Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

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  BRANWELL’S CAREER WAS still undecided. His art master, William Robinson, died suddenly in 1838, leaving a wife and six children and at least one pupil without occupation. In February 1838 Patrick Brontë was applying to a Liverpool wine merchant he knew through a Haworth family (and also, evidently, through being the vintner’s customer) for help in procuring Branwell “an opening…as Clerk in some Respectable Bank. I know not what the usual terms, are, on which a Young man enters upon such a line of life, but I have heard, that they are comparatively easy, as far as money matters, are concerned.” The letter demonstrates again Patrick Brontë’s ignorance of the usual procedure, and his touching trust in the likelihood of ability being recognised. It would do Branwell good, his father thought, to see a little of the world beyond Yorkshire and “open a wider field, for talent, and suitable connexions.” His sights had been lowered from a possible move to London and the RA or a Continental tour; now the father was primarily interested in finding Branwell something respectable “and in time, should he conduct himself well, sufficiently lucrative.”

  Aunt Branwell and her savings came to the rescue when, in a bid to do something definite for his son, and with the help of his old friend William Morgan, Patrick Brontë decided to set Branwell up in business as a portrait painter in Bradford in the summer of 1838. A studio was rented, and lodgings found with a family called Kirby, on Fountain Street; the rest was meant to be up to Branwell. William Morgan proved an active patron, commissioning portraits of himself and his family; the Kirbys too provided their young tenant with work, but Branwell’s talent was simply not up to the competition in his field, and he struggled from the first to find clients outside his immediate circle.

  What Branwell enjoyed most about Bradford was the company of lively and intelligent friends who liked to congregate at the George Hotel, including John Thompson, a former fellow pupil at William Robinson’s studio, and the talented young sculptor Joseph Bentley Leyland. Leyland said later that Branwell was not a drunkard at this time (though he was no abstainer either). Under the eye of his godfather William Morgan, no doubt Branwell was on his best behaviour in public, but, as was to be expected from a 21-year-old youth set free for the first time, he was not immune to the temptations of the town and quickly got used to being in debt.

  Portraits of local figures would have necessarily been Branwell’s bread-and-butter work, had he ever developed his career as a professional artist, but ambitious, imaginary painting interested him far more, and the few of his works that survive, heavily indebted to the style of John Martin, are much more distinctive than his wooden portraiture. By May 1839 Branwell had had such little success in Bradford that there was no justification for keeping on the studio, and he came home again. Charlotte had visited her brother in Bradford once, apparently the only member of the family to do so. One wonders what she made of his bachelor quarters and workplace there. Did “her sisterly ways,” as the Kirbys’ niece characterised them vaguely, include tidying up his canvases, brushes and paints, or did Charlotte and Branwell spend their time in discussion of their joint creations Wiggins, Townshend, Northangerland and mighty Zamorna? It would have been hard indeed for Charlotte not to run her eye over her brother’s studio and wonder what she could have done with such a place to herself and such an opportunity.

  Just as Branwell returned home, Charlotte had to leave for her first post as a governess, to the Sidgwick family at Stonegappe in Lothersdale, only about twelve miles away. It was an appointment for less than two months (filling in for the regular governess), in a lovely place quite near home, among people of their acquaintance (the Sidgwicks were related to the Durys and Miss Wooler’s sister was married to the local parson); nevertheless, Charlotte was in deep distress the whole time.

  Her charges were seven-year-old Mathilda and her brother John, who was only three—both far too young to be able to benefit from Charlotte’s teaching. Very young children did not interest her much, in fact she found them rather disgusting. Mrs. Sidgwick was expecting her fifth baby in August. The only member of the family whom Charlotte considered interesting was the head of the household, Mr. Sidgwick, who strolled the grounds at Stonegappe with a magnificent Newfoundland dog at his heels, looking “very like what a frank, wealthy, Conservative gentleman ought to be.”

  When the family moved from one summer residence to another, where a large house-party gathered, Charlotte was very disturbed by being among so many strangers, writing to Emily (whose sympathy on this point could be guaranteed):

  I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks’ society but I have had enough of it—it is dreary work to look on and listen. I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil. While she is teaching the children, working for them, amusing them, it is all right. If she steals a moment for herself she is a nuisance.

  The similarities to Jane Eyre’s feelings of being overlooked are striking. Charlotte’s former dreams of being in “grand folks’ society” were really dreams of having her true worth recognised, but now that she was among “grand folks,” her employer—a woman whose lack of feeling and bourgeois complacency she scorned—refused to recognise anything about her at all, beyond her relation to the children. “[She] does not know my character & she does not wish to know it,” Charlotte complained to Ellen. “I have never had five minutes conversation with her since I came—except while she was scolding me.” In a formulation much like that which Karl Marx was preparing to publish, she found Mrs. Sidgwick exploitative, with her determination that “the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me.” Not that labour repelled her; it was the loss of “mental liberty” she raged against and that her position rendered her invisible, condemned to “look on and listen” to fools, and then to wipe their children’s noses, fetch and carry their things or sit hemming their sheets. It was far worse than Roe Head, and she was both miserable and surprisingly angry. “At times I felt and I suppose seemed depressed,” she wrote to Ellen:

  to my astonishment I was taken to task on the subject by Mrs. Sidgwick with a stern[n]ess of manner & a harshness of language scarcely credible—like a fool I cried most bitterly—I could not help it—my spirits quite failed me at first I thought I had done my best—strained every nerve to please her—and to be treated in that way merely because I was shy—and sometimes melancholy was too bad. at first I was for giving all up and going home—But after a little reflection I determined—to summon what energy I had and to weather the Storm—

  The writer A. C. Benson was a nephew of her employers and recalled them as “extraordinarily benevolent people, much beloved, [who] would not wittingly have given pain to any one connected with them.” Their liberality was probably the problem, as far as Charlotte was concerned. A. C. Benson heard that one of his cousins “certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Brontë,” behaviour that she would have found intolerable, and yet was impotent to punish. This was her first experience of having to deal with headstrong boys (there’s no evidence that Branwell ever behaved ill towards an adult in his childhood) and it appalled her. The Sidgwicks’ impression was that the temporary governess “had no gifts for the management of children” and was “in a very morbid condition” all the time she worked at Stonegappe: “if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.”

  The Bible that A. C. Benson heard about might be a confusion of the story that has come down through the Benson and Sidgwick families of Charlotte Brontë being left in sole charge of John and his ten-year-old brother William one day and their getting out of control. The elder brother egged on the younger, stones were lobbed at the governess, and she was cut on the forehead. Quizzed the next day by Mrs. Sidgwick, she refused to tell on them, thereby
earning a modicum of respect from her charges. But her antipathy towards Mrs. Sidgwick was confirmed when little John on one occasion at dinner took Charlotte’s hand and said “I love ’ou, Miss Brontë,” and his mother reprimanded him: “Love the governess, my dear!”*2

  The permanent governess returned to work in the middle of July, so Charlotte was free to go home, much to her employers’ relief as well as her own. What is surprising, given her intense antipathy to the work, is that she ever considered doing it again.

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  ELLEN’S SUGGESTION of a seaside holiday together could not have come at a better time for Charlotte, who felt that the prospect of weeks alone in Ellen’s company was almost more fun than she deserved. The plan was in danger of frustration by Aunt Branwell’s rival idea (much more boring, and not carried through) of taking the whole family to Liverpool for a holiday, and arrangements became so knotty that Ellen took the unusually firm step of simply turning up at Haworth one day in a carriage and forcing Aunt Branwell and Reverend Brontë to let Charlotte come away with her. Branwell provided comic commentary on this “brave defeat” of the “doubters” as his sister hurriedly packed for her five weeks away, so nearly missed because of dithering and second-guessing. As it was, Charlotte’s visit to the north Yorkshire coast in 1839 was “one of the green spots” of her life, recalled later with deep pleasure. She had taken her first ride on an amazing new railway train (from Leeds to York), she had stayed with strangers and not been too traumatised, and, at the age of twenty-three, she and Ellen had walked several miles from Easton to Bridlington to capture her first view of the sea. “[S]he was quite overpowered,” Ellen recalled; “she could not speak till she had shed some tears…for the remainder of the day she was very quiet, subdued and exhausted.”

  Between her release from Stonegappe and the end of the year, Charlotte was working on some much more ambitious stories, both in length and breadth, set ostensibly in Angria, but far from its “African” original, and more like a parallel-universe version of the north of England, with some real names and places thrown in (such as Alnwick). “Caroline Vernon” starts out in comic and domestic vein, with Northangerland grumpily back together with his wife and having to endure breakfast à deux, and Zamorna overseeing the harvest on his estates, like any complacent county landowner. Rather like Mr. Sidgwick, in fact, whose Newfoundland dog also makes an appearance.*3

  The character of Caroline Vernon is a remarkable study of adolescent sensibilities, quite unlike anything Charlotte had attempted before. Still writing in the tiny script, Brontë hit a subject that she could express with freshness and wit—the swooning and trembling delights of female adolescent sexuality:

  No doubt it is terrible to be looked fixedly at by a tall powerful man who knits his brows, & whose dark hair & whiskers & moustaches combine to shadow the eyes of a hawk & the features of a Roman statue. When such a man puts on an expression that you can’t understand—stops suddenly as you are walking with him alone in a dim garden—removes your hand from his arm & places his hand on your shoulder—you are justified in feeling nervous & uneasy.

  “Nervous & uneasy”—otherwise known as overpoweringly excited. Charlotte was cleverly capturing the mixture of flutter and focus that burgeoning sexual awareness excites in young girls. Asked (by a character called Hector Montmorency, who is deliberately trying to shock her) if she likes Zamorna (to whose mesmeric sexual attraction she is just awakening), Caroline answers “No—yes—no—not much.” In fact, it is only this conversation, in which Montmorency reveals that Zamorna is a lifelong womaniser and that Mina Laury, whom Caroline thought a genteel recluse, is his mistress, that alerts Caroline to the nature of her own feelings about him, draws them into being, almost. “The young lady’s feelings were not exactly painful, they were strange, new & startling—she was getting to the bottom of an unsounded sea & lighting on rocks she had not guessed at.”

  Caroline’s awakening sensibilities are described as a stream of consciousness, many decades before such a term became commonplace: “ ‘But how do I wish him to regard me? What terms should I like to be on with him? Really, I hardly know…I wonder whether I love him? O, I do!…I’m very wicked,’ she thought, shrinking again under the clothes.” The girl tries to account for her overpowering feelings, reasoning, “She did not want him to love her in return…she only wanted him to be kind—to think well of her, to like to have her with him—nothing more.” Ultimately, Caroline runs away to be with Zamorna, and he quickly seduces her (in a scene of glances, touches and kisses that Brontë utterly relishes), but her statement of what she hoped from this mesmerising older man seems both comic and tragic: a wish for a guilt-free, sin-free love with a man whose primary attraction is sex—the idealised erotics of the adolescent finely identified and expressed by a woman of twenty-three.

  The novelette is startlingly novel on other levels too, showing the same confident “Postmodern” touches that Charlotte introduced into her work as early as 1830. The author draws attention to the fact that the action of the story shadows “real time,” pointing out that, far from being suspended in a narrative limbo, “standing for upwards of a quarter of a year with her foot on the carriage-step,” her heroine has got on very well without us in the space between chapters:

  No, be assured the young person sighed over Hawkscliffe but once, wept two tears on parting with a groom & a pony she had been on friendly terms with, wondered thrice what her dear mama would do without any-body to scold, for four minutes had a childish feeling of pity that she should be left behind, sat a quarter of an hour after the start in a fit of speechless thought she did not account for, & all the rest of the way was as merry as a grig.

  With this complex comic snapshot, Charlotte Brontë has one hand stretched backwards towards Lawrence Sterne and one forwards towards Nabokov (whose Pale Fire has a passage using a very similar idea). What pleasure this must have given Charlotte to read to her siblings, and what a sophisticated comic writer this minuscule manuscript shows Charlotte Brontë could have been had she chosen that route.

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  IN THE AUTUMN of 1839 Patrick Brontë secured a new curate, a keen 26-year-old fresh from Durham University, called William Weightman. Articulate and energetic, with views very much in harmony with the minister’s own, he endeared himself immediately at the Parsonage and did a great deal to win over opinion in the town to Brontë’s faction. Weightman became a good friend to Branwell too, and was a much better influence on him than John Brown, the sexton; he also managed what no outsider had yet with the girls, which was to break down their resistance to social charm. On hearing that none of the sisters had ever received a Valentine (aged twenty-three, twenty-one and twenty), he wrote them each some verses and walked ten miles to post them in a suitably incognito manner. Charlotte replied on behalf of them all in some deliberately plodding verses, reassuring the handsome curate that none of the girls read anything romantic into his gesture, a fairly sure sign that some of them did:

  A Rowland for your Oliver

  We think you’ve justly earned;

  You sent us each a valentine,

  Your gift is now returned.

  We cannot write or talk like you;

  We’re plain folks every one;

  You’ve played a clever jest on us,

  We thank you for your fun.

  Believe us when we frankly say

  (Our words, though blunt, are true),

  At home, abroad, by night or day,

  We all wish well to you.

  They considered him “a pilgrim,” she insisted, whose destiny is to meet a worthier fate (and mate) than Haworth could offer.

  When Ellen came to visit, Weightman seemed to be singling her out for special attention, and even Mary Taylor was moved to banter with him over a chessboard. Only Emily remained immune, and she took up the role of protector, reportedly thwarting Weightman’s attempts at lone walks on the moor with Ellen and earning the nickname “The Major” for a “swashing and martial
” performance in mock (or not) aggression against him.

  Weightman was a generous and thoughtful young man. When he gave a lecture at Keighley Mechanics’ Institute in April 1840, he took pains to make it possible for the Brontë girls to attend, arranging for a married clergyman friend to offer to escort them to and from the venue. The plan passed muster with Aunt Branwell and Patrick Brontë (no small triumph), and the sisters were able to enjoy a rare evening of ordinary youthful fun, walking the eight miles to Keighley and back in a high-spirited party that also included Ellen Nussey. They got home at midnight, to find Aunt Branwell waiting unsmilingly with some stewed coffee and very much put out by having two more guests than she had bargained for. This was a dampener, but not a total quelling, of “the great spirits of the walking party,” as Ellen recalled, and though Charlotte felt embarrassed about her aunt’s irritability, and guilty at having provoked it, Weightman seems to have understood all this and tried to make it into a joke, declaring himself “very thirsty” for as much coffee as he could have. Thus he kept the young people’s spirits up without malice—he does seem to have had an unusual capacity for doing the cheerful right thing.