It was not until after Lydia Robinson’s elopement that Branwell declared openly, in letters to his friends, that he had been in love with Lydia’s mother and she with him. The runaway marriage acted like a torch to tinder, and his imagination was on fire with possibilities.
First would come regret that he had wasted his own chances—for what did the actor possess that he lacked?—and, secondly, the new fantasy that what the daughter had done the mother could do too. Confusion between mother and daughter of the same name must have been intense to a mind that could no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. His demon Percy was in full possession now, stripping him of self-control, leaving the shell of Branwell bereft of judgement and emotionally drained—not the all-conquering Alexander of the early Angrian tales, but the aged Earl of Northangerland, who had lost wife, mistress and daughter.
Branwell must have kept silence about the daughter’s runaway marriage, for no one in Haworth knew of it. Even ten or more years later, when Mrs Gaskell was collecting material for her biography of Charlotte, not a word was said to her about it. The only thing that mattered to Branwell, in the summer of 1845, was to transmute the mother’s distress at her daughter’s disgrace into despair at her own separation from Branwell. Here was fuel with which to feed the fire of gossip and Branwell’s own obsession. This was perhaps the origin of the stories circulating in Haworth, and repeated with gusto to Mrs Gaskell, that Mrs Robinson had proposed elopement with Branwell, and met him clandestinely in Harrogate. He had no other source by which to live now but the continual tragedy of his broken heart. Here was the ultimate excuse, the valid reason for failure. If the broken heart were mended, the bleeding wound staunched, he would be nothing but a man of twenty-eight who had wasted the best years of his life.
It was to Francis Grundy, the engineer, that he first wrote his confession; and although the letter bore no date when Grundy printed it in his book, from internal evidence it appears to have been written in October. Grundy’s Pictures of the Past, published in 1879, when Mrs Robinson—later Lady Scott—had been dead for twenty years, was probably never seen by her descendants; otherwise the offending letter, so often quoted since, might have been challenged, and the matter it contained denied. Mrs Gaskell, who in her biography of Charlotte, first published in March, 1857, called Mrs Robinson Branwell’s ‘paramour’, and accused her of ‘criminal advances’, was threatened with a libel action by Mrs Robinson’s solicitors, and was obliged to make a public apology, through her own lawyers, which was printed in The Times. Leyland the printer, reporting this when he published his own book on the Brontë family in 1886, said that ‘the indignation of the injured lady knew no bounds, and that she was only dissuaded from carrying the matter to a trial by the earnest desire of her friends’. He also stated that a gentleman he had spoken to, ‘who knew this lady personally, had good reason for entirely disbelieving the stories, relating to the lady in question’. Certainly Francis Leyland’s own opinion was that the story had ‘no foundation save in Branwell’s heated imagination’, and his brother the sculptor never believed it.
‘For a time Branwell could talk of nothing but of the lady to whom he was attached,’ said Francis Leyland.
This lady, he said, loved him to distraction. She was in a state of inconceivable agony at his loss. Her husband, cruel, brutal, and unfeeling, threatened her with his dire indignation, and deprivation of every comfort. Branwell told one friend by letter that in consequence of this persecution the suffering lady ‘had placed herself under his protection’, and many other stories, equally unfounded, extravagant, and impossible, were circulated. In a word, he went about among his friends, telling to each, in strict confidence, the woes under which he suffered, and painting in gloomy colours the miseries which the lady of his love had been compelled to undergo.
This is the letter which Branwell wrote to Grundy in the autumn of 1845.
I fear you will burn my present letter on recognising the handwriting; but if you will read it through, you will perhaps rather pity than spurn the distress of mind which would prompt my communication, after a silence of nearly three (to me) eventful years. While very ill and confined to my room I wrote to you two months ago, hearing that you were resident engineer of the Skipton Railway, to the inn at Skipton. I never received any reply, and as my letter asked only for one day of your society, to ease a very weary mind in the company of a friend who always had what I always wanted, but most want now, cheerfulness, I am sure you never received my letter, or your heart would have prompted an answer.
Since I last shook hands with you in Halifax, two summers ago, my life till lately has been one of apparent happiness and indulgence. You will ask, ‘Why does he complain then?’ I can only reply by showing the undercurrent of distress which bore my bark to a whirlpool, despite the surface waves of life that seemed floating me to peace. In a letter begun in the spring, and never finished owing to incessant attacks of illness, I tried to tell you that I was tutor to the son of Edmund Robinson, a wealthy gentleman whose wife is sister to the wife of Mr Evans, M.P. for the county of North Derbyshire, and the cousin of Lord—. This lady (though her husband detested me) showed me a degree of kindness which, when I was deeply grieved one day at her husband’s conduct, ripened into declarations of more than ordinary feeling. My admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet temper, and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where most should have been given… although she is seventeen years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led to reciprocations which I had little looked for. During nearly three years I had daily ‘troubled pleasure, soon chastised by fear’. Three months since I received a furious letter from my employer, threatening to shoot me if I returned from my vacation, which I was passing at home; and letters from her lady’s maid and physician informed me of the outbreak, only checked by her firm courage and resolution that whatever harm came to her, none should come to me…
I have lain during nine long weeks utterly shattered in body and broken down in mind. The probability of her becoming free to give me herself and her estate never rose to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief. I dreaded, too, the wreck of my mind and body, which, God knows, during a short life have been severely tried. Eleven continuous nights of sleepless horror reduced me to almost blindness, and being taken into Wales to recover, the sweet scenery, the sea, the sound of music caused me fits of unspeakable distress. You will say, ‘What a fool!’ but if you knew the many causes I have for sorrow which I cannot even hint at here, you would perhaps pity as well as blame.
At the kind request of Mr Macaulay and Mr Baines, I have striven to arouse my mind by writing something worthy of being read, but I really cannot do so. Of course you will despise the writer of all this. I can only answer that the writer does the same, and would not wish to live if he did not hope that work and change may yet restore him.
Apologising sincerely for what seems like whining egotism, and hardly daring to hint about days when in your company I could sometimes sink the thoughts which ‘remind me of departed days’, I fear never to return,—I remain, etc.
If Francis Grundy, whose garrulous reminiscences proclaim him an incessant chatterbox, repeated the contents of his friend’s letter to his many acquaintances on the railway staff, the gist, through repetition and misrepresentation, would suggest an innocent young man in the toils of a lady of easy virtue. At the same time, the fact that Branwell’s constant requests for employment, through Grundy, never seem to have reached the executive railway authorities implies that the engineer knew his friend’s weaknesses too well, and, however fond of him, had no desire to recommend him for a situation. ‘I believe, however, he was half mad, and could not control himself,’ Grundy admitted, referring to the Luddenden year of 1841–2.
On 25 November Branwell sent his poem ‘Penmaenmawr’ to Joseph Leyland, asking him to forward it to the Halifax Guardian.
‘I have no other way,’ he told the sculptor,
not pregnant with danger, of communicating with one whom I cannot help loving. Printed lines with my usual signature ‘Northangerland’ would excite no suspicion—as my late employer shrank from the bare idea of my being able to write anything, and had a day’s sickness after hearing that Macaulay had sent me a complimentary letter, so he won’t know the name.
I sent through a private channel one letter of comfort in her great and agonising present afflictions, but I recalled it through dread of the consequences of a discovery.
The ‘afflictions’, of course, were the shock and anxiety of her daughter’s elopement, but the sculptor was not to know this. Leyland must believe, like everyone else, that Mrs Robinson was pining for grief at his absence.
‘I suffer very much,’ Branwell said,
from that mental exhaustion, which arises from brooding on matters useless at present to think of, and active employment would be my greatest cure and blessing—for really, after hours of thoughts which business would have hushed, I have felt as if I could not live, and, if long continued, such a state will bring on permanent affection of the heart, which is already bothered with most uneasy palpitations.
I should like extremely to have an hour’s sitting with you, and if I had the chance, I would promise to try not to be gloomy. You said you would be at Haworth ere long but that ere has doubtless changed to ne’er, so I must wish to get to Halifax sometime to see you.
I saw Murray’s monument praised in the papers, and I trust you are getting on well with Beckwith’s, as well as with your own personal statue of living flesh and blood. Mine, like your Theseus, has lost its hands and feet, and, I fear, its head also, for it can neither move, write or think as it once could…
Leyland, heavily in debt, snowed under with commitments which he could not fulfil, was still fond enough of his many friends to welcome them to his studio and listen to their woes, but Branwell and his broken heart must have been a trial to patience. Nothing is so tedious as the love affair of another when it has turned to obsession, and Branwell in despair was very different company from Branwell in exultation. Leyland, slaving away at mural tablets to meet his debts instead of at the giant figures he preferred, surely groaned inwardly when Branwell repeated, for the tenth time, the story of his love for Lydia Robinson. Leyland’s own financial affairs were far more disturbing to him. Only £68 for the tablet to the Reverend John Murray in Halifax parish church, and now he was behindhand with the monument to Stephen Beckwith in York Minster, for which he was to be paid £250 and find his own material, an impossible task at the price, when the full-length recumbent figure of Dr Beckwith and the slab had both to be of pure statuary marble, the tomb of white Huddlestone stone and the cover of black polished marble. Even the £50 on account he asked for was but grudgingly allowed him by the memorial committee, which believed in treating a famous sculptor like a working mason.
Branwell, however, could not be expected to interest himself in such mundane matters.
I know a flower, whose leaves were meant to bloom
Till Death should snatch it to adorn a tomb,
Now, blanching ’neath the blight of hopeless grief,
With never blooming, and yet living leaf;
A flower on which my mind would wish to shine,
If but one beam could break from mind like mine.
I had an ear which could on accents dwell
That might as well say ‘perish’ as ‘farewell’!
An eye which saw, far off, a tender form,
Beaten, unsheltered, by affliction’s storm;
An arm—a lip—that trembled to embrace
My angel’s gentle breast and sorrowing face;
A mind that clung to Ouse’s fertile side
While tossing—objectless—on Menai’s tide!
The sculptor, shaking his head over the lines from ‘Penmaenmawr’, must have sighed for the excited fellow of a few years back who, at the Cross Roads Inn, had read some pages of very different stuff. He gave the poem to his brother the printer, who was much impressed, feeling that ‘the lady, whose charms had bewildered his [Branwell’s] imagination, had supplied him with a subject for sorrowful recollections’. Francis Leyland, himself newly married, and about to become a Roman Catholic, had more compassion, though possibly less perception, than the sculptor, and he hoped to convert not only his unbelieving brother but his brother’s erring friends.
It seems incredible that Branwell and Charlotte, so close in childhood, so understanding of one another in adolescence, should not at this moment have shared each other’s troubles. Perhaps they did. No surviving letter tells us they did not.
Proof exists that Charlotte was yearning for her professor; but we have only Branwell’s letters to his friends to tell us that his passion for Mrs Robinson was real.
Less than a week before Branwell wrote to his friend the sculptor of Mrs Robinson’s ‘agonising present afflictions’, Charlotte had told Monsieur Héger:
I have done everything; I have sought occupation; I have denied myself absolutely the pleasure of speaking about you—even to Emily; but I have been able to conquer neither my regrets nor my impatience. That, indeed, is humiliating—to be unable to control one’s own thoughts, to be the slave of a regret, of a memory, the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which lords it over the mind. Why cannot I have just as much friendship for you, as you for me—neither more nor less? Then should I be so tranquil, so free—I could keep silence then for ten years without effort.
Surely she was thinking of Branwell when she penned the words ‘the slave of a fixed and dominant idea’, and the possibility that she was suffering for the same reason, and with as bad a grace, was hateful to her.
‘Your last letter was stay and prop to me,’ she told her late professor,
nourishment to me for half a year. Now I need another and you will give it me; not because you bear me friendship—you cannot have much –but because you are compassionate of soul and you would condemn no one to prolonged suffering to save yourself a few moments’ trouble. To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to answer me, would be to tear from me my only joy on earth, to deprive me of my last privilege—a privilege I shall never consent willingly to surrender. Believe me, my master, in writing to me it is a good deed that you will do. So long as I believe you are pleased with me, so long as I have hope of receiving news from you, I can be at rest and not too sad. But when a prolonged and gloomy silence seems to threaten me with the estrangement of my master—when day by day I await a letter, and when day by day disappointment comes to fling me back in overwhelming sorrow, and the sweet delight of seeing your handwriting and reading your counsel escapes me as a vision that is vain, then fever claims me—I lose appetite and sleep—I pine away.
No sister who wrote lines such as this to a married man, years older than herself, could possibly wholly condemn a brother who vowed that he had been dismissed from his post as tutor for expressing just these sentiments. The letter which Branwell told Leyland he wrote to Mrs Robinson, and then withdrew, may even have been written at the same time as Charlotte wrote to the professor, some chord of sympathy or intuition uniting brother and sister in their common misery, just as years before they had invented and developed the same characters in the Angrian stories. For Monsieur Héger and Lydia Robinson were in truth those identical characters pegged on to living people. The infernal world had come alive for both Branwell and Charlotte, but without the old delight, the lovely solace. Figures of flesh and blood, unlike Zamorna and Mary Percy, could not be moulded as the will desired, but chose their own direction.
To Ellen Nussey, so often her confidante, Charlotte said nothing of Monsieur Héger or of the manuscript she was adapting, which she would call The Professor, or of the poems she was collecting and intended to have published. But she could at least complain of Branwell, if only because a sick and erring brother was the one thing in the world Ellen would understand, with one of her own being nursed at home and another in an asylum.
‘Branwell offers no prospect of hope—he professes to be too ill to think of seeking for employment—he makes comfort scant at home,’ she told Ellen on January 23rd, 1846, which was the very date that Emily began a poem with the lines:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere;
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
What a blessed relief it must have been for Emily to stride away over the moors with her dog, and put aside, if only for an hour on a winter’s afternoon, the memory of her brother humped on his bed thinking of his Lydia, and her sister crouched on the dining-room sofa brooding on her professor. Meanwhile Branwell, too listless to walk with her as he would have done once, too obsessed with his own image to collaborate in Earnshaw history, sat up in the bleak studio finishing the poem to a corpse which he had started back in the autumn.
I have an outward frame, unlike to thine,
Warm with young life—not cold in death’s decline;
An eye that sees the sunny light of Heaven –
A heart by pleasure thrilled, by anguish riven –
But, in exchange for thy untroubled calm,
Thy gift of cold oblivion’s healing balm,
I’d give my youth, my health, my life to come,
And share thy slumbers in thy ocean tomb.
Beside the last lines of another undated poem, entitled ‘Juan Fernandez’, he scribbled ‘Lydia’ in Greek.
Tossed overboard, my perished crew
Of Hopes and Joys sink, one by one,
To where their fellow-thoughts have gone
Where past gales breathed or tempests blew
Each last fond look ere sight declines
To where my own Fernandez shines,
Without one hope that they may e’er
Storm-worn, recline in sunshine there.
March was an evil month, cold and grey, and, with Charlotte away from home on her first snatched visit to Ellen Nussey since last July, Branwell could persuade his father into giving him a sovereign. A little store of gin and laudanum could thus be obtained. What blessed release it gave from pain and misery, what a blotting-out of feeling, and before full oblivion set in such strange and wandering images filled the room, the two Lydias beside him, mother and daughter in one, their shining faces sometimes turning into his own mother and sister, the two Marias.
‘I went into the room where Branwell was, to speak to him, about an hour after I got home,’ wrote Charlotte to Ellen Nussey on March 3rd.
It was very forced work to address him. I might have spared myself the trouble, as he took no notice, and made no reply; he was stupefied. My fears were not in vain. Emily tells me that he got a sovereign from Papa while I have been away, under the pretence of paying a pressing debt; he went immediately and changed it at a public-house, and has employed it as was to be expected. She concluded her account by saying he was a ‘hopeless being’; it is too true. In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is. What the future has in store I do not know.
She wrote on the same day to Messrs Aylott & Jones, sending them a draft for £31 10s. to cover the cost of the printing of the poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Her aunt’s legacy could be well employed. How providential, she may have thought, that none of it had been left to Branwell—he would only have spent it on drink.
On March 28th Charlotte requested the publishers to send all proofs and letters in future to Miss Brontë rather than C. Brontë Esq., a little mistake having occurred the day before. Did Branwell open the packet, and see what his sisters were about? If they wanted to print poems at their own expense, let them. They could afford to do so. He could not. Nevertheless, they need not think themselves the only poets in the household. Six days later he composed an ‘Epistle From a Father to a Child in Her Grave’, inspired, possibly, by some earlier Percy poem, and now interwoven with fantasies of what might have been. Perhaps he was thinking of Mrs Robinson’s baby Georgiana, who had died as an infant before he ever went to Thorp Green, or of some other young child laid to rest in Haworth churchyard. Hartley and Harriet Merrall’s little William Edwin, possibly, buried five years ago, in April, during his first year of life:
If then thoud’st seen, upon a summer sea,
One, once in features, as in blood, like thee,
On skies of azure blue and waters green,
Melting to mist amid the summer sheen,
In troubles gazing—ever hesitating
’Twixt miseries each new dread creating,
And joys—whate’er they cost—still doubly dear,
Those ‘troubled pleasures soon chastised by fear’;
If thou hadst seen him, thou would’st ne’er believe
That thou had’st yet known what it was to live!
Thine eyes could only see thy mother’s breast;
Thy feelings only wished on that to rest;
That was thy world; thy food and sleep it gave,
And slight the change ’twixt it and childhood’s grave.
Thou saw’st this world like one who, prone, reposes,
Upon a plain, and in a bed of roses,
With nought in sight save marbled skies above,
Nought heard but breezes whispering in the grove:
I—thy life’s source—was like a wanderer breasting
Keen mountain winds, and on a summit resting,
Whose rough rocks rose above the grassy mead,
With sleet and north winds howling overhead,
And Nature, like a map, beneath him spread;
Far winding river, tree, and tower and town,
Shadow and sunlight, ’neath his gaze marked down
By that mysterious hand which graves the plan
Of that drear country called ‘The Life of Man’…
The poem’s interest lies in the images conjured by certain lines. The ‘skies of azure blue and water’s green’, the ‘bed of roses’, the ‘marbled skies’, the ‘wanderer breasting keen mountain winds, and on a summit resting’—all these are successive dream-pictures, while the dead child is not only Branwell himself who, prone, reposes’ but also his other wandering self poised on the heights above.
The sensation of being, as it were, ‘out of the body’, looking down upon the other self, is a well-known sign of the mental disorder known today as schizophrenia. The taking of alcohol or laudanum would inevitably increase Branwell’s susceptibility to images both horrific and beautiful, leaving him suggestible to any impulse, and therefore a potential danger to those about him. The tales of upset candles, burning bedclothes, concealed carving-knives, all common chat in Haworth later, and repeated to successive visitors, must have dated from this period, when Branwell, aware of heightened imagination and failing concentration, was obliged to enact, in some outward fashion, the promptings of the demon within. If Emily read aloud to her brother, as she did to her sisters, the scenes in Wuthering Heights which, according to Charlotte, ‘banished sleep by night and disturbed mental peace by day’, then the identification of himself with Hindley Earnshaw was very possible.
He would have seen all three sisters working on their novels during these months. Their method of writing was known to him, the way they set about it, the unvarying routine. Had he not been their leader once, and Genius Brannii? It was on April 6th, 1846, that Charlotte wrote once more to Aylott & Jones, who were printing the poems, to ask advice about a ‘work of fiction, consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales’, which ‘C., E. and A. Bell’ were ‘preparing for the Press’. Branwell knew all three ‘tales’. The early part of Charlotte’s The Professor had been worked up from their Angrian stories of Alexander Percy’s sons; Wuthering Heights was the final Heathcliff narrative, completed with the second generation; and Agnes Grey the ‘Passages in the Life of an Individual’ which Anne had been struggling with at Thorp Green. He would not believe that a publisher would risk his money and reputation by printing novels or poems by unknown authors, but if the girls cared to try their luck it was their own affair. Certainly they would not receive any encouragement from him.
His own plan was more ambitious. He would write an epic about an ancestral connection of Leyland’s, the beautiful Anne Leyland of Morley Hall near Lancaster, eldest daughter of stern Sir Thomas Leyland. Anne fell in love with one Edward Tyldesley, and, notwithstanding her father’s anger and disapproval, eloped one night and fled to her lover’s moated home. About her waist was a rope, and she threw the loose end to her waiting lover on the farther side of the water, so that he was able to draw it to shore, and his loved one with it. The legend was the more remarkable because, although the irate father had a son and heir, the manor house of Morley passed to the Tyldesley family through this clandestine marriage. The resemblance between this story and Lydia Robinson’s elopement is too close to be pure accident.
‘You ask if we are more comfortable,’ wrote Charlotte to Ellen on April 14th.
I wish I could say anything favourable—but how can we be more comfortable so long as Branwell stays at home and degenerates instead of improving? It has lately been intimated to him that he would be received again on the same railroad where he was formerly stationed if he would behave more steadily, but he refuses to make an effort, he will not work—and at home he is a drain on every resource—an impediment to all happiness. But there’s no use complaining.
No use at all. All the same, Charlotte must have complained of his conduct. Cold looks and nagging tongues, or, worse still, a stony silence and a swift covering-up of conversation if he did choose to enter the dining-room, encouraged him to escape over to Halifax, and fling himself on Leyland’s mercy.
The three hours he had intended to stay stretched into three days. The shake-down at No. 10, The Square, was better than the back bedroom at the parsonage, especially when the sculptor fed him with nips of whisky or gin to steady his brain. The letter of thanks which Branwell wrote the sculptor on April 28th implied that the change of air and company had done him nothing but good, giving him new initiative and hope.
My dear Sir,—As I am anxious—though my return for your kindness will be like giving sixpence back for a sovereign lent—to do my best in my intended lines on ‘Morley’, I want answers to the following questions.
1st. (As I cannot find it on the map or Gazetteer) In what district of Lancashire is Morley situated?
2nd. Has the Hall a particular name?
3rd. Do you know the family name of its owners when the circumstances happened which I ought to dwell on?
4th. Can you tell in what century it happened?
5th. What, told in the fewest words, was the nature of the leading occurrences?
If I learn these facts I’ll do my best, but in all I try to write I desire to stick to probabilities and local characteristics.
Now, after troubling you so much, I doubt not that you will drive your fist through that damned medallion in your studio, as being the effigy of a thorough bore.
I cannot, without a smile at myself, think of my stay for three days in Halifax on a business which need not have occupied three hours; but in truth when I fall back on myself I suffer so much wretchedness that I cannot withstand my temptations to get out of myself—and for that reason I am prosecuting enquiries about situations suitable to me whereby I could have a voyage abroad. The quietude of home, and the inability to make my family aware of the nature of my sufferings makes me write –
Home thoughts are not, with me,
Bright, as of yore;
Joys are forgot by me,
Taught to deplore!
My home has taken rest
In an afflicted breast
Which I have often pressed,
But—may no more!
Troubles never come alone—and I have some little troubles astride the shoulders of the big one.
Literary exertion would seem a resource, but the depression attendant on it, and the almost hopelessness of bursting through the barriers of literary circles, and getting a hearing among publishers, make me disheartened and indifferent; for I cannot write what would be thrown, unread, into a library fire. Otherwise I have the materials for a respectably sized volume, and if I were in London personally I might perhaps try Henry Moxon—a patroniser of the sons of rhyme; though I dare say the poor man often smarts for his liberality in publishing hideous trash.
As I know that, while here, I might send a manuscript to London and say goodbye to it, I feel it folly to feed the flames of a printer’s fire.
So much for egotism!
I enclose a horrible ill-drawn daub done to while away the time this morning. I meant it to represent a very rough figure in stone.
When all our cheerful hours seem gone for ever,
All lost that caused the body or the mind
To nourish love or friendship for our kind,
And Charon’s boat, prepared o’er Lethe’s river
Our souls to waft, and all our thoughts to sever
From what was once life’s light, still there may be
Some well-loved bosom to whose pillow we
Could heartily our utter self deliver:
And if toward her grave—Death’s weary road
Our darling’s feet should tread, each step by her
Would draw our own steps to the same abode,
And make a festival of sepulture;
For what gave joy, and joy to us had owed,
Should Death affright us from, when he would her restore?
Yours most sincerely,
P. B. Brontë
Branwell enclosed the sketch of a woman, with bowed head, her face hidden by her streaming hair. Above it he had written ‘Our Lady of Grief’ and ‘Nuestra Senora de la pena’.
Perhaps those three days with Leyland had brought religious discussion too, argument as to whether the sculptor’s brother was saving his soul or selling it by taking instruction in the Catholic faith. The sculptor, hitherto supreme among the mockers, had been impressed by the printer’s sincerity, and Branwell would remember the plaster madonnas and the dripping candles in the homes of the Liverpool Irish at Luddenden Foot. But he himself was past salvation. He was as much a castaway as the subject of Cowper’s poem, and the corpse in his own:
Not time, but ocean, thins its flowing hair;
Decay, not sorrow, lays its forehead bare;
Its members move, but not in thankless toil,
For seas are milder than this world’s turmoil;
Corruption robs its lips and cheeks of red,
But wounded vanity grieves not the dead.
The answer was to get right away from his family, from Haworth, from everything that reminded him of the immediate past. Those ‘little troubles astride the shoulders of the big one’ were doubtless debts, loans made to him at Thorp Green or Little Ouseburn by a tenant or a member of the Robinson staff, or by his friends in Haworth. Was it in Liverpool that he ‘prosecuted his inquiries about situations where he could have a voyage abroad’, as he had mentioned in his letter to Leyland? The only way to escape creditors would be to leave the country. The only way to put aside the whole miserable mess of life was to start all over again. But how? And where?
He was certain of one thing, and that was ‘the hopelessness of bursting through the barriers of literary circles’. At the end of May, 1846, a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, published at their own expense, appeared from the press of Aylott & Jones, 8 Paternoster Row, London. In the year that followed exactly two copies were sold. Branwell may or may not have known of the luckless venture. On publication day he would hardly have cared had Aylott & Jones reported an advance sale of a thousand copies. For news had come from Thorp Green that Mr Edmund Robinson, his late employer, had died on May 26th.