A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

  In a word, ‘filth’ everywhere. (That ‘mud’ in the street is largely horse droppings and human waste.) So much filth in the air that it has blocked out the sun. And filth's inevitable companion is sickness. There is disease everywhere in the novel – it kills poor little Jo the child street-sweeper, and disfigures the heroine. The first instalments of Bleak House appeared in 1852. Six years later, the engineer Joseph Bazalgette began construction of the sewer system under the London streets. That ‘mud’ would disappear. It's not far-fetched to say that Dickens, although he never dug a spade into the London soil, or lifted a flagstone, or soldered a metal pipe, helped in the great Victorian sanitary reform. We still read Bleak House. Every London bookstore will have copies on sale. And city dwellers still walk – most of them wholly unconsciously – over the same sewer system that our Victorian predecessors laid under our feet.

  Lastly, and most importantly, one of the things that gives Dickens's novels their everlasting appeal is his honest belief in the essential goodness of people. Us, that is. There are villains (it would be hard to mount a defence for murderous Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist) but in general Dickens has huge faith in humanity – he always felt that people were good at heart. This faith in human goodness is the central feature in his most famous work, A Christmas Carol (1843). Ebenezer Scrooge is a hard-hearted skinflint who simply does not care if poor people die in the street outside his door. Are there no workhouses, he asks? But even Scrooge, when his heart is touched, can become a benevolent person – a second father to crippled Tiny Tim and a generous employer of Tim's father, Bob Cratchit. This ‘change of heart’ is an all-important moment in most of Dickens's narratives. And – if you'd asked him and he'd felt able to give a straightforward answer – Dickens would probably have said that the aim of all his writing, both his fiction and his journalism, was to change or, at least, ‘soften’ hearts. More than most writers, he succeeds. Even today.

  Charles Dickens would have been the first to admit that he was not, in every respect, a perfect man. Although most of his novels end with happy marriage, he himself was not the best of husbands or fathers. After his wife of twenty years had borne him ten children he got rid of her and took up with someone twenty years his junior, who suited him better. Even by Victorian standards Dickens was a man who was occasionally wrongheaded in his social views, attitudes and prejudices. But this wrongheadedness is more than outweighed by his wholly admirable beliefs in progress and the human race's ability to make a better world – if their ‘hearts’ are in it. Our world is what it is, a better place than what it was, thanks, in part, to Charles Dickens. That, ultimately, is why his novels are great. ‘Quite so’, as the Inimitable would say (probably grumpily, if you had ever dared to think otherwise).

  CHAPTER 19

  Life in Literature

  THE BRONTËS

  The lives of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49) – could themselves serve as the plot of a sensational novel. They were the daughters of a remarkable self-made man, born Patrick Prunty, one of ten children of a dirt-poor Irish farmer. By dint of native cleverness, work and a lot of good luck, Patrick got himself to Cambridge University. On graduation he was ordained into the Church of England and prudently changed his name to Brontë, one of the titles of Lord Nelson. Not everyone liked the Irish at the time – there were regular uprisings and bloodshed. The Revd Brontë married well, and in 1820 got himself a living (as religious postings were called) in Yorkshire, on the Pennine Moors not far from Keighley, a mill town producing textiles. The family lived with wild nature on one side, the Industrial Revolution on the other.

  The ‘living’ was misnamed. The handsome parsonage at Haworth was a place of death. Patrick's wife, worn out by six pregnancies, died in her mid-thirties, when Anne was a baby. The two eldest daughters died in childhood. Of the three sisters who survived, none reached forty – Charlotte lived longest, to just short of her thirty-ninth birthday. The son, and great hope of the family, Branwell, went to the bad, took to drink and drugs, and died, raving, aged thirty-one. All the children either died, or were fatally weakened, by ‘consumption’ (as tuberculosis was called at the time). Ironically their father, poor man, outlived them all. Was it for this he had dragged himself up by his bootstraps?

  Had the Brontë family been as healthy, happy, prosperous and long-lived as that other famous parson's daughter, Jane Austen (who was forty-one when she died), how different would their unwritten fiction have been, in that unlived decade? Very. That, at least, would seem undeniable. They were all of them developing as artists at phenomenal speed, almost up to the last moments of their short lives.

  Haworth – the parsonage, church, and adjoining graveyard – forms the climate and the small world of the sisters' fiction. None of the three broke free and they all spent virtually their whole lives within the boundaries of their father's parish. The fact they saw so little of the larger world is evident enough in their novels. In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, all the action takes place within a ten-mile radius of the ancient house that gives the novel its title. This tiny territorial reach leaves holes in the narrative. At the beginning of the story Mr Earnshaw has just walked to Liverpool and back (‘Sixty miles each way’) bringing with him a foundling – the infant Heathcliff, destined to overthrow the house he is fostered in. Other novelists would have dredged up some ‘back story’ for this strange child, or, at least, have given us the scene in which Earnshaw found the waif, as he claims (unconvincingly), in the Liverpool gutter. Is he an unacknowledged bastard, with some gipsy mother? Emily offers no explanatory scene. Why not?

  The most plausible reason is that she did not know Liverpool, and did not want to take her story to a place she did not know. The largest such hole in the Wuthering Heights plot concerns Heathcliff's ‘missing years’. On overhearing Cathy tell Nelly (another of the novel's many narrators) that she intends to marry Linton, Heathcliff runs away without so much as packing a bag, and with not a penny in his pocket. He comes back, three years later, rich, well-groomed and cultivated – a ‘gentleman’. How did that happen? Where has he been that this change could happen? The novel does not say.

  These ‘holes in the plot’, as I've called them, can be seen as touches of art, deliberately there as features of the novel's design. But they also witness the fact that the author was a provincial, unworldly woman who simply had no experience of the places and situations in which an ignorant country boy, like the runaway Heathcliff, could return so strangely different.

  Anne went to London, for a couple of days, only once in her life (to prove that she was the author of her first novel). Her two novels (which are traditionally underrated) frugally use her very limited life experience to the full. Drawing on the two years she spent as a governess with a family near York, in Agnes Grey (1847) she created the finest work of Victorian fiction to delineate the humiliations and frustrations of that ‘upper servant’ station in the middle-class household. The other thing she knew more than most women about was alcoholism. Because she was asthmatic, she spent more time at home and was more biddable than her sisters (as a child she won a medal for ‘good conduct’; it's hard to imagine Charlotte or Emily winning one). So it was Anne who had to look after Branwell in his wild bouts of drunkenness and dreadful withdrawals. It forms the plot of Anne's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), the most painfully accurate depiction of ‘dipsomania’, as alcoholism was then called, in Victorian literat
ure.

  A fact often forgotten is that the Brontës were a clergyman's daughters. It is woven into the fabric of their writing – sometimes invisibly. Most readers of Jane Eyre (1847) will remember the first line (‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’) and the horrors of the ‘red room’ and the odious Mrs Reed. But readers are often stumped to remember the last words of the novel: ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’

  It is important to remember, when reading their novels, that the sisters had virtually no institutional education. Their brief experience of Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School proved disastrous, and led to the eldest sisters' deaths. Charlotte immortalised the awful place, vengefully, as Lowood in Jane Eyre. After fifteen years, she still felt the physical pangs that sadistic school had inflicted on her and her sisters:

  we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning.

  After typhoid swept through the school, closing it, their father took over his three surviving daughters' education and tutored them at home, exceptionally well. For these five years – probably the happiest years of their lives – the sisters were free to rummage at will throughout the well-stocked parsonage library. They were stimulated by the books they found – Scott's romances and Byron's poems, notably.

  Around 1826, the three young sisters, together with Branwell, began secretively to write long serials, in tiny, almost illegible script, about imaginary worlds. This ‘web of childhood’ was initially inspired by games with Branwell's toy soldiers. The narratives ranged as far abroad as Africa, featuring Napoleonic and Wellingtonian heroes. The super-heroism of the characters in the imaginary Angria and Gondal filtered through in the later novels to such characters as Edward Rochester and, most glamorously, Heathcliff, that hero composed – as was his name (forename or surname?) – of the two hardest, least human elements in Emily's beloved moorland landscape.

  Once grown up, what should unusually clever young women like the Brontë sisters do? Marry, of course. When their father died they would be penniless. The few portraits and a single photograph (of Charlotte) that survive confirm they were physically attractive. There were young, eligible clergyman in plenty for them to choose from. But the sisters wanted more than marriage. Charlotte, for example, is known to have turned down early offers. They could, they resolved, pass on the home schooling their father had passed on to them. All three girls became governesses: Emily and Charlotte briefly and unhappily, Anne for longer and more long-sufferingly.

  In 1842, Emily and Charlotte went off to Brussels, to work, as student teachers, in an exclusive boarding school for girls, with the aim of mastering French. It would help them, they believed, set up a school of their own one day. In Brussels, Emily was chronically unhappy away from Yorkshire and the moors. She, like Heathcliff and Cathy, loved ‘wilderness’. One of the fascinating moments in Wuthering Heights is when the young Cathy and Heathcliff compare their favourite summer days. For her it is when the clouds scud across the sky, driven by the wind, and the land is dappled. For him it is still, sultry, cloudless days. That is not an episode we would find in Charlotte's fiction.

  Emily left Brussels to return to Haworth as soon as she decently could. The foreign place held nothing for her. Charlotte stayed another year. Disastrously for herself, but happily for literature, she fell madly in love with the principal of the school, Constantin Héger. He behaved well. She, consumed by passion, behaved, if not quite badly, then rather recklessly. Héger was the great love of her life. It was not to be, but nonetheless that wretched experience forms the stuff of the novels to come – Rochester's teasing, cat-and-mouse games with his governess, for example, in Jane Eyre. In Villette (1853), Héger appears, more realistically, as the man Lucy Snowe loves while working as a student teacher in a Brussels boarding school. The autobiographical element is heightened by both novels being written by the heroines in first-person narrative (‘I’ narrative) form. Rarely has an unhappy love affair produced greater fiction. And knowing what lay behind these novels helps us as readers to appreciate that greatness.

  After Brussels the three women found themselves reunited at Haworth. They were now in their twenties. Neither governessing nor Belgium had worked. But apparently they were still unwilling to put themselves on the marriage market and collectively resolved to earn their own income – never easy for women of the early Victorian period.

  They decided that they would write. On the profit their books made they would, one day, set up a school. To break into the world of authorship, dominated as it was by men both as authors and publishers, they adopted male pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). They paid for a volume of their verse to be printed under their pen-names, loosed it on the world, and waited expectantly. It sold two copies. Posterity has made some amends by recognising Emily, particularly, as a major poet.

  One wonderful year, 1847, saw the publication of all three of the great Brontë novels. But they were not all immediately successful. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey – Emily's and Anne's first novels (again published under their male pen-names) – were accepted by the most dishonest publisher in London. Under his mistreatment they sank without trace or payment. Long after the women's deaths, these novels would go on to be recognised as masterworks of Victorian fiction. Too late, though, for their authors.

  Charlotte fared better. Her first novel was rejected by the publisher she sent it to, but with the comment that the firm would be very interested to see her next work. She duly dashed off Jane Eyre in a few weeks. It became a bestseller and ‘Currer Bell’ (she did not keep the pseudonym going for long) found herself the novelist of the day. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, like many others, stayed awake to read the story of the plain little governess who takes on the world and wins the man she loves, after he has conveniently disposed of the madwoman (his first wife) in the attic, and been ‘tamed’, Samson-like, by losing his sight and a hand.

  Emily died a few months later, barely thirty, without finishing the second novel which she is thought to have been working on. Anne died, aged twenty-eight, five months after her sister. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was, like the first, shamefully mishandled by her publisher. Both sisters died of consumption.

  Charlotte lived on for another six years. She was also the only child of the family to marry, having accepted the proposal of her father's curate. Not long after the marriage, she died too, aged thirty-eight, from the complications of pregnancy. She was buried in the family vault at Haworth, one of three sisters who left behind them a body of fiction that will live forever.

  CHAPTER 20

  Under the Blankets

  LITERATURE AND CHILDREN

  Let's play some literary hide and seek. Where is the child hiding in Hamlet? Where are the little ones in Beowulf ? Pride and Prejudice was, in 2012, voted the most influential novel in the English language. Where are the children in Austen's story about the Bennet family? Come out, come out, wherever you are! You'll seek in vain.

  If, for the traditional parent, the ideal child was ‘seen and not heard’, in the long history of literature the child was, for centuries, neither seen nor heard. They are, of course, there, but they are invisible.

  Children's literature – in the double sense of books for children, and books about children – emerged as a distinct category of fiction in the nineteenth century. The new interest in ‘the child’ as something worth writing about and for can be credited to two leading spirits of the Romantic movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth. In Rousseau's Émile (1762) – a manual for the ideal education of the child – and Wordsworth's long autobiographical poem The Prelude in the following century, childhood is the period of life which ‘makes’ us. As Wordsworth put it: ‘The child is f
ather of the man’. Not on the sidelines, but at the centre of the human condition.

  Wordsworth's cult of the child had two sides to it. One was that childhood experience was ‘formative’ (it could also be traumatic – ‘deformative’). In The Prelude (and childhood is a prelude to adulthood) he argues that it is in childhood that our relationship with the world around us is established. In the poet's own case it was in childhood that his intimate relationship with nature was forged.

  The other aspect was Wordsworth's religious belief that the child, having been most recently in the company of God, was a ‘purer’ being than the grown-up person. This belief is proclaimed in his poem, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. We come into the world, the poem asserts, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, which are gradually dispersed as the years pass. Conventionally the term ‘growing up’ suggests addition: we become stronger, more knowledgeable, more skilled. It is not (in Britain or America) until we reach a certain age, when we are ‘mature’ enough, that we can see some films, drink alcohol, drive a car, marry or vote in public elections. Wordsworth saw it differently. Growing up was not gaining something, but losing something much more important.

  As we saw in Chapter 18, Wordsworth's heir in terms of a shared belief in childhood's primacy in human existence is – who else? – Charles Dickens. In his second novel, Oliver Twist (written in his mid-twenties, in 1837–38), he attacks new legislation, recently introduced, which made it more painful for the poor to rely on public aid – in order to motivate the ‘idle’ members of society to find useful employment and get off the municipal payroll. It's one of the recurrent swings in political thinking about the ‘welfare state’.