The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  Curates were scarce then: there was no Pastoral Aid – no Additional Curates’ Society to stretch a helping hand to worn-out old rectors and incumbents, and give them the wherewithal to pay a vigorous young colleague from Oxford or Cambridge. The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism in wash-hand basins.

  There should be, Arthur may have thought, no more of that nonsense in his spouse’s fiction.

  Devoted as he was to her, had she lived, without George Smith behind her, Charlotte Brontë would, one suspects, have been a novelist in marital shackles. Would Charlotte have kissed the rod (she was obedient in the first months of marriage) or, eventually, have exploded into rebellion?

  MURDER?

  Is Edward Rochester a murderer?

  The only book of litcrit I have written which has ever found its way to a bestseller list was Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Glorious week.

  The case against the brute of Wuthering Heights is open and shut from circumstantial evidence. No Sherlock needed. To my mind Heathcliff unquestionably killed Hindley, having sent the other resident in the house, Joseph, off to Dr Ken. He (probably) helped his drunken victim into the next world with a pillow over his face. If there was any justice on the Gimmerton Assize Circuit, Heathcliff ought to have swung before he could create more havoc in the West Riding.

  That Rochester is a would-be bigamist is similarly clear-cut. The evidence as to uxoricide is, admittedly, less overwhelming than it is with Heathcliff ’s homicide, but a powerful prosecution case can be made that the convenient disposal of Mrs Edward Rochester (universally derogated as ‘Bertha Mason’) is murder.

  Although Rochester claims ‘indirect assassination is not in his nature’, this would seem to be exactly how he clears the first Mrs Rochester out of the way, acquiring willing Jane to fill the vacant role. He may have kept the poor deranged woman at deserted Thornfield Hall for just that nefarious purpose. It was, with the right connections, possible to get a divorce by Act of Parliament but it was impossible to divorce a wife who was not compos mentis. Thackeray, aching as he was for another wife, could not divorce his luckless, schizophrenic, Isabella.

  The description of Bertha’s death is given to Jane in the Rochester Arms, as she is on the last leg of her obeying Rochester’s ethereal summons (see above, ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’, page 71). The public house is not, one would guess, a place where Edward Rochester would be spoken ill of by anyone wanting to carrying on pulling pints behind the bar.

  The innkeeper recounts the event, as Jane, ignorant even about the fire which has destroyed Thornfield, takes her breakfast:

  ‘Yes, indeed was he; and he went up to the attics when all was burning above and below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them down himself, and went back to get his mad wife out of her cell. And then they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. She was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming against the flames as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend through the skylight on to the roof; we heard him call “Bertha!” We saw him approach her; and then, ma’am, she yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Dead! Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered.’

  Jane’s fork, one fancifully visualises, must have paused over her breakfast black pudding. It is clear from the form of words (‘I witnessed and several more witnessed’) that the innkeeper, formerly the Thornfield butler, is parroting verbatim his (and fellow servants’) rigidly dutiful testimony at the coroner’s inquest. As a lifelong pensioner of the Rochesters, he would have been a fool not to have said in the witness stand what his paymaster required him to say. Damn the oath.

  There is no clear evidence that Edward went up to the burning roof to save Bertha. And at the very least Mr Rochester, if no wife-murderer, might be thought indictable for manslaughter by virtue of persistent and longstanding neglect. Mrs Poole should surely have been let go to get negligently drunk elsewhere (or did she know too much about what was going on at Thornfield to be dismissed?)

  The jury will be forever out on Rochester, but my verdict is guilty. My belief? He killed the woman.

  MYOPIA

  Visitors to the Brontë Museum (having braved the Brontë tat-fest and theme park which is now Haworth) will probably look with passing curiosity at Charlotte Brontë’s ‘specs’. They are folding tortoiseshell lorgnettes – the kind of spectacles which are most easily put on, and taken off.

  Charlotte did not, one gathers, like being seen with her visual aids on but was bat-blind without them. The Haworth lenses are measured at minus 10 dioptres, which grades as ‘severe short sight’. Stumblingly myopic.

  None of the surviving pictures of the sisters show any of them with glasses, although there was short-sightedness throughout the family. Branwell, images attest, did not mind being bespectacled.

  Mrs Gaskell notes the weakness of Charlotte’s eyes and offers an explanation:

  She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw; and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals, (‘stippling,’ don’t the artists call it?) every little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.

  In fact, as Juliet Barker notes, there is evidence that Charlotte’s short-sightedness was not the result of eye-strain in adolescence, but inherited. Charlotte could not join in sports at school, because she could not see beyond her nose. More consequentially, she could not learn a musical instrument because she had to lean so close to the score that her hands had no room to move across the keys.

  Gaskell is right, however, about the short-sightedness acting as a kind of protective screen for her writing. At the time the sisters were composing their mature works, their father was virtually blind with cataracts (the operation to cure them, with scalpel and without anaesthetic, a terrifying thought). Branwell was, in the years leading to his death, blind drunk. He did, however, in earlier years, collaborate on the notebooks which contain the Gondal/Angria sagas. The privacy of these creations was preserved by the smallness of the script. The lettering is so small as to be encoded.

  The ‘Professor’, William Crimsworth, notes, parenthetically, that he is short-sighted (although Edmund Dulac’s illustrations in the 1905 edition – see above, ‘The Idiot Child and Me’, page 69 – do not show him with spectacles). Spectacles are, however, central props in Villette. The first eruption of Paul Emanuel (the professor/master) into Lucy Snowe’s life focuses on them:

  The teacher ran to the salon door. M. Paul was summoned. He entered: a small, dark and spare man, in spectacles.

  ‘Mon cousin,’ began Madame, ‘I want your opinion. We know your skill in physiognomy; use it now. Read that countenance.’

  The little man fixed on me his spectacles: A resolute compression of the lips, and gathering of the brow, seemed to say that he meant to see through me, and that a veil would be no veil for him.

  ‘Thou God Seest Me’, as the favourite Victorian inscription has it. Emanuel uses light steel-framed ‘lunettes’, worn all day long.

  In the crisis of the story, Lucy breaks the sacred lunettes. It is an accident, but he ‘vociferates’ thunderingly in his rage at being deprived of his vision:

  ‘Là!’ said he: ‘me voilà veuf [widowed] de mes lunettes! I think Mademoiselle Lucy will now conf
ess that the cord and gallows are amply earned; she trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress! traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your hands!’

  Emanuel Agonistes. One recalls the Samsonically blind Rochester. Lucy is the man-destroying Delilah.

  It may strike the modern reader as quaint. All this ado over – what? – a pair of specs? But the symbolism resonates.

  There is a larger issue. The three sisters had one glorious ambition in their adult life: to set up a school. Schoolteaching was one of the very few ‘professions’ available to women of mental ability. And one of the features of the school environment was that spectacles were not disfiguring but, as with Emanuel, indices of teacherly distinction – along with the gown (and cane). In the schoolroom, Charlotte could have worn her glasses with pride.

  NO COWARD SOUL

  The Brontës’ poetry has been respected, but never admired as much as has the prose fiction. Their spectacular veer into the writing of three-volume novels might, of course, have been forestalled had the major poets of the age whom they consulted – Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth – been more encouraging. They singularly weren’t encouraging.

  There is one exception, Emily’s ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, known universally by its fighting first line, has been applauded as one of the greatest religious poems of the century.

  The seven-stanza lyric was published, under Charlotte’s authorisation, in an 1850 volume, with the comment ‘the following are the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote’. She had been dead two years. The detail added a dark lustre to the poem. It joins a select group, along with Donne’s ‘Hymne to God, my God in my Sicknesse’ (supposedly written on his deathbed) and, more recently, David Bowie’s ‘Lazarus’ (not, perhaps, company Emily would have wanted to keep).

  Charlotte’s dating was taken as gospel. Emily Dickinson, who felt a strong kinship with the Yorkshire Emily, requested, on her deathbed, that the poem be read out by a trusted friend at her funeral.

  In point of fact recent scholarship has established that Charlotte’s dating was amiss. The poem was composed in early January 1846, around the time Charlotte’s ‘invasion’ of Emily’s private papers, to put together the contents of the Poems volume, provoked an awful row between the sisters. There is, apparently, an even earlier proto-version of ‘No Coward Soul’ in the juvenile Gondal manuscripts. Charlotte, who was in charge of the ill-fated Bell poems, must surely have known the true chronology and yet publicised (the ‘last lines’ detail is radioactive) a false one.

  Her reasons for (1) not publishing ‘No Coward Soul’ in the printed volume and (2) giving it a false origin can only be speculated on. I speculate it was the assertive egocentric theology of the poem which offended the more religiously orthodox Charlotte: Emily’s frank boast that God was within her, that she was pregnant with divinity, and that God would still be there, were the whole universe (stars, planets and all) destroyed. It implies a singularly personal relationship with the Almighty. A dying woman, in articulo mortis, might get away with it. Just.

  Charlotte’s wilful misrepresentation of ‘No Coward Soul’ is just one example of a generally proprietary practice with her sisters’ work, verging at times on the high-handed. There are others. George Smith wanted to rescue Emily and Anne’s first novels from the rogue Newby (see below, ‘Publishers’, page 137). The sisters reportedly declined. I can’t believe Charlotte could not have persuaded them to transfer. But, under the ‘Bell’ nom de plume, the sibling relationship would have been made much of by a press which was already giving the novels a hammering.

  The following is the published text of ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’:

  No coward soul is mine,

  No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:

  I see Heaven’s glories shine,

  And faith shines equal arming me from fear.

  O God within my breast,

  Almighty ever-present Deity!

  Life—that in me hast rest,

  As I—Undying Life—have power in Thee!

  Vain are the thousand creeds

  That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;

  Worthless as withered weeds,

  Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

  To waken doubt in one

  Holding so fast by Thine infinity;

  So surely anchored on

  The steadfast rock of immortality.

  With wide-embracing love

  Thy spirit animates eternal years,

  Pervades and broods above,

  Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

  Though Earth and moon were gone,

  And suns and universes ceased to be,

  And Thou wert left alone,

  Every Existence would exist in Thee.

  There is not room for Death,

  Nor atom that his might could render void:

  Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,

  And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

  The poem ranks as the most moving Charlotte ever allowed into publication.

  NORMALITY?

  On 22 October 2015, the Daily Mail ran a story under the screaming headline:

  The brutal Brontës! Emily beat up her pet dog. Charlotte – plain, toothless and dull – was so spiteful children threw stones at her!

  The article was over an edited extract of Claire Harman’s (entirely balanced) biography, Charlotte Brontë: A Life.

  Ah yes, one mutters, the ‘brutal’ Brontës. But why stop there. Haworth was – what did Daphne du Maurier call it? – an ‘inferno’. Montage pictures come to mind: opium-maddened Branwell attempting to burn his father to death in his bed (a scene immortalised soon after in Jane Eyre). Patrick himself is meanwhile firing his pistol like a drink-maddened cowpuncher on Saturday night in Dodge City. A wild colonial boy in a dog-collar. The strangely remote children drift aerially like ghosts, indifferent to any world outside their own, trapped in their self-woven ‘web of childhood’. There must be children in the attic – and in another attic the first Mrs Brontë, ranting madly. Outside, the wind ‘wuthers’ (who else uses that word?) against the parsonage over the thorns, cockles and tares of wildest Yorkshire. Emily? A room of her own? Pah! Hers was a more rugged feminism. All that fiery spirit needed was a moor of her own. Rabid dogs wander the streets of the town. Heat a poker white-hot to cauterise the bite wounds and beat your own hound blind if he dares lie on your bed. TB ravages those who survived Yorkshire schools which made Wackford Squeers’s academy look like Cheltenham Ladies’ College on parents’ day.

  Juliet Barker wrote her massive, deeply researched biography in 1994, with the declared aim of sweeping the cloud of Brontëan mythopoeia, such as the above, into the dustbin of literary biography. There is a bucket of cold water on every one of Barker’s 800 or so pages. The Brontë children, she insists ‘had a perfectly normal childhood’. For the time and place, of course.

  They were, as Barker depicts, outgoing and fun-loving kids. Did not the whole of their writing careers begin with the gift of a dozen toy soldiers to Branwell? Patrick Brontë, as Barker revises his portrait, was a liberal, conscientious, hardworking, intellectually curious clergyman. And a good parent. A very interesting man all round, if one takes the trouble to look at him. Cowan Bridge was not a good school, but by current Yorkshire standards (as many graduates who read Jane Eyre enragedly testified) not that bad. Lowood was, pure and simple, exaggeration.

  The mythic Brontëmania originates with Mrs Gaskell, and the poison fruit of the tree (notably the venomous testimony of the dismissed servant, Martha Wright) she gave too ready a credence to. Every reader interested in the Brontës should read Barker’s corrective work, whose dullness is strategic. It serves as biographical coolant.

  But, somehow the Brontë myth-mania will not die. The flames leap back despite Barker’s dousing. Ten years after her book was published, for example, under the emetic headline: ‘Reader, I Shagged him: Why Charlotte Brontë was a
Filthy Minx’, the Guardian (25 March 2005) ran an article which asserted, in its subtitle:

  Since her death 150 years ago, Charlotte Brontë has been sanitised as a dull, Gothic drudge. Far from it, says Tanya Gold; the author was a filthy, frustrated, sex-obsessed genius.

  The compliment ‘genius’ rather wilts in the glare of Charlotte’s proclaimed dedication to ‘shagging’. One visualises her emerging guiltily from behind some convenient bush in Haworth moorland, rearranging her skirts.

  To dip in one’s thumb and pluck out the kind of plum one would rather not eat, consider the following from Ms Gold:

  As the 150th anniversary of her death on 31 March 1855 approaches, it is time to rescue Charlotte Brontë. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of Gaskell’s fake miserabilia. Enough of the Brontë industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte – filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

  There is no evidence offered for this sensational depiction beyond what other commentators have read in a less inflammatory way. ‘Normal’ (even if true, which I believe it is) has a hard time triumphing with the Brontës. We love the myths too much. And, of course, they sell books, films, TV serials and tea cosies.