Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  —

  FOR SOME TIME, Patrick Brontë had been keeping Branwell in his own room and sleeping on a cot at the foot of the bed, to have him under surveillance. The distraught father thus tried to absorb and contain some of the disturbance in the house, but, unlike the humble cottager in his own story, “The Cottage in the Wood,” whose fervent prayers reformed the dissolute young man found on the doorstep, he was unable to halt Branwell’s decline. Patrick’s faith in God’s strength, and his own, made him look continually for hopeful signs; Charlotte, on the other hand, seems to have given up on her brother. In this and the other trials she was about to face, her prayers tended to be for strength to bear what God’s inexorable will had in store for her; she had a Calvinistic aversion to the idea that personal intercession could change it.

  Patrick Brontë was doling out only a shilling a day to his son, but that was no obstacle to Branwell, as a pathetic note attests, written to John Brown one Sunday when everyone else was in church, and sealed with wax for secrecy:

  Dear John,

  I shall feel very much obliged to you if can [sic] contrive to get me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure

  Should it be speedily got I could perhaps take it from you or Billy at the lane top or what would be quite as well, sent out for, to you.

  I anxiously ask the favour because I know the favour good it will do me.

  Punctualy [sic] at Half past Nine in the morning you will be paid the 5d out of a shilling given me then.

  Yours P. B. B.

  Anne was not the only member of the household to have been affected “very deeply” by the spectacle of Branwell’s decline—the noise, the surges of energy, crazy determinations and unrestrainable force of the deteriorating addict. Patrick Brontë hardly slept. And, just as Branwell’s setting fire to his bed curtains seems to have found its way quickly into Jane Eyre, other aspects of his behaviour linger in Charlotte’s characterisation of Bertha in that novel, locked in the attic for fear of the havoc she might cause. The madwoman scenes had come in for some criticism when the book came out for being too “horrid,” but Charlotte defended herself by saying that such behaviour was “but too natural.” “There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind and a fiend-nature replaces it,” she told Williams. “The sole aim and desire of the being thus possessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural ingenuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end.”

  Francis Grundy had a more sympathetic view of his old friend’s predicament (he didn’t have to live with him) and gave it tender expression: Branwell was “no domestic demon,” he said; “just a man moving in a mist, who lost his way.” Years later, he told a horrific story of Branwell’s state in the last weeks of his life, of going to visit him in Haworth after Branwell had failed to keep an appointment in Skipton. Grundy ordered a dinner for two at the Black Bull and sent to the Parsonage for his friend, only to have Reverend Brontë appear, formally but sorrowfully explaining that his son had been very ill but would be arriving shortly. When Branwell did turn up, he was in a shocking state: spectrally thin, unkempt, “the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen…the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness”—all the marks of the hopeless opium-eater. Although he seemed to steady himself with brandy and some food, when Branwell was leaving he showed Grundy a carving-knife that he had been hiding in his sleeve all evening, having imagined that his summons to the inn had been from Satan, whom he was determined to stab. The familiarity of Grundy’s voice had shaken him from this terrible delusion, but the incident (even if heightened for dramatic effect) gives some idea of the danger, as well as the utter misery, that the Parsonage household was being made to endure day and night through the summer of 1848.

  —

  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in late June 1848, stoking press interest in “all these Bells,” as one paper called them, who suddenly seemed to be flooding the market with sensational novels—four in nine months. It encouraged the worst in Thomas Newby, who suggested to an American publisher that the Bells’ works, including this new one, were all the product of a single pen, Currer’s, and when Tenant of Wildfell Hall was advertised in this way—“by the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey’ ”—the American firm Harper’s, which had an agreement with Smith, Elder to publish Currer Bell’s next book, was understandably offended. George Smith could only pass on his own sense of affront to his author in Haworth by post, and ask for an explanation.

  This was a dreadful letter for Charlotte to receive, threatening to ruin her hitherto excellent relations with Smith, Elder and tainting her and her sisters with blame for what had been Newby’s casual double-dealing. She was so mortified that only direct action seemed appropriate, and instead of getting out her desk to write a letter of explanation, she set about packing a small box instead and had it sent down to Keighley Station by carrier. After a heated discussion with Emily and a hurried meal, she and Anne set off on foot for four miles in pouring rain, caught the train to Leeds and from there took the night train to London. Emily was having no part in this rash adventure, and Patrick Brontë does not seem to have been either consulted or informed.

  Telling Mary Taylor about these eventful few days, in a wonderfully comic letter, Charlotte described how on arrival in the capital early the next morning she and Anne made for the Chapter Coffee House, not knowing where else to go:

  We washed ourselves—had some breakfast—sat a few minutes and then set of[f] in queer, inward excitement, to 65. Cornhill. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew we were coming they had never seen us—they did not know whether we were men or women—but had always written to us as men.

  No. 65 Cornhill, the magical address to which Charlotte had been writing for the past year, turned out to be a large bookseller’s shop “in a street almost as bustling as the Strand”:

  —we went in—walked up to the counter—there were a great many young men and lads here and there—I said to the first I could accost—

  “May I see Mr. Smith—?” he hesitated, looked a little surprised—but went to fetch him—We sat down and waited awhile—looking a[t] some books on the counter—publications of theirs well known to us—of many of which they had sent us copies as presents. At last somebody came up and said dubiously

  “Do you wish to see me, Ma’am?”

  “Is it Mr. Smith?” I said looking up through my spectacles at a young, tall, gentlemanly man

  “It is.”

  I then put his own letter into his hand directed to “Currer Bell.” He looked at it—then at me—again—yet again—I laughed at his queer perplexity—A recognition took place—. I gave my real name—“Miss Brontë—”

  It is significant that Charlotte’s personal acquaintance with her publisher began with a laugh and a double-take. He never quite got over his amazement at the incongruity of it, that this strange little woman in glasses and old-fashioned travelling clothes was Currer Bell. And she, given the advantage of surprise, was able to make this first scrutiny of him without self-consciousness. What she saw was a tall, charming man of twenty-four, elegantly dressed and brimming with excitement at meeting her. He hurried his visitors into an office, where rapid explanations were gone into on both sides, accompanied by strong mutual condemnation of the “shuffling scamp,” Newby. At the first opportunity Smith called in his colleague Williams to share the revelation of their best-selling author’s identity, and now it was Charlotte’s turn to be surprised, for Williams, her confidential correspondent of the past year, appeared in the guise of “a pale, mild, stooping man of fifty,” stammering and shy. The shock to both of them must have been profound, having communicated so freely and equally, to meet at last and have to fit their epistolary personalities into these unlikely casings—one of them female. There was “a long, nervous shaking of hands—Then followed talk—talk—talk—
Mr. Williams being silent—Mr. Smith loquacious.”

  Smith was fully animated, and immediately had a dozen plans for the entertainment of the Misses Brontë and their introduction to London society. “[Y]ou must go to the Italian opera—you must see the Exhibition—Mr. Thackeray would be pleased to see you—If Mr. Lewes knew ‘Currer Bell’ was in town—he would have to be shut up,” et cetera, et cetera. Delightful though all these suggestions were, Charlotte cut him short with the warning that the sisters’ incognito had to be strictly preserved. She and Acton Bell had only revealed themselves to him to prove their innocence in the matter of Newby’s lies. “[T]o all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as heretofore,” she told him.

  Nevertheless, Smith was determined to fête them, offered them the hospitality of his own home and, when that was refused, came up with the idea of introducing the sisters not as authors but as his “country cousins,” the Misses Brown. “The desire to see some of the personages whose names he mentioned—kindled in me very strongly,” Charlotte told Mary, “but when I found on further examination that he could not venture to ask such men as Thackeray &c. at a short notice, without giving them a hint as to whom they were to meet, I declined even this—I felt it would have ended in our being made a show of—a thing I have ever resolved to avoid.” The sisters retired to the Coffee House, exhausted, where Charlotte took smelling salts—the conventional if rather potent remedy of the time against headache and pains—to prepare herself for a promised call later in the day from Smith and his sisters. But when the Smiths turned up, young and lovely in full evening dress (right down to white gloves), it was with the expectation that the Misses Brown would accompany them to the Opera—which Charlotte and Anne had “by no means understood.” But, despite their unpreparedness, and the effects of the analgesic, Charlotte decided on the spur of the moment that it would be better to go along with the plan, so within minutes she and Anne were being helped into the Smiths’ carriage, where Williams was also in full fig. “They must have thought us queer, quizzical looking beings—especially me with my spectacles,” Charlotte related with deep amusement. “I smiled inwardly at the contrast which must have been apparent between me and Mr. Smith as I walked with him up the crimson carpeted staircase of the Opera House and stood amongst a brilliant throng at the box-door which was not yet open. Fine ladies & gentlemen glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances—Still I felt pleasurably excited—in spite of headache sickness & conscious clownishness; and I saw Anne was calm and gentle which she always is—”

  Also in the audience that night, watching the Royal Italian Opera Company perform The Barber of Seville, were the Earl and Countess of Desart, Viscount Lascelles, the author Lady Morgan and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, a glamorous glimpse of real High Life for the two Brontës after all their years of imagining it in their writings. Charlotte was so impressed by the splendour of the Opera House building and company that she pressed Williams’s arm and whispered, “You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing.” Making such an aside to a man she had only just met would have been unthinkable at home, but Charlotte found herself so far outside her milieu that night that she could behave naturally without impunity. And her authorial persona protected her further. It was not Miss Brown on the arm of dashing young George Smith, nor even Miss Brontë, but Currer Bell.

  The next day the sisters were taken to church by Williams, and dined by Smith at his home in Westbourne Place, Paddington, an elegantly designed, mid-sized terraced house in the new streets surrounding the railway station, which he shared with his siblings and their widowed mother, a sensible, handsome woman of fifty-one. Charlotte admired Mrs. Smith and her daughters’ good manners, not being consternated by picking up “a couple of odd-looking country-women” at a City tavern, though “to see their elegant, handsome son & brother treating with scrupulous politeness these insignificant spinsters—must have puzzled them thoroughly.” The next day the “Browns” were taken to the Royal Academy and the National Gallery, dined again at Smith’s and took tea at Mr. Williams’s house, where one of the daughters of the poet and critic Leigh Hunt was visiting and sang charmingly at the piano.

  “A more jaded wretch than I looked when I returned, it would be difficult to conceive,” Charlotte told Mary, but the outing had been a most remarkable success. They got home laden with books that Smith had given them, and more to tell Emily than could ever be exhausted. One unpleasant task had had to be performed, though, before the sisters boarded the train north at Euston on Tuesday, 11 July: to confront Thomas Newby. It was a risky thing to do, as Newby had no discretion and might have tried to exploit this proof that Currer and Acton Bell were women (he discovered Charlotte’s real name, as she later lamented). No record of what was said has survived, but it seems reasonable to surmise that Charlotte and Anne gave him a piece of their minds. How the interview affected Emily’s and Anne’s future treatment by the firm is a moot point. Charlotte hoped that her sisters would move their business to Smith, and corresponded with him about it, but neither Emily nor Anne was willing to make the move. Neither liked to go back on an agreement, however badly it had been kept by the other party, and they probably also feared the loss of their £50 investment (with good reason). Smith’s arrangement with Charlotte was far from perfectly fair,*7 but she had at least earned £250 already from sales of Jane Eyre, and was on her way to earning more with Shirley.

  * * *

  *1 The picture is included in the photograph section.

  *2 Trunk-makers were known to use waste paper as lining material.

  *3 Another owner of a first edition Poems was Charles Dodgson (later known to the public as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland). His copy of the book is now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

  *4 The first leaf of the fair copy (see the photograph section) bears the date 16 March [1847] and the copy was completed on 19 August.

  *5 Charlotte also mentions in this letter that the novel had been revised twice already and that she was unwilling to make any further large adjustments for fear of damaging what had already been difficult enough to shape. It makes one wonder whether she did not, in fact, write Jane Eyre in one glorious swoop of inspiration between August 1846 and August 1847, as is assumed, but rather incorporated some older material too (as she had in The Professor). The Gateshead and Lowood episodes, for all their extraordinary power, certainly relate to the main narrative rather oddly, and the jump of eight years after Helen Burns’s death is very abrupt. And there was that paragraph in her 1843 notebook, beginning a story set in “Gateshead Hall.”

  *6 His copy, in the BPM, is noticeably worn from much reading. Charlotte may well have had more than one reason to seek out Butterfield’s advice: he was a leading light in the local Temperance Society and the biographer of temperance hero Thomas Worsnop. She might have spoken to him about her brother.

  *7 He had somewhat underpaid her for the copyright, with the understanding that he would supplement that sum with occasional extra payments, at discretion, if the book did well. He kept to this promise, but never paid her at a rate that accurately reflected the profits made by the firm on Jane Eyre, or the later titles.

  TWELVE

  Across the Abyss

  1848–9

  Unknown to Charlotte, the trip to London with Anne was to be the last bright spot in her life for a very long time. Branwell was sinking rapidly, worn out by the physical toll of his addictions and “intolerable mental wretchedness,” as he told Leyland. He owed money in many local inns, one of which had sent a demand for payment to Reverend Brontë and threatened his son with an arrest warrant. Branwell begged his friend Leyland to go both to the Talbot and to the Old Cock in Halifax on his behalf and get him an extension on his debts while he waited for word from Dr. Crosby, the Robinsons’ surgeon, who seems to have been acting as a conduit for sporadic payments from Branwell’s former mistress (either loans or a for
m of hush-money). Branwell had probably heard by the summer of 1848 that Lydia Robinson had moved to Birmingham, but had the gossip reached him (as it had Charlotte) that she was already the “infatuated slave” of her ailing cousin’s husband, Sir Edward, and hoped to marry him as soon as his wife died? The first Lady Scott obligingly passed away on 4 August 1848 and Lydia Robinson took her place just three months later, on 8 November, by special licence.

  One can’t avoid the suspicion that news of these unfolding events reached Branwell and precipitated his death in late September—that his death was in effect a form of suicide from self-neglect. The coincidence of the timing seems too much, as does the degree of his despair. Branwell’s death certificate states the cause as “Chronic bronchitis—Marasmus” (wasting away), and Charlotte later described him as “latterly consumptive,” but he was also clearly suffering from the effects of his addictions, including, from Grundy’s description, delirium tremens.

  That Branwell was infected with tuberculosis bacteria is almost certain, given the highly infectious nature of the disease (transmittable even through the ordinary breathing of an active sufferer), and given that all his siblings had it in one form or another—with the possible exception of Charlotte. Pulmonary tuberculosis (or consumption, or phsythis, as it was called in the Brontës’ time) can lie dormant for years and is often activated or aggravated by other viral infections; hence Maria and Elizabeth Brontë’s transition from whooping-cough to consumption in 1824–5 and the apparent triggering of Branwell’s last illness through bronchitis. He had always been the strongest of Patrick Brontë’s children but perhaps had come to over-rely on his superior powers of recovery. In January 1847 he even counted as a curse “a constitution still so strong that it will keep me years in torture and despair when I should every hour pray that I might die.” By the autumn of 1848, it failed him.