Branwell was now twenty-five, without a penny to his name. The aunt who had loved him, confident of his future success when she made her will in 1833, had left her small capital to be divided between her nieces. The boy of sixteen, as her nephew had been then, with a brilliant career in front of him, would need no help from her when the time came; and the ‘Japan dressing-box’, which perhaps he had looked into and admired as a child, was her single bequest to the nephew she had brought up from babyhood. Branwell’s erratic behaviour since he had grown to man’s estate had not caused her faith in him to falter. Beliefs die hard. The boy would surely make his own way one day. The girls needed support, and not only Charlotte, Emily and Anne but a fourth niece, Elizabeth Jane Kingston, child of her remaining sister Anne.
The question facing Branwell was, what now? The reading of his poems to Leyland and the Halifax coterie had not resulted in their publication, although the sculptor’s brother was a printer and bookseller. Friends on the railway gave no hope of employment. He seemed to have reached a dead end. Charlotte and Emily, who had not seen their brother for close on a year, must have noticed the change in his appearance, which could not be accounted for by grief at his aunt’s death alone.
And Branwell, on his side, must have felt that Charlotte, who had always been closest to him, had changed just as greatly. For, however much she might conceal it from her family and her reasoning self, her passion for her professor Monsieur Héger was turning from the usual pupil-master attitude to an obsession. Just as once the feelings of the highly emotional Charlotte had spent themselves in daydreams of a life shared with Ellen Nussey—only worked out of her system by a frantic writing of Angrian romances—so now they were simmering to boiling point once more, but with the added excitement of a male-female relationship, hitherto unexperienced. The stories she had written before she went to Brussels had all tended in this direction—the younger girl, the older man, and that man married. Once conceived in the imagination and put on paper, the stories had to work themselves out in reality, and Monsieur Héger, the master, was the peg on which to hang the preconceived idea. If it had not been Monsieur Héger it would have been someone else: the girl who had lived in fantasy with the Duke of Zamorna since childhood days was forced through emotional necessity to bring him alive. It did not matter if he was a ‘little, black ugly being’, something between ‘an insane tom-cat and a delirious hyena’, as she described him in a letter to Ellen; the moment had come for imagination and reality to fuse. No wonder Charlotte was determined to return to Brussels.
So before long only Emily was left at home, content to look after her father, and Branwell, too, if he cared to behave himself. But Emily’s satirical essay, written in French the preceding autumn, showing Death choosing Intemperance as Viceroy above all other claimants, hardly suggests a tolerant attitude to drinking; she would never scold, but she might easily ignore, and the man who drank to win attention, or through lack of will-power, would be met with a shrug of the shoulder and possibly silence. Self-contained and detached as she was, to Emily the easily aroused emotions of others showed weakness; she had long ago resolved never herself to betray feeling. It was for this reason that she was often misunderstood and even disliked by passing acquaintances. The Misses Wheelwright, English neighbours in Brussels with whom Charlotte was friendly, described Emily as ‘tall and ungainly, always looking untidy’, and complained that the small Wheelwright children of ten and eight, to whom she taught music, had more than once come from their lessons in tears. But Ellen Nussey, who knew her better, said: ‘Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely lovable… Few people have the gift of looking and smiling, as she could look and smile—one of her rare expressive looks was something to remember through life.’
It was Anne, with her strong sense of duty combined with quiet determination and a sense of humour, who seemed best fitted at this moment to be Branwell’s companion. Whether she was herself, at this time, suffering from a secret grief, which would make her especially sympathetic to the troubles of her brother, is a matter for speculation. It has been suggested that she was in love with William Weightman, and shattered by his death. But downcast looks in church and a poem to his memory are no more proof of emotional attachment than the fact that the hero of her first novel was a clergyman. The grave, quiet, plain Mr Weston of Agnes Grey bears small resemblance to the gay, flirtatious, light-hearted ‘Celia Amelia’ of Charlotte’s letters. Mr Weston could just as easily be an idealized portrait of the Reverend James La Trobe, who had prayed by the sick Anne’s bedside when she was a pupil at Roe Head, and who had still been minister to the Moravian congregation in Mirfield when she returned there in 1839, this time as governess to the Ingham family of Blake Hall.
Since March, 1841, Anne had been governess to the daughters of Mr and Mrs Robinson of Thorp Green Hall, near York. When she had been with them for four months she wrote in her birthday note to Emily—which would be opened, according to their private arrangements, four years later—‘I dislike the situation, and wish to change it for another’. There was nothing to prevent her, yet she had not changed it by January, 1843, and a few months after their aunt’s death she even prevailed upon Branwell to accept the post of tutor to Mr Robinson’s son and heir, and return with her to Thorp Green Hall. If Anne had disliked her pupils, mistrusted Mr and Mrs Robinson and felt uneasy and unhappy in her surroundings, she would never have come forward with such a suggestion, knowing as she did the peculiar weaknesses of her brother’s character. The Robinsons, therefore, no matter how they had first appeared to Anne in the spring of 1841, must have developed into sympathetic friends two years later, since she risked introducing Branwell into the household.
If Anne herself made the suggestion to her employers that her brother should return as tutor, it must have shown that she had confidence in their character, and a belief that the cheerful atmosphere of Thorp Green would act as a tonic to low spirits. If it was the Robinsons who put forward the plan, then at least they made a good-natured attempt to solve a family difficulty, and showed a desire to help the governess who had endeared herself to her pupils. Perhaps the brother would prove as capable an instructor and as pleasant a companion as the sister. The Murrays of Agnes Grey, rich, rude, shallow, uncultured and disagreeable, yet continually and confidently held to represent the Robinsons of Thorp Green Hall, would surely have been the last people on earth to whom to introduce a highly strung, susceptible, easily led and excitable young man like Branwell. If the Murrays were in truth the Robinsons, then Anne was either a fool or a criminal to take her brother among them.
But she was neither. She had a natural gift for satire, and, like Jane Austen, she poked fun at the society in which she found herself; but the Robinsons, unlike the fictitious Murrays, must have had some kind qualities, some genuine good faith, some good-tempered jollity among them for sister and brother to remain there, as they did, two-and-a-half years before trouble broke.
Anne was a young woman of spirit and determination. She would never have endured the insults and slights that Mrs Murray and her daughter Rosalie put upon Agnes Grey, nor would she have encouraged a brother who had already lost one position as tutor to take up another with people of no integrity. Those who insist that life with the Murrays of Horton Lodge is an accurate picture of life with the Robinsons of Thorp Green must follow the story through to its conclusion, and find the model for Henry Weston among the vicars or curates of Little Ouseburn, or even among those of Scarborough, where Anne was happiest of all, and which she chose as a final resting-place.
The position of Thorp Green Hall, set in a grove of trees in low, flat country, two-and-a-half miles from the village of Little Ouseburn and twelve from York, was not one calculated to appeal to Branwell, fond of ‘active life’ and the attractions of Halifax. This Anne knew very well. Occasional visits to York to admire the Minster and to shop with the family would be tame compared with jaunts to the Talbot and the Old Cock. She knew her brother’s innate restlessness, his fretting to mix with poets, painters, sculptors. Aware of the effect which such company had upon him, she must have believed it to be harmful, and considered that the Robinsons would have an opposite effect, and that a normal family circle was what Branwell needed most. A quiet country life, a lad of eleven as companion (and Branwell was the only one of his family genuinely fond of children), a comfortable home atmosphere, with his evenings free for writing—here was the opportunity, she would reason (they must all have reasoned, discussing the plan at the parsonage), for Branwell to start life afresh and develop into the responsible adult his family wished him to become. Anne would no more have taken her brother to a house where there was constant drinking and gambling, where men ill-treated their wives, where a husband had an ‘affaire’ with a visiting guest under his own roof—all described in her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and again held by successive readers to be a true picture of life at Thorp Green—than she would have taken him, had she lodged at Luddenden Foot, among the Liverpool Irish or the boaties at the Weavers Arms.
Mr Edmund Robinson, forty-three years of age when Branwell became tutor to his son, was a clerk in Holy Orders but held no living. He owned a fair-sized estate which he had inherited at the age of three months from his father. Mr Robinson’s maiden aunt Jane would seem to have had the control of the estate until her nephew came of age. It was she who paid the bills, dealt with the agent and wrote to the tenants; and when Edmund Robinson at twenty-four became engaged to Miss Lydia Gisborne, daughter of the Reverend Thomas Gisborne of Yoxall Lodge, Staffordshire, it was Aunt Jane who saw to the drawing up of the marriage settlement, and complained afterwards to her solicitor about ‘pious, canting old Gisborne’, who presumably had left Miss Robinson to pay the brunt of the lawyer’s fees. Edmund’s mother was taken to York to add her signature to the documents, but it was Jane who made all the arrangements for the day, and told her lawyer: ‘I hope the Almighty will bless us and prosper what we are doing. I am sure my nephew deserves to prosper as he is an excellent creature.’
Her two nieces both subsequently married clergymen, and, supported as he was by these pillars of the church, watched over by his mother after his aunt died, Edmund Robinson may have been narrow-minded and unimaginative—he was certainly not corrupt. His account-book, with expenses carefully entered, shows him to have been an indulgent husband and father to his wife and four children—Lydia, Elizabeth, Mary and Edmund—during the period when Branwell Brontë was tutor to his son. The account-book tells of shawls and scarves, parasols and brooches, either with his wife’s name—Lydia—beside them, or ‘The Girls’.
Branwell’s salary was £80 a year: ‘Mr Brontë’s salary. £20’ is marked on quarter days. The steward and his wife, Mr and Mrs Thomas Sewell, took a prominent part in the running of the house, and Mrs Sewell received thirty pounds as her annual wages. It could be that the Sewells lodged, as Branwell did, in the old dwelling known as the Monk’s House, standing within a couple of hundred yards of Thorp Green Hall itself. Here Branwell would have had a sitting-room to himself, where he could write or sketch, and where Anne would join him in those hours when she was free.
That his first few months were not particularly happy ones is obvious from the poem entitled ‘Thorp Green’, dated March 30th, 1843. This is the only scrap which is known to have been written during the two-and-a-half years he lived with the Robinsons. It was scribbled in the same notebook that he had kept at Luddenden Foot, and the despondent mood is that of 1841 once more, repeating the dispirited hymn-book jingle.
I sit, this evening, far away
From all I used to know,
And nought reminds my soul to-day
Of happy long ago.
Unwelcome cares, unthought-of fears,
Around my room arise;
I seek for suns of former years,
But clouds o’ercast my skies.
Yes—Memory, wherefore does thy voice
Bring back old times to view,
As thou wouldst bid me not rejoice
In thoughts and prospects new?
I’ll thank thee, Memory, in the hour
When troubled thoughts are mine –
For thou, like suns in April’s shower,
On shadowy scenes will shine.
I’ll thank thee when approaching death
Would quench life’s feeble ember,
For thou wouldst even renew my breath
With thy sweet word ‘Remember!’
Branwell, forgetting anything he had learnt from Hartley Coleridge, and reverting instead to the Methodist hymns he had sung at Maria’s knee, was once more haunted by the spirit of his dead sister. What was it that she asked of him? It was like being cleft in two, one part of him longing to hold fast to the first impressions of childhood, the faith he had learnt from Maria and his aunt, which Anne still so earnestly held before him as the only safeguard against despair; and the other part of him desiring nothing so much as to be back in Halifax, in high spirits and more than a little drunk, making his friends laugh with his mocking descriptions of life at Thorp Green.
Leyland and Halifax were miles away: fantasy and the infernal world, with all its joys, all its terrible consolation, bringing alternate excitement and lassitude to the body, tension and torpor to the mind, must be the one indulgence. Was not Charlotte following the very same path in Brussels?
‘It is a curious metaphysical fact,’ she wrote to him on May 1st, 1843, ‘that always in the evening when I am in the great dormitory alone, having no other company than a number of beds with white curtains, I always recur as fanatically as ever to the old ideas, the old faces, and the old scenes in the world below.’
Yes, but how deeply was she involved, how utterly dependent? When morning came, could she concentrate on teaching English to her French pupils? Or did she hear herself speak at random, as he did to young Edmund, eye on lesson book but imagination turning back to the manuscript And the Weary Are At Rest, begun in the summer of 1840 but never finished, in which Maria Thurston, mistress of Darkwall Hall, fell a victim to the wily tongue and impassioned advances of Alexander Percy? In one episode Percy is a guest under the Thurstons’ roof at the opening of the grouse shooting.
When, at noon-tide, the diverging groups of sportsmen and attendants met at a lonely spring, whose diamond water gushed up through deep green mosses in a knell of knee-deep heather under a semi-circle of whinstone rock, they seemed all engrossed in the display of their bags or in excusing a want of display… All rode triumphant over the acknowledged best shot in the party, Mr Percy.
‘Well,’ exclaimed Mr O’Connor, turning over Percy’s single cock bird, which was minus a head from some access of fury on the part of the shooter. ‘Well, gentlemen, hand me the flask. I have lived through many troubles in my time, but this is a regular extinguisher upon all! To think I have nine brace to show against half a one from the best gun between Derbyshire and Westmorland is enough to make me fancy I can pay off my debts… Percy, with half a bird! I say, Quamina, hand me over the flask.’
Mr Quamina replied, ‘He’s head over ears, O’Connor. He has bagged his bird before he donned his jacket, and Thurston had better take care of that…’
‘Who—I?—What are you saying?’ exclaimed the host furiously; but Mr Quamina, evidently astonished, swallowed all reply in another pull at his flask, and Mr Percy, not desirous of being victim of his friends’ or host’s revenge, tossed off his horn of mountain dew, threw his single headless bird to his old servant, and bidding him take care to bring the pony and his own skin back safe to Darkwall, he lost no time in good mornings and excuses, but dashed back across the gulley and down the long car-truck which served as a path from the peat pits to the farmsteads of a more civilised land.
I cannot be expected to dissect Mr Percy’s feelings or emotions during his rapid walk to Darkwall, as I believe he scarce left time to do so himself, but with a scorn of his morning’s employment, a distaste towards his morning’s companions, and a revulsion of thoughts which made the whole Twelfth a day of black chalks, he sprang over the first stile and strode over the first causeway through the twenty-acre pasture of green land stolen from heather and made part and parcel of Darkwall Farm.
Percy did not make any halt in his intrusion so soon and unexpectedly upon the quietude of the Hall, which expected domestic slumber till evening brought in such visitors as might be willing to turn night into day. He made his return known to the Lady of the Mansion, and was received by her in the breakfast room…
During the first moments of her meeting with the unexpectedly arrived guest, no servant about the establishment could have been so dull as not to perceive the embarrassment of their usually calm and sweet-tempered Mistress. The eye which usually had a dove-like glance for all, the voice which had a gentle tone, and the steps which were so quiet, now changed into a phase of irritation in manner, trouble in the eyes, and hesitation both in voice and step; but a ready key might have been given to these changes had the observers been aware of the promise given to her furious husband and meant to be kept as faithfully as made, and the revulsion of all hospitable or ladylike feeling should she keep to the letter of her promise, as well as the still, small voice, scarce daring to whisper amid conflicting winds, which told a woman’s and a lady’s heart that a visitor was sheltered under her roof whose mind possessed some mettle more attractive than ebullitions of sour reproach; whose feelings had a wider, higher and deeper range than what would be exercised in attempts to ruin others or oneself; whose person likewise had animated instead of cloudy looks, gentle flexibility of tone instead of bilious snappishness, eyes of mobile imaginativeness instead of acerb ill-temper—that she might now, in fact, have hoped for one happy afternoon after so many blank or blotted ones but for the grim, threatening scowl which, from neighbouring moors, frowned upon her companionship the thunder shadows of resentment and revenge.
Just as Ellen Nussey and Mary and Martha Taylor had been ignorant of the part they played in Angrian history, so Mrs Robinson, as she went about her household tasks or sat at her embroidery frame, was unaware that she made a perfect incarnation of Mrs Thurston of Darkwall Hall; while her husband, Branwell’s employer, fitted delightfully into the role of jealous, bilious Thurston, who had allowed none of his guests to pay court to the ladies of the household.
Mr and Mrs Robinson, when they invited Mr Brontë to stay for a short visit in the spring of 1843, and complimented him on the excellent characters of his son and daughter, had no more idea than their guest that the well-mannered and most respectful young man whom they had engaged as tutor enacted, during his solitary evenings at the Monk’s House, scenes of seduction from the Thurston story of so daring a nature that, when he was confronted with the reality of his position the following morning, and faced with the routine of the day, he was obliged to hold himself in check in order not to destroy the image they had formed of him.
At the beginning of January, 1844, Charlotte finally returned to the parsonage from Brussels, profoundly disillusioned and wounded in spirit, her beloved Professor Héger having shown a certain degree of evasion in her presence, and his wife a marked coldness, which could only mean a united marital front in a situation threatening embarrassment. Later in the month she wrote to Ellen Nussey: ‘Anne and Branwell have just left us to return to York. They are both wondrously valued in their situations.’ Neither brother nor sister was mentioned again until June 23rd, five months later, when she informed Ellen:
Anne and Branwell are now at home, and they and Emily add their request to mine that you will join us in the beginning of next week. Write and let us know what day you will come, and how—if by coach we will meet you at Keighley. Do not let your visit be later than the beginning of next week, or you will see little of A and B as their holidays are very short. They will soon have to join the family at Scarborough.
On July 16th both Charlotte and Emily were busy making shirts, presumably for Branwell to wear while escorting the Robinsons in Scarborough. This year the family arrived on July 11th, and took lodgings, as usual, in the most fashionable quarter of the town, at No. 7, Cliff. They were there certainly until August 9th, when their names disappeared from the list of Scarborough visitors.
The local newspapers of August 3rd mentioned the first appearance of the ‘celebrated comedian’ Robert Roxby, manager not only of the Theatre Royal, Scarborough, but also of the Royal, Manchester. Perhaps it was on this occasion that eighteen-year-old Miss Lydia, the eldest Miss Robinson, who was now ‘out’ and in society, saw and admired young Henry Roxby, one of the members of the actor’s family, with whom she afterwards eloped.
If Miss Lydia Robinson was truly the Rosalie Murray of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, then she was a very pretty girl indeed.
She was tall and slender, but not thin, perfectly formed, exquisitely fair, but not without a brilliant, healthy bloom; her hair, which she wore in a profusion of long ringlets, was of a very light brown, strongly inclining to yellow; her eyes were pale blue, but so clear and bright, that few could wish them darker; the rest of her features were small, not quite regular, and not remarkable otherwise, but altogether you could not hesitate to pronounce her a very lovely girl… She was lively, light-hearted, and could be very agreeable with those who did not cross her will. Towards me, when I first came, she was cold and haughty, then insolent and overbearing; but on a further acquaintance, she gradually laid aside her airs… She had never been taught to moderate her desires, to control her temper or bridle her will, or to sacrifice her own pleasure for the good of others; her temper being naturally good, she was never violent or morose, but from constant indulgence and habitual scorn of reason, she was often testy and capricious; her mind had never been cultivated: her intellect at best was somewhat shallow; she possessed considerable vivacity, some quickness of perception, and some talent for music and the acquisition of languages.
In Agnes Grey Rosalie Murray flirts with every male on sight; and had the novel included a red-haired young tutor never at a loss for conversation, with a turn for imitation and a fund of amusing stories, she would doubtless have made him her willing slave in the first few months. Whatever Lydia Robinson’s manner towards Branwell, whether she teased the tutor or ignored him, belongs to the realm of speculation: either mode of treatment would have contributed to his state of distress that summer and autumn. His irritability and tendency to excitement during the brief holiday at home preceding the visit to Scarborough were hinted at in a letter, months later, from Charlotte to Ellen Nussey; and in one of her many, never-answered letters to Professor Héger, written on October 24th, she said: ‘My father and my sister send you their respects. My father’s infirmity increases little by little. Nevertheless, he is not yet entirely blind. My sisters are well, but my poor brother is always ill.’
No clue exists to the cause of Branwell’s illness, but it was evidently not serious enough to warrant his giving up his post and coming home. Had he been drinking, Anne would have noticed it and warned Charlotte, and Charlotte would have phrased her letter to M. Héger differently, or not mentioned her brother at all. She knew too well, from bitter personal experience, how soaring spirits could plunge into despair. Why had she wasted her time in Brussels, waiting day after day for a glance or a smile from her professor that, when it came, would only plunge her into deeper misery? Reason and conscience brought her home. Branwell, with autumn closing in, Mrs Robinson and Miss Lydia going out and about in a society that did not include the tutor, would ask himself the question that Charlotte must have put to herself many times. What have I to show at twenty-seven for my many talents? Am I to remain for the rest of my life a paid employee, a gentleman lackey whose only value lies in opening doors, and winding skeins of silk, and carrying parasols? The familiarity which the Robinsons would have permitted him a year before, with their oldest daughter emerging from the schoolroom, would now be frowned upon and out of place. However gracious they may have been, the division was rigid between employers and employees in the nineteenth century.
It was this attitude that so riled Charlotte, in her two posts as governess, that in unconscious revenge she created Jane Eyre, the most celebrated governess not only of the century but of all time. Anne gave her answer in Agnes Grey. It was not so much the people whom she attacked as the system, the snobbery of a society where birth and affluence made employers deem themselves superior to those in humbler circumstances possessing better brains and a wider range of talent.
Did this resentment seize Branwell too? And did he allow his bitterness to turn inward, proudly refusing acceptance of what he thought base humility? If so, his Percy daydream may have induced him to toy for a time with the prospect of Lydia bestowing her favour upon him. Then, snubbed for his pains, did he transfer his infatuation from daughter to mother?
This would seem the most likely explanation of what was happening to Branwell during 1844 and the first few months of 1845. Wounded emotions can swiftly transfer themselves to another object. The few lame verses which he wrote to a lady sketching a self-portait and deliberately, so it would seem, making a poor job of it may have been a first tentative attempt at a declaration, if a very different one from the bravado with which Alexander Percy advanced upon Mrs Thurston.
Her effort shows a picture made
To contradict its meaning:
Where should be sunshine, painting shade,
And smiles with sadness screening;
Where God has given a cheerful view,
A gloomy vista showing;
Where heart and face are fair and true,
A shade of doubt bestowing.
Ah, Lady, if to me you give
The power your sketch to adorn,
How little of it shall I leave
Save smiles that shine like morn.
I’d keep the hue of happy light
That shines from summer skies;
I’d drive the shades from smiles so bright
And dry such shining eyes.
I’d give a calm to one whose heart
Has banished calm from mine;
I’d brighten up God’s work of art
Where thou hast dimmed its shine,
And all the wages I should ask
For such a happy toil –
I’ll name them—far beyond my task –
Thy Presence and Thy Smile.
Mrs Robinson—if the poem, which is undated, was in truth addressed to her—could read the vapid lines without a blush. Perhaps the smile, and the mock bow with which she would return it to the author, were seized upon as a promise of better things to come, of a secret understanding that would make every commonplace remark hereafter fraught with a double meaning. How pleasant, after all, the meadows and the stream and the copses of Thorp Green when summer came! The discomforts of Luddenden and Sowerby were a world away.
A smile, a glance, a kindly word in conversation, received as a crumb of comfort, can become transmuted to the bread of life. Starved emotions do not accept defeat. If Branwell loved, he dared to believe himself loved in return.
These were the fantasies that Charlotte had woven around Monsieur Héger in the rue d’Isabelle, but had had the sense to check in time.
An hour hence, in my master’s room,
I sat with him alone,
And told him what a dreary gloom
O’er joy had parting thrown.
He little said; the time was brief,
The ship was soon to sail;
And while I sobbed in bitter grief
My master but looked pale.
They called in haste: he bade me go,
Then snatched me back again;
He held me fast and murmured low,
‘Why will they part us, Jane?…
‘They call again: leave then my breast;
Quit thy true shelter, Jane;
But when deceived, repulsed, opprest,
Come home to me again!’
This poem was written in the exercise book which Charlotte brought back with her from Brussels. In January, 1845, when Branwell was entering upon his last months at Thorp Green, she wrote to Monsieur Héger:
Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them—they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. But if they are refused the crumbs they die of hunger. Nor do I, either, need much affection from those I love. I should not know what to do with a friendship entire and complete—I am not used to it. But you showed me of yore a little interest, when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest—I hold on to it as I would hold on to life…’
Branwell too held on to his little interest, but he was not content with the crumbs, nor with the small mercies of day-by-day, nor with dreams. The rich joys of his infernal world must be savoured in reality.