Brontë the station-master and Woolven the ticket-collector were jointly responsible for the book-keeping at Luddenden Foot station. Both had to appear before the auditors of the railway company when the books were found to be at fault. There was a discrepancy in the figures entered: the price of the tickets sold did not tally with the sums received. Closer examination of the ledger showed haphazard entries, with rough sketches of the station-master’s acquaintances in the margin. The ticket-collector admitted that the station-master had often been absent from duty. Neither could explain what had happened to the missing money. Theft was not proved, but careless book-keeping was.
Woolven seems to have kept his post, but Branwell’s ‘services’ were no longer required. His inglorious tenure of office in the Leeds and Manchester railway company had come to an end. Perhaps the removal from Sowerby Bridge station to Luddenden Foot had not been promotion at all, but merely a second chance to prove himself in a smaller station where responsibility would be lighter than at the junction, though Emily, at the time, had said to Charlotte, ‘It looks like getting on…’
Now Branwell had three failures to chalk to his record—four, if he counted non-admission to the Royal Academy schools. Lack of patronage had closed the career at Bradford, but lack of concentration too. The tutorship at Broughton-in-Furness? Almost certainly misdemeanour sent him home after six months. And now the railway…
A breakdown was inevitable. Branwell, in a letter to Leyland on May 15th, spoke of ‘severe indisposition’. The return home after facing the railway auditors, and the necessary explanation to his father and his aunt, was a bitter experience. Illness was the only answer, and the wave of depression that engulfed him was no subterfuge. If his father and his aunt could guess how he had spent his time during that year at Luddenden Foot they would be appalled—indeed, the doors of the parsonage might be closed to him forever.
Like all persons prone to hysteria, Branwell magnified his offences: he was guilty beyond redemption, he had sunk lower than the lowest. Worst of all was the shock to his own pride. He, Branwell Brontë, the brilliant versatile genius of the family, had not been able to hold down the trumpery job of station-master on a branch line.
By the end of May the pendulum had swung once more, the peace and quiet of home had mended the wounded pride and softened the sense of guilt, and Branwell’s innate tendency to soar from zero to the heights was set in motion once again. Today such a rapid swing might seem ominous, the increasing susceptibility to emotional extravagance a sign of neurosis and a presage of trouble to come, but in the mid-nineteenth century the abrupt emergence from depression to elation was seen as the natural recovery of youth and vigour.
Dr Thomas Andrew, respected inhabitant of Haworth, had lately died, and it was decided to put up a monument to him, in St Michael’s church, and commission Joseph Leyland to design it. Branwell was instructed to approach the sculptor, and for the first time he was able to invite his idol to Haworth, to introduce him to his father, to John Brown also, who, as stonemason, would carry out the lettering on the monument. It must have seemed to Branwell that Leyland was no longer the indulgent, amusing acquaintance of Halifax, forever surrounded by a group of hangers-on, but a personal friend, visiting Haworth at his bidding. The excitement of giving the invitation, the graciousness of Leyland’s acceptance, restored Branwell’s sense of dignity and pride. The folly of Luddenden Foot could be forgotten. The disgrace of the railway episode belonged to the past.
Whatever impression the sculptor might make upon Mr Brontë and the committee in charge of putting up the monument was nothing, in Branwell’s eyes, to the effect the small community would have upon his friend. He suffered all the agonies of a go-between with a foot in both societies. Eager for Leyland’s goodwill, and aware that the sculptor was putting himself out to oblige him, he had the mortification of hearing members of the committee talk to the great man as if he were a common mason. Some argument, possibly, about the charge, some disagreement perhaps in wording or design, whatever it was that marred the splendour of the visit, Branwell was humiliated in consequence.
‘I have not often felt more heartily ashamed,’ he wrote to the sculptor on June 29th, 1842,
than when you left the committee at Haworth; but I did not like to speak on the subject then, and I trusted that you would make that allowance which you have perhaps often ere now had to do, for gothic ignorance and ill-breeding, and one or two of the persons present afterwards felt that they had left by no means an enviable impression on your mind.
Though it is but a poor compliment—I long much to see you again at Haworth, and forget for half a day the amiable society in which I am placed, where I never hear a word more musical than an ass’s bray…
The apologies for his surroundings brought invitations in return. Branwell, who had hovered for so long on the fringe of that close group which delighted to foregather at No. 10, The Square, was now an intimate. Poems were exchanged and read aloud. Advice was given. Grundy, the engineer, to whom Branwell had written in May, when he was recovering from his breakdown, asking what hopes there might be for further employment on the railway, was now told that Branwell ‘had been advised to turn his attention to literature’, that he would indeed be a fool, ‘under present circumstances, to entertain any sanguine hopes respecting situations’.
Branwell revised some of his old poems and stories, sorting from the mixed collection such examples, minus Angrian names and allusions, as might appeal to Leyland and his friends. William Dearden challenged him to competition, but his letter to the Halifax Guardian describing the occasion (which has been briefly referred to in an earlier chapter) was not written until 1867, when all four Brontës were dead.
‘Many years ago,’ he wrote,
Patrick Brontë and I agreed that each should write a drama or a poem, the principal character in which was to have a real or imaginary existence before the Deluge; and that in a month’s time, we should meet at the Cross Roads Inn, which is about half way between Keighley and Haworth, and produce the result of our lucubrations. We met at the time and place appointed, and in the presence of a mutual friend, the late J. B. Leyland, the promising sculptor, I read the first act of The Demon Queen, but when Branwell dived into his hat—the usual receptacle of his fugitive scraps—where he supposed he had deposited his MS. poem, he found he had by mistake placed there a number of stray leaves of a novel on which he had been trying his ‘prentice hand’. Chagrined at the disappointment he had caused, he was about to return the papers to his hat, when both friends earnestly pressed him to read them, as they felt a curiosity to see how he could wield the pen of a novelist. After some hesitation, he complied with the request, and riveted our attention for about an hour, dropping each sheet, when read, into his hat. The story broke off abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and he gave us the sequel ‘viva voce’ together with the real names of the prototypes of his characters; but as some of these personages are still living, I refrain from pointing them out to the public.
He said he had not yet fixed upon a title for his production, and was afraid he should never be able to meet with a publisher who would have the hardihood to usher it into the world. The scene of the fragment which Branwell read, and the characters introduced in it—so far as then developed—were the same as those in Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte Brontë confidently asserts was the production of her sister Emily.
The letter continued with Dearden’s opinion on the published novel, and concluded with a ‘poetical sketch’ of his own describing how shocked both he and Leyland had been by the character of Heathcliff in the fragment read, and had earnestly advised Branwell to throw his prospective novel into the fire. Branwell refused to do so, saying his hero should ‘live a little longer yet’, and that one day he might fill his ‘empty exchequer’. If he should suit public taste, then Branwell would produce a ‘female mate’ and the pair of them would propagate ‘a monster race’ that might ‘quell the heroes and the heroines effete that strut in tinsel through the fictive world’.
‘But,’ said Branwell, ‘let my slandered Romeo, for the nonce, sleep in the tomb of all my Capulets,’ and he pointed to his hat.
The classical schoolmaster was a bad poet but no liar. If it was indeed an embryo Wuthering Heights that Branwell read aloud, then reason suggests that this first draft of what was later to become a world-famous novel by Emily Brontë was in fact either Branwell’s own work, or the result of collaboration between brother and sister. Charlotte and Branwell collaborated in the Angrian series; Emily and Branwell could have done the same. The handwriting of all three, when they wrote in the minute script which they used for their private writings, was very similar; that of Emily and Branwell so alike as to be nearly identical. Much confusion has been caused over the right authorship of their poems for this very reason.
There remains the possibility that Branwell, short-sighted as he was, seized a manuscript believing it to be his own, and on taking it from his hat realized that it was a tale of Emily’s. His love of mischief would make him read it aloud, if only to watch the effect upon Dearden and Leyland. That they were shocked, even horrified, would add to his delight. The fact that Branwell most significantly told his friends not only the ‘real names of the prototypes… some of them existing still’ (i.e., in 1867, when Dearden penned his letter) but also the ‘sequel’ proves that he knew the source of the story and the course it was destined to take, thus confirming Charlotte’s words, after both Branwell and Emily were dead, that Wuthering Heights was ‘hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials’.
Those who know something of Alexander Percy and his satanic qualities, who have read the Angrian stories of Charlotte and Branwell, accept with equanimity an embryonic Wuthering Heights consisting of a few chapters, written either by Branwell, or by Emily, or by both in collaboration. Brother and sisters borrowed freely from one another; Angrian stories and Gondal sagas were read aloud at the parsonage and enjoyed by all four young authors.
The nineteenth-century critics, who knew nothing of the early writings and came to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights believing that they had sprung fresh from the minds of two secluded sisters who had never before expressed themselves on paper, must be pardoned their attacks of apopletic rage when William Dearden penned his letter to the Halifax Guardian in 1867. That Edward Sloane, another member of the Halifax group of friends, corroborated Dearden’s story, declaring that: ‘Branwell had read to him, portion by portion, the novel as it was produced at that time, insomuch that he no sooner began the perusal of Wuthering Heights [published in December, 1847] than he was able to anticipate the characters and incidents to be disclosed’, intensified the fury of all those who admired the novel. They had no idea, any more than Dearden or Sloane, that brother and sisters had collaborated in each other’s stories from early childhood.
Whoever scribbled the first draft of that world-famous story in 1842, or even earlier—for Branwell told Dearden that it was a novel on which ‘some time ago’ he had tried his prentice hand—the reputation of Emily, who completed and revised the whole in the autumn and winter months of 1845–46, need not suffer. To her the full credit and the glory, though the germ of the idea could have sprung from her brother.
Somewhere between the Worth and Calder valleys, somewhere between the Haworth, Stanbury and Wadsworth moors, or even sweeping to the fringes of Halifax and thence to Hebden Bridge and Hepstonstall, Emily, surely with Branwell’s knowledge, sketched out the destiny of two families known to them both by hearsay—whether drawn from the many scattered Heatons nearer home, or from the heights of Ewood where the much inter-married Grimshaws lived and died, who can say? Members of these families were ‘living still’ when both brother and sister, buried within three months of one another, had lain nineteen years in the grave, and Joseph Leyland, who acted as judge on that memorable occasion at the Cross Roads Inn, had been dead nearly as long. Thirty-nine years old, riddled with dropsy, attended faithfully by his personal manservant and a boy, the one-time brilliant sculptor came to his tragic end in a debtors’ prison in 1851, surviving Branwell by three years.
In 1842 both fatalities were remote. Leyland, with his inevitable meerschaum alight and a full glass in his hand, a sardonic smile on his heavy, handsome face, would have listened while his bespectacled, red-haired little friend read aloud some chapters about the impossible owner of a remote moorland farm, and, backed by the classical schoolmaster, have advised Branwell that he had created a motiveless monster out of his own black bile.
Like Richard the Third? Nonsense! Richard the Third was born deformed, and, politically ambitious, won his throne by cunning and high intelligence. Besides, he redeemed himself at the end through courage in battle. But this hero of Brontë’s did not possess one human quality. No reader would believe in him. So Heathcliff was dismissed at his first hearing.
Back at home, Branwell passed his time going over the Percy manuscripts. Not the old Percy of Angrian days, but that more modern, sardonic version conceived in 1837, and probably developed in the summer of 1840 after the Broughton-in-Furness débâcle, when the whole countryside round Haworth had been stirred by the great Revivalist meetings which swept through the district. In the story which he had written then, called And the Weary Are At Rest, Percy, once more backed by his old Angrian henchmates, became the unscrupulous mocker of Evangelical preachers, from McNeile of St Jude’s to the Baptist Winterbotham of Haworth. No one was spared in Branwell’s tirade against the hypocrisy of the disestablished churches and the false modesty of the female sex. The life of Alexander Percy, when it came to be written in its entirety, would ridicule churches, chapels, wives, daughters, the law, freemasonry and the landed gentry; no traditional order of things would escape the shafts directed with so sure a hand from the back bedroom of a Yorkshire parsonage.
On the evening of the first day of Ardmore fair, Sanctification Chapel presented to the crowd assembled about its doors a blaze of gaslight from every square-paned window. Inside, abundance of light threw a yellow glory over the rapidly filling pews and galleries, while a double lustre blessed the green baize-bordered platform erected for the distinguished orators in the forthcoming missionary meeting. Men with slouched shoulders and downcast eyes assiduously trimmed the lamps or scraped discordant preludes on violins or violoncellos, and perspiring but regenerated souls buried their faces in their hands under the influence of groaning prayer. The ladies, too, crowded fast into the scene of action with a very holy fervour, though sadly carnal attraction as to dress. ‘Their upturned eyes and saddened sighs’ told of heaven; but their satin bonnets and white handkerchiefs smelt a little of the earth, earthly.
For a while the bare boards of the platform caused a feeling of impatience in the rapidly filling edifice, but ere long these boards were pressed by the boots of five as beautiful specimens of sinners as ever trod upon Memel timber. The Rev. H. M. M. Montmorency, the Rev. J. Simpson, the Rev. G. Gordon, the Rev. A. O’Connor, the Rev. Q. Quamina, all attired in solemn sable, took their seats amid the deepest groans among the male, and with the liveliest sympathies from the female, portion of the audience; and though the chosen presented countenances as rascally as ever faced the mob round Tyburn tree, their erect gentlemanly figures and well-whiskered manliness told well, especially with the fairer and holier portion of the audience…
Waiting until an obligato movement of sighs and groans had ceased, the Rev. Alexander Percy began in a distinct but calm and silvery voice:
‘My brethren and sisters in Christ. I feel so much oppressed with the weight of a duty which a higher power has laid upon me that I request from you a song of prayer and praise ere we open the business of the evening. My brother Slugg, I shall give out a hymn and accompany on the organ myself, so it will be quite unnecessary for my Christian friend to make any use of the instrument I see in the music seat.’
As I have alluded to Mr Percy’s musical powers, I need hardly add now that when, after giving out the hymn, he took his seat at the organ, he soon sent the solemn harmony rolling through the chapel and ascending as if to Heaven. Whatever the discomfited gut-scrapers felt, they were obliged to stare at the powers of the rich converted squire, and even the Rev. S. Slugg gave a groan of astonishment when the last deep chord had died away…
The Rev. A. Percy, with a general bow to the enraptured audience, took his seat amid a flourish of five hundred white handkerchiefs. The male portion of the assembly groaned deeply, but the female portion felt deeply; and, if a keen observer had noticed the odd half-smile on Percy’s mobile lips as he looked round after taking his seat, he would have known at once that the orator had known to whose feelings he ought to address himself and to whom he meant to feel indifference.
The advance in technique in this extract is very marked when compared with the arrival of Percy at Darkwall Hall, written in the autumn of 1837. The satirical touch is sure, and the writer knows his subject. Percy the mocker is a far more convincing figure than Percy the melancholy lover of the earlier Angrian tales.
So the summer of 1842 continued, the spasmodic additions to the Percy story interspersed with a more careful revision of past sonnets, and the monotony of the Haworth scene enlivened by growing friendship with William Weightman the curate, and varied by excursions to Halifax. Charlotte wrote cheerfully from Brussels; occasional bouts of homesickness would not deter either Emily or herself from staying on another half-year at the pensionnat Héger, where they had been offered free bed and board in exchange for teaching services. This decision, incidentally, combined with Mary Taylor’s statement to Ellen Nussey, in a letter dated September, 1842, that ‘Charlotte and Emily are well; not only in health but in mind and hope… They are content with their present position and even gay and I think they do right not to return to England…’ makes nonsense of the tradition that Emily hated Brussels and pined for Haworth.
Mary and her sister were now living en pension at the Château Koekelberg, in a suburb of Brussels, not far from the rue d’Isabelle and the pensionnat Héger. The intelligence of Mary, the high spirits of Martha, made a fascinating combination which perhaps even the self-sufficient Emily found it hard to resist. Familiar faces seen in new surroundings can have an unconscious charm; somewhere in Emily’s imagination a turbulent, tempestuous Cathy was taking shape, a wilful, passionate Cathy who had no wish to die.
‘Martha was her father’s pet child,’ said Ellen Nussey. ‘He delighted in hearing her sing, telling her to go to the piano, with his affectionate “Patty lass”. Among her school companions she was always a favourite, so piquant and fascinating were her ways. She was not in the least pretty, but something much better, full of change and variety, rudely outspoken, lively and original, producing laughter with her own good humour and affection.’
Martha was taken ill at the Château Koekelberg early in October, 1842. She died at ten o’clock at night on the 12th of the month, and her death was reported to the authorities at two a.m. the following morning by two Belgian gentlemen, ‘friends of the deceased’. She was buried immediately in Koekelberg cemetery, and her sister Mary went to relatives in Brussels. The cause of her death was not stated on the official certificate. The haste with which her death was reported, and not, apparently, by a doctor, suggests a bungle, or a mystery, or both; even Mary Taylor, writing to Ellen Nussey a fortnight later, said:
You will wish to hear the history of Martha’s illness—I will give you it in a few months if you have not heard it then; till then you must excuse me. A thousand times I have reviewed the minutest circumstances of it, but I cannot without great difficulty give a regular account of them. There is nothing to regret, nothing to recall—not even Martha. She is better where she is. But when I recall the sufferings that have purified her, my heart aches—I can’t help it, and every trivial accident, sad or pleasant, reminds me of her and what she went through.
Strange language for one sister to use about another, especially a forthright sister like Mary Taylor. Why should twenty-three-year-old ‘Patty’ need purifying? And were her sufferings physical or mental? The secret lies buried beneath the old Koekelberg cemetery, now grassed over and a cemetery no more.
When Branwell heard the news of Martha Taylor’s death from his sisters in Brussels, it would have seemed to him either additional proof of the utter heartlessness of God, or, more likely still, the confirmation that no God existed who heard prayer. For six weeks earlier the young curate William Weightman, playfully nicknamed Celia Amelia on his arrival in Haworth in 1840, and soon a general favourite at the parsonage—though according to Charlotte an incorrigible flirt—had been taken ill. He had died on September 6th. The cause of death was given as ‘cholera and peritonitis’—a wide term in those days, suggesting anything from a ruptured appendix to summer dysentery.
Young Weightman was a year older than Branwell, and according to Branwell’s letter to the engineer Grundy, written on October 25th, ‘one of my dearest friends’. Since Branwell’s return to Haworth six months before, what could only have been a casual acquaintance in the Sowerby Bridge and Luddenden Foot days, with Branwell returning home for occasional afternoons, had developed into warmer feelings of affection, with the curate in and out of the parsonage every day.
Martha Taylor and William Weightman. Two young people of Branwell’s age struck down within five weeks of one another, who were loved by all who knew them, who had done no wrong. If this was justice, Branwell wanted no part of it. If this was the love of God, the word was meaningless.
The long sermon that his father preached in commemoration of the curate on October 2nd might have been written especially for Branwell, sitting alone in the family pew below the pulpit.
When good men die early, in the full tide of their usefulness, there is bewildering amazement, till we read in the scriptures, that in mercy they are taken away from the evil to come. In all such cases we want faith, and strong faith too… This world, with its false lights, eclipses in our morbid imagination the unimaginable splendour of heaven. Honour and riches, power and fame, with long life to enjoy them, frequently occupy but too much of our attention, whilst we dread the visitation of death, the darkness of the grave, the worm of corruption, the loathsome work of decomposition, eternal separation and oblivion… We may easily comprehend why the wicked have a desire for life, and a dread of death and judgement; but that the followers of Christ should tremble at the last step of their journey, which will introduce them into His presence and His glory, can only be accounted for by the weakness of their faith, and the remains of sin, that would chain them down, or keep them from those unspeakable pleasures which he has in reserve for them in the kingdom of their Heavenly Father.
The weakness of faith, the remains of sin—when had the son ever been strong in faith, or without sin? The voice of his father, stern in the pulpit now as it had been in Branwell’s childhood, yet compassionate, too, and kind, strong in its own belief, only added to his remorse and sense of loss. Why speak of the splendours of heaven when there were no eyes to see the glories, no lips to smile, no hands to touch? Dear, warmhearted Weightman lay beneath the cold stone. There was the blunt truth. Nothing else counted. And the same would be true of vivacious Martha, soon to be buried in Brussels, far from home.
There was to be one more test of faith—if his father cared to call it so. Branwell’s aunt, now sixty-six, had given no signs of illness until she complained of pain in mid-October. On the 25th of the month, when Branwell told his friend Grundy of Weightman’s death, he added: ‘And now I am attending at the death-bed of my aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. I expect her to die in a few hours…’ On the 29th he wrote again: ‘I am incoherent, I fear, but I have been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure; and I have now lost the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood…’
Elizabeth Branwell had died that same day. The cause of death, ‘exhaustion from constipation’. This brief statement conjures in its very brevity the full misery of illness a hundred and fifty years ago. The courageous little Cornish woman, who had left her home twenty years before to devote her life to her sister’s husband and his children, was obliged, through lack of medical skill, to endure unspeakable agony and die, when today efficient treatment, or at worst an immediate operation, would have saved not only suffering but life as well.
This letter of Branwell’s to Grundy is the sole witness of her last moments. Was he the only one to sit by the bedside? Did his father, powerless to help, remain below? Did little fourteen-year-old Martha, daughter of John Brown and assistant to the crippled aged Tabby, fetch and carry?
Branwell, in early childhood, had seen two sisters die. Some seven weeks since he had lost a gay and affectionate friend. Now the aunt who for twenty-two years had tried to take his mother’s place had gone after a fortnight’s suffering which no doctor or drug had been able to cure.
Anne returned for the funeral; Charlotte and Emily, travelling from Belgium, arrived when all was over. But to Branwell reunion with his sisters, when it came, was not enough. He had seen with his own eyes the ugliness of death. They lied who said that death was beautiful. His aunt had no wish to meet her Maker face to face. All she had demanded, had cried aloud for, was to be spared pain. And this had been denied. Prayer therefore was useless, was a mockery, and all that his aunt had lived for and sworn by and upheld deserted her when she needed it most. If he should ever come to suffer physically he would ask for no one’s prayers. He would not pray himself. There was only one panacea to pain—oblivion. And oblivion could be found in whisky, gin or laudanum. These would be his gods when the time of reckoning came.
Meanwhile… meanwhile nothing but the memory of that suffering, the puzzled wondering face, the restless tortured eyes. And did he but know it, it was not the quiet of the parsonage that could ever comfort him, nor the familiar ticking of the clock on the stairs, nor the silent prayers of his father alone in the parlour. The natural release to Branwell’s pent-up emotions would have been the keening of an Irish wake, the neighbours with veiled heads sitting beside the coffin; the wailing, the singing, the rocking to and fro, the flushed weeping faces, the comradeship, the tears.