The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  The Rochester wealth, we can confidently presume (they and the Masons are ‘old acquaintances’), came from the same source as that of Bertha’s family. Slave-worked sugar plantations in Jamaica, that is, in the British West Indies. The action of Jane Eyre is set (although it slithers a bit – see above ‘Dates’, page 43) in the 1820s, some years before the final abolition of slavery in the islands in 1833.

  Rochester is heir to wealth generated by black sweat and brutality in distant sugar fields over hundreds of years. Late in the novel Jane herself becomes an heiress – to a fortune made by her (distant) family in Madeira. How was colonial wealth generated there? From sugar, rum and the dessert wine named after the island. How, historically, were those crops gathered and refined into delectable liquor. By slave labour – who did not, on the whole, take a glass of Madeira, my dear, after their evening meal. Jane’s wealth too has an origin some readers may not want to think about as they rejoice in her ‘liberation’.

  Jane Eyre ends in leafy Ferndean. No couple is happier than the Rochesters. Neither of them work. No need. Their slaves do it for them. They have done for aeons. Pull that rope, tote that bale.

  SELF-MURDER

  For most of Christianity’s rule in Britain suicide was thus described. There is a relevant exchange between Nelly and Heathcliff on the subject. She has deduced that he intends to kill himself by starvation and remonstrates:

  ‘And supposing you persevered in your obstinate fast, and died by that means, and they refused to bury you in the precincts of the kirk?’ I said, shocked at his godless indifference. ‘How would you like it?’

  Heathcliff ’s reply is very Wuthering Heights:

  ‘They won’t do that,’ he replied: ‘if they did, you must have me removed secretly; and if you neglect it you shall prove, practically, that the dead are not annihilated!’

  He will, he threatens, come back and haunt her. It’s a shrewd threat. Nelly, like Tabitha Aykroyd with her belief in ‘fairies’ (see above, ‘Ghosts’, page 53), has a peasant fear of the undead. But the notion of her exhuming, by shovel, Heathcliff ’s mouldering corpse, having pulled out the stake nailing the suicide to the earth (see below), and then lugging it to the consecrated ground of Gimmerton Kirk for clandestine, non-Christian burial, in Christian earth, is a stretch.

  There is a clear hint of self-murder in both the principals’ deaths. Villagers ignorant of the circumstances of Catherine’s death (and supposing it to have been due to the rigours of childbirth – common enough) are taken aback when they see where she is buried: ambiguously in the margin of sacred and non-sacred earth:

  The place of Catherine’s interment, to the surprise of the villagers, was neither in the chapel under the carved monument of the Lintons, nor yet by the tombs of her own relations, outside. It was dug on a green slope in a corner of the kirk-yard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry-plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat-mould almost buries it.

  Suicide remained a crime in England until 1961, incredibly and shamefully. There are still, as late as 2016, bars in the way of full Christian obsequies for suicides.

  The interment regulations in the 19th century were positively medieval. If suicide were proved, the corpse was taken, by night, to a crossroads, buried in a hole without marker or ceremony, with a stake through the body (resurrection was thus prevented – a cruel posthumous punishment, like the quicklime thrown on the bodies of executed murderers).

  Until 1822 (twenty years before the main action of Wuthering Heights), a suicide’s possessions could be forfeit to the crown. Crossroad burial was abolished at the same period. Macadamized roads were one reason. Patrick Brontë must, charitably, have dealt with the self-murdered, and given them illicit rest in Haworth churchyard. One hopes so. From what one knows of him (thanks to the rescue efforts of Juliet Barker) he was a kind man.

  Two of Patrick’s children, Emily and Branwell (see above, ‘Obstinate Fasting’, page 116; and ‘Opium [1]’, page 120) could plausibly be thought to have ‘murdered’ themselves. They lie, peacefully, in the family vault; not, as they should be, 200 yards away in the unhallowed earth of the Church Lane/West Lane crossroads.

  SPIRIT-WRITTEN

  ‘There are stories,’ the anonymous blogger on the lively ‘Ghost Cities’ site1 reports,

  that, after Emily’s death in 1848, she appeared to her last remaining sister Charlotte with her last unpublished work. This so-called ‘lost Brontë’ is said to still be out there somewhere, perhaps buried in the churchyard at Haworth. Emily’s ghost is doomed to wander the moors – much like her heroine Catherine – until this is found and published.

  That there may have been a second novel under way when Emily died, on 19 December 1848, is given currency by a letter written by her rogue of a publisher, T.C. Newby. What Newby wrote to ‘Ellis Bell’ on 15 February 1848 is tantalising:

  I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your new work. If it be an improvement on your first, you will have established yourself as a first rate novelist, but if it fall short the Critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be in your own time.

  If only the fool had asked her to make all speed, as did George Smith with Jane Eyre. Time was the one thing Emily Brontë did not have. But the idea of a second novel already under way would seem, on the face of it, a strong possibility. Clearly the proposal for a follow-up came from her. How far ahead with thinking and writing did Emily come in the eight months remaining to her on earth? Were preparatory materials destroyed with the other literary remains Charlotte is accused of having destroyed, after her sisters’ deaths?

  The brain spins. What subject would Emily – a novelist developing at lightning speed artistically – have moved on to? A sequel? A ‘factory’ novel (there were many small industrial firms in Haworth and the ‘workshop of the world’, Manchester, was not far away)? A novel on Liverpool’s slave trade?

  Wonder no more. On 30 October 2014 the Keighley News (located not too far from Haworth) ran a story under the eye-catching headline: ‘“Ghost writer” claims she has penned Emily Brontë’s missing second novel’. It opened:

  Emily Brontë’s ‘lost’ novel has been published after she communicated from the grave with a modern-day writer.

  This is the claim of Leeds woman Morwenna Holman, who says she collaborated with the ghost of the famous author of Wuthering Heights.

  ‘Spirit writer’ Morwenna last year published Westerdale after many hours speaking with ‘real perfectionist’ Emily and has gone on to write a sequel entitled Heaton.

  A third novel, no less. Roam no more Emily.

  Ms Holman claimed to have been in communication with Emily since visiting the museum and vault, aged ten. She was not frightened by the novelist’s visitations: she (Ms Holman) had been seeing spirits ‘since about the age eight’.

  She was not yet, however, ready for the full blast of extra-sensory communication from the author, who had selected her as her posthumous outlet. ‘At the age of 18 my psychic powers reached their full strength,’ she complacently records, ‘and Emily told me I had to write her second novel, which was destroyed by Charlotte when she lay dying.’

  Westerdale is available from Olympia Press, kindled by Amazon for a very appealing price. It chronicles, like Wuthering Heights, a struggle between two ‘houses’, with a moorland setting. Emily was not yet ready, we apprehend, to change her formula. For those who purchase the novel, Ms Holman adds:

  I run a small cat rescue for abandoned felines and every penny of the royalty money for my books will be going to the rescue.

  Westerdale is (in my estimation) an interesting read. More so since ‘spirit writing’ – a small, str
ange genre – is itself an interesting phenomenon, witnessing to the power great writers have over us. They ‘capture’ us.

  Spirit communication with great dead is, in general, safer ground than ghost-writing, secretarially, new literary master-works from ghosts. Victor Hugo, one is told, claimed to chat with Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Martin Luther, inter alia. What they said, he did not divulge. His fiction tells the tale.

  Attempts to channel actual literary works (or musical works) by geniuses, usually via the Ouija board, or planchette, are relatively rare – and never successful since the results can be compared, to their inevitable detriment, with what was written while the authors were still alive and kicking. Take, for example (leaving Westerdale to one side) Jap Heron (1917) by Emily Grant Hutchings and ‘Mark Twain’. It has the frank subtitle, ‘A novel written via the Ouija board’. Hutchings discovered she had been recruited as Twain’s ‘pencil on earth’. She was sued on earth by the Twain estate, unimpressed by the Ouija board, and Jap Heron disappeared. It’s now available online. And, as with Westerdale, alas (one feels for the cats), one feels that, wherever they find themselves for eternity, great writers should observe silence after death. Poor Emily, one suspects, is doomed to wander the moors forever.

  Footnote

  1. One of many such sites – most informative.

  STEEL

  In his 1855 poetic reflections in the graveyard at Haworth (a poem which laid the foundations for much of the subsequent hyper-romantic Brontë legend), Matthew Arnold describes Anne’s genius as the least ‘puissant’ of the sisters’. Odd word.

  Anne is also regarded as the most submissive Brontë sister. And the most reticent personally. There was, said Charlotte, in a much-quoted obituary piece on her two writing sisters, a ‘nun-like veil’ which covered her feelings and ‘was rarely lifted’. Even to the family, apparently. Was there ever a more opaque end to a novel than that to Agnes Grey: ‘And now I think I have said sufficient’? No you haven’t, Agnes! the reader thinks.

  There was, as Charlotte observed, a certain ‘obduracy’ in Anne’s character and, as her most sympathetic biographers (notably Winifred Gerin) have claimed, a vein of inner ‘steel’ in her personality. What, then, is that steely quality?

  A picture of Anne, which captures the willpower underlying her docile exterior.

  It helps to approach the question from an oblique angle. In an article entitled ‘“Hapless Dependents”: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey’, published in the learned journal Studies in the Novel (2002), Maggie Berg opens with a declaration of pedagogic perplexity:

  In one of my recent graduate classes on the Brontës, the presenter of Agnes Grey [i.e. the student reading out their class assignment] observed as an amused aside that the whole moral scheme of the novel seemed to revolve around how animals are treated. The class laughed derisively.

  Professor Berg was not amused. The reaction of her students made her think about Anne and animals and this strange theme in the novel.

  In simple narrative terms the student’s comment is true. Animals, domestic and wild, feature centrally in the novel. One animal, the dog Snap, has a starring role, running in tandem with that of his eventual mistress.

  A ‘little rough terrier’, Snap comes into Agnes’s possession, from a negligent and cruel owner, in her second governess post. She looks after him from infancy to adolescence. He turns out to be a very lovable adult dog. Only Agnes shows him the love he responds to. But, like Agnes, his place in the family is precarious. Like her, he has the Damoclean sword – dismissal – over his head. It inevitably falls:

  Snap, my little dumb, rough-visaged, but bright-eyed, warm-hearted companion, the only thing I had to love me, was taken away, and delivered over to the tender mercies of the village rat-catcher, a man notorious for his brutal treatment of his canine slaves.

  Snap drops out of the story until, as Agnes is walking her beloved (Scarborough) sands:

  I heard a snuffling sound behind me and then a dog came frisking and wriggling to my feet. It was my own Snap – the little dark, wire-haired terrier! When I spoke his name, he leapt up in my face and yelled for joy. Almost as much delighted as himself, I caught the little creature in my arms, and kissed him repeatedly. But how came he to be there? He could not have dropped from the sky, or come all that way alone: it must be either his master, the rat-catcher, or somebody else that had brought him; so, repressing my extravagant caresses, and endeavouring to repress his likewise, I looked round, and beheld – Mr. Weston!

  It is the curate she loves who has rescued him. The jointly loved dog seals their union, each of the three loving the others forever and ever.

  It is sentimental, of course. The brutally unsentimental scenes in the novel are those in which the abominable man-child Tom tortures any animal that comes his way, looking forward impatiently to his adult manhood when he can whip (‘cut’ horses) mercilessly, and shoot and torment anything furred and feathered. He is not a hunter but a sadist. And typical of his whip- and gun-wielding gender.

  Agnes’s womanhood rebels against Tom’s cruelty to animals. Her rebellion goes beyond protest. In the most horrific scene in the novel she acts with defiant resolve. The scene opens with Tom running into the Bloomfield garden ‘in high glee’ with ‘a brood of little callow nestlings’ in his hands. His sisters (Agnes’s charges) want to nurse the chicks. But Tom has other plans, ‘laying the nest on the ground, and standing over it with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust into his breeches-pockets’.

  He wears the trousers. He will shock and awe the womenfolk by ‘fettling ’em off. My word, but I will wallop ’em? See if I don’t now. By gum! but there’s rare sport for me in that nest.’ Master Tom will show who is master.

  Agnes tells him she will not let him torture the birds. They must be taken back, she says, to where their nest came from. If he won’t tell her where that is, ‘I shall kill them myself – much as I hate it.’ She can’t, Tom commands her. She’s a servant. He’s a master. But do it she does, even if it means losing her position:

  So saying – urged by a sense of duty – at the risk of both making myself sick and incurring the wrath of my employers – I got a large flat stone, that had been reared up for a mouse-trap by the gardener; then, having once more vainly endeavoured to persuade the little tyrant to let the birds be carried back, I asked what he intended to do with them. With fiendish glee he commenced a list of torments; and while he was busied in the relation, I dropped the stone upon his intended victims and crushed them flat beneath it.

  His uncle comes up and supports Tom in his violence. It’s a man thing: ‘He’s beyond petticoat government already: by God! he defies mother, granny, governess, and all!’

  What is striking in this scene is the pitting of male against female. It is not, principally, about kindness or cruelty to animals; rather, it is proto-feminism that one sees in Agnes’s defiance against the little tyrant. And male chauvinism in what Tom is doing. The contest is explicitly political.

  The early energies of the Victorian women’s movement were kindled, and mobilised, by protest against male treatment of the ‘lesser creation’ – a description which fitted women as much as animals. The notable pioneer of rights for women Frances Power Cobbe was, for example, a founder of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals bore the warrant of the most powerful woman in the world (who was notably kind to animals).

  Anne did not live long enough to join the anti-vivisection, women’s rights movement. She would have been in its forefront, fighting the universal Toms of the world: the ‘tyrant sex’. Therein lies Anne Brontë’s inner steel.

  SURVIVOR’S PRIVILEGES

  One knows infuriatingly little about the day-to-day relations between the sisters. One of the things which is clear is that, at least in her later years, when her religious views hardened, Charlotte took an increasingly dim view of both Anne’s and
Emily’s fiction. Disapproved, in fact, to the extent of actively suppressing rather than promoting it.

  After the deaths of the younger Brontës the noble George Smith, who had acquired the Acton/Ellis copyright, suggested, in summer 1850, that Smith, Elder reissue them, properly, textually corrected, ‘with a prefatory and explanatory notice of the authors’.

  Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were duly reissued, in a combined edition (as they had customarily been packaged) prefaced by a ‘biographical notice of Ellis and Acton Bell by Charlotte Brontë’. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, however, was kept out of print (almost certainly at Charlotte’s request) for some years.

  In that ‘prefatory and explanatory notice’ Charlotte is damning in her verdict on ‘Acton’s’ second novel, declaring that, in her judgement, Anne/Acton had been defeated as an artist by a subject entirely beyond her powers:

  She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was a naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind: it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents and situations), as a warning to others.

  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is, posterity has come to believe, something more than a temperance tract by a woman traumatised by the proximity of a drunk in the family. Why talk down the novel in this way?