiscretion. The story, connected with ‘the family of a woollen manufacturer, and moderately wealthy’, had, according to Mrs Gaskell, ‘made a deep impression on Charlotte’s mind in early girlhood’. Heard at secondhand, and misreported, the tale was not even true; but the Heatons of Ponden Hall and Bridge House, the family concerned, were to suffer many a transformation, in the course of time, at the hands of Charlotte, Branwell and Emily, too. A golden touch of imagination, combined with much romantic reading and ill-digested gossip dropping on young ears, brought the Heatons immortality.
In August, 1813, Elizabeth Heaton, youngest daughter of Robert Heaton and Elizabeth Murgatroyd, had been obliged to marry, suddenly and disastrously, a young shopkeeper from Gomersal, John Bates, who later ill-treated her. But at least he gave her baby a name, which was why Robert Heaton paid him to marry her. The poor eighteen-year-old bride endured two years of married life, and then returned home to Ponden Hall so ‘much emaciated, that there seemed little hope of her recovery’. She died a year later, within a few months of her mother, and it was these two who were said to ‘walk and weep in the garden, though both had long mouldered in their graves’. The brothers and sisters of the unhappy girl were married and middle-aged by the time Charlotte and Branwell and Emily heard the tale, Robert the younger living at Ponden Hall and his brother Michael at Royd House. What riches for inventive minds, what glut of material for adolescent authors!
Weaving the murky past of their father’s parishioners into fictitious Angrian amours was not the only occupation of Branwell and his sisters at this time. In 1834 a passion for drawing seized them, and Mr Brontë was persuaded to engage the services of a drawing-master, a Mr Robinson of Leeds, who had studied under Sir Thomas Lawrence and had even painted the Duke of Wellington himself, a feat which must certainly have recommended him to Charlotte, alias the Marquis of Douro.
Mrs Gaskell, years later, observed that the drawing-master was ‘a man of considerable talent, but very little principle’. She did not enlarge upon the subject, but the microscopic manuscripts of Mr Robinson’s pupils during this period, which Mrs Gaskell never read, give much prominence to the love life of Sir William Etty, a more famous contemporary of the Leeds artist. In one of the stories he turns out to be the illegitimate son of Alexander Percy himself—offspring of a fatal love affair between Branwell’s hero and an Italian countess.
The drawing-master certainly gave a fillip to imagination, and rather more besides; he encouraged in seventeen-year-old Branwell, always the first of the four to excel in any subject, an ambition to take up painting as a profession, an ambition which increased in intensity after a visit, in the summer of 1834, to an exhibition at Leeds given by the Northern Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts.
Mr Robinson himself contributed portraits to this collection, but the exhibit that caught Branwell’s eye, and the praise of the critics too, was not a painting but a piece of sculpture, a gigantic bust of Satan, modelled by a young man of twenty-three from Halifax called Joseph Bentley Leyland. Leyland had already been lauded for another colossal statue—Spartacus—which had been on exhibition in Manchester two years before. The bust of Satan was later taken to London, and the critic of the Morning Chronicle said of it that –
Mr Leyland has conquered the difficulties of his task with a masterly hand. The moment chosen by the sculptor is that celebrated passage in Milton’s poem, known as Satan’s Address to the Sun. The characteristic marks of the features are, a scornful lip, distended nostrils, and a forehead more remarkable for breadth than prominence, indicative of great mental capacity, bereft of moral principle. Mr Leyland has made his Satan a being, not fearful merely, but of that Satanic beauty which is so true to the conception of Milton.
Branwell, walking round the Leeds Gallery with the drawing-master, must have returned again and again to the bust of Satan. Here indeed was Alexander Percy, not just a figment of his own imagination, born in dreams from childhood, but cast in plaster before his very eyes, the conception of someone only six years older than himself, living at Halifax, not fifteen miles from Haworth. If Joseph Leyland had become famous at twenty-three, why not Branwell Brontë? He too could work in a studio at the parsonage, as Leyland had worked in his own home at Halifax; he would paint in oils as Leyland worked in clay, and later study in London, mix with other artists and sculptors as Leyland now did, and then return and have an exhibition at Leeds.
He may even have seen the young sculptor himself at the exhibition, and pressed his drawing-master for an introduction. Joseph Bentley Leyland, square-shouldered, dark, good-looking in a lazy, sardonic way, would have nodded briefly, giving a kind word perhaps to the excited red-haired lad, neither of them foreseeing that this was a significant meeting, the prelude to a friendship which would prove both curious and close.
Branwell, eager to find out all he could about the twenty-three-year-old sculptor, would learn from Mr Robinson that he was the son of a well-known bookseller and naturalist; that he had begun modelling in clay at sixteen; and that thanks to the patronage of a Halifax gentleman, Mr Christopher Rawson, who had a fine collection of Greek marbles, he had been able to study these until he felt himself sufficiently trained to send two original works to an exhibition in Manchester, one of the Thracian Spartacus, the other of his own greyhound. Noticed by the portrait painter Thomas Illidge, who praised his work, Leyland followed Illidge to London, and was at once taken up in artistic circles, meeting Francis Chantry, among others, and studying anatomy under the painter and writer Benjamin Robert Haydon—who had taught Constable and Landseer, and, living on the borderline of sanity for many years, was to kill himself in 1846.
Branwell went back to Haworth with his mind afire with plans for the future. His talk was now all of Leyland, of art, of London; and into the secret chronicles of their Angrian game came a new description of Alexander Percy, penned this time by Charlotte, who must also have seen Leyland’s bust of Satan in the gallery at Leeds.
The expression is somewhat pensive, composed, free from sarcasm except the fixed sneer of the lip and the strange deadly glitter of the eye, whose glance—a mixture of the keenest scorn and deepest thoughts—curdles the spectator’s blood to ice. In my opinion the head embodies the most vivid idea we can conceive of Lucifer, the rebellious archangel: there is such a cold frozen pride; such a fathomless power of intellect; such passionless yet perfect beauty… And then his eye… a gleam, scarcely human, dark and fiend-like… I felt as if he could read my soul, and had a harassing dread lest anything good might arise which would awake the tremendous power of sarcasm that I saw lurking in every feature of his face. Northangerland has a black drop in his veins that taints every limb, stagnates round his heart, and there in the very citadel of life turns the glorious bood of the Percies to the bitterest, rankest gall…
Branwell, in the midst of his account of the foundation of the Kingdom of Angria (some twenty-three pages of crowded microscopic handwriting), makes Percy exclaim:
Backward I look upon my life,
And see one waste of storm and strife,
One wrack of sorrows, hopes, and pain,
Vanishing to arise again!
That life has moved through evening, where
Continual shadows veiled my sphere;
From youth’s horizon upward rolled
To life’s meridian, dark and cold.
A few months later, changing from the minute print to his natural upright hand, Branwell continued in much the same vein, making his hero survey the past, bereft suddenly of his wife Mary:
Oh what is Man? A wretched being
Tossed upon the tide of time,
All its rocks and whirlpools seeing,
Yet denied the power of fleeing
Waves, and gulfs of woe and crime;
Doomed from life’s first bitter breath
To launch upon a sea of death,
Without a hope, without a stay
To guide him upon his weary way.
Cowper’s The Castaway had hit Branwell even harder than the sight of young Leyland’s Satan, and the story of Cowper’s bouts of insanity must have made him question his own fitful moods and doubts. What sin could be worse than death itself? What great betrayal brought a genius like Cowper to such a brink of horror and despair?
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment –
thus Cowper wrote, before one of his fits, deeming himself ‘damned below Judas’.
The point was—who could be saved? Was Lucifer himself cast down from heaven by the Almighty when the world was created, and told to tempt the men and women who should people it? Was James Hogg right, in his Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, when he asserted that Satan could walk about disguised as oneself, committing murders and fornication, and a hapless innocent being, who had committed no crime, yet be accused of them, the world being ignorant of the fact that Satan had usurped the body?
If so, it meant that Satan could seize his right hand and master it, compelling it to write what it had no desire to write. The prospect was too hideous to contemplate. The two sides of Branwell’s nature stood in balance. The one affectionate, ardent, devoted to his family and above all his father, hoping—for their sake as well as for his own—that either by writing or by painting he would prove so successful that not only they but the whole world would come to recognize his talent; the other diffident, mocking, sceptical, doubting as much in his own powers as in a Power above, and sometimes so fearful of the black abyss of Eternity that the only way to quieten apprehension would seem to be a plunge into vice and folly.
Already his belief in prayer had grown less; and that his early faith was lost is shown by his description of the death of Mary Percy, his hero’s second wife, written about this time:
She, so long as her strength held out, would often desire to be placed on a sofa at a great open window, and in the glorious sunshine would gaze with a smile upon the vast expanse of foliated vegetation, which, as she said, would accompany her to the grave.
[Percy’s] distressing and hopeless agony, which now he scorned to conceal, and which day after day was preying upon his heart till he had become savage and dark almost to madness, gave her thoughts of what he would be when the last hour came, and when she was gone forever.
She shuddered, and started to picture her strange, wild, wonderful husband, and she said, ‘He is so far past my sight that I have never seen the depths of his character. Oh, I do not think in the world there lives, or has ever lived, a man of so mighty a spirit and with so utterly unrestrained and unrestrainable a mind. He can never be bent or taught. I see it, but I do not know what his course shall be, or where it will end. Is he to live on, year on year, in his dark and dreaded melancholy, which I have seen darker than I dare tell?’
And at other times she would waste herself in tears of bitterness over her children, whom she would never see again, and who in all the storms and dangers of life would be tossed and threatened without a mother, or any knowledge of one. She pictured them in distress and sickness, but there was none to help, and the heart of this dying mother yearned in vain towards those who thought not of her, and who she felt would, if they lived, look on her grave as if no mother lay buried there…
‘Oh, Alexander, the place whither I am hastening, though unseen, is indeed awfully near. But there is something which still chains me. You are here, and I cannot bear to leave you. I know now that you cannot believe what I am certain is true—that you think me about to decay and perish forever. You have had given you such a mind that you could not fail under any circumstances to drink to its dregs the cup of sorrow. I dread to think of the deeds into which I see you entering. For them we may be parted for ever!’
What was all this to her husband? Why, unmixed torment. He was certain that what she said was a bright delusion; that an hour, perhaps, would reduce her to a corpse without life and spirit hereafter. He felt certain that under any circumstances they must part forever. That heart that was filling with black fierceness towards men, and defiance towards the visionary heavens, could make no promise of life without condemning sin. His arms were around her, her head was on his shoulder, and all he could say was with the parting embrace ‘O, Mary, Mary, a long, long farewell.’
Mary was dead. He seemed completely withered and silent. All the days that had been, the being that was gone, the thoughts, the voices, the scenes that were as if they had never been, all rushed back to his mind with overpowering directness. And he leant over the chill white wasted corpse till, numb with torture, his eye and his mind seemed to receive no impression. He spoke to no one, never raising his eyes, never dropping a single tear.
A magnificent horse stood near, ready for mounting. He was attired in a travelling cloak of mourning black.
‘Now then,’ he said, ‘now then, thou art gone, Mary… There is a long journey of life before me, and yet through all the wild turmoil that I shall pass through, however long I live, there shall be no voice of thine to lighten me. Till now, whatever was my misery, thou, Mary, wert the star that seemed to rise above me. Had’st thou never been alive, I should not now be alive; whilst thou lookedst always to me for guidance, I knew it was myself who leaned on thee. But here is the end of all these feelings. Here I feel that the wild visions of Heaven and a hereafter must be laid aside. What is there? Real death! Nothing but the body hidden in its coffin, dead and buried here beneath me, fast festering to decay. Through all, I know, Mary, that I have lost thee; and how can I feel a breeze of joy when ten, twenty years to come I shall have to say. “But thou art dust, Mary, now—gone long before—and I, while memory is fading and the past is sinking into nothing, shall know, as I do now, that I shall Never, Never See Thee More.” ’
The horse was mounted, and with fiery speed its rider urged it far from these agonizing remembrances, and away from Percy Hall.