Eagerness to know such people began to work on Charlotte in a beneficial way. She came to realise, gradually and imperfectly, the effect that her presence on the literary scene had been having ever since the publication of Jane Eyre—its effect on readers, writers and the culture generated between them. That world had its own life and momentum and would go on without her whether she joined it or not, though she began to think it time to assert herself. Just before she fell out with him over his disappointing review of Shirley, Charlotte had confessed to George Henry Lewes that during the previous year she had sometimes ceased “to care about literature and critics and fame” altogether, that she had temporarily “lost sight of whatever was prominent in my thoughts at the first publication of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” “[B]ut now I want these things to come back—vividly—if possible.” Something else was also impelling her to find new distractions—the anniversary of Emily’s death looming, memories of which were revived with intolerable poignancy by the returning season. By the middle of November, she told Williams that she had “almost formed the resolution of coming to London,” and then—nearly as abruptly as her trip to London with Anne in 1848—she was packing her bags and heading for a fortnight’s stay with George Smith and his family in the “big Babylon.”
George Smith was very obviously delighted to be allowed to present Miss Brontë to his friends at last, however modestly she said she wished to be entertained. He had instructed his mother and sisters to treat their guest at their terraced townhouse in Paddington with special care; the first day or two were consequently rather constrained, as the Smiths ran around making sure there were enough candles and fire for their frail-looking visitor. When Mrs. Smith relaxed from this sentinel posture, Charlotte began to like her a great deal. “[K]indness is a potent heart-winner,” Charlotte remarked to Ellen. She liked young Mr. Smith much better than before too, having seen how good a son and brother he was.
The visit was a chance to make better acquaintance with W. S. Williams, although there was still constraint there, by comparison with the freedom of their letters: “[he] too is really most gentlemanly and well-informed—his weak points he certainly has—but these are not seen in society.” The third member of the Smith, Elder team, “the little man,” red-headed, 33-year-old James Taylor, was more difficult to assess. Taylor had a position of some responsibility, overseeing at least forty junior staff, whom he ruled, Charlotte heard, with an iron will. Taylor’s striking resemblance to Branwell might have disturbed Charlotte; her father had noticed it when the young publisher called at the Parsonage in September to pick up the manuscript of Shirley. She found him both attractive and repulsive at once; reminiscent of “the Helstone order of men” for his despotism and rigidity, but with intriguing flashes of sensitivity. “He tries to be very kind and even to express sympathy sometimes,” Charlotte told Ellen, “and he does not manage it—he has a determined, dreadful nose in the midd[l]e of his face which when poked into my countenance cuts into my soul like iron—Still he is horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious—and with a memory of relentless tenacity: to turn to Williams after him or to Smith himself is to turn from granite to easy down or warm fur.”
Smith was keen to treat his guest to some stimulating outings: Charlotte saw Macready, the most famous actor of the day, both in Macbeth and in Othello (though she shocked a dinner party by being insufficiently impressed with him) and went to the National Gallery, where she was delighted with an exhibition of some of the paintings that Turner had bequeathed to the nation. If John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters Charlotte had admired very much, had not been out of the country, Smith would undoubtedly have arranged an introduction to him: Smith was Ruskin’s friend and publisher. Smith had a whole list of people he wished Charlotte to meet: Lady Morgan (author of The Wild Irish Girl), Catherine Gore (one of the fashionable “silver-fork” novelists), Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens. As it was, he tested Miss Brontë’s sociability to a new extreme by inviting two gentlemen to dinner one evening: Dr. John Forbes, with whom Charlotte had been in correspondence during Anne’s last illness, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Smith had forewarned the novelist not to upset Miss Brontë by indicating that he knew she was Currer Bell, but Thackeray couldn’t resist making a remark about his cigar, quoting from Jane Eyre, when the gentlemen rejoined the ladies after dinner. Charlotte was discomposed (not surprisingly, since Rochester’s cigar habit was one of Constantin Heger’s bequests to her novel) and shut down the conversation “in a chilly fashion,” as Smith was sorry to see, but Thackeray apparently went off to his club none the worse for his reprimand, saying, “Boys! I have been dining with ‘Jane Eyre.’ ”
To her father, Charlotte described the great man, whom she knew had been assessing her from a distance all through dinner: “He is a very tall man—above six feet high, with a peculiar face—not handsome—very ugly indeed—generally somewhat satirical and stern in expression, but capable also of a kind look…I should think to have him for a friend than an enemy—for he is a most formidable looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen—all he says is most simple but often cynical, harsh and contradictory.” For all its interest, Charlotte found the evening very taxing, and knew that nerves had made her “painfully stupid” with the man whose works she so admired. She fared much better with an introduction she arranged herself, writing to Harriet Martineau as Currer Bell to ask if she could call. Martineau and her relations waited in suspense to see who would turn up at the appointed hour: “whether a tall moustached man six feet high or an aged female, or a girl, or—altogether a ghost, a hoax or a swindler!” Miss Martineau needed the aid of an ear trumpet, so was hoping that the visitor’s real name was properly announced; she told her cousins they were to shout it distinctly into the horn if not. When a carriage was heard at the door and the bell rung, “in came a neat little woman, a very little sprite of a creature nicely dressed; & with nice tidy bright hair.” Charlotte did reveal her real name, but the Martineaus were sworn to keep it secret, and Charlotte must have been pleased with them and with the frisson her dramatic arrival caused, for she relaxed and was able to talk to them very naturally. “[S]he was so pleasant & so naive, that is to say so innocent and un Londony that we were quite charmed with her,” one of Martineau’s cousins said.
When Charlotte got back to Haworth in the week before Christmas, exhausted, she wrote to Williams—now safely back in his epistolary sphere—that her time in London had furnished her with “ideas, images, pleasant feelings—such as may perhaps cheer many a long winter evening,” but that as soon as the routine of home closed round her again, the whole visit seemed as unreal as a dream. “I think I should scarcely like to live in London,” she told Miss Wooler, “and were I obliged to live there, I should certainly go little into company—especially I should eschew the literary coteries.”
Smith’s generosity and thoughtfulness meant that more such visits occurred, though, and over the next four years Charlotte returned three times to Smith’s home, attended exhibitions, plays, concerts, operas; heard famous preachers and the infamous Cardinal Wiseman; breakfasted with the poet Samuel Rogers; took tea with Miss Martineau; dined with Thackeray. If Smith had hoped that this injection of activity and interest into Miss Brontë’s life would bring her out of her shell, he was wrong—she was and remained very self-conscious in company—but the closer contacts she made, with Elizabeth Gaskell particularly, fed her craving for intelligent discussion and a sympathetic audience.
Gaskell had been intrigued with Miss Brontë’s story—such of it as she could find out—long before they met, which was not until the summer of 1850. In the spring of that year an active but interfering man called James Kay-Shuttleworth, a former physician and Poor Law commissioner who had acquired a title and a castellated mansion called Gawthorpe, in Lancashire, from his wife Lady Janet, drove over to Haworth on a whim to be introduced to the famous Miss Brontë. Charlotte was far from pleased at the intrusion, but Patri
ck Brontë was strongly impressed by Sir James’s title and confident manner, and urged his daughter to accept the invitation that had been held out to her, to visit the couple at Gawthorpe Hall. Mrs. Gaskell had heard all about their meeting from her friend Lady Janet: it was through this channel that she picked up the first stories about Reverend Brontë’s eccentricities that caused trouble later, in her biography. But in 1850 such anecdotes simply added to the romance around the author of Jane Eyre.
When the two novelists met at the Kay-Shuttleworths’ house by Lake Windermere, Briery Close, in August, Gaskell was immediately impressed by Charlotte’s modesty and retirement, “a little lady in a black silk gown” who worked at her sewing and hardly spoke. “[B]ut I had time for a good look at her,” Gaskell told her correspondent, Catherine Winkworth (who was to become a friend of Charlotte’s herself). “She is, (as she calls herself) undeveloped; thin and more than ½ a head shorter than I, soft brown hair not so dark as mine; eyes (very good and expressive looking straight & open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad and rather overhanging.” This unpromising description was mitigated by Mrs. Gaskell’s tribute to Miss Brontë’s quiet charm and sincerity: “She has a very sweet voice, rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort, admirable and just befitting the occasion. There is nothing overstrained but perfectly simple.”
Mrs. Gaskell was intrigued by the long conversations she had during these three days with Miss Brontë, who told her the story of her life in some detail, including some amusingly narrated set-piece scenes, such as Charlotte going in to tell her father about the publication of Jane Eyre and his response at tea, “Children, Charlotte has been writing a book.” It is notable that most of these anecdotes, clearly encouraged by Mrs. Gaskell’s eager appreciation of every detail, were ones relating to her father, and tended to illustrate the opposition Charlotte had encountered from him all her life. It was rather disloyal as well as confessional to be telling this stranger that “At 19 I should have been thankful for an allowance of 1d a week. I asked my father, but he said What did women want with money.” No wonder, when Gaskell added this information to the garbled tales of parental tyranny she had heard elsewhere, that she produced such a negative portrait of Patrick Brontë in the biography she wrote seven years later. It had been dictated in part by his daughter.
Charlotte may have been encouraged by Elizabeth Gaskell’s interest in her life, and her deeply sympathetic response to the story of her siblings’ deaths from consumption (which Gaskell, incidentally, immediately assumed the emaciated Miss Brontë had also contracted), to consider doing what she had previously refused, and write something biographical about them. The adverse criticism that the works of Ellis and Acton Bell had attracted and the fading of interest in them since their deaths—which the public didn’t know about, of course—hung on Charlotte’s conscience. While she was fêted and rewarded, while she visited celebrities and banked large cheques from her publisher (£500 for the copyright of Shirley), her sisters were forgotten. Having asked George Smith to buy back the rights to Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey from the recalcitrant Newby, Charlotte offered to write a biographical preface to a new edition, in line with what he and Williams had suggested in 1849. In prose of sombre power and beauty, she outlined her family’s remote country upbringing, close sibling bonds and love of their moorland home, their delight in composition and—after Charlotte’s chance discovery of Emily’s poems—their efforts to get the poems, and then their novels, published and read. It made an irresistible narrative.
[Their works] appeared at last. Critics failed to do them justice. The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunderstood; the identity of its author was misrepresented; it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre. Unjust and grievous error! We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now. Hence, I fear, arose a prejudice against the book.
Emily’s character comes strongly before the reader: proud, uncompromising, distant, stoical. Her death, and that of Anne, were told briefly, but from a depth of personal pain that made this one of the most moving memorials of the age, to two tragic young women whose real names were only just being revealed:
Never in all her life had [Emily] lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of love and awe. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.
“An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world,” Charlotte said, brilliantly fulfilling that role herself in this poignant tribute to doomed and unrecognised genius. Of Anne, whose personality was, as in life, eclipsed by the heroic Emily, Charlotte said, “[she was] long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent,” but that “a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.” As character studies, these could hardly have been more suggestive and intriguing. The mystery of “the Bells” was solved—the legend of “the Brontës” begun.
—
IN THE MONTHS following her visit to London in December 1849, Charlotte felt much more intimate with her publisher George Smith, and his mother, and corresponded with both of them. Her second visit to their home, in the summer of 1850 (a new one—they had just moved to Gloucester Terrace), confirmed her increasing fondness for Smith, but also her vulnerability to his ebullient youthful charm. Defensively, she lampooned herself in advance as a dithery incompetent who would be “thankful to subside into any quiet corner of your drawing-room, where I might find a chair of suitable height,” perhaps hinting to him not to take her admiration the wrong way.
Charlotte was better prepared to meet the challenge of Smith’s hospitality this time round, and did so with grateful enthusiasm. There were as many outings as Miss Brontë could cope with—to the Royal Academy, the Opera, the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park (an amazing experience for Charlotte, seeing for the first time outside an engraved book lions, tigers, elephants, “cameleopards” and the zoo’s newly acquired hippopotamus)—and on the second Friday of her stay Mrs. Smith held a ball at Gloucester Terrace, to which both Dickens and Thackeray were invited. Thackeray’s reply expressed his regret that he wouldn’t be able to meet her on that occasion; Dickens, who was also unable to attend, cited “other and less agreeable engagements,” although his absence was of less moment to Charlotte. Williams and his family made a fine show: “all five were remarkable—their dress—their appearance were a decoration to the rooms—as Mrs. Smith afterwards remarked,” and they were graceful and elegant dancers. Whether Charlotte danced is not recorded. Did she ever dance, after the sorry attempts at school in Brussels? She never mentions dancing anywhere in her letters or novels. Was it one of the things she simply wasn’t interested in, or had somehow ruled out for herself?
G. H. Lewes wrote the party up (under a pseudonym) the following week in a piece jocularly complaining about how town was “full of authoresses,” prime among whom was “the charming CURRER BELL” surrounded by enthusiasts of Jane Eyre affecting “ ‘Rochester’ airs.” This image of a fully social Charlotte, charmingly coping with a crowd of male admirers, is so wildly at variance with almost every other description of her “company” manners (except the extraordinary, proposal-triggering charisma that so affected the curate David Pryce back in 1840) that one has to believe Lewes was smitten with her himself to some extent. Perhaps he picked up on a powerful signal from those brilliant and mesmerising eyes, for Charlotte fixed on him as soon as
he entered the room and he spent most of the evening sitting next to her, “greatly interested by her conversation.” Unknown to Lewes, Charlotte was staring ardently at a face other than his own: Emily’s, which she saw in a ghostly way reflected there—“[Emily’s] eyes, her features—the very nose, the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead—even at moments the expression.” It was a very peculiar sensation to have this bewhiskered controversialist rouse feelings of such tenderness, but she felt that whatever differences she and Lewes might continue to have about books and writing, she could now never hate him.*5
She had a similar experience of haunting the same week when she met the young Irish novelist Julia Kavanagh, a woman even smaller and more fragile-looking than herself, who nevertheless managed to support herself and her mother through writing, her father having abandoned them both. Kavanagh’s circumstances roused Charlotte’s compassion, but it was something else that made her want to go back and talk to her again—she resembled Martha Taylor “in every lineament.”
Thackeray called a few days later with an invitation to dinner and sat talking for more than two hours with Charlotte and George Smith. She found the close attention of “the giant” in a private conversation much less intimidating than having to speak to him in a general party—indeed she found on this occasion an ease of expression that showed her true sense of equality with such a man. This was nothing to do with vanity, though Thackeray had every reason to be surprised at her forthrightness. “I was moved to speak to him of some of his short-comings (literary of course),” she reported in a letter to Ellen, who was presumably pretty surprised herself at this account of her friend’s temerity; “one by one the faults came into my mind and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence—He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen—that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself. The matter ended in decent amity.”
Charlotte Brontë Page 36
