The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  Footnote

  1. ‘Dorcas’ being a biblical reference. At these meetings, genteel ladies gathered to sew charity clothes for the poor, while someone (often a minister) read out from holy writings.

  BIGAMY

  Like Dorian Gray’s picture, the madwoman in the attic is an image which has soared beyond fiction to become iconic. Edward Fairfax Rochester – the Brontëan Bluebeard – keeps the first Mrs Rochester behind bars upstairs. And nobody in the outside world, it would seem, knows she’s there – or exists, for that matter. It’s not an altogether convenient arrangement for a mentally deranged, enraged, woman with a proclivity for arson and a flame lamp burning day and night in her cell. Appointing a keeper with a weakness for the gin bottle and absent-minded about keys rather risks what convenience there might be.

  But the Thornfield Hall arrangement frees the master of the house to enjoy bachelor freedoms and plough his way through ‘French countesses, Italian signoras, and German Gräfinnen’.1 An offspring from his European dalliances (despite what he protests, she must surely be his), Adèle (a French dancer by-blow, presumably), having outgrown the nurse, and before that the wet nurse, requires the attendance of a civilising governess at Thornfield Hall where she (the mad-child of the ground floor) is running riot. It brings Jane Eyre to the Hall. A virtuous young lady, Miss Eyre does not surrender (as many of her subservient kind dutifully would) to her master’s sexual interest in her. Marriage is the only way for Edward to have full mastery over Jane.

  Before the 1858 Marriage Act bigamy was, social historians tell us, rife. It was divorce, Victorian-style. It’s interesting that when Rochester is found, at the altar, in the very act of (attempted) bigamy, no one thinks to summon the local police. ‘Just another one’ seems to be general view.

  Bigamy nonetheless had penalties; but there were virtually insuperable obstacles to divorce. The only legal option, as Dickens’s Bounderby explains to Stephen Blackpool (who has his own mad wife) in Hard Times (1854), is an Act of Parliament, no less, to cast asunder those whom the Lord hath joined together. Even that was impossible if the spouse were certified mad. Rochester has been careful not to certify Bertha.

  The plot of Jane Eyre hinges on one of the most melodramatic scenes in Victorian fiction. The marriage ceremony (two deaf and dumb servants recruited, one presumes, as hired witnesses) is interrupted, at the usually perfunctory ‘any let or hindrance’ point, by a member of the congregation, with a deep sun-tan, who indeed proclaims something of a hindrance. Rochester is married to his living sister, Bertha.

  A foiled Rochester conducts the company back to Thornfield Hall, and up the stairs of the private wing to show them his monstrous wife in the flesh. And having been irritatingly denied his bigamous solution, Rochester makes another (un-Christian) suggestion. Jane can, he says, without blessing of clergy, become (common law) wife No. 2. Or, as Jane more bitterly thinks, mistress No. 4, after (Countess) Céline, (Signora) Giacinta, and (Gräfin) Clara. They can live, Rochester blandly suggests, in a plain white cottage in France: he conscientiously respecting her virginal purity, as he would that of a nun. My hunch is that Rochester intends, when the moment is right, to do away with the luckless Bertha, as I believe he eventually does (see below, ‘Murder?’, page 105).

  This second, quasi-marital, proposal to Jane is in line with Rochester’s already established ‘Sultanic’ character. While lavishing on Jane silk dresses, underwear (we guess) and jewels (which revolt her), in the weeks before their union, he compliments her, chortlingly: ‘I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!’ The Eastern allusion ‘bites’ Jane, like an adder. If it is ‘houri’ (marital whores) he wants, she angrily retorts, let him go to the Stamboul bazaar.

  Having given Rochester’s polygamous offer some hours’ (wavering, chapter-length) thought, Jane runs for the hills – her pearl beyond price preserved for a less improper destiny. There seems to be a Victorian GPS implanted in Miss Eyre’s skull, since, exhausted, she collapses on the doorstep of a distant, hitherto unknown, cousin who promptly falls in love with her and, after due religious process, proposes emigration to convert India to Christianity. And Christian monogamy, presumably. St John Rivers should start by converting Thornfield Hall.

  Footnote

  1. He undertakes this epic philandering across the face of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester.

  The Brontës, during their lives, did not encourage illustrations. This was done, after their death, by Fred Walker. He is remembered for very fine illustrations to Thackeray and Dickens. The picture reminds how cumbersomely dressed mid-Victorians of the respectable classes were.

  BOG PEOPLE

  The connection between the Irish and bogs is traditional and traditionally insulting (e.g. ‘bog-trotters’).1 It is calculated some 17 per cent of the country’s surface is peat-bog. Patrick, once he went to Cambridge, cut entirely his connection with the ‘old sod’, his homeland. It was a deliberate act of decontamination. One understands it, but need not admire it. This was the period of the ‘no Irish need apply’ prohibition tacked on to even menial jobs in England. The 1798 uprising was remembered, bitterly. The Irish were primitive and treacherous.

  It is likely Patrick was genteelly mocked for his accent at university – something he soon modulated, although a brogue remained, Gaskell observed. It was also distantly detectable, she discerned, in Charlotte’s voice.

  Patrick seems never to have mentioned, or much communicated with, his sizeable Prunty family – nor the Irish patrons across the sea who got him to Cambridge. None of the children visited the country;2 nor, apparently, did they evince the slightest hint of interest in their close family in that country. No Prunty seems ever to have visited Haworth. The Haworth branch seems not to have been concerned by the Great Hunger of the mid-1840s, which must surely have killed, or at least impoverished, some of the Co. Down branch.

  Despite this scraping away of the bog stuck to their trotters. Mrs Gaskell refers, high-handedly, to their Irish character. It pre-disposed, she believed, to hot-headedness. Mrs Humphry Ward, in her haughty introductions to her seven-volume Haworth Edition of all the sisters’ published works, positively rants on the Hibernian theme:

  In the first place, has it ever been sufficiently recognised that Charlotte Brontë is first and foremost an Irishwoman, that her genius is at bottom a Celtic genius? … The main characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers – disinterestedness, melancholy, wildness, a wayward force and passion, for ever wooed by sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible – by murmurs from the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that speak to the Celtic sense as to no other.

  In the seven-strong corpus of published Brontë fiction there is just one memorable Irish character: the gluttonous, brutish Father Malone, in Shirley. No advertisement for the Emerald Isle, Malone is possessed of none of the high Celtic sensitivities Mrs Ward eulogises. But he does carry a shillelagh and speak with an accent the local children mock.

  There was an earthier encounter with bog for the Brontës. A near-death experience with the stuff occurred on 2 September 1824. After a prolonged wet spell there was a day of ‘exceeding fine’ weather. Young Emily, Anne, and Branwell prevailed on their father to let them go for a ramble with the family’s two day servants, Nancy and Sarah Garr, local women who knew the area. Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte were at Cowan Bridge (facing, it would emerge, other lethal dangers).

  On the ominously named Crow Hill a sudden storm brewed up. A violent wind raised gusts of dust and stubble. Lightning flashed, hailstones rained down. Climactically, close by, Crow Hill Bog exploded. No overstatement. Boulders were thrown in the air; mud spewed out in a seven-foot wave and coursed down the hillside, destroying all in its path.

  Led, running, by the Garrs, the children took shelter from the bog-burst in a porch of Ponden Hall (later immortalised a
s Thrushcross Grange). Patrick, back in the parsonage, assumed, at first, that it was the end of days. Apocalypse. He had always believed it was imminent. Brave man that he was (he had saved a drowning boy in his youth) he ran out to rescue his children, at the risk of his life. He found them, quivering and covered in mud.

  Later, Patrick came to believe the bog-burst was caused by earthquake. Geological investigation established it was, in fact, an eruptive subterranean water spout. He persisted in seeing it as the kind of sign predicted in the Book of Revelation. The Lord had rained down bog, as He had once rained down frogs, ‘to turn sinners from their ways’. Less theologically, one could see it as a near-miss of death by bog for him and three of his children.

  ‘One wonders,’ writes the ever-sober Juliet Barker, ‘what effect it had on the children.’ One recalls Cathy, in Wuthering Heights, running away from Thrushcross Grange (i.e. Ponden Hall), the bulldog Skulker tearing at her heels. (Did the dogs the party took with them to Crow Hill survive, one wonders?)

  On the bog theme, Lockwood’s description of Gimmerton Churchyard bears close inspection. ‘It lies in a hollow, between two hills,’ he says, ‘an elevated hollow, near a swamp, whose peaty moisture is said to answer all the purposes of embalming on the few corpses deposited there.’

  Peaty moisture = bog. The cold, oxygen-free, clammy substance (as in the American ‘tar pits’) is peculiarly preservative of the dead bodies it contains. This is put forward as the reason primitive peoples (including, notably, the Irish) buried certain of their dead in bog. It saved on all those bandages the Egyptians used.

  Heathcliff – Linton having just died – bribes the sexton to break open Cathy’s coffin. Her body has been lying in Gimmerton’s ‘peaty mould’ from March 1784 until August 1801. Heathcliff wrenches off the coffin lid and, as he tells an appalled Nelly, ‘I saw her face again – it is hers yet!’. He must be quick to seal the coffin, the sexton warns him. Her face will decompose in front of his eyes ‘if the air blew on it’. He arranges that his and Cathy’s immutable corpses shall embrace, in the airless peaty mould, forever, never decaying. It’s a scene with necrophiliac and vampiric overtones. But it’s scientifically sound. Bog preserves. The worm has no kingdom in it.

  Gimmerton Sough Kirk is clearly based on Haworth.3 The soil there was peaty. Sough means water channel. The graveyard at Haworth, drenched by rain running off the slopes, was, like Gimmerton, swampy.

  For the population of Haworth the wetness of their graveyard created huge problems. It may have preserved their bodies dead; it destroyed them living. It was estimated that by the 1840s 40,000 or more corpses had been deposited in the graveyard, which had no drainage other than run-off via the graves into the springs which fed the water pumps down in the village – most catastrophically, the spring water in the Black Bull pub, which brewed its own beer. One drank corpse in the Bull. Patrick did his best to get the graveyard, into which he deposited some 300 bodies a year, drained, but to no effect.

  In recent times, prehistoric bodies, immaculately embalmed, exhumed from Irish bogs, have provided rich hauls for archaeology – and for the country’s greatest poet of recent times. Seamus Heaney’s ‘bog poems’, beginning with ‘Bogland’ in the 1969 volume Door Into the Dark, are written in praise of the substance in which the history of Ireland is most faithfully, most ‘livingly’, preserved. It is pleasing to note that, thanks to Emily Brontë, Haworth’s own bogland has a place in literary history too.

  Postscript

  I cannot help noticing that if you add an umlaut (like that which is found in Brontë) to ‘Eyre’, rendering it acoustically ‘airer’, you get ‘Eire’ – Ireland. Was this a deep code, inserted by Charlotte, to affirm that ‘Celtic’ identity Mrs Ward rhapsodises about?

  Footnotes

  1. Bog is one of relatively few words in the English language to have come from Gaelic.

  2. Except Charlotte, on her short honeymoon in 1854. She did not, Juliet Barker notes, make any effort to look up her relatives.

  3. The ‘Southowram fallacy’, asserting it is based on Chapelle-Beer, near Halifax, is discredited.

  BRANDERHAM

  When he arrives at Wuthering Heights, flecks of snow falling, wind wuthering, dogs snarling, Lockwood’s eye is caught by the ‘grotesque carving’ over the front of the house. He can make out, ‘among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys’, the date ‘1500’. It’s an old house and one which quivers, like a cymbal, with past occupants. It has ghosts inside and ghosts outside, Lockwood will learn.

  The snow flecks thicken into storm. Lockwood must spend the night in the inhospitable place, where the main entertainment of an evening seems to be hanging puppies. A new servant (Zillah) mistakenly puts the guest in the wrong bedroom: the shrine Heathcliff keeps for the dead (is she?) Cathy to return to when she can find her way into the house. Everyone is already asleep – they rise for the day’s work at four.

  A bookish fellow, Lockwood reaches out for something to read by the flickering tallow candle he has been left. The Heights is not a bookish house. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and The Pilgrim’s Progress one might expect to be around. Instead of which Lockwood finds an old, leather-bound, privately printed volume. He’s curious.

  Its inside page is inscribed by the same ‘Catherine’ who, he had noted, had carved three versions of her surname with a knife on the wooden inside window ledge:

  my eye wandered from manuscript to print. I saw a red ornamented title – ‘Seventy Time Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First. A Pious Discourse delivered by the Reverend Jabez Branderham, in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough.’ And while I was, half-consciously, worrying my brain to guess what Jabes Branderham would make of his subject, I sank back in bed, and fell asleep.1

  Nightmare follows. In it Branderham is rantingly preaching to ‘a full and attentive congregation’ listening to his interminable catalogue of the 490 separate sins flesh is heir to. There were, Lockwood notes, ‘odd transgressions that I never imagined previously’. One recalls those ‘shameless boys’ on the front of the house.

  Enraged by Branderham’s insistence that, despite mankind’s seven times seventy sinfulness, he Jabes, is one of the elect, and needs no pardon, Lockwood rises up to denounce him for his antinomian heresy.2 Jabes summarily instructs the congregation to kick the stranger to death, which they set about doing.

  It’s a very odd way to begin a novel. One can make sense of it by thinking about where ‘Ellis Bell’ wrote it. The Haworth chapel dated back at least to the 14th century. Over the next half millennium it went through various restorations. But it was never very much of a place – just a ‘chapelry of ease’ in the vast parish of Bradford (everything is big in Yorkshire).

  It was inconvenient to carry corpses the four miles or more to the city’s burial grounds. And corpses were what Haworth produced as efficiently as Preston manufactured cotton. The church graveyard (see above, ‘Bog people’, page 11) was estimated to contain 44,000 bodies – bodies which, perversely, did not rot as they would elsewhere, in decent, God-fearing dirt. Dead Haworthians were routinely buried ten feet down in the soggy, boggy earth, to make room for neighbours above.

  Haworth was the necropolis of the north-west. The one visit the Archbishop of York, the chapel’s nominal head, is recorded as making, during Patrick’s decades of curacy, was to consecrate ground for the enlargement of the graveyard. More corpse-room. Age expectancy, for the 60 per cent who were lucky (or unlucky) enough to survive infancy, was in the low twenties.

  Haworth church

  The parsonage, with the graveyard in the foreground.

  Nor was the curacy beneficent. Patrick was hired on a £60 p.a. stipend. This pittance was exacted from the local population, through their tight-fisted church committee who did not all think that their new curate was worth more than £5 a month. On arrival, before death thinned their numbers, the Brontës were a family of eight, with full-time servants in attendance. Sixty pounds a year would barely k
eep eight sheep alive.

  But the parsonage, the building they would live, write, and die in, was exceedingly fine. It was a spacious Georgian mansion constructed in the 1770s: the era of Britain’s finest Neoclassical architecture. It is currently, with some small enlargement, the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

  The Brontës were paupers and charity children (no decent education could be afforded them) who found themselves living in a house a mill-owner in Bradford might envy. It created that condition of strange social anomaly which runs through their lives and fiction. Why were such brilliant women ‘governesses’ (upper servants)? Why was such a brilliant young man as Branwell a railway clerk? Why did they not ‘rise’?

  How to explain this anomaly? And how to explain the grand house? The Revd William Grimshaw (undoubtedly the inspiration for Jabes Branderham) is the answer. Grimshaw (1708–1763) was the clergyman who made pre-Brontë Haworth famous. And he achieved that fame for himself and his town by fire-and-brimstone preaching. When he came to the Haworth chapel, in the early 1740s, he reported to the Archbishop that the attendance on a Sunday was a dozen communicants. Pitiful. One of the great Anglican revivalists of the century at the peak of his career, Grimshaw would enthral, in open air-services, as many as 1,000 congregants and 500 communicants. He did brisk ‘cottage services’ by the dozen a day. He was a sermonising whirlwind.

  A Sabbatarian of savage enthusiasm (he ended, forever, Haworth’s Sunday football, drunken ‘wakes’, horseracing and other hellish dissipation), Grimshaw would, legend had it, drive any recalcitrant worshippers into the church with a horsewhip. Since, thanks to him, there was no other entertainment of a Sunday than his sermons he probably did not need the whip. He was, portraits confirm, a large, burly, man.

  He also had a brain. What Grimshaw shrewdly realised was that Methodism was spreading like wildfire through the decayed parochial institutions of the Anglican Church by virtue of one dynamic thing. Sermons. The faithful did not want sub-Latinate liturgy or psalms – they liked it hot. Grimshaw was a master of the ‘market’ dialect which got across to his listeners. He preached up to 30 times a week, using the Methodists’ own winning formula.