“I am amused at the interest you take in politics. Don’t expect to rouse me; to me, all ministries and all oppositions seem to be pretty much alike. D‘Israeli was factious as leader of the Opposition; Lord John Russell is going to be factious, now that he has stepped into D’Israeli’s shoes. Lord Derby’s ‘Christian love and spirit,’ is worth three half-pence farthing.”
To W.S. Williams, Esq.
“March 25th, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—Mr. Smith intimated a short time since, that he had some thoughts of publishing a reprint of ‘Shirley.’ Having revised the work, I now enclose the errata. I have likewise sent off to-day, per rail, a return-box of Cornhill books.
“I have lately read with great pleasure, ‘The Two Families.’ This work, it seems, should have reached me in January; but owing to a mistake, it was detained at the Dead Letter Office, and lay there nearly two months. I liked the commencement very much; the close seemed to me scarcely equal to ‘Rose Douglas.’5 I thought the authoress committed a mistake in shifting the main interest from the two personages on whom it first rests—viz., Ben Wilson and Mary—to other characters of quite inferior conception. Had she made Ben and Mary her hero and heroine, and continued the development of their fortunes and characters in the same truthful natural vein in which she commences it, an excellent, even an original, book might have been the result. As for Lilias and Ronald, they are mere romantic figments, with nothing of the genuine Scottish peasant about them; they do not even speak the Caledonian dialect; they palaver like a fine lady and gentleman.
“I ought long since to have acknowledged the gratification with which I read Miss Kavanagh’s ‘Women of Christianity.’6 Her charity and (on the whole) her impartiality are very beautiful. She touches, indeed, with too gentle a hand the theme of Elizabeth of Hungary; and, in her own mind, she evidently misconstrues the fact of Protestant charities seeming to be fewer than Catholic. She forgets, or does not know, that Protestantism is a quieter creed than Romanism; as it does not clothe its priesthood in scarlet, so neither does it set up its good women for saints, canonize their names, and proclaim their good works. In the records of man, their almsgiving will not perhaps be found registered, but Heaven has its account as well as earth.
“With kind regards to yourself and family, who, I trust, have all safely weathered the rough winter lately past, as well as the east winds, which are still nipping our spring in Yorkshire,—I am, my dear Sir, yours sincerely,
“C. BRONTË.”
“April 3rd, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—The box arrived quite safely, and I very much thank you for the contents, which are most kindly selected.
“As you wished me to say what I thought of ‘The School for Fathers,’ I hastened to read it. The book seems to me clever, interesting, very amusing, and likely to please generally. There is a merit in the choice of ground, which is not yet too hackneyed; the comparative freshness of subject, character, and epoch give the tale a certain attractiveness. There is also, I think, a graphic rendering of situations, and a lively talent for describing whatever is visible and tangible—what the eye meets on the surface of things. The humour appears to me such as would answer well on the stage; most of the scenes seem to demand dramatic accessories to give them their full effect. But I think one cannot with justice bestow higher praise than this. To speak candidly, I felt, in reading the tale, a wondrous hollowness in the moral and sentiment; a strange dillettante shallowness in the purpose and feeling. After all, ‘Jack’ is not much better than a ‘Tony Lumpkin,’cf and there is no very great breadth of choice between the clown he is and the fop his father would have made him. The grossly material life of the old English fox-hunter, and the frivolous existence of the fine gentleman present extremes each in its way so repugnant, that one feels half inclined to smile when called upon to sentimentalize over the lot of a youth forced to pass from one to the other; torn from the stables, to be ushered perhaps into the ball-room. Jack dies mournfully indeed, and you are sorry for the poor fellow’s untimely end; but you cannot forget that, if he had not been thrust into the way of Colonel Penruddock’s weapon, he might possibly have broken his neck in a fox-hunt. The character of Sir Thomas Warren is excellent; consistent throughout. That of Mr. Addison not bad, but sketchy, a mere outline—wanting colour and finish. The man’s portrait is there, and his costume, and fragmentary anecdotes of his life; but where is the man’s nature—soul and self? I say nothing about the female characters—not one word; only that Lydia seems to me like a pretty little actress, prettily dressed, gracefully appearing and disappearing, and reappearing in a genteel comedy, assuming the proper sentiments of her part with all due tact and naivete, and—that is all.
“Your description of the model man of business is true enough, I doubt not; but we will not fear that society will ever be brought quite to this standard; human nature (bad as it is) has, after all, elements that forbid it. But the very tendency to such a consummation—the marked tendency, I fear, of the day—produces, no doubt, cruel suffering. Yet, when the evil of competition passes a certain limit, must it not in time work its own cure? I suppose it will, but then through some convulsed crisis, shattering all around it like an earthquake. Meantime, for how many is life made a struggle; enjoyment and rest curtailed; labour terribly enhanced beyond almost what nature can bear! I often think that this world would be the most terrible of enigmas, were it not for the firm belief that there is a world to come, where conscientious effort and patient pain will meet their reward.—Believe me, my dear Sir, sincerely yours,
“C. BRONTË.”
A letter to her old Brussels schoolfellow gives a short retrospect of the dreary winter she had passed through.
“Haworth, April 12th, 1852.
“.... I struggled through the winter, and the early part of the spring, often with great difficulty. My friend stayed with me a few days in the early part of January; she could not be spared longer. I was better during her visit, but had a relapse soon after she left me, which reduced my strength very much. It cannot be denied that the solitude of my position fearfully aggravated its other evils. Some long stormy days and nights there were, when I felt such a craving for support and companionship as I cannot express. Sleepless, I lay awake night after night, weak and unable to occupy myself I sat in my chair day after day, the saddest memories my only company. It was a time I shall never forget; but God sent it, and it must have been for the best.
“I am better now; and very grateful do I feel for the restoration of tolerable health; but, as if there was always to be some affliction, papa, who enjoyed wonderful health during the whole winter, is ailing with his spring attack of bronchitis. I earnestly trust it may pass over in the comparatively ameliorated form in which it has hitherto shown itself.
“Let me not forget to answer your question about the cataract. Tell your papa that my father was seventy at the time he underwent an operation; he was most reluctant to try the experiment; could not believe that, at his age, and with his want of robust strength, it would succeed. I was obliged to be very decided in the matter, and to act entirely on my own responsibility. Nearly six years have now elapsed since the cataract was extracted (it was not merely depressed); he has never once during that time regretted the step, and a day seldom passes that he does not express gratitude and pleasure at the restoration of that inestimable privilege of vision whose loss he once knew.”
I had given Miss Brontë, in one of my letters, an outline of the story on which I was then engaged,cg and in reply she says:—
“The sketch you give of your work (respecting which I am, of course, dumb) seems to me very noble; and its purpose may be as useful in practical result as it is high and just in theoretical tendency. Such a book may restore hope and energy to many who thought they had forfeited their right to both; and open a clear course for honourable effort to some who deemed that they and all honour had parted company in this world.
“Yet hear my protest!
“Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping?
“My heart fails me already at the thought of the pang it will have to undergo. And yet you must follow the impulse of your own inspiration. If that commands the slaying of the victim, no bystander has a right to put out his hand to stay the sacrificial knife: but I hold you a stern priestess in these matters.”
As the milder weather came on, her health improved, and her power of writing increased. She set herself with redoubled vigour to the work before her; and denied herself pleasure for the purpose of steady labour. Hence she writes to her friend:—
“May 11th.
“Dear E—,—I must adhere to my resolution of neither visiting nor being visited at present. Stay you quietly at B., till you go to S., as I shall stay at Haworth; as sincere a farewell can be taken with the heart as with the lips, and perhaps less painful. I am glad the weather is changed; the return of the southwest wind suits me; but I hope you have no cause to regret the departure of your favourite east wind. What you say about—ch does not surprise me; I have had many little notes (whereof I answer about one in three) breathing the same spirit,—self and child the sole all-absorbing topics, on which the changes are rung even to weariness. But I suppose one must not heed it, or think the case singular. Nor, I am afraid, must one expect her to improve. I read in a French book lately, a sentence to this effect, that ‘marriage might be defined as the state of two-fold selfishness.’ Let the single therefore take comfort. Thank you for Mary’s letter. She does seem most happy; and I cannot tell you how much more real, lasting, and better-warranted her happiness seems than ever—’s did. I think so much of it is in herself, and her own serene, pure, trusting, religious nature.—’s always gives me the idea of a vacillating, unsteady rapture, entirely dependent on circumstances with all their fluctuations. If Mary lives to be a mother, you will then see a greater difference.
“I wish you, dear E., all health and enjoyment in your visit; and, as far as one can judge at present, there seems a fair prospect of the wish being realised.
“Yours sincerely,
“C. BRONTË.”
CHAPTER XI.
The reader will remember that Anne Brontë had been interred in the churchyard of the Old Church at Scarborough. Charlotte had left directions for a tombstone to be placed over her; but many a time during the solitude of the past winter, her sad, anxious thoughts had revisited the scene of that last great sorrow, and she had wondered whether all decent services had been rendered to the memory of the dead, until at last, she came to a silent resolution to go and see for herself whether the stone and inscription were in a satisfactory state of preservation.
“Cliffe House, Filey, June 6th, 1852.
“Dear E—,—I am at Filey utterly alone. Do not be angry, the step is right. I considered it, and resolved on it with due deliberation. Change of air was necessary; there were reasons why I should not go to the south, and why I should come here. On Friday I went to Scarborough, visited the churchyard and stone. It must be refaced and relettered; there are five errors. I gave the necessary directions. That duty, then, is done; long has it lain heavy on my mind; and that was a pilgrimage I felt I could only make alone.
“I am in our old lodgings at Mrs. Smith’s; not, however, in the same rooms, but in less expensive apartments. They seemed glad to see me, remembered you and me very well, and, seemingly, with great good will. The daughter who used to wait on us is just married. Filey seems to me much altered; more lodging-houses—some of them very handsome—have been built; the sea has all its old grandeur. I walk on the sands a good deal, and try not to feel desolate and melancholy. How sorely my heart longs for you, I need not say. I have bathed once; it seemed to do me good. I may, perhaps, stay here a fortnight. There are as yet scarcely any visitors. A Lady Wenlock is staying at the large house of which you used so vigilantly to observe the inmates. One day I set out with intent to trudge to Filey Bridge, but was frightened back by two cows. I mean to try again some morning. I left papa well. I have been a good deal troubled with headache, and with some pain in the side since I came here, but I feel that this has been owing to the cold wind, for very cold has it been till lately; at present I feel better. Shall I send the papers to you as usual? Write again directly, and tell me this, and anything and everything else that comes into your mind.“Believe me, yours faithfully,“C. BRONTË”
“Filey, June 16th, 1852.
“Dear E—,—Be quite easy about me. I really think I am better for my stay at Filey; that I have derived more benefit from it than I dared to anticipate. I believe, could I stay here two months, and enjoy something like social cheerfulness as well as exercise and good air, my health would be quite renewed. This, however, cannot possibly be; but I am most thankful for the good received. I stay here another week.
“I return—’s letter. I am sorry for her: I believe she suffers; but I do not much like her style of expressing herself..... Grief as well as joy manifests itself in most different ways in different people; and I doubt not she is sincere and in earnest when she talks of her ‘precious, sainted father;’ but I could wish she used simpler language.”
Soon after her return from Filey, she was alarmed by a very serious and sharp attack of illness with which Mr. Brontë was seized. There was some fear, for a few days, that his sight was permanently lost and his spirits sank painfully under this dread.
“This prostration of spirits,” writes his daughter, “which accompanies anything like a relapse is almost the most difficult point to manage. Dear E—, you are tenderly kind in offering your society; but rest very tranquil where you are; be fully assured that it is not now, nor under present circumstances, that I feel the lack either of society or occupation; my time is pretty well filled up, and my thoughts appropriated..... I cannot permit myself to comment much on the chief contents of your last; advice is not necessary: as far as I can judge, you seem hitherto enabled to take these trials in a good and wise spirit. I can only pray that such combined strength and resignation may be continued to you. Submission, courage, exertion, when practicable,—these seem to be the weapons with which we must fight life’s long battle.”
I suppose that, during the very time when her thoughts were thus fully occupied with anxiety for her father, she received some letter from her publishers, making inquiry as to the progress of the work which they knew she had in hand, as I find the following letter to Mr. Williams, bearing reference to some of Messrs. Smith and Elder’s proposed arrangements.
“To W. S. Williams, Esq.
“July 28th, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—Is it in contemplation to publish the new edition of ‘Shirley’ soon? Would it not be better to defer it for a time? In reference to a part of your letter, permit me to express this wish,—and I trust in doing so, I shall not be regarded as stepping out of my position as an author, and encroaching on the arrangements of business,—viz.: that no announcement of a new work by the author of ‘Jane Eyre’ shall be made till the MS. of such work is actually in my publisher’s hands. Perhaps we are none of us justified in speaking very decidedly where the future is concerned; but for some too much caution in such calculations can scarcely be observed: amongst this number I must class myself. Nor, in doing so, can I assume an apologetic tone. He does right who does his best.
“Last autumn I got on for a time quickly. I ventured to look forward to spring as the period of publication: my health gave way; I passed such a winter as, having been once experienced, will never be forgotten. The spring proved little better than a protraction of trial. The warm weather and a visit to the sea have done me much good physically; but as yet I have recovered neither elasticity of animal spirits, nor flow of the power of composition. And if it were otherwise, the difference would be of no avail; my time and thoughts are at present taken up with close attendance on my father, whose health is just now in a very critical state, the heat of the weather having produced determination of blood to the head.
“I am, yours sincerely,
“C. BRONTË.”
Before the end of August, Mr. Brontë’s convalescence became quite established, and he was anxious to resume his duties for some time before his careful daughter would permit him.
On September the 14th the “great duke” died. He had been, as we have seen, her hero from childhood; but I find no further reference to him at this time than what is given in the following extract from a letter to her friend:—
“I do hope and believe the changes you have been having this summer will do you permanent good, notwithstanding the pain with which they have been too often mingled. Yet I feel glad that you are soon coming home; and I really must not trust myself to say how much I wish the time were come when, without let or hindrance, I could once more welcome you to Haworth. But oh! I don’t get on; I feel fretted—incapable—sometimes very low. However, at present, the subject must not be dwelt upon; it presses me too hardly—nearly—and painfully. Less than ever can I taste or know pleasure till this work is wound up. And yet I often sit up in bed at night, thinking of and wishing for you. Thank you for the ‘Times’; what it said on the mighty and mournful subject was well said. All at once the whole nation seems to take a just view of that great character. There was a review too of an American book, which I was glad to see. Read ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’:ci probably, though, you have read it.
“Papa’s health continues satisfactory, thank God! As for me, my wretched liver has been disordered again of late, but I hope it is now going to be on better behaviour; it hinders me in working—depresses both power and tone of feeling. I must expect this derangement from time to time.”
Haworth was in an unhealthy state, as usual; and both Miss Brontë and Tabby suffered severely from the prevailing epidemics. The former was long in shaking off the effects of this illness. In vain she resolved against allowing herself any society or change of scene until she had accomplished her labour. She was too ill to write; and with illness came on the old heaviness of heart, recollections of the past, and anticipations of the future. At last Mr. Brontë expressed so strong a wish that her friend should be asked to visit her, and she felt some little refreshment so absolutely necessary, that on October the 9th she begged her to come to Haworth, just for a single week.
“I thought I would persist in denying myself till I had done my work, but I find it won’t do; the matter refuses to progress, and this excessive solitude presses too heavily; so let me see your dear face, E., just for one reviving week.”
But she would only accept of the company of her friend for the exact time specified. She thus writes to Miss Wooler on October the 21st:—
“E—has only been my companion one little week. I would not have her any longer, for I am disgusted with myself and my delays; and consider it was a weak yielding to temptation in me to send for her at all; but in truth, my spirits were getting low—prostrate sometimes—and she has done me inexpressible good. I wonder when I shall see you at Haworth again; both my father and the servants have again and again insinuated a distinct wish that you should be requested to come in the course of the summer and autumn, but I have always turned rather a deaf ear; ‘not yet,’ was my thought,’ ‘I want first to be free;‘ work first, then pleasure.”
Miss—’s visit had done her much good. Pleasant companionship during the day produced, for the time, the unusual blessing of calm repose at night; and, after her friend’s departure, she was well enough to “fall to business,” and write away, almost incessantly, at her story of “Villette,” now drawing to a conclusion. The following letter to Mr. Smith, seems to have accompanied the first part of the MS.
“Oct. 30th, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—You must notify honestly what you think of ‘Villette’ when you have read it. I can hardly tell you how I hunger to hear some opinion besides my own, and how I have sometimes desponded, and almost despaired, because there was no one to whom to read a line, or of whom to ask a counsel. ‘Jane Eyre’ was not written under such circumstances, nor were two-thirds of ‘Shirley.’ I got so miserable about it, I could bear no allusion to the book. It is not finished yet; but now I hope. As to the anonymous publication, I have this to say: If the withholding of the author’s name should tend materially to injure the publisher’s interest, to interfere with booksellers’ orders, &c., I would not press the point; but if no such detriment is contingent, I should be most thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito. I seem to dread the advertisements—the large-lettered ‘Currer Bell’s New Novel,’ or ‘New Work, by the Author of Jane Eyre.’ These, however, I feel well enough, are the transcendentalisms of a retired wretch; so you must speak frankly..... I shall be glad to see ‘Colonel Esmond.’ My objection to the second volume lay here: I thought it contained decidedly too much history—too little story.”
In another letter, referring to “Esmond,” she uses the following words:—
“The third volume seemed to me to possess the most sparkle, impetus, and interest. Of the first and second my judgment was, that parts of them were admirable; but there was the fault of containing too much History—too little Story. I hold that a work of fiction ought to be a work of creation; that the real should be sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the ideal. Plain household bread is a far more wholesome and necessary thing than cake; yet who would like to see the brown loaf placed on the table for dessert? In the second volume, the author gives us an ample supply of excellent brown bread; in his third, only such a portion as gives substance, like the crumbs of bread in a well-made, not too rich, plum-pudding.”
Her letter to Mr. Smith, containing the allusion to “Esmond,” which reminded me of the quotation just given, continues:—
“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. Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme, though I honour philanthropy; and voluntarily and sincerely veil my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s work, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ To manage these great matters rightly, they must be long and practically studied—their bearings known intimately, and their evils felt genuinely; they must not be taken up as a business matter, and a trading speculation. I doubt not Mrs. Stowe had felt the iron of slavery enter into her heart, from childhood upwards, long before she ever thought of writing books. The feeling throughout her work is sincere, and not got up. Remember to be an honest critic of ‘Villette,’ and tell Mr. Williams to be unsparing: not that I am likely to alter anything, but I want to know his impressions and yours.”
To G. Smith, Esq.
“Nov. 3rd.
“My dear Sir,—I feel very grateful for your letter; it relieved me much, for I was a good deal harassed by doubts as to how ‘Villette’ might appear in other eyes than my own. I feel in some degree authorised to rely on your favourable impressions, because you are quite right where you hint disapprobation. You have exactly hit two points at least where I was conscious of defect;—the discrepancy, the want of perfect harmony, between Graham’s boyhood and manhood,—the angular abruptness of his change of sentiment towards Miss Fanshawe. You must remember, though, that in secret he had for some time appreciated that young lady at a somewhat depressed standard—held her a little lower than the angels. But still the reader ought to have been better made to feel this preparation towards a change of mood. As to the publishing arrangements, I leave them to Cornhill. There is, undoubtedly, a certain force in what you say about the inexpediency of affecting a mystery which cannot be sustained; so you must act as you think is for the best. I submit, also, to the advertisements in large letters, but under protest, and with a kind of ostrich-longing for concealment. Most of the third volume is given to the development of the ‘crabbed Professor’s’ character. Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a ‘curled darling’ of Nature and of Fortune, and must draw a prize in life’s lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it must be the Professor—a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to ‘put up with.’ But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from the beginning, I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places. The conclusion of this third volume is still a matter of some anxiety: I can but do my best, however. It would speedily be finished, could I ward off certain obnoxious headaches, which, whenever I get into the spirit of my work, are apt to seize and prostrate me....................
“Colonel Henry Esmond is just arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne’s garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well represented by the old ‘Spectator’ type.”
In reference to a sentence towards the close of this letter, I may mention what she told me; that Mr. Brontë was anxious that her new tale should end well, as he disliked novels which left a melancholy impression upon the mind; and he requested her to make her hero and heroine (like the heroes and heroines in fairy-tales) “marry, and live very happily ever after.” But the idea of M. Paul Emanuel’s death at sea was stamped on her imagination till it assumed the distinct force of reality; and she could no more alter her fictitious ending than if they had been facts which she was relating. All she could do in compliance with her father’s wish was so to veil the fate in oracular words, as to leave it to the character and discernment of her readers to interpret her meaning.
To W. S. Williams, Esq.
“Nov. 6th, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—I must not delay thanking you for your kind letter, with its candid and able commentary on ‘Villette.’ With many of your strictures I concur. The third volume may, perhaps, do away with some of the objections; others still remain in force. I do not think the interest culminates anywhere to the degree you would wish. What climax there is does not come on till near the conclusion; and even then, I doubt whether the regular novel-reader will consider the ‘agony piled sufficiently high’ (as the Americans say), or the colours dashed on to the canvass with the proper amount of daring. Still, I fear, they must be satisfied with what is offered: my palette affords no brighter tints; were I to attempt to deepen the reds, or burnish the yellows, I should but botch.
“Unless I am mistaken, the emotion of the book will be found to be kept throughout in tolerable subjection. As to the name of the heroine, I can hardly express what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name; but, at first, I called her ‘Lucy Snowe’ (spelt with an ‘e’); which Snowe I afterwards changed to ’Frost.’ Subsequently, I rather regretted the change, and wished it
‘Snowe’ again. If not too late, I should like the alteration to be made now throughout the MS. A cold name she must have; partly, perhaps, on the ‘lucus a non lucendo’ principle—7 partly on that of the ‘fitness of things,’ for she has about her an external coldness.
“You say that she may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid. It was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional, for instance; it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness. If, however, the book does not express all this, there must be a great fault somewhere. I might explain away a few other points, but it would be too much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended to be represented. We know what sort of a pencil that is which needs an ally in the pen.
“Thanking you again for the clearness and fulness with which you have responded to my request for a statement of impressions, I am, my dear Sir, yours very sincerely,
“C. BRONTË.
“I trust the work will be seen in MS. by no one except Mr. Smith and yourself.”
“Nov. 10th, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—I only wished the publication of ‘Shirley’ to be delayed till ’Villette’ was nearly ready; so that there can now be no objection to its being issued whenever you think fit. About putting the MS. into type, I can only say that, should I be able to proceed with the third volume at my average rate of composition, and with no more than the average amount of interruptions, I should hope to have it ready in about three weeks. I leave it to you to decide whether it would be better to delay the printing that space of time, or to commence it immediately. It would certainly be more satisfactory if you were to see the third volume before printing the first and the second; yet, if delay is likely to prove injurious, I do not think it is indispensable. I have read the third volume of ‘Esmond.’ I found it both entertaining and exciting to me; it seems to possess an impetus and excitement beyond the other two,—that movement and brilliancy its predecessors sometimes wanted, never fails here. In certain passages, I thought Thackeray used all his powers; their grand, serious force yielded a profound satisfaction. ‘At last he puts forth his strength,’ I could not help saying to myself No character in the book strikes me as more masterly than that of Beatrix; its conception is fresh, and its delineation vivid. It is peculiar; it has impressions of a new kind—new, at least, to me. Beatrix is not, in herself, all bad. So much does she sometimes reveal of what is good and great as to suggest this feeling—you would think she was urged by a fate. You would think that some antique doom presses on her house, and that once in so many generations its brightest ornament was to become its greatest disgrace. At times, what is good in her struggles against this terrible destiny, but the Fate conquers. Beatrix cannot be an honest woman and a good man’s wife. She ‘tries, and she cannot.’ Proud, beautiful, and sullied, she was born what she becomes, a king’s mistress. I know not whether you have seen the notice in the ‘Leader;’ I read it just after concluding the book. Can I be wrong in deeming it a notice tame, cold, and insufficient ? With all its professed friendliness, it produced on me a most disheartening impression. Surely, another sort of justice than this will be rendered to ‘Esmond’ from other quarters. One acute remark of the critic is to the effect that Blanche Amory and Beatrix are identical—sketched from the same original! To me they are about as identical as a weazel and a royal tigress of Bengal—both the latter are quadrupeds,—both the former, women. But I must not take up either your time or my own with further remarks. Believe me yours sincerely,
“C. BRONTË.”
On a Saturday, a little later in this month, Miss Brontë completed “Villette,” and sent it off to her publishers. “I said my prayers when I had done it. Whether it is well or ill done, I don’t know; D. V, I will now try and wait the issue quietly. The book, I think, will not be considered pretentious; nor is it of a character to excite hostility.”
As her labour was ended, she felt at liberty to allow herself a little change. There were several friends anxious to see her and welcome her to their homes: Miss Martineau, Mrs. Smith, and her own faithful E—. With the last, in the same letter as that in which she announced the completion of “Villette,” she offered to spend a week. She began, also, to consider whether it might not be well to avail herself of Mrs. Smith’s kind invitation, with a view to the convenience of being on the spot to correct the proofs.
The following letter is given, not merely on account of her own criticisms on “Villette,” but because it shows how she had learned to magnify the meaning of trifles, as all do who live a self-contained and solitary life. Mr. Smith had been unable to write by the same post as that which brought the money for “Villette,” and she consequently received it without a line. The friend with whom she was staying says, that she immediately fancied there was some disappointment about “Villette,” or that some word or act of hers had given offence;8 and had not the Sunday intervened, and so allowed time for Mr. Smith’s letter to make its appearance, she would certainly have crossed it on her way to London.
“Dec. 6th, 1852.
“My dear Sir,—The receipts have reached me safely. I received the first on Saturday, enclosed in a cover without a line, and had made up my mind to take the train on Monday, and go up to London to see what was the matter, and what had struck my publisher mute. On Sunday morning your letter came, and you have thus been spared the visitation of the unannounced and unsummoned apparition of Currer Bell in Cornhill. Inexplicable delays should be avoided when possible, for they are apt to urge those subjected to their harassment to sudden and impulsive steps. I must pronounce you right again, in your complaint of the transfer of interest in the third volume, from one set of characters to another. It is not pleasant, and it will probably be found as unwelcome to the reader, as it was, in a sense, compulsory upon the writer. The spirit of romance would have indicated another course, far more flowery and inviting; it would have fashioned a paramount hero, kept faithfully with him, and made him supremely worshipful; he should have been an idol, and not a mute, unresponding idol either; but this would have been unlike real life—inconsistent with truth—at variance with probability. I greatly apprehend, however, that the weakest character in the book is the one I aimed at making the most beautiful; and, if this be the case, the fault lies in its wanting the germ of the real—in its being purely imaginary. I felt that this character lacked substance; I fear that the reader will feel the same. Union with it resembles too much the fate of Ixion, who was mated with a cloud. The childhood of Paulina is, however, I think, pretty well imagined, but her . . . .” (the remainder of this interesting sentence is torn off the letter). “A brief visit to London becomes thus more practicable, and if your mother will kindly write, when she has time, and name a day after Christmas which will suit her, I shall have pleasure, papa’s health permitting, in availing myself of her invitation. I wish I could come in time to correct some at least of the proofs; it would save trouble.”
CHAPTER XII.
The difficulty that presented itself most strongly to me, when I first had the honour of being requested to write this biography, was how I could show what a noble, true, and tender woman Charlotte Brontë really was, without mingling up with her life too much of the personal history of her nearest and most intimate friends. After much consideration of this point, 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.
One of the deepest interests of her life centres naturally round her marriage, and the preceding circumstances; but more than all other events (because of more recent date, and concerning another as intimately as herself, it requires delicate handling on my part, lest I intrude too roughly on what is most sacred to memory. Yet I have two reasons, which seem to me good and valid ones, for giving some particulars of the course of events which led to her few months of wedded life—that short spell of exceeding happiness. The first is my desire to call attention to the fact that Mr. Nicholls was one who had seen her almost daily for years;cj seen her as a daughter, a sister, a mistress and a friend. He was not a man to be attracted by any kind of literary fame. I imagine that this, by itself, would rather repel him when he saw it in the possession of a woman. He was a grave, reserved, conscientious man, with a deep sense of religion, and of his duties as one of its ministers.
In silence he had watched her, and loved her long. The love of such a man—a daily spectator of her manner of life for years—is a great testimony to her character as a woman.
How deep his affection was I scarcely dare to tell, even if I could in words. She did not know—she had hardly begun to suspect—that she was the object of any peculiar regard on his part, when, in this very December, he came one evening to tea. After tea, she returned from the study to her own sitting-room, as was her custom, leaving her father and his curate together. Presently she heard the study-door open, and expected to hear the succeeding clash of the front door. Instead, came a tap; and, “like lightning, it flashed upon me what was coming. He entered. He stood before me. What his words were you can imagine; his manner you can hardly realise, nor can I forget it. He made me, for the first time, feel what it costs a man to declare affection when he doubts response.... The spectacle of one, ordinarily so statue-like, thus trembling, stirred, and overcome, gave me a strange shock. I could only entreat him to leave me then, and promise a reply on the morrow. I asked if he had spoken to Papa. He said he dared not. I think I half led, half put him out of the room.”
So deep, so fervent, and so enduring was the affection Miss Bronte had inspired in the heart of this good man! It is an honour to her; and, as such, I have thought it my duty to speak thus much, and quote thus fully from her letter about it. And now I pass to my second reason for dwelling on a subject which may possibly be considered by some, at first sight, of too private a nature for publication. When Mr. Nicholls had left her, Charlotte went immediately to her father and told him all. He always disapproved of marriages, and constantly talked against them. But he more than disapproved at this time; he could not bear the idea of this attachment of Mr. Nicholls to his daughter. Fearing the consequences of agitation to one so recently an invalid, she made haste to give her father a promise that, on the morrow, Mr. Nicholls should have a distinct refusal. Thus quietly and modestly did she, on whom such hard judgments had been passed by ignorant reviewers, receive this vehement, passionate declaration of love,—thus thoughtfully for her father, and unselfishly for herself, put aside all consideration of how she should reply, excepting as he wished!1
The immediate result of Mr. Nicholls’ declaration of attachment was, that he sent in his resignation of the curacy of Haworth; and that Miss Brontë held herself simply passive as far as words and actions went, while she suffered acute pain from the strong expressions which her father used in speaking of Mr. Nicholls, and from the too evident distress and failure of health on the part of the latter. Under these circumstances she more gladly than ever availed herself of Mrs. Smith’s proposal, that she should again visit them in London; and thither she accordingly went in the first week of the year 1853.
From thence I received the following letter. It is with a sad, proud pleasure I copy her words of friendship now.
“January 12th, 1853.
“It is with you the ball rests. I have not heard from you since I wrote last; but I thought I knew the reason of your silence, viz. application to work,—and therefore I accept it, not merely with resignation, but with satisfaction.
“I am now in London, as the date above will show; staying very quietly at my publisher‘s, and correcting proofs, &c. Before receiving yours, I had felt, and expressed to Mr. Smith, reluctance to come in the way of ‘Ruth;’ not that I think she would suffer from contact with ‘Villette’—we know not but that the damage might be the other way; but I have ever held comparisons to be odious, and would fain that neither I nor my friends should be made subjects for the same. Mr. Smith proposes, accordingly, to defer the publication of my book till the 24th inst.; he says that will give ‘Ruth’ the start in the papers daily and weekly, and also will leave free to her all the February magazines. Should this delay appear to you insufficient, speak! and it shall be protracted.
“I dare say, arrange as we may, we shall not be able wholly to prevent comparisons; it is the nature of some critics to be invidious; but we need not care: we can set them at defiance; they shall not make us foes, they shall not mingle with our mutual feelings one taint of jealousy: there is my hand on that; I know you will give clasp for clasp.
“ ‘Villette’ has indeed 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; nor can it claim precedence on the ground of surpassing power: I think it much quieter than ‘Jane Eyre.’
“I wish to see you, probably at least as much as you can wish to see me, and therefore shall consider your invitation for March as an engagement; about the close of that month, then, I hope to pay you a brief visit. With kindest remembrances to Mr. Gaskell and all your precious circle, I am,” &c.
This visit at Mrs. Smith’s was passed more quietly than any previous one, and was consequently more in accordance with her own tastes. She saw things rather than persons; and being allowed to have her own choice of sights, she selected the “real in preference to the decorative side of life.” She went over two prisons,—one ancient, the other modern,—Newgate and Pentonville; over two hospitals, the Foundling and Bethlehem. She was also taken, at her own request, to see several of the great City sights; the Bank, the Exchange, Rothschild’s, &c.
The power of vast yet minute organization, always called out her respect and admiration. She appreciated it more fully than most women are able to do. All that she saw during this last visit to London impressed her deeply—so much so as to render her incapable of the immediate expression of her feelings, or of reasoning upon her impressions while they were so vivid. If she had lived, her deep heart would sooner or later have spoken out on these things.
What she saw dwelt in her thoughts, and lay heavy on her spirits. She received the utmost kindness from her hosts, and had the old, warm, and grateful regard for them. But looking back, with the knowledge of what was then the future, which Time has given, one cannot but imagine that there was a toning-down in preparation for the final farewell to these kind friends, whom she saw for the last time on a Wednesday morning in February. She met her friend E—at Keighley on her return, and the two proceeded to Haworth together.
“Villette”—which, if less interesting as a mere story than “Jane Eyre,” displays yet more of the extraordinary genius of the author—was received with one burst of acclamation. Out of so small a circle of characters, dwelling in so dull and monotonous an area as a “pension,” this wonderful tale was evolved!
See how she receives the good tidings of her success!
“Feb. 15th, 1853.
“I got a budget of no less than seven papers yesterday and to-day. The import of all the notices is such as to make my heart swell with thankfulness to Him, who takes note both of suffering, and work, and motives. Papa is pleased too. As to friends in general, I believe I can love them still, without expecting them to take any large share in this sort of gratification. The longer I live, the more plainly I see that gentle must be the strain on fragile human nature; it will not bear much.”
I suspect that the touch of slight disappointment, perceptible in the last few lines, arose from her great susceptibility to an opinion she valued much,—that of Miss Martineau, who, both in an article on “Villette” in the “Daily News,” and in a private letter to Miss Brontë, wounded her to the quick by expressions of censure which she believed to be unjust and unfounded, but which, if correct and true, went deeper than any merely artistic fault.2 An author may bring himself to believe that he can bear blame with equanimity, from whatever quarter it comes; but its force is derived altogether from the character of this. To the public, one reviewer may be the same impersonal being as another; but an author has frequently a far deeper significance to attach to opinions. They are the verdicts of those whom he respects and admires, or the mere words of those for whose judgment he cares not a jot. It is this knowledge of the individual worth of the reviewer’s opinion, which makes the censures of some sink so deep, and prey so heavily upon an author’s heart. And thus, in proportion to her true, firm regard for Miss Martineau, did Miss Brontë suffer under what she considered her misjudgment, not merely of writing, but of character.
She had long before asked Miss Martineau to tell her whether she considered that any want of womanly delicacy or propriety was betrayed in “Jane Eyre.” And on receiving Miss Martineau’s assurance that she did not, Miss Brontë entreated her to declare it frankly if she thought there was any failure of this description in any future work of “Currer Bell’s.” The promise then given of faithful truth-speaking, Miss Martineau fulfilled when “Villette” appeared. Miss Brontë writhed under what she felt to be injustice.
This seems a fitting place to state how utterly unconscious she was of what was, by some, esteemed coarse in her writings. One day, during that visit at the Briery when I first met her, the conversation turned upon the subject of women’s writing fiction; and some one remarked on the fact that, in certain instances, authoresses had much outstepped the line which men felt to be proper in works of this kind. Miss Brontë said she wondered how far this was a natural consequence of allowing the imagination to work too constantly; Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth and I expressed our belief that such violations of propriety were altogether unconscious on the part of those to whom reference had been made. I remember her grave, earnest way of saying, “I trust God will take from me whatever power of invention or expression I may have, before He lets me become blind to the sense of what is fitting or unfitting to be said!”
Again, she was invariably shocked and distressed when she heard of any disapproval of “Jane Eyre” on the ground above-mentioned. Some one said to her in London, “You know, you and I, Miss Brontë, have both written naughty books!” She dwelt much on this; and, as if it weighed on her mind, took an opportunity to ask Mrs. Smith, as she would have asked a mother—if she had not been motherless from earliest childhood—whether, indeed, there was anything so wrong in “Jane Eyre.”
I do not deny for myself the existence of coarseness here and there in her works, otherwise so entirely noble. I only ask those who read them to consider her life,—which has been openly laid bare before them,—and to say how it could be otherwise. She saw few men; and among these few were one or two with whom she had been acquainted since early girlhood,—who had shown her much friendliness and kindness,—through whose family she had received many pleasures,—for whose intellect she had a great respect,—but who talked before her, if not to her, with as little reticence as Rochester talked to Jane Eyre. Take this in connection with her poor brother’s sad life, and the out-spoken people among whom she lived,—remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be,—and then do her justice for all that she was, and all that she would have been (had God spared her), rather than censure her because circumstances forced her to touch pitch, as it were, and by it her hand was for a moment defiled. It was but skin deep. Every change in her life was purifying her; it hardly could raise her. Again I cry, “If she had but lived!”
The misunderstanding with Miss Martineau on account of “Villette,” was the cause of bitter regret to Miss Brontë. Her woman’s nature had been touched, as she thought, with insulting misconception; and she had dearly loved the person who had thus unconsciously wounded her. It was but in the January just past that she had written as follows, in reply to a friend, the tenor of whose letter we may guess from this answer:—
“I read attentively all you say about Miss Martineau; the sincerity and constancy of your solicitude touch me very much; I should grieve to neglect or oppose your advice, and yet I do not feel it would be right to give Miss Martineau up entirely. There is in her nature much that is very noble; hundreds have forsaken her,3 more, I fear, in the apprehension that their fair names may suffer, if seen in connection with hers, than from any pure convictions, such as you suggest, of harm consequent on her fatal tenets. With these fair-weather friends I cannot bear to rank; and for her sin, is it not one of those of which God and not man must judge?
“To speak the truth, my dear Miss—, I believe, if you were in my place, and knew Miss Martineau as I do,—if you had shared with me the proofs of her genuine kindliness, and had seen how she secretly suffers from abandonment,—you would be the last to give her up; you would separate the sinner from the sin, and feel as if the right lay rather in quietly adhering to her in her strait, while that adherence is unfashionable and unpopular, than in turning on her your back when the world sets the example. I believe she is one of those whom opposition and desertion make obstinate in error; while patience and tolerance touch her deeply and keenly, and incline her to ask of her own heart whether the course she has been pursuing may not possibly be a faulty course.”
Kindly and faithful words! which Miss Martineau never knew of; to be repaid in words more grand and tender, when Charlotte lay deaf and cold by her dead sisters. In spite of their short, sorrowful misunderstanding, they were a pair of noble women and faithful friends.
I turn to a pleasanter subject. While she was in London, Miss Brontë had seen Lawrence’s portrait of Mr. Thackeray, and admired it extremely. Her first words, after she had stood before it some time in silence, were, “And there came up a Lion out of Judah!” The likeness was by this time engraved, and Mr. Smith sent her a copy of it.
To G. Smith, Esq.
“Haworth, Feb. 26th, 1853.
“My dear Sir,—At a late hour yesterday evening I had the honour of receiving, at Haworth Parsonage, a distinguished guest, none other than W M. Thackeray, Esq. Mindful of the rites of hospitality, I hung him up in state this morning. He looks superb in his beautiful, tasteful gilded gibbet. For companion he has the Duke of Wellington, (do you remember giving me that picture?) and for contrast and foil Richmond’s portrait of an unworthy individual, who, in such society, must be nameless. Thackeray looks away from the latter character with a grand scorn, edifying to witness. I wonder if the giver of these gifts will ever see them on the walls where they now hang; it pleases me to fancy that one day he may. My father stood for a quarter of an hour this morning examining the great man’s picture. The conclusion of his survey was, that he thought it a puzzling head; if he had known nothing previously of the original’s character, he could not have read it in his features. I wonder at this. To me the broad brow seems to express intellect. Certain lines about the nose and cheek betray the satirist and cynic; the mouth indicates a childlike simplicity—perhaps even a degree of irresoluteness, inconsistency—weakness in short, but a weakness not unamiable. The engraving seems to me very good. A certain not quite Christian expression—‘not to put too fine a point upon it’—an expression of spite, most vividly marked in the original, is here softened, and perhaps a little—a very little—of the power has escaped in this ameliorating process. Did it strike you thus?”
Miss Brontë was in much better health during this winter of 1852-3, than she had been the year before.
“For my part,” (she wrote to me in February) “I have thus far borne the cold weather well. I have taken long walks on the crackling snow, and felt the frosty air bracing. This winter has, for me, not been like last winter. December, January, February, ‘51-2, passed like a long stormy night, conscious of one painful dream, all solitary grief and sickness. The corresponding months in ’52-3 have gone over my head quietly and not uncheerfully. Thank God for the change and the repose! How welcome it has been He only knows! My father too has borne the season well; and my book, and its reception thus far, have pleased and cheered him.”
In March the quiet Parsonage had the honour of receiving a visit from the then Bishop of Ripon. He remained one night with Mr. Brontë. In the evening, some of the neighbouring clergy were invited to meet him at tea and supper; and during the latter meal, some of the “curates” began merrily to upbraid Miss Brontë with “putting them into a book;” and she, shrinking from thus having her character as authoress thrust upon her at her own table, and in the presence of a stranger, pleasantly appealed to the bishop as to whether it was quite fair thus to drive her into a corner. His Lordship, I have been told, was agreeably impressed with the gentle unassuming manners of his hostess, and with the perfect propriety and consistency of the arrangements in the modest household. So much for the Bishop’s recollection of his visit. Now we will turn to hers.
“March 4th.
“The Bishop has been, and is gone. He is certainly a most charming Bishop; the most benignant gentleman that ever put on lawn sleeves; yet stately too, and quite competent to check encroachments. His visit passed capitally well; and at its close, as he was going away, he expressed himself thoroughly gratified with all he had seen. The Inspector has been also in the course of the past week; so that I have had a somewhat busy time of it. If you could have been at Haworth to share the pleasures of the company, without having been inconvenienced by the little bustle of the preparation, I should have been very glad. But the house was a good deal put out of its way, as you may suppose; all passed, however, orderly, quietly, and well. Martha waited very nicely, and I had a person to help her in the kitchen. Papa kept up, too, fully as well as I expected, though I doubt whether he could have borne another day of it. My penalty came on in a strong headache as soon as the Bishop was gone: how thankful I was that it had patiently waited his departure. I continue stupid to-day: of course, it is the re-action consequent on several days of extra exertion and excitement. It is very well to talk of receiving a Bishop without trouble, but you must prepare for him.”
By this time some of the Reviews had begun to find fault with “Villette.” Miss Brontë made her old request.
To W. S. Williams, Esq.
“My dear Sir,—Were a review to appear, inspired with treble their animus, pray do not withhold it from me. I like to see the satisfactory notices,—especially I like to carry them to my father; but I must see such as are unsatisfactory and hostile; these are for my own especial edification;—it is in these I best read public feeling and opinion. To shun examination into the dangerous and disagreeable seems to me cowardly. I long always to know what really is, and am only unnerved when kept in the dark....
“As to the character of ‘Lucy Snowe,’ my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which ‘Jane Eyre’ was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her.
“The note you sent this morning from Lady Harriette St. Clair, is precisely to the same purport as Miss Muloch’sck request,—an application for exact and authentic information respecting the fate of M. Paul Emanuel! You see how much the ladies think of this little man, whom you none of you like. I had a letter the other day, announcing that a lady of some note, who had always determined that whenever she married, her husband should be the counterpart of ‘Mr. Knightly’ in Miss Austen’s ‘Emma,’ had now changed her mind, and vowed that she would either find the duplicate of Professor Emanuel, or remain for ever single! I have sent Lady Harriette an answer so worded as to leave the matter pretty much where it was. Since the little puzzle amuses the ladies, it would be a pity to spoil their sport by giving them the key.”
When Easter, with its duties arising out of sermons to be preached by strange clergymen, who had afterwards to be entertained at the Parsonage,—with Mechanics’ Institute Meetings, and school tea-drinkings, was over and gone, she came, at the close of April, to visit us in Manchester. We had a friend, a young lady, staying with us. Miss Brontë had expected to find us alone; aud although our friend was gentle and sensible after Miss Brontë’s own heart, yet her presence was enough to create a nervous tremour. I was aware that both of our guests were unusually silent; and I saw a little shiver run from time to time over Miss Brontë’s frame. I could account for the modest reserve of the young lady; and the next day Miss Brontë told me how the unexpected sight of a strange face had affected her.
It was now two or three years since I had witnessed a similar effect produced on her, in anticipation of a quiet evening at Fox-How; and since then she had seen many and various people in London: but the physical sensations produced by shyness were still the same; and on the following day she laboured under severe headaches. I had several opportunities of perceiving how this nervousness was ingrained in her constitution, and how acutely she suffered in striving to overcome it. One evening we had, among other guests, two sisters who sang Scottish ballads exquisitely. Miss Brontë had been sitting quiet and constrained till they began “The Bonnie House of Airlie,” but the effect of that and “Carlisle Yetts,” which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time up and down the street; she upbraiding herself all the while for folly, and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory rather than on the thought of a third sister who would have to be faced if we went in. But it was of no use; and dreading lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance. Much of this nervous dread of encountering strangers I ascribed to the idea of her personal ugliness, which had been strongly impressed upon her imagination early in life, and which she exaggerated to herself in a remarkable manner. “I notice,” said she, “that after a stranger has once looked at my face, he is careful not to let his eyes wander to that part of the room again!” A more untrue idea never entered into any one’s head. Two gentlemen who saw her during this visit, without knowing at the time who she was, were singularly attracted by her appearance; and this feeling of attraction towards a pleasant countenance, sweet voice, and gentle timid manners, was so strong in one as to conquer a dislike he had previously entertained to her works.
There was another circumstance that came to my knowledge at this period which told secrets about the finely-strung frame. One night I was on the point of relating some dismal ghost story, just before bed-time. She shrank from hearing it, and confessed that she was superstitious, and prone at all times to the involuntary recurrence of any thoughts of ominous gloom which might have been suggested to her. She said that on first coming to us, she had found a letter on her dressing-table from a friend in Yorkshire, containing a story which had impressed her vividly ever since;—that it mingled with her dreams at night, and made her sleep restless and unrefreshing.
One day we asked two gentlemen to meet her at dinner, expecting that she and they would have a mutual pleasure in making each other’s acquaintance. To our disappointment, she drew back with timid reserve from all their advances, replying to their questions and remarks in the briefest manner possible; till at last they gave up their efforts to draw her into conversation in despair, and talked to each other and my husband on subjects of recent local interest. Among these Thackeray’s Lectures (which had lately been delivered in Manchester) were spoken of, and that on Fielding especially dwelt upon. One gentleman objected to it strongly, as calculated to do moral harm, and regretted that a man having so great an influence over the tone of thought of the day, as Thackeray, should not more carefully weigh his words. The other took the opposite view. He said that Thackeray described men from the inside, as it were; through his strong power of dramatic sympathy, he identified himself with certain characters, felt their temptations, entered into their pleasures, &c. This roused Miss Brontë, who threw herself warmly into the discussion; the ice of her reserve was broken, and from that time she showed her interest in all that was said, and contributed her share to any conversation that was going on in the course of the evening.
What she said, and which part she took, in the dispute about Thackeray’s lecture, may be gathered from the following letter, referring to the same subject:—
“The Lectures arrived safely; I have read them through twice. They must be studied to be appreciated. I thought well of them when I heard them delivered, but now I see their real power, and it is great. The lecture on Swift was new to me; I thought it almost matchless. Not that by any means I always agree with Mr. Thackeray’s opinions, but his force, his penetration, his pithy simplicity, his eloquence,—his manly sonorous eloquence—command entire admiration.... Against his errors I protest, were it treason to do so. I was present at the Fielding lecture: the hour spent in listening to it was a painful hour. That Thackeray was wrong in his way of treating Fielding’s character and vices, my conscience told me. After reading that lecture, I trebly felt that he was wrong—dangerously wrong. Had Thackeray owned a son, grown, or growing up, and a son, brilliant but reckless—would he have spoken in that light way of courses that lead to disgrace and the grave? He speaks of it all as if he theorised; as if he had never been called on, in the course of his life, to witness the actual consequences of such failings; as if he had never stood by and seen the issue, the final result of it all. I believe, if only once the prospect of a promising life blasted on the outset by wild ways had passed close under his eyes, he never could have spoken with such levity of what led to its piteous destruction. Had I a brother yet living, I should tremble to let him read Thackeray’s lecture on Fielding. I should hide it away from him. If, in spite of precaution, it should fall into his hands, I should earnestly pray him not to be misled by the voice of the charmer, let him charm never so wisely. Not that for a moment I would have had Thackeray to abuse Fielding, or even Pharisaically to condemn his life; but I do most deeply grieve that it never entered into his heart sadly and nearly to feel the peril of such a career, that he might have dedicated some of his great strength to a potent warning against its adoption by any young man. I believe temptation often assails the finest manly natures; as the pecking sparrow or destructive wasp attacks the sweetest and mellowest fruit, eschewing what is sour and crude. The true lover of his race ought to devote his vigour to guard and protect; he should sweep away every lure with a kind of rage at its treachery. You will think this far too serious, I dare say; but the subject is serious, and one cannot help feeling upon it earnestly.”
CHAPTER XIII.
After her visit to Manchester, she had to return to a reopening of the painful circumstances of the previous winter, as the time drew near for Mr. Nicholls’ departure from Haworth. A testimonial of respect from the parishioners was presented, at a public meeting, to one who had faithfully served them for eight years: and he left the place, and she saw no chance of hearing a word about him in the future, unless it was some second-hand scrap of intelligence, dropped out accidentally by one of the neighbouring clergymen.
I had promised to pay her a visit on my return from London in June; but, after the day was fixed, a letter came from Mr. Brontë, saying that she was suffering from so severe an attack of influenza, accompanied with such excruciating pain in the head, that he must request me to defer my visit until she was better. While sorry for the cause, I did not regret that my going was delayed till the season when the moors would be all glorious with the purple bloom of the heather; and thus present a scene about which she had often spoken to me. So we agreed that I should not come to her before August or September. Meanwhile, I received a letter from which I am tempted to take an extract, as it shows both her conception of what fictitious writing ought to be, and her always kindly interest in what I was doing.
“July 9th, 1853.
“Thank you for your letter; it was as pleasant as a quiet chat, as welcome as spring showers, as reviving as a friend’s visit; in short, it was very like a page of ‘Cranford.’ ... * A thought strikes me. 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 may affect other minds; what blame or what sympathy it may call forth? *Gaskell’s novel was serialized in Dickens’s Household Words (1851-1853). Does no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing soul? In a word, are you never tempted to make your characters more amiable than the Life, by the inclination to assimilate your thoughts to the thoughts of those who always feel kindly, but sometimes fail to see justly? Don’t answer the question; it is not intended to be answered...... Your account of Mrs. Stowe was stimulatingly interesting. I long to see you, to get you to say it, and many other things, all over again. My father continues better. I am better too; but to-day I have a headache again, which will hardly let me write coherently. Give my dear love to M. and M., dear happy girls as they are. You cannot now transmit my message to F. and J. I prized the little wild-newer, —not that I think the sender cares for me; she does not, and cannot, for she does not know me;—but no matter. In my reminiscences she is a person of a certain distinction. I think hers a fine little nature, frank and of genuine promise. I often see her, as she appeared, stepping supreme from the portico towards the carriage, that evening we went to see ‘Twelfth Night.’ I believe in J.’s future; I like what speaks in her movements, and what is written upon her face.”
Towards the latter end of September I went to Haworth. At the risk of repeating something which I have previously said, I will copy out parts of a letter which I wrote at the time.
“It was a dull, drizzly Indian-inky day, all the way on the railroad to Keighley, which is a rising wool-manufacturing town, lying in a hollow between hills—not a pretty hollow, but more what the Yorkshire people call a ‘bottom,’ or ‘botham.’ I left Keighley in a car for Haworth, four miles off—four tough, steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wave-like hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it,—grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to poor, hungry-looking fields;—stone fences everywhere, and trees nowhere. Haworth is a long, straggling village: one steep narrow street—so steep that the flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, that the horses’ feet may have something to cling to, and not slip down backwards; which, if they did, they would soon reach Keighley. But if the horses had cats’ feet and claws, they would do all the better. Well, we (the man, horse, car, and I) clambered up this street, and reached the church dedicated to St. Autest (who was he?); then we turned off into a lane on the left, past the curate’s lodging at the Sexton’s, past the school-house, up to the Parsonage yard-door. I went round the house to the front door, looking to the church;—moors everywhere beyond and above. The crowded grave-yard surrounds the house and small grass enclosure for drying clothes.
“I don’t know that I ever saw a spot more exquisitely clean; the most dainty place for that I ever saw. To be sure, the life is like clockwork. No one comes to the house; nothing disturbs the deep repose; hardly a voice is heard; you catch the ticking of the clock in the kitchen, or the buzzing of a fly in the parlour, all over the house. Miss Brontë sits alone in her parlour; breakfasting with her father in his study at nine o’clock. She helps in the housework; for one of their servants, Tabby, is nearly ninety, and the other only a girl. Then I accompanied her in her walks on the sweeping moors: the heather-bloom had been blighted by a thunderstorm a day or two before, and was all of a livid brown colour, instead of the blaze of purple glory it ought to have been. Oh! those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole world, and the very realms of silence! Home to dinner at two. Mr. Brontë has dinner sent into him. All the small table arrangements had the same dainty simplicity about them. Then we rested, and talked over the clear, bright fire; it is a cold country, and the fires were a pretty warm dancing light all over the house. The parlour has been evidently refurnished within the last few years, since Miss Brontë’s success has enabled her to have a little more money to spend. Everything fits into, and is in harmony with, the idea of a country parsonage, possessed by people of very moderate means. The prevailing colour of the room is crimson, to make a warm setting for the cold grey landscape without. There is her likeness by Richmond, and an engraving from Lawrence’s picture of Thackeray; and two recesses, on each side of the high, narrow, old-fashioned mantelpiece, filled with books,—books given to her, books she has bought, and which tell of her individual pursuits and tastes; not standard books.
“She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw; and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals; (‘stippling,’ don’t the artists call it?) every little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.
“But now to return to our quiet hour of rest after dinner. I soon observed that her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation, if a chair was out of its place; everything was arranged with delicate regularity. We talked over the old times of her childhood; of her elder sister’s (Maria’s) death,—just like that of Helen Burns in ‘Jane Eyre;’ of those strange, starved days at school; of the desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way,—writing or drawing; of her weakened eyesight, which prevented her doing anything for two years, from the age of seventeen to nineteen; of her being a governess; of her going to Brussels; whereupon I said I disliked Lucy Snowe, and we discussed M. Paul Emanuel; and I told her of—’s admiration of ‘Shirley,’ which pleased her, for the character of Shirley was meant for her sister Emily, about whom she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans,—great—grand—daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth. One day, Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil-painting, done by her brother, of herself,—a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen,—and the two other sisters, girls of sixteen and fourteen, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes. . . . . Emily had a great dog,—half mastiff, half bull-dog,—so savage, &c. . . . . This dog went to her funeral, walking side by side with her father; and then, to the day of its death, it slept at her room door, snuffing under it, and whining every morning.
“We have generally had another walk before tea, which is at six; at half-past eight, prayers; and by nine, all the household are in bed, except ourselves. We sit up together till ten, or past; and after I go, I hear Miss Brontë come down and walk up and down the room for an hour or so.”
Copying this letter has brought the days of that pleasant visit very clear before me,—very sad in their clearness. We were so happy together; we were so full of interest in each other’s subjects. The day seemed only too short for what we had to say and to hear. I understood her life the better for seeing the place where it had been spent—where she had loved and suffered. Mr. Brontë was a most courteous host; and when he was with us,—at breakfast in his study, or at tea in Charlotte’s parlour,—he had a sort of grand and stately way of describing past times, which tallied well with his striking appearance. He never seemed quite to have lost the feeling that Charlotte was a child to be guided and ruled, when she was present; and she herself submitted to this with a quiet docility that half amused, half astonished me. But when she had to leave the room, then all his pride in her genius and fame came out. He eagerly listened to everything I could tell him of the high admiration I had at any time heard expressed for her works. He would ask for certain speeches over and over again, as if he desired to impress them on his memory.
I remember two or three subjects of the conversations which she and I held in the evenings, besides those alluded to in my letter.
I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in “Villette” was so exactly like what I had experienced, —vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, &c. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep,—wondering what it was like or how it would be,—till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened. I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it.
She made many inquiries as to Mrs. Stowe’s personal appearance; and it evidently harmonised well with some theory of hers, to hear that the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was small and slight. It was another theory of hers, that no mixtures of blood produced such fine characters, mentally and morally, as the Scottish and English.
I recollect, too, her saying how accutely she dreaded a charge of plagiarism, when, after she had written “Jane Eyre,” she read the thrilling effect of the mysterious scream at midnight in Mrs. Marsh’s story of the “Deformed.” She also said that, when she read the “Neighbours,” she thought every one would fancy that she must have taken her conception of Jane Eyre’s character from that of “Francesca,” the narrator of Miss Bremer’s story.4 For my own part, I cannot see the slightest resemblance between the two characters, and so I told her; but she persisted in saying that Francesca was Jane Eyre married to a good-natured “Bear” of a Swedish surgeon.
We went, not purposely, but accidentally, to see various poor people in our distant walks. From one we had borrowed an umbrella; in the house of another we had taken shelter from a rough September storm. In all these cottages, her quiet presence was known. At three miles from her home, the chair was dusted for her, with a kindly “Sit ye down, Miss Brontë;” and she knew what absent or ailing members of the family to inquire after. Her quiet, gentle words, few though they might be, were evidently grateful to those Yorkshire ears. Their welcome to her, though rough and curt, was sincere and hearty.
We talked about the different courses through which life ran. She said, in her own composed manner, as if she had accepted the theory as a fact, that she believed some were appointed beforehand to sorrow and much disappointment; that it did not fall to the lot of all—as Scripture told us—to have their lines fall in pleasant places; that it was well for those who had rougher paths, to perceive that such was God’s will concerning them, and try to moderate their expectations, leaving hope to those of a different doom, and seeking patience and resignation as the virtues they were to cultivate. I took a different view: I thought that human lots were more equal than she imagined; that to some happiness and sorrow came in strong patches of light and shadow, (so to speak,) while in the lives of others they were pretty equally blended throughout. She smiled, and shook her head, and said she was trying to school herself against ever anticipating any pleasure; that it was better to be brave and submit faithfully; there was some good reason, which we should know in time, why sorrow and disappointment were to be the lot of some on earth. It was better to acknowledge this, and face out the truth in a religious faith.
In connection with this conversation, she named a little abortive plan which I had not heard of till then; how, in the previous July, she had been tempted to join some friends (a married couple and their child)cl in an excursion to Scotland. They set out joyfully; she with especial gladness, for Scotland was a land which had its roots deep down in her imaginative affections, and the glimpse of two days at Edinburgh was all she had as yet seen of it. But, at the first stage after Carlisle, the little yearling child was taken with a slight indisposition; the anxious parents fancied that strange diet disagreed with it, and hurried back to their Yorkshire home as eagerly as, two or three days before, they had set their faces northward, in hopes of a month’s pleasant ramble.
We parted with many intentions, on both sides, of renewing very frequently the pleasure we had had in being together. We agreed that when she wanted bustle, or when I wanted quiet, we were to let each other know, and exchange visits as occasion required.
I was aware that she had a great anxiety on her mind at this time; and being acquainted with its nature, I could not but deeply admire the patient docility which she displayed in her conduct towards her father.
Soon after I left Haworth, she went on a visit to Miss Wooler, who was then staying at Hornsea. The time passed quietly and happily with this friend, whose society was endeared to her by every year.
To Miss Wooler.
“Dec. 12th, 1853.
“I wonder how you are spending these long winter evenings. Alone, probably, like me. The thought often crosses me, as I sit by myself, how pleasant it would be if you lived within a walking distance, and I could go to you sometimes, or have you to come and spend a day and night with me. Yes; I did enjoy that week at Hornsea, and I look forward to spring as the period when you will fulfil your promise of coming to visit me. I fear you must be very solitary at Hornsea. How hard to some people of the world it would seem to live your life! how utterly impossible to live it with a serene spirit and an unsoured disposition! It seems wonderful to me, because you are not, like Mrs.—, phlegmatic and impenetrable, but received from nature feelings of the very finest edge. Such feelings, when they are locked up, sometimes damage the mind and temper. They don’t with you. It must be partly principle, partly self-discipline, which keeps you as you are.”
Of course, 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 not felt it wrong to use. Miss Brontë passed the winter of 1853-4 in a solitary and anxious manner. But the great conqueror Time was slowly achieving his victory over strong prejudice and human resolve. By degrees Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter’s marriage.5
There is one other letter, addressed to Mr. Dobell, which developes the intellectual side of her character, before we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife, and in the too short, almost perfect, happiness of her nine months of wedded life.
“Haworth, near Keighley,
“Feb. 3rd, 1854.
“My dear Sir,—I can hardly tell you how glad I am to have an opportunity of explaining that taciturnity to which you allude. Your letter came at a period of danger and care, when my father was very ill, and I could not leave his bedside. I answered no letters at that time, and yours was one of three or four that, when leisure returned to me, and I came to consider their purport, it seemed to me such that the time was passed for answering them, and I laid them finally aside. If you remember, you asked me to go to London; it was too late either to go or to decline. I was sure you had left London. One circumstance you mentioned—your wife’s illness—which I have thought of many a time, and wondered whether she is better. In your present note you do not refer to her, but I trust her health has long ere now been quite restored.
“ ‘Balder’ arrived safely.cm I looked at him, before cutting his leaves, with singular pleasure. Remembering well his elder brother, the potent ‘Roman,’ it was natural to give a cordial welcome to a fresh scion of the same house and race. I have read him. He impressed me thus: he teems with power; I found in him a wild wealth of life, but I thought his favourite and favoured child would bring his sire trouble—would make his heart ache. It seemed to me, that his strength and beauty were not so much those of Joseph, the pillar of Jacob’s age, as of the Prodigal Son, who troubled his father, though he always kept his love.
“How is it that while the first-born of genius often brings honour, the second as almost often proves a source of depression and care? I could almost prophesy that your third will atone for any anxiety inflicted by this his immediate predecessor.
“There is power in that character of ‘Balder,’ and to me a certain horror. Did you mean it to embody, along with force, any of the special defects of the artistic character? It seems to me that those defects were never thrown out in stronger lines. I did not and could not think you meant to offer him as your cherished ideal of the true, great poet; I regarded him as a vividly-coloured picture of inflated self-esteem, almost frantic aspiration; of a nature that has made a Moloch of intellect—offered up, in pagan fires, the natural affections—sacrificed the heart to the brain. Do we not all know that true greatness is simple, self-oblivious, prone to unambitious, unselfish attachments? I am certain you feel this truth in your heart of hearts.
“But if the critics err now (as yet I have seen none of their lucubrations), you shall one day set them right in the second part of ‘Balder.’ You shall show them that you too know—better, perhaps, than they—that the truly great man is too sincere in his affections to grudge a sacrifice; too much absorbed in his work to talk loudly about it; too intent on finding the best way to accomplish what he undertakes to think great things of himself—the instrument. And if God places seeming impediments in his way—if his duties sometimes seem to hamper his powers—he feels keenly, perhaps writhes, under the slow torture of hindrance and delay; but if there be a true man’s heart in his breast, he can bear, submit, wait patiently.
“Whoever speaks to me of ‘Balder’—though I live too retired a life to come often in the way of comment—shall be answered according to your suggestion and my own impression. Equity demands that you should be your own interpreter. Goodbye for the present, and believe me,
“Faithfully and gratefully,
“CHARLOTTE BRONTË.
“Sydney Dobell, Esq.”
A letter to her Brussels schoolfellow gives an idea of the external course of things during this winter.
“March 8th.
“I was very glad to see your handwriting again. It is, I believe, a year since I heard from you. Again and again you have recurred to my thoughts lately, and I was beginning to have some sad presages as to the cause of your silence. Your letter happily does away with all these; it brings, on the whole, glad tidings both of your papa, mama, your sisters, and last, but not least, your dear respected English self.
“My dear father has borne the severe winter very well, a circumstance for which I feel the more thankful as he had many weeks of very precarious health last summer, following an attack from which he suffered in June, and which for a few hours deprived him totally of sight, though neither his mind, speech, nor even his powers of motion were in the least affected. I can hardly tell you how thankful I was, when, after that dreary and almost despairing interval of utter darkness, some gleam of daylight became visible to him once more. I had feared that paralysis had seized the optic nerve. A sort of mist remained for a long time; and, indeed, his vision is not yet perfectly clear, but he can read, write, and walk about, and he preaches twice every Sunday, the curate only reading the prayers. You can well understand how earnestly I wish and pray that sight may be spared him to the end; he so dreads the privation of blindness. His mind is just as strong and active as ever, and politics interest him as they do your papa. The Czar, the war, the alliance between France and England—into all these things he throws himself heart and soul; they seem to carry him back to his comparatively young days, and to renew the excitement of the last great European struggle. Of course my father’s sympathies (and mine too) are all with Justice and Europe, against Tyranny and Russia.6
“Circumstanced as I have been, you will comprehend that I have had neither the leisure nor the inclination to go from home much during the past year. I spent a week with Mrs. Gaskell in the spring, and a fortnight with some other friends more recently, and that includes the whole of my visiting since I saw you last. My life is, indeed, very uniform and retired—more so than is quite healthful either for mind or body; yet I find reason for often-renewed feelings of gratitude, in the sort of support which still comes and cheers me on from time to time. My health, though not unbroken, is, I sometimes fancy, rather stronger on the whole than it was three years ago: headache and dyspepsia are my worst ailments. Whether I shall come up to town this season for a few days I do not yet know; but if I do, I shall hope to call in P Place.”
In April she communicated the fact of her engagement to Miss Wooler.
“Haworth, April 12th.
“My dear Miss Wooler,—The truly kind interest which you have always taken in my affairs makes me feel that it is due to you to transmit an early communication on a subject respecting which I have already consulted you more than once. I must tell you then that, since I wrote last, papa’s mind has gradually come round to a view very different to that which he once took; and that after some correspondence, and as the result of a visit Mr. Nicholls paid here about a week ago, it was agreed that he was to resume the curacy of Haworth, as soon as papa’s present assistant is provided with a situation, and in due course of time he is to be received as an inmate into this house.
“It gives me unspeakable content to see that now my father has once admitted this new view of the case, he dwells on it very complacently. In all arrangements, his convenience and seclusion will be scrupulously respected. Mr. Nicholls seems deeply to feel the wish to comfort and sustain his declining years. I think from Mr. Nicholls’ character I may depend on this not being a mere transitory impulsive feeling, but rather that it will be accepted steadily as a duty, and discharged tenderly as an office of affection. The destiny which Providence in His goodness and wisdom seems to offer me will not, I am aware, be generally regarded as brilliant, but I trust I see in it some germs of real happiness. I trust the demands of both feeling and duty will be in some measure reconciled by the step in contemplation. It is Mr. Nicholls’ wish that the marriage should take place this summer; he urges the month of July, but that seems very soon.
“When you write to me, tell me how you are ... I have now decidedly declined the visit to London; the ensuing three months will bring me abundance of occupation; I could not afford to throw away a month . . . Papa has just got a letter from the good and dear bishop, which has touched and pleased us much; it expresses so cordial an approbation of Mr. Nicholls’ return to Haworth (respecting which he was consulted), and such kind gratification at the domestic arrangements which are to ensue. It seems his penetration discovered the state of things when he was here in June 1853.”
She expressed herself in other letters, as thankful to One who had guided her through much difficulty, and much distress and perplexity of mind; and yet she felt what most thoughtful women do, who marry when the first flush of careless youth is over, that there was a strange, half-sad feeling in making announcements of an engagement—for cares and fears came mingled inextricably with hopes. One great relief to her mind at this time was derived from the conviction that her father took a positive pleasure in all the thoughts about and preparations for her wedding. He was anxious that things should be expedited, and was much interested in every preliminary arrangement for the reception of Mr. Nicholls into the Parsonage as his daughter’s husband. This step was rendered necessary by Mr. Brontë’s great age and failing sight, which made it a paramount obligation on so dutiful a daughter as Charlotte, to devote as much time and assistance as ever in attending to his wants. Mr. Nicholls, too, hoped that he might be able to add some comfort and pleasure by his ready presence, on any occasion when the old clergyman might need his services.
At the beginning of May, Miss Brontë left home to pay three visits before her marriage. The first was to us. She only remained three days, as she had to go to the neighbourhood of Leeds, there to make such purchases as were required for her marriage. Her preparations, as she said, could neither be expensive nor extensive; consisting chiefly in a modest replenishing of her wardrobe, some re-papering and re-painting in the Parsonage; and, above all, converting the small flagged passage-room, hitherto used only for stores (which was behind her sitting-room), into a study for her husband. On this idea, and plans for his comfort, as well as her father’s, her mind dwelt a good deal; and we talked them over with the same unwearying happiness which, I suppose, all women feel in such discussions—especially when money considerations call for that kind of contrivance which Charles Lamb speaks of in his “Essay on Old China,” as forming so great an addition to the pleasure of obtaining a thing at last.
“Haworth, May 22nd.
“Since I came home I have been very busy stitching: the little new room is got into order, and the green and white curtains are up; they exactly suit the papering, and look neat and clean enough. I had a letter a day or two since, announcing that Mr. Nicholls comes to-morrow. I feel anxious about him; more anxious on one point than I dare quite express to myself. It seems he has again been suffering sharply from his rheumatic affection. I hear this not from himself, but from another quarter. He was ill while I was in Manchester and B—. He uttered no complaint to me; dropped no hint on the subject. Alas! he was hoping he had got the better of it, and I know how this contradiction of his hopes will sadden him. For unselfish reasons he did so earnestly wish this complaint might not become chronic. I fear—I fear; but if he is doomed to suffer, so much the more will he need care and help. Well! come what may, God help and strengthen both him and me! I look forward to to-morrow with a mixture of impatience and anxiety.”
Mr. Brontë had a slight illness which alarmed her much. Besides, all the weight of care involved in the household preparations pressed on the bride in this case—not unpleasantly, only to the full occupation of her time. She was too busy to unpack her wedding dresses for several days after they arrived from Halifax; yet not too busy to think of arrangements by which Miss Wooler’s journey to be present at the marriage could be facilitated.
“I write to Miss Wooler to-day. Would it not be better, dear, if you and she could arrange to come to Haworth on the same day, arrive at Keighley by the same train; then I could order the cab to meet you at the station, and bring you on with your luggage? In this hot weather walking would be quite out of the question, either for you or for her; and I know she would persist in doing it if left to herself, and arrive half killed. I thought it better to mention this arrangement to you first, and then, if you liked it, you could settle the time, &c. with Miss Wooler, and let me know. Be sure and give me timely information, that I may write to the Devonshire Arms about the cab.
“Mr. Nicholls is a kind, considerate fellow. With all his masculine faults, he enters into my wishes about having the thing done quietly, in a way that makes me grateful; and if nobody interferes and spoils his arrangements, he will manage it so that not a soul in Haworth shall be aware of the day. He is so thoughtful, too, about ‘the ladies,’—that is, you and Miss Wooler. Anticipating, too, the very arrangements I was going to propose to him about providing for your departure, &c. He and Mr. S—come to—the evening before; write me a note to let me know they are there; precisely at eight in the morning they will be in the church, and there we are to meet them. Mr. and Mrs. Grant are asked to the breakfast, not to the ceremony.”
It was fixed that the marriage was to take place on the 29th of June. Her two friends arrived at Haworth Parsonage the day before; and the long summer afternoon and evening were spent by Charlotte in thoughtful arrangements for the morrow, and for her father’s comfort during her absence from home. When all was finished—the trunk packed, the morning’s breakfast arranged, the wedding-dress laid out,—just at bedtime, Mr. Brontë announced his intention of stopping at home while the others went to church. What was to be done? Who was to give the bride away? There were only to be the officiating clergyman, the bride and bridegroom, the bridesmaid, and Miss Wooler present. The Prayer-book was referred to; and there it was seen that the Rubric enjoins that the Minister shall receive “the woman from her father’s or friend’s hands,” and that nothing is specified as to the sex of the “friend.” So Miss Wooler, ever kind in emergency, volunteered to give her old pupil away.
The news of the wedding had slipt abroad before the little party came out of church, and many old and humble friends were there, seeing her look “like a snow-drop,” as they say. Her dress was white embroidered muslin, with a lace mantle, and white bonnet trimmed with green leaves, which perhaps might suggest the resemblance to the pale wintry flower.
Mr. Nicholls and she went to visit his friends and relations in Ireland; and made a tour by Killarney, Glengariff, Tarbert, Tralee, and Cork, seeing scenery, of which she says, “some parts exceeded all I had ever imagined.” .... “I must say I like my new relations. My dear husband, too, appears in a new light in his own country. More than once I have had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides. Some of the old servants and followers of the family tell me I am a most fortunate person; for that I have got one of the best gentlemen in the country.... I trust I feel thankful to God for having enabled me to make what seems a right choice; and I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honourable man.”
Henceforward the sacred doors of home are closed upon her married life. We, her loving friends, standing outside, caught occasional glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling of the gladness within; and we looked at each other, and gently said, “After a hard and long struggle—after many cares and many bitter sorrows—she is tasting happiness now!” We thought of the slight astringencies of her character, and how they would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace. We remembered her trials, and were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. Those who saw her, saw an outward change in her look, telling of inward things.cn And we thought, and we hoped, and we prophesied, in our great love and reverence.
But God’s ways are not as our ways!
Hear some of the low murmurs of happiness we, who listened, heard:—
“I really seem to have had scarcely a spare moment since that dim quiet June morning, when you, E—, and myself all walked down to Haworth Church. Not that I have been wearied or oppressed; but the fact is, my time is not my own now; somebody else wants a good portion of it, and says, ‘we must do so and so.’ We do so and so, accordingly; and it generally seems the right thing..... We have had many callers from a distance, and latterly some little occupation in the way of preparing for a small village entertainment. Both Mr. Nicholls and myself wished much to make some response for the hearty welcome and general goodwill shown by the parishioners on his return; accordingly, the Sunday and day scholars and teachers, the church-ringers, singers, &c., to the number of five hundred, were asked to tea and supper in the School-room. They seemed to enjoy it much, and it was very pleasant to see their happiness. One of the villagers, in proposing my husband’s health, described him as a ‘consistent Christian and a kind gendanan’ I own the words touched me deeply, and I thought (as I know you would have thought had you been present) that to merit and win such a character was better than to earn either wealth, or fame, or power. I am disposed to echo that high but simple eulogium. . . . . My dear father was not well when we returned from Ireland. I am, however, most thankful to say that he is better now. May God preserve him to us yet for some years! The wish for his continued life, together with a certain solicitude for his happiness and health, seems, I scarcely know why, even stronger in me now than before I was married. 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 has secured papa good aid in his old age.”
“September 19th.
“Yes! I am thankful to say my husband is in improved health and spirits. It makes me content and grateful to hear him from time to time avow his happiness in the brief, plain phrase of sincerity. My own life is more occupied than it used to be: I have not so much time for thinking: I am obliged to be more practical, for my dear Arthur is a very practical, as well as a very punctual and methodical man. Every morning he is in the National School by nine o’clock; he gives the children religious instruction till half-past ten. Almost every afternoon he pays visits amongst the poor parishioners. Of course, he often finds a little work for his wife to do, and I hope she is not sorry to help him. I believe it is not bad for me that his bent should be so wholly towards matters of life and active usefulness; so little inclined to the literary and contemplative. As to his continued affection and kind attentions, it does not become me to say much of them; but they neither change nor diminish.”
Her friend and bridesmaid came to pay them a visit in October. I was to have gone also, but I allowed some little obstacle to intervene, to my lasting regret.
“I say nothing about the war; but when I read of its horrors, I cannot help thinking that it is one of the greatest curses that ever fell upon mankind. I trust it may not last long, for it really seems to me that no glory to be gained can compensate for the sufferings which must be endured. This may seem a little ignoble and unpatriotic; but I think that as we advance towards middle age, nobleness and patriotism have a different signification to us to that which we accept while young.
“You kindly inquire after Papa. He is better, and seems to gain strength as the weather gets colder; indeed, of late years his health has always been better in winter than in summer. We are all indeed pretty well; and, for my own part, it is long since I have known such comparative immunity from headache, &c., as during the last three months. My life is different from what it used to be. May God make me thankful for it! I have a good, kind, attached husband; and every day my own attachment to him grows stronger.”
Late in the autumn, Sir James Kay Shuttleworth crossed the border-hills that separate Lancashire from Yorkshire, and spent two or three days with them.
About this time, Mr. Nicholls was offered a living of much greater value than his curacy at Haworth, and in many ways the proposal was a very advantageous one; but he felt himself bound to Haworth as long as Mr. Brontë lived. Still, this offer gave his wife great and true pleasure, as a proof of the respect in which her husband was held.
“Nov. 29.
“I intended to have written a line yesterday, but just as I was sitting down for the purpose, Arthur called to me to take a walk. We set off, not intending to go far; but, though wild and cloudy, it was fair in the morning; when we had got about half a mile on the moors, Arthur suggested the idea of the waterfall; after the melted snow, he said, it would be fine. I had often wished to see it in its winter power,—so we walked on. It was fine indeed; a perfect torrent racing over the rocks, white and beautiful! It began to rain while we were watching it, and we returned home under a streaming sky. However, I enjoyed the walk inexpressibly, and would not have missed the spectacle on any account.”
She did not achieve this walk of seven or eight miles, in such weather, with impunity. She began to shiver soon after her return home, in spite of every precaution, and had a bad lingering sorethroat and cold, which hung about her, and made her thin and weak.
“Did I tell you that our poor little Flossy is dead?co She drooped for a single day, and died quietly in the night without pain. The loss even of a dog was very saddening; yet, perhaps, no dog ever had a happier life, or an easier death.”
On Christmas-day she and her husband walked to the poor old woman (whose calf she had been set to seek in former and less happy days), carrying with them a great spice-cake to make glad her heart. On Christmas-day many a humble meal in Haworth was made more plentiful by her gifts.
Early in the new year (1855), Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls went to visit Sir James Kay Shuttleworth at Gawthorpe. They only remained two or three days, but it so fell out that she increased her lingering cold, by a long walk over damp ground in thin shoes.
Soon after her return, she was attacked by new sensations of perpetual nausea, and ever-recurring faintness. After this state of things had lasted for some time, she yielded to Mr. Nicholl’s wish that a doctor should be sent for. He came, and assigned a natural cause for her miserable indisposition;7 a little patience, and all would go right. She who was ever patient in illness, tried hard to bear up and bear on. But the dreadful sickness increased and increased, till the very sight of food occasioned nausea. “A wren would have starved on what she ate during those last six weeks,” says one. Tabby’s health had suddenly and utterly given way, and she died in this time of distress and anxiety respecting the last daughter of the house she had served long. Martha tenderly waited on her mistress, and from time to time tried to cheer her with the thought of the baby that was coming. “I dare say I shall be glad sometime,” she would say; “but I am so ill—so weary—” Then she took to her bed, too weak to sit up. From that last couch she wrote two notes—in pencil. The first, which has no date, is addressed to her own “Dear Nell.”
“I must write one line out of my dreary bed. The news of M——’s probable recovery came like a ray of joy to me. I am not going to talk of my sufferings—it would be useless and painful. I want to give you an assurance, which I know will comfort you—and that is, that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best earthly comfort that ever woman had. His patience never fails, and it is tried by sad days and broken nights. Write and tell me about Mrs.—’s case; how long was she ill, and in what way? Papa—thank God!—is better. Our poor old Tabby is dead and buried. Give my kind love to Miss Wooler. May God comfort and help you.
“C. B. NICHOLLS.”
The other—also in faint, faint pencil marks—was to her Brussels schoolfellow.
“Feb. 15th.
“A few lines of acknowledgment your letter shall have, whether well or ill. At present I am confined to my bed with illness, and have been so for three weeks. Up to this period, since my marriage, I have had excellent health. My husband and I live at home with my father; of course, I could not leave him. He is pretty well, better than last summer. No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness. Deeply I sympathise in all you tell me about Dr.W and your excellent mother’s anxiety. I trust he will not risk another operation. I cannot write more now; for I am much reduced and very weak. God bless you all.—Yours affectionately,
“C. B. NICHOLLS.”
I do not think she ever wrote a line again. Long days and longer nights went by; still the same relentless nausea and faintness, and still borne on in patient trust. About the third week in March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband’s woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. “Oh!” she whispered forth, “I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.”
Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.
CHAPTER XIV.
I have always been much struck with a passage in Mr. Forster’s Life of Goldsmith.cp Speaking of the scene after his death, the writer says:—
“The staircase of Brick Court is said to have been filled with mourners, the reverse of domestic; women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable.”
This came into my mind when I heard of some of the circumstances attendant on Charlotte’s funeral.
Few beyond that circle of hills knew that she, whom the nations praised far off, lay dead that Easter morning. Of kith and kin she had more in the grave to which she was soon to be borne, than among the living. The two mourners, stunned with their great grief, desired not the sympathy of strangers. One member out of most of the families in the parish was bidden to the funeral; and it became an act of self-denial in many a poor household to give up to another the privilege of paying their last homage to her; and those who were excluded from the formal train of mourners thronged the churchyard and church, to see carried forth, and laid beside her own people, her whom, not many months ago, they had looked at as a pale white bride, entering on a new life with trembling happy hope.
Among those humble friends who passionately grieved over the dead, was a village girl who had been seduced some little time before, but who had found a holy sister in Charlotte. She had sheltered her with her help, her counsel, her strengthening words; had ministered to her needs in her time of trial. Bitter, bitter was the grief of this poor young woman, when she heard that her friend was sick unto death, and deep is her mourning until this day. A blind girl, living some four miles from Haworth, loved Mrs. Nicholls so dearly that, with many cries and entreaties, she implored those about her to lead her along the roads, and over the moor-paths, that she might hear the last solemn words, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Such were the mourners over Charlotte Brontë’s grave.
I have little more to say. If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debateable land. One who knew her long and well,—the “Mary” of this Life—writes thus of her dead friend:—
“She thought much of her duty, and had loftier and clearer notions of it than most people, and held fast to them with more success. It was done, it seems to me, with much more difficulty than people have of stronger nerves, and better fortunes. All her life was but labour and pain; and she never threw down the burden for the sake of present pleasure. I don’t know what use you can make of all I have said. I have written it with the strong desire to obtain appreciation for her. Yet, what does it matter? She herself appealed to the world’s judgment for her use of some of the faculties she had,—not the best,—but still the only ones she could turn to strangers’ benefit. They heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of her labours, and then found out she was much to be blamed for possessing such faculties. Why ask for a judgment on her from such a world?”
But I turn from the critical, unsympathetic public,—inclined to judge harshly because they have only seen superficially and not thought deeply. 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.
THE END.
ENDNOTES
Volume I
CHAPTER I
1 (p. 14) A.D. sexcentissimo: This inscription suggests that a monastic community was established in Haworth in 600. Were this accurate, the community would have predated the arrival of Christianity in the region in the generally accepted year of 627, when the Roman missionary Paulinus, later archbishop of York, converted the Anglo-Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria.
2 (p. 15) curate at Haworth: Thomas Dunham Whitaker (1759-1821), vicar of Blackburn and local antiquarian, casts doubt on the antiquity of the Haworth chapel by suggesting that a stone mason mis-read the original inscription. This debate is important to Gaskell because it allows her to establish the independent character of the locals and to explain the grounds for their unusual right of refusal of curates.
CHAPTER II
1 (p. 20) religious dictations of such men as Laud: William Laud (1573-1645), archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, tried to impose a uniform standard of worship throughout England in an effort to deter religious dissent. Dissenters were members of sects that worshiped outside of the Church of England. These sects were historically well established in the northern manufacturing districts, Yorkshire among them. Gaskell, a Unitarian, was herself a dissenter.
2 (p. 20) Commonwealth men: Gaskell turns social historian and explains the religious and economic forces that induced Yorkshire to support the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell, which deposed and executed Charles I in 1649, and set about overturning the religious and trading restrictions the Stuarts had imposed.
3 (p. 21) persecuting days of Charles II: Upon his restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles II attempted to rein in religious dissent with the Act of Uniformity (1662), which required all clergy to take an oath that they would adhere to Anglican doctrine as established in The Book of Common Prayer.
4 (p. 21) “Life of Oliver Heywood”: Joseph Hunter wrote The Rise of the Old Dissent, Exemplified in the Life of Oliver Heywood, One of the Founders of the Presbyterian Congregations in the County of York (1842).
5 (p. 26) scene of the ministrations of the Rev. William Grimshaw: The Reverend William Grimshaw (1708-1763), perpetual curate of Haworth from 1742 until his death and a major Evangelical figure, is credited with revitalizing the spiritual life of the town by introducing the Evangelical Revival. The Evangelical party comprised reform-minded clergy within the Church of England who believed in a religion based on personal revelation and social responsibility.
6 (p. 26) Newton, Cowper’s friend: John Newton (1725-1807), a slave-ship captain who underwent a conversion and became an Evangelical clergyman, wrote Memoirs of the Life of the LateWilliam Grimshaw (1825). Newton and the poet William Cowper (1731-1800) collaborated on the Olney Hymns (1779). Cowper, a proto-Romantic, is best known for the expressive style of his poetry and its theme of religious doubt.
7 (p. 27) fervour of a Wesley... fanaticism of a Whitefield: John Wesley (1703-1791) and George Whitefield (1714-1770) led Methodism, a religious movement that valued personal spiritualism over ritualistic devotion, from within the Anglican Church. Methodists adopted open-air preaching in order to reach marginalized members of the community. Doctrinal differences ultimately led to the severing of the relationship between Whitefield, a strict Calvinist who believed in predestination, and Wesley, a follower of Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, who maintained that individuals could effect their own salvation. Methodism’s formal break with the established church occurred in 1795.
8 (p. 30) Dr. Scoresby: William Scoresby (1789-1857) was an Arctic explorer before he entered the Anglican ministry and later became the vicar of Bradford (1839-1847); he was a source of local history and local color for Gaskell.
9 (p. 32) circumstances which I have described: Samuel Redhead’s son-in-law disputed Gaskell’s version of events. Gaskell responded in the third edition by appending testimony from two eyewitnesses supporting her account.
CHAPTER III
1 (p. 34) Patrick Brontë... County Down in Ireland: For Patrick Brontë’s biography, see John Lock and W T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, 1777-1861 (London: Nelson, 1965), and Barker, The Brontës; see “For Further Reading.”
2 (p. 35) military duties which they had to perform: During the period 1803-1805 Napoleon was gathering forces at Boulogne with the intention of invading England, a threat that ended with Nelson’s victory off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. One of Patrick Brontë’s Cambridge classmates, Lord Palmerston (1784—1865), later became prime minister (1855-1858, 1859-1865).
3 (p. 39) of Mr. Brontë’s composing: Patrick Brontë was a published author at the time of his marriage. He had published two collections of moral poems, Cottage Poems (1811) and the Rural Minstrel (1813), as well as the didactic romances Cottage in the Wood (1815) and The Maid of Killarney (1818). He also weighed in on religious and social issues of the day by contributing to regional newspapers throughout his career.
4 (p. 39) “Advice to a Lady”: George, Baron Lyttelton’s Advice to a Lady (1733) was typical of eighteenth-century conduct literature for girls. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) summarized and lampooned it: “Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet; / In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.”
5 (p. 43) “potatoes for their dinner”: The false claim that Patrick Brontë enforced a vegetarian diet and the charge of wastefulness, to which servants Nancy and Sarah Garrs objected, were retracted in the third edition. Gaskell wanted only to show that “no stingy motive” induced Patrick to deny his children meat (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 368). This and much other disputed information about life at the parsonage came from the nurse who attended Mrs. Brontë in her final illness.
6 (p. 44) the ideas of Rousseau and Mr. Day: Political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was also an educational theorist. In Émile (1762) he advocated educating boys to exercise the independence accorded them by nature rather than making them conform to their social station; girls, however, were to be molded with the exclusive purpose of pleasing their future partners. Rousseau influenced Thomas Day (1748-1789), whose History of Sandford and Merton (1783-1789) was one of the first novels written for children.
7 (p. 45) reduced to the condition of stools: The catalogue of Patrick’s “volcanic wrath,” which included burning his children’s boots, shredding his wife’s silk dresses, burning a hearthrug, and sawing the backs off chairs was omitted, at Patrick’s request, in the third edition.
8 (p. 45) days of the Luddites: The Luddite riots (1811-1816) were staged by organized gangs of cloth workers who roamed the manufacturing districts destroying the machinery they felt was displacing them from their jobs. Brontë would set Shirley (1849) amid this uprising.
CHAPTER IV
1 (p. 53) William Carus Wilson: The Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791-1859), a Calvinist Evangelical who was the model for Jane Eyre’s Reverend Brocklehurst, established the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Like his fictional counterpart, Carus Wilson wrote devotional tracts full of fire and brimstone for children. He was a polarizing figure. A vitriolic public debate erupted with the publication of the Life about the degree of culpability he had, if any, in his management of Cowan Bridge (see Wise and Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, vol. 4, appendix 1).
2 (p. 53) certain sum was raised annually in subscription: Subscribers to the school included such prominent Evangelicals as moralist Hannah More and abolitionist William Wilberforce.
3 (p. 59) Miss Temple, the superintendent: Miss Ann Evans (1792-1856) was superintendent of the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Evans died before the publication of the Life, but her husband and a Miss Andrews, who was the model for Miss Scatcherd in Jane Eyre (1847), came to the defense of William Carus Wilson, who ran the school (see note 1, above).
4 (p. 59) after Maria’s and Elizabeth’s deaths: Charlotte and Emily in fact did not return to the school after their sisters’ deaths. According to school records, they withdrew on June 1, 1825.
CHAPTER V
1 (p. 64) Tabby: Tabitha Aykroyd (the name had various spellings) served the Brontës from her mid-fifties until her death in 1855. For Gaskell, and perhaps for Brontë as well, she embodied England’s folkloric past and Yorkshire superstition. Bessie in Jane Eyre and Martha in Shirley share some of Tabby’s qualities. Aykroyd was a Methodist and a class leader at her chapel.
2 (p. 69) “We then chose who should be chief men in our islands”: The Brontë children’s choice of heroes evidences their Toryism and the degree to which the periodicals their father received informed their worldview. Branwell selects the fictional John Bull, Englishness personified, and the poet Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). Emily chooses literary men: novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and John Gibson Lockhart (1794—1854), contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and later editor of the Quarterly Review. Charlotte picks the Duke of Wellington (see note 3, below), and Christopher North, the fictional persona adopted by John Wilson, editor of Blackwood’s. Anne chooses Lord William Bentinck, the governor-general of Bengal who abolished suttee (self-cremation of a Hindu widow on the funeral pyre of her husband as a mark of her devotion to him). With the exception of Emily, they each choose an eminent physician as well.
3 (p. 69) “Wellington and two sons”: Charlotte’s lifelong hero was Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), the Irish-born career soldier and Tory politician who was made duke of Wellington for his victories over Napoleon, which included the decisive Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Wellington later served as prime minister (1828-1830). The Marquis of Douro and Lord Charles Wellesley (Brontë’s favored persona in her younger years) were Wellington’s two sons.
4 (p. 70) Blackwood’s Magazine: The Leeds Intelligencer (founded 1754) and the Leeds Mercury (founded 1718) were regional newspapers. The character John Bull appeared in a series of satirical Tory pamphlets (1712). Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (founded 1817) was a monthly magazine with a Tory bent that covered literary and political issues.
5 (p. 71) “Friendship’s Offering for 1829”: The reference is to an annual miscellany of poetry, prose, and engravings published by Smith, Elder and Company, later to be Brontë’s publisher.
6 (p. 72) ”the great Catholic question”: The Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the culmination of a series of laws passed beginning in the eighteenth century, lifted most civil restrictions imposed on Catholics and allowed them to stand for Parliament.
CHAPTER VI
1 (p. 78) Miss Woolers, who lived at Roe Head: The four Wooler sisters ran the school Charlotte Brontë and her sisters attended at Roe Head. Charlotte was subsequently employed as a teacher there. The school relocated to Dewsbury Moor in 1837. Margaret Wooler became a lasting friend of Charlotte’s.
2 (p. 81) E.’s home was five miles away: Ellen Nussey (1817-1897), Brontë’s closest friend, lived at Brookroyd House, Birstall, Yorkshire. Some suggest that the Brontë—Nussey correspondence, which forms the basis for much of the Life, results in a one-dimensional portrait of Brontë, who notably did not discuss her literary affairs with Nussey. See the Introduction for a more detailed account of their relationship.
3 (p. 81) (The Rose and Jessie Yorke of “Shirley”): Mary (1817-1893) and Martha (1819-1842) Taylor. The Taylors lived in Gomersal and later at Hunsworth, both in Yorkshire. Brontë met them at Roe Head; they later attended school at the same time in Brussels, where Martha died. Mary was independent and outspoken, and she championed women’s rights. Dismayed by the employment opportunities available to women in England, Mary emigrated to New Zealand in 1845. She destroyed all of Brontë’s letters but the one describing her first visit to the offices of Smith, Elder and Company.
4 (p. 83) “She knew the names of the two ministries... the Reform Bill”: The Reform Bill of 1832 extended enfranchisement by lowering property qualifications for voters and redistributing parliamentary seats from rural areas (known as “rotten” or “pocket” boroughs) controlled by the gentry, to heavily populated urban areas that had previously been underrepresented.
5 (p. 84) ‘Frazer’s Magazine’: A Tory periodical founded in 1830, Fraser’s Magazine was a rival to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.
6 (p. 88) burning of Cartwright’s Mill: In April 1812 more than one hundred Luddites attacked William Cartwright’s mill in Huddersfield, not far from Haworth. Cartwright defended his property with the aid of a few soldiers. Two Luddites were killed. Several weeks later the Luddites murdered local mill owner William Horsfall. Brontë dramatized this incident in Shirley.
7 (p. 89) Mr. Roberson, of Heald’s Hall: Reverend Hammond Roberson (1757-1841) functions almost as a foil for Patrick Brontë, who, though a Tory, was far more tolerant and less doctrinaire in his allegiances than Roberson was. Although Brontë supported the mill owners in the conflict with the Luddites, in other disputes he supported the workers.
CHAPTER VII
1 (pp. 96-97) “J‘arrivait d Haworth... elles auront ce plaisir”: “I arrived at Haworth in perfect safety without the slightest accident or misfortune. My little sisters ran out of the house to meet me as soon as the carriage could be seen, and they embraced me with as much eagerness and pleasure as if I had been away for more than a year. My Papa, my aunt, and the gentleman of whom my brother had spoken, were all assembled in the parlor, and in a little while I went in as well. It is often Heaven’s order that when one loses a pleasure there is another ready to take its place. Just so, I had to leave very dear friends, but I returned to a family as dear and beloved. Likewise, as you were losing me (dare I believe that my departure caused you pain?) you awaited the arrival of your brother and sister. I gave my sisters the apples you kindly sent them; they said that they are certain Miss E. is very amiable and good; all are extremely impatient to see you; I hope that in very few months time they will have that pleasure” (translated by Anne Taranto) .
2 (p. 97) Wordsworth’s and Southey’s poems: Robert Southey (1774-1843) was poet laureate from 1813 until his death. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was considered the founder, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), of the Romantic movement in poetry; Wordsworth became poet laureate upon Southey’s death.
3 (pp 97-98) “mad Methodist Magazines”: The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (founded 1778) and The Lady’s Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770-1848) were publications Mrs. Brontë brought with her from Cornwall when she married. Gaskell includes these examples to show the imaginative legacy Brontë received from her mother.
4 (p. 100) “British Essayists” ... ”The Lounger”: British Essayists (1807-1808) was a compilation by the biographer and prolific editor Alexander Chalmers. Essays of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) appeared in the periodical The Rambler (1750-1752). Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) was editor and chief contributor to the Scottish periodicals The Mirrour (1779-1780) and The Lounger (1785-1787).
5 (p. 103) “read the rest fearlessly”: Brontë’s course of reading for Nussey contains some books that were thought inappropriate for young women, such as Lord Byron’s Cain (1821) and Don Juan (1819-1824), and Shakespeare’s bawdier comedies. This list is a testimony to Patrick Brontë’s liberal attitude toward his daughter’s education, whether from benign neglect, as Gaskell posits, or other motives.
CHAPTER VIII
1 (p. 109) in her place at Miss Wooler’s: The quoted paragraph that follows is taken from Brontë prefatory remarks to the selection of her sisters’ poetry appended to the second edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (1850).
2 (p. 110) duties of the day... tedious and monotonous: Brontë’s fragmentary“ Roe Head Journal,” which Gaskell does not quote from, is more expressive than are her letters to Nussey about her frustration with her current employment and her consequent depression. Brontë registers her anger at being interrupted by a student in a moment of inspiration: “I felt as if I could have written gloriously.... But just then a Dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited” (Barker, ed. The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 39).
3 (p. 110) an event happened... good deal of interest: This anecdote detailing the supposed genesis of Jane Eyre is omitted in the third edition.
4 (p. 112) any other poet: In the third edition Gaskell adds Mary Taylor’s comment that Cowper’s popular poem “The Castaway” was a favorite in the Brontë household. Gaskell’s insistence on the affinity between Brontë and Cowper stems from her desire to find an analogue for Brontë in the mainstream Christian poet who struggled with depression and religious doubt. Brontë does not include Cowper among the “first-rate” poets in the reading list she prepares for Ellen Nussey (see note 4 to volume I, chapter VII).
5 (p. 112) “they fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus:” Tantalus is the Greek mythological figure punished with eternal thirst and hunger for transgressing against the gods; he is thus an emblem of thwarted desire.
6 (p. 117) Coleridge: Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), a minor poet and critic, was the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (endnote 1 to volume I, chapter VII).
7 (p. 117) given by the poet to Mr. Quillinan : Edward Quillinan was Wordsworth’s son-in-law. Gaskell is mistaken about Wordsworth’s estimation of Branwell’s letter. In fact, according to Southey, Wordsworth was “disgusted” by the letter’s “gross flattery” and “abuse of other poets“” and declined to answer it. Why he preserved it is unclear (Southey to Caroline Bowles, March 27, 1837; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 171, note 1).
8 (p. 132) some one having a slight resemblance... in holy orders: Ellen Nussey’s brother, Henry, proposed to Brontë in the spring of 1839. He received a prompt rejection: ”I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose—you would think me romantic and eccentric.... I will never for the sake of... escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy“ (Charlotte Brontë to Henry Nussey, March 5, 1839; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, pp. 185-186).
9 (p. 134) “Anne’s departure”: This refers to Anne’s leaving to be a governess to the Inghams at Blake Hall. She was dismissed within the year
10 (p. 135) engaged as a governess: Charlotte was employed by the Sidgwicks of Stonegappe, near Lothersdale, from May to July 1839. She was responsible for two children aged four and six. Charlotte complained to her sister Emily that Mrs. Sidgwick cared “nothing in the world about me except how to contrive the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me” (Charlotte Brontë to Emily Brontë, June 8, 1839; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 191).
11 (p. 139) the assistance of a curate: William Weightman (1814-1842) was the curate at Haworth for three years (1839-1842). Although Weightman was an integral and beloved member of the parsonage while he served there, Gaskell suppresses almost all information about him, presumably because, in letters Gaskell omits, Charlotte Brontë and Nussey both manifest signs of infatuation with the young curate.
12 (p. 140) his own curate: Brontë’s second proposal of marriage came from David Pryce (sometimes Bryce; 1811-1840), curate to William Hodgson, who was formerly Patrick Brontë’s curate.
13 (p. 143) “drop my subscription to the Jews”: “The Jews” is shorthand for the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809.
CHAPTER IX
1 (p. 146) the “Spectator”: A periodical published by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729), the Spectator (1711-1712) satirized the mores of its times.
2 (p. 148) employed her leisure hours in writing a story: Brontë was writing “Ashworth,” an untitled and incomplete novel. See Christine Alexander, ed., Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 204.
3 (p. 149) “whether his ‘C.T.’ meant Charles Timms or Charlotte Tomkins”: Gaskell, anxious about the letter’s irreverent tone, liberally edits out material without using ellipses, as she does elsewhere, to indicate missing text. Among the comments Gaskell censors is Brontë’s taunting remark on gender anonymity: “Several young gentlemen curl their hair and wear corsets—and several young ladies are excellent whips and by no means despicable jockies,” and her facetious wonder that Hartley Coleridge deigned to read her “demi-semi” novelette (Charlotte Brontë, draft letter to H. Coleridge, December 1840; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 237).
4 (p. 151) “Puseyite or a Hookist:” This is a reference to the followers of Edward Bouverie Pusey and Walter Farquhar Hook, important figures of the Oxford Movement, which advocated a return to formalism in the Anglican Church.
5 (p. 155) “Mr. and Mrs. —?”: Mr. and Mrs. Collins are possibly the models for the abusive marriage portrayed by Anne Brontë in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
CHAPTER X
1 (p. 158) “Mr. and Mrs.—”: Brontë was governess to the White family, Upperwood House, from March to December 1841. She was responsible for two children, aged six and eight. Of her charges Brontë observed: “The children are not such little devils incarnate as the Sidgwicks, but they are over-indulged, and at times hard to manage” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, March 21, 1841; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 248).
CHAPTER XI
1 (p. 170) pensionnat of Madame Héger: Claire Zöe Heger (1804-1890), later fictionalized as Mme. Beck in Villette (1853), was the director of the school Brontë and her sister Emily attended in Brussels. Her husband, Constantin Heger (1809-1896), the model for Paul Emanuel in Villette, was a rhetoric professor at the Athénée Royale, an upper school for boys. In addition to teaching at his wife’s boarding school, he also conducted evening classes for factory workers.
2 (p. 171) and straight returned to his wild Yorkshire village: Actually, Patrick Brontë visited the battlefield at Waterloo and toured Brussels before returning home.
3 (p. 174) whose acquaintance I am glad to have made: Gaskell traveled to Brussels in May 1856 ”to have a look at“ the Hegers as part of her research for the biography (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 271a). During this visit M. Heger shared letters Brontë sent him after her departure from Brussels; they revealed an obsessive attachment to her former teacher that was fueled by the intellectual and imaginative connection they had forged.
4 (pp. 174—175) “”Je ne connais pas personellement M. Héger... appreciée par ses élèves:” Gaskell includes this letter, written by an unidentified correspondent who did not know M. Heger personally, as testimony to his upright character. Gaskell was perhaps anxious to protect M. Heger’s reputation in the event that Brontë’s attachment to him was surmised by readers of the biography. The writer describes M. Heger as a “noble” man of “principle and conscience” who is “profoundly and openly religious,” and who “makes everyone who comes into contact with him love him.” The writer, who has seen Mme. Heger only once, describes her as a ”cold“ woman who is nevertheless beloved by her pupils.
5 (p. 179) “Mirabeau Orateur”:The quotation is from Étude sur Mirabeau (1834), by Victor Hugo (1802-1885). The Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791), a great orator, was a political moderate active in the early stages of the French Revolution.
6 (pp. 180-182) “De temps en temps... de Moise et de Josue”: Brontë’s essay celebrates the religious zeal of Peter the Hermit (c. 1050-1115), a lowly monk who led the First Crusade in 1096. “From time to time there appear on the earth men who are destined to be the instruments of great moral or political changes,” she begins. Among these great men she ranks “conquerors” like Alexander the Great and Attila, “revolutionaries” like Cromwell and Robespierre, and ”religious enthusiasts“ like Muhammad and Peter the Hermit. The essay generally extols men whose passionate natures propel them to great action and accepts the fact that they tend to have no moderation “either in good or evil.” Brontë especially admires Peter the Hermit, whom she describes as a poor, physically small, and relatively unattractive man who was able to sway nations through his eloquence, enthusiasm, and faith. Brontë assigns to Peter the Hermit the “double role of prophet and warrior,” and reveals her Western bias by remarking that “Mahomet never moved to action the indolent nations of the East as Peter moved the vigorous people of the West.”
7 (p. 183) M. Héger took up a more advanced plan... synthetical teaching: M. Heger’s pedagogical method focused on analyzing rhetorical strategies among authors treating the same subject, with a view to discerning political and other buried agendas. This training aided Brontë in the novelist’s task of developing character complexity and framing a point of view.
8 (p. 184) desire to do the will of the Lord: The authors and the works referred to are Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), the funeral oration for Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), widow of Charles I, in 1669; François Guizot (1787-1874), Histoire de la revolution d’Angleterre (6 vols., 1826-1856); and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).
9 (pp. 191-193) “Au Révérend Monsieur Brontë... de mes sentiments de haute consideration”: M. Heger’s condolence letter to Patrick Brontë includes a favorable report of his daughters’ progress at school and expresses the wish that they will soon return to finish their studies in order that they might become qualified teachers. At such time, M. Heger explains, he and his wife could offer one or both girls a post that would provide ”that sweet independence so difficult for a young person to find. This is not, understand well, Sir, this is not now a matter of personal interest for us, it is a matter of affection; you will pardon me if we talk to you of your children, if we concern ourselves with their future, as if they were part of our family.”
CHAPTER XII
1 (p. 199) “Sur La Nom de Napoleon”: The title should read, Sur La Mort de Napoleon. Brontë’s condemnation of Napoleon culminates in a paean to her childhood hero, the Duke of Wellington.
2 (pp. 199-202) “Napoléon naquit en Corse... Wellington a de droit à sa reconnoissance”: Brontë’s essay, which deplores Napoléon’s demagoguery, negates his achievements and focuses instead on his death in exile on the island of St. Helena. “Others have told and retold his exploits, as for me,” Brontë explains, “I stop to contemplate the desolation of his final hour.” Brontë asks: “Between his cradle and his grave what was there?” Her answer: “A sea of blood, a throne, then more blood, and chains.” Brontë judges Napoleon on both a political and a personal level. She condemns him for “tearing up entire nations” to build his empire, but his greatest sin in her estimation was that he was not bound by human affection: “He did not love; he considered his friends and associates merely as instruments upon which he played, while they were useful, and which he threw aside when they ceased to be so.” Brontë’s national pride is evidenced when she contrasts Napoléon’s ambition and love of flattery with the political selflessness and “modesty” of his vanquisher, the Duke of Wellington.
3 (p. 204) There were causes for stress and anxiety... particularly as regarded Branwell : The Brontës did not discover Branwell’s disgrace in the Robinson affair (see Introduction) until July 1845, a year and a half after the period under discussion here. Gaskell intentionally confuses the chronology of events in order to manufacture external reasons for Brontë’s depression.
4 (p. 206) she was uncompromising truth: Gaskell manufactures a cover story for Brontë here. Mme. Heger’s coldness was the result of Brontë’s growing attachment to M. Heger not of religious differences. Gaskell became aware of the true reason for the estrangement during her visit to Brussels, when Mme. Heger on finding she was Brontë’s friend, refused to see her. Brontë’s unease about exposing the Heger affair through Villette is evidenced by her decision to reserve the right of translation of the novel. Nevertheless, a pirated French edition appeared in 1855.
CHAPTER XIII
1 (p. 215) But a weight hung over her: The remainder of this paragraph and the following one were omitted in the third edition due to a threatened libel suit from Mrs. Robinson, by then Lady Scott. Gaskell’s lawyers also printed a retraction in the Times (May 30, 1857). All unsold copies of the first and second editions were pulled from the shelves.
2 (p. 216) The story must be told: Gaskell vilifies Lydia Robinson as the seducer of innocent Branwell. Patrick Brontë approved this version of the events, but it is unclear where the truth lies, or if there was indeed a sexual liaison, as Branwell claimed. See the Introduction.
3 (p. 219) she thus writes to M. Héger: The text that follows is compiled from carefully culled extracts made by Heger for Gaskell from two of Brontë’s letters (July 24 and October 24, 1844). For the full French text of the letters, see Gérin, Charlotte Brontë:The Evolution of Genius, Appendix D.
4 (p. 219) “Il n‘y a rien que je craigns ... Agréez, Monsieur, &c.”: “There is nothing I fear as much as idleness, inertia, lethargy of the faculties. When the body is lethargic, the spirit suffers cruelly; I would not know this lethargy, if I could write. I used to spend days, weeks, entire months writing, and not altogether without success, since Southey and [Hartley] Coleridge, two of our best authors, to whom I sent some manuscripts, were pleased to give their approbation; but at present, my eyesight is weak; if I write too much I will become blind. This weakness of sight is a terrible privation for me; without it, do you know what I would do, Monsieur? 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.... Do not forget to tell me how you are and how Madame and the children are. I hope to receive news from you soon; this idea cheers me, because the memory of your kindness will never be effaced from my mind, and as long as this memory endures, the respect that you have inspired will endure also. Accept, Monsieur, &c.” (translated by Anne Taranto).
5 (p. 222) “Je crains beaucoup d’oublier le français ... j‘y irai” “I very much fear that I will forget my French—I learn half a page of French by heart every day, and I take great pleasure in the lesson. I want to assure Mme. of my esteem for her; I fear that Marie, Louise, and Claire will have already forgotten me; but I will see you again one day; As soon as I can earn enough money to go to Brussels I will do so“” (translated by Anne Taranto).
6 (p. 225) never see Branwell Brontë again: Mr. Robinson’s will reveals this claim to be untrue. Branwell might have floated this face-saving rumor, or, as Barker suggests, Lydia Robinson may have done so in an effort to deter Branwell’s unwanted attentions (Barker, The Brontës, pp. 493-496).
CHAPTER XIV
1 (p. 228) an intelligent man living in Haworth: The man is John Green-wood, the Haworth stationer. According to Gaskell, Brontë counted him her only friend in Haworth (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 337).
2 (p. 231) railway panic: In the mid-nineteenth century several companies formed to build rail lines across England, selling shares on the stock market to raise money for their ventures. Especially notorious was George Hudson (1800—1871), the “Railway King,“” chairman of the York and North-Midland Company and a speculator who merged several companies into one conglomerate and engaged in what is now termed insider trading, to inflate holdings artificially. The bubble Hudson helped to create burst in 1847, bringing financial ruin to many investors.
3 (p. 237) her father’s curate: Arthur Bell Nicholls (1818?-1906) came to Haworth as curate in May 1845. He was born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Note how Gaskell frames Brontë’s apparent indifference to Nicholls as modesty.
Volume II
CHAPTER I
1 (p. 246) Mr. Trench: Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886), professor of divinity, philologist, and later archbishop of Dublin, wrote On the Study of Words ( 1851) and English, Past and Present (1855).
2 (p. 247) “the death of Currer Bell”: The anonymous obituary of Brontë by Harriet Martineau, a novelist who influenced Brontë, appeared in the Daily News, April 1855 (see Allot, ed., The Brontës:The Critical Heritage, pp. 301-305).
CHAPTER II
1 (p. 255) Mr. Smith: George Smith (1824-1901), Brontë’s publisher, revitalized the business founded by his father in 1816, making Smith, Elder and Company a house of literary distinction. Smith counted Ruskin and Darwin among his authors, and the success of Jane Eyre attracted other prominent novelists, among them Thackeray and Gaskell. Smith founded the Cornhill Magazine (1860), the foremost literary periodical of its day, and published the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900).
2 (p. 259) gentleman connected with the firm to read it first: William Smith Williams (1800-1875), Smith’s literary adviser, was the first to recognize the merit of Jane Eyre. Williams’s critical acumen was central to the firm’s success.
3 (p. 259) The Reviews: Reviews of the first edition of Jane Eyre mentioned here appeared in the following periodicals (in these notes and the footnotes, brackets are placed around a writer’s name to indicate that the review appeared unsigned—that is, as an anonymous review): [H. F. Chorley], Athenaeum, October 23, 1847; Spectator, November 6, 1847; Literary Gazette, October 23, 1847; and [A.W Fonblanque], the Examiner, November 27, 1847. Other reviews ran in the Economist, November 27, 1847, and People’s Journal, November 1847. Reviews of the second edition of Jane Eyre include Elizabeth Rigby’s infamous, if unsigned, ad hominem attack in the Quarterly Review 84 (December 1848) and an unsigned notice by G. H. Lewes, in Fraser’s Magazine (December 1847). For a selection, see Allot, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage.
4 (p. 266) one who offered presumptuous and injudicious praise: Samuel Johnson admonished Hannah More to ”consider what her flattery was worth, before she choaked him with it.“ (Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson [1786]). In The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) James Boswell renders it: “Dearest madam, consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you bestow it so freely.”
5 (p. 267) G. H. Lewes: The versatile and largely self-educated thinker George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) was a philosopher, journalist, literary critic, novelist, playwright, and sometime actor. He had a fraught professional relationship with Brontë, who thought he had a touch too much of dogmatism.”
6 (p. 269) truth is considered a libel in speaking of such people: Gaskell is referring to Thomas Cautley Newby, who published Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey in 1847, but rejected Charlotte’s manuscript of The Professor. Newby’s unscrupulous business practices deprived both Emily and Anne Brontë proceeds from the sale of the copyrights for their novels; more damagingly, his false advertising capitalized on the success of Jane Eyre to portray the Bells as one person.
7 (p. 275) “I can understand admiration of George Sand”: The French writer George Sand (1804—1876) is celebrated as much today for her bohemian lifestyle and cross-dressing as for her prolific literary output as novelist, dramatist, correspondent, memoirist, and political tract writer. “My profession is to be free,” she once declared.
8 (p. 278) “beyond anything due to a Bulwer or D’Israeli production”: Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) were politicians, novelists, and friends. Bulwer-Lytton’s sensationalistic bent made him one of the most popular writers of his day. Disraeli, who twice served as prime minister, wrote “condition of England” novels treating social issues. In suggesting that Lewes’s novel deserves more acclaim than a Bulwer or Disraeli production, Brontë is perhaps offering faint praise.
9 (p. 278) water-supply to each house: Patrick Brontë campaigned the Board of Health in London for more than a decade for a clean water supply and improved sanitary conditions for Haworth. Although an inspector finally arrived in 1849 and advocated, among other measures, immediately closing the graveyard, Haworth did not receive a piped water supply until 1858. (See Barker, The Brontës, p. 814.)
10 (p. 279) “That England may be spared the spasms... I earnestly pray”: Brontë fears that the working-class Chartist movement (1838-1848), which called for universal male suffrage and abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament, would unleash a revolution in England like those that had been spreading on the Continent.
11 (p. 286) Chatterton: The poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), too avant-garde to be appreciated in his day, committed suicide at age seventeen. He later became an idol to the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites.
CHAPTER III
1 (p. 296) “Quarterly Review” of December, 1848: Elizabeth Rigby’s anonymous review of Jane Eyre appeared this month (see endnote 3 to volume II, chapter II).
2 (p. 297) “lama sabachthoni,”—still, even then let him pray... than judge with the Pharisee: Gaskell’s defense of Brontë overdramatically culminates in Christ’s appeal on the cross: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (See the King James Version of the Bible, Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46.) For the parable of the publican and the Pharisee, see Luke 18:10-14.
3 (p. 308) following account of the journey—and of the end: Ellen Nussey provided this eyewitness account of Anne Brontë’s death, albeit written in retrospect for Gaskell, who edited it.
CHAPTER IV
1 (p. 315) “three curates”: Two were based on Patrick Brontë’s former curates, James William Smith and Joseph Brett Grant, and the last on a curate of a neighboring parish. Brontë’s contempt for curates as a class is registered in a letter to Ellen Nussey: “At this blessed moment we have no less than three of them in Haworth-Parish—and God knows there is not one to mend another” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, June [18?], 1845; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 399).
2 (p. 320) Mr. Hall: William Margetson Heald, the vicar of Ellen Nussey’s parish, believed that either he or his father was the model for this character (William Heald to Nussey, January 8, 1850; in Wise and Symington, vol. 3, p. 63).
3 (p. 324) mortified her far more than actual blame: Interestingly, the criticisms Lewes offers are not of the kind Gaskell enumerates here. Far from lowering the standard, he claims to raise the bar by taking Brontë to task for stepping ”“out of her sex—without elevating herself above it.” [G. H. Lewes], Edinburgh Review 91, January 1850.
4 (p. 324) She often writes... the following... letters to Cornhill: The following letter is to James Taylor (November 6, 1849; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, pp. 280-281). Gaskell suppresses Taylor’s name as correspondent here and throughout presumably because she wants to deflect the suggestion that Brontë invited his marriage proposal. Brontë continued to correspond with Taylor after she rejected his suit and he left England to head Smith, Elder’s India office.
5 (p. 325) “I send you a couple of reviews:” The reviews are: [A. W Fonblanque], Examiner, November 3, 1849. and [W H. Howitt], Standard of Freedom, November 10, 1849 (see Allot, pp. 125-129, 133-135).
6 (p. 328) Miss Martineau: The versatile writer and thinker Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) addressed a wide range of subjects including women’s education, religion, and political economy. Her novel Deerbrook (1839) influenced Brontë.
7 (p. 329) in came a young-looking lady, almost child-like in stature: In her Autobiography (3 vols., London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1877), Martineau describes Brontë as “the smallest creature I had ever seen (except at a fair)” (vol. 2, p. 326).
CHAPTER V
1 (pp. 332-333) “friends have sent me books lately... ‘Nemesis of Faith’ ”: The books mentioned are Harriet Martineau’s Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), Francis Newman’s The Soul, Its Sorrows and Its Aspirations (1849), and James Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith (1849).
2 (p. 333) “Mr.—.. Mr. R—... John—s wife”: Both Mr.—and Mr. R—are references to Arthur Bell Nicholls, Brontë’s future husband, on whom the one flattering portrait of a curate in Shirley is based. Brontë tells Nussey in another part of this letter that Nicholls “triumphed in his own character.” The wife of John Brown, the Haworth sexton, was Nicholls’s landlady.
3 (p. 333) “When they got the volumes at the Mechanics’ Institute”: Mechanics Institutes were cultural centers established for the use of the working classes. The one in Keighley hosted concerts, lectures, and classes, and offered a circulating library that the Brontës could use. Brontë refers in this letter to the Haworth Mechanics Institute, which was founded in 1849 with support from Brontë and her father.
4 (p. 337) “Nella Miseria—”: From Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, canto 5, lines 121-123, which reads in full: “There is no greater grief than remembering happy times in misery” (my translation).
5 (p. 338) Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth: James Kay Shuttleworth was a philanthropist and social reformer who was knighted for his services. Trained as a medical doctor, he worked to improve sanitary conditions among the poor and working classes in order to combat disease. He was also an early champion of national education. Sir James’s avocation was entertaining celebrated authors. It was at his estate near Windermere that Gaskell and Brontë met.
6 (p. 340) “Unprotected Female’ ”: The “Unprotected Female” was a series of sketches that appeared in the periodical Punch (founded in 1841) from 1849 to 1850. Punch, established by social reformer Henry May-hew (1812-1887) and journalists Joseph Stirling Coyne and Mark Lemon, blended political commentary and humorous cartoons.
7 (p. 341) “that, too, I read, and with unalloyed pleasure”: The most recent collection of essays by William Hazlitt would have been Winterslow: Essays and Characters Written There (1850). The other titles are Charles Cuthbert Southey’s edition of The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (1849-1850); Julia Kavanagh, Woman in France During the Eighteenth Century (1850); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1850); and A. J. Scott, Suggestions on Female Education (1849).
CHAPTER VI
1 (p. 344) “I had thought to bring the ‘Leader’: The Leader (1850) was a radical literary periodical founded by G. H. Lewes.
2 (p. 347) to join the friends with whom she had been staying in town: Gaskell skims over the unorthodox nature of Brontë’s trip to Scotland with George Smith, an unmarried man, and his sister. Both Smith’s mother and Ellen Nussey urged against it. Brontë reassures Ellen: “My six or eight years of seniority not 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).
3 (p. 349) “Papa had worked himself up to a sad pitch... obviously joining him”: The letter continues: “I can’t deny but I was annoyed.... Papa’s great discomposure had its origin in ... the vague fear of my being somehow about to be married to somebody.” In editing out this portion of the letter Gaskell suppresses Patrick’s fear that Brontë and George Smith had formed a romantic attachment.
CHAPTER VII
1 (p. 352) I shall probably convey my first impressions... a longer description: The text that follows is extracted from two of Gaskell’s letters. One is to Catherine Winkworth, on August 25, 1850, and another, written on the same date, is to an unknown correspondent.
2 (p. 353) “liking ‘Modern Painters’... Father Newman’s Lectures”: John Ruskin (1819-1900) wrote Modern Painters (1843-1860) and The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). Father Newman, later a cardinal, is John Henry Newman (1801-1890), a leader of the Oxford Movement within the Anglican Church. He later converted to Roman Catholicism.
3 (p. 353) “invitation to drink tea quietly at Fox How”: Fox How was the home of the widow and children of Dr. Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), moralist, social reformer and educational theorist. The curricular innovations Arnold instituted as headmaster of Rugby School influenced the course of British education. He was the father of poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888).
4 (p. 356) ‘Westminster Review’: The Westminster Review was a reform-minded periodical acquired by John Stuart Mill in 1836.
5 (p. 357) “I have read Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ ”: On Gaskell’s recommendation Brontë read, or rather, attempted to read Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), an elegy to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Presumably to educate her new friend in her own aesthetic preferences, Brontë sends Gaskell the final edition of Wordsworth’s autobiographical The Prelude, which was published posthumously in 1850.
6 (p. 359) “I should be glad if you would include... ‘Life of Dr. Arnold’”: Brontë wanted to read Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (1844).
CHAPTER VIII
1 (p. 360) task of editing them: Brontë wrote a “Biographical Notice” of her sisters for this edition, published by Smith, Elder and Company, and she appended a heavily edited selection of their poetry.
2 (p. 361) That gentleman says:—: G. H. Lewes, writing to George Smith. Gaskell wanted input from Lewes but, unlike Brontë, would not correspond with him directly because of his reputed immorality (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 314). In 1854 he dissolved his open marriage to live with writer George Eliot.
3 (p. 362) “I lent her some of Balzac’s and George Sand’s novels”: The novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) that G. H. Lewes is talking about are Modeste Mignon (1844) and Illusions Perdues (1837-1843). Gaskell is quick to give anecdotal evidence of Brontë’s “disgust” for Balzac, who was not considered proper reading for a lady. George Sand’s Lettres d’un Voyageur (Letters of a Traveler), part autobiography, part travel narrative, appeared in 1837.
4 (p. 366) “ ‘The Roman’ ”: The Roman (1850) was a poem by Sydney Dobell, the critic who had endeared himself to Brontë with his praise of Wuthering Heights.
CHAPTER IX
1 (p. 372) “You ask me whether Miss Martineau made me convert to mesmerism”: Mesmerism, a form of hypnotism thought to cure disease, was first practiced by Franz Mesmer (1734-1815), a Viennese physician. Harriet Martineau was a believer.
2 (p. 373) Your account of Mr. A—”: Henry Atkinson and Martineau coauthored Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851).
3 (p. 377) great Exhibition: The Great Exhibition of 1851, held at the Crystal Palace in London, was an international industrial show intendedto showcase British ascendancy. Brontë visited it five tim“under coercion.” On a subsequent trip to London, Brontë made her own itinerary and “selected the real in preference to the decorative side of life” (see the Introduction).
4 (p. 386) “‘Phrenological Character’” : Phrenology was a pseudo-science in which a person’s character was analyzed by examining his or her skull structure. Brontë and George Smith posed as brother and sister and had a phrenological reading done by a physician in London. See Gérin, Appendix B, for his report.
CHAPTER X
1 (p. 389) “I have read the ‘Saint’s Tragedy’ ”: Brontë is referring to The Saint’s Tragedy: or, The True Story of Elizabeth of Hungary (1848) , by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875).
2 (p. 391) “James Martineau’s sermons”: James Martineau (1805-1900), brother of Harriet Martineau, was a Unitarian minister and moral philosopher.
3 (p. 391) “I have seen none, except ... Emancipation of Women”: The article is “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which appeared in the Westminster Review 55 (July 1851): 289-311. Although J. S. Mill is given authorial credit, Harriet Taylor (1807-1858), Mill’s collaborator, companion, and eventually his wife, is believed to have been the primary author.
4 (p. 396) “Melville seemed to me... Maurice whose ministry I should frequent”: The Evangelical Henry Melville (1798-1871) was considered one of the greatest preachers of his day. F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), a Christian Socialist, believed the church should be an instrument of social equality.
5 (p. 403) “the close seemed to me scarcely equal to ’Rose Douglas’ ”: Sarah R. Whitehead wrote Rose Douglas; or, Sketches of a Country Parish, Being the Autobiography of a Scotch Minister’s Daughter (1851) and Two Families (1852).
6 (p. 403) “I read Miss Kavanagh’s ‘Women of Christianity’ ”: The full title of Julia Kavanagh’s book is Women of Christianity: Exemplary for Acts of Piety and Charity (1852).
7 (p. 416) “I called her ’Lucy Snowe’ ... ‘lucus a non lucendo’ principle”: The principle is an etymological contradiction. The word lucus means “dark grove” in Latin, but it is derived from the verb lucere, “to shine,” based on the absence of light. Similarly, Lucy Snowe’s “external coldness” belies her inner fire.
8 (p. 418) some word or act of hers had given offence: Gaskell minimizes Brontë’s fears here to gloss over her true cause for concern—the fact that she had represented George Smith and his mother in Villette as Mrs. Bretton and her son Dr. John. Smith later owned that the portraits were based on his mother and him.
CHAPTER XII
1 (p. 421) put aside all consideration of how she should reply, excepting as he wished!: Brontë had her own reservations about marrying Nicholls, independent of her father’s objections. See the Introduction.
2 (p. 424) Miss Martineau... wounded her to the quick... merely artistic fault: In her review of Villette in the Daily News, February 3, 1853 (Allot, pp. 171-174), Martineau faulted Brontë for making love too central to the lives of her female characters, insisting that there “are substantial, heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love.”
3 (p. 426) “I read attentively all you say about Miss Martineau... hundreds have forsaken her”: Martineau objected to this characterization, and to Gaskell’s account of her rift with Brontë. In the third edition Gaskell included a footnote and additional material in the body of the text to represent Martineau’s side of the story, which was, in the main, a reiteration of the fact that Brontë urged her to be frank with her criticism.
4 (p. 438) Mrs. Marsh’s story ... Miss Bremer’s story: Anne Marsh-Caldwell wrote “The Deformed,” published in Two Old Men’s Tales (1834); Fredrika Bremer wrote The Neighbours (translated in 1842).
5 (p. 440) Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter’s marriage: Gaskell may have directly contributed to this change of heart by asking Richard Monckton Milnes to use his influence to secure a pension that would increase Nicholls’s income. Gaskell urged secrecy: “If my well-meant treachery becomes known I will lose her friendship, which I prize most highly” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 168).
6 (p. 443) “my father’s sympathies... are all with Justice and Europe, against Tyranny and Russia”: Brontë refers here to the diplomatic prelude to the Crimean War.
7 (p. 451) natural cause for her miserable indisposition: Brontë’s letters to Nussey indicate that she was pregnant. It is unclear whether her death was caused by a complication of pregnancy or by an infectious disease.
THE LEGACY OF THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Throughout The Life of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell claims Brontë as her “dear friend.” Their status as leading Victorian novelists initially brought the two women to each other’s notice, and as they embarked upon their friendship, professional appreciation quickly translated into a deep personal connection. In the mid-nineteenth century, Gaskell was the more popular novelist, but her renown gradually faded after her death, while Brontë’s fame grew after she died. Brontë’s continued popularity owes much to Gaskell’s Life, and Gaskell’s enduring reputation has been earned as much from her only attempt at biography as from her novels. This mutual benefit to two authors—subject and biographer—echoes that which resulted following James Boswell’s publication in 1791 of The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; widely considered the greatest biography in the English language, it enhanced the reputation of both men.
While some readers now consider Gaskell’s fiction overly sentimental, others continue to enjoy her novels of manners Cranford (1853) and Wives and Daughters (1866), and to read and study her “condition of England” novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854), which prove particularly enduring as they shed light on the social history of their time. As for The Life of Charlotte Brontë, it is the depth of the work and the sympathy the writer obviously felt for her subject that make it compelling to readers today. Much of the book’s immediate and continued success derives from Gaskell’s talent for, as Eneas Sweetland Dallas put it in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, “personal discourse and familiar narrative,” novelistic touches that were enthusiastically received by a reading public thirsty for confidences and scandal.
Most dramatically, Gaskell describes the plight of Charlotte’s feckless brother, Branwell, who, she alleges, engaged in a sexual liaison with Lydia Robinson, the wife of the man who had hired him as a tutor. The present text of The Life of Charlotte Brontë is that of the first 479 edition, which includes Gaskell’s original and full “account of Branwell Brontë’s wretched fate,” as William Caldwell Roscoe described it in the National Review, adding that it was “recorded with unnecessary detail.” Here is what Gaskell wrote:[Branwell’s] case presents the reverse of the usual features; the man became the victim; the man’s life was blighted, and crushed out of him by suffering, and guilt entailed by guilt; the man’s family were stung by keenest shame. The woman—to think of her father’s pious name—the blood of honourable families mixed in her veins—her early home, underneath whose rooftree sat those whose names are held saintlike for their good deeds,—she goes flaunting about to this day in respectable society; a showy woman for her age; kept afloat by her reputed wealth. I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronize the Christmas balls; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms (p. 223 in this edition).
As Gaskell prepares to quote from some of Charlotte’s letters to bolster her case against Robinson, she continues, “Now let us read, not merely of the suffering of her guilty accomplice but of the misery she caused to innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door.”
Gaskell’s version of Branwell’s affair with Robinson provoked a strong reaction in the press. James Fitzjames Stephen, writing in the Edinburgh Review, railed against Gaskell: “No doubt, from mistaken information and mistaken motives... she appears to have entirely misconceived the duties and the rights of her position as an authoress.” Stephen continued, “A man’s honour, a woman’s virtue, are not to be blown to the winds merely because it suits the humour of a romancer to rake up some imaginary or forgotten transgression—to dress it in colours of fiction, heightened by the mischievous attraction of personal slander.”
Not only was Lydia Robinson still living when the Life was published, she was a prominent member of London society (she had remarried and become Lady Scott). Upon publication of the book, she immediately filed a libel suit against Gaskell; as a result, all unsold copies of The Life of Charlotte Brontë were pulled from the shelves. In a letter from Mrs. Gaskell’s solicitor that appeared in the London Times, the author endeavored “to retract every statement contained in that work which imputes to a widowed lady, referred to, but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, and of her social duties, &c.” All subsequent editions of the Life were issued as “revised,” to indicate that all passages deemed incriminating to Lady Scott had been removed.
To the advantage of both Brontë and Gaskell, the Life has outlived the topical scandal that plagued its initial publication to become one of the most widely read biographies written in English.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
HENRY FOTHERGILL CHORLEY
The story of a woman’s life unfolded in this book is calculated to make the old feel young and the young old. Persons who have been conversant with society and manners as they existed in the remote corners of England within the century will feel themselves strangely recalled to the narrow homes, the grim prejudices, the few pleasures and privileges belonging to a period of heavy taxation, costly literature, and limited intercourse, by the picture of a provincial parsonage and its inmates here set before them. Some of those, on the other hand, who are bursting with life, and brimming with creative power, may feel palsied (as it were by some cold prophecy) while they follow the record of a career of self-denial and struggle, sustained to the last with courage, principle, and genius, but without hope. Nevertheless, a true tale of what may be achieved in spite of disabilities, be the facts ever so cheerless, let the pilgrim’s lot have been cast on ever so rugged a road, let his cup have been ever so full of the waters of bitterness, can hardly be followed to its close without some strength being gained for the reader. By all, this book will be read with interest. As a work of Art, we do not recollect a life of a woman by a woman so well executed....
Protracted life and success, and increased experience with what is best in society (not what is most convenient in observance), might have ripened, and mellowed, and smoothed the creations of this singular novelist without destroying their charm of force and individuality. But conjecture stops at the grave-side. At the time when “the silver lining of the cloud” began to show itself, when domestic cherishing and prosperity seemed to await her after so many hard, dark, cruel years, the end came. All this is gently and sadly told by Mrs. Gaskell, with whom the task has been a labour of love (a little, also, of defence),—and who, we repeat, has produced one of the best biographies of a woman by a woman we can recall to mind.
—from an unsigned review in The Athenaeum (April 4, 1857)
THE SPECTATOR
Besides the actual poverty of incident that characterizes this life, the materials for largely illustrating it, such as it was, even in its later period, and still more in its growing time, are wanting. Very little correspondence can have passed between the Misses Brontë and other people, and of that little less had been preserved. Their father, who has survived them, is very old and infirm, and little more than vague general recollections seem to have been obtained from him. Charlotte does not appear to have been communicative about herself and her proceedings while she lived, and she lived in such retirement and isolation that no one now seems able to describe minutely what she left unrecorded. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, it is impossible to read through Mrs. Gaskell’s two volumes without a strong conviction that Charlotte Brontë was a woman as extraordinary by her character as by her genius. She possessed in a remarkable degree, not only the poetical imagination shown in her works, but an unconquerable will, and a sense of duty to which everything in her life was subordinated....
Those who can be powerfully interested by character developing itself without striking outward incident—who can follow the drama of the inner life in a lonely parsonage, where three eccentric girls, and an eccentric father, with an equally eccentric old Yorkshire servant, for the most part lead an existence of which one day is precisely in its outward aspect like every other—will find in Mrs. Gaskell’s account of Charlotte Brontë and her family one of the profoundest tragedies of modern life, if tragedy be, as we believe it to be, the contest of humanity with inexorable fate—the anguish and the strife through which the spirit nerves itself for a grander sphere—the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory.
—April 4, 1857
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
I have just finished your “Life of Charlotte Bronte”—which has afforded exquisite delight to my evenings on this remote patch of rock, round which the Atlantic roars, and dashes like a troop of lions, making a solitude almost equal to Haworth moors—quite equal, as far as any society I get here. If I had any public means of expressing my high sense of the skill, delicacy and artistic power of your Biography, I should not trouble you with this note. But it is a law of the literary organization that it must relieve itself in expression, and I discharge my emotion through the penny post; at least, such of it as was not discharged in wet eyes and swelling heart, as chapter after chapter was read.
The book will, I think, create a deep and permanent impression; for it not only presents a vivid picture of a life noble and sad, full of encouragement and healthy teaching, a lesson in duty and self-reliance; it also, thanks to its artistic power, makes us familiar inmates of an interior so strange, so original in its individual elements and so picturesque in its externals—it paints for us at once the psychological drama and the scenic accessories with so much vividness—that fiction has nothing more wild, touching, and heart-strengthening to place above it.
The early part is a triumph for you; the rest a monument for your friend. One learns to love Charlotte, and deeply to respect her. Emily has a singular fascination for me—probably because I have a passion for lions and savage animals, and she was une bête fauve in power, splendour, and wildness. What an episode that death of hers! and how touching is Charlotte’s search for the bit of heather which the glazed eyes could not recognize at last! And what a bit of the true religion of home is the whole biography!
—from a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell (April 15, 1857)
ENEAS SWEETLAND DALLAS
Women ought to be good biographers. They have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance. Mrs. Gaskell, we regret to say, has, in the present work, so employed her talent that she appears too much in the latter light—as a gossip and a gad-about. There was not much to say of Charlotte Brontë, better known as Currer Bell, but the biographer was determined to say a great deal: she therefore makes a pilgrimage to every spot where her heroine was ever known to have set her foot. First of all, she devotes a chapter to Haworth, counting all the rooms and all the windows in the parsonage. The next chapter she devotes to a description of the character of Yorkshiremen, who appear to be the most unsocial beings on the face of the earth. In the third chapter she hies away to Cornwall, gives a long account of the customs of Penzance, Mrs. Brontë’s birthplace; favours us with some of this lady’s letters to her husband in the days of their courtship; informs us how Mr. Brontë used to saw off the backs of chairs, fire pistols through doors when he was angry, tear his wife’s silk dress to shreds, and every day of his life eat his dinner all alone by himself With amazing rapidity she then relates the birth of half-a-dozen children, kills off Mrs. Brontë, and sends Charlotte to school. Here comes a grand opportunity for describing the school at Cowanbridge—how it was started, where it was situated, who were the managers, what were the rules, how the girls were fed. Then comes another school at Roehead, and the biographer writes a gazetteer of the neighbourhood from the days of the Stuarts downwards. So she dwells on every incident. Miss Brontë, in passing through London, went to the Chapter Coffeehouse: Mrs. Gaskell, therefore, gives us the history of that tavern, carefully describes the different rooms, makes us familiar with the waiters, and enlarges on the kind of custom on which the house depends. Miss Brontë went to a school at Brussels: her biographer, therefore, beginning with the thirteenth century, writes the history of the Rue d’Isabelle, in which the school is situated, quotes long pages of Charlotte’s French exercises, with all her teacher’s corrections; is great on the subject of the school hours, the kind of rolls for supper, the number of lamps in the refectory, and presents us with an inventory of the bedroom furniture. All this information of the Dame Quickly sort, with which every chapter abounds, Mrs. Gaskell has seasoned with as much petty scandal as might suffice for half-a-dozen biographies.... The biographer even tries to persuade herself that the sad history of Branwell’s intrigue, every word of which she has since been obliged ignominiously to retract, is given to the public, not at all from any love of scandal, but in the Christian hope that it may meet the eye, and bring repentance to the heart, of the cruel lady who survives, and who is said to mix in the best society of the metropolis. Without pretending to half so high an opinion of Currer Bell as her biographer professes to entertain, we respect her too much not to condemn such an outrage upon her memory, committed in the name of friendship and sky-high religion. If it was impossible to write the biography without entering into these details, then it ought never to have been written. Whoever could speak in this vein of Currer Bell and her relations, has no genuine sympathy with that retiring nature who shrank from popular observation. Mrs. Gaskell is, indeed, lavish of her sympathy; but it is of the patronising apologetic kind, feeling for rather than with the sufferer; crushing her with condescension, overpowering her with affection, and rejoicing itself with a copious discharge of those cheap protestations which Sairey Gamp, over her brown teapot, might offer to Betsy Prig. If we do Mrs. Gaskell any injustice, we ask her pardon, and we dare say that in reality she is very different from the author of these volumes, who appears in the character of a shallow, showy woman, fond of her own prattle, and less intent on describing Currer Bell (even if it be by saying that she is “half a head shorter than I am”), than on speaking of “myself,” “my husband,” “our little girls,” “an aunt of mine,” “a friend of mine,” “a visit I paid,” “a letter I received,” “what I partly knew,” and “what my feelings were.”
—from an unsigned review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1857)
JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN
Nor can we, with a due regard to literary justice, pass over in silence the grave offence of a similar character of which Mrs. Gaskell, the biographer of Miss Brontë, has herself been guilty. The life of this remarkable woman has been read with an avidity which does not surprise us, for both the subject and the manner of the book are well calculated to excite the deepest interest. But Mrs. Gaskell appears to have learnt the art of the novel-writer so well that she cannot discharge from her palette the colours she has used in the pages of ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth.’ This biography opens precisely like a novel, and the skilful arrangement of lights and shades and colours—the prominence of some objects and the evident suppression of others—leave on the mind the excitement of a highly-wrought drama, rather than the simplicity of daylight and of nature. To heighten the interest of this strange representation, and also to assert her own imperious sense of moral obligations, the biographer has thought it proper and necessary to introduce the episode of Branwell Brontë, a worthless brother of the three mysterious Bells, whose misconduct added a pang to their dreary existence; and in giving the history of this scapegrace Mrs. Gaskell has allowed herself to enter into details affecting the character and conduct of living persons, on whom she proceeds to pass sentence in a tone for which she now feels, or ought to feel, great shame and regret. It turns out that these details were borrowed from imperfect or incorrect evidence; no effort seems to have been made to verify the facts on which Mrs. Gaskell proceeded to consign another woman to infamy and to brand her with maledictions. The name and station of the lady thus assailed were easily identified, and it became known that she is a member of a highly honourable family; legal proceedings were threatened, and we believe commenced, to vindicate her reputation; and on the 30th May a letter appeared in the ‘Times’ newspaper from Mrs. Gaskell’s solicitor, stating that he was instructed ‘to retract every statement contained in that work which imputes to a widowed lady, referred to, but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, and of her social duties, &c ... [and] to express the deep regret of Mrs. Gaskell that she should have been led to make them.’ This apology has been accepted; though the disavowal of the false statements would have been more becoming to both parties, if it had not been conveyed in the studied phraseology of an attorney.
—from an unsigned review in the Edinburgh Review (July 1857)
PATRICK BRONTË
I am much pleased with reading the opinions of those in your letters, and other eminent characters, respecting the “Memoir.” Before I knew their’s I had formed my own opinion, and the reading World’s opinion of the “Memoir” is, that it is in every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another, and that it ought to stand, and will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time.
—from a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell (July 30, 1857)
HENRY JAMES
[Mrs. Gaskell’s] “Life of Charlotte Brontë,” for instance, although a very readable and delightful book, is one which a woman of strong head could not possibly have written; for, full as it is of fine qualities, of affection, of generosity, of sympathy, of imagination, it lacks the prime requisites of a good biography. It is written with a signal want of judgment and of critical power; and it has always seemed to us that it tells the reader considerably more about Mrs. Gaskell than about Miss Brontë.
—from The Nation (February 22, 1866)
Questions 1. Can one write a biography without possessing a store of empathy or antipathy for the subject? What would you surmise is the basis for Gaskell’s empathy for, or identification with, Brontë?2. Do Brontë’s letters reveal a side of her character that Gaskell does not explore? Do Brontë’s own words ever contradict Gaskell’s claims? Do you feel that Gaskell always understands her subject correctly? If not, can you point to moments in the Life when Brontë’s own words jar against Gaskell’s interpretation of them?3. Do you ever feel while reading this biography that Gaskell is less interested in Brontë the individual than in Brontë the symbol of the suppression of women?4. Can you identify literary techniques (foreshadowing, compression, metaphor) that Gaskell, a novelist, brings to bear on Brontë’s life story? If so, what impact do these techniques have on the narrative?5. How would you characterize Gaskell’s relationship to the reader? Does she directly address the reader at times? At what moments does she do so, and to what effect?6. Do you get a sense of Brontë’s character development over the course of Gaskell’s biography? Can you trace a character arc? What are the culminating moments of Brontë’s life story as it is shaped by Gaskell?
FOR FURTHER READING
Charlotte Bronte
CORRESPONDENCE
Barker, Juliet, ed. The Brontës: A Life in Letters. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002. This readily available paperback edition is an excellent starter for those interested in exploring the Brontës’ correspondence.
Smith, Margaret, ed. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995-2004. This long-awaited, scrupulously annotated edition is the most reliable source of Charlotte Brontë’s letters.
Wise, T. J., and J. A. Symington, eds. The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence. 1932; 4 vols., Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980. Although sometimes unreliable, this remains the most comprehensive source of letters by and to the Brontës.
WORKS
Alexander, Christine, ed. An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987—1991.The most comprehensive collection of the juvenilia.
Winnifrith, Tom, ed. The Poems of Charlotte Brontë. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
For those looking to venture beyond Brontë’s prose writings.
BIOGRAPHIES
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. A meticulously researched history of the Brontë family.
Fraser, Rebecca. Charlotte Brontë. London: Methuen London, 1988. Highly readable and reliable.
Gérin, Winifred. Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. A watershed biography that remains unsurpassed in its combination of breadth of coverage and critical insight.
Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York: W W Norton, 1995. A perceptive, impressionistic bio-critical account.
CRITICISM
Allot, Miriam, ed. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Contemporary reactions to Brontë’s work.
Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. New York: Norton, 1976. Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
OTHER
Alexander, Christine, and Margaret Smith, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A remarkably detailed and scholarly compendium of facts relating to the Brontës’ lives and works.
Pollard, Arthur. The Landscape of the Brontës. New York: E. P Dutton, 1988. Contains a trove of photographs illustrating places the Brontës lived, visited, and featured in their novels.
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