Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  —

  THE NEW CURATE who arrived in May 1845 was just in time to make the acquaintance of the Brontë family before they received the hammer-blow of Branwell’s fresh disgrace. Arthur Bell Nicholls was a rather straight-laced 26-year-old Irishman, just out of Trinity College Dublin. He had been born near Belfast but had lived since the age of seven with a childless uncle and aunt in Banagher on the Shannon, a name which can’t have failed to strike a chord with Charlotte, since she believed her hero Wellington (another Arthur) to have hailed from the same area. Nicholls’s arrival was welcome and overdue for hard-pressed Patrick Brontë and immediately relieved him of many duties and services, including the management of the school. Charlotte was able to report to Mrs. Rand after only a couple of weeks that Nicholls “appears a respectable young man, reads well, and I hope will give satisfaction.” On the whole, though, she was extremely out of patience with the type. Before their visit to Hathersage in the summer, Ellen had been trying to interest her in one of Henry Nussey’s clerical neighbours, a Mr. Rooker, but Charlotte wrote back sharply that any visit to her brother’s parish would not be on that account. “[He] must be like all the other curates I have seen,” she said, “and they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race.” The Haworth area seemed to be suddenly overrun with curates: Joseph Grant in Oxenhope (where he was in charge of the grammar school), James Bradley in Oakworth and now Arthur Nicholls in the home church. James Smith in Keighley was these young men’s social leader and they could often be found together, in one another’s lodgings, or descending en masse on the Parsonage unannounced, as they did one afternoon in June 1845. Perhaps this noisy group ate too much (in Shirley, Charlotte includes a very funny but feeling description of a curate’s landlady being eaten out of house and home by him and his colleagues), they certainly talked too much—and Charlotte, seething over the teacups for a while at the presumption of these backwater boobies, suddenly let fly: “I pronounced a few sentences sharply & rapidly which struck them all dumb,” she told Ellen, with evident satisfaction. “Papa was greatly horrified also—I don’t regret it.”

  Charlotte’s visit to Hathersage in July was an oblique reminder of what she had passed up in refusing Henry Nussey’s proposal six years earlier, for she and Ellen stayed at the Vicarage to which he was about to bring his new bride, handsome and rich Miss Emily Prescott. Charlotte felt not a single pang of jealousy of the new Mrs. Nussey; one feels she would always have much rather kept house with Ellen than with any man.

  The holiday, which immediately preceded her hearing of Branwell’s disgrace, was full of gentle pleasures, not least discovering the beauty of the Peak District, whose limestone dales, dramatic escarpments and caverns full of rare Blue John stone had been a draw for the romantic tourist for decades. The handsome Vicarage, nestled in a group of houses around the hilltop church in a beautiful prospect of rolling greenery, was like a Haworth enskied. Ellen and Charlotte went by pony and trap to Castleton and the ruins of Peveril Castle (whose associations with Walter Scott’s novel Peveril of the Peak would have thrilled them) and a walk of about a mile through the fields outside Hathersage brought them to North Lees Hall, a small, battlemented stone house built in Elizabethan times. There the owner, a widow called Mary Eyre, told the young women of the ruined Catholic chapel nearby, showed them a tall cabinet decorated with heads of the twelve apostles and told them how a former mistress of the house had gone mad and been kept in a padded room on the top floor, where she died in a fire that had once damaged the house severely. In the parish church, they admired the ancient brasses of these Eyres, and the tomb of Damer de Rochester. Charlotte took it all in.

  Back home, some decision had to be made about Branwell, who was keeping the household awake at night with his noisy despairing over Lydia Robinson. At the end of July he was sent to Liverpool and north Wales with his friend John Brown as minder, allowing the household at home a short respite. Emily was the only one to remain sanguine in the crisis, writing in her Diary Paper on her birthday, “I am quite contented for myself…seldom or ever troubled with nothing to do…and merely desiring that every body could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding and then we should have a very tolerable world of it.” Emily’s contentment was partly to do with her continued pleasure in writing, which included her poems and “a work on the First Wars” of Gondal, now lost. “The Gondals still flo[u]rish bright as ever,” she reported to the little tin box, and it’s odd to see her, at the age of twenty-seven, with an absolutely undiminished enthusiasm for role-playing. Her account of a two-day trip to York with Anne in June makes the undiscovered genius sound positively childlike, from the very fact that it was “our first long Journey by ourselves” to the way they spent the excursion conspiratorially “in character” as their Gondal avatars.

  Anne was in a less equable mood as a result of her recent experiences at Thorp Green, as Charlotte acknowledged in 1850: “hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm.” Having to resign her post after so many years of being resigned to it was less of an escape than a defeat; Branwell’s transgressions had also lost Anne the friendship of the younger Robinson girls and affected her chances of getting a good “character” from her former employers. Anne’s Diary Paper is peppered with questions and uncertainty:

  [Charlotte] is now sitting sewing in the Dining-Room Emily is ironing upstairs I am sitting in the Dining-Room in the Rocking chair before the fire with my feet on the fender Papa is in the parlour Tabby and Martha I think are in the Kitchen Keeper and Flossy are I do not know where little Dick [the canary] is hopping in his cage—When the last paper was written we were thinking of setting up a school—the scheem has been dropt and long after taken up again and dropt again because we could not get pupils—Charlotte is thinking about getting another situation—she wishes to go to Paris—Will she go? she has let Flossy in by the bye and he is now lying on the sopha—Emily is engeaged in writing the Emperor Julius’s life she has read some of it and I very much want to hear the rest—she is writing some poetry too I wonder what it is about—I have begun the third volume of passages in the life of an Individual. I wish I had finished it—This afternoon I began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at Keigthley—What sort of a hand shall I make of it? E. and I have a great deal of work to do—when shall we sensibly diminish it? I want to get a habit of early rising shall I succeed?…I wonder how we shall all be and where and how situated on the thirtyeth of July 1848 when if we are all alive Emily will be just 30 I shall be in my 29th year Charlotte in her 33rd and Branwell in his 32nd and what changes shall we have seen and known and shall we be much chan[g]ed ourselves? I hope not—for the worse [a]t least—I for my part cannot well b[e] flatter or older in mind than I am n[o]w—Hoping for the best I conclude Anne Brontë

  Charlotte…wishes to go to Paris. This wish, clearly never put into action, shows Charlotte’s restlessness after Branwell’s return. “My hopes ebb low indeed about Branwell,” she confided to Ellen, only a few weeks later. “I sometimes fear he will never be fit for much—his bad habits seem more deeply rooted than I thought.” This is the first indication that Charlotte now understood her brother to be addicted to drink and, probably, opium as well. “It is only absolute want of means that acts as any check to him,” she noted with disgust. Mrs. Gaskell, relying on local sources other than Charlotte, one presumes, dated his full-blown addiction from this year: “In procuring it he showed all the cunning of the opium-eater. He would steal out while the family were at church—to which he had professed himself too ill to go—and manage to cajole the village druggist out of a lump; or, it might be, the carrier had unsuspiciously brought him some in a packet from a distance.”

  Getting away from home again, and getting nearer to Brussels, held out to Charlotte a glimmer of hope in this otherwise bleak time. On the way back from Hathersage, she had shared a railway carriage with a man who looked so French th
at she felt emboldened to address him in the language. “He gave a start of surprise and answered immediately in his own tongue.” Hearing French again after so long “sounded like music in my ears,” as she confided to Heger a few months later. “Every word was most precious to me because it reminded me of you.”

  In an overlooked remark made to her publisher’s editor two years later (in December 1847), Charlotte mentions “a brief translation of some French verses sent anonymously to a Magazine,” which was the only thing she had published by that date, besides her “little book of rhymes” (Poems, 1846) and Jane Eyre. The magazine has never been identified, but the work could have been her translation of Auguste Barbier’s poem about Napoleon, “L’Idole,” her only remaining attempt at “some French verses” of the right date, and could have been worked on and submitted to a periodical at any time in 1844 or 1845. This unidentified and anonymous publication, now lost, was Charlotte Brontë’s first appearance in print. It seems significant that after all her years of feverish ambition “to be forever known” as a poet, her solicitations of notice from Southey, Coleridge and others, her authorship of hundreds of thousands of words of prose and verse of her own, she finally made her debut as a translator of poetry from the French. Attracting the attention of a magazine editor through the work of Barbier (or Belmontet, André Chénier, Millevoye—whichever poet it was: she was interested in them all) would have been easier than getting her own “rhymes” published, but in 1844 and 1845 her priorities had shifted. Getting published was no longer a matter of lofty, distant personal ambition, but a way—perhaps the only way—to maintain communication with Constantin Heger. Sending him a magazine in which her translation appeared—undoubtedly of a text he had recommended to her in Brussels—would have made it almost impossible for him not to respond, surely? And the evidence of her intellectual and creative progress would have been a way of “proving” that he, and Madame, had misjudged her frantic need to correspond. She wasn’t a lovesick troublemaker, after all; she was a writer.

  In their changed, unhappy household, each of the Brontë siblings was, separately and to a great extent privately, taking refuge in writing. They were all desperate for money and employment; indeed it is hard to see how Patrick Brontë could have afforded to have all four adult children back at home, not earning a penny. Writing, the old solace, now was also the only resource. Anne, as her diary makes clear, had almost finished a three-volume novel called “Passages in the Life of an Individual” (almost certainly the work that appeared later as Agnes Grey), and Emily must have started her own novel around this time. Branwell was convinced that fiction writing was an easy road to riches and had drafted about forty pages of a story called “And the Weary are at Rest,” from which he hoped to earn at least £200. He also saw publication as a way to win back favour with Lydia Robinson, with whom he was more obsessed than ever. On 25 November he sent Leyland a very personal poem for The Halifax Guardian under his usual signature, “Northangerland,” telling his friend, “I have no other way, not pregnant with danger, of communicating with one whom I cannot help loving.”

  And, while Branwell’s effusion about his “Angel” appeared in the local paper, Charlotte was privately writing an early version of a poem just as personal and explicit about Constantin Heger, “I gave, at first, Attention close,” and working it into a novel of her own, called at this stage “The Master” (later known as The Professor), a painfully obvious piece of wish-fulfilment in which an overlooked, misunderstood and dutiful young teacher in Brussels wins the affections of her demanding superior, and is found to be a poet of strength and seriousness.

  The story must have been well under way by the end of 1845, as she finished it in June of the following year. In line with the notes she made in Brussels and with Heger’s advice, she had decided to write a realistic story, putting aside “ornamented and redundant” style and depicting a male protagonist who would “work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” This immediately presented difficulties for someone who didn’t in truth know much about men’s working lives. Her Brussels experience could be adapted to fit, but more was needed, and her solution to the problem was to adapt some scenes and themes from her own stock of Angrian tales (notably “Ashworth” and “The Spell”) along with material from Branwell’s fraternal enemies story “The Wool is Rising,” which he had dashed off in a matter of days in the summer of 1834, at the very beginning of the Angrian chronicles. In it, Northangerland’s rejected son Edward Percy progresses through the business world with ruthless single-mindedness to establish a huge mill empire, enter Parliament and marry a princess. His younger brother William, initially tyrannised by Edward, breaks free and joins the army, but it was only the early scenes, of William’s oppression in his brother’s counting house and the bitter sibling strife between them, that Charlotte recycled in her novel.

  That Charlotte felt the need to use anything so old and odd, and not of her invention, is extraordinary. It’s not as if she didn’t have hundreds of thousands of written words of her own to draw on, or that she couldn’t spin more at the drop of a hat. It’s not that she was trying to pay tribute to Branwell’s genius (his story doesn’t show any) or involve him collaboratively in her venture. It’s not likely that she even told him she was using it. What she seems to have been doing by grafting Branwell’s mill scenes on to the start of her narrative was trying to establish a more vigorous, masculine tone in a novel that is desperately anxious not to look like a piece of woman’s work and to distract attention from the story’s starkly autobiographical core. She was intending to submit it anonymously.

  At another level “The Master” is a retelling, or correction, of what Charlotte felt had happened to her at the hands of Madame Heger. The plot and setting seem at many points like a literal transcription of Charlotte’s Brussels experience, with an almost photographic return to the Pensionnat’s airy salons, busy classrooms and shade-dappled garden, remembered lovingly shrub by shrub. But “The Master” wasn’t a simple form of revenge. Crimsworth is nothing like Monsieur Heger; he is like Charlotte—English, Protestant, proud, angry, impoverished, even though his situation in the school is a fantasy version of Heger’s before his marriage to Zoë Parent. Crimsworth is given the choice of two possible mates: the charming but guileful directrice, Mademoiselle Reuter, or the insignificant, independent, poor, plain Anglo-Swiss Protestant girl, Frances Henri, a person whom Crimsworth literally doesn’t see in the classroom for some time, and then quickly comes to love. Frances is even more of a self-portrait of Charlotte than Crimsworth, from her unshowy looks to her poems straight out of the author’s own notebooks. The resulting romance between these two authorial avatars is intense but hardly erotic.

  “The Master” was a manuscript that Charlotte Brontë continued to work on for years, but that remained unpublished throughout her lifetime, much to her chagrin, as she felt, with justice, that parts of it were “as good as I can write; it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” The love story may have been unconvincing, indeed a little dull, but as she was writing it, a lifetime’s worth of unaired opinions, observations and grievances sprang to the tip of Charlotte’s pen and found powerful expression. These are fascinating moments, when the narrator is diverted into some tirade or violent digression, against adulterers, against drunkards, against mill-owners’ money-grubbing, like a bog bursting and bringing up “black moory substance” from deep below the surface. In the year when Friedrich Engels, only forty miles away in Manchester, was writing his Condition of the Working Class in England, Charlotte Brontë was putting into the mouth of her character Hunsden some extraordinary speeches about the state of England. Hunsden’s trajectory from rabble-rouser against Edward Crimsworth’s despotism (bringing to mind the real-life West Riding protests of the early 1830s against conditions in the mills) to owner of a fine old Elizabethan home in an area “whose verdure the smoke of mills has not yet sullied, w
hose waters still run pure” is narrated satirically by Crimsworth,*5 and the reader is not allowed to admire too much an undoubtedly liberal character, but Hunsden’s eloquence on the evils of the times seems like a satire-free zone, and a release of sincere feeling. He protests that Frances has no idea what England is really like and should test her idealism against facts:

  Come to England and see. Come to Birmingham and Manchester; come to St. Giles in London and get a practical notion of how our system works. Examine the footprints of our august aristocracy see how they walk in blood, crushing hearts as they go. Just put your head in at English cottage doors, get a glimpse of Famine crouched torpid on black hearthstones; of Disease lying bare on beds without coverlets; of Infamy wantoning viciously with Ignorance, though indeed Luxury is her favourite paramour and princely halls are dearer to her than thatched hovels—

  Just as striking is the way the novel deals with the subject of gender and the repression of women’s opinions, even their voices, by speculating on what is left unsaid. When Crimsworth praises Frances’s devoir and counsels her to cultivate her faculties, she replies not in words, but with a smile “in her eyes…almost triumphant,” which seems to mean the following: “ ‘I am glad you have been forced to discover so much of my nature; you need not so carefully moderate your language. Do you think I am myself a stranger to myself? What you tell me in terms so qualified, I have known fully from a child.’ ” No words are uttered; that would be unseemly, and, the author implies, somewhat redundant. Brontë is depicting a very familiar scene—a silent, apparently submissive woman (like her mother)—and showing its double-sidedness. The convention of not answering back allows able women a scornful superiority, flashing out in looks, in suppression of comment, withheld speech; quellingly disdainful, devastatingly critical, but always held in check. This pent-up power, secretly triumphant because unrealised, is the incendiary device at the heart of Jane Eyre, and of all Charlotte Brontë’s works. And through its identification and her precise observation of it, she presented something completely revolutionary.