Branwell’s own impressions of life with Mr Robert Postlethwaite of Broughton House, Broughton-in-Furness, are given in a letter to John Brown which he wrote on March 13th, 1840, and which so amused the Worshipful Master of the Three Graces Lodge, and his brother William, that it was treasured in the Brown family until a few years before William’s death in 1876, when it disappeared. The letter has been quoted many times as proof of Branwell’s shocking character. It must be quoted again, not only because it gives clues to individuals who have escaped notice, but because it is entertaining for its own sake.
Old Knave of Trumps,
Don’t think I have forgotten you, though I have delayed so long in writing to you. It was my purpose to send you a yarn as soon as I could find materials to spin one with, and it is only just now that I have had time to turn myself round and know where I am. If you saw me now, you would not know me, and you would laugh to hear the character the people give me. Oh, the falsehood and hypocrisy of this world! I am fixed in a little retired town by the sea-shore, among wild woody hills that rise round me—huge, rocky, and capped with clouds.
My employer is a retired county magistrate, a large landowner, and of a right hearty and generous disposition. His wife is a quiet, silent, and amiable woman, and his sons are two fine, spirited lads. My landlord is a respectable surgeon, and six days out of seven is as drunk as a lord! His wife is a bustling, chattering, kind-hearted-soul; and his daughter!—oh! death and damnation! Well, what am I? That is, what do they think I am? A most calm, sedate, sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher, the picture of good works, and the treasure-house of righteous thoughts. Cards are shuffled under the table-cloth, glasses are thrust into the cupboard, if I enter the room. I take neither spirits, wine, nor malt liquors. I dress in black, and smile like a saint or martyr. Everybody says, ‘What a good young gentleman is Mr Postlethwaite’s tutor!’ This is fact, as I am a living soul, and right comfortably do I laugh at them. I mean to continue in their good opinion. I took a half year’s farewell of old friend whisky at Kendal on the night after I left. There was a party of gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. We ordered in supper and whisky-toddy as ‘hot as hell’! They thought I was a physician, and put me in the chair. I gave sundry toasts that were washed down at the same time, till the room spun round and the candles danced in our eyes. One of the guests was a respectable old gentleman with powdered head, rosy cheeks, fat paunch, and ringed fingers. He gave ‘The Ladies’… after which he brayed off with a speech; and in two minutes, in the middle of a grand sentence, he stopped, wiped his head, looked wildly round, stammered, coughed, stopped again and called for his slippers. The waiter helped him to bed. Next a tall Irish squire and a native of the land of Israel began to quarrel about their countries; and, in the warmth of argument, discharged their glasses, each at his neighbour’s throat instead of his own. I recommended bleeding, purging, and blistering; but they administered each other a real ‘Jem Warder’, so I flung my tumbler on the floor too, and swore I’d join ‘Old Ireland!’ A regular rumpus ensued, but we were tamed at last. I found myself in bed next morning, with a bottle of porter, a glass, and a corkscrew beside me. Since then I have not tasted anything stronger than milk-and-water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return at mid-summer; when we will see about it. I am getting as fat as Prince William at Springhead, and as godly as his friend, Parson Winterbotham. My hand shakes no longer. I ride to the banker’s at Ulverston with Mr Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea and talking scandal with old ladies. As to the young ones! I have one sitting by me just now—fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen—she little thinks the devil is so near her!
I was delighted to see thy note, old squire, but I do not understand one sentence—you will perhaps know what I mean… How are all about you? I long to hear and see them again. How is the ‘Devil’s Thumb’, whom men call—, and the ‘Devil in Mourning’, whom they call—? How are—, and—, and the Doctor; and him whose eyes Satan looks out of, as from windows—I mean—, esquire? How are little—,—,—,—, ‘Longshanks’, and the rest of them? Are they married, buried, devilled and damned? When I come I’ll give them a good squeeze of the hand; till then I am too godly for them to think of. That bow-legged devil used to ask me impertinent questions which I answered him in kind. Beelzebub will make of him a walking-stick! Keep to thy teetotalism, old squire, till I return; it will mend thy old body… Does ‘Little Nosey’ think I have forgotten him? No, by Jupiter! nor his clock either. I’ll send him a remembrancer some of these days! But I must talk to someone prettier than thee; so good-night, old boy, and
Believe me thine,
The Philosopher.
Write directly. Of course you won’t show this letter; and for heaven’s sake, blot out all the lines scored with red ink.
The letter, dashed off so gaily by a carefree Branwell, was shown to all of Haworth; or at least to that portion of Haworth society which would foregather, after the Three Graces Lodge had been closed in perfect harmony in their Masonic rooms, in the ‘snug’ at the Black Bull, under the benevolent eye of the landlord ‘Little Nosey’.
That the Worshipful Master did blot out the lines scored with red ink is evident from the surviving copy of the letter, but a list of the members of the Three Graces Lodge for the year 1840, which was in existence until a few years ago, gave one ‘esquire’ among them. He was John Heaton.
John Heaton, woolcomber, aged twenty-three when he became a member of the Lodge in 1830, was one of the many Ponden Hall cousins scattered around the Worth valley among the acres known as Dean Fields. According to a tithe list for 1840, he held twenty-four acres at Well Head on Oakworth moor, with one brother at Upper Pitcher Clough and another at Slippery Ford. Sheep Hole and Silver Hill, Old Snap and Throstles Nest—all were Heaton holdings, the very names lyrical enough to set imagination on fire. If Branwell’s ‘esquire’, whose ‘eyes Satan looks out of, as from windows’, inspired Nelly Dean’s description of Heathcliff’s eyes, ‘that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never opened their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them like devil’s spies’, then Heathcliff’s identification with John Heaton becomes possible.
As to the rest—the Devil’s Thumb, the Devil in Mourning, Longshanks and the bowlegged devil—a freemason perhaps could wrestle with the symbolism; but the Mosleys, Toothills, Akroyds, Greenwoods, Blands and Ropers who figure among the old lost minutes of the Three Graces Lodge would doubtless have recognized themselves in 1840. So would ‘Prince William of Springhead’, either a Merrall or William Cockcroft Greenwood, son of Joseph Greenwood, J.P., and Parson Winterbotham, Baptist minister of West Lane chapel, Haworth, since 1831.
The evening in the Royal Hotel, Kendal, sounds so like Percy on a spree with O’Connor and Montmorency that doubt enters the mind whether the event can ever have taken place, except in Branwell’s imagination. Would a young tutor risk getting drunk the night before he entered upon a situation, and in a town where his employer might be known? So much was wishful thinking, so much parody, so much high spirits born of doubt. Percy did all these deeds in fantasy: he wore the laurel wreath and waved the wand, he was villain, king and hero, and he bore the brunt of the blame when things went ill, just as a wooden soldier once committed the many sins a small boy did not dare.
Success with women was one of Percy’s greatest boasts. From the day when the young Alexander knelt at the feet of Augusta, who was to become his first wife, until the time when the ageing Earl of Northangerland traded his mistress to his son-in-law, Percy’s only moments of freedom from female entanglements were on the battlefield. Branwell, sitting in the same room as the daughter of the Broughton surgeon with whom he lodged, would remember the small attempts at gallantry which had hitherto seemed successful: an arm to Ellen Nussey, a duet with Mary Taylor, laughter at the irrepressible ‘Patty’, polite exchanges with Mrs Kirby’s niece during the painting of the portrait. Now, on his own for six months, more completely separated from home than he had ever been at Bradford, some slight attempt at conquest must be made.
Charlotte, in a letter to Ellen Nussey some eight months afterwards, said: ‘Did I not once tell you of an instance of a relative of mine who cared for a young lady till he began to suspect that she cared more for him and then instantly conceived a sort of contempt for her? You know to what I allude. Never as you value your life mention the circumstances—Mary is my study—for the contempt, the remorse, the misconstruction which follow the development of feelings in themselves noble, warm, generous, devoted and profound, but which, being too freely revealed, too frankly bestowed, are not estimated at their real value.’
That the scornful, strong-minded Mary Taylor should ever have had a penchant for Branwell seems unlikely, but both Charlotte and Branwell, obsessed with sex in Angria, lived out their fiction in real life. A glance from Mary would have amounted, in the eyes of both brother and sister, to a declaration.
It is significant that the opening narrator of Wuthering Heights, Mr Lockwood, describes sentiments identical with those of Branwell at Broughton-in-Furness, and in Branwell’s own particular style. Lockwood says:
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the seacoast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature; a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I ‘never told my love’ vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was head over ears; she understood me at last, and looked a return—the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame—shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
Branwell, like young Mr Lockwood, was bold on paper, certainly in the letter to John Brown, and perhaps in letters to his sisters at the parsonage. Whether he was also bold in person, vis-à-vis the surgeon’s daughter, has yet to be proved. Tradition has it that his appointment with Mr Robert Postlethwaite, J.P., terminated in June, 1840, ‘at his father’s wish’. Mr Brontë presumably did not wish it to get about Haworth that the magistrate had asked him to remove his son, who, ‘imbibing too freely’, according to Postlethwaite tradition, had not proved himself the best of all possible influences upon his young sons John and William.
Whatever Branwell’s conduct as tutor at Broughton House, and whatever sighs and glances passed between him and the surgeon’s daughter in the house where he lodged—surely less satisfactory than those relaxing moments experienced in the barges on the Todmorden canal—Branwell’s main desire, to make himself known to Hartley Coleridge, at Nab Cottage, on the banks of Rydal Water, came to fulfilment during his employment with Mr Postlethwaite. The letter that he wrote to the poet on April 20th, enclosing his second Harriet poem, as well as two translated Odes from Horace, was in much the same vein as that with which he had approached Coleridge’s neighbour Wordsworth, though written perhaps with more modesty and care.
Sir,—
It is with much reluctance that I venture to request, for the perusal of the following lines, a portion of the time of one upon whom I can have no claim, and should not dare to intrude; but I do not, personally, know a man on whom to rely for an answer to the question I shall put, and I could not resist my longing to ask a man from whose judgement there would be little hope of appeal.
Since my childhood I have been wont to devote the hours I could spare from other and very different employments to efforts at literary composition, always keeping the results to myself, nor have they in more than two or three instances been seen by any other. But I am about to enter active life, and prudence tells me not to waste my time which must make my independence; yet, sir, I love writing too well to fling aside the practice of it without an effort to ascertain whether I could turn it to account, not in wholly maintaining myself, but in aiding my maintenance, for I do not sigh after fame and am not ignorant of the folly or the fate of those who, without ability, would depend for their lives upon their pens; but I seek to know, and venture, though with shame, to ask from one whose word I must respect: whether, by periodical or other writing, I could please myself with writing, and make it subservient to living.
I would not, with this view, have troubled you with a composition in verse, but any piece I have in prose would too greatly trespass upon your patience, which, I fear, if you look over the verse, will be more than sufficiently tried. I feel the egotism of my language, but I have none, sir, in my heart, for I feel beyond all encouragement from myself, and hope for none from you.
Should you give an opinion upon what I send, it will, however condemnatory, be most gratefully received by,
Sir, your most humble servant,
P. B. Brontë.
The first piece is only the sequel of one striving to depict the fall from unguided passion into neglect, despair, and death. It ought to show an hour too near those of pleasure for repentance, and too near death for hope. The translations are two out of many made from Horace, and given to assist an answer to the question—would it be possible to obtain remuneration for translations such as these from that or any other classical author?
Hartley Coleridge, to his eternal credit, must have answered, for Branwell, in a letter written on June 27th, the day after his birthday, reminds the poet of the delightful day he had spent in his company at Ambleside.
Hartley Coleridge, eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and one of the least-known and most intriguing figures in English literature, would have been at this time forty-three. A child of brilliant promise, idolized by his parents, loved by Wordsworth, Southey and indeed all who knew him, he gave signs, on adolescence, of so acute a sensibility, so nervous and highly strung a temperament, that although he survived school, entered university, and obtained a fellowship at Oriel, the breakdown, when it came, was half-expected; the father, although he had not bequeathed insanity to his son, had bred a being who could in no way face reality, who shrank from pain, who could not open a letter without trembling, and who was constitutionally incapable of leading a normal life.
The erratic swing from extravagant hilarity to deep melancholy, increased by bouts of heavy drinking, made it impossible for him to hold his fellowship; he was obliged to forfeit it, to the shame and sorrow of himself and his family. Here was a neurotic who was saved from suicide or some other form of violent outburst by an ability to spill excessive emotional energy on paper.
His poems, at their worst, would shame the bard of Caldene. His sonnets, at their best, can compare with Shakespeare’s. This strange, lovable near-genius was so far from being able to fend for himself that, after some painful years of struggle to be a schoolmaster, he retired to Grasmere, where he was cared for by a farmer’s widow until she died. He then lived with another young farmer and his wife, later moving with them to Nab Cottage, Rydal Water, where he ended his days.
Hartley Coleridge’s book of poems, published in 1833, his contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine, and his series of ‘Yorkshire Worthies’ would have been read and enjoyed by Branwell before ever he took his post as tutor at Broughton-in-Furness. Indeed, the sonnet written with a backward glance at childhood would seem such an echo of Branwell’s own sentiments that it is curious the boy did not approach Hartley Coleridge originally, rather than waste his efforts as a letter-writer upon the elderly Wordsworth.
Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I;
For yet I lived like one not born to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking
I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran:
A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, tho’ I be old,
Time is my debtor for my years untold.
One of the strangest things about Hartley Coleridge was his appearance. He was barely five feet high, and—there must have been some congenital cause for this—when he was quite young his thick dark hair turned white, and he walked with the gait of an old man. This touching, shuffling creature, with his dark lustrous eyes, who loved all animals and little children, who sometimes, in his absent-minded fits, would wander from his cottage home and forget to return, alarming the friends who cared for him, was one of the few established writers ever to encourage Branwell in the hope that he might some day win a small place for himself in literature.
No record, alas, exists of their conversation that day by Rydal Water, or of what the older man thought of Harriet, Augusta, Percy and the sins of Jordan Hall; but surely at some moment in their time together Branwell would have discovered that he and Charlotte were not alone in their infernal world, that, long before Angria had been created at Haworth, the dream continent of Ejuxria had become real to the young Hartley Coleridge; that islands, countries peopled with statesmen and generals, had had their existence in his mind from boyhood through adolescence into manhood, and were perhaps still, to the prematurely aged man of forty-three, more vivid and real than the shepherds on the fells.
His brother Derwent, writing of Hartley’s childhood ‘play’ after his death, said:
A spot of waste ground was appropriated to his use. This was divided into kingdoms, and subdivided into provinces, each of the former being assigned to one of his playmates. A canal was to run through the whole, upon which ships were to be built. A tower and armoury, a theatre and a ‘chemistry-house’ (under which mines were expected to be formed) were to be built, and considered common property. War was to be declared and battles fought between the sovereign powers… and he had a scheme for training cats, and even rats, for various offices and labours, civil and military.
His usual mode of introducing the subject was—‘Derwent, I have had letters from Ejuxria,’ then came his budget of news, his words flowing on in an endless stream, and his countenance bearing witness to the inspiration—shall I call it?—by which he was agitated.
This resemblance to the Angrian and Gondal ‘play’ of the Brontës is uncanny; and the discovery of a mutual obsession would forge an instant bond of sympathy between twenty-two-year-old Branwell and the poet of forty-three. The urge that had driven Hartley Coleridge to drinking, and to what must have seemed to his friends an aimless existence in the hills among simple people, was surely the same flight from reality that drove Branwell deeper, year by year, into the infernal world. Here he was master, here he controlled his puppets, and here the inordinate ambition which, both in himself and in Hartley Coleridge, fought to overcome a sense of inferiority could best be satisfied, where it could meet no challenge. Better to be lord and master of Angria and Ejuxria than measure oneself against superior brains; better to converse with shepherds and boaties, a little god and an accepted friend, than be worsted in an encounter, not only with intellectuals, but with the more common-place minds of day-by-day as well.
One of the favourite Ejuxrian ‘plays’ of the young Hartley was the tale of Scauzan, a subtle and intellectual villain, and Scauzan’s father, a giant, who was continually outlawed and persecuted by his son. The significance of this fantasy—Hartley’s unconscious resentment against the genius of his father, which he could never hope to equal—is obvious, although Hartley’s brother Derwent, speaking of the childhood game, was unaware of its meaning.
Similarly, Branwell’s Angrian hero must surely have had some deep-seated, if unconscious, inspiration in his own father. Into the character of Alexander Percy, with his dead wife Mary whom he could not forget and a beloved daughter of the same name, can be read not only Branwell himself but also his father. Branwell the child, asleep in Mr Brontë’s room, the unknowing medium for his father’s loneliness and frustration, worked out in fantasy the rebellions of them both, bringing to fruition the dreams and ambitions that had never, would never, achieve reality.
Today, Branwell Brontë and Hartley Coleridge, alike in so much, possessing the same weaknesses, fated indeed to die within a few months of one another with minds and bodies wasted from the same cause, could have sat by Rydal Water and hammered out the reason for their deep-seated fears, and perhaps even helped one another to find some alleviation of their trouble. In the spring of 1840 Hartley Coleridge could only shake Branwell by the hand and wish him luck, advise perhaps on his reading matter, and suggest that he should continue with his translation of the Odes of Horace. He may not have felt qualified to judge the introspective Harriet, with her doubts of the Almighty, her longing for her lover Percy despite her adulterous shame. A young man who had written so many lines as a young woman, rather than about one, might have seemed singular even to an eccentric like Hartley Coleridge.
And Branwell, waving farewell to the hunched, white-haired figure by the lakeside, would not consider for one moment that the poet’s tragedy was similar to his own, that although Coleridge was a known and respected figure in the literary world he still represented failure, both as man and as poet, and that those melancholy eyes, those trembling hands, conveyed a warning to Branwell not to sink too deeply into his infernal world, lest the myriad oceans should engulf him, just as Hartley Coleridge had been drowned in the Ejuxrian sea. The note scribbled years before, when he was seventeen, at the conclusion of an Angrian manuscript, might have served as a further reminder, had he possessed the intuition to interpret it: ‘That night I dreamt I saw Angria devouring Percy…’
The conversation, that spring day on Ambleside, was mainly literary: this is born out by the letter Branwell sent to Hartley Coleridge after he had returned to Haworth. He had already, from time to time during the past few years, amused himself by translating Odes from Horace; now, encouraged and inspired by Coleridge’s own translations, Branwell had completed the entire contents of the First Book, with the exception of Ode XXXVIII—a note beneath the number explaining why: ‘This ode I have no heart to attempt after having heard Mr H. Coleridge’s translation, on May day, at Ambleside.’
His letter to the poet said:
Sir—You will, perhaps, have forgotten me, but it will be long before I forget my first conversation with a man of real intellect, in my first visit to the classic lakes of Westmorland. During the delightful day which I had the honour of spending with you at Ambleside, I received permission to transmit to you, as soon as finished, the first book of a translation of Horace, in order that, after a glance over it, you might tell me whether it was worth further notice or better fit for the fire.
I have—I fear most negligently, and amid other very different employments—striven to translate two books, the first of which I have presumed to send you, and will you, sir, stretch your past kindness by telling me whether I should amend and pursue the work or let it rest in peace?
Great corrections I feel it wants, but till I feel that the work might benefit me, I have no heart to make them; yet if your judgement prove in any way favourable, I will rewrite the whole, without sparing labour to reach perfection.
I dared not have attempted Horace but that I saw the utter worthlessness of all former translations, and thought that a better one, by whomsoever executed, might meet with some little encouragement. I long to clear up my doubts by the judgement of one whose opinion I should revere, and—but I suppose I am dreaming—one to whom I should be proud to inscribe anything of mine which any publisher would look at, unless, as is likely enough, the work would disgrace the name as much as the name would honour the work. Amount of remuneration I should not look to—as anything would be everything—and whatever it might be, let me say that my bones would have no rest unless by written agreement a division should be made of the profits (little or much) between myself and him through whom alone I could hope to obtain a hearing with that formidable personage, a London bookseller.
Excuse my unintelligibility, haste, and appearance of presumption, and –
Believe me to be, Sir, your most humble and grateful servant,
P. B. Brontë.
If anything in this note should displease you, lay it, sir, to the account of inexperience and not impudence.
It was a mistake, perhaps, to dismiss as worthless the efforts of Cowley, Pope, Dryden, Congreve and many other previous translators of Horace; and, too, a fault in taste and judgement to mention the word ‘remuneration’, with the suggestion that profits should be shared, the older poet tipped, as it were, for his courtesy in furthering the cause of one unknown (a common mistake among many would-be writers), but Hartley Coleridge would seem the last man in the world to take offence.
Whether he answered the letter, what advice he gave, Branwell did not disclose. His translations from Horace remained unpublished until 1923, when the late John Drinkwater had them privately printed by the Pelican Press. Mr Drinkwater said in his introduction:
They are unequal, and they have many of the bad tricks of writing that come from out of some deeply rooted defect of character. But they also have a great many passages of clear lyrical beauty, and they have something of the style that comes from a spiritual understanding, as apart from mere formal knowledge, of great models.
In conclusion, John Drinkwater said:
I do not wish to advance any extravagant claim for this little book, but I think it adds appreciably to the evidence that Branwell Brontë was the second poet in his family, and a very good second at that…
The reader who has no Latin can only appreciate a translation from that language on its own merits. The Odes of Horace were written for other audiences, and to suit different tastes. It would throw light on Branwell to know which, among the thirty-seven that he translated, gave him the most pleasure. The IVth, To Sestius, would seem to come nearest to a reflection of his own moods and fancies.
Rough winter melts beneath the breeze of spring,
Nor shun refitted ships the silenced sea,
Nor man nor beasts to folds or firesides cling,
Nor hoar frosts whiten over field and tree;
But rising moons, each balmy evening, see
Fair Venus with her Nymphs and Graces join,
In merry dances tripping o’er the lea;
While Vulcan makes his roaring furnace shine
And bids his Cyclops arms in sinewy strength combine.
Now let us, cheerful, crown our heads with flowers,
Spring’s first fruits, offered to the newborn year,
And sacrifice beneath the budding bowers,
A lamb, or kid as Faunus may prefer:
But—pallid Death, an equal visitor,
Knocks at the poor man’s hut, the monarch’s tower;
And the few years we have to linger here
Forbid vain dreams of happiness and power,
Beyond what man can crowd into life’s fleeting hour.
Soon shall the night that knows no morning come,
And the dim shades that haunt the eternal shore;
And Pluto’s shadowy kingdom of the tomb,
Where Thee the well-known dice may never more
Make monarch, while thy friends the wine cup pour;
Where never thou mayest woo fair Lycidas,
Whose loveliness our ardent youth adore:
Whose faultless limbs all other forms surpass,
And, lost amid whose beams, unseen all others pass.
Branwell’s comparative success with Hartley Coleridge had inspired Charlotte to send one of her Angrian romances to Coleridge’s neighbour Wordsworth, the locality changed from Africa to Yorkshire to give the tale more semblance of reality, but she received a snub for her pains. The elderly poet told his correspondent, who had signed her story ‘C.T.’, that he could not make out whether the writer was an attorney’s clerk or a novel-reading dressmaker. In short, she was not encouraged to continue. Charlotte laid aside her pen for the time being, but no damping criticism could quench for long the smouldering fire of that restless imagination, forever seeking outlet in some form or other, and this summer in particular weaving romance into the person of her father’s new curate.
The most interesting thing about the Reverend William Weightman, beloved of all biographers because by tradition he sent the parsonage into a flutter, flirting with the girls, their friends and all the young ladies in the neighbourhood, besides being of a most amiable and kind-hearted disposition, is the fact that during his first few months as curate he was called—behind his back, very naturally—‘Miss Celia Amelia’. Even in her letters to Ellen Nussey, that most eager—though hardly perceptive—of friends, Charlotte alluded to the curate as ‘she’ and ‘her’.
Branwell returned from Broughton-in-Furness to find this delightful newcomer persona grata in his father’s home, exchanging valentines and drawings with his sisters, and sitting for his portrait to Charlotte dressed in his ’varsity gown, taking care to point out the exquisite silk material from which it was made. Who can wonder that the ex-tutor, straight from the proximity of the surgeon’s daughter, should write:
When you, Amelia, feel like me
The dullness of satiety,
You will not smile as now you smile,
With lips that even me beguile…
At last somebody had turned up in Haworth who would make the dining-room at the parsonage a counter-attraction to the ‘snug’ at the Black Bull. Unfortunately, the prospective curate William Weightman flitted to Ripon at mid-summer to prepare for his ordination, and from there to Appleby and Crackenthorp, and was away at least six weeks. Once more Branwell found himself at a loose end. The Book of Odes was finished, but nobody cared to publish it. The paintings remained unsold in the studio back-bedroom. Tutoring had proved an error, teaching was not his forte. His exchequer was low, though, and he must somehow earn his living. What better way than to enter the service of the Leeds and Manchester railway? Work on it was progressing fast: soon the link-up would be completed, and the eastward-bound train from Manchester would come thundering past Todmorden through the Calder valley. There was more life down the line than there was at home, and before long Sowerby Bridge would be a busy junction, with trains running east and west. There would be work in plenty for ambitious, enterprising young men of character who believed in progress and the dawn of a new mechanical age.
Whether Branwell himself found a situation; whether strings were somehow pulled by a Mr Fletcher, whose portrait he had painted, and who had influence with the waterways in the Calder valley; or whether his friend William Dearden, who lived at Brockwell, Sowerby Bridge, was able to put in a word for him, a post on the Leeds and Manchester railway was in fact found. At the end of September, 1840, Branwell became a booking-clerk at Sowerby Bridge station.