Charlotte was a natural satirist and introduced a vulgar character called Wiggins into the stories who was a caricature of her cocky brother:
His form was that of a lad of sixteen, his face that of a man of twenty-five, his hair red, his features not bad, for he had a Roman nose, small mouth and well-turned chin. His figure too though diminutive was perfectly symmetrical and of this he seemed not unconscious from the frequent and complacent looks he cast down on his nether man. A pair of spectacles garnished his nose and through these he was continually gazing at Flanigan [an Angrian boxing-master] whose breadth of shoulder appeared to attract his sincere admiration, as every now and then he touched his own with the tip of his forefinger and pushed out his small contracted chest to make it appear broader.
Wiggins had some embarrassing relations, as he told the Verdopolitan journalists:
“I’ve some people who call themselves akin to me in the shape of three girls, not that they are honoured by possessing me as a brother, but I deny that they’re my sisters…”
“What are your sisters’ names?”
“CHARLOTTE Wiggins, JANE Wiggins, and ANNE Wiggins.”
“Are they as queer as you?”
“Oh, they are miserable silly creatures not worth talking about. CHARLOTTE’s eighteen years old, a broad dumpy thing, whose head does not come higher than my elbow. Emily’s sixteen, lean and scant, with a face about the size of a penny, and Anne is nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“What! Is she an idiot?”
“Next door to it.”
Charlotte was very close to her brother at this time, and very proud of him; as Ellen Nussey said later, “he was then…as dear to Charlotte as her own soul; they were in perfect accord of taste and feeling, it was mutual delight to be together.” When Charlotte paid her long-awaited first visit to Ellen’s home, Rydings in Birstall, that September, Branwell (who had come along as escort) leapt round “in wild ecstasy,” delighted with the beautiful old house and gracious grounds. It belonged to Ellen’s uncle (her father was dead) and housed many of the spread-out Nussey clan. Branwell said it was Paradise, and that if Charlotte was not happy there she never would be, but no doubt Charlotte enjoyed her recollections of Rydings much more than she did the experience of being there, and wished her brother had stayed, for she was as painfully shy as ever: Ellen recalled Charlotte being so nervous at being led into dinner by a stranger that “she trembled and nearly burst into tears.”
When Ellen made her first visit to Haworth ten months later, it seemed “wild and uncultivated” by comparison with the Spen Valley, though only twenty miles distant. The hill up to the church was so steep the horses’ feet caught at the cobbles “as if climbing.” Ellen noted Aunt Branwell and Reverend Brontë’s formal manners and eccentricities; indeed everyone must have been on best behaviour, as it was so rare to have visitors to stay. It sounds as if Aunt Branwell opened up considerably to well-brought-up, pretty Ellen, who left a suggestive portrait of the lonely 56-year-old, stuck in the chilly town where she had come a dozen years earlier to nurse her sister, left to make the best of it as housekeeper to her queer brother-in-law. Ellen thought Miss Branwell very “antiquated,” with her big old-fashioned caps and false hairpiece of auburn curls; but she conceded that “she probably had been pretty.” Having a teenaged visitor seems to have unleashed Aunt Branwell’s memories of her own youth:
She talked a great deal of her younger days, the gaities [sic] of her native town, Penzance in Cornwall, the soft warm climate &c…the social life of her younger days she appeared to recall with regret…In Summer she spent part of her afternoons in reading aloud to Mr. Brontë, and in winter the evenings, she must have enjoyed this, for she and Mr. Brontë had sometimes to finish their discussions on what she had read when we all met for tea, she would be very lively and intelligent “in her talk,” and tilted argument without fear against Mr. Brontë.
This willingness to give as good as she got with her emphatic brother-in-law must have been a valuable example to her nieces. A wife would have had to be more circumspect. But Aunt Branwell had an independent streak and some unconventional habits, taking snuff out of a pretty little gold box, as Ellen noted, “which she sometimes presented with a little laugh as if she enjoyed the slight shock and astonishment visible in your countenance.”
Ellen was similarly surprised by some of the stories that Charlotte’s father chose to tell “with great gusto” at the breakfast or tea-table, “of some of the old inhabitants in out of [the] way places over the moors.” Ellen recognised some of the same rude material later in Wuthering Heights, but thought them strange tales to hear from the mouth of a clergyman when she was the only guest at tea, saying primly, “I tried to hear as little as I could.”
—
THERE WAS a mood of optimism in the household in these years before any of the siblings left home to try their fortunes, fostered to a large extent by Charlotte’s success at Roe Head. She had studied hard, won prizes and made friends (something they all found so hard to do) and expended a minimal amount of the family’s resources. Best of all she had come home, and seemed likely to stay there. In her absence, Mr. Brontë had succeeded in getting a new building erected in the lane between the Parsonage and the church for a Sunday School, using a grant from the National School Society. This was to be of benefit to the parishioners, of course, and was in itself a hopeful sign of better connections between the Established Church and the other denominations, and also between the Brontës and the town, standing as it did so close to the Parsonage (overlooking its small front garden in fact). Patrick Brontë must have had his eldest daughter in mind all along as the school’s first superintendent, and she seems to have been content with having those duties on top of her sisters’ schooling. The tiny sixteen-year-old coped with such responsibilities with less anxiety than at any other time of her life, telling Ellen about having the other teachers round to tea and themselves going to tea twice in the village—a previously unheard-of amount of local socialising. As a teacher, she was careful and diligent, and made a point of hearing every child read.
Branwell also taught at the Sunday School, though with less admired results. His lonely upbringing made him unfit to be in charge of boys who were just a year or two his junior and viewed him with hostility. One of them later remembered him as “rapid and impulsive in his manner” and impatient with any slowness on the part of his charges. One day, when Branwell threatened to throw one of the bigger boys out of the class for struggling boringly with his reading, he got the defiant reply “Tha’ willn’t, tha’ old Irish —” as the boy got up to leave of his own accord. And when the recalcitrant scholars all trooped back into church to join the service, the vicar’s son always took himself into a corner of the pew alone and read “some book which was not the Prayer-book.” If disturbed by anyone, he would twist the miscreant’s hair and give him “a sharp rap with his knuckles.” And because they were in church, no one could cry out.
The tailor’s son who remembered this also studied the other Brontës in church: Charlotte keeping out of sight in the Parsonage pew, Emily sitting bolt upright in a corner “as motionless as a statue” with her eyelids half closed and mouth compressed. Their father would be preaching, extempore, with his watch laid on the cushion of the pulpit to keep exactly to half an hour. “His discourses were characterised by a steady and continuous flow of language as pleasant as a gurgling rill,” the boy remembered, with obvious gratitude for the soporific qualities of Mr. Brontë’s voice and the utter predictability of the sermon’s length.
Emily and Anne, who had become inseparable, “like twins,” as Ellen Nussey described them, had developed their own “play” in Charlotte’s absence, and the first mention of their breakaway invention, Gondal, is in a diary fragment written by Emily in November 1834, which, like Charlotte’s “History of the Year” and later autobiographical fragments, gives a vivid snapshot of a moment in the busy Brontë household:
I fed Rainbow, Diamond,
Snowflake Jasper [2 w. illeg.] this morning Branwell went down to Mr. Drivers and brought news that Sir Robert peel was going to be invited to stand for Leeds Anne and I have been peeling Apples for Charlotte to make an apple pudding. Charlotte said she made puddings perfectly and she was of a quick but lim[i]ted intellect Taby said just now Come Anne pillopatata (ie pill a potato[)]. Aunt has come into the kitchen just now and said where are your feet Anne Anne answered on the floor Aunt papa opened the parlour Door and gave Branwell a Letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte—The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally mosley is washing in the back-kitchin
It is past Twelve o’clock Anne and I have not tid[i]ed ourselves, done our bed work or done our lessons and we want to go out to play We are going to have for Dinner Boiled Beef Turnips potato’s and applepudding[.] the Kitchin is in avery untidy state Anne and I have not Done our music excercise which consists of b majer Taby said on my putting a pen in her face Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate[.] I answered O Dear, O Dear, O Dear I will derictly[.] with that I get up, take a Knife and begin pilling (finished pilling the potatos[)] papa going to walk Mr. Sunderland expected[.]
Six Diary Papers like this by Emily and Anne survive from the years 1834 to 1845. The sisters developed a plan to write brief accounts of their lives every four years (around the date of Emily’s birthday), read the previous period’s papers and seal up the new ones in a box or tin until four more years had passed, like a time capsule. In 1834 the interval had not been decided yet, and Emily was looking forward a good deal further than 1838:
Anne and I say I wonder what we shall be like and what we shall be and where we shall be if all goes on well in the year 1874—in which year I shall be in my 57th year Anne will be going in her 55th year Branwell will be going in his 58th year And Charlotte in her 59th year hoping we shall all be well at that time We close our paper[.]
The two younger sisters seem to have expected life in their fifties to be essentially a continuation of their current situation. No Papa and Aunt around, of course, but no spouses or children either in that far-off time of the 1870s.
Emily’s terrible spelling and naive expression in this messily written diary entry make one wonder what exactly the girls had been doing in their lessons together since Charlotte returned from Roe Head. Nothing very difficult or disagreeable, one imagines. Emily’s poor literacy would seem amazing in any middle-class sixteen-year-old girl of the time, but especially in one who within a few years would write a classic novel and some of the most penetrating poetry of the age. Her mind, always elusive and recalcitrant, seems particularly so here. Nor does Anne Brontë seem destined for a literary career.
The problem of how to launch Branwell into the world had reached a critical stage. With his own extraordinary leap from Drumballyroney to St. John’s College as the only example on hand, Reverend Brontë was perhaps not very well qualified to advise his son on the best course of action. On one side, Patrick Brontë’s experience had encouraged him to think that anything was possible when natural abilities, hard work and the will of God combined; on the other, his meteoric rise had left him with many social anxieties intact and much of his innate conservatism strengthened.
As the most intensively educated and apparently most promising of the Brontë children—and holding the trump card of maleness—Branwell might have been expected to blaze a trail for the others and raise them in the world together. Sacrifices had been made for his education (he had drawing lessons, boxing lessons, flute and possibly organ lessons from private teachers), allowances had been made for his temperament and volatility, and it is clear that great things were expected. Quite which great things, though? Branwell’s talents seemed legion—that was part of the problem—but in order to develop them, money would be needed, and certain stages, such as a university education, were simply too expensive and too protracted to consider. The other traditional middle-class male professions of the law, medicine and the army were also dismissed, probably on grounds of expense. “I once thought that he might get into the Merchantile line,” Patrick Brontë wrote a few years later, “but there seem to be many and great difficulties in reference to this.” The Church also seems to have been ruled out early on, and Branwell was forthright about his complete lack of religious zeal, writing to his friend Grundy in 1842, “I have not one mental qualification, save, perhaps, hypocrisy, which would make me cut a figure in its pulpits.” This brusque critique, and Branwell’s frequent absence from church services, must have been extremely painful to his father.
But, for all his talk of prudence, planning and “great precaution,” Patrick Brontë ended up encouraging his only son to turn to a notoriously unstable profession, and one, moreover, in which Branwell’s talents were far from outstanding: art. It was an especially rash strategy, given that Branwell had three unmarried sisters to be responsible for ultimately, and no family money to cushion him against failure.
All three sisters had had drawing lessons, from John Bradley, a founder member of Keighley Mechanics’ Institute, one of many similar adult education establishments springing up in the industrialised towns.*4 An ability to sketch a landscape or take a likeness was a valuable accomplishment for middle-class girls (like being able to play the piano or sing), but no one expected them to take art seriously, or think of pursuing it professionally. The Brontë sisters had no interest in “accomplishments,” or living the sort of lives that included them, but latched on to art instruction eagerly and practised techniques from drawing manuals with obsessive dedication. Studying and copying pictures was for them a further route into worlds of the imagination, and away from society.
This is one of the reasons why Charlotte had become such an avid memoriser of art works, as if to capture them for future private use. Mary Taylor remembered that at school, whenever Charlotte had access to “a picture or cut of any kind,” “she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her ‘what she saw in it.’ She could always see plenty, and explained it very well.” Her own drawings had reached a high standard very early, and she had incredible dexterity on the most minute scales, rendering detail with obsessive care. On a highly finished drawing, such as one titled St. Martin’s Parsonage, Birmingham that she contributed to a schoolfriend’s album, you need to use a magnifying glass to see that she has drawn each leaf of even the distant trees, a strange, secretive thoroughness.
Charlotte spent the three years after her return home from Roe Head in a frenzy of productivity, writing as much in 1833 as in any year of her life, according to her early editors Wise and Symington. But her main ambition at this date was, surprisingly, not to be a writer, but an artist: Branwell’s friend Francis Leyland observed at the time that “so strong was this intention, that she could scarcely be convinced that it was not her true vocation.” Clearly he did not think much of her chances. Charlotte came to agree with him, but only some fifteen years later, when, happening upon her old portfolio, she felt that “some fairy had changed what I once thought sterling coin into dry leaves.” At that point she was “much inclined to consign the whole collection of drawings to the fire.”
Many drawings by Charlotte have survived, showing a high level of technical skill and a generally low level of originality. She always felt more comfortable copying the works of others, effectively taking possession of them, and her pictures drawn from life—of Anne, for example—do not seem very life-like. Flowers, birds and picturesque landscapes, copied from books, were her most frequent subjects and pencil her preferred medium, fitting her choice of miniature and highly detailed images. She could achieve a very convincing metallic finish with it, creating a look like the steel engravings she admired. Small scale suited her taste and her near-sightedness (she could get up close to a miniature and see what she was doing); it was also, of course, a lot cheaper to use only pencil, watercolour and small amounts of paper and board. It meant she could think of pursu
ing art as a career—perhaps as a book illustrator—without the need of a studio, a battery of equipment and oils, or a master.
Charlotte’s most impressive pieces look as if they were made with one eye on compiling a professional portfolio and the other on making a lavish Angrian portrait gallery for purely personal consumption. She pored over prints in albums, picking out images that fitted scenarios or characters from “Glass Town” and giving them tiny adjustments, as in The Atheist Viewing the Dead Body of His Wife, her appropriation of a lithograph by A. B. Clayton illustrating a poem by Robert Montgomery; she used this to show Zamorna contemplating the corpse of his mistress Mary Percy. Conversely, Branwell’s paintings, also frequently copied from prints, tended to be in the sublime or heroic vein, such as his martial personification in Terror or his copy of John Martin’s Queen Esther.
Charlotte’s numerous drawings include three portraits of Anne (clearly a much more willing sitter than Emily, of whom no portrait by Charlotte exists), one in pencil, dated April 1833, and two watercolours, one undated but thought to be 1833 also, the other made in June 1834. Added to Branwell’s portraits, this makes Anne the most-recorded of the Brontë siblings,*5 though placed together, one would not necessarily recognise the likenesses as of the same young girl: Charlotte’s earliest picture has Anne posed elegantly in a veil, like a heroine of Gondal or Angria; the second is more animated, but oddly proportioned; and the latest seems rather formal for a fourteen-year-old, with her hair complexly curled. Charlotte’s poor sight must have made life-drawing difficult, and every attempt partly imagined. Some features of her portraits of Anne, such as the neck and shoulders, seem so stylised or idealised as to be little help in picturing the subject herself.
Charlotte Brontë Page 10
