Branwell’s literary output, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, was fantastic. The complete history of the kingdom of Angria in nine parts, including several long stories and many poems, covers sheet after sheet of manuscript, all in microscopic handwriting. These manuscripts, scattered as they are today, and housed in various collections throughout the country, might—after years of study—give the patient reader some idea of this extraordinary conception.
Here was this imaginary colony, situated where we should find Ghana and Nigeria today, founded by the original soldier adventurers when Branwell was eleven or twelve years old; then split into kingdoms, united into an empire, given a written constitution and an army, its geography and population noted in minute particular, relief maps drawn, military and political history recorded, the life stories of the individual leaders, with their personal appearance, qualities, failings and emotions, all described in detail; the whole a gigantic fantasy conjured up in the imagination of a brother and sister who were constantly separated by the sister’s school term, and neither of whom had any personal experience of the world outside their own small neighbourhood.
Those manuscripts of Branwell’s which have been transcribed, the poems and stories which have been printed, show no outstanding literary merit. Manner and style are crude, the events described betray the young author’s naïve preoccupation with gambling and dissipation, the most deadly sins, perhaps, to a boy brought up by a Methodist aunt and an evangelical father. Nevertheless, although many a poet and novelist scribbles in adolescence, foreshadowing maturer work to come, not many found a colony and people it, as this boy and his sister founded Angria, so shaping its history and the lives of its people that to its creators the colony became a living entity.
In August, 1836, Branwell, for the purpose of reference, summarized the early life of his hero, Alexander Percy, intending to expand it later.
This child, in the first years of his life, was a beautiful angelic looking being with golden hair and blue eyes, and a musical voice, and of a soul capricious, passionate, indulged, and bent with amazing devotion towards the science of music, for which he discovered a passion in his earliest infancy that only strengthened as it grew into a soul-wrapping sort of Idolatry. He lived in music, and when disengaged from his grand pursuit he wandered about or laid himself down for hours on hours in the stately park or girdling woods beneath the glorious skies of an African summer afternoon. The rich luxuriance of nature, the deep blue of heaven, the gold and brightness of the clouds, the dazzling effulgence of the sun, filled his unreasoning but sensitive spirit with a delight which he could not express or attempt to name. It was the same when he accompanied his mother to her cottage on the shores of the Atlantic, where, seated on her lap, he would gaze for hours at the wide waltzing waving sea; the same at night when he stole out of the crowded and dazzling rooms of his father’s hall to look at the moon or stars in the midnight sky. It was that feeling too which led him to be for ever talking about religion, the Bible, and heaven; or wishing that to go there he might die; but with opening youth came other feelings too; a most ungovernable spirit withal, passionate and resentful, embroiling him constantly with his hard, heartless and bilious looking father, but throwing him straight away into the acquaintanceship and paths of the drunken drover old Robert Sdeath, whose hardened soul being fired on him would not leave him, but drew him on from one thing to another till even his noble but indulgent mother could not shut her eyes to the excesses of her darling son.
While still in his teens Alexander married the Lady Augusta Romana di Segovia, a beautiful but unscrupulous lady, who subsequently arranged that Sdeath should murder her husband’s father for the sake of the estate which Alexander would then inherit. The lady herself was subsequently dispatched with poison, and Alexander married
Mary Henrietta Wharton, daughter of Lord Georg Wharton of Alnwick, Nigrita… a young and lovely creature, with a generous heart and quick warm feeling, with an imagination that spoke in the centre of her eyes, and a heart that could hardly last without friends and friendship round it.
When she died of consumption Alexander, his heart broken, ‘commenced a run of hollow heartless dissipation’, and was imprisoned for treachery against his superior officer. Threatened by his creditors and by the husband of a lady whom he had seduced, in despair he decided to leave the shores of his native Africa.
But once out on the open sea his active unprincipled mind began to speculate upon some method of retrieving his broken fortunes. Piracy with his men and means seemed the likeliest way. By crossing the Atlantic northward into the seas of Europe he entered the lawless and bloody trade, taking and cruelly destroying vessels, till his name the ‘Rover’ became a terror of the sea. Coasting along S.America and thence to the West Indies, he tracked back again towards Norway, through the British seas into the Mediterranean, and finally, almost exhausted with melancholy and restless as Cain, he ordered the vessel home under Sdeath and landed alone on the Coast of Sidon. How he wandered through Palestine, or how he returned toward Africa, is not known, for he will never tell it, but in 1824 he appeared on a sudden at Percy Hall before his brother and his child after an absence of six dark and bloody years.
The outlines of the history of his infernal world completed, Branwell, still far from weary of its wars and rivalries, reviewed the many pages with the idea of describing in greater detail the highlights of his hero’s career. Alexander Percy, ex-Rogue, now Earl of Northangerland, was by this time a man past middle age, thrice married, with two sons whom he detested, a daughter, Mary Henrietta, Duchess of Zamorna, whom he adored, and an illegitimate daughter by a French mistress; though this illegitimate daughter, Caroline, does not appear in the Angrian series much before 1838 or 1839.
‘If Alexander Rogue looked like Satan, the prince of darkness,’ Branwell wrote of his jaded hero,
Lord Northangerland looked like Lucifer, Star of the Morning. And the sneer was here before me too, but it was changed from what I had seen before. It was a sneer of calm contempt at himself and nature, not of fierce hatred of his enemies and mankind. I acquit this man of any feeling whatsoever for man or nation, or the welfare of any state or kingdom. I acquit him of kindly affection to society and happiness. I could not call him cold and icy stoical: say rather, hot as flame…
To kill off this being who so possessed his creator was out of the question. Nor must he be allowed to fade into old age. Branwell’s answer was to return to Percy’s youth and describe him through the eyes of a discarded mistress, telling the tale, in prose and verse, of how Harriet O’Connor, later Harriet Montmorency, wife of Percy’s friend and ally, left husband for lover, was deserted by Percy and died.
Hitherto Branwell had always written through the character of Percy himself, or as Charles Wentworth, Angrian poet and historian, or the nobleman Baron Richton; now, as the artless and passionate young Harriet, he described in verse not only the pangs and anguish of adulterous love but the torment of religious doubt succeeding it. The switch in sex is interesting.
Fragments of Angrian tales, suggestions in poems, all give tantalizing hints of this Harriet, who met Percy when he was paying court to his first wife, the Italian Augusta di Segovia. At one moment Percy and Harriet even appear to be rivals in love for Augusta, an emotional state of affairs foreshadowing life in present-day Chelsea rather than nineteenth-century Haworth.
The death of Harriet’s older sister Caroline was to launch Branwell into a series of poems which, showing the influence of Blackwood’s John Wilson combined with his own memories of his sister Maria, might be read aloud to both his aunt and his father without fear of disapprobation.
They came—they pressed the coffin lid
Above my Caroline,
And then, I felt, for ever hid
My sister’s face from mine!
There was one moment’s wildered start –
One pang remembered well –
When first from my unhardened heart
The tears of anguish fell:
That swell of thought which seemed to fill
The bursting heart, the gushing eye,
While fades all present good or ill
All else seems blank—the mourning march
Before the shades of things gone by.
The proud parade of woe,
The passage ’neath the churchyard arch,
The crowd that met the show.
My place or thoughts amid the train
I strive to recollect, in vain –
I could not think or see:
I cared not whither I was borne
And only felt that death had torn
My Caroline from me.
The poem describing Harriet’s fall from grace is in a different key from the account of her subsequent desertion by Percy. It seems clear that there must have been a time-lag between the writing of the two poems. The account of Harriet’s desertion begins thus:
At dead of Midnight, drearily
I heard a voice of horror say
‘Oh God, I am lost for ever!’
After many lines imploring the Almighty for pardon, and wondering whether ‘fires infernal’ will hold her down in ‘hideous pains’, it continues:
Oh, I led a life of sinning,
At her beck, whose soul was sin;
Yet my spirit ceased repining
If a look from him ’twould win!
Bright that band with hellish glory
Circling round Augusta’s throne,
Dark those hearts whose influence o’er me,
Led me in and lured me on! –
All their Mirth I knew was hollow,
Gain and guilt their path and aim,
Yet I cared not what might follow –
Deaf to warning, dead to shame.
What to me if Jordan Hall
Held all Hell within its wall,
So I might in his embrace
Drown the misery of disgrace!
Many lines further on poor Harriet admits that ‘faces blushed to name her name, and silence hushed the adulterer’s shame’, and that:
Three short words might speak her lot –
Fallen, Forsaken, and Forgot!
Despite the absurdity of some of the verse, the reader feels a sense of regret that so much has been left unsaid. Jordan Hall, the abode of the wicked Lady Augusta di Segovia, which ‘held all Hell within its wall’, must have whipped its creator to a high pitch of excitement; while the wicked Augusta herself was surely a forerunner of Emily’s Augusta, fatal heroine of her Gondal saga, begun that very year.
There can be no doubt that Branwell and Emily, during the time when Charlotte and Anne were at Roe Head, collaborated in ideas, if not in actual incidents or verse. One of the earlier Angrian tales, ‘A Leaf From An Unopened Volume’, attributed to Charlotte and now in the library of A. Edward Newton, contains so many names used later by Emily in her Gondal poems that it may indeed be a contribution by the younger sister to the Angrian series.
This story, dated 1834, concerns the second generation of the Angrian dynasty. The names of the Duke of Zamorna’s sons and daughters—the Archduke Julius (later Emperor), the Archdukes Adrian and Alexander, and the Princess Irenë—and her maid of honour Zorayda, who played the guitar, are too reminiscent of Emily’s later creations not to leave the reader with a strong impression that when Emily began her Gondal saga she did so as an off-shoot from Angria.
Emily’s and Branwell’s poems, during the year 1837, also have lines that suggest close collaboration.
Emily: O God of heaven! the dream of horror,
The frightful dream is over now;
The sickened heart, the blasting sorrow,
The ghastly night, the ghastlier morrow,
The aching sense of utter woe.
Branwell: ‘O God!’—she murmured forth again,
While scarce her shattered senses knew
What darkness shrouded from her view –
‘Oh, take from me this sick’ning pain!
That frightful dream, if t’was a dream,
Has only wakened me to die;
Yet death and life confounded seem
To inward thought and outward eye!’
Life at the Parsonage, and at Roe Head too, would seem about this time to have struck a note of discord. Religious doubts were seizing all four young Brontës at once. Charlotte, still torn between her friends Ellen and Mary, had written to the former: ‘I wish I could live with you always… If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own I do think we might live and love on till Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness’, and later in the same year, in December of 1836: ‘If I could always live with you and daily read the Bible with you, if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught from the same pure fountain of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better, than my evil wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be.’
Certainly gentle Ellen Nussey knew nothing of Jordan Hall and its delights. The fervour of Charlotte’s letters betrayed the fever within, the guilty knowledge that in a few weeks’ time she would be home for the holidays, free to indulge herself in the amours of her hero Zamorna and his new mistress. The infernal world would have her in grip again.
During the Christmas holidays of 1836–37 both Branwell and Charlotte endeavoured to atone for the secret delight that filled them when they were writing the Angrian stories by composing and revising laborious verse, in the belief that, if it were ever to win recognition, it must set a high moral and religious note. Poets they were determined to be, rather than storytellers, verse could be sent to Mr Wordsworth and Mr Southey for criticism, but seduction and passion must remain hidden from any eyes but their own.
Charlotte wrote to Southey and Branwell to Wordsworth, Branwell enclosing a long poem describing the infant Percy asleep, before he had fallen from grace. In his letter he explained: ‘What I send you is the prefatory scene of a much longer subject, in which I have striven to develop strong passions and weak principles struggling with a high imagination and acute feelings, till, as youth hardens towards age, evil deeds and short enjoyments end in mental misery and bodily ruin.’ He was alluding, of course, to his whole Percy saga, and a word of encouragement from the greatest English poet of the day would no doubt have set him to work upon a more polished version of what he hoped would be an epic poem longer than Wordsworth’s Prelude. He received no answer. His letter disgusted the ageing poet, who told Southey that it contained ‘gross flattery and plenty of abuse of other poets’. In fairness to Branwell this letter, often reproduced, must be quoted again. It was dated January 19th, 1837.
Sir—I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgement upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this nineteenth [actually twentieth] year of my life I have lived among secluded hills, where I could neither know what I was or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke—out of the impulse and feelings of the mind; nor could I help it, for what came, came out, and there was the end of it. For as to self-conceit, that could not receive food from flattery, since to this hour not half-a-dozen people in the world know I have penned a line.
But a change has taken place now, sir; and I am arrived at an age wherein I must do something for myself; the powers I possess must be exercised to a definite end, and as I don’t know them myself I must ask of others what they are worth. Yet there is not one here to tell me; and still, if they are worthless, time will henceforth be too precious to be wasted on them.
Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured to come before one whose works I have most loved in our literature, and who most has been with me a divinity of the mind, laying before him one of my writings, and asking of him a judgement of its contents. I must come before someone from whose sentence there is no appeal; and such a one is he who had developed the theory of poetry as well as its practice, and both in such a way as to claim a place in the memory of a thousand years to come.
My aim, sir, is to push out into the open world, and for this I trust not poetry alone; that might launch the vessel, but could not bear her on. Sensible and scientific prose, bold and vigorous efforts in my walk of life, would give a further title to the notice of the world; and then again poetry ought to brighten and crown that name with glory. But nothing of all this can ever be begun without means, and as I don’t possess these I must in every shape strive to gain them. Surely, in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward.
Once again Branwell had made a slip. The phrase ‘not a writing poet worth a sixpence’ condemned him in the eyes of the elderly Wordsworth. Apart from this, the letter was sincere and well expressed. The nineteen-year-old boy then described what manner of poem he was enclosing, and ended:
Now, to send you the whole of this would be a mock upon your patience; what you see does not pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child. But read it, sir; and as you would hold a light to one in utter darkness—as you value your own kindheartedness—return me an answer if but one word, telling me whether I should write on, or write no more. Forgive undue warmth, because my feelings in this matter cannot be cool; and believe me, sir, with deep respect,
Your really humble servant,
P. B. Brontë.
It would not have cost Wordsworth five minutes to acknowledge the letter. One word of encouragement, the poem perhaps unread, and the boy would have faced the year with at least the hope of breaking through into what must have seemed to him an impenetrable world. No answer came. Neither from Wordsworth, nor from the editor of Blackwood’s, to whom Branwell had also written ten days before. It is very evident that he had no sense of judgement where either his own work was concerned, or that of established poets. The slackest, most sentimental lines in the poems of others were taken as the criterion of what should be; he could not distinguish between the worst of Wilson and the best of Cowper.
The poem that he sent to Wordsworth contained such lines as:
Oh, how I could wish to fly
Far away through yonder sky,
O’er those trees upon the breeze
To a paradise on high!
A Sunday School child of seven could have done better. Possibly this was, in fact, the effort of Branwell at a much earlier age—perhaps inspired by Mr Brontë’s Cottage Poems—put away in a drawer, and revised with the mistaken idea that this sort of stuff would appeal to the Lakeland poet.
Somewhere among the same pile of manuscript, had Branwell delved a little further, he would have found a piece of his Angrian prose.
Why, listen, and know what refined vengeance is. I’d have him whole, sound and hearty, upright on his pins and standing at one end of a table. I’d have him see what me and Simpson had been doing yesterday, no, the day before yesterday; a darkish room, but enough light to see ill with; a table, I say, and us beside it; the wind and rain blowing a racket without, and not a soul around to care for Him! Yes, Him I say (exalting his voice to a discordant screech), His son, his eldest son, holding him in his arms as if he were going to baptise him; the priest at hand with a right red iron in his paws; whereon, we stand, and here we go, have at it; then in goes the iron, first into one eye and then into the other, hissing and searing to the brain. Off I ships the pitch cap and we shakes him to the skies—this is the way my boys; this is the torment… Bring him out to make sport for the Philistines—Maew, Maew…
What a relief for Branwell to submerge in the infernal world after striving to please Mr Wordsworth! If he were not Percy or Quashia, Percy’s Ashantee ally, he could turn himself into the comparatively new character of Henry Hastings, reeling home through the streets of Rosses town after a night of debauchery and drunkenness. ‘ “The “coach of Hell!” cried I, “Lend me a hand, Who-hoop! And now, off as if Daddy were at th’ back of us!” ’
The swing from violence to exultation, and back to despair again; an icy December crippling poor Tabby so that the girls had to do the work of the house… Branwell, choosing his piece of bathos, perhaps written months or years before, to send to Wordsworth, had not the discernment to pick out the scrap he had scribbled a few days previously, on January 13th, 1837, looking from the snow-bound parsonage to the white graves below.
However young and lovely round
Fresh faces court my frozen eye,
They’ll only desecrate the ground
Where fairer forms corrupting lie;
And voices sweet and music’s thrill,
And laughter light as marriage strain,
Will only wake a ghostly chill,
As if the buried spoke again.
All—all is over, friend and lover,
Need never seek a refuge here,
Though they may sweep my heart strings over,
No music will awake the ear.
I’m dying away in dull decay,
I feel and find the sands are down,
The evening’s latest lingering ray
At last from my wild Heaven has flown.
I feel and find that I am cast
From hope, and peace, and power, and pride,
A withered leaf on autumn’s blast,
A scattered wreck on ocean’s tide.
Morbid, possibly, a word ill-chosen here and there, but surely better verse.
Mr Brontë and his sister-in-law have both been blamed for intolerance, and for creating an atmosphere of religious gloom at the parsonage. The truth would seem otherwise. Neither sisters nor brother ever blamed father or aunt for their own passing moods of despondency. Ellen Nussey, loved and favoured visitor to the house, remembered only ‘Miss Branwell being lively and intelligent, reading to Mr Brontë in the afternoons, finishing their discussions on what they had read when we all met for tea. The social life of her younger days she used to recall with regret; she gave one the idea that she had been a belle among her own home acquaintances. She took snuff out of a very pretty gold box, which she sometimes presented to you with a little laugh, as if she enjoyed the slight shock and astonishment visible in your countenance.’
Here was no Methodist dragon, frowning on high spirits, but a little lady who, though past her sixtieth birthday in 1837, believed herself the equal in culture of her nieces and nephew, and whose Georgian manners may well have had a smack of that eighteenth century which had seen her heyday. Where else but from their aunt did Charlotte and Branwell learn of balls and socials, the quizzings with eye-glasses, the tappings with a fan, that figured so largely in the Angrian world of romance?
It was conscience that brought Charlotte time and again to the verge of breakdown: fear that teaching and the infernal world were incompatible, guilt because her attraction towards Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor and Mary’s irresistible younger sister Martha—the piquant and fascinating ‘Patty’—tempted her to transform them into Zamorna’s bride and mistresses. Branwell was too close to Charlotte to remain unaware of his sister’s pangs of conscience. The pretty Mary Taylor made an exquisite peg on which to hang Mary Henrietta Percy—Alexander’s daughter and Zamorna’s bride—and how stimulating to invent an illegitimate younger sister Caroline (not the Caroline of the poem already quoted), who would have ‘Patty’ Taylor’s imperious lovable ways. Term-time would pass all the more quickly for Charlotte if he waved the magic wand.
Branwell’s trouble was not conscience but frustration. Frustration that at twenty he was still without the means of earning his living, that the home education of which his father was so proud had fitted him for nothing. Too late now for university. Too late now for the Royal Academy. The editor of Blackwood’s would not grant him an interview. How in heaven’s name was he to use the talents he believed himself to possess?
Tradition has it that about this time he went for a term as usher in a school, and that he left because the boys ‘ridiculed his downcast smallness’. The school has never been named. The story awaits confirmation. It was Emily who in the autumn of 1837 tried her luck away from home, teaching at Law Hill School near Halifax and staying there, according to Ellen Nussey, a grim six months.
The desire to earn money and thus win some measure of independence must have driven her to this step, which was so uncongenial to her nature; nevertheless, Law Hill cannot have been the hard labour it was thought to be. Too many poems written during those six months suggest moments of creative fever; and the headmistress, Miss Elizabeth Patchett, described in Mrs Chadwick’s In the Steps of the Brontës as ‘a very beautiful woman of forty-four wearing her hair in curls, a skilled horsewoman, whose daily walks with the girls were a prized recreation’, surely afforded some measure of interest and amusement to the hard-worked Emily, if only in her letters home.
Anne, unhappy with asthma—that complaint so often associated with anxiety—and her own religious doubts at Dewsbury Moor, whether Miss Wooler’s school had removed from Roe Head, suffered more, perhaps, than her loved sister at Law Hill. Anne’s consolation would be the memory of the thirty-four-year-old Moravian minister of religion, the Reverend James La Trobe, who during an illness at Roe Head had visited her several times, bringing a message of gentle hope and comfort very different from the stern creed taught at home.
Branwell had no such clerical support. Dissenting ministers were not for him, unless they could be made sport of in an Angrian tale. The Reverend Moses Saunders and the Reverend Winterbotham, Baptist preachers at Haworth, made glorious copy from time to time, and his fellow-brethren in the Three Graces Lodge, some of them also fellow-Conservatives, could be turned into Angrian revolutionaries fighting and drinking in the wilds of Africa, without ever being a whit the wiser. The red-haired, bespectacled ‘parson’s son’, Patrick to the village, with his book-learning and his ability to write minutes with both hands, was certainly an addition to the monthly Lodge meetings; but that every word and every action on the part of members and brethren was quietly recorded at the back of ‘Patrick’s’ mind, to be used in some Angrian tale the instant he got back to the parsonage, was something that Messrs. Hartley, Garnett, Sutcliffe, Heaton and the other gentlemen would never know. Even the local doctor would not escape notice, but must play his small part in an Angrian beer-house scuffle.
Branwell held the post of secretary to the Three Graces Lodge from June 12th to December 11th, 1837, writing the minutes on each occasion as well as acting as organist (in other words, playing the piano). During this time he possibly had more fun mocking the brethren on paper back at home than he did at the gatherings themselves. For once the awe and the freshness had worn off the Lodge meetings, the imp in his brain that gibed at all things dignified and sober could only have despised those fellow brethren who looked upon the meeting as a second Sunday school. The best part of the proceedings, no doubt, was when the Steward of the Spirit Cupboard produced refreshment, and John Brown, Worshipful Master, temporarily relaxed from his exalted position and made the company split their sides over Haworth’s past.
But even John, who could make anyone’s blood freeze in their veins when he had the mind, with his tales of coffins opening, and people buried alive, and shrouds displaced; who persuaded Branwell to spend a night alongside curate Hodgson in a haunted double-bed that heaved under its occupants, so frightening Branwell that he ran home to the parsonage in his night-clothes—even John, with his rough humour and warm personality, could not discuss the things that really mattered: books, poems, pictures, music, life.
There was no one of Branwell’s intellectual level in Haworth, when his sisters were away and his father was in no mood to sympathize. Almost certainly Mr Brontë would have discouraged Branwell from attempting to break into the literary or artistic worlds, on the grounds that there was no money to be made in either, except under rich or noble patronage. Better, he must have said, that his son should teach, like his sisters, or follow his own calling and go into the Church.
When the old generation talked in this fashion there was only one thing to do—ignore the advice. A fellow-student who had studied under Mr Robinson of Leeds told him he was wasting his time and talent trying to work in a bedroom studio at the parsonage. He ought to live in rooms in Bradford, and get introductions to people, who would sit for him and pay for their portraits.
Easy enough for Thompson to talk. How was Branwell to raise the funds? There was always, of course, his aunt… His aunt might possibly make some financial arrangement with her cousin by marriage, the Reverend William Morgan of Christ Church, Bradford, Branwell’s godfather. After all, she wanted him to have a successful career as much as anyone. He must do credit to her name.
Whether it was indeed his aunt who backed him, or Mr Morgan himself, or both, the upshot was that some time in 1838 Branwell achieved one of his ambitions. He had not had anything accepted by Blackwood’s Magazine, but he did become a lodger with Mr and Mrs Kirby of Fountain Street, Bradford, renting a room which he used as a studio, and returning home to the parsonage for weekends.
He was twenty, and it was the first time—save for the fruitless visit to London—that he was sleeping away from home, away from his father. It was the start of independence, the beginning, so he hoped, of a successful artistic future, and a break, however temporary, with the claims of the infernal world.