Mr Edmund Robinson was forty-six years old when he died on May 26th, and the cause of his death was stated in the certificate to be ‘Dyspepsia many years Phthisis 3 months’. The local newspapers, reporting the death, said that Mr Robinson, ‘was greatly esteemed by his parishioners’, and that ‘he died, as he lived, in a firm and humble trust in his Saviour’.
That his wife Lydia was devoted to her husband is very evident from the jottings in the small cash-book during May and June. On May 29th she noted £18 ‘paid to Old Servants’, and in brackets ‘for my Angel’. On June 7th the poor of Great Ouseburn were given £5 in cash, and two in the parish of Little Ouseburn £10. Mr Lascelles, the vicar of Little Ouseburn, was paid £5 for taking the funeral ceremony, the six bearers, the clerk and sexton a further £6, the singers 6s., and ‘Joe and Braggs, too old to help’, another £1. On June 17th ‘Taylors Funeral Bill’—doubtless the undertakers—of £30 9s. was paid, and on the blotting paper opposite his widow wrote ‘My Angel Edmund’.
Here, finally and forever, is the proof that Lydia Robinson was devoted to her husband.
Edmund Robinson had altered his will (originally drafted in 1825 and 1831) on January 2nd, 1846, less than three months after his eldest daughter Lydia had made her runaway marriage, and four months before his own death. The reason for the new draft was to make certain that his daughter and her actor husband should not benefit from his own marriage settlement, which they would have done had the 1831 will stood unaltered.
Under the terms of the new will, all Mr Robinson’s money and other possessions were left to his wife, to his son and heir Edmund, and to his daughters Elizabeth and Mary. His wife was left guardian of the children. The daughter Lydia was not even named. Nor, contrary to the story which Branwell put about, was there a clause under which Mrs Robinson would forfeit her inheritance if she remarried.
The memorial tablet to Edmund Robinson in St Mary’s, Little Ouseburn, says:
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
When the shore is won at last
Who will count the billows past?
Such was the exemplary character of the worthy gentleman who, according to Branwell, had threatened to shoot him. Dyspeptic his death certificate proves him to have been, but the tell-tale cash-book records for posterity that he was also his wife’s ‘Angel Edmund’.
Whether Branwell first heard the news of his employer’s death through a newspaper, through a letter from one of the staff at Thorp Green, or from the visit of the Robinson’s coachman, is hard to disentangle from the ensuing Haworth gossip. It was evidently unexpected, and almost as great a shock as his dismissal. The talk in Haworth at the news of Mr Robinson’s death, the chit-chat repeated at the Black Bull to Mrs Gaskell and others years afterwards—that Branwell, after an interview with one of the Robinson servants in a private room at the inn, was found ‘in a kind of fit’, the man having paid his bill and ridden away—suggests that whatever news the servant brought had produced an attack of epilepsy, unrecognized by the people at the inn or any of Branwell’s family. Those outside the room, said Mrs Gaskell, ‘heard a noise like the bleating of a calf’—a recognizable description of the cry of an epileptic, caused not by terror or pain, but by the convulsive action of the muscles of the larynx.
Somehow Branwell had to fabricate a reason for not going to the widow immediately to offer his condolences. His family, his friends, all expected that he would marry her after a suitable period of mourning. Had he not told everyone that his love for Mrs Robinson had been returned? He must, whatever the cost, cling to his story.
Francis Grundy was one of the first to hear the news. Branwell asked for employment at the same time, which showed that he was still determined to find himself some sort of situation. Unfortunately, although the engineer mentions this request, in his Pictures of the Past he only printed part of Branwell’s letter, leaving out the beginning, in which the plea for work was made.
The gentleman with whom I have been is dead. His property is left in trust for the family, provided I do not see the widow; and if I do, it reverts to the executing trustees, with ruin to her. She is now distracted with sorrows and agonies; and the statement of her case, as given me by her coachman, who has come to see me at Haworth, fills me with inexpressible grief. Her mind is distracted to the verge of insanity, and mine is so wearied that I wish I were in my grave.
Leyland the sculptor received a longer letter.
My dear Sir,
I should have sent you ‘Morley Hall’ ere now, but I am unable to finish it at present from agony to which the grave would be far preferable.
Mr Robinson of Thorp Green is dead, and he has left his widow in a dreadful state of health. She sent the coachman over to see me yesterday, and the account which he gave of her sufferings was enough to burst my heart.
Through the will she is left quite powerless, and her eldest daughter who married imprudently is cut off without a shilling.
The Executing Trustees detest me, and one declares that if he sees me he will shoot me.
These things I do not care about, but I do care for the life of one who suffers even more than I do. Her coachman said that it was a pity to see her, for she was only able to kneel in her bedroom in bitter tears and prayers. She has worn herself out in attendance on him, and his conduct during the few days before his death was exceedingly mild and repentant, but that only distressed her doubly. Her conscience has helped to agonize her, and that misery I am saved from.
You, though not much older than myself, have known life. I now know it with a vengeance—for four nights I have not slept—for three days I have not tasted food—and when I think of the state of her I love best on earth, I could wish that my head was as cold and stupid as the medallion which lies in your studio.
I write very egotistically but it is because my mind is crowded with one set of thoughts, and I long for one sentence from a friend.
What I shall do I know not—I am too hard to die, and too wretched to live. My wretchedness is not about castles in the air, but about stern realities; my hardihood lies in bodily vigour: but, dear Sir, my mind sees only a dreary future which I as little wish to enter on as could a martyr to be bound to the stake.
I sincerely trust that you are well, and hope that this wretched scrawl will not make me appear a worthless fool, or a thorough bore.
Believe me,
Yours most sincerely,
P. B. Brontë.
Another undated letter followed closely in the wake of the first.
Well, my dear Sir, I have got my finishing stroke at last—and I feel stunned to marble by the blow.
I have this morning received a long, kind and faithful letter from the medical gentleman who attended Mr R. in his last illness and who has since had an interview with one whom I can never forget.
He knows me well, and he pities my case most sincerely for he declares that, though used to the rough ups and downs of this weary world, he shed tears when he saw the state of that lady and knew what I should feel.
When he mentioned my name—she stared at him and fainted. When she recovered she in turn dwelt on her inextinguishable love for me—her horror at having been the first to delude me into wretchedness, and her agony at having been the cause of the death of her husband who, in his last hours, bitterly repented of his treatment of her.
Her sensitive mind was totally wrecked. She wandered into talking of entering a nunnery: and the Doctor fairly debars me from hope in the future.
It’s hard work for me, dear Sir: I would bear it—but my health is so bad that the body seems as if it could not bear the mental shock.
I never cared one bit about the property. I cared about herself—and always shall do.
May God bless her, but I wish I had never known her!
My appetite is lost; my nights are dreadful, and having nothing to do makes me dwell on past scenes—on her own self, her voice, her person, her thoughts, till I could be glad if God took me. In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.
I am not a whiner, dear Sir, but when a young man like myself has fixed his soul on a being worthy of all love—and who, for years, has given him all love, pardon him for boring a friend with a misery that has only one black end.
I fully expected a change in the will, and difficulties placed in my way by powerful and wealthy men, but I hardly expected the hopeless ruin of the mind that I loved even more than its body.
Excuse my egotism, and believe me,
Dear Sir,
Yours,
P. B. Brontë.
The ‘change in the will’ was now his alibi, and the ‘executing trustees’ were able to take the place of Mr Robinson as formidable foes holding his lady completely in their power. Thus he would save face, not only before his friends but in his own eyes too. The astonishing thing was that his family believed him.
‘The death of Mr Robinson, which took place about three weeks or a month ago,’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey on June 17th,
served Branwell for a pretext to throw all about him into hubbub and confusion with his emotions, etc., etc. Shortly afterwards, came news from all hands that Mr Robinson had altered his will before he died and effectually prevented all chance of a marriage between his widow and Branwell, by stipulating that she should not have a shilling if she ever ventured to reopen any communication with him. Of course, he then became intolerable. To papa he allows rest neither day nor night, and he is continually screwing money out of him, sometimes threatening that he will kill himself if it is withheld from him. He says that Mrs Robinson is now insane; that her mind is a complete wreck owing to remorse for her conduct towards Mr Robinson (whose end it appears was hastened by distress of mind) and grief for having lost him. I do not know how much to believe of what he says, but I fear she is very ill. Branwell declares that he neither can nor will do anything for himself, good situations have been offered him more than once, for which, by a fortnight’s work, he might have qualified himself, but he will do nothing, except drink and make us all wretched.
Branwell was undoubtedly drinking, but he continued to ask Francis Grundy for work, which was something, perhaps, he did not tell his sister. He also repeated the tale of Mrs Robinson’s illness.
Since I saw Mr George Gooch, I have suffered much from the account of the declining health of her whom I love most in this world, and who, for my fault, suffers sorrows which surely were never her due. My father, too, is now quite blind, and from such causes literary pursuits have become matters I have no heart to wield. If I could see you it would be a sincere pleasure, but…
In the midst of all this Currer Bell, alias Charlotte Brontë, undaunted by the ill-success of the poems, had written on July 4th to another publisher, Mr Henry Colburn, asking whether she might send him the completed manuscripts of The Professor, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. These three novels, which the sisters had ‘prepared for the press’ during winter and spring, were now to set forth on their wearisome round of one publishing house after another. At some point Branwell must have seen the return of the rejected packages, which would confirm him in his fixed opinion that it was useless for an unknown writer to attempt an entry into the literary world.
He hoped to accept an invitation to visit Grundy on July 31st, but the distance of seventeen miles must have been too much for him, for he never turned up, and shortly afterwards Grundy went over to Haworth instead.
Grundy’s notion of time was extremely vague. In his Pictures of the Past, published thirty years later, he post-dated all the events of 1846 to 1848. The matter contained in Branwell’s letters proves them, however, to have been written in 1846, and indicates that his particular visit to Haworth was probably made in August. Grundy was shocked at Branwell’s wrecked and wretched appearance. ‘Yet he still craved for an appointment of any kind, in order that he might try the excitement of change; of course uselessly. I now heard his painful history from his own lips—his happiness, his misery, and the sad story which was the end. He was miserable.’
If it was indeed in August that Grundy paid his visit to Branwell, then very possibly Charlotte and her father had already left for Manchester, where Mr Brontë was to undergo an operation for cataract. Branwell, always more at ease these days when Charlotte, once his inseparable companion, was out of the way, would have invited Grundy to the parsonage.
‘Patrick Brontë declared to me,’ said Grundy in 1879, ‘and what his sister said bore out the assertion, that he wrote a great portion of Wuthering Heights himself.’
This statement, howled at by critics at the time, as William Dearden’s had been some twelve years earlier, could have had the simplest possible origin. Branwell, in the presence of either Emily or Anne, may have told his friend that all four members of the family had collaborated on tales at varying times. Such a remark, dropped at random, would have lingered at the back of Grundy’s mind, and when he came to read Wuthering Heights he would immediately connect the story with the ‘weird fancies of diseased genius’ of Luddenden Foot days, and the remark of Branwell’s about early collaboration.
Charlotte and Mr Brontë were a month in Manchester, and the operation was successful. During their absence Branwell gave no trouble. It might well be that the two members of the family who had always held the highest hopes of his success in the world were the very people whose presence he could now least bear about him. He had failed the father who well-nigh worshipped him, and failed the sister who had been his boyhood’s dearest companion. It was these two whose unuttered reproaches and weary sighs nagged his conscience most. Anne was at least a link with Thorp Green, and Emily… Emily neither sympathized nor condemned, she had the supreme tact to let him be.
John Brown remained as staunch as ever, and when the atmosphere at the parsonage became too much for him Branwell could always go down the lane to John and be sure of a welcome, or to William either, for that matter; neither Mary, John’s wife, nor Anne, the wife of William, gave him the looks he got at home.
Freemasonry was a thing of the past, though. He never attended a meeting now. Sometimes he may have remembered the old vows of initiation and the various ceremonies, and the threat that, if he betrayed them, retribution of a fearful kind would overtake him. It was easy to laugh, in retrospect, but what if all the misery of his life had come about through some sort of betrayal? It was beyond his memory now to recall whether he had ever revealed the secrets of freemasonry to anyone. But the possibility that he might have done so when in his cups, and that one day the Devil himself would call for him, was not the least of his fears during moments of tension.
The success of his father’s operation quietened Branwell’s conscience for a time. The sight of that near-blinded figure, sitting so patiently in the parlour, waited on by the girls, and more especially by Charlotte, had added gall to his own bitterness; but now he had recovered his sight, and was likely to do duty again before long, one anxiety had been lifted—the fear of his father’s death or total blindness being somehow laid at his door, not through his sisters’ reproaches, but by his own accusing self.
His friend Leyland, as usual overwhelmed with work, was farming some of it out to John Brown, and early in October Branwell was well enough to act as go-between for this particular commitment.
My dear Sir,—Mr John Brown wishes me to tell you that if, by return of post, you can tell him the nature of his intended work, and the time it will probably occupy in execution, either himself or his brother, or both, will wait on you early next week.
He has only delayed answering your communication from his unavoidable absence in a pilgrimage from ‘Rochdale on the Rhine’ to ‘The Land of Ham’ and from thence to Gehenna, Tophet, Golgotha, Erebus, the Styx and to the place he now occupies called Tartarus where he along with Sisyphus, Tantalus, Theseus, and Ixion, lodge and board together.
However, I hope that when he meets you he will join the company of Moses, Elias and the twelve prophets, ‘singing psalms sitting on a wet cloud’, as an acquaintance of mine described the occupation of the blest.
Why Tophet—which in masonic language means ‘wanting understanding’—and Golgotha, the ‘expansion of the five senses through the human skull, particularly on the forehead’, should come to be allied with Erebus, one of the gods of Hades, son of Chaos, and Tartarus, an inner region of hell where only the exceptionally depraved were sent, Branwell and possibly Leyland alone understood. Doubtless John Brown would have laughed at the allusion and the sketch of himself, glass in hand, tables flying, which graced the head of the writing paper.
‘Morley Hall is in the eighth month of her pregnancy,’ Branwell continued, ‘and expects ere long to be delivered of a fine thumping boy whom its father means to christen Homer at the least, though the mother suggests that “Poetaster” would be more suitable, but that sounds too aristocratic.
‘Is the medallion cracked that Thorwaldsen executed of August Caesar?’
Here Branwell drew his own head on a coin, with the emperor’s name around it. Thorwaldsen, the Danish sculptor, who had died two years before, was presumably Leyland’s temporary nickname.
I wish I could see you, and as Haworth fair is held on Monday after the ensuing one, your presence there would gratify one of the FALLEN. [Here he showed himself, plunging head foremost into a gulf.]
In my own register of transactions during my nights and days I find no matter worthy of extraction for your perusal. All is yet with me clouds and darkness. I hope you have at least blue sky and sunshine.
Constant and unavoidable depression of mind and body sadly shackle me in even trying to go on with any mental effort which might rescue me from the fate of a dry toast soaked six hours in a glass of cold water, and intended to be given to an old maid’s squeamish cat.
Is there really such a thing as the ‘Risus Sardonicus’—the sardonic laugh? Did a man ever laugh the morning he was to be hanged?
The sketch of a gallows, and a hand holding out a rope to a smiling John Brown, concluded the letter. The victim being his friend the sexton and not himself suggests that the reason for John Brown’s absence was not simply a drinking bout but a masonic initiation ceremony, possibly to pass the degree of Royal Arch Mason. John Brown, as candidate, would be prepared with a cable-tow—not round the neck, but round the waist; the gallows would be Branwell’s own mocking salute to the occasion.
As to the epic Morley Hall, in the ‘eighth month of her pregnancy’, the only piece that survives consists of a fragment which constitutes part of the introduction, and gives no hint of the romance to come. The lame couplets, hammered out by Branwell during heaven knows how many laborious hours, were simply an echo of his own weary thoughts. The ‘thumping boy’ was mere bravado, for the sculptor, remembering Branwell’s rapid composition in the past, would hardly credit such a long gestation period for lines so few and so lamentably lacking in inspiration. The poem was written in Branwell’s upright hand on four pages of an exercise book, and was unsigned and undated.
Morley Hall
Leigh—Lancashire
When life’s youth, overcast by gathering clouds
Of cares, that come like funeral-following crowds,
Wearying of that which is, and cannot see
A sunbeam burst upon futurity,
It tries to cast away the woes that are
And borrows further joys from times afar.
For, what our feet may tread may have been a road
By horses’ hoofs pressed, ’neath a camel’s load,
But, what we ran across, in childhood’s hours
Were fields, presenting June with Mayday flowers
So what was done, and born, if long ago,
Will satisfy our heart though stained by tears of woe.
When present sorrows every thought employ
Our father’s woes may take the garb of joy,
And, knowing what our sires have undergone,
Ourselves can smile, though weary, wondering on.
For if our youth a thundercloud o’ershadows,
Changing to barren swamps life’s flowering meadows,
We know that fiery flash and bursting peal
Others, like us, were forced to hear and feel.
And while they moulder in a quiet grave,
Robbed of all havings—worthless all they have –
We still with face erect behold the sun –
Have bright examples in what has been done
By head or hand—and in the times to come
May tread bright pathways to our gate of doom…
And so on for another thirty interminable couplets. It ends abruptly—and none too soon, Leyland must have thought, when the pages were sent to him as a sample of what was to come. Nothing could show more clearly the disastrous decline in imagery and thought than these poor lines from Branwell’s pen. Compared with the sonnets of a few years back, and the facility of expression he managed to achieve when translating the Odes of Horace, Morley Hall was fourth-rate stuff, an amateur effort that might have come from one of Branwell’s railway acquaintances at Luddenden Foot.
Not that the supreme poet of the family, Emily, was doing so very much better. Her masterpiece, ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, had been written in the January of that same year, 1846. After this, silence until September 14th, when she began revising an earlier ballad, the rhyming couplets certainly more spirited than her brother’s, but lacking both the fire and the vision of her earlier work. Perhaps the ill-success of the published poems had disillusioned her, or she had spent herself in the writing of Wuthering Heights, still going the dreary round of publishing houses. The ballad, like Morley Hall, was never finished; indeed, no later poem of hers has ever been found, except a revised scrap of this same poem dated May 13th, 1848.
There has never been an explanation of Emily’s silence. Anne, with less talent, was writing steadily and well, and in the early summer of 1848 her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published. It has been suggested that Emily did in fact write further poems and another novel, but destroyed them, for some reason, before she died. If this was so, why did she not destroy all her earlier unpublished poems and fragments? Why leave anything at all for posterity?
Possibly, once she saw the poems in print, and unwanted, a curious distaste came upon her for the whole business, a reluctance ever again to unmask herself, even under a pseudonym. Charlotte, impelled by her emotions to express herself—and already at Manchester she had been working furiously on Jane Eyre—and Anne, equally impelled by a sense of duty to portray society, were stimulated by the names Currer and Acton Bell on the printed page. Not so Ellis. The undercurrent of cynicism in her nature, which had first betrayed itself in the French essays she had written at Brussels, now rose to the surface; not only were ‘the thousand creeds that move men’s hearts unutterably vain’, but the hopes and the ambitions too.
In December, 1846, Branwell suffered a further humiliation. Whoever it was he owed money to at Great or Little Ouseburn, or at Thorp Green itself, the creditor showed no mercy. A sheriff’s officer arrived at the parsonage from York to serve a writ; either the money must be paid or Branwell return with him to prison. The debts were paid—by his father, his sisters, or both. And not, it would seem, for the first time.
‘It is not agreeable to lose money time after time in this way,’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey on December 13th. ‘But it is ten times worse to witness the shabbiness of his behaviour on such occasions.’
Shabbiness… The word conjures in its very forcefulness the wretched figure Branwell must have cut on the occasion. At first surprise, perhaps indignation, at the appearance of the sheriff’s officer, swiftly followed by denial of responsibility. Then, when the hopelessness of the situation had sunk in, blaming the mess upon other shoulders. Companions had led him astray, he had been misled, those he had imagined his friends had proved enemies; and after a tirade of abuse against whoever it was near York who now demanded repayment of the debt there would come the collapse, the gasps for breath, the excuse of illness, complaints of misunderstanding and even ill-treatment by all around him, and finally tears, abject, miserable tears, the utter loss of any remaining self-control.
And so, finally, to bed. Not to the studio, where he might do some damage to himself, but to his father’s bedroom, which he had shared as a little boy, and must now, in shame and humiliation, share again. Mr Brontë, his sight recovered, could still watch over his beloved son by night, listen to blasphemy, and pray.
This would be the period when Grundy, the engineer, came to Haworth for the last time, and invited Branwell to dinner at the Black Bull.
Presently the door opened cautiously, and a head appeared. It was a mass of red, unkempt, uncut hair, wildly floating around a great, gaunt forehead; the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the thin white lips not trembling but shaking, the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness—all told the sad tale but too surely. I hastened to my friend, greeted him in my gayest manner, and, as I knew he best liked, drew him quickly into the room, and forced upon him a stiff glass of hot brandy. Under its influence, and that of the bright, cheerful surroundings, he looked frightened—frightened of himself. He glanced at me a moment, and muttered something of leaving a warm bed to come out into the cold night. Another glass of brandy, and returning warmth gradually brought him back to something like the Brontë of old. He even ate some dinner, a thing which he said he had not done for long; so our last interview was pleasant, though grave. I never knew his intellect clearer. He described himself as waiting anxiously for death—indeed, longing for it, and happy, in these his sane moments, to think it was so near. He once again declared that death would be due to the story I knew, and to nothing else.
When at last I was compelled to leave, he quietly drew from his coat sleeve a carving-knife, placed it on the table, and holding me by both hands, said that, having given up all thoughts of ever seeing me again, he imagined when my message came that it was a call from Satan. Dressing himself, he took the knife, which he had long secreted, and came to the inn, with a full determination to rush into the room and stab the occupant. In the excited state of his mind he did not recognise me when he opened the door, but my voice and manner conquered him, and ‘brought him home to himself’, as he expressed it. I left him standing bare-headed in the road, with bowed form and drooping tears.
The bluff, kind-hearted Grundy, his dates all wrong, declared in his reminiscences that Branwell died a few days later. He did nothing of the sort. But the tumblers of brandy probably put him to bed for a further fortnight. The weary effort of weaning him off alcohol would begin all over again, and Dr Wheelhouse, who had the unenviable task of forbidding every form of intoxicant, would become for Branwell the most hated figure in Haworth. He might deny Branwell alcohol, but he could not keep pen and paper from him.
While holy Wheelhouse far above
In heaven’s unclouded light of love,
Looks down with a benignant smile
That heaven and hell might reconcile,
And shouts to Satan, ‘Thou’art a funny’un,
Give him sauce as well as onion.’
You bloody bugger, ram him, jam him,
And with a forty horse-power damn him,
Or if your work you don’t do well
By God I’ll take your place in hell.
Say Doctor Wheelhouse is a jewel
Or you and I must fight a duel.
Say that his guts are all his hitches,
And I shall call you sons of bitches.
Say that he longed like me for woman
And I and all will call you No Man.