Table of Contents
FROM THE PAGES OF THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Title Page
Copyright Page
ELIZABETH GASKELL
THE WORLD OF ELIZABETH GASKELL AND THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Introduction
THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË,
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.The History of the Year 1829.THE WOUNDED STAG.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.(Written In Pencil to a Friend.)(To Emily, About This Time.)
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË,
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.To Messrs. Smith and Elder.To Messrs. Smith and Elder.To Messrs. Smith and Elder.Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co.Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co.Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co.Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co.To Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co.To Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co.To G. H. Lewes, Esq.To W. S. Williams, Esq.To G. H. Lewes, Esq.To G. H. Lewes, Esq.To W S. Williams, Esq.
CHAPTER III.From Anne Brontë.
CHAPTER IV.To W.S. Williams, Esq.To G. H. Lewes, Esq.
CHAPTER V.To G. H. Lewes, Esq.To G. H. Lewes, Esq.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.To G. Smith, Esq.To W. S. Williams, Esq.
CHAPTER XII.To G. Smith, Esq.To W. S. Williams, Esq.
CHAPTER XIII.To Miss Wooler.
CHAPTER XIV.
ENDNOTES
THE LEGACY OF THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
FROM THE PAGES OF THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon the church; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried school-house, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond. (page 13)
For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë, it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed, and from which both her own and her sisters’ first impressions of human life must have been received. (page 18)
Children leading a secluded life are often thoughtful and dreamy: the impressions made upon them by the world without—the unusual sights of earth and sky—the accidental meetings with strange faces and figures—(rare occurrences in those out-of-the-way places)—are sometimes magnified by them into things so deeply significant as to be almost supernatural. (page 74)
“Human affairs are mutable, and human resolutions must bend to the course of events. We are all about to divide, break up, separate. Emily is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a governess.” (page 107)
“I am no teacher; to look on me in that light is to mistake me. To teach is not my vocation. What I am, it is useless to say. Those whom it concerns feel and find it out.” (page 326)
“I want us all to get on. I know we have talents, and I want them to be turned to account.” (page 166)
“Perfection is not the lot of humanity; and as long as we can regard those we love, and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by what appear to us unreasonable and headstrong notions.”
(page 231)
“There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her way through life quietly, perseveringly, without support of husband or brother.” (page 232)
She went on with her work steadily. But it was dreary to write without any one to listen to the progress of her tale,—to find fault or to sympathise,—while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more. Three sisters had done this,—then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk,—and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound. (pages 317—318)
The characters were her companions in the quiet hours, which she spent utterly alone, unable often to stir out of doors for many days together. The interests of the persons in her novels supplied the lack of interest in her own life; and Memory and Imagination found their appropriate work, and ceased to prey upon her vitals. But too frequently she could not write, could not see her people, nor hear them speak; a great mist of headache had blotted them out; they were non existent to her. (page 402)
I appeal to that larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius, and how to reverence with warm, full hearts all noble virtue. To that Public I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë. (page 454)
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The Life of Charlotte Brontë first appeared in 1857.
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Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2005 by Anne Taranto.
Note on Elizabeth Gaskell, The World of Elizabeth Gaskell and
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The Life of Charlotte Brontë
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FIRST PRINTING
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in London in 1810, the daughter of Unitarian parents. Her father chose a variety of different careers, including experimental farming, preaching in the Unitarian church, and writing for various periodicals. Her mother died the year after Elizabeth was born, and of the eight children she bore, only two survived childhood. Elizabeth was raised by her maternal aunt, Hannah Holland Lumb, whose farm in rural Knutsford provided a serene and happy childhood for the young girl. Unitarians believed in education for girls, and after lessons at home Elizabeth was further educated at a progressive boarding school.
Elizabeth’s ties to her brother John were kept up through letters and occasional visits. After setting sail for India in 1828, he disappeared without a trace, leaving Elizabeth stunned and her father in deep depression. Her father’s failing health compelled Elizabeth to travel to London to nurse him until his death the following year. After his death, Elizabeth visited a variety of cultured family members, and met William Gaskell, an assistant Unitarian preacher in Manchester, whom she wed in 1832.
Although the Industrial Revolution thrummed in the background of her childhood, it was William’s Manchester congregation that first put Gaskell in touch with the grim realities of factory work. Cotton mills dominated the labor force in the city, and filthy shanty towns housed thousands of exploited, undernourished mill workers. William and Elizabeth were kept busy by their congregation and by their efforts to address the social problems that plagued the booming industrial city of Manchester. Although she had written only personal diaries, and was also busy raising her own family in the early years of her marriage, Gaskell’s community work inspired her to collaborate with her husband on the narrative poem “Sketches Among the Poor, No. 1,” which was published in 1837.
Gaskell’s happy, busy life was interrupted by tragedy in 1845 when her infant son died of scarlet fever while on a family vacation. Overcome by grief, Gaskell followed her husband’s advice and became absorbed in her writing. The result was her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of a Manchester Life (1848), which earned her instant success—and hostile criticism from the cotton mill owners whom she so unsparingly portrayed. Gaskell went on to write six other novels: Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phyllis (1864), and Wives and Daughters (1866). She also wrote numerous short stories, as well as a famous biography of her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Much of Gaskell’s short fiction appeared in popular literary journals, and several of her novels were serialized in those publications. Gaskell’s works were popular during her lifetime and received critical acclaim as well. Friendships with literary giants of the day—including Charles Dickens, who also published her work in his journals—aided her career, and frequent travels throughout Europe gave her material for her writing and eased the strains of an extremely busy life. Gaskell had six children, four of whom, all daughters, lived to be adults.
In 1865 Gaskell bought a country house in Hampshire as a surprise for her husband’s retirement. By then her last novel, Wives and Daughters, was being serialized in the Cornhill Magazine. Physically exhausted, and yet to complete the final installment of her novel, Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly on a visit to the house on November 12, 1865. Although never completed, Wives and Daughters is considered by many to be a study in character on a par with the novels of George Eliot and Jane Austen. Elizabeth Gaskell was buried at Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford.
THE WORLD OF ELIZABETH GASKELL AND THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
1800 The Napoleonic Wars begin. 1810 Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson is born on September 29 in London to Unitarian parents. She is her parents’ eighth and last child. 1811 Elizabeth’s mother dies, and she is taken in by her mother’s sister, Hannah Holland Lumb, in the town of Knutsford in Cheshire. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is published.1812 Charles Dickens, future publisher and friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, is born. 1814 Elizabeth’s father remarries. Elizabeth remains in Knutsford with her aunt. 1815 Anthony Trollope is born. The Napoleonic Wars end with the Battle of Waterloo. 1816 Charlotte Brontë is born on April 21 in Thornton, England, the third of six children of the Reverend Patrick and Maria Branwell Brontë. 1817 Patrick Branwell Brontë is born. 1818 Emily Brontë is born. 1819 Novelist George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) is born. John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is published. Victoria, the future queen, is born. 1820 Anne Brontë is born, and the Brontë family moves to Haworth, where Reverend Brontë has been offered a lifetime curacy. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is published.1821 Charlotte’s mother, Maria, dies, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moves into the Brontë household to help raise the six young children. 1822 Elizabeth Gaskell enters the liberal-minded Avonbank School at Stratford-on-Avon, where she spends the next five years absorbed in her studies. She receives an excellent education, unlike many girls of her generation. 1825 Maria and Elizabeth Brontë contract what is probably tuberculosis and die. Charlotte and Emily are pulled out of school to return home to Haworth. 1826 The four surviving Brontë siblings create the “Young Men” plays, the first of their imaginative fictional writings, which are followed in 1827 by “Our Fellows” and “The Islanders.” 1828 Tragedy grips the Stevenson family when John disappears on a trip with the East India Company to India. Elizabeth travels to London to nurse her father, whose health is deteriorating. 1829 William Stevenson dies, and Elizabeth lives with a distant relative, Unitarian minister William Turner. She is exposed to a socially progressive and intellectual way of life that will inform her fictional works. 1830 Modern rail travel begins in England. 1831 On a trip to Manchester, Elizabeth meets her future husband, William Gaskell, an assistant minister at an important Unitarian center, the Cross Street Chapel. 1832 Elizabeth and William Gaskell marry in Knutsford. After their honeymoon in Wales, they reside in Manchester. The First Reform Act redistributes parliamentary seats and extends voting rights for the middle classes. 1833 Gaskell suffers the stillborn birth of her first child. Slavery is abolished in the British Empire. 1834 A daughter, Marianne, is born to Gaskell. 1835 Charlotte Brontë teaches at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head. 1836 Gaskell writes the poem “On Visiting the Grave of My Stillborn Little Girl, Sunday July 4th , 1836.”1837 The narrative poem “Sketches Among the Poor, No. 1,” which Gaskell wrote with her husband, is published by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. A daughter, Margaret Emily, known as Meta, is born. Charlotte Brontë writes to Robert Southey, the British poet laureate, to ask his opinion of her poetry. His disheartening response implies that while Charlotte displays what Wordsworth calls “faculty of verse,” this is nothing extraordinary in a time of so many successful poets. He goes on to declare that women have no place in the business of literature. Queen Victoria assumes the throne of England.1838 Charlotte resigns from her teaching position at Miss Wooler’s school. Dickens’s Oliver Twist is published.1839 Charlotte works for the next three years as a governess, first in Lothersdale and later in Rawdon. 1840 “Clopton Hall,” a short essay recalling a visit to Clopton House during Gaskell’s school days, is included in William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places. Thomas Hardy is born.1842 A daughter, Florence, is born to Gaskell. Charlotte and Emily Brontë travel to Brussels to study at Pensionnat Heger, where they read, among other things, works by French and German Romantics. They stay less than a year, returning to Haworth because their aunt Elizabeth Branwell has died. 1843- 1844 Charlotte spends a second year at the Pensionnat in Brussels honing her French and German language skills. She develops a strong emotional attachment to her married employer and former teacher, Constantin Heger. Charlotte returns to Haworth in January 1844. A son, William, is born to Gaskell in 1844. 1845 While on family vacation in Wales, the infant William contracts scarlet fever and dies. Gaskell distracts herself from her grief by focusing on her writing. Friedrich Engels’s Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England) is published.1846 A daughter, Julia Bradford, is born to Gaskell. In February, Charlotte sends a manuscript, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (the pen names of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, respectively), to the London publisher Aylott and Jones. The poems are published in May at the sisters’ expense; only two copies are sold. In June Charlotte completes her first novel, The Professor. By the end of the year she has begun work on Jane Eyre. 1847 Gaskell’s “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras” appears in Howitt’s Journal, published by fellow Unitarian William Howitt. While Charlotte’s manuscript for The Professor is rejected by various publishers, her sisters’ novels—Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights—are accepted for publication by Thomas Cautley Newby. Charlotte approaches another publisher, Smith, Elder, with Jane Eyre, which is published in October to instant success, overshadowing the publication in December of her sisters’ novels and surpassing them in acclaim. All three sisters are still publishing under their “Bell” pen names. 1848 Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of a Manchester Life, is published anonymously, although the author’s identity is immediately uncovered. The sympathetic portrait of mill workers and their unbearable living conditions infuriates Manchester factory owners. Amid growing rumors that there is only one “Bell” writer, Charlotte and Anne travel to London to prove otherwise. Charlotte’s publisher, George Smith, learns the truth of the Brontës’ identities but is sworn to protect their secret. In September, Branwell Brontë dies after a sustained bout of depression, alcoholism, and drug use; in December, Emily dies of tuberculosis. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto) is published. Major rebellions take place in France, Austria, Prussia, and other European countries. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is published.1849 Gaskell’s writing finds many admirers, and she meets Dickens, Thackeray, and Wordsworth, among other well-known authors. In May, Anne Brontë dies of tuberculosis. Charlotte’s novel Shirley is published by Smith, Elder. In November, Charlotte travels again to London, this time as a successful author. She, like Gaskell, meets one of her literary idols, William Makepeace Thackeray.1850 Charlotte returns to London. In August, she travels to Windermere, where she and Elizabeth Gaskell meet for the first time. The two will become close friends. In December, Charlotte writes the prefaces and biographical notes for her sisters’ novels; she reveals the true identities of the “Bells” and works to protect the posthumous reputations of Emily and Anne, who have received some criticism for their “coarse” and “nihilisbtic” writings. Several of Gaskell’s works, including “The Heart of John Middleton,” are published in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal Household Words. The Moorland Cottage, a novella, is published in book form.1851 The first two chapters of Cranford—often considered Gaskell’s most popular work—are published in Household Words (the final installments will appear in 1853). “The Deserted Mansion” appears in Fraser’s Magazine. 1853 Gaskell’s Ruth is published in book form; the novel stirs controversy because it questions the conventional wisdom that the life of a “fallen woman” necessarily ends in ruin. Cranford is published in book form. The stories “Cumberland Sheep Shearers” and “The Squire’s Story,” among others, appear in Household Words. Charlotte’s novel Villette is published in January. In April, Charlotte and Gaskell spend a week together in Manchester; in September, Gaskell visits Charlotte at Haworth.1854 Gaskell’s novel North and South, which addresses social problems, is serialized in Household Words. Gaskell meets Florence Nightingale in London. In June, Charlotte marries Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she has known since 1845, when he began work as a curate at Haworth.1855 Charlotte is happily married for a few months, but early in the year she becomes ill; she dies on March 31. Her father asks Gaskell to write Charlotte’s biography North and South is published in book form, and Household Words publishes Gaskell’s “An Accursed Race” and “Half a Life-Time Ago.” A group of Gaskell’s short stories is published as the book Lizzie Leigh and Other Stories. 1857 Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë is published. Although it is praised by most, some individuals depicted in the work threaten legal action over the way they are portrayed. Charlotte’s first novel and the last to bear her name, The Professor, is published, though the book’s release is partly obscured by the enormous interest readers show in Gaskell’s biography of her. The Matrimonial Causes Act enables women to inherit, own, and bequeath property.1858 Gaskell’s “The Doom of the Griffiths” appears in the American monthly Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. “My Lady Ludlow” and other short stories are published in Household Words. 1859 Round the Sofa and Other Tales, a book of short stories, is published. Several short stories appear in All the Year Round, Dickens’s new weekly magazine. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are published.1860 Right at Last and Other Tales, a book of short stories, is published.1861 The American Civil War begins. 1862 “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” is published in the Cornhill Magazine. 1863 “A Dark Night’s Work” appears in All the Year Round. Cousin Phyllis, a short novel, is serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, to be concluded early in 1864. The story’s country setting prefigures a more detailed portrait in Wives and Daughters. The novel Sylvia’s Lovers, set in Napoléon’s time, is published.1864 The first installments of Wives and Daughters appear in the Cornhill Magazine. The novel evokes the pastoral setting of Gaskell’s girlhood country home.1865 As a surprise for her husband’s future retirement, Gaskell buys a country house in Hampshire with the proceeds from her writing. Physically exhausted, and yet to complete the final installment of her novel, Gaskell dies suddenly on a visit to the house on November 12. She is buried at Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford. 1866 The serial publication of Wives and Daughters ends. In lieu of the novel’s last installment, the editor of the Cornhill Magazine writes a note that explains how he thinks the author would have completed the book. The novel is released in book form.1928 In August, Haworth Parsonage opens to the public as the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
INTRODUCTION
The Apology
There is a photographic realism to the opening passages of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, with its view of the Leeds and Bradford railway running along the deep valley of the Aire, and its double-exposure image capturing Keighley’s transformation from an old-fashioned village into a busy manufacturing town. With the gritty aspect of a daguerreotype, the Life pictures “the great worsted factories” and worker cottages poised between Keighley and Brontë’s village of Haworth, and describes the air as “dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business” (p. 12). Focusing her lens not on the picturesque details of Brontë’s Yorkshire but rather on its industrial aspect, Gaskell situates her subject in a time of technological revolution that is ushering in social and political change. In pointing out that “modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion” (p. 11) occur at a more rapid pace in newly industrialized areas than they do elsewhere in England, Gaskell neatly anticipates the Life’s broader agenda concerning changing attitudes toward women’s place in the social order.
As we begin the ascent from Keighley to Haworth, “the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists,” and by the time we reach the flower beds under the parsonage windows “only the most hardy plants could be made to grow.” The garden is encroached upon by the churchyard, “terribly full of upright tombstones,” which surrounds the parsonage on all sides but one (pp. 12-14). Suddenly, in the midst of realism we are in metaphor, those tenacious flowers representing Brontë herself, who will lose her struggle to survive in an uncongenial world. The Brontë home is described as a haven of domesticity amid the desolation of the “wild, bleak moors” (p. 13). “Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness”; the very doorsteps are “spotless,” Gaskell assures the reader. “Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity,” Gaskell testifies (p. 14), signaling that we are not, after all, in the province of the documentarian, but rather that of the novelist, the hagiographer, and perhaps even the apologist.
Gaskell, a friend of Brontë’s and a famous novelist in her own right, undertook the biography project only months after Brontë’s death in 1855 at the urging of Brontë’s father the Reverend Patrick Brontë. Because Brontë was a celebrity, her death generated a lot of attention, most of it unwelcome to those who knew her personally. Brontë’s oldest and closest friend, Ellen Nussey, who was especially troubled by the tabloid stories that were appearing, induced Charlotte’s father to commission a definitive account of his daughter’s life to counter the sensationalistic reports then circulating in the press. Patrick faced opposition from Brontë’s husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who did not like how “the public snatched at every gossiping account” of his wife’s life, and who wanted to keep her memory private. Patrick, who saw the project as a means of controlling Brontë’s literary legacy, prevailed. “No quailing, Mrs. Gaskell!” Patrick directed, “no drawing back!” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 257; see “For Further Reading”).
Gaskell was herself a member of the hungry public at one time. She wanted desperately to find out who had written the literary sensation Jane Eyre (1847). By the time Shirley (1849) was published, Gaskell believed she had penetrated at least half of the mystery: “Currer Bell [Brontë’s pen name] (aha! what will you give me for a secret?) She’s a she—that I will tell you” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 57). When Gaskell finally did meet Brontë in August 1850 they shared a natural affinity, but in many ways Gaskell came to know Brontë more completely through her research for the Life than she did through their friendship, which was of relatively brief duration. Gaskell and Brontë had the opportunity to meet on only five occasions, but they furthered their acquaintance through a correspondence that evidences a genuine professional and personal connection, although at heart the two women subscribed to different models of female authorship. In addition, as I discuss below, their friendship may have suffered in intimacy from Brontë’s strategically conforming to social standards when she thought it would please Gaskell.
The Life is recognized as an enduring work of the nineteenth century, and it is ranked among the greatest biographies of all time. That said, it is important to remember that Brontë’s life was written by a woman who was unsure if she liked Jane Eyre. Gaskell’s intent in writing Brontë’s life was to make the reader “honour her as a woman, separate from her character as authoress” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 242). Most readers know that Brontë was a literary sensation in her day, but modern audiences have lost sight of how polarizing her work was. Although she self-effacingly liked to style herself “a plain country parson’s daughter” (p. 370), her novels were incendiary. The aesthetic merit of Brontë’s fiction was universally acknowledged, but the political subtexts of her novels provoked consternation. Her heroines registered a generalized discontent and a self-interest that was perceived by some as threatening to the accepted social order, which held that women naturally constituted the silent, self-sacrificing moral nucleus of society, the “angel in the house.” This ideological construction was coming under scrutiny in the mid-nineteenth century, under the rubric of the “woman question.” Advocates of “female emancipation” held that certain civil rights, suffrage among them, should be extended to women on the grounds that they were capable of exercising the same rational faculty as men.
Brontë provoked those on both ends of the political spectrum. Traditionalists deemed her engagement with female desire “coarse,” or immodest, and proponents of women’s rights, who believed political gains could be achieved only by demonstrating women’s rational equality with men, found her passionate heroines unsettling for other reasons. Brontë did not weigh in on the “woman question” in a positive way, but rather protested against current conditions without outlining solutions. Critics have only recently begun to understand Brontë’s feminist agenda as psychological in impulse—an impulse to expose the intangible constraints women face as subjects of a patriarchal system. Brontë was very much aware of the institutional nature of women’s oppression, and the impact it had not simply on material issues, like economic independence, but on more fundamental yet harder to characterize concerns, such as intellectual and imaginative freedom. “Millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth,” Jane Eyre warns her reader (p. 96).
Gaskell was working from a position of ambivalence in her defense of Brontë. She confesses to the reader that she cannot deny “the existence of coarseness here and there in her works,” and “only ask[s] those who read them to consider her life,—which has been openly laid bare before them” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letters 25a, 517). Gaskell is often faulted for attempting to exonerate Brontë by favoring the portrait of “the friend, the daughter, the sister” over that of the professional author (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 267). Her reasoning for not including a critical discussion of Brontë’s novels in the Life, as Brontë’s father had desired, was that “public opinion had already pronounced her fiat, set her seal” upon them (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 294). Nevertheless, in writing the Life Gaskell confronts her own ambivalence about Brontë’s work, and in the process refines her ideas on women’s professional engagement generally. The work is animated by that tension, and consequently it has broader implications that transcend its purported defense of one woman.
Gaskell and the “Brontë Myth”
Long before she was commissioned to write Brontë’s biography, Gaskell began a process of creating “a drama of her life in my own mind” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 266). Gaskell pursued information about her subject with the avidity of a paparazzo. On her first visit to the parsonage, for example, she asked a servant to show her the family graves without Brontë’s knowledge (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 166). And yet Gaskell believed she was motivated by the sympathy of a friend. She pitied Brontë from the first, and romanticized her “wild sad life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 242). She jotted down particulars after hearing them directly from Brontë, and recorded the manner in which she revealed the authorship of Jane Eyre to her father, the privations she faced at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and other more ephemeral and sentimental details that might have otherwise been lost, such as the “shiver” that passed over Brontë when she told Gaskell about bringing the dying Emily a sprig of heather from her beloved moors, and the pathetic spectacle of Emily’s dog, Keeper, following her funeral procession. These notes became the basis for the Life, and, accordingly, much of what is now regarded as the stuff of Brontë myth came directly from Brontë.
Brontë on occasion enjoyed playing the “wild little maiden from Haworth” for her new friend, perhaps sensing an eager audience (p. 82). In her first letter to Gaskell, Brontë offers a glimpse of life at Haworth replete with the romantic touches of “ ‘storms of rain’ ... sweeping over the garden and churchyard” and “the moors... hidden in deep fog” (p. 356). Brontë playfully warns Gaskell before her first visit to the parsonage that she will “come out to barbarism, isolation, and liberty,” and she urges her to come when the heather is in bloom, telling her, “I have waited and watched for its purple signal as the forerunner of your coming” (Charlotte Brontë to Gaskell, June 1, 1853; September 1853; in Barker, ed., The Brontës: A Life in Letters, pp. 374, 376).
The Brontë myth is exemplified by the supernatural animation of the natural world. Gaskell reports hearing Brontë defend the uncanny moment at the end of Jane Eyre, for example, when Jane hears Rochester’s call, borne on the wind from miles away, by insisting that “ ‘it is a true thing; it really happened’ ” (p. 338). Similarly, Brontë explains that she experiences her sisters’ presence in the moors after their deaths: “ ‘There is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of [Emily]. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizons’ ” (p. 345).
Although Gaskell does not provide critical commentary on the novels, she does provide firsthand accounts of their composition, the most vivid of these being the ritual the sisters adopted of pacing up and down the dining room at night when they were developing their plots and conferring on drafts of their novels, a practice that Gaskell witnessed Brontë continue alone after her sisters had died: “Three sisters had done this,—then two... and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound” (pp. 317-318). The Gothic coloring of this passage is a prime example of Gaskell allowing the imaginative liberty of the novelist to take precedence over the literalism of the biographer. And yet there is an underlying psychological truth that Gaskell captures through pathetic fallacy. “ ‘The great trial,’ ” Brontë explained of her sisters’ loss, to Ellen Nussey, her lifelong friend, “ ‘is when evening closes and night approaches. At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room—we used to talk.’ ” In her sisters’ absence, Brontë found herself consumed by their dying moments, remembering “ ‘how they looked in mortal affliction,’ ” and thinking of the “ ‘narrow dark dwellings’ ” in which they were laid, “ ‘never more to reappear on earth.’ ” “ ‘This nervousness is a horrid phantom,’ ” Brontë acknowledges (pp. 312-313).
As a novelist, Gaskell understood that there is an emotional truth that is more compelling than bare factual accounting. The Life exists on the border between documentary accuracy and a novelistic verisimilitude that Gaskell believed to be more authentic. To borrow the dichotomy between what is “real” and what is “true” that Brontë develops to express what she does not like about Jane Austen’s novels, there is a greater emotional truth to the Life that diminishes, if not excuses, its representational lapses (p. 276). Brontë feels that Austen’s unsentimental choice to represent life “without poetry, maybe is sensible, real,” but she finds it “more real than true” (p. 276). As Gaskell characterizes it, she always tells the truth in the Life, although she might not tell the whole truth: “I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others” (p. 420). Gaskell is less interested in strict reportage than she is in creating a sensibility of heightened romantic coloring that she believes is faithful to Brontë’s own mode of self-presentation.
The Life partakes of Brontë’s own strategies of self-representation in nuanced ways. In her diary paper for 1829, for example, the teenaged Brontë records a typical evening at home with her sisters, including a memory of her dead sister Maria. “ ‘Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography-book; she wrote on its blank leaf, “Papa lent me this book.” This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast-things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlor, brushing the carpet’ ” (p. 70). This passage is significant for its “graphic vividness” as Gaskell notes. Maria, the departed sister, is as present as Emily and Anne. She has inscribed herself in the geography book and in Brontë’s consciousness, and she plays an ongoing role in family activities. Gaskell captures this collapse of past into present, this presence in absence in the Life and animates her narrative with a psychological rhythm that she found in Brontë’s own personal writing. G. H. Lewes praised the “psychological drama” of the Life, asserting that “fiction has nothing more wild, touching, and heart-strengthening to place above it” (Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, p. 386).
Gaskell’s interest in Brontë was animated as much by her life as by her work: “I have been so interested in what she has written. I don’t mean merely in the story and mode of narration, wonderful as that is, but in the glimpses one gets of her, and... of the way in [which] she has suffered” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Upon meeting Brontë for the first time, Gaskell telegraphed out accounts to all of her acquaintances. “Such a life as Miss B’s I never heard of before,” she informs one (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 75). “The wonder to me is how she can have kept heart and power alive in her life of desolation,” she tells another (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 79). Gaskell has long been charged with manufacturing the myth that Brontë’s life was one of “monotony and privation of any one to love,” and the Life’s main themes of isolation, emotional deprivation, and chronic ill health are now often dismissed by critics as products of Gaskell’s sentimentalism, but it seems that Brontë herself participated in the formation of this impression.
When Gaskell began her acquaintance with Brontë in August 1850, it was at a time of bereavement for Brontë, who had lost all three of her siblings to tuberculosis in quick succession, from September 1848 to May 1849. Her grief was exacerbated by her decision to prepare a new edition of her sisters’ novels, Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne’s Agnes Grey (1847), to which she planned to append a selection of their poetry. Rereading her sisters’ work “ ‘occasioned a depression of spirits well nigh intolerable,’ ” Brontë told Nussey in September 1850. Brontë found that her grief intensified, rather than diminished, over time: “ ‘I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the solitude and isolation of my lot’ ” (p. 361). She described being “haunted” by recollections of her sisters that grew “intolerably poignant,” magnified both by her imagination and by her solitude (pp. 361, 371).
During their initial meeting Brontë supplied Gaskell with a concise but thorough account of her life up to that point, rounding off her pathetic description of the recent deaths of her sisters with the prediction that her own “death will be quite lonely; having no friend or relation in the world to nurse her, & her father dreading a sick room above all places” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 75). Brontë, having been exposed to tuberculosis, understandably feared that her own death might be imminent, and her statement need not be read as purely melodramatic. It does not accurately reflect the objective truth of her situation, however. She had a very close friend, Nussey, and the housekeeper, Tabby, who was more like family than a servant, to care for her. It does reveal a sense of the emotional and intellectual isolation that Brontë felt in no longer being a member of a creative sisterhood. As such, it constitutes an appeal for Gaskell’s understanding and friendship, born of an urge to forge a new literary sisterhood. Brontë emphasizes her personal tragedy and fragility perhaps to offset the incendiary nature of Jane Eyre, whose reputation preceded her, in approaching the more conventionally feminine and socially acceptable Gaskell. Gaskell certainly came away from this meeting with the feeling that Brontë needed her protection, a feeling that is symbolized by her recollection that Brontë’s tiny hands felt like “the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm” (p. 77). If the Life sentimentalizes Brontë and her suffering, Brontë was complicit in that construction.
“Morbidity”
Brontë’s cast of mind when she met Gaskell was partly the result of recent sorrow and partly an ongoing psychological reality for Brontë, whose letters indicate that she endured a lifelong struggle with depression. Although she is sometimes evasive about its cause, Gaskell confronts the emotional intensity of Brontë’s depression unflinchingly. Her directness caused one penetrating reviewer to observe that the “inconsiderate” reader would regard the Life as “an unhealthy book” because it “discusses sick minds almost without admitting that they are unsound” (Easson, p. 382). Gaskell wavers between assigning a “constitutional” or physiological cause to Brontë’s depression, and deeming it the product of “this pressure of grief which had crushed all buoyancy of expectation out of her” (p. 95). She cautions the idle critic who would condemn Brontë’s work as “morbid” to remember how death swept her “hearthstone bare of life and love” (p. 297).
Gaskell traces the origin of Brontë’s “hopelessness” to the loss of her mother and her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, when she was still a child (p. 95). In retrospectively attributing a depressive affect to Brontë, Gaskell writes: “I can well imagine that the grave serious composure... was no acquisition of later years, but dated from that early age when she found herself in the position of an elder sister to motherless children” (p. 77). Gaskell’s description of Brontë’s mother is animated by the same dual impulse that informs her portrait of Brontë. On the one hand, Maria Branwell is made to bear the burden of conventional feminine respectability that her daughter was accused of lacking; on the other, she is an independent thinker and writer, and her letters are the “ ‘records of a mind whence my own sprang,’ ” as Brontë herself put it (p. 336). In service of the latter, Gaskell provides extracts from Maria Branwell’s letters to the Reverend Patrick Brontë written during their engagement, and refers to a monograph Maria Branwell intended for publication, “The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns” (p. 40). In addition, when Gaskell enumerates the literary influences upon the young Brontë, listing the canonical authors she found in her father’s library, the biographer also includes the imaginative legacy Brontë inherited from her mother in the form of her collection of romantically sea-stained “Lady’s Magazines” and “Methodist Magazines,” full of superstition and romance, that Brontë (as she noted in a letter) “ ‘read by stealth,’ ” because her father did not approve of them (pp. 97-98, 149).
The Maria Branwell that Gaskell acquaints us with diffidently prepares for matrimony by “learning by heart a ‘pretty little hymn’ of Mr. Brontë’s composing,” and baking her own wedding cake (p. 39). After marriage, Gaskell reports, “Maria Branwell fades out of sight; we have no more direct intercourse with her; we hear of her as Mrs. Brontë, but it is as an invalid, not far from death” (p. 39). With a Gothic flourish, Gaskell compresses years of married life and childbearing into the ominous report that “Mrs. Brontë was confined to the bed-room from which she never came forth alive” (p. 43).
The fate of Brontë’s mother is meant to foreshadow Brontë’s own fate after her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, when, as Gaskell sees it, her professional identity became subsumed into her husband’s as she performed the endless round of duties incumbent upon a curate’s wife at the expense of cultivating her imaginative life. Before commencing the section of the Life that details Brontë’s engagement and marriage, Gaskell exhorts the reader once more to consider the “intellectual side of character, before we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife” (p. 440). According to Victorian social economy, Gaskell warns, the birth of Mrs. Nicholls entails the death of Miss Brontë, but that is a system of accounting that the Life works to redress.
“Coarseness”
Gaskell intended the biography to vindicate Brontë, who had come under personal attack for the “coarseness” of her works. The charge was a general one, indicating that the novels were not sufficiently feminine or delicate either in expression or subject matter. Reviewers objected particularly to Brontë’s frank treatment of female desire, but the angry subtexts of her novels, which debunked religious hypocrisy and decried social inequity, also rankled Victorian audiences who found such criticism especially insupportable from the pen of a woman. “Conventionality is not morality,” Brontë admonished her critics in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. “Self-righteousness is not religion.” One reviewer, Elizabeth Rigby, branded Jane Eyre a “dangerous” book, calling its heroine “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit,” and condemning the novel’s “murmuring against God’s appointment” and its “proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man.” The review culminates in an ad hominem attack that impugns Brontë’s character as a woman. “If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex,” Rigby pronounced (Allot, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, pp. 109, 111).
In the face of vicious public attacks such as this one, Gaskell felt that she had a “grave duty” to protect her friend’s reputation—both literary and personal (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 245). As part of her recuperative task, Gaskell cannot emphasize enough the strange “otherness” of the Yorkshire people Brontë lived among, maintaining that even an inhabitant of neighboring Lancashire is struck by their “peculiar force of character” (p. 18). “For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë,” Gaskell explains, “it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed” (p. 18). Gaskell characterizes Brontë as “one who has led a wild and struggling and isolated life,—seeing few but plain and outspoken Northerns, unskilled in the euphuisms which assist the polite world to skim over the mention of vice” (p. 297).
To some degree Gaskell’s prejudice reflects Brontë’s own, and her defense takes its cue from Brontë’s “Biographical Notice” of her sisters, which prefaced the posthumous edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that Brontë prepared for her publisher, Smith, Elder and Company in 1850. The great theme of the “Biographical Notice” is of contagion. Brontë describes her sisters as unconscious victims of what they observed, thus finding an external explanation for the disturbing elements of their work. Emily was contaminated not through direct contact with the Haworth locals, but through their lore, which unconsciously shaped her imagination. “In listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress,” Brontë explains. She maintains that Emily “did not know what she had done” in writing Wuthering Heights. Anne “hated her work,” Brontë insists, but “believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail” of the dissolute characters she drew as a warning to others (p. 282). Brontë characterizes both of her sisters as unwilling scribes, whose subjects were forced upon them by the exigencies of life.
Similarly, Gaskell maintains that Brontë was “utterly unconscious” of “what was, by some, deemed coarse in her writings,” and she urges the reader to “remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be” (p. 425). The offending elements of Jane Eyre are copied from life, Gaskell explains, while the scenes drawn from Brontë’s “own imagination... stand out in exquisite relief from the deep shadows and wayward lines” of the “wild and grotesque” scenes of life she witnessed around her (p. 244).
Gaskell locates the most acute source of moral contagion within the parsonage itself, however, in the shape of Brontë’s brother, Branwell, whose struggle with alcoholism and opium addiction resulted in premature death. “Think of her home,” Gaskell exhorts the reader who would fault Brontë for want of delicacy, “and the black shadow of remorse lying over one in it, till his very brain was mazed, and his gifts and his life were lost” (p. 245). In Gaskell’s estimation Branwell’s sins range from denying his sisters’ dream of independence—his evident debauchery being the reason they were unable to start a school at the parsonage—to the more strained claim that the “many bitter noiseless tears” Brontë shed on his account weakened her eyesight (p. 219).
The Brontës viewed Branwell as the most promising artist among them. Accordingly, they were prepared to make sacrifices to forward his education. Brontë’s letters evidence the pressure she and her sisters felt to relieve their father of the financial burden of their maintenance so that he could support Branwell’s attendance at the Royal Academy of Arts. All three sisters went out as governesses, although they were ill suited to the work, which Brontë termed “‘slavery’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell generalizes the plight of the Brontë sisters with a feminist apostrophe: “These are not the first sisters who have laid their lives as a sacrifice before their brother’s idolized wish. Would to God they might be the last who met with such a miserable return!” (p. 107). Branwell never entered the Royal Academy; the reason why is unknown. Instead, he cycled through a series of jobs, ending in a position analogous to that of his sisters, as tutor to a prominent local family, the Robinsons of Thorp Green Hall.
Evasions
While at Thorp Green Hall, Branwell allegedly engaged in a sexual relationship with Lydia Robinson, the wife of his employer. No proof has been found, but Branwell’s assertions that Robinson was one “whom I must, till death, call my wife” (Branwell Brontë to Francis Grundy, October 1845; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 367) and his dismissal in the summer of 1845 for behavior that his employer characterized as “bad beyond expression” are suggestive (p. 222). If Gaskell melodramatically represents the Brontë sisters as victims of Branwell’s profligacy, she is even more extravagant in absolving Branwell from responsibility for the Robinson affair. Gaskell rests most of the blame with Robinson, noting that this “case presents the reverse of the usual features; the man became the victim.” In Gaskell’s telling Branwell is merely one of a number of “innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door” (p. 223).
Not surprisingly, Robinson, who had remarried and become Lady Scott by the time the Life appeared, threatened Gaskell with a libel suit. All unsold copies of the Life were pulled from the shelves, a revised edition issued, and a public retraction printed in the Times (May 26, 1857). This injured Gaskell’s personal credibility and raised questions about the factual accuracy of the Life generally: It begged the question of why Gaskell should place such emphasis on an episode tangential to Brontë’s history.
As one contemporary reviewer observed, because the Life was written so soon after Brontë’s death and many of those concerned in it were living, the text is fissured by suppressions and evasions that occasion us “to read between the lines” (Easson, p. 381). The Robinson episode is one. Gaskell had to provide a compelling reason for Brontë’s aggravated depression at the end of her stay in Brussels and after her return to Haworth in January 1844, which resulted from her unrequited attachment to a married man, Constantin Heger. Heger was Brontë’s literature teacher at the school she attended in Brussels, which was run by his wife. Brontë was later employed there as an English teacher. Heger’s growing awareness of the intensity of Brontë’s feelings caused him to withdraw from her, and her relationship with Mme. Heger, her employer, simmered with so much suppressed hostility that it became too uncomfortable for Brontë to remain. Gaskell provides an earlier, inaccurate date for Branwell’s disgrace and freights the episode with excessive narrative energy in order to cover the trace of Brontë’s more innocent but, to Gaskell, equally shocking secret.
When Gaskell traveled to Brussels in May 1856 “to have a look at” the Hegers, as part of her research for the biography, Madame Heger refused to meet with her upon finding that she was Brontë’s friend, but Constantin Heger shared with Gaskell, on the condition of confidentiality, a series of obsessive letters Brontë had sent him after she left the school (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 271a). Although Gaskell was aware of the entire correspondence and may have read it, it was Heger who made the extracts from Brontë’s letters that appear in the Life, giving a sense of their intensity, but notably excising Brontë’s alternately masochistic and angry demands for attention that his silence provoked.
Even before Heger shared his cache of letters with Gaskell, she had her suspicions that he was the model for Paul Emanuel, the love interest in Villette (1853). Brontë’s attachment to Heger has generally been discussed in the language of romantic infatuation (a notable exception is Lyndall Gordon’s treatment in Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life), but her passion is perhaps best understood as a product of the intellectual and imaginative connection she forged with her teacher, who represented a world of letters that Brontë felt exiled from on her return to Haworth. “ ‘I feel as if we were all buried here,’ ” she complained to Nussey after her return, “ ‘I long to travel; to work; to live a life of action’ ” (p. 218).
Gaskell’s treatment of Brontë’s connection to Heger, while evasive on some level, does confront the relationship in aspects important to a critical assessment of Brontë’s development as a writer. Gaskell understood that curiosity seekers would read the Life as a key to the novels. As one reviewer put it, “It was natural to wonder whence came this astonishing knowledge of the workings of fiery passion. Did she write from memory—or was she taught by the inspiration of a creative mind?” This reviewer came away with the erroneous impression that “Miss Brontë had, so far as is known to her biographer, never felt anything like love when she wrote Jane Eyre” (Easson, p. 377).
In creating this impression, Gaskell may break her contract with the reader to present the details of the life of the woman, but she provides a professional analysis of the influence Heger had on Brontë’s work. It is for this reason that Gaskell spends so much time discussing Heger’s pedagogical technique. Nor does Gaskell shrink completely from exposing the emotional content of that bond, as she includes the melancholy letter in which Brontë confesses to Nussey: “I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me” (p. 209).
The full force of Brontë’s impassioned letters to Heger is muted, but Gaskell preserves Brontë’s great desire, to write a novel and dedicate it to her teacher:“I would write a book and dedicate it to my literature master, to the only master I have ever had—to you, Monsieur! I have told you often in French how much I respect you, how indebted I am to your kindness and your instruction. I would like to say it one time in English. But that cannot be; there’s no use thinking about it. A literary career is closed to me” (p. 219; my translation).
Brontë’s despair registers as anxiety about her ability to make her voice heard as a published author. Heger heard that voice and knew its power, reflecting its worth back to Brontë in his comments on her devoirs (composition exercises). Brontë’s increasing desperation at his silence after she leaves Brussels stemmed perhaps not from desire for his affection, but from a need for his encouragement to write.
Another relationship that receives evasive treatment in the Life is Brontë’s friendship with her publisher, George Smith, which had an exuberant quality unlike any other in Brontë’s adult life. Brontë’s letters to Smith dance with a boisterous, good-humored sarcasm not fully displayed in the Life, as Smith withheld the most playful of them from Gaskell, claiming they were too “purely personal” to be “generally interesting” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 271a).
In Villette Lucy Snowe describes the penchant that Dr. John, who was inspired by Smith, has for making life exciting: “Of every door which shut in an object worth seeing... he seemed to possess the ‘Open! Sesame.’ ” Similarly, Smith brought to life some of Brontë’s fantasies. He arranged a visit to the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons. He took her to the chapel at St. James’s Palace to see her childhood idol, the Duke of Wellington, at Sunday worship. He initiated a trip to Scotland to visit the home of her favorite novelist, Sir Walter Scott. He introduced Brontë to William Makepeace Thackeray, the contemporary author she most admired. As a lasting memory, Smith presented Brontë with portraits of her heroes, Wellington and Thackeray, and to complete the fantasy, he commissioned one of Brontë, by George Richmond, a leading portraitist of the day, thus enshrining her among her worthies.
Gaskell discovered evidence in the Brontë-Nussey correspondence, which she suppresses in the Life, of a romantic attachment between Brontë and her publisher. Nussey, who did not approve of Brontë’s traveling to Scotland with the unmarried Smith and his sister, an event that Gaskell neatly sidesteps in the Life, asked her to qualify their relationship. Brontë breezily reassures Ellen: “My six or eight years of seniority to say nothing of lack of all pretension to beauty &c. are a perfect safeguard—I should not in the least fear to go with him to China” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, June 20, 1850; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 419).
Six months later, however, Brontë adopts a slightly darker tone when she concedes that were “there no vast barrier of age, fortune, &c. there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which now are impossible. If men and women married because they like each others’ temper, look, conversation, nature and so on ... the chance you allude to might be admitted as a chance—but other reasons regulate matrimony—reasons of convenience, of connection, of money.” Brontë is also now reluctant to travel with Smith, who had proposed a trip to Germany. “That hint about the Rhine disturbs me,” Brontë tells Nussey, “I am not made of stone—and what is excitement to him—is fever to me” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, January 20, 1851; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 557).
Commentators make much of the chillingly terse note of congratulation Brontë sent Smith when she received news of his forthcoming marriage: “In great happiness as in great grief, words of sympathy should be few. Accept my mead of congratulation” (Charlotte Brontë to George Smith, December 10, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 213). Brontë’s displeasure with Smith may have been compounded by what she perceived to be a professional, not a personal slight. Significantly, she cools her relationship with William Smith Williams, the firm’s literary adviser, at this time as well. “Do not trouble yourself to select or send any more books. These courtesies must cease one day,” she writes, “and I would rather give them up than wear them out” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, December 6, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 212). She had expected no less than £700 pounds for Villette, and Smith offered only £500, the same sum he had paid for Jane Eyre and Shirley, respectively. To place this in context, Smith paid Gaskell £1,000 for the Life. It was on the basis of Jane Eyre’s success that Smith’s reputation grew and that the firm attracted other high-profile clients, Thackeray among them. A growing sense of professional dissatisfaction may have prompted Brontë to withdraw from amicable relations with the men of Smith, Elder and Company. Brontë’s retreat also coincides with her decision to marry, suggesting perhaps that she saw a new vocation becoming evident.
Courtship and Marriage
Gaskell prefaces her discussion of Brontë’s courtship and marriage with a caveat. “As I draw nearer to the years so recently closed, it becomes impossible for me to write with the same fulness of detail as I have hitherto,” Gaskell explains, signaling that she will offer a version of the truth, but not the whole truth (p. 440). Gaskell keeps to the letter of her law in portraying the tortuous history of Brontë’s courtship with Nicholls by citing Patrick’s opposition to the match as its only impediment, and not registering any of Brontë’s own ambivalence. Brontë feared that her future husband’s views on religious and social issues might prove too narrow to suit her, and she worried that he would be unsympathetic to her literary concerns. “My own objections arise from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feelings, tastes—principles,” Brontë confessed to Nussey (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, December 18, 1852; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 95). Gaskell represents Brontë’s initial refusal of Nicholls as a duty to a father who appears at once tyrannical and dependent. Gaskell observes how “quietly and modestly” Brontë, “on whom such hard judgments had been passed by ignorant reviewers,” received Nicholls’s “vehement, passionate declaration of love,” and how “unselfishly” she refused it in deference to her father’s wishes (p. 421).
Gaskell attempts to gloss over Patrick’s actual objections to the match, that Nicholls was socially beneath his daughter and his income too modest, by saying that he “disapproved of marriages” generally. Brontë’s letters say otherwise, however. Patrick did encourage James Taylor’s suit. Taylor, who was a manager of Smith, Elder and Company, is not named as a correspondent throughout the Life, although Gaskell quotes liberally from letters Brontë wrote to him both before and after rejecting him. Gaskell doubtless intended to protect Brontë from the charge that she encouraged a proposal that she did not accept. By including mention of Taylor’s proposal as well as those from two other suitors that Brontë received before Nicholls presented himself, Gaskell makes clear that she remained single by choice, not fate, scorning to marry simply to escape “the stigma of an old maid,” as she told her first suitor, Henry Nussey, Ellen’s brother (Charlotte Brontë to Henry Nussey, March 5, 1839; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, pp. 185-186). Brontë’s three previous rejections also give a consequent weight to her decision to accept Nicholls.
Nicholls’s persistence assured Brontë of the intensity of his passion, something she feared he lacked, and his promise not to seek an independent living but to remain at Haworth as Patrick’s curate relieved her father’s fear of separation. “By degrees Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter’s marriage,” Gaskell reports, suppressing the fact that she may have directly contributed to this change of heart by secretly arranging for Nicholls to receive a pension that increased his income, something that Brontë never discovered (p. 440; The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letters 168, 195).
Brontë’s fears about compatibility proved to be no more than customary premarital jitters. “My husband is not a poet or a poetical man—and one of my grand doubts before marriage was about ‘congenial tastes’ and so on,” Brontë wrote during her honeymoon, having realized that Nicholls offered a connection that was “a thousand times better than any half sort of psuedo sympathy” (Charlotte Brontë to Catherine Winkworth, July 27, 1854; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, pp. 279-280). If Brontë was personally happy in her choice, she was equally happy to have provided assistance and companionship for her father through her marriage: “ ‘Papa has taken no duty since we returned; and each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice, I feel comforted to think that this marriage secured papa good aid in his old age’ ” (p. 448). Nicholls kept his promise “to comfort and sustain [Patrick’s] declining years,” (p. 444) living with him until his death in 1861.
Gaskell loads Brontë’s marriage with recuperative possibility and expresses the hope that “the slight astringencies of her character... would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace” (p. 447). Brontë saw things similarly, if more pragmatically and with less certainty. “If true domestic happiness replace Fame—the exchange
Patrick Brontë
The portrait of Brontë’s father that emerges from the Life is one of public benefactor and domestic tyrant. While Gaskell extols Patrick’s “diligent” attention to his parishioners in his role as Haworth’s perpetual curate, his tolerance of nonconformists, and a freedom from dogmatism that enables him “fearlessly” to take “whatever side in local or national politics appeared to him right,” it is hard to view these laudable qualities through the dense fog of anecdote cataloguing his “volcanic wrath.” Most of these details, such as his burning his children’s colored boots and slashing his wife’s silk gown because he thought them too “gay and luxurious,” were provided by an unreliable source and omitted, at Patrick’s request, in the revised third edition of the Life. Gaskell attributes Patrick’s peculiarities, such as his alleged propensity to work off his rage by “firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession,” to his “passionate, Irish nature,” and insists that she mentions these instances of “eccentricity in the father” not to “judge them,” but because they are necessary “for a right understanding of the life of his daughter” (pp. 45, 46).
But the Life is internally inconsistent on Patrick’s domestic character. His description in a letter of intervening as “ ‘arbitrator’ ” when the “ ‘little plays’ ” his children invented erupted into impassioned political debate (p. 49), his initiation of a game in which he offered his children masks to encourage them to speak their opinions more “ ‘boldly,’ ” and his own testimony that he discussed “the leading topics of the day” with his young daughter Maria “with as much freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person” work to undermine Gaskell’s claim that Patrick was a “considerably restrained” father who was not “naturally fond of children” (pp. 37, 41).
Gaskell paints Patrick as a misanthropic and unsympathetic father who neglected his growing daughters’ health, education, and social needs. Patrick did see to it that all of his daughters were offered formal education in a period when it was not considered a right or a necessity. Furthermore, his unconventional approach to their education, whether through benign neglect, as Gaskell argues, or from a more active principle, worked to draw out Brontë’s talent. She was allowed unfettered access to Patrick’s library, and she was not barred from reading authors not considered appropriate fare for young women at the time. Among these was Lord Byron, whose version of Romanticism influenced Brontë greatly. The one area in which Patrick did exercise censorship was in burning his wife’s collection of the “Lady’s Magazines,” because they contained “foolish love stories” that he did not like his daughters to read (Charlotte Brontë to Hartley Coleridge, December 10, 1840; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 240).
Gaskell’s antipathy for Patrick may be explained in part by her first meeting him at a time of crisis in the Brontë household, when father and daughter had reached an uneasy stalemate after Patrick forbade Brontë to accept Nicholls’s offer of marriage. “He was very polite and agreeable to me,” Gaskell commented on Patrick’s demeanor during her visit, adding that she was nevertheless, “sadly afraid of him in my inmost soul; for I caught a glance of his stern eyes over his spectacles at Miss Brontë once or twice which made me know my man” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 166). Both Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, whose friendship with Brontë dated back to their days together at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, thought Patrick overly controlling.
Patrick did not seem to sense Gaskell’s unease. He encouraged her friendship with his daughter, writing shortly after Gaskell’s visit: “I think that you and my daughter are congenial spirits, and that a little intercourse between you might under the strange vicissitudes and frequent trials of this mortal life... be productive of pleasure and profit to you both” (Patrick Brontë to Gaskell, September 15, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 193).
Sister Authors?
As two of the most famous writers of their day, Brontë and Gaskell shared an exceptional bond. Although Brontë’s fame now eclipses Gaskell’s, in their day Gaskell was perhaps the more generally admired of the two. Modern reversal of Victorian valuation may have more to do with narrative mode than choice of subject matter; Gaskell’s sentimentalism fell out of favor, while Brontë’s psychological realism finds greater and greater resonance with successive generations of readers. But this imbalance is now being redressed, as critics take a new interest in the social significance of Gaskell’s work. Patrick Brontë praised the biography as “every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another” (Patrick Brontë to Gaskell, July 30, 1857; quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 808). Similarly, a reviewer remarked that the Life benefited from insights that could only have been provided by “a kindred spirit, a fellow-worker in the same vineyard, a sister genius, and a loving-friend” (Easson, p. 388).
Although it is a quaint notion to picture Brontë and Gaskell as toilers in the same “vineyard,” the true extent of their literary sisterhood is debatable. Gaskell was a noted “condition of England” novelist, whose fiction was a vehicle for education and reform, although her work is more nuanced than this rubric suggests, and she moved away from this model in later novels, as in the posthumously published Wives and Daughters (1866). She gives voice to the concerns of disenfranchised workers in her industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), and, in her most controversial novel, Ruth (1853), she depicts the confluence of social and economic forces that lead to the seduction of a young woman. Gaskell allows Ruth to survive her shame and lead a useful life for a time, only to impose a penitential ending in which Ruth dies in an act of self-sacrifice. While aspects of Gaskell’s work may seem overly sentimental to today’s readers, she leverages emotion to build the reader sympathy necessary to open up settled moral questions to a new angle of vision. How do we define criminality? Is stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child more immoral than legalized institutional thefts such as the exploitation of labor and the derogation of personal dignity? Gaskell asserts in the preface to Mary Barton that she is interested in exploring “the state of feeling” on topical issues, not in debating economic facts and figures. She does so, in part, to stay within the proscribed sphere of her sex, but also because she wants her reader to learn to sympathize, not to theorize.
Gaskell viewed fiction writing as a natural extension of the missionary or “rescue work” that she performed as the wife of a Unitarian minister in the great manufacturing hub of Manchester. (For details on Gaskell’s missionary work, see Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell:A Habit of Stories.) This is not to say that her books were traditionalist; Ruth was burned (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). But she does at times undercut the full radical potential of the sympathy she awakens by imposing a recuperative ending. Brontë objected to Ruth’s death, for example, on the grounds that it diminishes the novel’s efficacy as an agent of change: “ ‘Such a book may restore hope and energy to many who thought they had forfeited their right to both.... Yet hear my protest! Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping?’ ” (p. 406). Significantly, Brontë encases her political critique in an affective one, perhaps aware that she was treading on sensitive ground.
There is a similar hesitancy, unlike Brontë’s forthright and assured voice when addressing critical questions in letters to Williams, for example, in the rhetorical question she puts to Gaskell about the pressure she might encounter to conform to proscribed standards and beliefs in her work: “Do you, who have so many friends,—so large a circle of acquaintance,—find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman, uninfluenced or swayed by the consciousness of how your work might affect other minds.... Does no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing soul? Don’t answer this question; it is not intended to be answered” (pp. 433-434). Although Brontë is careful to bestow the ladylike designation “sweet associations,” upon them, she is prodding Gaskell to reassess the ties that may bind her to a conventionalism she might not adhere to in her “secret and clear-seeing soul.” Brontë pushes Gaskell to confront her own limitations as a writer here, and urges her toward a greater degree of verisimilitude.
Brontë’s social impulse is harder to characterize than is Gaskell’s, which is what may account for Gaskell’s ambivalence about her work. (Critics have begun to consider the feminist implications of Brontë’s novels relatively recently.) “I often wish to say something about the ‘condition of women’ question,” she told Williams, “but it is one respecting which so much ‘cant’ has been talked, that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it. It is true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked—but where or how could another be opened?” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).
Jane Eyre registers the restlessness and dissatisfaction a governess feels with her lot in life: “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do” (p. 96). Responding to the charge that the heroine of Villette “ ‘may be thought morbid and weak,’ ” Brontë retorts, “ ‘anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid’ ” (p. 416). Brontë does not isolate Lucy Snowe as a case study of neurosis; rather, she puts her “morbidity” in perspective, pointing to its cultural causes, above all the limited range for the exercise of her intellect in dignified employment.
Teaching was virtually the only respectable profession open to women of Brontë’s social standing, and teachers’ salaries were generally not sufficient to render them truly independent. Gaskell does not shy from registering Brontë’s disdain for that kind of work: “ ‘I am no teacher; to look on me in that light is to mistake me. To teach is not my vocation. What I am, it is useless to say. Those whom it concerns feel and find it out,’ ” Brontë told Nussey (p. 326). As a teacher at Miss Wooler’s school, Brontë chafed against the uniformity of her employment: “ ‘Nothing but teach, teach, teach, from morning to night’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell qualifies Brontë’s time there as “tedious and monotonous,” but in the journal Brontë kept at this time she describes it more pejoratively, as a term of imprisonment: “ ‘Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare-walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?’ ” (Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 39). While the Life does register the depth of Brontë’s anguish during this period, it casts her professional identity crisis of 1835-1837 as a religious crisis, relying as it does on Brontë’s letters to Nussey in which she uses the cryptic language of transgression and of longing for “ ‘reconciliation to God’ ” to describe her angst (p. 113). But the journal entries from the same period tell a different story—one of frustrated genius—of longing to “write gloriously” but being condemned to teach “Dolts” and “asses” (The Brontës, pp. 39-40).
The Brontë-Nussey Correspondence
Some argue that the Life suffers from Gaskell’s heavy reliance on Brontë’s letters to Nussey, who is often characterized as a provincial and conventional person with whom Brontë did not discuss her literary concerns. This view of Nussey is based in part on a letter in which Brontë seems to slight her when she describes her as “no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl” who is “without romance,” and whose clumsy attempts to read poetry aloud make Brontë want to stop her ears. The letter contains the passionate avowal, however, that “no new friend, however lofty and profound in intellect—not Miss Martineau herself—could be to me what Ellen is” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, January 3, 1850; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 323).
In the early days of their friendship, Brontë trusted a mutual friend, the independent and unconventional Mary Taylor, to understand her better than Nussey did. This correspondence, sadly, is lost. Taylor burned all of Brontë’s letters but the one in which she describes her first visit to her publishers, Smith, Elder and Company. In an 1836 letter to Nussey, Brontë told her, “I sat down and wrote to you such a note as I ought to have written to none but M. Taylor who is nearly as mad as myself, when I glanced it over it occurred to me that Ellen’s calm eye would look at this with scorn, so I determined to concoct some production more fit for the inspection of common-sense” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, September 26, 1836; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 151). If Brontë’s personification of Nussey as “common-sense,” seems dismissive, her revelation that she has written two letters entails an appeal, an embedded question: Would Ellen scorn such a production? Brontë indirectly seeks Nussey’s permission for greater freedom of expression in their correspondence.
The desired intimacy was achieved during Brontë’s tenure at Miss Wooler’s school. “ ‘Don’t deceive yourself by imagining I have a bit of real goodness about me,’ ” a self-loathing Brontë enigmatically warned Nussey. “ ‘If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up ... you would pity and I dare say despise me’ ” (p. 112). The source of Brontë’s anxiety is the fear, which she veils, that her compulsive engagement with the imaginary world of the juvenile Glasstown and Angria Saga that she and Branwell coauthored was socially unacceptable for a young woman. Brontë’s depression stems not only from the fact that she feels forced to teach at the expense of writing, but also from a corollary effort to abandon the lurid fantasy writing of her youth in favor of realist fiction. Brontë expresses herself in letters from this period with a vehemence that might have repelled a truly conventional person, and emerges from this dark spell calling Nussey “ ‘her comforter’ ” (p. 127).
As their friendship deepened, Brontë was more authentic and unguarded with Nussey than with any other correspondent. “ ‘I write to you freely,’ ” Brontë explained in the difficult summer following her sisters’ deaths, “ ‘because I believe you will hear me with moderation’ ” (p. 314). While it is true that letters to Nussey are evidence that Brontë “was one to study the path of duty well,” as Gaskell says (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 267), we can also understand why Brontë’s husband deemed her letters to this friend “lucifer matches” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, October 24, 1854; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 295). Nicholls understood that Brontë’s publicity would make these expressive letters of interest to a wider audience, and consequently made it a condition of their correspondence that Nussey burn them. The purportedly conventional Nussey, notably, did not comply with Nicholls’s request. This correspondence, which captures Brontë under the stress of self-development, provides a natural character arc for Brontë as heroine of Gaskell’s novelistic Life.
“The Woman Question”
Brontë did prefer teaching in a school to submitting to the “ ‘slavery’ ” of being a governess in a private family (p. 115). Gaskell captures with vivid intensity the painful alienation Brontë felt during her years as a governess. The liminal position of governesses, who were suspended between classes, being neither equal to their masters nor truly servants, had the effect of negating both the value and the difficulty of their work. Brontë’s remarks that she would rather be a “ ‘housemaid’ ” than a governess, and that she “ ‘could like to work in a mill,’ ” may show signs of class insensitivity, but her hyperbole constitutes a critique of the value structure of genteel employment (pp. 134, 138). To make employment suitable for young ladies, the issue of labor had to be politely elided, the compensation nominal.
As much as she detested working at Margaret Wooler’s school, Brontë looked up to Wooler because she managed to contrive an independent life by running a school. “ ‘There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her way through life,’ ” Brontë told her (p. 232). When Williams asked Brontë’s advice about educating his daughters, Brontë urged him to “give their existence some object” in case they did not marry. “An education secured is an advantage gained—a priceless advantage. Come what may—it is a step towards independency—and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency,” she cautions: Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career.... How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? in that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope sustains me still.... I wish every woman in England had also a hope and a motive. Alas! there are many old maids who have neither (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, July 3, 1849; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 227 ).
When Brontë speaks generally about the lot of single women, she names economic dependency as their “great curse,” but in atomizing her own condition, she places emphasis not on her material condition, but on her intellectual and psychological needs.
Gaskell, too, was sensitive to “the trials of many single women, who waken up some morning to the sudden feeling of the purposelessness (is there such a word) of their lives.” “I think I see everyday how women, deprived of their natural duties as wives & mothers, must look out for other duties if they wish to be at peace,” Gaskell explains to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Gaskell’s formulation of the problem, that women are appointed by natural order to perform specific duties, differs only marginally from Brontë’s more practical view that a career would be a superfluity for a married woman: “When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident—when her destiny isolates her—I suppose she must do what she can—live as she can” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).
Gaskell refines her position in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, an artist. “One thing is clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life,” Gaskell muses, coming to the conclusion that “assuredly a blending of the two is desirable. (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean), which you will say it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68). Gaskell’s awkward answer in the Life is to divide Brontë’s existence into “two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled” (p. 272). While Gaskell’s ambivalence about female duty certainly registers here, the fact that she labels the currents “parallel” suggests that she saw the division not as a subordination of one role to the other, but rather as an uneasy coexistence of the two. In addition, Gaskell’s careful delineation between Brontë’s public and private personae has the effect of preserving her professionalism. Thackeray angered Brontë by referring to her publicly as “Jane Eyre,” a conflation that she felt effaced her artistry. She was not Jane Eyre; she had created Jane Eyre.
Gaskell conducted her own literary career with uncompromising professionalism, famously locking horns with Charles Dickens over creative differences when she wrote for his periodical Household Words. But her ambivalence about Brontë’s work persisted well into their friendship. “The difference between Miss Brontë and me,” Gaskell explained to a friend, “is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing, and out of her life; and my books are so far better than I am that I often feel... as if I were a hypocrite” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Both Brontë and Gaskell saw their work as therapeutic. Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in an attempt to exorcize her grief over the death of an infant son. Brontë found relief from loneliness in the life of her imagination after the deaths of her sisters. “ ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking... its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God, who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession,’ ” Brontë told Williams (p. 320).
Where Brontë sees writing as a form of solace and pleasure, Gaskell loads it with the corrective function of “normalizing” the self by working out unhealthy energy. Women’s participation in the “hidden world of art” is beneficial if it “keeps them from being morbid,” Gaskell believes, but if “Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is not doubt of that—and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68).
Gaskell feared that Brontë’s desire to write and to be heard was a self-indulgence that was abnormal and not strictly womanly. As Gaskell described it in a letter to a friend, Brontë had a “ ‘desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way’ ” (p. 436).
So desirous was Brontë of recognition, that she sent samples of her work to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate, just before her twenty-first birthday. Southey recognized her talent, but discouraged her from pursuing a literary career, saying that “ ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ ” and promising that the woman who is “ ‘engaged in her proper duties’ ” . . . is “ ‘less eager for celebrity’ ” (p. 123). Brontë’s response seemed a model of contrition, and it pleased Southey as such, but it was carefully veiled rebellion (p. 125). Her letter fairly drips with sarcasm in the guise of naive acceptance: “ ‘You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures... You kindly allow me to write... provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do ... I am afraid, sir, you think me very foolish. I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end; but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote’ ” (p. 124).
Brontë’s original letter is not extant, but judging from her response it sounds as if she first approached Southey in an inauthentic voice that she here disowns. Brontë smartly assures Southey that she knows and does her duty She explains that as the daughter of a clergyman of limited income she has been forced out into the world as governess. “ ‘In that capacity,’ ” Brontë affirms, “ ‘I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment’s time for one dream’ ” (p. 124).
Brontë’s avowal of domestic responsibility appeased Southey and was reassuring to Gaskell as well. Throughout the Life Gaskell anxiously repeats that Brontë did not cultivate the literary arts at the expense of the domestic ones. “Never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant,” Gaskell protests (p. 246). She often counterweights discussions of Brontë’s professional engagement with examples of her fulfilling her duty to her father and other dependents. “ ‘The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest—which implies the greatest good to others,’ ” Brontë counseled Nussey when she was torn between staying at home to care for her aging mother and going out to “ ‘governess drudgery,’ ” as Brontë called it. “ ‘I recommend you to do what I am trying to do myself,’ ” Brontë adds, showing signs of a character in conflict, a struggle to be dutiful (p. 237).
In Gaskell’s discussion of Jane Eyre’s composition history, she relates the anecdote of Brontë’s “breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing,” to “carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes” that had been missed by the aging and nearly blind Tabby (p. 246). Rather than diminishing Brontë’s stature as a professional, as some contend, these details make the reader appreciate the divided nature of her labor. Examples such as this may have won Brontë a belated place in the hearts of Victorians who saw in her sacrifice “the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory,” but they impress today’s reader instead with the constraints under which she produced enduring literary classics (Easson, p. 381).
Gaskell, who had to meet the needs of four growing daughters, the manifold responsibilities of a minister’s wife, and the demands of her rescue work, complained to her friend Charles Eliot Norton of the household mundanities that harassed her away from writing:If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I could write! ... But you see everybody comes to me perpetually. Now in this hour since breakfast I have had to decide on the following variety of important questions. Boiled beef—how long to boil? What perennials will do in Manchester smoke, & what colours our garden wants? Length of skirt for a gown? Salary of a nursery governess, & certain stipulations for amount of time to be left to herself (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 384).
Although she couches it in the neutral wish for a private library, Gaskell’s point is that if she were a man, and thereby liberated from the domestic responsibilities that divide her focus, she would be a better, or at least a more prolific, writer.
The Brontë—Gaskell correspondence evidences an ongoing conversation about women’s changing role. “ ‘Men begin to regard the position of woman in another light than they used to do,’ ” Brontë observed in her first letter to Gaskell. “ ‘They say... that the amelioration of our condition depends on ourselves. Certainly there are evils which our own efforts will best reach; but as certainly there are other evils—deep-rooted in the foundations of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch’ ” (pp. 356—357). A letter written a month later suggests that the friends shared what was, for their day, quite a progressive position on women’s labor: “ ‘Why are you and I to think (perhaps I should rather say to feel) so exactly alike on some points that there can be no discussion between us?’ ” Brontë wrote to her future biographer. “ ‘Your words on this paper express my thoughts.’ ” The subject under discussion was Harriet Taylor’s article “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1851 and was attributed to J. S. Mill. Brontë opposed many aspects of it, but she embraced its treatment of the question of women’s employment, “ ‘especially’ ” the contention “ ‘that if there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject; leave all careers open; let them try’ ” (p. 391). Oddly, although Brontë’s letter suggests that Gaskell expressed her absolute agreement (in a letter that is now lost), in a letter to J. S. Mill, written after the publication of the Life, Gaskell denies having read the article at all (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 435).
Whatever general beliefs Gaskell held about the fitness of women’s employment, she justifies Brontë’s literary career by characterizing it as a duty, an “extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents” (p. 273). In so doing, Gaskell uses conventional terminology about women’s place to a radical end. If entering into public discourse can be termed a feminine duty, then it is acceptable, even incumbent upon women to exercise their talents in this arena. Gaskell’s model is an extension of the Victorian ideology of the “angel in the house,” which held that women were to provide a global moral compass by exerting domestic influence. Similarly, to excuse women’s foray into print, Gaskell believes their work should be a vehicle for social improvement.
As Gaskell explains of Brontë, “She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others” (p. 273). It is easier, however, to make a case for the moral utility of Gaskell’s social problem novels than it is for Brontë’s less practically interventionist engagement with issues of the day. Brontë had a somewhat uneasy relation to her fiction in this regard. She writes to her publisher, George Smith: “ ‘You will see that “Villette” touches on no matter of public interest. I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral’ ” (p. 414). Brontë’s letter to Smith is unapologetic, but she assumes an air of self-chastisement when she writes to Gaskell on the same subject: “ ‘Villette has no right to push itself before Ruth. There is a goodness, a philanthropic purpose, a social use in the latter, to which the former cannot for an instant pretend’ ” (p. 422). The difference in tone of the two letters suggests, as does Brontë’s cautious criticism of Ruth’s tragic ending, that Brontë might have muted the force of some of her opinions in order not to alienate her new friend.
Villette did provoke Harriet Martineau, another new literary acquaintance to whom Brontë looked for approbation. In her review of the novel in the Daily News, Martineau faulted Brontë for her “incessant... tendency to describe the need of being loved,” and for allowing her heroine to “entertain a double love,” which was tantamount to an accusation of immodesty. Ironically, this criticism has much in common with the accusations in the Rigby review of Jane Eyre, although Martineau was coming at the issue from a different perspective. Martineau, a feminist, feared that the novel’s unapologetic exhibition of female desire would prove counterproductive to the political and social gains that were taking place based on an emerging sense of women’s rational equality with men. “There are substantial, heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love,” Martineau insisted, “and to the absence of it may be attributed some of the criticism which the book will meet with from readers who are no prudes, but whose reason and taste will reject the assumption that events and characters are to be regarded through the medium of one passion only” (Allot, p. 173). Brontë’s view, that the personal is political, would not seem a plausible feminist platform for another hundred years.
Significantly, Gaskell follows Brontë’s apology for Villette’s lack of moral utility, with the promise that “had she lived,” she would have started to produce more socially responsible work. On her final trip to London, Gaskell explains, Brontë was free to make her own itinerary and she elected to see “ ‘the real in preference to the decorative side of life,’ ” visiting Newgate and Pentonville prisons, Bethlehem Hospital for the insane, and the Foundling Hospital. “All that she saw during this last visit to London impressed her deeply,” Gaskell reports, “so much so as to render her incapable of the immediate expression of her feelings.” “If she had lived,” Gaskell predicts, “her deep heart would sooner or later have spoken out” (p. 423).
Conclusions
Gaskell came to know Brontë more completely through her research for the Life than she did through their friendship, which was of relatively brief duration and, as stated above, may have suffered in intimacy from Brontë’s strategically conforming to social standards when she thought it would please Gaskell. What impressed Gaskell most in reading Brontë’s personal correspondence was the degree to which her voice and “spirit” varied “according to the correspondent whom she was addressing” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 274). Bronte did not adopt the irreverent, rakish swagger in her letters to Gaskell that she did in those to Branwell, nor did she display the astringent sarcasm (which Gaskell quietly censored without a telltale ellipsis in the Life) that animates her anonymous letter to the critic and minor poet Hartley Coleridge, who had failed to appreciate her work. Gaskell also saw the “wild weird” writing of the juvenile period that she felt bordered on “delirium” (p. 72). Gaskell allows a “fac simile” of a page of one of these miniscule manuscripts to stand in for proper analysis, perhaps deterred by their balder articulation of eroticism and participation in the supernatural than is found in the mature works, and by the irreverent cynicism of Brontë’s male narrators of the Angrian period (p. 73).
Gaskell saw her primary role as that of elegist, celebrating not the work, but the life of her “dear friend, Charlotte Brontë” (p. 18). To that end, Gaskell employs her full arsenal of literary technique. Pathos is the currency of the Life because reader empathy is integral to Gaskell’s vindication project. Gaskell’s repetition of key themes and her layering of the voices of eyewitnesses, family, and friends lend the Life an authority and intensity that no other biographical study of Brontë shares. With these “viva voce glimpses into her [Brontë’s] daily life” Gaskell creates a circle of acquaintances around Brontë of which the reader feels a part (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Gaskell employs one of Brontë’s own favored devices, direct reader address, to create a conspiratorial feeling between author and audience. (Brontë often used it for the opposite effect, to distance the reader or to anticipate reader hostility.) Gaskell does not address her memoir to any general audience, but rather to those who “know how to listen” (p. 267). She turns from “the critical, unsympathetic public,” to appeal to a “larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius.” Gaskell addresses posterity here, a public she envisions as both broader and more broadminded than Victorian society. “To that public,” Gaskell declares in the Life’s concluding line, “I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë,” entrusting the reader with a heavy charge (p. 454).
While the Life seems transparent, it is not. Gaskell is skilled at manipulating point of view. Although she seems to give the reader un-mediated access to Brontë’s voice through personal correspondence, Gaskell carefully culled and edited that correspondence; she staged Brontë’s voice, and in so doing she stripped that voice of some of its power and pique. Despite Gaskell’s self-effacing comment that “the letters speak for themselves, to those who know how to listen, far better than I can interpret their meaning into my poorer and weaker words,” the very act of selection is an act of interpretation (p. 267).
But Brontë’s words do often speak for themselves more loudly than Gaskell’s attempt to shape them. One example is the letter to Nussey in which Brontë denies having published: “ ‘I have given no one a right either to affirm, or to hint, in the most distant manner, that I was ‘publishing’—(humbug!) ... Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none.... The most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to vulgar notoriety’ ” (p. 281). Gaskell calls this letter “confirmatory” of guilt in the “very vehemence... of intended denial,” but this is one occasion that “those who know how to listen,” as Gaskell describes her ideal reader, hear something other than Gaskell does, a playful tone that indicates mock anger and the spouting of lady-like correctness. Brontë is actually issuing an admission under the coy cover of a denial.
Brontë’s reaction to the proposal of marriage she received from James Taylor has a different meaning for today’s readers than it did for Victorians. Gaskell is eager to correct those who would “imagine, from the extraordinary power with which [Brontë] represented the passion of love in her novels, that she herself was easily susceptible of it” (p. 376). She offers Brontë’s confession to Nussey that she could not accept Taylor because her “veins ran ice” when he approached her as proof of Brontë’s natural modesty, thus distinguishing her from her passionate heroines. To a modern reader, however, the episode suggests, rather, the importance Brontë placed on sexual attraction in marriage.
There is an undulating movement to Gaskell’s narrative in its liberal use of foreshadowing and compression. She uses compression particularly effectively in reproducing the Brontë funerary tablet in the first chapter. The memorial, with its lines “pressed together,” the letters becoming “small and cramped” as “one dead member of the household follows another fast to the grave” mirrors the narrative’s overall movement (p. 16). Brontë’s memorial tablet, which Gaskell also reproduces at the end of chapter one, makes no mention of her professional achievement. On it she is stripped of all cultural referents except the titles of wife and daughter (p. 17). The Life of Charlotte Brontë, which does not refer to Brontë by her married name, is a monument that attempts to restore her complexity.
There is evidence that the Life served the corrective function Gaskell intended it to serve, rescuing Brontë’s works for those who had dismissed the writer as “coarse.” Gaskell received testimonials such as this one, from Charles Kingsley: “I gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! ... Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written” (to Gaskell, May 14, 1857; in Wise and Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, vol. 4, pp. 222—223). Those who come in search of this kind of vindication will find it, but for others the Life tells a different story, that of Brontë’s active struggle against constraints at the same time psychological and material, domestic and institutional. If Brontë does emerge from the pages of the Life as someone who studied “the path of duty well,” as Gaskell would have it, it is not as a victim, but rather as one who consciously “spent herself lavishly for others—lavishly and even wastefully,” as one reviewer observed (Easson, p. 380). It is the story of someone who is challenged by life, but not subdued by it: “ ‘Crushed I am not,’ ” Brontë told Nussey in the dark summer of 1849, “ ‘I have some strength to fight the battle of life’ ” (p. 313). The overall “effect of the book is melancholy,” one contemporary reviewer of the Life offered in summation, adding that although Gaskell’s Brontë was led by a “stern sense of duty... within that imprisonment of constraint was a really free spirit” (Easson, p. 383).
Anne Taranto was educated at Columbia and Oxford Universities and at Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. She has taught courses on the novel and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at Georgetown University and is currently at work on a study of Charlotte Brontë’s relationship to the literary marketplace.
THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË,
AUTHOR OF
“JANE EYRE,” “SHIRLEY,” “VILLETTE,” &c.
BY
E. C. GASKELL,
AUTHOR OF “MARY BARTON,” “RUTH,” ETC.
“Oh my God,
Thou hast knowledge, only Thou,
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.”
AURORA LEIGH.
IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.
The Leeds and Bradford railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to the neighbouring river of Wharfe. Keighley station is on this line of railway, about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name. The number of inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been very greatly increased during the last twenty years, owing to the rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a branch of industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part of Yorkshire, which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis.
Keighley is in process of transformation from a populous, old-fashioned village, into a still more populous and flourishing town. It is evident to the stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture. The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass. Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce. In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is there of any dwellings of the professional middle-class, such as abound in our old cathedral towns. In fact, nothing can be more opposed than the state of society, the modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion, in such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the north, and any stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south. Yet the aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not picturesqueness. Grey stone abounds; and the rows of houses built of it have a kind of solid grandeur connected with their uniform and enduring lines. The frame-work of the doors, and the lintels of the windows, even in the smallest dwellings, are made of blocks of stone. There is no painted wood to require continual beautifying, or else present a shabby aspect; and the stone is kept scrupulously clean by the notable Yorkshire housewifes. Such glimpses into the interior as a passer-by obtains, reveal a rough abundance of the means of living, and diligent and active habits in the women. But the voices of the people are hard, and their tones discordant, promising little of the musical taste that distinguishes the district, and which has already furnished a Carrodus a to the musical world. The names over the shops (of which the one just given is a sample) seem strange even to an inhabitant of the neighbouring county, and have a peculiar smack and flavour of the place.
The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his journey in a westerly direction. First come some villas; just sufficiently retired from the road to show that they can scarcely belong to any one liable to be summoned in a hurry, at the call of suffering or danger, from his comfortable fire-side; the lawyer, the doctor, and the clergyman, live at hand, and hardly in the suburbs, with a screen of shrubs for concealment.
In a town one does not look for vivid colouring; what there may be of this is furnished by the wares in the shops, not by foliage or atmospheric effects; but in the country some brilliancy and vividness seems to be instinctively expected, and there is consequently a slight feeling of disappointment at the grey neutral tint of every object, near or far off, on the way from Keighley to Haworth. The distance is about four miles; and, as I have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of workmen’s houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farm-house and out-buildings, it can hardly be called “country” any part of the way. For two miles the road passes over tolerably level ground, distant hills on the left, a “beck” flowing through meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business. The soil in the valley (or “bottom,” to use the local term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges; and what crops there are, on the patches of arable land, consist of pale, hungry-looking, grey-green oats. Right before the traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a background of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wavelike hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be.
For a short distance the road appears to turn away from Haworth, as it winds round the base of the shoulder of a hill; but then it crosses a bridge over the “beck,” and the ascent through the village begins. The flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, in order to give a better hold to the horses’ feet; and, even with this help, they seem to be in constant danger of slipping backwards. The old stone houses are high compared to the width of the street, which makes an abrupt turn before reaching the more level ground at the head of the village, so that the steep aspect of the place, in one part, is almost like that of a wall. But this surmounted, the church lies a little off the main road on the left; a hundred yards, or so, and the driver relaxes his care, and the horse breathes more easily, as they pass into the quiet little by-street that leads to Haworth Parsonage. The churchyard is on one side of this lane, the school-house and the sexton’s dwelling (where the curates formerly lodged) on the other.
The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon the church; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried school-house, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond. The area of this oblong is filled up by a crowded churchyard, and a small garden or court in front of the clergyman’s house. As the entrance to this from the road is at the side, the path goes round the corner into the little plot of ground. Underneath the windows is a narrow flower-border, carefully tended in days of yore, although only the most hardy plants could be made to grow there. Within the stone wall, which keeps out the surrounding churchyard, are bushes of elder and lilac; the rest of the ground is occupied by a square grass plot and a gravel walk. The house is of grey stone, two-stories high, heavily roofed with flags, in order to resist the winds that might strip off a lighter covering. It appears to have been built about a hundred years ago, and to consist of four rooms on each story; the two windows on the right (as the visitor stands, with his back to the church, ready to enter in at the front door) belonging to Mr. Brontë’s study, the two on the left to the family sitting-room. Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness. The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes glitter like looking-glass. Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity.
The little church lies, as I mentioned, above most of the houses in the village; and the graveyard rises above the church, and is terribly full of upright tombstones. The chapel or church claims greater antiquity than any other in that part of the kingdom; but there is no appearance of this in the external aspect of the present edifice, unless it be in the two eastern windows, which remain unmodernized, and in the lower part of the steeple. Inside, the character of the pillars shows that they were constructed before the reign of Henry VII. It is probable that there existed on this ground a “field-kirk,” or oratory, in the earliest times; and, from the archbishop’s registry at York, it is ascertained that there was a chapel at Haworth in 1317. The inhabitants refer inquirers concerning the date to the following inscription on a stone in the church tower:—“Hic fecit Cæanobium Monachorum Auteste fundator. A. D. sexcentissimo.” 1
That is to say, before the preaching of Christianity in Northumbria. Whitaker says that this mistake originated in the illiterate copying out, by some modern stone-cutter, of an inscription in the character of Henry the Eighth’s time on an adjoining stone:—“Orate pro bono statu EutestTod.”“Now every antiquary knows that the formula of prayer ‘bono statu’ always refers to the living. I suspect this singular Christian name has been mistaken by the stone-cutter for Austet, a contraction of Eustatius, but the word Tod, which has been mis-read for the Arabic figures 600 is perfectly fair and legible. On the presumption of this foolish claim to antiquity, the people would needs set up for independence, and contest the right of the Vicar of Bradford to nominate a curate at Haworth.”2
I have given this extract, in order to explain the imaginary groundwork of a commotion which took place in Haworth about five and thirty years ago, to which I shall have occasion to allude again more particularly.
The interior of the church is common-place; it is neither old enough nor modern enough to compel notice. The pews are of black oak, with high divisions; and the names of those to whom they belong are painted in white letters on the doors. There are neither brasses, nor altar-tombs, nor monuments, but there is a mural tablet on the right-hand side of the communion-table, bearing the following inscription:—HERELIE THE REMAINS OFMARIA BRONTË, WIFEOF THEREV P. BRONTE, A.B., MINISTER OF HAWORTH.HER SOULDEPARTED TO THE SAVIOUR, SEPT. 15TH, 1821,IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE.
“Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh.”—Matthew xxiv. 44.ALSO HERE LIE THE REMAINS OFMARIA BRONTË, DAUGHTER OF THE AFORESAID;SHE DIED ON THE6TH OF MAY, 1825, IN THE 12THYEAR OF HER AGE,AND OFELIZABETH BRONTË, HER SISTER,WHO DIED JUNE 15TH, 1825, IN THE 11TH YEAR OF HER AGE.
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”—Matthew xviii. 3.HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OFPATRICK BRANWELL BRONTË,WHO DIED SEPT. 24TH, 1848, AGED 30 YEARS.AND OFEMILY JANE BRONTË,WHO DIED DEC. 19TH, 1848, AGED 29 YEARS,SON AND DAUGHTER OF THEREV. P. BRONTË, INCUMBENT.THIS STONE IS ALSO DEDICATED TO THEMEMORY OF ANNE BRONTË,YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF THE REV P BRONTË, A.B.SHE DIED, AGED 27 YEARS,b MAY 28TH, 1849,AND WAS BURIED AT THE OLD CHURCH, SCARBORO’.
At the upper part of this tablet ample space is allowed between the lines of the inscription; when the first memorials were written down, the survivors, in their fond affection, thought little of the margin and verge they were leaving for those who were still living. But as one dead member of the household follows another fast to the grave, the lines are pressed together, and the letters become small and cramped. After the record of Anne’s death, there is room for no other.
But one more of that generation—the last of that nursery of six little motherless children—was yet to follow, before the survivor, the childless and widowed father, found his rest. On another tablet, below the first, the following record has been added to that mournful list:—ADJOINING LIE THE REMAINS OFCHARLOTTE, WIFEOF THEREV ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS, A.B.,AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A.B., INCUMBENT.SHE DIED MARCH 31 ST, 1855, IN THE 39THYEAR OF HER AGE.
CHAPTER II.
For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë, it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed, and from which both her own and her sisters’ first impressions of human life must have been received. I shall endeavour, therefore, before proceeding further with my work, to present some idea of the character of the people of Haworth, and the surrounding districts.
Even an inhabitant of the neighbouring county of Lancaster is struck by the peculiar force of character which the Yorkshiremen display. This makes them interesting as a race; while, at the same time, as individuals, the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency they possess gives them an air of independence rather apt to repel a stranger. I use this expression “self-sufficiency” in the largest sense. Conscious of the strong sagacity and the dogged power of will which seem almost the birthright of the natives of the West Riding, each man relies upon himself, and seeks no help at the hands of his neighbour. From rarely requiring the assistance of others, he comes to doubt the power of bestowing it; from the general success of his efforts, he grows to depend upon them, and to over-esteem his own energy and power. He belongs to that keen, yet short-sighted class, who consider suspicion of all whose honesty is not proved as a sign of wisdom. The practical qualities of a man are held in great respect; but the want of faith in strangers and untried modes of action, extends itself even to the manner in which the virtues are regarded; and if they produce no immediate and tangible result, they are rather put aside as unfit for this busy, striving world; especially if they are more of a passive than an active character. The affections are strong, and their foundations lie deep: but they are not—such affections seldom are—wide-spreading; nor do they show themselves on the surface. Indeed, there is little display of any of the amenities of life among this wild, rough population. Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, probably, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air and of isolated hill-side life; something be derived from their rough Norse ancestry. They have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour; the dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations, pithily expressed. Their feelings are not easily roused, but their duration is lasting. Hence there is much close friendship and faithful service; and for a correct exemplification of the form in which the latter frequently appears, I need only refer the reader of “Wuthering Heights” to the character of “Joseph.”
From the same cause come also enduring grudges, in some cases amounting to hatred, which occasionally has been bequeathed from generation to generation. I remember Miss Brontë once telling me that it was a saying round about Haworth, “Keep a stone in thy pocket seven year; turn it, and keep it seven year longer, that it may be ever ready to thine hand when thine enemy draws near.”
The West Riding men are sleuth-hounds in pursuit of money. Miss Brontë related to my husband a curious instance illustrative of this eager desire for riches. A man that she knew, who was a small manufacturer, had engaged in many local speculations, which had always turned out well, and thereby rendered him a person of some wealth. He was rather past middle age, when he bethought him of insuring his life; and he had only just taken out his policy, when he fell ill of an acute disease which was certain to end fatally in a very few days. The doctor, half-hesitatingly, revealed to him his hopeless state. “By jingo!” cried he, rousing up at once into the old energy, “I shall do the insurance company! I always was a lucky fellow!”
These men are keen and shrewd; faithful and persevering in following out a good purpose, fell in tracking an evil one. They are not emotional; they are not easily made into either friends or enemies; but once lovers or haters, it is difficult to change their feeling. They are a powerful race both in mind and body, both for good and for evil.
The woollen manufacture was introduced into this district in the days of Edward III. It is traditionally said that a colony of Flemings came over and settled in the West Riding to teach the inhabitants what to do with their wool. The mixture of agricultural with manufacturing labour that ensued and prevailed in the West Riding up to a very recent period, sounds pleasant enough at this distance of time, when the classical impression is left, and the details forgotten, or only brought to light by those who explore the few remote parts of England where the custom still lingers. The idea of the mistress and her maidens spinning at the great wheels while the master was abroad, ploughing his fields, or seeing after his flocks on the purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, and we can hear particulars from the lips of those now living, details of coarseness—of the uncouthness of the rustic mingled with the sharpness of the tradesman—of irregularity and fierce lawlessness—come out, that rather mar the vision of pastoral innocence and simplicity. Still, as it is the exceptional and exaggerated characteristics of any period that leave the most vivid memory behind them, it would be wrong, and in my opinion faithless, to conclude that such and such forms of society and modes of living were not best for the period when they prevailed, although the abuses they may have led into, and the gradual progress of the world, have made it well that such ways and manners should pass away for ever, and as preposterous to attempt to return to them, as it would be for a man to return to the clothes of his childhood.
The patent granted to Alderman Cockayne, and the further restrictions imposed by James I. on the export of undyed woollen cloths (met by a prohibition on the part of the States of Holland of the import of English-dyed cloths), injured the trade of the West Riding manufacturers considerably. Their independence of character, their dislike of authority, and their strong powers of thought, predisposed them to rebellion against the religious dictations of such men as Laud,1 and the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts; and the injury done by James and Charles to the trade by which they gained their bread, made the great majority of them Commonwealth men.2 I shall have occasion afterwards to give one or two instances of the warm feelings and extensive knowledge on subjects of both home and foreign politics existing at the present day in the villages lying west and east of the mountainous ridge that separates Yorkshire and Lancashire; the inhabitants of which are of the same race and possess the same quality of character.
The descendants of many who served under Cromwell at Dun-bar, live on the same lands as their ancestors occupied then; and perhaps there is no part of England where the traditional and fond recollections of the Commonwealth have lingered so long as in that inhabited by the woollen manufacturing population of the West Riding, who had the restrictions taken off their trade by the Protector’s admirable commercial policy. I have it on good authority that, not thirty years ago, the phrase, “in Oliver’s days,” was in common use to denote a time of unusual prosperity. The class of Christian names prevalent in a district is one indication of the direction in which its tide of hero-worship sets. Grave enthusiasts in politics or religion perceive not the ludicrous side of those which they give to their children; and some are to be found, still in their infancy, not a dozen miles from Haworth, that will have to go through life as Lamartine, Kossuth, and Dembinsky.c And so there is a testimony to what I have said, of the traditional feeling of the district, in the fact that the Old Testament names in general use among the Puritans are yet the prevalent appellations in most Yorkshire families of middle or humble rank, whatever their religious persuasion may be. There are numerous records, too, that show the kindly way in which the ejected ministers were received by the gentry, as well as by the poorer part of the inhabitants, during the persecuting days of Charles II.3 These little facts all testify to the old hereditary spirit of independence, ready ever to resist authority which was conceived to be unjustly exercised, that distinguishes the people of the West Riding to the present day.
The parish of Halifax touches that of Bradford, in which the chapelry of Haworth is included; and the nature of the ground in the two parishes is much of the same wild and hilly description. The abundance of coal, and the number of mountain streams in the district, make it highly favourable to manufactures; and accordingly, as I stated, the inhabitants have for centuries been engaged in making cloth, as well as in agricultural pursuits. But the intercourse of trade failed, for a long time, to bring amenity and civilization into these outlying hamlets, or widely scattered dwellings. Mr. Hunter, in his “Life of Oliver Heywood,”4 quotes a sentence out of a memorial of one James Rither, living in the reign of Elizabeth, which is partially true to this day—
“They have no superior to court, no civilities to practise: a sour and sturdy humour is the consequence, so that a stranger is shocked by a tone of defiance in every voice, and an air of fierceness in every countenance.”
Even now, a stranger can hardly ask a question without receiving some crusty reply, if, indeed, he receive any at all. Sometimes the sour rudeness amounts to positive insult. Yet, if the “foreigner” takes all this churlishness good-humouredly, or as a matter of course, and makes good any claim upon their latent kindliness and hospitality, they are faithful and generous, and thoroughly to be relied upon. As a slight illustration of the roughness that pervades all classes in these out-of-the-way villages, I may relate a little adventure which happened to my husband and myself, three years ago, at Addingham—From Penigent to Pendle Hill,
From Linton to Long-Addingham,
And all that Craven coasts did tell, &c.
one of the places that sent forth its fighting men to the famous old battle of Flodden Field, and a village not many miles from Haworth.
We were driving along the street, when one of those ne’er-do-well lads who seem to have a kind of magnetic power for misfortunes, having jumped into the stream that runs through the place, just where all the broken glass and bottles are thrown, staggered naked and nearly covered with blood into a cottage before us. Besides receiving another bad cut in the arm he had completely laid open the artery, and was in a fair way of bleeding to death—which, one of his relations comforted him by saying, would be likely to “save a deal o’ trouble.”
When my husband had checked the effusion of blood with a strap that one of the bystanders unbuckled from his leg, he asked if a surgeon had been sent for.
“Yoi,” was the answer; “but we dunna think he’ll come.”
“Why not?”
“He’s owd, yo seen, and asthmatic, and it’s up-hill.”
My husband, taking a boy for his guide, drove as fast as he could to the surgeon’s house, which was about three-quarters of a mile off, and met the aunt of the wounded lad leaving it.
“Is he coming?” inquired my husband.
“Well, he didna’ say he wouldna’ come.”
“But tell him the lad may bleed to death.”
“I did.”
“And what did he say?”
“Why, only, ‘D———n him; what do I care.’ ”
It ended, however, in his sending one of his sons, who, though not brought up to “the surgering trade,” was able to do what was necessary in the way of bandages and plaisters. The excuse made for the surgeon was, that “he was near eighty, and getting a bit doited, and had had a matter o’ twenty childer.”
Among the most unmoved of the lookers-on was the brother of the boy so badly hurt; and while he was lying in a pool of blood on the flag floor, and crying out how much his arm was “warching,” his stoical relation stood coolly smoking his bit of black pipe, and uttered not a single word of either sympathy or sorrow.
Forest customs, existing in the fringes of dark wood, which clothed the declivity of the hills on either side, tended to brutalize the population until the middle of the seventeenth century. Execution by beheading was performed in a summary way upon either men or women who were guilty of but very slight crimes; and a dogged, yet in some cases fine, indifference to human life was thus generated. The roads were so notoriously bad, even up to the last thirty years, that there was little communication between one village and another; if the produce of industry could be conveyed at stated times to the cloth market of the district, it was all that could be done; and, in lonely houses on the distant hill-side, or by the small magnates of secluded hamlets, crimes might be committed almost unknown, certainly without any great uprising of popular indignation calculated to bring down the strong arm of the law. It must be remembered that in those days there was no rural constabulary; and the few magistrates left to themselves, and generally related to one another, were most of them inclined to tolerate eccentricity, and to wink at faults too much like their own.
Men hardly past middle life talk of the days of their youth, spent in this part of the country, when, during the winter months, they rode up to the saddle-girths in mud; when absolute business was the only reason for stirring beyond the precincts of home; and when that business was conducted under a pressure of difficulties which they themselves, borne along to Bradford market in a swift first-class carriage, can hardly believe to have been possible. For instance, one woollen manufacturer says that, not five-and-twenty years ago, he had to rise betimes to set off on a winter’s morning in order to be at Bradford with the great waggon-load of goods manufactured by his father: this load was packed over-night, but in the morning there was great gathering around it, and flashing of lanterns, and examination of horses’ feet, before the ponderous waggon got under weigh; and then some one had to go groping here and there, on hands and knees, and always sounding with a staff down the long, steep, slippery brow, to find where the horses might tread safely, until they reached the comparative easy going of the deep rutted main road. People went on horseback over the upland moors, following the tracks of the packhorses that carried the parcels, baggage, or goods from one town to another, between which there did not happen to be a highway.
But in the winter, all such communication was impossible, by reason of the snow which lay long and late on the bleak high ground. I have known people who, travelling by the mail-coach over Black-stone Edge, had been snowed up for a week or ten days at the little inn near the summit, and obliged to spend both Christmas and New Year’s Day there, till the store of provisions laid in for the use of the landlord and his family falling short before the inroads of the unexpected visitors, they had recourse to the turkeys, geese, and Yorkshire pies with which the coach was laden; and even these were beginning to fail, when a fortunate thaw released them from their prison.
Isolated as the hill villages may be, they are in the world, compared with the loneliness of the grey ancestral houses to be seen here and there in the dense hollows of the moors. These dwellings are not large, yet they are solid and roomy enough for the accommodation of those who live in them and to whom the surrounding estates belong. The land has often been held by one family since the days of the Tudors; the owners are, in fact, the remains of the old yeomanry—small squires, who are rapidly becoming extinct as a class, from one of two causes. Either the possessor falls into idle, drinking habits, and so is obliged eventually to sell his property: or he finds, if more shrewd and adventurous, that the “beck” running down the mountain side, or the minerals beneath his feet, can be turned into a new source of wealth: and leaving the old plodding life of a landowner with small capital, he turns manufacturer, or digs for coal, or quarries for stone.
Still there are those remaining of this class—dwellers in the lonely houses far away in the upland districts—even at the present day, who sufficiently indicate what strange eccentricity—what wild strength of will—nay, even what unnatural power of crime was fostered by a mode of living in which a man seldom met his fellows, and where public opinion was only a distant and inarticulate echo of some clearer voice sounding behind the sweeping horizon.
A solitary life cherishes mere fancies until they become manias. And the powerful Yorkshire character which was scarcely tamed into subjection by all the contact it met with in “busy town or crowded mart,” has before now broken out into strange wilfulness in the remoter districts. A singular account was recently given me of a landowner (living it is true, on the Lancashire side of the hills, but of the same blood and nature as the dwellers on the other) who was supposed to be in the receipt of seven or eight hundred a year, and whose house bore marks of handsome antiquity, as if his forefathers had been for a long time people of consideration. My informant was struck with the appearance of the place, and proposed to the countryman who was accompanying him, to go up to it and take a nearer inspection. The reply was, “Yo’d better not; he’d threap yo down th’ loan. He’s let fly at some folks’ legs, and let shot lodge in ’em afore now, for going too near to his house.” And finding, on closer inquiry, that such was really the inhospitable custom of this moorland squire, the gentleman gave up his purpose. I believe that the savage yeoman is still living.
Another squire, of more distinguished family and larger property—one is thence led to imagine of better education, but that does not always follow—died at his house, not many miles from Haworth, only a few years ago. His great amusement and occupation had been cock-fighting. When he was confined to his chamber with what he knew would be his last illness, he had his cocks brought up there, and watched the bloody battle from his bed. As his mortal disease increased, and it became impossible for him to turn so as to follow the combat, he had looking-glasses arranged in such a manner around and above him, as he lay, that he could still see the cocks fighting. And in this manner he died.
These are merely instances of eccentricity compared to the tales of positive violence and crime that have occurred in these isolated dwellings, which still linger in the memories of the old people of the district, and some of which were doubtless familiar to the authors of “Wuthering Heights” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
The amusements of the lower classes could hardly be expected to be more humane than those of the wealthy and better educated. The gentleman who has kindly furnished me with some of the particulars I have given, remembers the bull-baitings at Rochdale, not thirty years ago. The bull was fastened by a chain or rope to a post in the river. To increase the amount of water, as well as to give their workpeople the opportunity of savage delight, the masters were accustomed to stop their mills on the day when the sport took place. The bull would sometimes wheel suddenly round, so that the rope by which he was fastened, swept those who had been careless enough to come within its range down into the water, and the good people of Rochdale had the excitement of seeing one or two of their neighbours drowned, as well as of witnessing the bull baited, and the dogs torn and tossed.
The people of Haworth were not less strong and full of character than their neighbours on either side of the hill. The village lies embedded in the moors, between the two counties, on the old road between Keighley and Colne. About the middle of the last century, it became famous in the religious world as the scene of the ministrations of the Rev. William Grimshaw,5 curate of Haworth for twenty years. Before this time, it is probable that the curates were of the same order as one Mr. Nicholls, a Yorkshire clergyman in the days immediately succeeding the Reformation, who was “much addicted to drinking and company-keeping,” and used to say to his companions, “You must not heed me but when I am got three feet above the earth,” that was, into the pulpit.
Mr. Grimshaw’s life was written by Newton, Cowper’s friend; 6 and from it may be gathered some curious particulars of the manner in which a rough population were swayed and governed by a man of deep convictions, and strong earnestness of purpose. It seems that he had not been in any way remarkable for religious zeal, though he had led a moral life, and been conscientious in fulfilling his parochial duties, until a certain Sunday in September, 1744, when the servant, rising at five, found her master already engaged in prayer; she stated that, after remaining in his chamber for some time, he went to engage in religious exercises in the house of a parishioner, then home again to pray; thence, still fasting, to the church, where, as he was reading the second lesson, he fell down, and, on his partial recovery, had to be led from the church. As he went out, he spoke to the congregation, and told them not to disperse, as he had something to say to them, and would return presently. He was taken to the clerk’s house, and again became insensible. His servant rubbed him, to restore the circulation; and when he was brought to himself “he seemed in a great rapture,” and the first words he uttered were “I have had a glorious vision from the third heaven.” He did not say what he had seen, but returned into the church, and began the service again, at two in the afternoon, and went on until seven.
From this time he devoted himself, with the fervour of a Wesley, and something of the fanaticism of a Whitefield,7 to calling out a religious life among his parishioners. They had been in the habit of playing at foot-ball on Sunday, using stones for this purpose; and giving and receiving challenges from other parishes. There were horse-races held on the moors just above the village, which were periodical sources of drunkenness and profligacy. Scarcely a wedding took place without the rough amusement of footraces, where the half naked runners were a scandal to all decent strangers. The old custom of “arvills,” or funeral feasts, led to frequent pitched battles between the drunken mourners. Such customs were the outward signs of the kind of people with whom Mr. Grimshaw had to deal. But, by various means, some of the most practical kind, he wrought a great change in his parish. In his preaching he was occasionally assisted by Wesley and Whitefield, and at such times the little church proved much too small to hold the throng that poured in from distant villages, or lonely moorland hamlets; and frequently they were obliged to meet in the open air; indeed, there was not room enough in the church even for the communicants. Mr. Whitefield was once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that he hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they had sat under so pious and godly a minister for so many years; “whereupon Mr. Grimshaw stood up in his place, and said with a loud voice, ‘Oh, sir! for God’s sake do not speak so. I pray you do not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with their eyes open.’ ” But if they were so bound, it was not for want of exertion on Mr. Grimshaw’s part to prevent them. He used to preach twenty or thirty times a week in private houses. If he perceived any one inattentive to his prayers, he would stop and rebuke the offender, and not go on till he saw every one on their knees. He was very earnest in enforcing the strict observance of Sunday; and would not even allow his parishioners to walk in the fields between services. He sometimes gave out a very long Psalm (tradition says the 119th), and while it was being sung, he left the reading-desk, and taking a horsewhip went into the public-houses, and flogged the loiterers into church. They were swift who could escape the lash of the parson by sneaking out the back way. He had strong health and an active body, and rode far and wide over the hills, “awakening” those who had previously had no sense of religion. To save time, and be no charge to the families at whose houses he held his prayer-meetings, he carried his provisions with him; all the food he took in the day on such occasions consisting simply of a piece of bread and butter, or dry bread and a raw onion.
The horse-races were justly objectionable to Mr. Grimshaw; they attracted numbers of profligate people to Haworth, and brought a match to the combustible materials of the place, only too ready to blaze out into wickedness. The story is, that he tried all means of persuasion, and even intimidation, to have the races discontinued, but in vain. At length, in despair, he prayed with such fervor of earnestness that the rain came down in torrents, and deluged the ground, so that there was no footing for man or beast, even if the multitude had been willing to stand such a flood let down from above. And so Haworth races were stopped, and have never been resumed to this day. Even now the memory of this good man is held in reverence, and his faithful ministrations and real virtues are one of the boasts of the parish.
But after his time, I fear there was a falling back into the wild rough heathen ways, from which he had pulled them up, as it were, by the passionate force of his individual character. He had built a chapel for the Wesleyan Methodists, and not very long after the Baptists established themselves in a place of worship. Indeed, as Dr. Whitaker says, the people of this district are “strong religionists;” only, fifty years ago, their religion did not work down into their lives. Half that length of time back, the code of morals seemed to be formed upon that of their Norse ancestors. Revenge was handed down from father to son as an hereditary duty; and a great capability for drinking, without the head being affected, was considered as one of the manly virtues. The games of foot-ball on Sundays, with the challenges to the neighbouring parishes, were resumed, bringing in an influx of riotous strangers to fill the public-houses, and make the more sober-minded inhabitants long for good Mr. Grimshaw’s stout arm, and ready horsewhip. The old custom of “arvills” was as prevalent as ever. The sexton, standing at the foot of the open grave, announced that the “arvill” would be held at the Black Bull, or whatever public-house might be fixed upon by the friends of the dead; and thither the mourners and their acquaintances repaired. The origin of the custom had been the necessity of furnishing some refreshment for those who came from a distance, to pay the last mark of respect to a friend. In the life of Oliver Heywood there are two quotations, which show what sort of food was provided for “arvills” in quiet Nonconformist connections in the seventeenth century; the first (from Thoresby) tells of “cold possets, stewed prunes, cake, and cheese,” as being the arvill after Oliver Heywood’s funeral. The second gives, as rather shabby, according to the notion of the times (1673), “nothing but a bit of cake, draught of wine, piece of rosemary, and pair of gloves.”
But the arvills at Haworth were often far more jovial doings. Among the poor, the mourners were only expected to provide a kind of spiced roll for each person; and the expense of the liquors—rum, or ale, or a mixture of both called “dog’s nose”—was generally defrayed by each guest placing some money on a plate, set in the middle of the table. Richer people would order dinner for their friends. At the funeral of Mr. Charnock (the next successor but one to Mr. Grimshaw in the incumbency), above eighty people were bid to the arvill, and the price of the feast was 4s. 6d. per head, all of which was defrayed by the friends of the deceased. As few “shirked their liquor,” there were very frequently “up-and-down-fights” before the close of the day; sometimes with the horrid additions of “pawsing” and “gouging,” and biting.
Although I have dwelt on the exceptional traits in the characteristics of these stalwart West-Ridingers, such as they were in the first quarter of this century, if not a few years later, I have little doubt that in the every-day life of the people so independent, wilful, and full of grim humour, there would be much found even at present that would shock those accustomed only to the local manners of the south; and, in return, I suspect the shrewd, sagacious, energetic Yorkshire man would hold such “foreigners” in no small contempt.
I have said it is most probable that where Haworth Church now stands, there was once an ancient “field-kirk,” or oratory. It occupied the third or lowest class of ecclesiastical structures, according to the Saxon law, and had no right of sepulture, or administration of sacraments. It was so called because it was built without enclosure, and open to the adjoining fields or moors. The founder, according to the laws of Edgar, was bound, without subtracting from his tithes, to maintain the ministering priest out of the remaining nine parts of his income. After the Reformation, the right of choosing their clergyman, at any of those chapels of ease, which had formerly been fieldkirks, was vested in the freeholders and trustees subject to the approval of the vicar of the parish. But owing to some negligence, this right has been lost to the freeholders and trustees at Haworth, ever since the days of Archbishop Sharp; and the power of choosing a minister has lapsed into the hands of the Vicar of Bradford. So runs the account, according to one authority. Mr. Brontë says,—“This living has for its patrons the Vicar of Bradford and certain trustees. My predecessor took the living with the consent of the Vicar of Bradford, but in opposition to the trustees; in consequence of which he was so opposed that, after only three weeks’ possession, he was compelled to resign.”
In conversing on the character of the inhabitants of the West Riding with Dr. Scoresby,8 who had been for some time Vicar of Bradford, he alluded to certain riotous transactions which had taken place at Haworth on the presentation of the living to Mr. Redhead, Mr. Brontë’s predecessor; and said that there had been so much in the particulars indicative of the character of the people, that he advised me to inquire into them. I have accordingly done so, and, from the lips of some of the survivors among the actors and spectators, I have learnt the means taken to eject the nominee of the Vicar.
The previous incumbent, next but one in succession to Mr. Grimshaw, had been a Mr. Charnock. He had a long illness which rendered him unable to discharge his duties without assistance, and Mr. Redhead came to help him. As long as Mr. Charnock lived, his curate gave the people much satisfaction, and was highly regarded by them. But the case was entirely altered when, at Mr. Charnock’s death in 1819 they conceived that the trustees had been unjustly deprived of their rights by the Vicar of Bradford, who appointed Mr. Redhead as perpetual curate.
The first Sunday he officiated, Haworth church was filled even to the aisles; most of the people wearing the wooden clogs of the district. But while Mr. Redhead was reading the second lesson, the whole congregation, as by one impulse, began to leave the church, making all the noise they could with clattering and clumping of clogs, till, at length, Mr. Redhead and the clerk were the only two left to continue the service. This was bad enough, but the next Sunday the proceedings were far worse. Then, as before, the church was well filled, but the aisles were left clear; not a creature, not an obstacle was in the way. The reasons for this was made evident about the same time in the reading of the service as the disturbances had begun the previous week. A man rode into the church upon an ass, with his face turned towards the tail, and as many old hats piled on his head, as he could possibly carry. He began urging his beast round the aisles, and the screams and cries, and laughter of the congregation entirely drowned all sound of Mr. Redhead’s voice; and, I believe, he was obliged to desist.
Hitherto they had not proceeded to anything like personal violence; but on the third Sunday they must have been greatly irritated at seeing Mr. Redhead, determined to brave their will, ride up the village street, accompanied by several gentlemen from Bradford. They put up their horses at the Black Bull—the little inn close upon the churchyard, for the convenience of arvills as well as for other purposes—and went into church. On this the people followed, with a chimney-sweeper, whom they had employed to clean the chimneys of some outbuildings belonging to the church that very morning, and afterwards plied with drink till he was in a state of solemn intoxication. They placed him right before the reading-desk, where his blackened face nodded a drunken, stupid assent to all that Mr. Redhead said. At last, either prompted by some mischief-maker, or from some tipsy impulse, he clambered up the pulpit stairs, and attempted to embrace Mr. Redhead. Then the profane fun grew fast and furious. They pushed the soot-covered chimney-sweeper against Mr. Redhead, as he tried to escape. They threw both him and his tormentor down on the ground in the churchyard where the soot bag had been emptied, and, though, at last, Mr. Redhead escaped into the Black Bull, the doors of which were immediately barred, the people raged without, threatening to stone him and his friends. One of my informants is an old man, who was the landlord of the Black Bull at the time, and he stands to it that such was the temper of the irritated mob, that Mr. Redhead was in real danger of his life. This man, however, planned an escape for his unpopular inmates. The Black Bull is near the top of the long, steep Haworth street, and at the bottom, close by the bridge, on the road to Keighley, is a turnpike. Giving directions to his hunted guests to steal out at the back door (through which, probably, many a ne’er-do-weel has escaped from good Mr. Grimshaw’s horsewhip), the landlord and some of the stable boys rode the horses belonging to the party from Bradford backwards and forwards before his front door, among the fiercely-expectant crowd. Through some opening between the houses, those on the horses saw Mr. Redhead and his friends creeping along behind the street; and then, striking spurs, they dashed quickly down to the turnpike; the obnoxious clergyman and his friends mounted in haste, and had sped some distance before the people found out that their prey had escaped, and came running to the closed turnpike gate.
This was Mr. Redhead’s last appearance at Haworth for many years. Long afterwards, he came to preach and in his sermon to a large and attentive congregation, he good-humouredly reminded them of the circumstances which I have described.9 They gave him a hearty welcome, for they owed him no grudge; although before they had been ready enough to stone him, in order to maintain what they considered to be their rights.
Into the midst of this lawless, yet not unkindly population, Mr. Brontë brought his wife and six little children, in February, 1820. There are those yet alive who remember seven heavily laden carts lumbering slowly up the long stone street, bearing the “new parson’s” household goods to his future abode.
One wonders how the bleak aspect of her new home—the low, oblong, stone parsonage, high up, yet with a still higher back-ground of sweeping moors—struck on the gentle, delicate wife, whose health even then was failing.
CHAPTER III.
The Rev. Patrick Brontë is a native of the County Down in Ireland. 1 His father, Hugh Brontë, was left an orphan at an early age. He came from the south to the north of the island, and settled in the parish of Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. There was some family tradition that, humble as Hugh Brontë’s circumstances were, he was the descendant of an ancient family. But about this neither he nor his descendants have cared to inquire. He made an early marriage, and reared and educated ten children on the proceeds of the few acres of land which he farmed. This large family were remarkable for great physical strength, and much personal beauty. Even in his old age, Mr. Brontë is a striking looking man, above the common height, with a nobly shaped head, and erect carriage. In his youth he must have been unusually handsome.
He was born on Patrickmas day (March 17), 1777, and early gave tokens of extraordinary quickness and intelligence. He had also his full share of ambition; and of his strong sense and forethought there is a proof in the fact, that, knowing that his father could afford him no pecuniary aid, and that he must depend upon his own exertions, he opened a public school at the early age of sixteen; and this mode of living he continued to follow for five or six years. He then became a tutor in the family of the Rev. Mr. Tighe, rector of Drumgooland parish. Thence he proceeded to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he was entered in July, 1802, being at the time five-and-twenty years of age. After nearly four years’ residence, he obtained his B. A. degree, and was ordained to a curacy in Essex, whence he removed into Yorkshire. The course of life of which this is the outline, shows a powerful and remarkable character, originating and pursuing a purpose in a resolute and independent manner. Here is a youth—a boy of sixteen—separating himself from his family, and determining to maintain himself; and that, not in the hereditary manner by agricultural pursuits, but by the labour of his brain.
I suppose, from what I have heard, that Mr. Tighe became strongly interested in his children’s tutor, and may have aided him, not only in the direction of his studies, but in the suggestion of an English university education, and in advice as to the mode in which he should obtain entrance there. Mr. Brontë has now no trace of his Irish origin remaining in his speech; he never could have shown his Celtic descent in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his face; but at five-and-twenty, fresh from the only life he had ever known, to present himself at the gates of St. John’s proved no little determination of will, and scorn of ridicule.
While at Cambridge, he became one of a corps of volunteers, who were then being called out all over the country to resist the apprehended invasion by the French. I have heard him allude, in late years, to Lord Palmerston as one who had often been associated with him then in the mimic military duties which they had to perform.2
We take him up now settled as a curate at Hartshead, in Yorkshire—far removed from his birth-place and all his Irish connections; with whom, indeed, he cared little to keep up any intercourse, and whom he never, I believe, re-visited after becoming a student at Cambridge.
Hartshead is a very small village, lying to the east of Huddersfield and Halifax; and, from its high situation—on a mound, as it were, surrounded by a circular basin—commanding a magnificent view. Mr. Brontë resided here for five years; and, while the incumbent of Hartshead, he wooed and married Maria Branwell.
She was the third daughter of Mr. Thomas Branwell, merchant, of Penzance. Her mother’s maiden name was Carne: and, both on father’s and mother’s side, the Branwell family were sufficiently well descended to enable them to mix in the best society that Penzance then afforded. Mr. and Mrs. Branwell would be living—their family of four daughters and one son, still children—during the existence of that primitive state of society which is well described by Dr. Davy in the life of his brother.
“In the same town, when the population was about 2,000 persons, there was only one carpet, the floors of rooms were sprinkled with sea-sand, and there was not a single silver fork.
“At that time, when our colonial possessions were very limited, our army and navy on a small scale, and there was comparatively little demand for intellect, the younger sons of gentlemen were often of necessity brought up to some trade or mechanical art, to which no discredit, or loss of caste, as it were, was attached. The eldest son, if not allowed to remain an idle country squire, was sent to Oxford or Cambridge, preparatory to his engaging in one of the three liberal professions of divinity, law, or physic; the second son was perhaps apprenticed to a surgeon or apothecary, or a solicitor; the third to a pewterer or watchmaker; the fourth to a packer or mercer, and so on, were there more to be provided for.
“After their apprenticeships were finished, the young men almost invariably went to London to perfect themselves in their respective trade or art: and on their return into the country, when settled in business, they were not excluded from what would now be considered genteel society. Visiting then was conducted differently from what it is at present. Dinner-parties were almost unknown, excepting at the annual feast-time. Christmas, too, was then a season of peculiar indulgence and conviviality, and a round of entertainments was given, consisting of tea and supper. Excepting at these two periods, visiting was almost entirely confined to tea-parties, which assembled at three o’clock, broke up at nine, and the amusement of the evening was commonly some round game at cards, as Pope Joan, or Commerce. The lower class was then extremely ignorant, and all classes were very superstitious; even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous. There was scarcely a parish in the Mount’s Bay that was without a haunted house, or a spot to which some story of supernatural horror was not attached. Even when I was a boy, I remember a house in the best street of Penzance which was uninhabited because it was believed to be haunted, and which young people walked by at night at a quickened pace, and with a beating heart. Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, and still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in. Smuggling was carried on to a great extent; and drunkenness, and a low state of morals, were naturally associated with it. Whilst smuggling was the means of acquiring wealth to bold and reckless adventurers, drunkenness and dissipation occasioned the ruin of many respectable families.”
I have given this extract because I conceive it bears some reference to the life of Miss Brontë, whose strong mind and vivid imagination must have received their first impressions either from the servants (in that simple household, almost friendly companions during the greater part of the day) retailing the traditions or the news of Haworth village; or from Mr. Brontë, whose intercourse with his children appears to have been considerably restrained, and whose life, both in Ireland and at Cambridge, had been spent under peculiar circumstances; or from her aunt, Miss Branwell, who came to the parsonage, when Charlotte was only six or seven years old, to take charge of her dead sister’s family. This aunt was older than Mrs. Brontë, and had lived longer among the Penzance society, which Dr. Davy describes. But in the Branwell family itself, the violence and irregularity of nature did not exist. They were Methodists, and, as far as I can gather, a gentle and sincere piety gave refinement and purity of character. Mr. Branwell, the father, according to his descendants’ account, was a man of musical talent. He and his wife lived to see all their children grown-up, and died within a year of each other—he in 1808, she in 1809, when their daughter Maria was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age. I have been permitted to look over a series of nine letters, which were addressed by her to Mr. Brontë, during the brief term of their engagement in 1812. They are full of tender grace of expression, and feminine modesty; pervaded by the deep piety to which I have alluded as a family characteristic. I shall make one or two extracts from them, to show what sort of a person was the mother of Charlotte Brontë: but first, I must state the circumstances under which this Cornish lady met the scholar from Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. In the early summer of 1812, when she would be twenty-nine, she came to visit her uncle, the Reverend John Fennel, who was at that time a clergyman of the Church of England, living near Leeds, but who had previously been a Methodist minister. Mr. Brontë was the incumbent of Hartshead; and had the reputation in the neighbourhood of being a very handsome fellow, full of Irish enthusiasm, and with something of an Irishman’s capability of falling easily in love. Miss Branwell was extremely small in person; not pretty, but very elegant, and always dressed with a quiet simplicity of taste, which accorded well with her general character, and of which some of the details call to mind the style of dress preferred by her daughter for her favourite heroines. Mr. Brontë was soon captivated by the little, gentle creature, and this time declared that it was for life. In her first letter to him, dated August 26th, she seems almost surprised to find herself engaged, and alludes to the short time which she has known him. In the rest there are touches reminding one of Juliet’s—“But trust me, gentlemen, I’ll prove more true Than those that have more cunning to be strange.”
There are plans for happy pic-nic parties to Kirkstall Abbey, in the glowing September days, when “Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin Jane,”—the last engaged to a Mr. Morgan, another clergyman—were of the party; all since dead, except Mr. Brontë. There was no opposition on the part of any of her friends to her engagement. Mr. and Mrs. Fennel sanctioned it, and her brother and sisters in far-away Penzance appear fully to have approved of it. In a letter dated September l8th, she says:—
“For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever; so far from it, that my sisters, who are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother, used to consult me on every occasion of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my opinions and actions: perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that I do not boast of it. I have many times felt it a disadvantage, and although, I thank God, it has never led me into error, yet, in circumstances of uncertainty and doubt, I have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor.” In the same letter she tells Mr. Brontë, that she has informed her sisters of her engagement, and that she should not see them again so soon as she had intended. Mr. Fennel, her uncle, also writes to them by the same post in praise of Mr. Brontë.
The journey from Penzance to Leeds in those days was both very long and very expensive; the lovers had not much money to spend in unnecessary travelling, and, as Miss Branwell had neither father nor mother living, it appeared both a discreet and seemly arrangement that the marriage should take place from her uncle’s house. There was no reason either why the engagement should be prolonged. They were past their first youth; they had means sufficient for their unambitious wants; the living of Hartshead is rated in the Clergy List at 2021. per annum, and she was in the receipt of a small annuity (501. I have been told) by the will of her father. So, at the end of September, the lovers began to talk about taking a house, for I suppose that Mr. Brontë up to that time had been in lodgings; and all went smoothly and successfully with a view to their marriage in the ensuing winter, until November, when a misfortune happened, which she thus patiently and prettily describes:—
“I suppose you never expected to be much the richer for me, but I am sorry to inform you that I am still poorer than I thought myself. I mentioned having sent for my books, clothes, &c. On Saturday evening, about the time when you were writing the description of your imaginary shipwreck, I was reading and feeling the effects of a real one, having then received a letter from my sister, giving me an account of the vessel in which she had sent my box being stranded on the coast of Devonshire, in consequence of which the box was dashed to pieces with the violence of the sea, and all my little property, with the exception of a very few articles, being swallowed up in the mighty deep. If this should not prove the prelude to something worse I shall think little of it, as it is the first disastrous circumstance which has occurred since I left my home.”
The last of these letters is dated December the 5th. Miss Branwell and her cousin intended to set about making the wedding-cake in the following week, so the marriage could not be far off. She had been learning by heart a “pretty little hymn” of Mr. Brontë’s composing;3 and reading Lord Lyttelton’s “Advice to a Lady,”4 on which she makes some pertinent and just remarks, showing that she thought as well as read. And so Maria Branwell fades out of sight; we have no more direct intercourse with her; we hear of her as Mrs. Brontë, but it is as an invalid, not far from death; still patient, cheerful and pious. The writing of these letters is elegant and neat; while there are allusions to household occupations—such as making the wedding-cake-there are also allusions to the books she has read, or is reading, showing a well-cultivated mind. Without having any thing of her daughter’s rare talents, Mrs. Brontë must have been, I imagine, that unusual character, a well-balanced and consistent woman. The style of the letters is easy and good; as is also that of a paper from the same hand, entitled “The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns,” which was written rather later, with a view to publication in some periodical.
She was married, from her uncle’s house, in Yorkshire on the 29th of December, 1812; the same day was also the wedding-day of her younger sister, Charlotte Branwell, in distant Penzance. I do not think that Mrs. Brontë ever revisited Cornwall, but she has left a very pleasant impression on the minds of those relations who yet survive; they speak of her as “their favourite aunt, and one to whom they, as well as all the family, looked up, as a person of talent and great amiability of disposition;” and, again, as “meek and retiring, while possessing more than ordinary talents, which she inherited from her father, and her piety was genuine and unobtrusive.”
Mr. Brontë remained for five years at Hartshead, in the parish of Dewsbury. There he was married, and his two children, Maria and Elizabeth, were born. At the expiration of that period, he had the living ofThornton, in Bradford parish. Some of those great West Riding parishes are almost like bishoprics for their amount of population and number of churches. Thornton church is a little episcopal chapel of ease, rich in Nonconformist monuments, as of Accepted Leister and his friend Dr. Hall. The neighbourhood is desolate and wild; great tracks of bleak land, enclosed by stone dykes, sweeping up Clayton heights. The church itself looks ancient and solitary, and as if left behind by the great stone mills of a flourishing Independent firm, and the solid square chapel built by the members of that denomination. Altogether not so pleasant a place as Hartshead, with its ample outlook over cloud-shadowed, sun-flecked plain, and hill rising beyond hill to form the distant horizon.
Here, at Thornton, Charlotte Brontë was born, on the 21st of April, 1816. Fast on her heels followed Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, and Anne. After the birth of this last daughter, Mrs. Brontë’s health began to decline. It is hard work to provide for the little tender wants of many young children where the means are but limited. The necessaries of food and clothing are much more easily supplied than the almost equal necessaries of attendance, care, soothing, amusement, and sympathy Maria Brontë, the eldest of six, could only have been a few months more than six years old, when Mr. Brontë removed to Haworth, on February 25th, 1820. Those who knew her then, describe her as grave, thoughtful, and quiet, to a degree far beyond her years. Her childhood was no childhood; the cases are rare in which the possessors of great gifts have known the blessings of that careless happy time; their unusual powers stir within them, and instead of the natural life of perception,—the objective, as the Germans call it—they begin the deeper life of reflection—the subjective.
Little Maria Brontë was delicate and small in appearance, which seemed to give greater effect to her wonderful precocity of intellect. She must have been her mother’s companion and helpmate in many a household and nursery experience, for Mr. Brontë was, of course, much engaged in his study; and besides, he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent appearance on the scene as a drag both on his wife’s strength, and as an interruption to the comfort of the household.
Haworth Parsonage is—as I mentioned in the first chapter—an oblong stone house, facing down the hill on which the village stands, and with the front door right opposite to the western door of the church, distant about a hundred yards. Of this space twenty yards or so in depth are occupied by the grassy garden, which is scarcely wider than the house. The grave-yard goes round house and garden, on all sides but one. The house consists of four rooms on each floor, and is two stories high. When the Brontës took possession, they made the larger parlour, to the left of the entrance, the family sitting-room, while that on the right was appropriated to Mr. Brontë as a study. Behind this was the kitchen; behind the former, a sort of flagged storeroom. Up-stairs were four bed-chambers of similar size, with the addition of a small apartment over the passage, or “lobby” as we call it in the north. This was to the front, the staircase going up right opposite to the entrance. There is the pleasant old fashion of window seats all through the house; and one can see that the parsonage was built in the days when wood was plentiful, as the massive stair-bannisters, and the wainscots, and the heavy window frames testify.
This little extra up-stairs room was appropriated to the children. Small as it was, it was not called a nursery; indeed, it had not the comfort of a fireplace in it; the servants—two rough affectionate warm-hearted, wasteful sisters, who cannot now speak of the family without tears—called the room the “children’s study.” The age of the eldest student was perhaps by this time seven.
The people in Haworth were none of them very poor. Many of them were employed in the neighbouring worsted mills; a few were mill-owners and manufacturers in a small way; there were also some shopkeepers for the humbler and every-day wants; but for medical advice, for stationery, books, law, dress, or dainties, the inhabitants had to go to Keighley. There were several Sunday-schools; the Baptists had taken the lead in instituting them, the Wesleyans had followed, the Church of England had brought up the rear. Good Mr. Grimshaw, Wesley’s friend, had built an humble Methodist chapel, but it stood close to the road leading on to the moor; the Baptists then raised a place of worship, with the distinction of being a few yards back from the highway ; and the Methodists have since thought it well to erect another and a larger chapel, still more retired from the road. Mr. Brontë was ever on kind and friendly terms with each denomination as a body; but from individuals in the village the family stood aloof, unless some direct service was required, from the first. “They kept themselves very close,” is the account given by those who remember Mr. and Mrs. Brontë’s coming amongst them. I believe many of the Yorkshiremen would object to the system of parochial visiting; their surly independence would revolt from the idea of any one having a right, from his office, to inquire, to counsel, or to admonish them. The old hill-spirit lingers in them, which coined the rhyme, inscribed on the under part of one of the seats in the Sedilia of Whalley Abbey, not many miles from Haworth,“Who mells wi’ what another does Had best go home and shoe his goose.”
I asked an inhabitant of a district close to Haworth, what sort of a clergyman they had at the church which he attended.
“A rare good one,” said he; “he minds his own business, and ne’er troubles himself with ours.”
Mr. Brontë was faithful in visiting the sick, and all those who sent for him, and diligent in attendance at the schools; and so was his daughter Charlotte too; but, cherishing and valuing privacy themselves, they were perhaps over-delicate in not intruding upon the privacy of others.
From their first going to Haworth, their walks were directed rather out towards the heathery moors, sloping upwards behind the parsonage, than towards the long descending village street. A good old woman, who came to nurse Mrs. Brontë in the illness—an internal cancer—which grew and gathered upon her, not many months after her arrival at Haworth, tells me that at that time the six little creatures used to walk out, hand in hand, towards the glorious wild moors, which in after days they loved so passionately; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things.
They were grave and silent beyond their years; subdued, probably, by the presence of serious illness in the house; for, at the time which my informant speaks of, Mrs. Brontë was confined to the bedroom from which she never came forth alive. “You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. Maria would shut herself up” (Maria, but seven!) “in the children’s study with a newspaper, and be able to tell one every thing when she came out; debates in parliament, and I don’t know what all. She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. But there never were such good children. I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen. In part, I set it down to a fancy Mr. Brontë had of not letting them have flesh-meat to eat. It was from no wish for saving, for there was plenty and even waste in the house, with young servants and no mistress to see after them; but he thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily: so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner;5 but they never seemed to wish for anything else; they were good little creatures. Emily was the prettiest.”
Mrs. Brontë was the same patient, cheerful person as we have seen her formerly; very ill, suffering great pain, but seldom if ever complaining; at her better times begging her nurse to raise her in bed to let her see her clean the grate, “because she did it as it was done in Cornwall;” devotedly fond of her husband, who warmly repaid her affection, and suffered no one else to take the night-nursing; but, according to my informant, the mother was not very anxious to see much of her children, probably because the sight of them, knowing how soon they were to be left motherless, would have agitated her too much. So the little things clung quietly together, for their father was busy in his study and in his parish, or with their mother, and they took their meals alone; sat reading, or whispering low, in the “children’s study,” or wandered out on the hill-side, hand in hand.
The ideas of Rousseau and Mr. Day6 on education had filtered down through many classes, and spread themselves widely out. I imagine, Mr. Brontë must have formed some of his opinions on the management of children from these two theorists. His practice was not half so wild or extraordinary as that to which an aunt of mine was subjected by a disciple of Mr. Day’s. She had been taken by this gentleman and his wife, to live with them as their adopted child, perhaps about five-and-twenty years before the time of which I am writing. They were wealthy people and kind-hearted, but her food and clothing were of the very simplest and rudest description, on Spartan principles. A healthy merry child she did not much care for dress or eating; but the treatment which she felt as a real cruelty was this. They had a carriage, in which she and the favourite dog were taken an airing on alternate days; the creature whose turn it was to be left at home being tossed in a blanket—an operation which my aunt especially dreaded. Her affright at the tossing was probably the reason why it was persevered in. Dressed-up ghosts had become common, and she did not care for them, so the blanket exercise was to be the next mode of hardening her nerves. It is well known that Mr. Day broke off his intention of marrying Sabrina, the girl whom he had educated for this purpose, because, within a few weeks of the time fixed for the wedding, she was guilty of the frivolity, while on a visit from home, of wearing thin sleeves. Yet Mr. Day and my aunt’s relations were benevolent people, only strongly imbued with the crotchet that by a system of training might be educed the hardihood and simplicity of the ideal savage, forgetting the terrible isolation of feelings and habits which their pupils would experience, in the future life which they must pass among the corruptions and refinements of civilization.
Mr. Brontë wished to make his children hardy, and indifferent to the pleasures of eating and dress. In the latter he succeeded, as far as regarded his daughters; but he went at his object with unsparing earnestness of purpose. Mrs. Brontë’s nurse told me that one day when the children had been out on the moors, and rain had come on, she thought their feet would be wet, and accordingly she rummaged out some coloured boots which had been given to them by a friend—the Mr. Morgan who married “Cousin Jane,” she believes. These little pairs she ranged round the kitchen fire to warm; but, when the children came back, the boots were nowhere to be found; only a very strong odour of burnt leather was perceived. Mr. Brontë had come in and seen them; they were too gay and luxurious for his children, and would foster a love of dress; so he had put them into the fire. He spared nothing that offended his antique simplicity. Long before this, some one had given Mrs. Brontë a silk gown; either the make, the colour, or the material, was not according to his notions of consistent propriety, and Mrs. Brontë in consequence never wore it. But, for all that, she kept it treasured up in her drawers, which were generally locked. One day, however, while in the kitchen, she remembered that she had left the key in her drawer, and, hearing Mr. Brontë up-stairs, she augured some ill to her dress, and, running up in haste, she found it cut into shreds.
His strong, passionate, Irish nature was, in general, compressed down with resolute stoicism; but it was there notwithstanding all his philosophic calm and dignity of demeanour. He did not speak when he was annoyed or displeased, but worked off his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession. Mrs. Brontë, lying in bed up-stairs, would hear the quick explosions, and know that something had gone wrong; but her sweet nature thought invariably of the bright side, and she would say, “Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?” Now and then his anger took a different form, but still speechless. Once he got the hearth-rug, and stuffing it up the grate, deliberately set it on fire, and remained in the room in spite of the stench, until it had smouldered and shrivelled away into uselessness. Another time he took some chairs, and sawed away at the backs till they were reduced to the condition of stools.7
He was an active walker, stretching away over the moors for many miles, noting in his mind all natural signs of wind and weather, and keenly observing all the wild creatures that came and went in the loneliest sweeps of the hills. He has seen eagles stooping low in search of food for their young; no eagle is ever seen on those mountain slopes now. He fearlessly took whatever side in local or national politics appeared to him right. In the days of the Luddites,8 he had been for the peremptory interference of the law, at a time when no magistrate could be found to act, and all the property of the West Riding was in terrible danger. He became unpopular there among the mill-workers, and he esteemed his life unsafe if he took his long and lonely walks unarmed; so he began the habit, which has continued to this day, of invariably carrying a loaded pistol about with him. It lay on his dressing-table with his watch; with his watch it was put on in the morning; with his watch it was taken off at night. Many years later, during his residence at Haworth, there was a strike; the hands in the neighbourhood felt themselves aggrieved by the masters, and refused to work; Mr. Brontë thought they had been unjustly and unfairly treated, and he assisted them by all the means in his power to “keep the wolf from their doors,” and avoid the incubus of debt. Several of the more influential inhabitants of Haworth were mill-owners; they remonstrated pretty sharply with him, but he believed that his conduct was right, and persevered in it. His opinions might be often both wild and erroneous, his principles of action eccentric and strange, his views of life partial, and almost misanthropical; but not one opinion that he held could be stirred or modified by any worldly motive; he acted up to his principles of action; and, if any touch of misanthropy mingled with his view of mankind in general, his conduct to the individuals who came in personal contact with him did not agree with such view. It is true that he had strong and vehement prejudices, and was obstinate in maintaining them, and that he was not dramatic enough in his perceptions to see how miserable others might be in a life that to him was all-sufficient. But I do not pretend to be able to harmonize points of character, and account for them, and bring them all into one consistent and intelligible whole. The family with whom I have now to do shot their roots down deeper than I can penetrate. I cannot measure them, much less is it for me to judge them. I have named these instances of eccentricity in the father because I hold the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of the life of his daughter.
Mrs. Brontë died in September, 1821, and the lives of those quiet children must have become quieter and lonelier still. Charlotte tried hard, in after years, to recall the remembrance of her mother, and could bring back two or three pictures of her. One was when, sometime in the evening light, she had been playing with her little boy, Patrick Branwell, in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage. But the recollections of four or five years old are of a very fragmentary character.
Owing to some illness of the digestive organs, Mr. Brontë was obliged to be very careful about his diet; and, in order to avoid temptation, and possibly to have the quiet necessary for digestion, he had begun, before his wife’s death, to take his dinner alone,—a habit which he always retained. He did not require companionship, therefore he did not seek it, either in his walks, or in his daily life. The quiet regularity of his domestic hours was only broken in upon by churchwardens, and visitors on parochial business; and sometimes by a neighbouring clergyman, who came down the hills, across the moors, to mount up again to Haworth Parsonage, and spend an evening there. But, owing to Mrs. Brontë’s death so soon after her husband had removed into the district, and also to the distances, and the bleak country to be traversed, the wives of these clerical friends did not accompany their husbands; and the daughters grew up out of childhood into girlhood, bereft, in a singular manner, of all such society as would have been natural to their age, sex, and station. There was one family residing near Haworth who had been remarkably attentive and kind to Mrs. Brontë in her illness, and who had paid the children the attention of asking them occasionally to tea; and as the story connected with this family, and which, I suspect, dissolved their intercourse with their neighbours, made a deep impression on Charlotte’s mind in her early girlhood, I may as well relate it here. It will serve as a specimen of the wild stories afloat in an isolated village, for as to its truth in minor particulars, I will not vouch; no more did she, the principal event having occurred when she was too young to understand its full import, and the tale having been heard with the addition, probably, of the whispered exaggerations of the uneducated. The family were Dissenters, professing some rather rigid form of religion. The father was a woollen manufacturer and moderately wealthy; at any rate, their style of living appeared “grand” to the simple children who bounded their ideas by the frugal habits of the parsonage. These people had a green-house, the only one in the neighbourhood; a cumbrous building; with more wood and wall than glass, situated in a garden which was divided from the house by the high road to Haworth. They had a large family; and one of the elder daughters was married to a wealthy manufacturer “beyond Keighley;” she was near her confinement, when she begged that a favourite young sister might go and pay her a visit, and remain with her till her baby was born. The request was complied with; the young girl—fifteen or sixteen years of age—went. She came home, after some weeks spent in her brother-in-law’s house, ill and dispirited. Inquiries were made of her by her parents, and it was discovered that she had been seduced by her sister’s wealthy husband; and that the consequences of this wickedness would soon become apparent. Her angry and indignant father shut her up in her room, until he could decide how to act; her elder sisters flouted at and scorned her. Only her mother, and she was reported to be a stern woman, had some pity on her. The tale went, that passers along the high-road at night time saw the mother and young daughter walking in the garden, weeping, long after the household were gone to bed. Nay, more; it was whispered that they walked and wept there still, when Miss Brontë told me the tale—though both had long mouldered in their graves. The wild whisperers of this story added, that the cruel father, maddened perhaps by the disgrace which had fallen upon a “religious” family, offered a sum of money to any one who would marry his poor fallen daughter; that a husband was found, who bore her away from Haworth, and broke her heart, so that she died while even yet a child.
Such deep passionate resentment would have seemed not unnatural in a man who took a stern pride in his character for religious morality; but the degrading part, after all, was this. The remaining members of the family, elder sisters even, went on paying visits at their wealthy brother-in-law’s house, as if his sin was not a hundred-fold more scarlet than the poor young girl’s, whose evil-doing had been so hardly resented, and so coarsely hidden. The strong feeling of the country-side still holds the descendants of this family as accursed. They fail in business, or they fail in health.
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