Grimshaw’s style was histrionic. He was, says his curt entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, an ‘alarming’ preacher. Most alarming was his sermon on 2 September 1744 when, mid-service (the second of the day) he collapsed, foaming, in the pulpit. He was thought dead, but, like Lazarus, William Grimshaw came back to report he had been in the third heaven. The reference was to 2 Corinthians where Paul recalls:
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven … He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.
It was not all ecstasy, histrionics and day trips to paradise. A shrewd ecclesiastical tactician, Grimshaw formed working alliances with local Methodists. The strength of the Anglican Church was ceremonial: it could christen, marry, and bury. But it could not, as successfully as its rival, inflame. An ecumenical modus vivendi was possible.
Grimshaw lived in a run-down ‘cottage’ of grotesque shabbiness in the aptly named Sowdens Crossroads (the name could be taken to mean ‘sty of pigs’), deep in Haworth valley. Its water pump discharged Haworth’s usual attar of corpse and human filth – and bacilli. Grimshaw, otherwise hale, died a young 54 of typhus. All his family – wife and children – died before him of the same water-borne disease. Care of souls was one thing, but care of sewers might have served Haworth better.
It was Grimshaw’s achievement, and what he had done for the Church in the Haworth area, which encouraged the arch-bishopric to invest in the anomalously fine parsonage. It was, alas, opened ten years too late for Grimshaw himself. High up the valley slope, the new parsonage enjoyed pure moorland water. It meant that the Brontës could die of the ‘poets’ disease’, TB, not putrid typhus which killed their predecessor and his family.
William Grimshaw has no monument in Haworth. Emily’s ‘Jabes Branderham’ will have to serve. Oh, and for those who think about it, the parsonage.
Footnotes
1. The number seven, and its multiples, is everywhere in the Book of Revelation – not, one suspects, Lockwood’s favourite bedtime reading matter.
2. Emily would have been long familiar with antinomianism (invincible salvation, whatever one’s sinfulness) from the children’s delight in their favourite novel, James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
BRANWELL’S ROBINSONIAD
‘My brilliant boy’, Patrick called his one and only son. Brilliant but doomed. Before being terminally incapacitated by drink, drugs, self-pity and sexual incontinence, Branwell had written – as he told his closest friend in September 1845 – the first volume of a three-decker novel. There were four Brontës at the parsonage pulling away at the same oar around this period. A veritable fiction factory.
The plot of what Branwell was writing was clear in his mind. It would be what the Victorians called ‘a novel with a purpose’. The three volumes would be Branwell’s testament: chronicling a fall like Lucifer’s, precipitated, like Adam’s felix culpa, by a woman and a serpent. The name of the villainess? Mrs Robinson. It would be something sensational.
Whatever Branwell put on paper was, one presumes, destroyed in the ruthless purge of literary remains Charlotte carried out after the last of her siblings died, leaving her to fashion the Brontës’ literary legacy as she saw fit and prudent. Branwell’s Robinsoniad (let’s call it that) probably went to the bonfire, along with bundles of indiscreet letters, journals, a quantity of Emily’s poetry and, quite feasibly, her mythic follow-up to Wuthering Heights. Charlotte’s motives for this destruction have never been explained but they can be surmised (see below, ‘Survivor’s Privileges’, page 152).
A fine silhouette of Branwell. Such pictures were made mechanically.
His story contained, Branwell confided to his drinking pal, the unvarnished account of his disastrous love affair with the sirenic ‘Mrs R.’, as Charlotte called her, unable to speak the Jezebel’s name. Patrick called her the ‘diabolical seducer’.
Branwell, as anyone who knew him confirmed, was formidably talented but he was woefully uneducated in any formal sense. Money being short, he had been home-tutored by Patrick, in the father’s few hours of spare time, with the hope that like his father, Branwell could overcome formidable obstacles and make it to university. In the event he couldn’t.
Branwell was clever, had gifts as an artist and poet, but he fell somewhat short, on the evidence that survives, of ‘brilliance’. Emily was the better artist; Charlotte was infinitely better with words and more organised intellectually. Both were more diligent autodidacts. So, too, in her reticent way, was Anne.
He collaborated with his sisters on the Angria/Gondal sagas – those fascinating juvenile and adolescent ‘wonderlands’ the Brontë children created in their Haworth years (Emily was still dabbling in them as an adult). Angria – a region in the Verdopolitan (Glass town) Federation – was largely the creation of Charlotte and Branwell; the stories reveal a precocious interest in colonialism. Emily and Anne’s Gondal, on the other hand, is less interested in wonderland than male heroism: supermen of the time such as Napoleon and Wellington, whose mythology feeds into Heathcliff, Rochester, et al.
In later life Branwell complained that the ‘petting’ he had received, as the hope of the Brontës, rendered him constitutionally idle. It was one of his more honest self-assessments. The infant Emily (around seven years old) was asked by her father what she would do for Branwell, ‘who was sometimes a naughty boy’. She answered ‘reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason whip him’. It worked with her dog. Who knows, it might have worked with her brother.
Like all the writing Brontës, Branwell revered the author of Don Juan and was a would-be Byronist. But he lacked (to his credit, some might say) the Byronic ruthlessness in his dealings with women. As an art student in Leeds, and practising artist in Bradford, he hung out with a loose crowd who probably talked more fornication than they got. Scarce Haworth funds were squandered on booze and doxies. He probably developed laddish ideas about sex which would last all his short life.
It would be interesting to know what Branwell was like in drink. Accounts suggest he was a roisterer: a life-and-soul kind of man. One thing is demonstrable: he bought more rounds than he could pay for. Debts to public houses (notably the Old Cock – interesting name) brought, in the months of his downfall, bailiffs all the way from Bradford to the parsonage door. Most biographers credit a friend’s comment that Branwell fathered at least one bastard child on a luckless servant girl. It may have been the cause of his dismissal from his first (quickly terminated) job as a private tutor.
Dismissal was to be a recurrent entry on the Branwell CV. He failed as a portrait painter to Bradford’s self-regarding nouveaux riches and failed as a clerk in the booming railway business which was laying down a modern transport network in the industrial north. Patrick fondly hoped his son would become a captain of industry, if he couldn’t be the next Gainsborough. But the Leeds and Manchester Company job lasted less than a year. There was the faint suspicion of peculation in his departure. Or it may have been incompetence – the arithmetic Patrick taught him was perhaps as patchy as his spelling. Whatever the offence, summary dismissal followed. The magazines (Blackwood’s, notably) and eminent writers (Wordsworth and Southey, notably) he bombarded with his verse and ill-written demands for employment were politely dismissive. Sometimes less than politely.
By 1842 Patrick Branwell Brontë was at a very loose end. Emily cared for him sparingly (doubtless she still thought whipping would help). Charlotte considered him a cross she had to bear. He had manifestly failed the father whose names he bore. Shame was making him reckless.
Anne, the most caring of the sisters where Branwell was concerned, finally found something for him. Herself now a governess with the Robinson family at Thorp Green Hall, near York, she had charge of the two younger daughters. The family, headed by the Revd Edmund Robinson, was wealthy. The country house was rather more grand than Haworth Parsonage (as noted elsewhere, it is immortalise
d as Horton Lodge, in Agnes Grey).
The comfortable lodging was more congenial to Anne than was Thorp Green’s free and easy moral atmosphere within it. The head of the house was, if we credit Anne’s novel, a hunting and drinking parson. His younger wife, Lydia, was, if we credit the novel, ‘dashing’. Coming from a Brontë it was not a term of praise.
There had been an elopement scandal with one of the older girls. The younger two daughters, Anne’s teenaged charges, were, the novel hints, flighty. Keeping them in line was a battle for Anne. The son and heir, Edmund Jr, had been last to arrive. With him in the world Mrs Robinson’s marital duty was done. Now, aged eight, the young man needed a tutor to prepare him for school and university. On Anne’s recommendation Branwell was recruited. It was a comfortable berth. He had his own apartment and his tutorial duties were light and, having been home-tutored himself, easily handled.
There is a veil of obscurity over how, as he always did, Branwell went off the rails. It may have been drink. He may have taken liberties (welcomed perhaps) with the younger Robinson women. A paedophiliac interest in young Edmund has been unconvincingly hypothesised. Possibly some financial misdemeanour was committed (he was a good enough artist to forge signatures). One would like to think not.
What is known from surviving records is that the precipitating cause of the disaster was (alleged) misconduct with (complicit?) Mrs Robinson. Forty-three when Branwell arrived, Lydia Robinson was, supposedly, sexually appetitive, and ‘damnably’ fond of him, Branwell wrote to a friend. She was also cultivated and connected to the highest echelons of Whig politics through her brother, Thomas Gisborne, MP for Nottingham. Thorp Green, and a maternal role, may have been stiflingly boring for her.
The handsome, clever, malleable young tutor could satisfy Lydia’s middle-aged restlessness. But Branwell never registered the fact that the worldly Lydia had no intention of ever throwing herself away on the penniless son of a penniless curate. He himself had used some servant girl: an upper servant that he was, he too would receive the same kind of using. If he were lucky, more gently and profitably.
A scenario can be reconstructed from Branwell’s later, frantic letters. There are those who think his account of the Thorp Green imbroglio so much fantasy. There are others, a majority, who think them essentially true: he was taken advantage of. Seventeen years older than he, Lydia Robinson was possessed, Branwell believed, of ‘totally unselfish generosity, sweet temper and unwearied care for all others’. She was brutally treated, she gave him to understand, ‘by an eunuch like fellow who though possessed of such a treasure never even occupied the same apartment with her’. The Revd Robinson, that was to say.
No eunuch he, Branwell, it would seem, furtively shared the apartment (or she his) and ‘had daily “troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear”1 in the society of one whom I must, till death, call my wife.’ This for three years, he told his confidant, and boozing friend, Francis Grundy. The blunt rejoicing in his superior sexual potency suggests that, by some strangely inverted theology Branwell conceived adultery, as he experienced it, as a kind of marriage: solemnised by his loins.
What strains credulity is that for three years the affair was not noticed – at least by the cuckolded head of the household to whom the servants reported. Where was the affair going, if there was an affair? Divorce was only possible by an Act of Parliament. Unlikely. Elopement would mean life without servants. Even more unlikely. Lydia would have to be very much in love (and much younger) to give up the amenities of Thorp Green Hall.
In an ideal world, death would soon enough carry off Lydia’s ‘bloodless mock husband’, as Branwell called him, clearing the way for his successor. No question who that should be (in Branwell’s mind). The Revd Robinson was, as it happened, ill and the medical forecast was dire. Branwell, fool that he was, saw himself as the future master of Thorp Green. He wrote confidently to his friend, Grundy, about ‘The probability of [Robinson’s] state of health ere long leaving [Lydia] free to give me herself and her estate.’ It is hard to forgive Branwell for that calculation about usurping another man’s ‘estate’ (not to mention his wife).
The nearness of York Minster, and the annual holidays in blissful Scarborough had been the happiest things in Anne’s short, emotionally restricted life. But the Thorp Green delinquency sorely chafed her moral sensibility. She must surely have tried to bring her brother to his senses. Where Mrs Robinson was concerned he was evidently senseless.
Anne remained five years, until Branwell’s misdoings made further staying impossible, and she resigned her post, in June 1845, before the crisis came. ‘During my stay [at Thorp Green]’, she confided to her diary, ‘I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt of experience of human nature’. In the margin of her prayer book she jotted that human beings now disgusted her. Animals (‘the lesser creation’) she could still love.
Her two girls, flibbertigibbets that they were (one suspects), now in their nubile late teens, loved Anne, even after the Branwell disaster. And they gave her what would be one of her dearest possessions: the puppy ‘Flossy’ (see below, page 50). Everyone who came close to her loved Anne, it seems. She could have stayed, not as a governess to her now adult charges but as a salaried companion, until they got married. Things might have worked out well for her – perhaps, as in Agnes Grey, some suitor as eligible (and preferably high church) as the Revd Weston might have come her way, having perceived Miss Brontë’s quiet worth.
The havoc Branwell precipitated, as the Robinson imbroglio came to a head, is outlined in the few desperate letters of his which survive, in guardedly oblique remarks in his sisters’ correspondence, and in Mrs Gaskell’s tendentious (and, as it turned out, libellous) account. Whatever hopes Lydia raised in foolish Branwell, she was not foolish enough to disinherit herself. Her husband was not so sick that he could not, as his last act on his deathbed if need be, change his will. And her children were not so loving to Anne that they would welcome Branwell Brontë as their step-papa.
Someone (a Thorp Green gardener, one version has it) told Edmund what had been going on for years under his nose, shortly after Anne left. A savage letter was dispatched to Branwell, taking a summer break at Haworth, threatening to shoot him out of hand should he venture to Thorp Green. The hunting parson had that much life left in him. The Revd Robinson did not, however, change his will, which left Lydia the bulk of the family’s sizeable wealth and property.
One can only speculate what self-serving version of events Lydia invented to mollify her husband. Most likely it was one which cast Branwell as a fantasist. He had misunderstood Mrs Robinson’s, his employer’s, courtesies as covert passion. He was a madman. He had made it all up, to extort money from the family.
Branwell waited impatiently at Haworth, stupefying himself with drink, opium and wild dreams of things working out his way. Lydia clandestinely sent him sums of money. They kept his hopes alive, and the Black Bull public house, down the hill from the parsonage (it’s still there), busy.
The Revd Robinson duly died, ten months later, in May 1846. Fury against Branwell may have accelerated his demise. The way should now, Branwell thought, have been open for him to return and claim his love and her wealth. The way was not open. In fact it was permanently barred. He was told, by responsible third parties, that Lydia herself was dangerously ill, ‘insane’ with grief and emotional confusion. Branwell’s letters were, apparently, returned unopened.
The Black Bull
Branwell was subsequently given to understand, by increasingly cold (dis)missives, that Robinson’s will excluded his wife from any posthumous benefit in the event of her not breaking off, entirely, any relationship present or future with Patrick Branwell Brontë. She was obliged to do that.
The business about the clause in the will was not true; and if true it would never have been enforceable. Like Edward Casaubon’s posthumous prohibition against Ladislaw’s marrying the widowed Dorothea in Middlemarch, English law would laugh at such ‘dead hand’ contro
l over the living.
Branwell evidently believed his true love was being persecuted and held in vile bondage by the terms of her dead spouse’s cruel will. He further stupefied himself on what she sent and whatever he could scrounge, or steal, from the parsonage (or get on credit from the Black Bull and the local apothecary, both of whom knew the money would come from the family, if not him). There’s an unpleasant reference in one of Charlotte’s letters to his cheating his father out of a sovereign.
Branwell was paralysed, totally inert, as Charlotte told Ellen Nussey, bitterly:
Branwell 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 have qualified himself – but he will do nothing – except drink and make us all wretched.
Why did Lydia send him money to drink himself paralytic? It’s absurd to think that Branwell was blackmailing the woman he so foolishly, and genuinely, loved. And if he tried to threaten her with exposure Thorp Green men with horsewhips would have joined the bailiffs at the parsonage door. Nor is it easy to credit that, ‘diabolical’ as she may have been, Lydia hoped to precipitate his death by encouraging toxic overdose – although that was what was happening. He was drinking and drugging himself to death.
The most likely explanation is that she feared the stupid young fellow would kill himself. It was the same reason, in his last weeks, his father slept overnight in the same bed with Branwell. They must have been troubled nights.
The Brontesaurus Page 3
