The novel is narrated autobiographically by William Crimsworth. The setting is loosely late 1830s. The hero is an Etonian in his early twenties (a genus Charlotte Brontë knew less well than she did the man in the moon). William is orphaned and unless he wants to marry a flibbertigibbet cousin (much of the novel is taken up with his distaste for flibbertigibbets) he must work. He accepts the curse stoically.
He enrols as a £90 p.a. clerk for his rich, northern mill-owner brother Edward. They have been alienated for years (the family background is complex and somewhat blurred). A bully and self-made man, Edward despises ‘soft’ southrons like William. But if there is one thing an Etonian knows it is how to face down bullies. After a horsewhipping fracas and with the assistance of a friendly ‘radical’ mill-owner, Yorke Hunsden, William takes off for Brussels, to teach English in a boarding school.
The proprietress of a neighbouring girls’ school, Zoraïde Reuter, a Catholic as sirenic as her name, lures William, sexually. But he sees through her wiles in favour of a Protestant pupil, Frances Henri, a demure young Anglo-Swiss. Like himself she is a fillette of impeccable earnestness. They marry, set up their own school, and have children (authorial wish-fulfilment run riot).
On the edge of the couple’s terminal ‘happy ever after’, the brutal Edward, enriched by ‘steam’, carries on prosecuting the industrial revolution, turning the West Ridings into a wasteland.
Famously, George Smith, Charlotte’s publishing saviour, and his adviser William Smith Williams, saw ‘something’ in the book when the elsewhere rejected manuscript was submitted to them by ‘Mr Bell’. Williams, particularly, is one of the unsung heroes of Victorian fiction.
Smith Elder rejected the manuscript but commissioned a three-decker (The Professor would have made up a meagre two volumes: generally disliked by circulating libraries – see below, ‘Three-Decker’, page 162). The three-decker arrived at their office a few months later as Jane Eyre. In it the idea of the ‘master’ (Jane’s term of address to Rochester, even after marriage) is let rip. There are other ‘seeds’ in The Professor, which would later bloom. The Villette love-in-a-classroom story is embryonically there. There are moments in the first third of the novel, in the clash between William and Edward, when we glimpse the skeletal outline of an unwritten ‘social problem’ (‘factory’) novel of the North and South or Hard Times kind. Charlotte would pursue that theme in Shirley.
There are other moments in The Professor when one feels a wholly different novel struggling to get out. William gives Frances a devoir (assignment). She is instructed to write an essay on Alfred, the peasant’s cottage, and the burnt cakes. This is what Frances (one can assume it’s a version of Charlotte, writing to impress Héger) comes up with:
Take care, young man [commands the peasant wife], that you fasten the door well … whatever sound you hear stir not and look not out. The night will soon fall … strange noises are often heard … you might chance to hear, as it were, a child cry, and on opening the door to give it succour … a shadowy goblin dog might rush over the threshold; or more awful still, if something flapped, as with wings, against the lattice, and then a raven or a white dove flew in and settled on the hearth, such a visitor would be a sure sign of misfortune. The stranger, left alone, listens awhile to the muffled snow-wind.
The real world of Monday morning seems to have slipped a bit and a strong whiff of – what else? – Wuthering Heights assails the reader’s nostrils. There would be no readers, alas, of Charlotte’s idiot child to be assailed by this whiff until well after its fond mother’s death.
THE IDIOT CHILD AND ME
The Professor was the first Brontë novel I read. My well-meaning mother, discerning, perhaps, an academic future for her child, gave me a second-hand copy. (There was, I was often told, a ‘clairvoyant’ gift in my family. My grandmother was a tassologist of renown in Colchester, widely consulted. No tea leaf held its secrets from Daisy Salter.)
The book my mother put my way – God knows where she got it – was a treasure (although it would be four years before I went on to Wuthering Heights). It was, I now know, the mass-market Dent 1905 edition of The Professor. What distinguished it were the six full-page, colour-processed pictures by Edmund Dulac – the finest artist, for my money, ever to have illustrated the Brontë works (Charlotte prohibited illustration of her novels during her lifetime; her sisters, dealing with a lower class of publisher, were never asked).
Dulac had emigrated as a young man to London from Paris. Aged a mere 22, he was recruited by Dent to illustrate a collected Brontë edition, using the new technologies for coloured reproduction pioneered in the London book world (one of the reasons Edmund had emigrated).
I was a lonely little boy, eleven years old. Most of the story flew over my head. But I recall, to this day, the impact on me of one of Dulac’s illustrations, featuring a pensive young William Crimsworth overlooking an industrial townscape a short distance away. The caption reads: ‘Steam, trade, machinery had long banished from it all romance and seclusion’.
It represents what is a moment of truth for William. He is at the turning point of his life. Is he about to become part of the system’s ‘machinery’? ‘Muck and brass’, as the phrase went? The relevant passage in the book reads:
At a distance of five miles, a valley, opening between the low hills, held in its cups the great town of X–––. A dense, permanent vapour brooded over this locality – there lay Edward’s ‘Concern’. I forced my eye to scrutinise this prospect, I forced my mind to dwell on it for a time, and when I found that it communicated no pleasurable emotion to my heart – that it stirred in me none of the hopes a man ought to feel, when he sees laid before him the scene of his life’s career – I said to myself, ‘William, you are a rebel against circumstances; you are a fool, and know not what you want; you have chosen trade and you shall be a tradesman …’
At this period of my life (I have written about it)1 I, like William Crimsworth, was at a crux in my life. I had overheard my mother say that if I failed the eleven-plus (which I nearly did) the best thing would be for me to be apprenticed to a bricklayer (they were making good money in the late 1940s). Not quite the same downfall as an Etonian becoming a ‘tradesman’, but analogous to my young mind. And touched by that fine picture of Crimsworth looking at a future he does not want but cannot, perhaps, avoid.
George Smith and W.S. Williams saw ‘something’ in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Idiot Child’. So did childish I. I still do.
Footnote
1. See The Boy who Loved Books (2009).
JANE! JANE! JANE!
Rochester’s astral telephony with Jane, precipitating their reunion and eventual marriage is one of the stranger lapses from ‘Monday morning’ realism which Charlotte liked to protest was the foundation of her mature fiction.
Just what day of weekly reality is this scene set in? Are we, the reader may well ask, back in Angria? Fantasy Brontëland? The situation in the narrative is as follows. Jane is at the St John Rivers home, after evening prayers. It is around nine o’clock on Monday evening.
Never a lively place, this is a very quiet moment in the parlour. Family and servants have gone to bed, St John Rivers is alone with Jane. He solemnly renews his proposal of marriage. She wavers: ‘I could decide if I were but certain … were I but convinced that it is God’s will I should marry you …’
Jane needs a sign from above. Little conversation is recorded, but the two are evidently together for a few hours. She, all the while, is staring, steadfastly, at the ‘one candle’ illuminating the room (the St John household is frugal). It gutters. As Jane describes it:
All the house was still; for I believe all, except St John and myself, were now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb.
Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock
, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake.
They rose expectant: eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones.
‘What have you heard? What do you see?’ asked St John. I saw nothing, but I heard a voice somewhere cry –
‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ nothing more.
Is this, perhaps, the sign she is waiting for? God, as the hymn tells us, moves in mysterious ways and sometimes His signalling (as the Israelites discovered in the desert) can be very enigmatic.
I might have said, ‘Where is it?’ for it did not seem in the room – nor in the house – nor in the garden: it did not come out of the air – nor from under the earth – nor from overhead. I had heard it – where, or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being – a known, loved, well-remembered voice – that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently.
‘I am coming!’ I cried. ‘Wait for me! Oh, I will come!’
Four days later, after her breakneck dash back to Thornfield, Rochester will tell Jane that on the Monday night in question he himself sat for some hours in his unlit room gazing, unblinkingly, at the moon through the window. Involuntarily, near midnight, he ejaculated, ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ Then, to his amazement, he heard her voice reply, audibly, ‘I am coming; wait for me!’
That Rochester’s communication, across many miles, was not hallucinatory was insisted on by Charlotte herself, defending the scene, which has always bothered some strict Brontëans. ‘It is a true thing: it really happened,’ she insisted. By which, it seems, she meant such a thing was scientifically possible. ‘Really’?
Her defiant word ‘truth’ is, on the face of it, perverse. Some early reviewers apprehended that Brontë might be fantasising about the exciting new technology of telegraphy: see Jane’s remark about ‘electric shock’. But the ‘wires’, as Victorians called them, linking humanity (usually alongside railway lines), electrically, across great distance, was still in its infancy, and it was unlikely that it was much discussed over the breakfast table at Haworth.
What the Brontës would have been interested in (as they were with phrenology – see above, ‘Bumps on the Head’, page 35) were recent reports of mesmerism, ‘animal magnetism’, clairvoyance and tele-auditory communication. It is possible that Charlotte, in the Haworth Mechanics’ Library, perhaps, came across the Revd Chauncey Hare Townshend’s Facts in Mesmerism, with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry Into It (London 1840). The book was published under Longman’s highly respectable imprint, and was, for a while, taken seriously by the scientific community. In his book Townshend asserted:
It has been said that persons in certain states either mesmeric or akin to the mesmeric can become aware of the thoughts of others without the usual communication of speech … But is there, it may still be asked, any one acknowledged instance in nature by which the possibility of receiving actual experiences other than by the normal inlets of sense can be demonstrated? There is.
To back up this blunt statement, Townshend cited numerous scientifically valid examples of telepathic communication. Meetings of minds, and voices, across great distances, requiring no sound-waves, riding the energy of animal magnetism.
The commonest way to produce a mesmeric state, or trance, is to look for a long period at a candle (I tried it myself, with moderate success, I recall, as a schoolboy – before finding substances that produced the necessary effect more quickly).
So that’s it. The ‘truth’ of it. Or so a novelist up with the latest thinking on animal magnetism might think in 1847. No Monday morning transgression.
JANE’S CHANGE OF HEART
Jane rushes, post-haste, ‘home’ to Thornfield in the same way she left the place, unthinkingly, under the propulsion of overwhelming emotion. She left, one recalls, because her conscience would not allow her to remain as Rochester’s mistress; nor did she trust herself to remain in the house a pure woman, Bertha raving by night upstairs.
Now that Edward has summoned her in this unusual manner (see above, ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’, page 71), it seems that she does want just that. Impurity. Why else would she go back to Thornfield? She does not at this point know, living as she has been out of the way with the Riverses, that the first Mrs Rochester has conveniently committed suttee, leaving her post vacant.
Rather adultery with her ‘master’, Jane has evidently resolved (even though she can’t consciously admit it to herself), than a lifetime of marital probity converting the Indian masses to Christianity alongside St John Rivers. Who can blame her? But what would she have done if Bertha, when she arrived home, were still in the land of the living? There is another novel there.
LETTERS
Brontë scholarship, developing at the time into outright hagiography, was turned upside down with the release, in 1913, of four surviving letters written by Charlotte to her maître, Constantin Héger. The letters were lucky to have survived. They had been torn up, tossed away, retrieved (by an unknown hand) and laboriously sewn together (clearly by a female hand). They give visible proof of trailing havoc and high temperature behind them. Oddly, they were used at one point to jot down shopping lists. The name of M. Héger’s bootmaker has been detected. They were, nonetheless, stored in Mme Héger’s jewel box. For reasons one can easily surmise, these letters were ‘valuables’.
The four manuscripts were donated to the British Museum and published, in full, in The Times. They had been preserved in the family for decades because the Hégers (most strongly the matriarch) felt they would be needed to prove that Charlotte Brontë’s passion for Constantin was a one-way thing. The patriarch of the family was unassailably virtuous – no seducer of young English assistantes. Not he. Here is the incontrovertible proof. Charlotte Brontë was a little English fool.
The Hégers were the family Charlotte and Emily stayed with as pupils, and undermistresses, in Brussels, on their one protracted period away from Haworth. The letters, said Héger’s son Paul, had been ‘religiously preserved’ (apart, that is, from the tossing, sewing, and bootmaker details). They were now made public to the English nation as revealing ‘what has hitherto been spoken of as the “Secret of Charlotte Brontë”, and show how groundless is the suspicion which has resulted from the natural speculations of critics and biographers’.
Groundless, that is, as regards the conduct of Héger père, not the infatuation of deranged Mlle Brontë. Among themselves the Hégers’ verdict on the besotted anglaise was cruel. Héger recalled ‘sadly defective teeth – somewhat ill-favoured’. The women wondered how so ‘ugly’ a girl thought she could entice the virtuous, handsome Constantin.
The family had no reason to be kind. The depiction of Mme Beck (clearly Mme Héger), the pensionnat proprietor in Villette, was cruel. The description of the pensionnat Beck’s regime of ‘espionage’ (and the doltishness of the pupils) was defamatory, and commercially damaging. It is not hard to see the novel as the outpouring of a woman scorned (it is, of course, much more).
Worst of all, from the Hégers’ aggrieved point of view, Villette, as the years passed, was a perennial bestseller. More and more people were reading it and drawing ill-informed conclusions about Constantin’s professional conduct. The Hégers were, as the century turned, a well-known and respected family in Brussels.
Mrs Gaskell knew about the letters (she visited the Hégers while writing her biography) but suppressed any ‘natural speculation’ she may have felt. ‘I cannot tell you how I should deprecate anything leading to the publication of these letters,’ she told George Smith, the publisher of her biography, with a palpable shudder. Smith, like her, was a resolute protector of Brontë’s reputation. One suspects his long suppression of The Professor was because of the other offensive misrepresentation of Mme Héger in that novel as the serpentine Mlle Zoraïde Reuter (one of Mme Héger’s forenames was Zoe). He was more ca
reful of Charlotte’s reputation than Charlotte was.
The last straw for the Hégers was, one guesses, Clement Shorter’s monumental, iconographic, The Brontës: Life and Letters in 1908. There was also increasing gossip (building on the love plot of Villette) that there must surely have been some kind of relationship beyond the strictly pedagogical between Charlotte and her professor in Brussels, when she was studying there. Trust the novel.
Not everyone did trust Villette. Frederika Macdonald, another English, Protestant pupil of the Hégers (fifteen years after Charlotte) was quick to defend her teachers and the family in her 1914 book entitled (echoing Paul Héger’s remark) The Secret of Charlotte Brontë. Using the well-known rhetorical device of airing a ‘false’ allegation only to let it stand, Macdonald wrote:
From the moral and personal standpoint, [Charlotte Brontë] remains convicted (if she be held to be telling her own story [in Villette]) of the baseness of a half-confession;—and of a dishonourable and a successful, not a romantic and tragical, love for a married man. And of the treacherous wrong done a sister-woman, who threw open her home to her, when she was a friendless alien in a foreign city. And, if this were so, this traitress would have further aggravated the dishonest betrayal of her protectress, by holding up the woman she had wronged to the world’s detestation, either as the contemptible and scheming Mlle. Zoraïde Reuter, of The Professor:—or the less contemptible but more hateful Madame Beck, in Villette.
Constantin Héger (1809–1896) was the husband of the proprietress, Claire, of the Héger pensionnat (boarding school). It catered for around 100 girls (at its fullest) in Brussels. Charlotte and Emily went there, on very generous terms, to learn French, and gain teaching experience, in 1842. A teacher of literature at a nearby boys’ school, Constantin gave occasional free-ranging lessons, mainly on literature, in his wife’s pensionnat. The couple had married in 1836, and would go on to have six children – as had Patrick Brontë. Children, the sisters must have ruefully observed, lived longer in Brussels than Haworth.
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