Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  The death early in 1812 of their uncle Richard, who owned the house the sisters lived in, precipitated changes. Charlotte Branwell decided to stay in Penzance (she had fallen in love with her cousin Joseph and was engaged to marry him), as did Elizabeth, a confirmed spinster at thirty-six, but Maria made the bold move to join her aunt Jane and husband John Fennell in Yorkshire, and help them in the running of Woodhouse Grove. At twenty-nine, she seemed to have little intention of going back to a life of inaction, and while making herself useful at the school and offering herself as a future domestic substitute for her cousin Jane, she might also have been on the lookout for a mate herself.

  She found one very quickly in the queer, talkative best friend of cousin Jane’s fiancé. She and Patrick Brontë struck up an acquaintance on his visits to the school and soon were “walking out” together to local beauty spots, where Patrick impressed her with his charm and qualities of mind and spirit. With his person too, no doubt. Patrick Brontë was tall and well-made, with dark red hair, piercing eyes, a “nobly-shaped head, and erect carriage.” Mrs. Gaskell, who met him when he was almost seventy years old, guessed immediately that “in his youth he must have been unusually handsome.” Maria Branwell, on the other hand, was extremely small and “not pretty, but very elegant,” a description that passed without objection by Patrick Brontë, so must have truth in it and may have even originated with him. Very few other descriptions of her exist, but they indicate an amiable, wry and clever woman, “possessing more than ordinary talents.”

  We know about their courtship wholly from Maria’s side, as nine remarkably frank and revealing letters she wrote to Patrick were preserved carefully by him. They contain almost all we know about the mother of the Brontës; the only other relic of her that has survived is a pious essay. That there are so few letters makes their thoughtful, soliloquising air all the more poignant, as Charlotte appreciated better than anybody when she read them forty years later: “there is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense—a gentleness about them indescribable. I wished She had lived and that I had known her.” The first letter was written in August 1812, full of bemusement at the speed of events: “If you knew what were my feelings whilst writing this you would pity me,” Maria said to the near-stranger she had fallen in love with. “[I] fear to go too far, and exceed the bounds of propriety.” The places they had known together had begun to seem insipid without “your arm to assist me, and your conversation to shorten the walk”; she was thinking about her lover so much, in fact, that “when I work, if I wish to get forward I may be glad that you are at a distance.” Somehow, she felt compelled to confess all this to Patrick: “I have now written a pretty long letter without reserve or caution, and if all the sentiments of my heart are not laid open to you believe me it is not because I wish them to be concealed.”

  By early September the couple were promised to each other in secret, Patrick having proposed, picturesquely, in the grounds of Kirkstall Abbey. Maria’s cousin and family had formed “a pretty correct notion” how matters stood, however, “and as their hints, etc., meet with no contradiction from me, my silence passes for confirmation.” Maria had progressed from addressing Patrick as “Dear Friend” to “My dear Saucy Pat,” but she was aware that every advance in intimacy left her more vulnerable. When there was a delay in getting a reply to her letters, or no answer at all, she was painfully disappointed, and Patrick’s tendency to forget or mistake messages obviously disturbed her more scrupulous and dutiful nature. On one occasion, some visitors turned up at the Fennells’ unannounced, Patrick having entirely forgotten to pass on their intention to call. Everyone put this down, good-humouredly, to the young minister’s being “mazed” with love: “And even I begin to think that this, together with the note, bears some marks of insanity! However, I shall suspend my judgment until I hear what excuse you can make for yourself. I suppose you will be quite ready to make one of some kind or another.” This was an interesting tone to be adopting so early in their acquaintance: fond, indulgent, but consciously patient. Maria’s expectation of happiness was great—“the anticipation of sharing with you all the pleasures and pains, the cares and anxieties of life, of contributing to your comfort and becoming the companion of your pilgrimage, is more delightful to me than any other prospect which this world can possibly present”—but she also seems to have intuited that even requited love might not necessarily entail mental intimacy and that to some degree she would always be observing this unusual man and needing to accommodate his personality. No wonder that the letters resonated with Charlotte when she was shown them in 1850, who could herself have penned this frank, sensual, thoughtful declaration, written in fear of Patrick having cooled slightly in his responses, just three weeks before their wedding:

  Real love is ever apt to suspect that it meets not with an equal return; you must not wonder then that my fears are sometimes excited. My pride cannot bear the idea of a diminution of your attachment, or to think that it is stronger on my side than on yours…I am certain no one ever loved you with an affection more pure, constant, tender, and ardent than that which I feel. Surely this is not saying too much; it is the truth, and I trust you are worthy to know it.

  Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey saw the letters in the 1850s too, and remembered “a pathos of apprehension” in them from Maria’s thoughtful, solitary musings about the man she was to marry. Impressive as Patrick Brontë was, and blessed with unflinching faith and an intellect that was all the stronger for its simplicity, Maria Branwell seems to have had the superior mind and finer sensibility, and the modesty to suppress that fact.

  —

  THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN of 1812 passed quickly for the lovers, snatching time to go on walks together, and for Patrick attending to the preparation of married quarters. Maria didn’t go home to Cornwall to settle her affairs there, and just a few weeks before the wedding the trunk containing her possessions was involved in a shipwreck off the Devonshire coast. Everything was lost except “a very few articles,” including two very different kinds of reading matter, The Imitation of Christ and some copies of The Lady’s Magazine. The shipwreck must have seemed strangely symbolic of the abrupt and final cutting off from home that her marriage effected, for, just as Patrick never returned to Ireland, there is no record of Maria ever going back to her beloved Cornwall after 1812. They were starting afresh, on their own voyage together.

  The wedding—or weddings, rather—took place on 29 December 1812, for three were celebrated at the same time on the same day. While Charlotte Branwell and Joseph Branwell were exchanging vows in Cornwall, Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell and William Morgan and Jane Fennell were doing so at Guiseley Church in North Yorkshire. In a charming, almost comical arrangement, Mr. Fennell was to give both the Guiseley brides away and both couples interchanged roles in turn: first William performed the marriage ceremony for Patrick and Maria, with Jane acting as bridesmaid, then they all swapped places and Patrick was minister, Maria the bridesmaid, and Jane and William bride and groom. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Joseph were taking their vows “on the same day and hour” in Madron Church, the very place where John Fennell and Jane Branwell had married twenty-two years earlier. Through these coincidences, the occasion enforced and celebrated all the connections between these very like-minded people, a little society in itself optimistically setting out to do good in the West Riding.

  Patrick and Maria Brontë began their married life at Hartshead, in a rented house at the top of the hill. Patrick wasn’t happy with the accommodation, especially after they knew that their first child was on the way, but his attempts to get a new parsonage built with money from the Church Commissioners led to disappointment and personal expense, and he seems to have been looking around almost immediately for a different parish. Maria gave birth to a daughter, named after her, early in 1814, and another daughter, Elizabeth, was born the following year. In the meantime, Patrick had come to a happy agreement with his friend Thomas Atkinson of Thornton (
who was courting a young woman near Hartshead), and in May 1815 the two clerics swapped parishes and the Brontës moved with their two little girls to a square stone modern house on Market Street, just a few hundred yards from St. James’s Church and the main road into Bradford.

  Patrick Brontë always spoke of his five years in Thornton as the best of his life. He and his wife were in their prime, their family was growing, and for the first and last time the Brontës made close and affectionate friendships in the village where they lived, most particularly with the local doctor, John Scholefield Firth and his eighteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who lived at Kipping House, a few minutes’ walk down the road from the Brontës’ modest parsonage. Elizabeth’s mother had died the previous year in a riding accident, so Elizabeth, an only child, was running the household when the new curate’s family moved in. She immediately warmed to Maria Brontë and her little girls and stood godmother to the younger one, Elizabeth, when she was baptised in August 1815.

  There was “constant friendly intercourse” between the two families and strong ties among their mutual friends, whose relationships were complex and close-knit. Thomas Atkinson, with whom Brontë had swapped livings (and who was a nephew of Hammond Roberson), married Dr. Firth’s niece Frances Walker soon after his move to Hartshead.*1 Dr. Firth’s second wife, Anne, whom he married in 1815, had a twin sister, Mrs. Frances Outhwaite, whose daughter Frances was a schoolfriend of Elizabeth Firth and became Anne Brontë’s godmother. Her brother, John Outhwaite, a respected young physician in Bradford, became a friend of Patrick Brontë.*2 Between them, they made up a network of professional contacts, friends and godparents who stood the Brontës and their children in good stead their whole lives.

  Maria’s elder sister Elizabeth Branwell was also part of this friendly circle. She stayed with her sister and brother-in-law from the middle of 1815 (the time of her god-daughter Elizabeth Brontë’s christening) until after the birth of the next baby in the summer of 1816, and became a good friend of Miss Firth. Bradford had a library and a literary society, of which Patrick Brontë was a member, and there were many musical events and lectures. They also enjoyed dinners, outings, countless tea-drinkings and long, ambitious walks—to the top of Allerton, to Swill Hill. Both these last were in July 1815, just before Maria Brontë found out she was expecting her third child. The Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo was a cause of national rejoicing that summer, and at his church in Liversedge, Hammond Roberson had just had a new set of bells fitted in time to celebrate, cast from cannon captured from the French at Genoa. In Thornton, the Firths and Brontës collected money for the widows and orphans of Waterloo and took part in a day of public thanksgiving in January 1816 for the restoration of peace, and it seemed a hopeful time when the new baby, a girl called Charlotte, was born on 21 April.

  Elizabeth Branwell returned to Penzance soon after the baby’s christening,*3 taking an affectionate leave of Miss Firth, who noted “she kissed me and was much affected.” Patrick Brontë was also sorry to see her go, and inscribed a copy of Cottage Poems to his “beloved sister” as a token of “affection and esteem.” Aunt Branwell’s later reputation was as a bit of a dry old stick, but this shows that in 1816, aged thirty-nine, she was responsive, appreciative and very much part of the friendly Thornton group.

  To help run the household, the Brontës got their first servant the same year, a twelve-year-old-girl called Nancy Garrs, who had been trained at Bradford School of Industry, a home for orphans and poor children of which Mrs. Outhwaite was a patron. Nancy acted as cook, maid and nurse to the growing family. Mrs. Brontë was soon pregnant again, and this time, much to everyone’s delight, she gave birth to a son, Patrick Branwell Brontë, fourteen months after Charlotte, on 26 June 1817. Nancy’s sister Sarah joined the household the following year, by which time another baby was on the way, a girl born on 30 July 1818 and christened Emily Jane. The comings and goings between the Firth and Brontë families were as frequent as ever, though Miss Firth’s walks into Bradford were now mostly without Maria, so busy at home with her five young children, and tea parties were sometimes, charmingly, arranged for the older Brontë girls on their own. “M. E. and C. Brontë to tea,” Miss Firth recorded in January 1819, and again, in October, “The little Brontës called.”

  The year 1819 was a troubled one in the north of England. The aftermath of the long war had brought widespread unemployment and new protectionist Corn Laws taxing imported grain led to distress from high bread prices. Tensions rose dramatically following the shocking slaughter in August of fifteen men and women attending a pro-reform rally in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, bitterly dubbed “Peterloo.” For some months that autumn and winter, the country seemed on the brink of armed rebellion, with uprisings uncomfortably close to Thornton, one as near as Huddersfield. On 29 September, Miss Firth noted: “Came home in safety, thank God”; and on 31 March 1820, “We sat up expecting the Radicals.” Her grandson later explained that Patrick Brontë had completely unnerved his old friends with tales of what he had witnessed in Ireland in 1798, and “by his prophecies of what was coming in England, almost frightened Mr. Firth to death, so that he had all his windows barred up in consequence.” Patrick’s own habit of keeping loaded guns around the house, by his bed and even on his person (reported by various servants and visitors from the 1820s onwards) may well date from this time.

  The anxious vigil at Kipping House took place just after the christening of Maria’s sixth baby, Anne, to whom Elizabeth Firth and Fanny Outhwaite stood as godmothers. But the Brontës were not to be their neighbours much longer. The vicar of Bradford had nominated Patrick to the perpetual curacy of Haworth, a village only a few miles to the north-west of Thornton, but on high, windswept ground. The chapelry itself had a challengingly wide spread, taking in villages within a radius of almost eight miles, but it was the former parish of a famous evangelical preacher, William Grimshaw, and it possessed a good-sized, free-standing parsonage house, very suitable for the family, who by now must have struggled to fit into Market Street’s modest rooms. They made plans to leave.

  Patrick Brontë had published two more books in his years at Thornton, The Maid of Killarney (1818) and The Cottage in the Wood; or, The Art of Becoming Rich and Happy (1815), the latter a charming little production, 3 by 5 inches in size, with a beautifully executed frontispiece specially commissioned for the book, showing a pious cottager discovering a drunkard at his door. In later years the Brontë children must have been intensely interested in their father’s little novel, scaled down to their size and with its fine illustration and neat print. Even the story would have enthralled them, with its taming of a rake by a good girl, and readers of Charlotte Brontë’s novels might recognise some familiar themes—a man hoping he can bribe a girl into mistresshood or marriage, the girl’s virtuous determination to support herself, whatever the difficulty, and her reward of a surprise bequest.

  The author’s preface marks a decided change from his confession in Cottage Poems of the thrill he got from writing; here, Patrick warns against developing an addiction to it that destroys the writer’s contentment with the everyday:

  The sensual novelist and his admirer, are beings of depraved appetites and sickly imaginations, who having learnt the art of self-tormenting, are diligently and zealously employed in creating an imaginary world, which they can never inhabit, only to make the real world, with which they must necessarily be conversant, gloomy and insupportable.

  Patrick Brontë’s children had the run of his books and must have read these words often, but no group of young people ever took less heed of such a warning.

  * * *

  *1 The Atkinsons became godparents to Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Atkinson was the aunt of Amelia Walker, one of Charlotte’s later schoolfriends.

  *2 The Outhwaites were a philanthropic family—John was well loved for not charging the poorer patients at Bradford Infirmary, and Frances and her mother were patrons of the Bradford School of Industry.

>   *3 At which the godparents were Thomas and Frances Atkinson.

  TWO

  An Uncivilised Little Place

  1820–25

  Patrick Brontë’s move to Haworth was fraught with vexations. The vicar of Bradford had made the appointment without seeking the opinion or approval of the church trustees, who did not take kindly to being ignored. Confusion reigned for a few weeks: Brontë resigned before he had even taken up residence, and his replacement, Samuel Redhead—also elected by the vicar without reference to the trustees—was given a potent demonstration of local discontent when the whole congregation walked out of his first service. In the wake of this decisive thumbs-down Patrick Brontë returned to the post, although he didn’t move his family across to the village immediately. Haworth already seemed a contentious place in comparison with Thornton.