Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  10

  The Devilish Face – Hathersage and North Lees Hall

  In 1845, Charlotte Brontë visited her best friend Ellen Nussey at the vicarage in Hathersage in the Peak District. She stayed for three weeks, and this visit was to greatly influence the writing of Jane Eyre. North Lees Hall, a short walk from the vicarage, is probably the main inspiration for Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall. Moorseats Hall became the Rivers family’s ‘Moor House’, and the small town of Morton is based on Hathersage.

  The village, positioned where the Hood Brook meets the River Derwent, has an ancient history. By the late 1700s, brass-button making thrived in the mills nearby. By the early 1800s, the industry had changed to pins and needles. Needle grinding was a lethal trade, and many men, women and children died from the grinding dust. Needles were a rather niche product and weren’t made anywhere else in the area, which also connects with the description of Morton in the book, where it is characterised as a manufacturing village where many work in the needle factory. It would have been a bustling manufacturing centre when Charlotte visited. In addition to needles, other items made in the area included buttons, hackle and gill pins, fish hooks, wire for pianos and harps, umbrella ribs, and steel hoops for ladies’ crinoline underskirts. The quarrying of millstones was another local industry. It is still a bustling centre, but the people who come here these days do so to climb Stanage Edge, yomp the moors, cycle the winding country lanes or hang-glide over Hope Valley.

  It’s 24 July 2019. I’m here to meet the writer and academic Dr Claire O’Callaghan, who has written extensively about the Brontës. It’s the hottest day of the year so far. The Met Office have issued severe-weather warnings for most of England. All-time temperature records have been set across Europe, and the thermometer as I park my car in the village car park reads 35°C. And it’s only mid-morning. I’m a bit early. I decide to have a walk around the village, but as I step out the heat is sweltering. It hits me immediately and clings to my skin. I can already feel a bead of sweat trickle down my back and tickle my spine. I decide to conserve my energy instead. I stand beneath the shade of a sycamore where it is cool. And wait.

  I can just make out the huge gritstone escarpment above Hathersage known as Stanage Edge, which is our destination. I think about Charlotte, who also arrived in midsummer. She visited the vicarage from 24 June to 19 July 1845. Was it as hot as this, I wonder? She had probably walked to Keighley, travelled by coach to Leeds, then by rail to Sheffield and completed the final leg by horse-drawn omnibus. She was coming to help Ellen Nussey prepare the vicarage for her brother Henry’s bride, who had succeeded Charlotte in his affections. Henry Nussey had proposed to Charlotte on 28 February 1839, and she had rejected his offer ten days later.

  When Claire drives up in her red Volkswagen Polo, the temperature has risen another degree. I go over to her car to greet her. She opens the door and climbs out.

  ‘I’m boiling.’

  I feel a waft of hot air as it escapes from her car, like getting hit with a hairdryer. It turns out that the air conditioning in her VW isn’t working, and she’s driven all the way from Loughborough with her hands clinging to a melting steering wheel.

  I’ve worked with Claire before. We did an event together at last year’s Emily Brontë conference in York. We were in conversation about the film A Regular Black, discussing racial depictions of Heathcliff, both in the documentary and in my novel Ill Will. We chat for a bit in the shade, putting off the inevitable trek. We look at the map of the area and work out a route. We walk from Hathersage village up School Lane Road. The sky is a blanket of azure blue with just a few wispy clouds and the sun a golden disk of fire burning its heat into our skin. It makes the grass look greener and the cow parsley radiate whiteness, like wedding confetti. Nectar-heavy bees and butterflies buzz and flutter around low-hanging boughs of frothy lilac blossom that in its indigo glow resemble bunches of luscious grapes. Foxgloves bloom pink and blue. Their proper name is Digitalis, Latin for ‘finger’, which is perhaps a reference to the shape and size of the flower, which resemble a thimble.

  ‘Patrick Brontë had an interest in foxgloves,’ Claire says.

  ‘Oh, really. They’re poisonous, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re used in medicine as well. To treat heart conditions. He annotated his copy of Graham’s Modern Medicine, though you’d struggle to read his annotations.’

  We stop at St Michael’s Church, the church where Ellen Nussey’s elder brother Henry was curate, and where the supposed grave of Little John is placed, but also the graves of the Eyre family, who lived at North Lees Hall. Inside the church are several notable brasses on the tombs of members of the Eyre family. Behind St Michael’s is the old vicarage where Ellen Nussey invited Charlotte Brontë to stay in 1845. There is no plaque to mark the occasion.

  ‘It’s weird, isn’t it,’ I say, ‘how little Hathersage does to mark its Charlotte Brontë connection.’

  ‘They probably don’t need the extra tourism.’

  Claire has a point. The village isn’t short of visitors.

  As we talk about Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë, a car pulls up at the vicarage and an elderly couple get out.

  ‘Is this where Ellen Nussey used to live?’ I ask as a conversational opening.

  ‘It’s where my daughter lives. Before that it was owned by …’ the woman says – I don’t catch the name.

  ‘No, I meant in 1845.’ I explain why we have made the journey. She introduces herself to us as Julie.

  ‘Why don’t you come inside,’ Julie says. ‘I’ll show you around.’

  We weren’t expecting this, and I look at Claire, who is smiling. We jump at the chance to have a nosey.

  Inside there is a welcome coolness. Julie leads us through a grand hallway and into a front room with a large open fireplace. There’s a Mikhail Gorbachev Russian doll on the mantelpiece and some abstract-art paintings hanging on the wall. We walk into the kitchen and interrupt the cleaner, who is mopping the floor. There is a bright-red Aga in one corner and a rustic stone floor. By no means original features, but perhaps not all that different to what was here in the mid nineteenth century. We walk through the main living room, which has patio doors that open into a spacious back garden with a wooden summer house. Huge creepers climb up the outside of the house and the surrounding wall. The garden is filled with lavender and lupins. Wisteria hangs in clumps over a stone archway. The view of Stanage Edge and the surrounding moorland from here is framed by the leafed branches of the trees that line the garden, and the effect is cinematic. The church spire looms over us. In its configuration and layout, this parsonage is very similar to the Haworth parsonage. It too stands on the edge of moorland and is in the shadow of the church and graveyard. It too is a detached stone building of ample size. I wonder if Charlotte felt at home here. We imagine her sitting in the garden with Ellen, having breakfast or taking tea on the lawn.

  ‘What do they do?’ I ask the woman.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your daughter and son-in-law?’

  ‘She runs a museum in Manchester. He’s a barrister. They came up here because he’s a keen climber.’

  She shows us round the rest of the building. Her daughter and son-in-law have restored a lot of the original features, and it’s easy to superimpose Ellen and Charlotte as we explore the property. We interrupt a teenage boy who has created a man cave in the cellar. He is sprawled on a bed in front of a fifty-five-inch plasma screen, playing Fifa19. Upstairs, we bump into their eldest son, who looks to be about seventeen or eighteen. He’s packing to attend a festival.

  ‘I’m just showing these two people around,’ Julie explains. ‘They’re writing about Charlotte Brontë’s stay in the village.’

  ‘Not another one.’

  ‘Have there been a lot?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah. Had two here yesterday.’

  Claire gives me a look, which I can’t quite read.

  We go back downstairs and thank the
woman for her time. As we leave, we talk about how strange it must have been for Charlotte to be here helping Ellen prepare the house for his bride to be, having turned down Henry’s proposal. She told Ellen that although she ‘esteemed Henry’, she did not have an ‘intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him’.

  We take a path that goes behind the vicarage, through the edge of Moorseats Wood, below Moorseats Hall, a possible inspiration for Moor Hall, over some fields, along a path parallel with Birchin Wood. The sun shines through the green canopy, and we walk through dappled light.

  ‘This must be the path that they took to the hall,’ I say.

  ‘Makes sense. It’s the most direct route.’

  We walk along Hood Brook, passing Brookfield Manor, which is now a training centre but at the time of Charlotte’s visit was the home of Miss Hannah Wright, who owned North Lees Hall, although it was inhabited by the widowed Mary Eyre, her son George and three daughters. Some say Brookfield Manor is the basis for Vale Hall in the novel. The road takes us past Brontë Cottage, one of the few places in the area to recognise the Brontë connection, before making our way up the track to the hall itself. We are almost upon it before we see its castellated tower reaching out above the tree line, and you have to get very close indeed before it reveals itself completely.

  There is a real Jane Eyre vibe to North Lees Hall. It is a three-storey castle tower with mullion windows and leaded panes, and it fits the description in the novel: ‘steps and bannisters were of oak … windows high and latticed … it was three storeys high, of proportion, not vast … battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look … further off were hills … like barriers of separation from the living world’. The top of the tower is turreted with semi-circular embattlements and there is a roof terrace. There is also a three-bedroom farmhouse attached, with an unfeasibly high chimney stack. The farmhouse is empty, although it would have been in use during Charlotte’s visit. The tower, which is owned by the Peak District National Park, is occupied by a woman who occasionally opens it to Airbnb customers, and before that it was used as an educational centre. Stone steps lead up to a black painted iron gate. Moss grows over the slated roof of the farmhouse, and weeds sprout from the flagstones of the path, which leads to a studded wooden door, an original feature. We are staring at the same door Charlotte would have seen.

  The hall is positioned with gardens all around it, with another farm building further up called Crook Barn. It is surrounded by trees, where rooks roost. An apple tree bends low with still unripe fruit. We find somewhere to sit in the shade close to the hall. The stone step is comparatively cool. We mop our brows and drink copious amounts of water. I’m thinking about Charlotte’s visit. Anne and Branwell had just returned from Thorpe Green. I don’t think Charlotte was fully aware at that time of what Branwell had done, but she must have picked up on the subtext, that all was not well. I take out my notes.

  ‘The description of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre matches quite accurately what we are looking at now. Later in the book, she travels to the roof of the hall to take in the view and talks about how in the immediate vicinity it is surrounded by woods and a rookery. It’s basically a description of what we can see. There’s even a door that suggests the door that leads to Bertha’s place of confinement,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, and isn’t it weird that when we got here and found no one home, we noticed the window on the third floor was wide open. When I saw that, I thought, Bertha’s up there,’ Claire says.

  ‘I got the same feeling. Charlotte Brontë came here in June or July 1845 with Ellen Nussey – probably just a social visit. What do you think it was about this place then that inspired her? I mean, she was quite well travelled at this point. She’d been to Brussels; she’d visited many estate homes. She’d stayed in Mary Taylor’s Red House, which was rather opulent. And visited Oakwell Hall a bit further up the road.’

  ‘It’s perhaps the sense of isolation. It is sort of doubly isolated. It is on its own, in the middle of the countryside. It is separated by trees and also by a ridge of rocks behind it.’

  ‘Yeah, and it’s not just isolated, is it? It is actually concealed. It is almost as if whoever built it was hiding from something,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. You don’t see it at all until you are almost upon it. What is weird, though, is that it’s not particularly romantic for the love story that unfolds.’

  ‘But it sort of suits Rochester’s personality, don’t you think?’

  ‘In what way? I mean, yeah, it’s a really queer building,’ Claire says.

  ‘Well, he is referred to as “peculiar”, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, and it is odd. It’s kind of subdued for an aristocratic home.’

  ‘The Eyres were Catholics, and there was a chapel in that field over there, the remains of which are still visible. So maybe they had good reason to hide. And we know Charlotte wasn’t much of a fan of Catholics, was she?’ I say.

  ‘No, and, of course, in the book you have critiques of the different kinds of religious doctrine.’

  ‘What’s Rochester’s take on religion, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think he refers to it really. He goes to the church to get married, where he is about to sin before God. I can’t really recall any other instances. When I’ve taught different aspects of religion in the book, I’ve always concentrated on Mr Brocklehurst, Helen Burns and St John Rivers. Those are the main critiques of religion going on in the book. Rochester is removed from that. And maybe that’s reflected in the building. That idea of being removed. When I look at the tower now, for some reason I think of Rapunzel,’ Claire says.

  ‘Yeah, another confined woman. There’s a fairy-tale look to it.’

  ‘But not in a particularly conventional way,’ Claire says.

  ‘And it’s not a very practical space. I’ve walked round the interior.’

  ‘You know the scenes in the book with Jane waking up at night and hearing noises around corridors and Bertha is running around? The descriptions in the text give much more an impression of space and expansiveness. Looking at the size of the building now, this feels like you would just hear everything.’

  ‘Yeah, and that bit when she describes a long corridor with many closed doors. That doesn’t fit at all.’

  Of course, the world of Jane Eyre is a product of Charlotte’s imagination, but it is interesting to consider to what extent her vision of it was invented and to what extent there are comparisons with real places. As we sit in the shade, we watch rooks flap their ragged black wings as they circle the rookery. One perches on a branch and bobs its head, making that raspy sound that resembles a football rattle.

  ‘In my Penguin Classics edition from 1996,’ Claire says, ‘the notes at the back say that the descriptions of Thornfield draw on her experience of two Yorkshire houses: Rydings in Birstall, home of Ellen Nussey till 1837, and Norton Conyers near Ripon. These contribute to the grounds and the external appearance of Thornfield.’

  ‘So, they’ve completely missed the North Lees Hall connection. That’s so interesting. The hall was owned by a family called Eyre, and when Charlotte visited, Mary Eyre was living there with her children. The first mistress of North Lees Hall, Agnes Ashurst, it was said, went mad and was confined in a padded room and died in a fire.’

  We talk about whether it was these extraordinary stories of North Lees Hall’s residents that inspired Charlotte or whether it was the Gothic setting itself. The rook that was making so much noise is joined by its mate, and this seems to silence it for a while. We sit in quiet reflection. It was also here, at North Lees Hall, that Charlotte saw the so-called ‘apostles cupboard’, a huge walnut and ebony wardrobe, containing twelve panels, each depicting one of the apostles. No one knows who painted the panels, but they were probably copied from Van Dyk. The furniture was here when Charlotte visited but was bought by the Haworth Parsonage Museum in 1935 and is now part of their permanent exhibition. It finds its way into Jane Eyre. In chapter twen
ty, Jane describes waking in the dead of night, her curtains open, to a full moon and hearing a cry that ‘rent in twain’ the silent night with a ‘savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall’. She says the noise came out of the third storey, from a room above her chamber. She then hears a struggle and a voice shouting ‘help!’ repeatedly. The cry wakes the other inhabitants, including Mr Rochester, who tries to downplay the event, saying it is just a servant’s bad dream. We learn later that this scream was uttered by Bertha, Mr Rochester’s wife, who is imprisoned in the hall and whose very existence he denies. Jane cannot sleep and spends a long time staring out of the window ‘over the silent grounds and silvered fields’. She is later called to assist Mr Rochester, fetching a sponge to nurse Mason, who is ‘soaked in blood’ – Bertha has bitten him and ‘sucked his blood’, vampire-style.

  Rochester locks Jane in the room with Mason while he fetches a surgeon. It is during this confinement that her eyes turn to a ‘great cabinet … whose front, divided into twelve panels, bore, in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each enclosed in its separate panel as in a frame’. The flickering candlelight animates the figures so that Luke ‘bent his brow’ and ‘St John’s long hair waved’ and the ‘devilish face of Judas’ gathered life.

  We stare at the exterior again. I’ve visited both of the halls mentioned in Claire’s Penguin edition, and I didn’t get the same feeling as I do now, staring at this hall, of being immersed in the book.

  I ask Claire about her essay in a recent edition of Brontë Studies called ‘“He is rather peculiar, perhaps”: Reading Mr Rochester’s Coarseness Queerly’. It’s a brilliant essay that made me revisit Jane Eyre and think differently about Charlotte Brontë. In it, Claire talks about how one reviewer (Elizabeth Rigby from 1848) condemned Jane Eyre, calling it an ‘anti-Christian composition’. This may seem like an odd thing to accuse a clergyman’s daughter of, but Rigby would not have known that at the time, as Charlotte was writing under the nom de plume of Currer Bell. I’m wondering whether Rigby’s accusation refers to the bigamy in the book, or whether there are other anti-Christian elements. Claire explains that in the full review a lot of the anti-Christian criticism is also aimed at Jane, not just Rochester. Rigby goes on to accuse Charlotte of making an ‘unworthy character interesting’. A strange accusation to a modern reader. These days, that’s the job description of a novelist. Her sister Emily is similarly accused for her portrayal of Heathcliff. Rigby then goes on to say that Rochester is ‘made to be as coarse and as brutal as can in all conscience be required to keep our sympathies at a distance’. This coarseness, then, is a combination of elements. Rigby is talking about coarse as in vulgar, but also base and even obscene. We often overlook underlying aspects of violence around Rochester’s character. The fact that he has a woman locked up. The fact that he does threaten Jane with violence.