On the face of it, Rochester’s astral communication with the heroine at the conclusion of Jane Eyre (‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’, Chapter 35) is the most un-Brontëan thing in Charlotte Brontë’s mature fiction. This was the author who declared in the preface to one of her novels that it should be as unromantic as a Monday morning. The Jane–Rochester exchange across the ether would seem to be the stuff of Walpurgisnacht. It is the more surprising since Brontë is a novelist who firmly eschews supernatural agency and intervention in her narratives.

It will help to summarize the events which precede Rochester’s celestial telegram. Jane is at St John Rivers’s home, where she is detained after evening prayers. It is around nine o’clock on a Monday evening. The family and servants go to bed. St John renews his proposal of marriage. Jane wavers: ‘I could decide if I were but certain,’ she says, ‘were I but convinced that it is God’s will I should marry you’ (Ch. 35). She wants a sign. There are only a few minutes-worth of conversation recorded, but evidently St John Rivers and Jane are together for a period of some hours, she staring intently at the ‘one candle’ which illuminates the room (the Rivers’ household is frugal):

Jane recognizes the ‘known, loved, well-remembered voice’ of Edward Fairfax Rochester. She rushes into the garden and calls back, ‘I am coming! Wait for me! Oh, I will come!’

Brontë moves quickly to forestall any ‘Gothic’ interpretations by her readers. ‘Down superstition!’, Jane is made to command: ‘This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did – no miracle – but her best’ (Ch. 35). That Rochester’s communication was not hallucinatory is confirmed after Jane makes her trip to Ferndean four days later. Rochester tells her that on the Monday night in question he sat for some hours in his room gazing at the moon (as Jane was simultaneously gazing at the candle). Involuntarily, ‘near midnight’ he came out with the exclamation ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ Then, to his consternation, he heard her voice reply, ‘I am coming: wait for me!’ (Ch. 35). He does not, at this point, know that she heard his call and used in reply the very words which at his end he reports hearing.

What is going on here? Margaret Smith’s note to the Oxford World’s Classics edition puts the problem clearly, if inconclusively:

Charlotte Brontë defended this incident by saying ‘But it is a true thing; it really happened.’ (See Life, ii. 149) A similar incident occurs in the Angrian story of Albion and Marina (1830) as Miss Ratchford points out: see B.S.T., 1920, p. 13 f., and Ratchford 212. Charlotte Brontë’s fear of being accused of plagiarism when, after she had written Jane Eyre, she read of the midnight voice in Mrs Marsh’s Two Old Men’s Tales, certainly rules out any conscious literary indebtedness. See Life. ii. 311. Parallels have been noted in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and George Sand’s Jacques (by Mrs Humphry Ward, Haworth edition, 1899). (p. 494)

It is not hard to come up with other literary analogies, some of which Brontë might have been more likely to know than Defoe (the voice which St Augustine in his Confessions recalls hearing; the visionary communication between the tragic lovers in Keats’s Isabella). But what is problematic is the author’s insistence, reiterated in the text and in commentary on the text, that ‘it is a true thing; it really happened’; ‘no miracle.’ Brontë does not, as would seem tempting for someone perpetrating an episode so fantastic, take refuge in the traditional licence of the romancer.

Some early reviewers apprehended that Brontë was alluding to the newly discovered invention of telegraphy.1 But 1847 is too early for this. It is true that the Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1846, but it was not until the 1850s that full commercial exploitation occurred. What seems more likely is that Brontë was drawing on her knowledge of the science of mesmerism. She was, as is well recorded by her biographers, fascinated by ‘animal magnetism’ (as mesmerism was sometimes termed in the 1840s) and the related field of phrenology. She attended lectures on the subject in the early 1840s and communicated with mesmeric investigators and phrenologists. Her novels are peppered with incidental allusions to her knowledge of the field.

In her defiant assertion, ‘it is a true thing’, Charlotte Brontë was probably thinking of two specific authorities on the subject of mesmerism and clairvoyant communication. Catherine Crowe, a novelist and popularizer of spiritualism, had recently attempted a historico-scientific vindication of psychic phenomena in her translation of the German Die Seherin von Prevorst (The Seeress of Prevorst, translated from the German of Justinus Kerner, London, 1845). The ‘seeress’ was Frederica Hauffe, born in 1801, whose life was a long succession of witnessed and confirmed acts of clairvoyance, prevoyance, ‘sleep-seeing’, and prophecy – all justified by Crowe on the basis of ‘magnetism’ (the explanatory source of mesmerism). In 1848 Crowe published The Night Side of Nature, an assortment of weird tales, haunted houses, supernatural happenings, and apparitions – all vouched for as genuine by the author.2

Crowe, who was to become a full-time propagandist for spiritualism in the 1850s (and a social acquaintance of Brontë’s, after the success of Jane Eyre), was probably congenial to Brontë but less than convincing as a scientific authority. In making her claim for the ‘truth’ of the ethereal exchange between Jane and Rochester, Brontë was more likely drawing on another popular treatise on mesmeric phenomena, the Revd Chauncy Hare Townshend’s Facts in Mesmerism, with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into it (London, 1840). Townshend’s book, which was put out by the very respectable publisher Longman and Green, offered a huge array of ‘facts’ testifying to the validity of the pseudo-science. Many of these facts dealt with remote communication between mesmerically sensitized subjects. Townshend was quite dogmatic that this was a scientifically authenticated truth and cited chapter-and-verse cases to support his theories:

It has been said that persons in certain states either mesmeric or akin to the mesmeric can become aware of the thoughts of others without the usual communication of speech … But is there, it may still be asked, any one acknowledged instance in nature by which the possibility of receiving actual experiences, other than by the normal inlets of sense can be demonstrated? There is. (pp. 365, 460)

Townshend gives a number of historically recorded instances of messages received ‘other than by the normal inlets of sense’. The ‘Testimony to a curious Fact by Dr Filippi of Milan’ in July 1839, for example: ‘Mr Valdrighi, advocate, had his sense of hearing so exquisitely exalted that he could hear words pronounced at the distance of two rooms, the doors of which were shut, although pronounced in a weak and low voice’ (p. 473).

More significantly, Townshend, who was himself a practising mesmerist, describes experiments along these lines which he conducted with a subject called ‘Anna M.’ He discovered that it was possible to ‘magnetize’ her from a distance – and communicate with her, suggesting objects and messages which she could pick up far beyond the range of the human ear. Over the course of his experiments with Anna M., Townshend successfully extended the distance between himself and his magnetized subject to a quarter of a mile, transmitting his ‘influence’ electrically (as he assumed) and communicating information to her.

There were other sensational displays of mesmeric clairvoyance and ‘mental travelling’ which might have inspired Brontë’s protestation that the ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ episode was a ‘true thing’. In the early 1840s Alexis Didier (previously a clerk in a Parisian haulage firm) toured extensively in France, Belgium, and England, giving shows. As Alison Winter records: ‘His routine included playing cards and reading books whilst blindfolded, identifying the contents of envelopes, and “travelling clairvoyance” – viewing objects at a great distance.’3 Even more likely to have been in Brontë’s mind was the public quarrel over clairvoyance and mental travelling that Harriet Martineau became involved with in late 1844 and early 1845. The Martineaus (the woman of letters, Harriet, and her Unitarian brother, James) were the most powerful literary figures with whom the young Brontës could claim connection before the success of Jane Eyre made Charlotte nationally famous.4 In late November 1844 Harriet Martineau sent the London review, the Athenaeum, a long letter describing the clairvoyant feats of a young maidservant called Jane Arrowsmith (the echo of this name in ‘Jane Eyre’ may not be accidental). Sensationally, Martineau claimed that her Jane had, while in a mesmeric trance, witnessed a shipwreck occurring some dozen miles distant at sea. Jane also gave proof of being able to hear at great distances, without the aid of her physical ears. Martineau followed up with three more pieces, describing and analysing Jane’s powers of ‘mental travelling’ as a demonstration of the truth of mesmeric science.5

These reports of Jane Arrowsmith’s clairvoyance provoked a huge controversy, including pamphlets and a series of savagely denunciatory pieces by an irate London doctor, who visited the town where Jane Arrowsmith lived and claimed to have discovered that she had been told about the shipwreck just before the crucial session with the mesmerist. Martineau stuck to her guns, insisting on the ‘truth’ of Jane’s clairvoyance. It is extremely likely that, one way or another, Charlotte would have caught wind of the Jane Arrowsmith affair; it is equally likely that she would have stood firmly with Harriet Martineau in asserting its ‘truth’.

How then should we read the critical scene in Jane Eyre? Accidentally, it would seem, both Jane and Rochester put themselves simultaneously into a mesmeric state of ‘sleepwaking’. Jane does it by staring for a long period at the single candle (this, incidentally, was the standard parlour-game technique for putting someone under the influence; it is possible that Brontë had used it successfully on herself). Rochester produces the same effect on himself by staring at the moon. He, as the stronger will, has Jane under his influence, which she feels as something akin to, but not quite like, an electric shock (one of Townshend’s favourite tricks at lectures on mesmerism was to give members of his audience mild electrical shocks, to demonstrate the nature of mesmeric energy). Like Anna M. and Townshend, in this condition of nervous ‘exaltation’ the exchange of messages can take place. It is, as Jane protests, no ‘miracle’, but an accident produced by their fortuitously mesmerizing themselves at the same critical moment.

Notes

1. See Michael Mason’s note to this episode in his Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre (1995). Mason quotes George Troup, reviewing the novel in Tait’s Edinburgh Review (May 1848): ‘the voice has not got a telegraphic communication direct to the ear at fifty miles distance, although intelligence by the magnetic wire may travel hundreds and thousands “in no time”.’

2. On her visit to London in June 1850 Thackeray made a point of introducing Charlotte Brontë to Catherine Crowe, ‘the reciter of ghost stories’. It would be interesting to know how the two ladies got on. See Clement Shorter (ed.), The Brontës’ Life and Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1908), ii. 94, 147.

3. Winter is drawing on a report by John Elliotson in his journal of mesmeric science, Zoist, 2 (1844–5), 477–529, ‘Reports of Various Trials of the Clairvoyance of Alexis Didier Last Summer in London’.

4. The connection was via Charlotte’s father, Patrick. See Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London, 1994), 401, 511.

5. See the Athenaeum (30 Nov., 14 Dec., 21 Dec., 1844), 1093–4; 1117–18; 1173–4.