The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  The folderol about the prohibitive clause in the will was a smokescreen, Lydia’s enemies assert. The cunning widow had a plan in which Branwell had no place. Edmund Robinson died at the end of May 1846. Eighteen months later, Lydia had resourcefully won the heart of Sir Edward Dolman Scott: some 27 years older than she, now a rather less ‘dashing’ 48. Sir Edward had a conveniently dying spouse (what love potion did the woman have? Or, horrible gothic thought, killing potion).

  Lady Scott (daughter of the evangelically named Temperance Gisborne) was Lydia’s cousin. Lydia the widow was there to console the widower. She must have done it deftly. She became, by private licence, the second Lady Scott at the end of 1848.

  By this time the rejected Branwell had lost all will to live and had died, a sot and an addict, at the end of September 1848. Whether he was buried still wearing on his chest the lock of hair Lydia had given him in happier days is not recorded. It would all have made a good novel. But he never completed that, any more than he succeeded at anything in his life.

  Footnote

  1. The quotation is from Pope’s translation of the Iliad, Book VI. Branwell was doubtless teaching it to Edmund. The surrounding passage describes Hector’s tender departure from his wife, Andromache. Branwell as Hector is a bit of a pull.

  BRANWELL’S ROBINSONIAD II

  Lydia’s story

  She was, Mrs Gaskell bluntly declared, ‘a bad woman’. According to Charlotte, ‘a worse woman, I might say I believe, hardly exists – the more I hear of her the more deeply she revolts me’.

  How bad and revolting was she? Some rearguard defence – as with Benjamin Braddock’s Mrs Robinson in The Graduate – can be mounted. Lydia Gisborne (what Branwell always called her, annulling her marriage verbally) came from a wealthy, politically active, ecclesiastically powerful family which had been distinguished gentry and clerisy for generations in Derbyshire.

  In addition to large land-holdings the Gisbornes had industrial interests in coal, lime and sand in Manchester – building materials and fuel required in ever-increasing quantities during the industrial revolution. Lydia’s clergyman father was one of the moving spirits behind the evangelical revolution, the so-called ‘Clapham Sect’, which transformed the 19th-century Anglican Church. He was notable.

  William Wilberforce, even more notable, was a frequent guest at Thomas Gisborne Snr’s home. There were family connections with Thomas Babington Macaulay. It is hard to believe some of the high domestic culture did not rub off on Lydia (named after her mother and the younger of the two daughters in the family). Her background in the elite Victorian intelligentsia must have had magnetic appeal to Branwell.

  Lydia’s elder brother, Thomas Gisborne the Younger (1789–1852), went on to become a noted, if rather scatty MP of the Reform Party. Lydia must have brought money to her marriage with Robinson – which, by the law of the land, became her husband’s. But she also brought, by virtue of her name, distinction; and, one guesses, intellectual liveliness.

  Branwell’s allegations of marital incompatibility may have been well founded. What he meant by the husband’s ‘brutality’ is unknowable. Lydia may not have wanted five children, but a son (the fifth to arrive) was required of her. Thereafter her bedroom (as Branwell observed), and her body, were her own.

  One can easily imagine that Thorp Green was, for Lydia, a stultifying environment compared to that she grew up in. She was, one suspects, pre-menopausal. Branwell was flattering diversion and reassurance she still had sexual charm. He was widely read and ‘Byronic’ (he hoped). And, as he implicitly boasts, he may have been a lusty lover.

  Once widowed, Lydia could escape to a larger world than Thorp Green. That world was not the Haworth Parsonage. Sir Edward Dolman Scott, a baronet, owned extensive land in Great Barr. He was also enriched by lime-works. This was one of the industrial lines in which the Gisbornes also had a commercial interest. There were probably longstanding family, social and business connections, which would explain the speed of the second marriage between Lydia and Sir Edward, and the ease with which the mutually widowed couple slipped into it.

  A grandee and a magnate, Sir Edward had had a long, if silent, career in Parliament as a Whig with occasional radical tendencies. Although Charlotte Brontë called him Lydia’s ‘infatuated slave’, the disposition of his property after death was anything but reckless. He died, at his family seat in Great Barr, in December 1851. His will had been made a few months earlier. It suggested the marriage was more pragmatic than blissful.

  Lydia was left a meagre £600 a year life annuity. The family estates went entirely, with the baronet’s title, to the eldest son. If she were an adventuress (she probably wasn’t) Lydia had gambled for high stakes and lost. But she still had the wealth her first husband had left her. She lived on, twice widowed, for decades, never publicly disclosing the truth of the Branwell affair, despite provocations. It was not until after her death that Mrs Gaskell’s unvarnished account of what had happened at Thorp Green Hall was published.

  Mrs Gaskell had told her publisher, the ever-loyal George Smith, before publication that she positively relished a libel suit from the ‘bad woman’ of Thorp Green Hall. Lady Scott’s lawyers promptly obliged when the biography was published, in 1857.

  Gaskell’s account was, as she had warned Smith, ostentatiously libellous. It was a gamble and ultimately Smith lost his nerve. All unsold copies of the first edition had to be recalled. The second edition was purged of reference, by lawyer’s direction. A humiliating ‘letter of retraction’ was published in The Times. No legally worthwhile substantiation of Branwell’s conduct could be found to mitigate the shame. Luckily no younger member of the Brontë family was alive to feel the shame. Patrick must have.

  The humiliating revisions to the biography, and the ‘retraction’, branded Branwell not the victim of a designing woman, as he was in the suppressed first edition, but a downright fantasist, aided by an irresponsible biographer. A minority verdict would believe, to this day, that was exactly what he was. One longs for the unwritten novel – or, at least, the first volume Charlotte destroyed.

  BUMPS ON THE HEAD

  Mrs Gaskell gives a vivid snapshot (‘a good look’) of her first meeting with the then-34-year-old Charlotte Brontë. It has a livingness quite unlike the few lifetime portraits done by Branwell and others which have survived.

  I went up to unbonnet, etc.; came down to tea; the little lady worked away and hardly spoke but I had time for a good look at her. She is (as she calls herself) undeveloped, thin, and more than half a head shorter than I am; soft brown hair, not very dark; eyes (very good and expressive, looking straight and open at you) of the same colour as her hair; a large mouth; the forehead square, broad and rather over-hanging.

  The forehead – which sounds a trifle Cro-Magnon – is, for thoughtful Victorians, a most telling detail.

  On 29 June 1851, on one of her rare excursions to London, Charlotte went with her publisher, George Smith (under the alias Mr and Miss Fraser), to the phrenologist Dr J.P. Browne, whose surgery was in Cadogan Square. Trained in Edinburgh, Browne was, doubtless, a disciple of the most famous Scoto-British phrenologist, George Combe (1788–1858).

  Smith kept Browne’s long and detailed ‘Phrenological Estimate of the Talents and Dispositions of a Lady’. To draw it up, the phrenologist would have ‘felt’ with his fingers the head beneath her soft brown hair – erotically, almost, as his knowing fingers passed and pressed over the salient, anterior and superior areas of ‘Miss Fraser’s’ skull. He would also have calipered the dimensions and sketched it.

  Her cranial configuration, Browne determined, was:

  very remarkable. The forehead is at once very large and well formed. It bears the stamp of deep thoughtfulness and comprehensive understanding. It is highly philosophical. It exhibits the presence of an intellect at once perspicacious and perspicuous.

  A perceptive verdict, it might seem. For good measure, he added, ‘If not a poet her sentiments are poetic
al’.

  However, what Browne reported on ‘Miss Fraser’ was, accounts of him in the Phrenological Journal suggest, a usual line in flattering patter and the discovery of ‘remarkable’ features. He was, like most of his kind, more interested in guineas than science.

  Psychologists dismiss phrenology as quackery – along with Victorian table-rapping, ‘animal magnetism’, and astrological readings of character (all of which the Brontës subscribed to). But, at the level of folklore, we retain a loyalty to Dr Browne’s discredited ‘science’ in terms such as ‘highbrow’.

  The Victorians were peculiarly interested in cranial size and often weighed brains postmortem. Brontë’s idol, Thackeray, weighed in at a massive 58.5oz. The grey matter dwarfed that of Walt Whitman – a mere 44oz – but was, alas for England, dwarfed by Turgenev’s jumbo 70oz.

  However dubiously he got there, Dr Browne’s cerebral anatomisation hit the nail on the head, so to speak. The report confirmed Charlotte’s faith in the pseudo-science, which she introduced prominently (‘headfirst’, one might say) into her fiction.

  At her interview with Mme Beck (in Villette), Lucy, for example, is ‘read’ physiognomically (digital investigation of her skull being, probably, a step too far). This was easier with men of years. The Victorian cult of male baldness (while approving the beard) was a way of giving prominence to the brow, as something proudly displayed.

  Characters in Brontë’s fiction are often defined as rattling bags of cranial ‘organs’. In Chapter 4 of Shirley we are told:

  Mr. Yorke, in the first place, was without the organ of Veneration – a great want, and which throws a man wrong on every point where veneration is required. Secondly, he was without the organ of Comparison – a deficiency which strips a man of sympathy; and, thirdly, he had too little of the organs of Benevolence and Ideality, which took the glory and softness from his nature, and for him diminished those divine qualities throughout the universe.

  As for the ‘little woman’ (to borrow Mrs Gaskell’s term)? The forehead must tell all.

  THE CONFESSION BOX

  It is instructive to dig a little deeper into the plot of Villette, in those places where one can test what the fiction portrays against the (frustratingly fragmentary) factual record of Charlotte’s sojourn in Brussels. (I’ve wrestled, vainly, with why she pseudonymised that fine capital city as ‘little town’. Probably every Belgian schoolchild knows.)

  A prime example of where fact can be tested against the novel’s fiction is the extraordinary scene in which Lucy, in the throes of her illicit passion for Paul Emanuel – as the author herself had been to her maître in Brussels, Constantin Héger – submits herself to Catholic confession.

  There is high tension around the scene: will Lucy, in the extremity of her uncontrollable desires (and, possibly, opium), fall prey to the Whore of Rome? Charlotte, inflamed by her feelings for Constantin, herself took Catholic confession, on 1 September 1843, in the Brussels Church (now a cathedral) of St Michael and St Gudula. Belgian Brontëans (an indefatigably resourceful crew) have identified the very confessional box (a wildly florid structure) in which Charlotte, defying every tenet of Haworth, found her most unusual audience.

  Charlotte confided to Emily what happened in a surprisingly skittish (given the seriousness of her act) letter. The priest, on learning the English lady on the other side of the grille was Protestant, quite properly declined to receive her confession. Eventually, after her beseeching him to do so, he relented, in the hope, as he said, that it would bring her back to the ‘true church’ (truth in short supply in Haworth’s Chapel of Ease, evidently; the Revd Patrick Brontë would have snorted indignantly).

  In the novel the confessor is the wily Père Silas. His characterisation borrows strongly from 1840s and 1850s anti-Jesuit paranoia, depicted, melodramatically, in innumerable novels of ‘faith and doubt’ of that period. It was not all low-grade propagandistic fiction. Brontë’s other maître, Thackeray, introduced a subtle Jesuit into Henry Esmond, a couple of years before Villette.

  Fear of Jesuits, and the Catholic Church generally, had been raised to paranoid levels by Newmanism and the Oxford movement1 in the 1840s and by the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1851, when Rome decided to ‘establish’ itself in Britain, with a national hierarchy. John Bull raged.

  What on earth induced Charlotte Brontë to expose her soul to a Catholic priest at this fraught period? James Tully claims (in his uncompromisingly titled docufiction Crimes of Charlotte Brontë) that ‘the indications’ are that Charlotte and M. Héger ‘eventually became lovers in every sense of the word’. Tully assumes Charlotte was so weighed down with guilt at her adultery, ‘she had to unburden herself’ – if not to her church, then to Héger’s. It would ease her conscience if she could divulge her sin to someone who, by the disciplines of his church, could never pass on her confession.

  One doesn’t give this scenario too much credence. But there are, undeniably, hints of pervasive sexual guilt in the eerie history of the pensionnat Beck in Villette (based, closely, on the Héger institution in Rue d’Isabelle). Its dormitories were once nuns’ cells (ambiguous word). In the garden there is a tree where, whispered legend among the girls had it, a nun who had defiled her vows of chastity had been buried alive. Her ghost walked. Or so the pupils tell each other.

  The Héger girls (those Belgian Brontëans, again, have established) often had, as their breakfast, fruit – pears, when in season – plucked from the garden, marinaded in wine. The pear tree was very old; it must have been there in the days of the convent, and the luckless nun. What did the tree roots clutch and suck in the depths of the soil?

  My own feeling is that Charlotte was drawn to the Catholic Church, as many have been, by the beauty of its décor, its venerable ritual, its Latin, its authority – headed as it is by the most powerful father figure in the world. There are hints elsewhere in the fiction of a pull to Rome: in Shirley, for example, with its remarks on the opening page about Protestant baptism resembling a hasty ablution in a bedroom ewer.

  Like Anne (who felt a similar attraction to the magnificence of York Minster) Charlotte’s sensibility was, one can surmise, occasionally unfulfilled by the pragmatic simplicity of Haworth: a ‘holy’ place where local women hung their washing out to dry on the gravestones (Patrick tolerated them doing it: he wrote an amused poem about vests on the stones).

  The immensely well-informed editor of Charlotte’s letters, Margaret Smith, pooh-poohs fanciful speculation about any sexual peccadilloes with Héger or temptations to ‘go over’ in the confession box. Charlotte’s act was, Smith asserts, a high-spirited ‘experiment’. Nothing more. As she described it in her letter to Emily ‘it was only a freak’. Adding, however, ‘don’t tell father’. Wise warning.

  Footnote

  1. John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, was the most famous of the Anglicans who ‘went across’ to Rome. He resigned his position at Oxford University to do so and took a number of his collegians with him.

  CREOLE

  Bertha Mason-Rochester’s irruption into the narrative is the most dramatic moment in Jane Eyre’s action. It’s somewhat spoilt by the fact that modern readers will probably know what’s coming. One envies those first readers of October 1847 for whom the madwoman in the attic was an unexpected bombshell.

  Latter-day readers, however, have taken new, and more speculative lines of interpretation. Bertha’s entry on the scene tends nowadays to be seen as more complex than a coup de théâtre and what G.H. Lewes (Charlotte Brontë’s favourite critic) called mélodrame. It points to things much larger than the world of Thornfield.

  Bertha’s marital/sexual degradation at the hands of Rochester, modern critical thinking proposes, is of global significance. She is, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gerber, argue:

  The Jamaican Creole whose racial and geographical marginality oils the mechanism by which the heathen, bestial Other could be annihilated to constitute European female subjectivity.

  One wonders whe
ther Charlotte would have liked that critical phraseology as much as she liked the Gallic suavities of G.H. Lewes. But in a modern, post-colonial, post-racial world it’s a thought-provoking observation by Gilbert and Gubar.

  There is, however, a problem. If, like the (odious) Apartheid-era policeman one tries to work out what precise fraction of Bertha is ‘black’ or ‘mixed race’ and what fraction ‘European’, things get blurry.

  ‘Creole’, the epithet applied to Bertha, generally denotes ‘patois-speaking’, not racial origin. Jamaicans have a particularly rich creole dialect which is now recognised in some quarters as an actual language. It has, via immigration (and the popularity of reggae artists like Bob Marley), enriched contemporary British vernacular speech.

  Historically ‘creoles’ were largely white colonials who had adapted in their speech, chameleon-like, to their surroundings – not colonials sexually intermixed with native inhabitants. Nonetheless, the term could mean that. It’s vague.

  Bertha is never given a word of speech in the novel (she had to wait for Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea to verbalise her). It would be interesting to know how she talks. She is described by Jane as ‘tall, dark, and majestic’. No specific ascription of mixed race is made. Her pigmentation is ‘dark’; her brother Richard’s is ‘sallow’. That could, as Jane thinks, mean exposure to sun – or, we might think, some strain of Afro-Jamaican ancestry.

  There is one shred of hard evidence. Rochester tells Jane that Bertha’s family wanted him to marry her not simply to dispose of a bad seed (nymphomaniac daughter of a mad mother) but because ‘I was of good race’. So was she, on her side, of ‘bad’ race? Rochester later adds:

  Bertha Mason is mad [because] she came of a mad family; – idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!