The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  Anne, Emily, large pillar, Charlotte.

  The portrait, scarred by its careless folding, was acquired by the gallery and a large simulacrum was painted for the Haworth museum.

  Over time, the reason for the pillar has become apparent. As the NPG further notes: ‘In the centre of the group a male figure, previously concealed by a painted pillar, can now be discerned; it is almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist, their brother Branwell Brontë.’ Custodians at the NPG are said to have observed that, over the decades, Branwell is ‘coming through’. Breaking, as it were, through the obscuring pillar.

  No other novelists have inspired as many legends about ghosts as the Brontës, and it is tempting to offer up an explanation that continues that tradition. The portrait was done in 1834, internal evidence suggests (such as the gigot sleeves Mrs Gaskell noted, and manifest youthfulness of the sitters.) This was a period when the highest hopes were anticipated for Branwell as an artist. His self-portrait, done by the usual mirror technique, was central. He was the hope of the family. Dominant. But, alas, disgrace ensued. Some hand (all three sisters could draw and paint) ‘buried’ him, obscurely, behind the pillar. This, perhaps, at the period when the sisters were breaking into print. No embarrassing inquiries about their scapegrace, alcoholic, drug-addicted brother were welcome.

  Over the years, a spectral Branwell was forcing his way back into the light. As admirers such as Daphne du Maurier (The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë) insist, Branwell has never had his due. He is still fighting for it. Scrabbling, like Cathy at the window in Wuthering Heights, to get back (according to du Maurier, he co-wrote that novel).

  An alternative view, advanced by Juliet Barker (always ready with a refreshingly sober line of analysis) is that, while painting, Branwell realised that the composition was too crowded, and obscured himself (with less durable paint). He modestly painted himself out.

  Perhaps we may, at last, find out the truth of it. On 18 December 2015 the NPG announced that, as part of the anniversary celebrations, they were going to use state-of-the-art imaging techniques to reveal what lies behind the pillar. Heaven forfend it is the Revd Patrick Brontë.

  PISTOL-PACKING PARSON

  Patrick Brontë was, like all the English middle classes, much alarmed by the Luddite uprising that swept like wildfire through northern England in the early decades of the 19th century. There was a particularly dangerous outburst of machine wrecking and Captain Swing1 mayhem in the West Riding region, where the thirty-something parson (then unmarried) had his first living, at Hartshead (1811–15).

  The bloody Luddite attack on the Cartwright mill, at Rawfolds, near Huddersfield, inspired the attack on Moore’s mill in Shirley. There were assassinations. Patrick proclaimed his loyal anti-Luddite views from the pulpit, and by so doing made himself a prime target. He bought himself a firearm, for personal protection, and carried it with him. This too is recorded in Shirley, where the Irish curate, Peter Malone, carries a pistol and shillelagh with him, even on district visiting to the poor of the parish.

  Patrick kept the pistol long after the uprisings were quelled. Mrs Gaskell’s passing observation that, even 30 years later, when she came on the scene, he was in the habit of discharging the weapon out of his bedroom window every morning – as some kind of reveille ritual – has been drawn on as witnessing the strain of lunacy that ran in the Brontë blood.

  It was not, we may deduce, the conventional sidearm. Viz. the scene in Chapter 13 of Wuthering Heights, when Hindley, mad drunk, tells Nelly his nightly plan to kill Heathcliff:

  ‘Look here!’ he replied, pulling from his waistcoat a curiously constructed pistol, having a double-edged spring knife attached to the barrel. ‘That’s a great tempter to a desperate man, is it not? I cannot resist going up with this every night, and trying his door. If once I find it open he’s done for! …’

  I surveyed the weapon inquisitively. A hideous notion struck me: how powerful I should be possessing such an instrument! I took it from his hand, and touched the blade.

  As any historian of ‘combination weapons’ will tell you, this is an Unwin & Rodgers. A Sheffield firm, their dual weapons came on to the market in the early 19th century and proved particularly salesworthy in Yorkshire at the time of the Luddite alarms.

  One can assume that the Brontë children, as mischievous as they were created, found and played with their father’s pistol. One can assume, too, he often told them about the bloody events, before their births, of the uprising: hence the episode in Shirley. It had been enshrined in family legend.

  There is an innocent explanation for the Revd Brontë’s morning discharge. The Unwin & Rodgers was a single-shot weapon. If the bullet missed, the hope was that you could get your man with the blade. But once loaded, the ‘ball’ and powder could not be removed – except by firing. There was no safety catch.

  The Luddites had most commonly attacked by night. Before going to bed (having said his prayers and stowed the chamber pot, presumably), Patrick, we may deduce, loaded his gun and put it under his pillow (Nancy Reagan, we are told, did the same with her pearl-handled .38). His single shot out of the window in the morning was to unload the weapon. He did not do his district visiting (in which duty, Mrs Gaskell tells us, he was conscientious) armed to the teeth like Long John Silver. At least, not after 1815. Nor, good father that he was, did he want to leave a loaded gun about the house with children around. Who knows what that wildcat Emily would do with it?

  Footnote

  1. The Luddites’ mythical leader.

  PLAIN JANE

  Mrs Gaskell recorded her first impressions of Charlotte Brontë in a private letter, in which she could, as it were, speak plain: ‘She is underdeveloped, thin and more than half a head shorter than I … [with] a reddish face, large mouth and many teeth gone; altogether plain.’

  ‘Altogether’ is a bit hard.

  With a defiant ‘so be it’, Charlotte declared that in Jane Eyre she would create ‘a heroine as plain and as small as myself’. The name ‘Jane’ was chosen to echo that resolve. No one, it seems, knows where the phrase ‘plain Jane’ originates – some accounts think it was popularised in reference to Jane Seymour, the least beautiful of Henry VIII’s wives. The phrase received a greater boost from Charlotte’s novel, and the reiteration of the epithet in key places of the narrative.

  The word ‘plain’ (bless the e-text’s search function) occurs 56 times in Jane Eyre, mostly in reference to Jane’s unimpressive (to male eyes) appearance.

  We no longer use the word ‘plain’ much, in reference to female facial appearance. The Victorians used it a lot. On the spectrum of female attractiveness plainness is probably central between downright ugly and downright beautiful. It need not, necessarily, it’s suggested, put a man off if he looks beneath the surface (fine feathers do not always make fine birds; nor vice versa) to inner worth.

  Jane’s climactic protest for the rights of the plain woman makes that point passionately:

  ‘Do you think, because I am poor, plain, obscure and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed though the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are.’

  What is odd is that Jane is not plain when men take note of her. Her inner worth exteriorises itself. She glows. St John’s sprightly sister Diana (one of the finer minor characterisations in the novel) makes the point as she urges Jane not to waste herself by marrying her brother and going as a missionary’s wife to India:

  ‘You do not love him then, Jane?’

  ‘Not as a husband.’

  ‘Yet he is a handsome fellow.’

  ‘And I am so plain, you see, Die. We should never su
it.’

  ‘Plain! You? Not at all. You are much too pretty, as well as too good, to be grilled alive in Calcutta.’ And again she earnestly conjured me to give up all thoughts of going out with her brother.1

  Rochester makes the same point as she prepares for the bridal. Jane, on the pedestal of male desire, is anything but plain.

  Footnote

  1. She should not be doomed to the widow’s fate – suttee, burning alive. St John does, in fact, work himself to death in India, after ten years’ missionary grind.

  PRIVACY

  There are many oddities about everyday life at Haworth. Most of them, probably, we shall never know about. Among the oddities, for me, is the following episode, recounted in Mrs Gaskell’s seminal The Life of Charlotte Brontë. As mise en scène, recall that Patrick dined alone – why he did so has never been clear. My guess is that he could not stand his children’s chatter.

  Now, however, when the demand for the work had assured success to ‘Jane Eyre,’ her sisters urged Charlotte to tell their father of its publication. She accordingly went into his study one afternoon after his early dinner, carrying with her a copy of the book, and one or two reviews, taking care to include a notice adverse to it.

  She informed me that something like the following conversation took place between her and him. (I wrote down her words the day after I heard them; and I am pretty sure they are quite accurate.)

  ‘Papa, I’ve been writing a book.’

  ‘Have you, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, and I want you to read it.’

  ‘I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.’

  ‘But it is not in manuscript: it is printed.’

  ‘My dear! You’ve never thought of the expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows you or your name.’

  ‘But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.’

  So she sate down and read some of the reviews to her father; and then, giving him the copy of ‘Jane Eyre’ that she intended for him, she left him to read it. When he came in to tea, he said, ‘Girls, do you know Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely?’

  It is a quaint and touching scene. But strange. How, one wonders, living as suffocatingly close to each other (and, when it came to consumption, literally suffocatingly) as they all did (one thinks of the three-seater lavatory in the back, and the shared bedding arrangements, between the girls and between Patrick and Branwell), could a father of the household not know that his eldest child (and, as it happened, the other three as well) was writing a three-volume novel?

  One of the bitter complaints which Charlotte made about the Héger household was its regime of ‘espionage’ – everyone sticking their noses into each other’s affairs; it was like Bentham’s panoptical prison.1 But, in the realities of any domestic setting, how could Charlotte not know that Emily was writing reams of poetry until she ‘accidentally’ (one has to suspect snooping) came across her sister’s journal? In reconstructing the world of Haworth parsonage, one should imagine bubbles of ‘mind your own business!’ privacy bumping into each other, but never merging into collectivity.

  It has never, I think, been worked out whether, after the communality of childhood Angria/Gondal collaboration, the Brontës critiqued each other’s efforts as they were in the process of being written. One thinks probably not. Charlotte so disapproved of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for example, she would have killed it at birth (as it was, she could only suppress it after Anne died – see below, ‘Survivor’s Privileges’, page 152).

  It was, an odd place, Haworth. How can a family have been so close together, yet so separate?

  Footnote

  1. In the late 18th century, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed an ideal prison in which prisoners could be observed at all times, even in their cells (George Orwell developed the idea with his ‘telescreens’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four). Bentham’s proposal had considerable influence on the later design of prisons.

  PUBLISHERS

  The Prince and the scamp

  If there is a heroic publisher in the Brontës’ short writing careers there is no question who it was: George Smith the younger (1824–1901), nicknamed the ‘Prince of Publishers’, for his youth and precocious brilliance. Less flatteringly he was ‘the boy publisher’. He began in his father’s firm as an apprentice. The best snapshot posterity has of him is as ‘Doctor John’ in Villette.

  It was Smith who, in 1847, had the wisdom to publish Jane Eyre (and the subsidiary wisdom to reject Charlotte’s earlier submitted novel, The Professor). Thereafter he nursed her career. She loved him and the relationship flourished until, to her chagrin, he chose someone else to marry.

  There is, similarly, no question as to who the publishing villain is in the Brontë chronicles: Thomas Cautley Newby (1797–1882). It was not merely the sisters whom he exploited: Newby was the most notorious publisher of fiction in the Victorian period. No publisher merited more than he Byron’s jibe ‘now Barabbas was a publisher’. Charlotte called him ‘a shuffling scamp’.

  Newby’s main line of goods was a steady stream of three-volume novels for the newly emerging metropolitan ‘leviathan libraries’ such as, pre-eminently, Mudie’s (see below, ‘Three-Decker’, page 162).

  What is remarkable, however, is the impressive list of good and great novelists who first saw the light of print with Newby’s name and address (72 Mortimer Street) on their title pages: Anne and Emily Brontë and Anthony Trollope, for example, featured in his 1847 advertisements. Other novelists whose later distinguished careers he launched (while blandly cheating them) were Eliza Lynn Linton (‘Mr Newby’s standing price for first books by young authors was £50,’ she bitterly recorded), Mrs J.H. Riddell and Julia Kavanagh. He is lampooned, deliciously, in her later work, A Struggle for Fame (1883), as ‘Pedland’. Interestingly, George Smith gets a more favourable portrait as ‘Mr P. Vassett’.

  Newby was shamelessly dishonest. He capitalised on the mysterious identity of the author of Adam Bede (George Eliot) by publishing a book supposedly by her. He advertised Anthony Trollope’s early works with the implication that they were by his (then) more famous mother, Mrs Frances Trollope.

  Newby was Anne and Emily’s publisher of last resort. In July 1847 he accepted Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights for publication. They were submitted under the sisters’ ‘Bell’ pseudonym. He bundled them together, awkwardly, as a single three-decker.

  Having worked out there might be a little money in the Bells’ background he demanded a £50 advance payment from the sisters. It was never returned, despite the novels making a profit. He held back publication and then, true to his routine practice, implied in advertisements that the bundle was the work of ‘Currer Bell’, currently famous for Jane Eyre. The trusting Anne nonetheless gave him The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which sold handsomely (across two editions) in summer 1848. Tantalisingly, Emily seems to have been on the way to giving him a successor to Wuthering Heights. Charlotte did not, for whatever motives, ease her sisters’ way to Smith, Elder & Co.

  It took Charlotte, with the aid of George Smith, great effort to recover her dead sisters’ copyrights for decent republication under the imprint of Smith, Elder & Co. Charlotte also, surprisingly, managed to screw a small belated payment from Newby.

  There is something to be said for the Barabbas of Mortimer Street. He took books other, more reputable publishers had turned down, giving the works a chance to live. Some notable careers were founded on Newby’s sharp practice. He had a preference for fiction by women – not merely, perhaps, because they were (like Emily and Anne) more easily exploited. And he advertised widely, with the aim of getting orders from provincial circulating libraries.

  Put bluntly: without Newby posterity might not have had two of the masterworks which came from Haworth: Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. That
should earn Thomas Cautley Newby a few days remission from Publishers’ Purgatory.

  ROCHESTER’S WEALTH

  Rochester is a very rich man. He oozes money. But he does not work. He does not even manage the extensive properties he has. He has no ‘interests’ in the City of London. Where did, and does, the (vast, continuously replenished) Rochester wealth originate?

  Not inheritance, at least not immediately. He was a younger son. He explains to Jane what that misfortune means in England, where primogeniture gives all to the eldest (male) offspring:

  ‘… Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the eldest son of my house: that I had once a brother older than I?’

  ‘I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once.’

  ‘And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?’

  ‘I have understood something to that effect.’

  ‘Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland. Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage. He sought me a partner betimes. Mr. Mason, a West India planter and merchant, was his old acquaintance. He was certain his possessions were real and vast: he made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he learned from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds: that sufficed. When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me …’

  Thirty thousand was, currency conversion informs us, rather more than a sufficiency. At Thornfield, Jane is probably getting by on a hundred a year plus bed and board.

  Four years later, Rowland, having inherited the Rochester estate entire, died aged 26, without issue (we don’t know how he died – perhaps dissipation). Edward now found himself the heir. With, of course, the embarrassment of a mad wife (her thirty thousand remained his, of course). He now had money enough to deal with that problem; although locking her with a drunk keeper in an upstairs room was one of the cheaper options.