Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Patrick Brontë was also kept in the dark about the forthcoming book, but perhaps there were other people, in or around the Parsonage, who were suspicious of the sudden postal traffic between an address in London and “C. Brontë Esq.” The “Esquire” was an assumption on Aylott and Jones’s part that Charlotte did nothing to correct until the proof sheets of the poems arrived in March and were somehow diverted, perhaps just momentarily, into the wrong hands, “a little mistake,” as Charlotte described it, that obviously threatened, but didn’t break, their cover at home. Charlotte asked the publisher to address all further correspondence to “Miss Brontë”—a declaration of her sex that she had hitherto avoided—but the interference with the post continued, and on receipt of the finished books in May, she reported back to Aylott and Jones that their last three letters and the parcel itself “had all been opened—where or by whom, I cannot discover; the paper covering the parcel was torn in pieces and the books were brought in loose.” Was someone at the post office opening up her mail?

  As production of the Poems progressed, Charlotte’s opinion of Aylott and Jones diminished. Their main interest seemed to be in selling more services to the hopeful authors, but, having spent so much already, the sisters baulked at finding more money for advertising, and kept it to a minimum, £2.00.*5 If the review copies resulted in good notices, Charlotte was prepared to think again, but that moment never came. The little book arrived in May, bound in dark green cloth, with the words Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell 4/– embossed inside a geometrical design on the cover. The sisters’ pleasure at handling their published work can be imagined: the solidity of the production, the excellence of the poems, the authority conferred by print—and anonymity.

  The book was available to the public by the end of May, but the public did not seem to notice. Though Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell got three hearteningly affirmative reviews some time later—two on the same day in July and one in October—the sales were absurdly, extravagantly low—two copies, Charlotte believed: worse than nothing.

  It was certainly an odd introduction to the world of letters. The elaborate defences of the pseudonyms now seemed hardly necessary, in fact quite an unwelcome distraction, since the first reviewer, in the Critic, used much of his wordage puzzling over the lack of editorial or biographical information about the Bells instead of doing what the authors had clearly intended: judging the poems “upon their own merits alone, apart from all extraneous circumstances.” The Dublin University Magazine also wondered whether the Bells “be in truth but one master spirit,” and all three reviewers felt the compulsion to rank them, the Athenaeum placing Ellis firmly at the top, with this perceptive remark: “a fine quaint spirit has the latter, which may have things to speak that men will be glad to hear,—and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.” All three “brothers” were included in the Critic’s equally warm praise for the originality and sincerity of their poetry, and “the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect.”

  The publication was a terrible anti-climax, though, and confirmed Emily in her belief that the whole thing had been a bad idea. She might well have taken secret pleasure in the fact that her contributions to the book garnered the most praise from the reviewers, but at home she referred to her work dismissively as “rhymes” and by 1848 “never alludes to them,” as Charlotte reported, “or when she does—it is with scorn.” Charlotte was determined to make the best of the experience, however: they could at least now present themselves as “published authors” to the publishers they hoped to interest in their novels. The strange package of stories went out in July to the publisher Henry Colburn, who refused it, but, undaunted, Charlotte sent it out again every time it came home.

  And their book of poems was not entirely without readers: copy for copy, it had astonishing effect. A letter arrived at the Parsonage two months later from a nineteen-year-old called Frederick Enoch, of Warwick, who ought to go down in literary history as the John the Baptist of the Brontës’ fame. He had not only bought the Bells’ Poems, but was moved to write and praise them, and ask for the favour of the authors’ autographs. The signatures that were sent him have now, by various by-ways, come back to Haworth Parsonage and are on exhibition in the Museum, the only examples of the sisters’ writing together on one sheet. How novel it must have been for the girls to sign, for the first time, as their authorial alter egos—Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, Acton Bell—a lone but puissant contact with their tiny readership.

  —

  AT EXACTLY THE TIME between the arrival of the printed Poems and the first reviews, in early June 1846, a bombshell hit the Parsonage in the form of an unexpected visitor from Thorp Green, the Robinsons’ coachman, William Allison. What Branwell’s thoughts could have been—or Anne’s—at the sudden appearance of this former fellow employee, almost a year after their painful severance of communication with the family, can only be guessed. The very surprising news that Allison brought would certainly have given Branwell a momentary rush of almost unbearable hope—Edmund Robinson had died, aged forty-six, on 26 May, after a three-month illness. But in virtually the same breath, and clearly well rehearsed, Allison made it clear that this did not open the way to the new widow’s arms: in fact no sort of approach to Mrs. Robinson would be possible. She was in “a dreadful state of health,” Branwell related feelingly to Leyland the next day; “the account which [Allison] gave of her sufferings was enough to burst my heart.” Apparently, Mrs. Robinson was only able to kneel in her bedroom “in bitter tears and prayers,” following the final illness of her husband, “worn…out in attendance on him.” Whether the coachman had provided these details or whether they sprang from Branwell’s volatile imagination is hard to tell, but the message was clear: for the good of Lydia’s health and mental equilibrium, Branwell must stay away from Thorp Green.*6

  Branwell seems to have believed what he told Leyland, which was that Edmund Robinson had changed his will, leaving his wife “quite powerless” in the matter of further communication with her former lover. But Robinson’s actual will, altered in January 1846, mentions nothing of the sort,*7 so the widow may well have planted this misinformation on purpose to work on Branwell’s feelings and keep him at bay. Unknown to Branwell, she had undergone a change of heart towards her husband now that he was dead, referring to him as “my angel Edmund” in her account book (a suitable place, perhaps). It seems that in the months following the traumatic discovery of her adultery in the summer of 1845, Lydia Robinson had ceased to want to give up everything—or indeed anything—for love of Branwell Brontë.

  Without any direct communication allowed between them, Branwell’s delusions about his situation flourished. The new obstacles to his happiness gave him as much traction as had the old ones and he wrote to Leyland in a sort of wretched ecstasy, telling him that he was so much persona non grata at Thorp Green that one of Robinson’s trustees had threatened to shoot him on sight, a remarkable claim given that one of the trustees was an archdeacon and the other an MP. Branwell couldn’t eat or sleep but maintained a tortured watch over events. “What I shall do I know not,” he wrote. “I am too hard to die, and too wretched to live…my mind sees only a dreary future which I as little wish to enter on, as could a martyr to be bound to the stake”—an image he drew and sent to Leyland.

  Branwell’s letters to his friends seem confident of their interest in the continuing melodrama of his circumstances, but at home he had overplayed his hand long before, and he knew it. Charlotte was the most steely of all, believing him to be using the news from Thorp Green merely as a “pretext to throw all about him into hubbub and confusion with his emotions—&c. &c.” His distress, drinking, even his threats of suicide she interpreted as signs of hopelessly weakened character: “[he] declares now that he neither can nor will do anything for himself—good situations have been offered more than once—for which by a fortnight’s work he might ha
ve qualified himself—but he will do nothing—except drink, and make us all wretched.”

  The revulsion in Charlotte’s tone is hardly surprising from one who had striven so long to improve herself in the cause of earning an independence. The more hopeless Branwell became, the more stringently Charlotte went about doing her duty. When, in the summer of 1846, Ellen began to talk of having to earn a living herself (because of the pressures on her family from her brother Joseph’s dissipation and her brother George’s mental breakdown), Charlotte advised her categorically to do as she was doing: to put off thoughts of independence while there was a pressing need for her to be at home. “The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest,” Charlotte pronounced sternly, “which implies the greatest good to others—and this path steadily followed will lead I believe in time to prosperity and to happiness though it may seem at the outset to tend quite in a contrary direction.”

  To the outside eye, it did look as if all three Brontë girls had given up the idea of work, just when the family needed money most. Ellen did not know about the Brontë sisters’ poems, or their hopes of making money from writing (rather than losing it). And none of them looked likely to marry, though Ellen had heard some juicy gossip—from whom? Charlotte demanded—that “Miss Brontë was…going to be married to her papa’s Curate.” The accusation earned a scornful reply, which, when she saw the letter in 1856, Mrs. Gaskell interpreted as Charlotte really not having noticed Nicholls’s growing devotion, “though others had.” But to a suspicious nature (and to anyone aware that Charlotte did eventually marry this man) Charlotte’s protests sound just a touch too much, rather like her denials of having any romantic connection in Brussels:

  I scarcely need say that never was rumour more unfounded—it puzzles me to think how it could possibly have originated—A cold, far-away sort of civility are the only terms on which I have ever been with Mr. Nicholls—I could by no means think of mentioning such a rumour to him even as a joke—it would make me the laughing-stock of himself and his fellow-curates for half a year to come—They regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the “coarser sex.”

  Nicholls’s feelings can be guessed from the fact that by June 1847, when he had been at Haworth for two years and was ready for promotion to a district, he stayed put—clearly from choice. He must have been aware of Patrick Brontë’s reliance on him, aware too of Charlotte’s anxiety on her father’s behalf at the prospect of losing his curate, as she expressed in a letter to Ellen that summer. Given the intensity of his expressions of love for Charlotte later, he almost certainly was passing over preferment in order to stay near Miss Brontë and display his usefulness.

  But, as the vehemence of her denial suggests, Charlotte’s own feelings about Nicholls may not have been as cut and dried at this stage as she represented them to Ellen. A pencil drawing exists in the Bonnell Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library*8 that was passed down in an envelope marked “Three One pencil sketches by Charlotte Brontë, Signed, & 1 sketch of Mr. Nicholls when he first went to Haworth.” The sketch is catalogued under “dubious attributions” in The Art of the Brontës, presumably because of the distinction made on the envelope between items “signed by Charlotte Brontë” and not. There is every reason to think that it is by Charlotte, though, signed or unsigned. It is very much in the style of her sketches and caricatures, and has been made on a corner of writing paper, probably surreptitiously—a rapid capturing of the new curate as he sits with his eyes cast downwards. It was bought by Bonnell from Mr. Nicholls’s niece and executrix, Violet Bolster, who had inherited it directly from Nicholls himself. Nicholls was not a vain man, and he is very unlikely to have agreed to sit to any sketcher willingly in his early days at the Parsonage. Nor would he have accepted or kept a drawing of himself unless he had strong reasons to do so. But he kept this one. I believe that either he found it in Charlotte’s papers after her death, or he was given it by her. Her taking of his likeness is the most telling thing of all, however. It shows that Charlotte found him interesting and was observing Nicholls long before he guessed, or she was prepared to admit.

  —

  IN THE SUMMER of 1846, and seemingly at their own instigation, Charlotte and Emily went to Manchester to “search out an operator,” that is, a surgeon, to treat their father’s failing sight. The highly respected oculist they found, William Wilson, was a Leeds man and an old friend of John Outhwaite of Bradford, so perhaps the discovery was not accidental; naturally, though, Wilson could not give any diagnosis or promise any relief until he had seen the patient in person, so three weeks later Charlotte came back with her father, leaving Emily and Anne with the equally difficult task of monitoring Branwell in their absence.

  After a consultation with Wilson, who told them that Patrick Brontë’s cataracts were in a suitable state to be removed, Charlotte and her father prepared for a long stay in Manchester—they were told it would be a week before the operation could take place and then about a month of convalescence must follow. They took lodgings about two miles out of the city centre, at 83 Mount Pleasant, Boundary Street, a not-pleasant-at-all small brick house facing a timber yard, in the town’s “numerous similar streets of small monotonous-looking houses,” as Mrs. Gaskell described them, the Victorian terraces that later became so characteristic of the city. The house was kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Ball, known to Mr. Wilson, but Mrs. Ball was not at home all the time of the Brontës’ residence, so they had to cater for themselves, a difficult task in a strange house, where the single servant was not at their command and a hired nurse had to be accommodated at the Brontës’ expense. Charlotte wrote to Ellen for “hints about how to manage”: “For ourselves I could contrive—papa’s diet is so very simple—but there will be a nurse coming in a day or two—and I am afraid of not having things good enough for her—Papa requires nothing you know but plain beef & mutton, tea and bread and butter but a nurse will probably expect to live much better.” The weeks ahead looked bothersome and dreary, and there was no chance of diversion—even short outings—with no one to escort her through the built-up streets. And Charlotte was unsurprisingly struck by a “feeling of strangeness…in this big town,” with its widespread bustle of traffic, mills, wharfs, canals, the ever-expanding railway and population of hard-pressed and sometimes desperate refugees from the famine in Ireland.*9

  Patrick Brontë’s nervous agitation increased as his operation loomed, and must have been difficult for Charlotte to witness. His description in a notebook of the procedure shows a nature inclined to dramatise his own dangers, especially dangers passed: “Belladonna, a virulent poison, prepared from deadly nightshade, was first applied, twice, to expand the pupil. This occasioned very acute pain for about five seconds.” But Wilson was an expert in his field and the procedure, on 25 August, a great success, eventually leading to a restoration of almost all Patrick Brontë’s sight. For several days afterwards, however, he had to be kept in a darkened room with bandages over his eyes, and for weeks more was allowed only to sit in the dark with a screen between him and the fire. “He is very patient but of course depressed and weary,” Charlotte reported. Charlotte, who was suffering terribly from tooth-ache all through the visit, was also tightly confined to the ugly little terrace on Boundary Street.

  It was in these unpromising conditions that she began a new novel. On the very day of her father’s operation, Charlotte had received a package in the post: it contained The Professor, back from its latest sojourn in a publisher’s office, with a curt note of refusal. While not giving up her hopes that it would eventually find a home, Charlotte bravely put the parcel to one side, got out her pencil and little homemade paper notebooks, and in the dismal Manchester lodgings began something entirely different:

  There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

  * * *

  *1 In her choice of name, Charlotte may have been remembering the “Miss Currer”
who was a trustee of Cowan Bridge School. If Emily Brontë was an admirer of Madame d’Arblay’s innovative novel The Wanderer (1814), her choice of “Ellis” might recall the shape-shifting, gender-indeterminate, homeless heroine of that book.

  *2 Beatrice E. Stanley suggests this was via Hainworth Shay and Cradle Edge; see “Changes at Haworth,” BST, 10:5 (1944).

  *3 The latter two thirds of Wuthering Heights are notably reprise-like and cyclical, with their replaying of Heathcliff’s old antagonisms and old love in and through the next generation. The end of volume one is, interestingly, the point at which the most famous film version—William Wyler’s 1939 production starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon—concludes the story.

  *4 Ninety lines of the poem’s prologue have survived.

  *5 A typical outlay for book advertising at the time started at about ten times this much; see LCB 1, 474 n4.

  *6 Charlotte passed on to Ellen the news “from all hands” that “Mr. Robinson had altered his will before he died and effectually prevented all chance of a marriage between his widow and Branwell by stipulating that she should not have a shilling if she ever ventured to reopen any communication with him” (CB to EN, 17 June 1846, LCB 1, 477).

  *7 Though Robinson did disinherit his eldest daughter, Lydia Mary, who had run away to Gretna Green in October 1845 to marry an actor. The similarity of her name and her mother’s might have led to some confusion once the story became known.

  *8 Included in the photograph section.

  *9 Manchester’s streets were described at the time as “crowded with paupers, most of them Irish,” hoping for work or access to emergency soup-kitchens (The Times, 17 February 1847).