The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  It hints at intermarriage, in the now-distant past. But blood will out. Bertha, we are told is labelled ‘creole’ on her marriage certificate, which seems odd. The implication, never quite confirmed, is that Bertha was the daughter of a woman who was noteworthily different – culturally or racially – from her husband, the patriarchal and rich plantation owner, Mr Mason.

  Charlotte Brontë (cunningly, I would like to think) leaves it all up in the air. As does Emily with Heathcliff ’s origins. Is he black, Gipsy, Irish? All three hypotheses have been tried out: none rings quite true. He, too, would leave our Apartheid-era inspector scratching his head.

  DATES

  Call up a selection of the greatest Victorian novels written by Victorian women and Middlemarch probably heads the list, followed, one might confidently hazard, by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

  Are they, however, Victorian novels? Yes and no. Yes they are Victorian in that they were all published during the reign of the most powerful woman in the world – Queen and Empress. No, they are not Victorian, in that they all practise that unique literary habit of the period, narrative antedating. Middlemarch, for example, published in the early 1870s, is set, historically, in the period before and shortly after the 1832 Reform Act.

  Many have tried but no critic has persuasively explained the Victorian novelists’ widespread practice of retro-narration. It may be homage to that archetypal 19th-century work, Scott’s Waverley, with its subtitle, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Some have suggested that the Victorian era was changing so fast that novelists went back, often to the period of their birth and childhood, in nostalgic reminiscence of historical stability: the way things were. Living in the present, said the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, was like travelling on a runaway express train.

  Trollope (unlike his idol, Thackeray, an inveterate ante-dater) is the exception. When Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now, he meant it. He published the work in the early 1870s, and that is precisely (and dateably) when the action of the novel is set. For most others it was the way we lived then.

  When, then, is Jane Eyre set? The 1944 Orson Welles film explicitly declares, on screen, that the central events take place in 1839. But to the picky reader of Charlotte’s novel the time scheme is a minefield. All over the place. When, for example, she recalls her journey from France (a few months before Jane’s arrival at Thornfield) Adèle describes ‘a great ship with a chimney that smoked – how it did smoke!’

  Steam-driven vessels did not provide services across the channel until well into the 1820s. But if smoky ships are momentarily glimpsed (or smelled) in Jane Eyre, steam-engined trains are wholly absent. That reinforces a mid-1820s, not 1830s date. Since the epilogue is set ten years on, it is feasible that Mr and Mrs Rochester the second, and their offspring the first, might travel on Mr Stephenson’s wonderful new transport system (as did Anne Brontë, on her last journey, to Scarborough, and her final station in life).

  There is a problem, however, with Jane Eyre’s mid-1820s setting. It clashes with the clearest date-marker in the narrative, inserted with some care by Brontë, it seems. Late in the novel, Jane has settled in with St John Rivers and his sisters and is installed professionally as a teacher at Morton School.

  On 5 November (an anti-Papist holiday) St John brings Jane ‘a book for evening solace’ as she is amusing herself sketching (the day’s darning and Bible-reading has been done, presumably):

  he laid on the table a new publication – a poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days – the golden age of modern literature. Alas! the readers of our era are less favoured. But courage! I will not pause either to accuse or repine. I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day. Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell – the hell of your own meanness.

  While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of ‘Marmion’ (for ‘Marmion’ it was), St. John stooped to examine my drawing.

  It’s a ‘new poem’, we’re told.

  Scott’s long narrative poem Marmion was published in late February 1808 as a book, by Archibald Constable. This, clearly is what St John Rivers (hoping against hope to win Jane) has purchased (it cost a whopping guinea – he was splashing out).

  But 1808 makes nonsense of critical elements in the characters’ prehistories. It would give Jane, for example, a birth date of 1777. More importantly the novel does not ‘feel’ as if were taking place in the first, pre-Regency, decade of the 19th century. Smoky chimney stacks on cross-channel steamers seem more apropos. The Orson Welles 1839 Victorian setting, if only one could justify it by internal evidence, seems more right. But one can’t get far beyond ‘seems’. One has to conclude that dates are slippery in Jane Eyre and not worry too much about them.

  In stark contrast Wuthering Heights has an internal time scheme as precisely laid out as the Annual Register. The tightness of the chronology was first tabulated, and discussed, by C.P. Sanger, in an influential essay, in 1926. By reference to Sanger’s table one can draw up, for example, a births, marriages and deaths list. This is how such a list opens:

  1757, June: Hindley Earnshaw born

  1757, August: Ellen Dean born

  1762, January: Edgar Linton born

  1764, July: Heathcliff born

  1765, May: Catherine Earnshaw born

  1765, October: Isabella Linton born

  1773, May: Mrs Earnshaw dies

  1777, October: Mr Earnshaw dies

  1778, June: Hareton Earnshaw is born

  1778, September: Frances dies

  And so on and so on until Lockwood’s last visit to Wuthering Heights, in September 1802, and Cathy’s marriage to Hareton the January following. One can trace every event in the novel with this eerie chronological exactitude. If you are interested in doing so, do what I did for the above, type ‘Wuthering Heights Sanger Timeline’ into a search engine and take it from there.

  I know of no other work of Victorian fiction where you can do this. Or, to be honest, would want to. Nor does C.P. Sanger. ‘In actual life,’ he says:

  I have never come across a pedigree of such absolute symmetry […]. It is a remarkable piece of symmetry in a tempestuous book.

  What keeps Wuthering Heights completely watertight, as regards dates, is that Emily Brontë does not refer to a single external historicising event. The American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the madness of King George? Unworthy of mention. There is no larger historical framework around the micro-history of the Heights. The self-enclosure is, when one ruminates on it, disturbing, verging as it does on a kind of historical solipsism. There is something creatively neurotic about it.

  ELEMENTARY

  It was David Lodge, I think, who first drew attention to Charlotte Brontë’s fondness for ‘elemental’ names, in Jane Eyre.1 They are clearly meaningful, but sometimes the intended meaning is less than clear. Nonetheless, Lodge is convincing on his fellow novelist’s play with ‘air’ – Ariel-like spirituality, which infuses the character of the heroine called ‘Eyre’. She soars, like an eagle, to its airy ‘eyrie’. One can easily get carried away into ever more ingenious connections.

  So too one can decode the name of the smoulderingly resentful Helen Burns, Jane’s bosom companion at Lowood (‘Low Wood’, NB), whose rebellion is extinguished into self-destroying masochism by the evangelical Miss Temple (one could work, of course, on that name). Her (head)master is Mr Brocklehurst. Charlotte knew northern dialect well enough to realise that meant ‘the wood which smells of fart’. One suspects she intended that under-meaning.

  ‘Burn’ connotes, simulta
neously, flame and water (as in the Yorkshire dialect burn = brook). Another watery character, the sluggish St John Rivers can never – slow-flowing water that he is – be a mate for Jane, the airy one. But ‘St John’, pronounced ‘Sinjin’ has the faintest overtone of ‘singeing’. Water that burns.

  Dismantling the elemental ingredients of Brontëan names would be an interesting litcrit parlour game (Lodge, one recalls, is the inventor of the wittiest of such games, ‘Humiliation’, in which the winner is the academic who can come up with the most flagrantly embarrassing work of fiction he/she has never read).

  Who, from the top of their head (no recourse to Wikicribs), can come up with the best list? Here’s mine – some may be less than elemental; all, however, are interestingly allusive:

  Heathcliff – easy: heath and cliff.

  Earnshaw – less easy. It’s dialect etymology is ‘eyrie of eagles’.

  Linton – flax-town (a clue as to where the nouveau riche family’s wealth has come from).

  Lockwood – life for him is full of doors he will never go through.

  Gérard Moore (Shirley) – another easy hit. ‘Gérard’, though, is, etymologically, ‘brave’.

  Lucy Snowe (Villette) – light (‘lux’) and snow. When not high on opium, Miss Snowe is the coldest of the Brontë heroines.

  Wildfell Hall – savage valley. And short for ‘wild fell(ow)’, which is what Arthur Huntingdon is. Northangerland (Branwell’s favourite pseudonym) – ‘anger of the north’.

  Thrushcross Grange – crucified songbird.

  Caroline Helstone (Shirley) – hailstones.

  Shirley Keeldar (Shirley) – very remote. Keeldar was the name of a stone which Northumbrian chiefs passed by on their installation ceremony.

  A second parlour game suggests itself. What are these elemental/cosmic names (or the particles within them) doing in the Brontëan gesamtwerk? How should the reader put them to interpretative use? Have no fear, academic ingenuity will find a use in any number of articles in learned journals and PhD theses.

  Footnote

  1. In The Language of Fiction, 1967.

  EXTRADIEGESIS

  The 1950s had its irony-hunting ‘deep readers’ (see below, ‘Villainy’, page 180). The 1970s and after had its ‘theorists’. Intradiegesis and extradiegesis were two tools the theorists put in the literary toolkit. What are they? The easiest example is the most dramatic extradiegetic remark in Victorian fiction:

  Reader, I married him.

  The remark breaks out of the ‘design’ (diegesis) of the novel – tramples through the convention of narrator–narratee which we observe. We, the reader, are not there. It is an extradiegetic moment. When, a line or two later, she says to her cook, ‘Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning’, it is intradiegetic. Contained within the novel’s design (diegesis).

  This big word may or may not be found useful. What feminist critics note (feminism was another of the doctrines riding high in the 1970s and after) is the transitive construction. ‘I married him’ – not ‘we got married’ or, heaven forfend, ‘he married me’. The simple sentence conveys the all-important fact: Jane is ‘empowered’. This is the woman who saved him on their first meeting, when he fell off his horse, who saved him from burning to death in his bed and who, finally, chose him as her mate.

  FLOSSY

  There is an oddity in the late correspondence of Patrick Brontë, when he writes a light-hearted letter to Charlotte in the person of ‘Flossy’. It was obviously a regular game between them.

  Flossy was a black and white Cavalier King Charles spaniel (no ordinary hound), given to Anne, as a puppy, by her Robinson pupils at Thorp Green, in 1843. It was a perfect gift for her. Flossy became a thing Anne loved – more than she loved most of humanity, who, as she wrote in her prayer book after witnessing the shenanigans (most painfully her brother’s adulteries) at Thorpe Green, ‘disgusted’ her.

  Dogs mattered in Haworth, channelling, as the animals do, warmer emotions than family members could openly express to each other. Luckily most dogs are very sensible about this. Flossy was stroked and pampered. There are complaints, late in her life, that she is getting too fat. There was not a lot of obesity at Haworth.

  In her youth, she was given to sheep-worrying. She littered (who the male dog was is not recorded – a thoroughbred, one hopes). A puppy was passed on to Ellen Nussey, Charlotte’s close friend. It, too, was called Flossy. The dog was, one senses, much cuddled and its silky fur was a pleasure to the stroking hand. Flossy (transmuted into a wire-haired terrier) had a lead role, as ‘Snap’, in Agnes Grey. Snap it is who eventually brings together Weston and the heroine in what will be a happy marriage.

  Flossy had privileges denied the other Haworth dogs (there were many). Look, for example, at the picture overleaf – from one of the few surviving pages of Emily’s diaries.

  What is interesting is that Flossy is on Emily’s bed (it is, inspection reveals, a ‘closet’ bed, like that which Lockwood sleeps in at Wuthering Heights – another fact worth noting). But Emily is serenely ignoring him. When Keeper dared lie on her bed the beast was thrashed and punched. Note that Keeper is lying dutifully at his mistress’s feet. Good, good dog, one mutters. Emily’s last recorded act, the night before she died, was to feed Flossy. Overfeed her, perhaps.

  A sketch in Emily’s diary, showing Emily, Keeper and Flossy.

  After Anne died (Flossy did not, apparently, accompany his mistress to Scarborough, on her last pilgrimage) she was looked after by Charlotte who was, we are told, less of a dog-lover, and probably more of a cat person than her sisters. Charlotte noted that all her life, Flossy seemed to be waiting for Anne’s return (as Keeper pined and whined for dead Emily).

  Flossy died, full of years, in 1854, having outlived virtually all the family. We are told she expired, aged eleven (77 in dog years) ‘without a pang’. Would that her owner had been as lucky.1

  Footnote

  1. There is some dispute about details of Flossy – even her/his sex. I have taken the above details from the resourceful Belgian Brontëans at kleurrijkBrontësisters.blogspot.co.uk

  GHOSTS

  ‘Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere …’

  So says Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. Confirmation of this spectral circumambience is found everywhere in the Brontë world. There is a legend that Emily, then three years old, was placed, for household convenience, in the bedroom where her mother, who had barely finished nursing her, lay as a corpse (where else to put a small child, with the gloomy bustle of ‘undertaking’ going on?).

  If, as one can easily picture, the little girl looked across the room, her little mind must have been unable to ascertain whether the person on the bed were sleeping or awake – or something in between.

  Lifelong belief in ghosts is sown deep in childhood. It was Robert Louis Stevenson’s night-nurse, Cummy, who chilled the little fellow’s spine with the bedtime tales which would flower as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a volume’s worth of the finest Victorian ghost stories.

  Tabitha Aykroyd came as housekeeper to Haworth aged 53, initially as a nurse, when all the longer-living sisters were under eight. Tabby, like all her generation and class, believed in ‘fairies’. ‘It wur the factories,’ she believed, ‘as had driven them away!’

  Supernaturalism is rife in the Angria/Gondal sagas. A classic piece of juvenilia from Charlotte, ‘Napoleon and the Spectre’, was written in 1833, when she was seventeen. It’s a ghost story worthy of Poe. Read it.

  But, as Charlotte put it, the novels she wrote for the world at large, as ‘Currer Bell’, beginning with The Professor, inhabit a world as real ‘as Monday morning’. She was a reformed author. So, too, was Anne. And Emily? Not so reformed.

  The reader may be led to believe that there is a night-time ghost, bent on revenge, at Thornton Hall. But it is revealed to be the all-too-real arsonist Bertha. Lucy
Snowe has hallucinatory visions, but they are opium-induced. Blame the apothecary. Delirium tremens torments Arthur Huntington with terrifying visions in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But they are the product of bottles, not the world beyond the veil. Blame those who supplied him with gin.

  Emily alone gives any credence to the actual existence of ghosts, working them into the fabric of her narrative. She turns the screw delicately. Screw-turning is Henry James’s term for the one thing a ghost story needs. A gentle hand, gradually pulling the reader in.

  The word ‘ghost(s)’ surfaces eleven times in the text of Wuthering Heights – usually with the implication that they are as real as all the others in the house. It is strongly suggested that the two main characters live on, after burial, as ghosts. When Cathy dies, Heathcliff ‘vociferates’ (as Emily likes to put it), with a dreadful oath: ‘I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad!’ She obliges.

  Cathy’s first appearance in the novel is as the spectre scrabbling at the window pane. The last appearance of Heathcliff is one of the finest ghost scenes in Victorian literature – worthy of M.R. James. Lockwood has returned to Wuthering Heights. It is summer: flowers bloom; wedding bells are imminent, as is a general removal to civilised Thrushcross. Heathcliff is dead and gone, the world reassures itself. Nelly is a happy woman. But, as she confides, uneasily, to her erstwhile employer Lockwood:

  the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that he walks: there are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you’ll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on ’em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death: – and an odd thing happened to me about a month ago. I was going to the Grange one evening – a dark evening, threatening thunder – and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided.