A copy of Modern Domestic Medicine, by Thomas John Graham, M.D., was one of Mr Brontë’s most thumbed books. Notes in his handwriting cover the margins, the most profuse being found on those pages relating to the digestive organs. For Mr Brontë was a martyr to dyspepsia. It is instructive to learn that he found bicarbonate of soda ‘very injurious’, and was of the opinion that brown bread was irritating and heating to delicate, sensitive stomachs. He also noted that people should sleep with their heads to the north, and should make water once in three or four hours, neither more nor less. Three ounces of white poppy heads and half-an-ounce of elder flowers was good for piles—in short, the ‘dear saucy Pat’ to whom Cornish Maria Branwell had written in 1812 had become, through widowed loneliness, a hypochondriac.
There is also mention of wine, including sherry and madeira, at twenty-six to thirty shillings a dozen. This is unexpected, for Mr Brontë was president of the local Temperance Society. Perhaps there is some connection between the reference to wine and the letter which he wrote in October, 1838, to Mr Milligan, a surgeon at Keighley, thanking him for some antidote, the nature of which is not specified:
I have taken your prescription, and after due time, and after having fairly weighed the effects, I can from my own experience (which I judge to be the best authority) honestly assert, that nothing received from the hands of any medical gentleman has ever done me more good… I have frequently thought that you might have wondered why I was so particular in requiring your signature—the truth is, I wished to have Medical Authority for what I might do, in order that I might be able to counteract (under providence) the groundless, yet pernicious, censures of the weak, wicked and wily, who are often on the alert to injure those who are wiser and better than ourselves.
Mr Brontë continued to express his thanks, but gave no hint of the nature of the remedy he had found so beneficial. The phrasing of his letter suggests that, like St Paul, he may have been advised to take a little wine ‘for his stomach’s sake’, and feared that this might attract adverse comment. After all, the wine had to be bought, Haworth was a small place, and it is difficult to keep such things secret.
Significant for a different reason is his underlining, in the volume of Modern Domestic Medicine, a remedy for intoxication. ‘12 drops of pure water of ammonia, taken in a wineglass of milk and water, repeated in ten minutes and again in half-an-hour.’ A note in Mr Brontë’s hand says: ‘Cold water may answer best. B.’ The text continues:
Dr Plet relates the case of a young man of nervous and irritable constitution who on the 22nd of January, 1822, became so violently drunk that he did the most indecent things, and broke everything he could get at. When Dr Plet saw him he was armed with a knife and running at his parents, with his eyes glaring and his mouth foaming. 12 drops of water of ammonia were given him in a glass of sugar and water, and he was calmed immediately, ashamed and confused at his conduct.
The vicar of Haworth notes: ‘Only some little effect, only a small quantity, well diluted. B. 1837.’ One can assume from this that at some time—or perhaps more than once—during 1837 the drops of ammonia, ‘well diluted’, were indeed applied: not to himself, very naturally, but possibly to an overexcited Branwell. If the vicar took wine for his stomach’s sake the son must have been aware of the fact, and did the same—though for a less innocuous reason. The Temperance Society knew him no more. When a young man has reached his majority, as Branwell did in June, 1838, he will not be dictated to by a retiring, elderly parent.
Someone slept ill within the parsonage walls, though whether it was Branwell, Emily, Charlotte, Anne or even Mr Brontë himself the volume of Domestic Medicine does not reveal. The only hint is the ‘B. 1838’ beside the heading Nightmare. The note reads:
Dr McNash, who has written very ably on the philosophy of sleep, has justly described the sensation of nightmare as being the most horrible that oppress human nature—an inability to move during the paroxysm—dreadful visions of ghosts, etc. According to Dr Buchan people, when oppressed with the nightmare, moan in their sleep, and should be awakened.
Did Mr Brontë, a night-shirted figure, candlestick in hand, go to the back bedroom where his son lay sleeping on May 14th of that year, the date scribbled in Branwell’s hand beneath a poem expressing the agony of Harriet?
O Percy! Percy! where art thou? –
I’ve sacrificed my God for thee,
And yet thou wilt not come to me!…
Methought I saw a sudden beam
Of passing brightness through the room
Like lightening vanish—Percy, come!
Leave me not in the dark; t’is cold,
And something stands beside my bed –
Oh, loose me from its icy hold
That presses on me! Raise my head –
I cannot breathe!…
Mr Brontë knew nothing of Harriet, nothing of Azrael, angel of Death—transcribed two days before—nothing of a story called Wuthering Heights, later to be read aloud at the Cross Roads Inn, but perhaps existing even now in a first draft which Branwell had been permitted to see:
… My fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in—let me in!’… As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear… ‘Begone!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.’ ‘It is twenty years,’ mourned the voice, ‘I’ve been a waif for twenty years!…’
No panacea for those dreams now; the damage had been done long since, in childhood. The unconscious fears of the sleeping Branwell filled the parsonage with phantoms, the dread of premature disease and death conjuring up the spirit of the lost Maria who wandered in eternity, haunting her brother all his life.
Terror vanished with the day. Poems could remain unfinished, manuscripts be cast into a drawer, paintings left to dry upon the easel. Life was all important—visiting new scenes, meeting new people, forgetting all the ghosts which came by night. Activity was what Branwell most desired.
The whole world was changing. He could not impress the fact strongly enough upon his father and aunt. The invention of the steam engine, the coming of the railway, had altered, was in the process of altering out of all recognition, the face of the countryside. Soon no one would travel by road at all, but go by train from one end of the country to the other. This would not greatly affect the older generation; but for the young, for people like himself, it meant new opportunities, new ventures, a social revolution and nothing would ever be the same again.
No doubt such talk was received quietly at the parsonage. Neither Mr Brontë nor his sister-in-law had any desire to travel, either by coach or rail. Their attitude must have been exasperating to Branwell. Movement excited him—the hiss of steam, the power of engines, the talk of engineers employed upon construction. It was lively, it was new, it belonged to the future. In 1839 he talked less of his painting. His enthusiasm was all for the railway. Whenever opportunity could be found he would go over to Hebden Bridge or Todmorden and watch the work in process, for the line from Manchester to Leeds was to pass through the Todmorden valley.
The canal running from Littleborough to Todmorden and passing Sowerby, Luddenden Foot and Hebden Bridge was the chief means of transport for stores and material to be used in the construction of the railway. Every day barges travelled to and fro, anchoring for the night very often in the cul-de-sac, or ‘basin’, at Luddenden Foot, when the bargees would spend their evenings at the Woodman, the Weavers Arms or the Anchor and Shuttle. These men fascinated Branwell. They were a law unto themselves, rowdy, rough, coarse, but of fine physique; these were the people he would prefer to draw and paint; not dull, drab creatures like Mr and Mrs Kirby.
Bargees—or ‘boaties’, as they were called—cared for nothing and no one. They were travelling gypsies, drinking, fighting, laughing. Their way of life was crude, but it was free. Branwell felt at ease with them. They did not know that he was ‘parson’s son’ from Haworth; they did not ask who he was, they did not care. All they saw was a little red-haired chap who glanced up at them from behind his spectacles and smiled. They welcomed him aboard their barges. He showed no side. He made them laugh. This, Branwell must have thought, was even better than the George at Bradford; because in the George, or at the Union Cross in Halifax, the poets he met had succeeded in getting their poems published and the artists had sold their pictures, while he, Branwell, was still an apprentice and a nonentity in their eyes. With the boaties it was different; he would feel anonymous, secure. The knowledge, too, that his father would disapprove, would be shocked and possibly horrified, would have been an added stimulant. Since university and the Royal Academy had been denied him, it was best to go to the opposite extreme, to mix with men like these, who cared nothing for intellect, who worked with their hands.
Back at home things became quieter than ever. Anne, with silent determination, took a post as governess with a Mrs Ingham, of Blake Hall, Mirfield. No one could dissuade her from so doing. The youngest Brontë had a strong will beneath the quiet façade. The desire to earn her living, and so spare her father’s purse, was synonymous with freedom. A month or so later Charlotte also tore herself away from the insidious delights of Caroline Vernon in love with her own brother-in-law, and took a temporary post as governess with a Mrs Sidgwick of Stonegappe.
The eldest and the youngest were earning money. The other two were not. Emily, brushing the carpet, sweeping the stairs or peeling potatoes in the kitchen under Tabby’s eye, was as insulated from intrusion as a hermit crab.
No—there was something in his face,
Some nameless thing they could not trace,
And something in his voice’s tone,
Which turned their blood as chill as stone.
The ringlets of his long black hair
Fell o’er a cheek most ghastly fair.
Youthful he seemed—but worn as they
Who spend too soon their youthful day…
Her private world held no terrors for her. Any dark nameless ghost was welcome.
Branwell had quitted Mrs Kirby’s rooms in Fountain Street. No rich client, desirous of having his portrait painted, had appeared. Twelve months’ residence in Bradford had little to show beyond a heap of canvasses, most of them unfinished, which he might just as well give away to the sitters as expect payment for; the rest could be stacked against a wall in the studio back-bedroom.
He was twenty-two in June, 1839, and at that age Joseph Leyland had modelled Spartacus and shown it at the Manchester Exhibition. But Branwell had not had Leyland’s opportunities, including the patronage of rich people like the Rawsons of Hope Hall, Halifax. No, something would turn up. He would sell a portrait yet, or have a poem published; meanwhile, it was summer, and he amused himself by going about the countryside, and, best of all, taking a trip to Liverpool, perhaps by barge, with young Hartley Merrall and one or two others, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they stayed longer than they intended, and Branwell, in his excitement, ran short of funds.
Sight-seeing, with a bunch of companions, was what Percy would have done with Montmorency and O’Connor. Going into St Jude’s church, where the evangelical Hugh McNeile was preaching, and watching the famous preacher shake his fist at Popery and the wicked wiles of Rome, was an echo of what these Angrian friends had done in an earlier manuscript, when they visited the Wesleyan chapel in Slug Street and Percy himself had dressed up as the Reverend Ashworth.
The forty-four-year-old Irish preacher McNeile was the draw of Liverpool, his opposition to the church of Rome a byword, but most delightful of all—to Branwell and his mocking friends—was the tirade against the celibacy of the Romish priesthood, which spelt ‘the degradation of men, the anguish, and agony and ruin of women, and the deliberate murder of little children’. The subdued ‘Hear, hear!’ would not be heard, but the stifled laughter might, and Branwell, scribbling notes from the sermon to send to his father, must have nudged his friends to silence, and thought what a superb parody could be made of the whole affair in some future Angrian tale, with Percy and Co, dolled up in sable attire, and St Jude’s transformed into Sanctification Chapel.
‘What happens,’ thundered the Reverend McNeile, ‘when the Papal system mars the lovely process of marriage? O, what but unsubdued passions, uncontrolled conduct, baseness and degradation, a woeful blank in the happiness of our race, a dismal eclipse of the soft radiance of Christianity, in the lurid, the blood-stained horrors of Antichrist!’
‘No Popery!’ was a famous Evangelical cry. Branwell was used to it at Haworth, but sometimes he thought of his Irish grandmother, who was born a Catholic and changed her faith on marriage, and he may have wondered if it was his Papist Irish blood that made him ridicule Protestant ranters.
What else Branwell and his friends did in Liverpool besides visit St Jude’s church remains obscure. The sea and the docks on Merseyside must have proved a great attraction. So much so, perhaps, that according to Leyland’s brother Francis, who was not of the party,’an attack of tic compelled him [Branwell] to resort to opium, in some form, as an anodyne, whose soothing effect in pain he had previously known’.
This may have been the tale in after-years. An attack of tic drove de Quincey to laudanum—Branwell would have read this in de Quincey’s Confessions. The same remedy soothed frayed nerves, and was a common panacea for diarrhoea and coughs. More significant still, it was said to ward off consumption.
Branwell may have taken his first dose of laudanum for any of these reasons. The fear of a convulsive attack seizing him in Liverpool, as it possibly had done in London four years before, would be enough to send him to the nearest pharmacy. His father noted in the volume of Domestic Medicine that tic douleureux are French words signifying a ‘painful convulsive fit’, and they should be pronounced ‘tic doolaros’. In those days opium could be obtained with the utmost ease for a few pence. Anything that dulled pain, or the apprehension of pain, and stimulated the imagination too, was likely to attract Branwell; besides, the very fact that opium had inspired Coleridge and de Quincey gave the drug a romantic flavour. If de Quincey could take fifty-three ounces of laudanum on one of his peak days, then it could not harm Branwell to take three. It was something that would not be noticed at home, either. It was different from drinking.
The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, a more modern work than Mr Brontë’s volume of Domestic Medicine, reports that ‘the vast majority of addicts are persons classified as neurotic or constitutional psychopathic inferiors, and addiction is only one manifestation of their fundamental personality defect… The drug provides an escape mechanism from reality, a way of release from the failures and disappointments of everyday life, a means of bridging the gap between ambition and accomplishment.’
To a boy of twenty-two who had not passed through the Royal Academy schools or painted the picture of the year, whose poems were refused by Blackwood’s, whose letters to Wordsworth remained unanswered and who still passionately desired to believe in his own genius, laudanum—with its ten per cent of opium—spelt liberation.
Here was a way to fulfilment without effort. A nagging conscience became numb. And, most wonderful of all, nightmares turned to dreams, the Erinyes to the Eumenides, the reproachful warning Marah to a clinging Proserpine. Henceforth Branwell would know where to turn when doubt and disappointment sounded in his father’s voice, when his aunt asked for the twentieth time if he had sold a picture, when Charlotte, blunter still, inquired his plans. How brighter far than hers the colours and the images of his infernal world!
Back in Haworth Branwell painted young Hartley Merrall’s portrait—perhaps a gift to his bride Harriet—and as a finishing touch decorated the four corners of the canvas with the names of Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Handel. This was a tribute to his friend Hartley, who, like his three brothers, was a keen musician.
For a time the talk was all of Liverpool. Branwell’s enthusiasm was infectious. The family must go—his father, his aunt, the girls; nobody had lived if they had not seen Liverpool. But inevitably, as always with the hesitant projects of the older generation, interest faded. His father was too busy—he was still waiting for a curate to replace Mr Hodgson, his previous assistant—and no doubt his aunt felt that the house could not be left in Tabitha’s charge. As for the girls, the girls would all have had their own excuses. Emily would not go without Anne, and Anne was due back at Mrs Ingham’s. Only Charlotte, escaped from her temporary post with Mrs Sidgwick, was free for a holiday, and she, of course, preferred to go off to Bridlington with Ellen Nussey.
Branwell could go nowhere. July in Liverpool had emptied his small exchequer. He could not even afford to send a couple of sovereigns to poor Mrs Robinson, widow of his old art master at Leeds, as an acknowledgement—so he told his artist friend Thompson in a letter—of
the kindness with which I was treated by her and our poor Master. But I am going to Leeds I believe shortly, and then I hope to be able in some degree to help one whom too many—I am afraid—have injured. Indeed, it astonished me when I read the hints contained in your letter, though I need not have wondered for this world is all rottenness…
The note concluded with an irritable word for Mrs Kirby, who expected him to go to Bradford to varnish her portraits. ‘Mrs Kirby’s name is an eyesore to me—what does the woman mean? How can I come paddling to Bradford with my wallet on my back in order to varnish her portraits…’ This letter from Branwell is dated August 14th, 1839. No later letter exists to explain the reference to Mrs Robinson. The art master and his ill-treated widow fade from view. Nor did Branwell take up any appointment in Leeds, which his letter suggested he may have had in mind.
Leyland, the sculptor, was back in Halifax, which made that town even more interesting than Bradford. He had found fame in London, but not stability. He took a studio at the back of No 10, The Square, and with a cynical disregard for his own artistic reputation advertised the premises as:
Halifax Marble Works,
Square Road,
J. B. Leyland, Sculptor.
Monuments, busts, tombs, tablets, chiffonier slabs and all kinds of marble work used in the upholstery business, made to order. A variety of marble chimney pieces on view, cleaned, repaired, or set up.
If Joseph Leyland, darling of the critics, could not make a living out of sculpture, then nobody could blame an unknown artist, Branwell decided, for failing after twelve months in Bradford.
On October 14th a large exhibition was opened at the national school in Sowerby Bridge, on behalf of the Mechanics’ Institute, to which Leyland contributed a head of his beloved lamented African bloodhound and a bust, The Lady of Kirklees, inspired by a poem of his and Branwell’s indefatigable friend, William Dearden. Branwell, with Leyland and his friends, went to the exhibition, where a heterogeneous collection of objects had been assembled, from a sword said to have been Napoleon’s to Wesley’s wig. The big names of the neighbourhood graced the occasion: the Priestleys of White Windows, the Rawsons of Haugh End, John Crossley of Scaitcliffe Hall, barrister, and inheritor, through his Lockwood mother, of all the Ewood lands once held by poor Johnny Grimshaw. The ‘gentry’, transformed into fictitious guise in many an Angrian tale, could now be observed at closer quarters. Mixing with them, though a little apart, of course, would be Joseph Leyland’s humbler friends, landlords William Haigh and Jackson from the Craig Vale and White Horse Inns, and the hostess from the hostelry at Heptonstall.
It was a happy way to spend an autumn day: starting off from the coach’s stopping-place, the Swan Hotel at Halifax, halts for refreshment along the seven-mile stretch of road at both Sowerby Bridge and Luddenden Foot, thence back again to Halifax, Leyland and his friends to No. 10, The Square, and Branwell to pick up his Haworth coach at the Wheatsheaf Inn.
It was no way, though, to earn money. Winter was approaching. Leyland had commissions to fulfill, only half finished and already past delivery date, and Branwell had to face the fact that unless he accepted the post of tutor which had been proposed to him, and which at least gave him the chance of seeing the Lakeland country he had always hoped to visit, home of Wordsworth, Southey and Hartley Coleridge, he would be obliged to spend the winter of 1839–40 kicking his heels in Haworth without a penny in his pocket.
Charlotte, writing three days after Christmas to Ellen Nussey, said:
One thing, however, will make the daily routine more unvaried than ever. Branwell, who used to enliven us, is to leave us in a few days to enter the situation of a private tutor in the neighbourhood of Ulverston. How he will like it or settle remains to be seen; at present he is full of hope and resolution. I, who know his variable nature, and his strong turn for active life, dare not be too sanguine.