by Brontë, Anne
Life: Edward Chitham, A Life of Anne Brontë (Blackwell, 1991). Rosengarten: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. Herbert Rosengarten and introduced by Margaret Smith (OUP, 1992).
SHLL: ’The Shakespeare Head Press Brontë’: The Brontës, Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, 4 vols. (Blackwell, 1933, reissued 1980).
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
1. success of the present work: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a success by comparison with Agnes Grey, which had been published jointly as part of a three-volume work with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in late 1847 by T. C. Newby. The authors had subsidized publication by £50. At least 250 copies of 500 copies of the first edition of Wildfell Hall were sold: in all, Anne received £50 for the work. As three-volume novels sold at a retail price of £1. us. 6d. (perhaps £10 by today’s rates), only circulating lending libraries and affluent private subscribers could afford to buy them. Unsold sheets of the first edition seem to have been sold as the ‘second edition’, with the addition of a Preface, perhaps in order to boost sales by implying demand.
2. praises it has elicited… it has been censured: in fact praise and censure were often vehemently mingled, as critics struggled to assimilate their admiration for the ‘power, effect, and… nature’ of Acton Bell’s work with ‘his’ disposition to the savage, brutal and coarse (Spectator, 8 July 1848, 21, pp. 662–3; in CH, p. 250).
3. it needs some courage to dive for it… the clearance she effects: the eccentric pair of comparisons for the novelist’s liability to be abused by society for truth-telling is typically an androgynous pairing: a male diver, stirring up the mud from which he has salvaged the emblematic ‘jewel’, truth, is succeeded by an honest-to-goodness cleaning woman, whose dust-raising activities in the ‘careless bachelor’s apartment’ are scorned because they reveal the filthy conditions in which privileged males live. This wittily preludes the major theme of male debauch. Chitham (Life, p. 168) notes that the Parsonage well had been cleansed in September 1847 of effluent, no doubt odoriferous.
4. accused of extravagant over-colouring: evidence of such an accusation is hard to find. Normally Anne Brontë’s plain realism was praised, and the statement in Atlas (22 January 1948; CH, p. 232) cited by Hargreaves (‘Preface’, n. 3) that Agnes Grey is ‘not wholly free from exaggeration’ is obviously ironic, since it goes on ‘(there are some detestable young ladies in it)’ and concludes by insisting that the novel ‘does not offend by any startling improbabilities’.
5. a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal: Spectator, 8 July 1848 (CH, p.250).
6. ’Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace: this quotation from Jeremiah 8:11 is apocalyptic, denouncing those who ‘have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace’. Anne Brontë, in accusing her society of wilfully exposing its daughters and sons to outrage, also invokes the prophet’s wrath on society’s silences.
7. Such humble talents: refers to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 and Luke 19. Anne Brontë, fearful of hiding her gifts like the ‘wicked and slothful servant’ (Matthew 25:26) who wasted his talent (originally, a sum of money), represents the writing of her narrative as a spiritual duty, which to have left undone would have incurred eternal consequences.
8. Respecting the author’s identity: the Brontë sisters’ male-sounding pseudonyms – Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – were intended to secure a fair hearing against the double standard of criticism pertaining for male and female authors. The names also generated confusion. Emily’s and Anne’s publisher, T. C. Newby, attempted to cash in on the success of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre by claiming that the three Bells were really one person. Charlotte and Anne accordingly visited the former’s publisher, Smith, Elder, in London, during the month in which the Preface was written, to identify themselves. See the vivid account in Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (Chatto & Windus, 1994), pp. 166–74.
VOLUME I
1. TO J. HALFORD, ESQ.: Halford, the first of the five ‘H’ characters in Wildfell Hall (Helen, Huntingdon, Hattersley, Hargrave), has no function other than to receive Markham’s letters and never appears in person. His name is probably a relic of Anne’s participation in the Brontes’ childhood games, ‘Sir Henry Halford’, being one of the ‘chief men’ named as hers in the ‘Play of the Islanders’ of 1827, when she was seven (see Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Blackwell, 1983), Ch. 5). Halford’s imputed character, of grumpy reserve, however, meshes in with Anne Brontë’s notion of a male norm.
CHAPTER 1
1. burying my talent… biding my light under a bushel: Matthew 25:25 and 5:15, and see Preface, n. 7. The parental dispute about Gilbert’s profession is an authorial attempt to render a farmer culturally eligible for Helen’s hand.
2. looking neither to the right hand nor to the left: Numbers 20:17, Deuteronomy 2:27, 5:32. Gilbert’s background transmits conservative and patriarchal values, from which he, however, is shown to deviate.
3. surtout: a man’s top-coat.
4. Wildfell Hall: Chitham describes Anne Brontë’s house, Wildfell Hall, as ‘mocking’ Emily’s Wuthering Heights by deromanticizing it and its mysterious inmate ( Life, pp. 142–3); it may be more appropriate to think of it as a critical and rational alternative. Located five miles from the sea, which Anne especially loved, it seems to have been imagined as situated near her personal terrain between Scarborough and Whitby, on the edge of the North Yorkshire moors. Winifred Gérin thought it based on Ponden Hall near Haworth (Anne Brontë (Nelson, 1976 edn.), p. 71). Such speculation is inconclusive. We note that Anne introduces the place in a spate of tea-table gossip rather than more portentously, thus domesticating our first view.
5. every lady ought to be familiar with: Mrs Markham’s busybodying attempt to indoctrinate the newcomer with housewifely arts, which Helen resists, introduces the newcomer in a feminist light, as a strong and independent individual who stands against the norms spelt out, for instance, in the Saturday Review: ‘Married life is woman’s profession; and to this life her training – that of dependence – is modelled’ (‘Queen Bees or Working Bees?’, Saturday Review 8 (November 1859), p. 576.)
6. grim escutcheons: shields with armorial bearings, indicative of an ancient Wildfell dynasty, now defunct This family (as we learn later) may be Helen’s maternal ancestry.
7. shovel hat: hard, broad-brimmed clerical hat.
8. How doth the little busy bee: first line of Isaac Watts’s ‘Against Idleness and Mischief, from Divine Songs for… the Use of Children (1715), a traditional favourite amongst parents if not children, who had to learn it by heart in order to profit by the bee’s example, so as to ‘Improve each shining hour’ through industrious enterprise. This furnishes the first allusion to the debate about education, in the comic key.
9. old Eli, or David and Absalom: Eli, judge and high priest in 1 Samuel 2–4, indulged his sons and forfeited his life; Absalom rebelled against David (2 Samuel 13–18), but at his death the father was inconsolable.
10. were assured it was all fancy: Mr Mill ward’s dietary preoccupation seems a reversal of Jane Austen’s Mr Woodhouse’s nervous commendation of thin gruel and soft-boiled eggs in minute quantities in Emma (1815). The Markham narrative includes social comedy in the tradition of Austen, an author who was depreciated by Charlotte Brontë (‘the Passions are perfectly unknown’ (to Miss Austen), Letter to W. S. Williams, 12 April 1850, SHLL, Vol. 3, p. 99).
CHAPTER 2
1. the light of your countenance: Psalms 4:6, a flippant allusion. Markham’s scriptural allusions tend to be glib and arbitrary until his narrative has been touched by Helen’s influence.
2. Linden-Car: ‘Linden’ from lime-trees; ‘car’ (-‘carr’ or -‘ker’) in northern dialect denotes marsh or bog (Kenneth Cameron, English Place-Names (Batsford, 1961), p. 214).
3. Wildfell, the wildest and the loftiest eminence in our neighbourhood: although An
ne Brontë’s style in describing Wildfell and the hall becomes itself rather wild, straining for effect in long, tortuous sentences connected by numerous dashes, it is notable that the narrative eye remains concerned with the agricultural properties and use of the land (or the lack); the prevalence of game; the territory as the property of farmer or land-owner: a perspective suited to Markham’s calling.
4. mansion of the Elizabethan era: somewhat over half a century younger than Wuthering Heights, which bears the date 1500. For fuller consideration, see Introduction, pp. ix-xi.
5. the shapes he chose to give them: the topiary details add a unique twist to the theme of recidivism played out both by Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights (see S. Davies, Emily Brontë (Harvester Wheatsheaf, etc., 1988), pp. 130–54). Nature, ‘tortured’ to an art which represents nature (the boxwood swan, the lion) is in process of reverting to nature. However, swan and lion belong with laurel towers and fabricated warrior as armorial tributes to dynasty – a dynasty which has died out, subverted by nature. For Emily Bronte’s mystery, Anne Brontë substitutes grotesquerie, in a chaotic vision in which human aspirations are in process of recrudescence, paralleling the disintegration in the ethical sphere of the novel: but the author fails to develop these implications.
6. either in heaven or earth… under the earth: Exodus 20:4. The source emphasizes the impiety of graven images, underlying the ‘vanity’ theme exemplified in the ruined garden.
7. ghostly legends: the first edition has ‘legions’.
8. the upper portion of a diminutive ivory nose: the stylized but tender description of the gradually emergent child, preluding the arrival of his mother into the reader’s ken, typifies Anne Brontë’s affection for children and her longing for a baby of her own. The mother-child bond haunts the poetry, both Gondal and personal lyrics (e.g., ‘Verses to a Child’ (1838) in which the father has abandoned wife and child; ‘Dreams’ (1845): ‘Then I may cherish at my breast / An infant’s form beloved and fair…’ (5–6)). In Agnes Grey, however, Anne Brontë showed an unsentimental awareness of original and conditioned sin in children.
9. like Mahomet… since the mountain would not come to him: proverbial. OED quotes Francis Bacon’s essay, ‘Of Boldness’: ‘If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.’
10. by the frock: this detail points to the tender but transitional age of the child. Boys were dressed as girls and belonged to the female world until initiation at five or six into the patriarchal hierarchy. Helen attempts to keep her son as a ‘mother’s boy’ – condemned as effeminization and retardation by the community but in fact a radical attempt to save him from the evils of the men’s world.
11. roused my corruption: i.e., the unregenerate ‘old Adam’ in Markham’s male (and here, sexual) nature. The arousing ‘proud, chilly look’ seems to have been a feature of Gondal females, written into Wuthering Heights as the first Catherine’s imperious manners and the second Catherine’s scowls.
12. the mania for Berlin wools: ‘a fine dyed wool used for knitting, tapestry, and the like’ (OED). A perfunctory attempt to imply a historical period.
CHAPTER 3
1. Ruin, Mrs Markham?: Helen’s emphasis on the word ‘ruin’ points up the ironic narrative mode in foregrounding key-words whose meaning will lie at the centre of the moral drama.
2. the ‘Farmer’s Magazine’: we must presume this to be an old copy of The Farmer’s Magazine… Exclusively Devoted to Agriculture, and Rural Affairs, published in Edinburgh but discontinued in 1825.
3. done what I could to make him hate them: Anne Brontë’s novel is an early example of the ‘temperance novel’, whose best-known protagonist was Mrs Henry Wood, who won £100 for her novel Danesbury House in a Temperance League competition in 1860. Anne’s presentation of the subject in a society where alcohol addiction was commonplace opens the subject to rational debate: Mrs Henry Wood argues that all who are not taught to abhor alcohol in childhood are due for damnation. A multitude of wine-and gin-lovers are shown dying horrible deaths or being saved by water-loving wives, or the factory-owner, who opens a coffee-shop to wean his workers from liquor. Wildfell Hall is exclusively concerned with abuse amongst the ‘genteel’ classes.
4. What is it that constitutes virtue, Mrs Graham?: Markham recites the essence of the doctrine of experience and choice famously expounded in Milton’s Areopagitica (1644): ‘If every action which is good, or evill in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name… when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing” (Complete Prose Works, Vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 527). Anne Brontë’s position was a modified version of this; but her experience of the corruption latent in human nature taught her caution, and Wildfell Hall multiplies instances of men incapable of resisting temptation, however privileged their position. This is why Helen attempts behavioural immunization of her son.
5. hitherto been able to muster against them: Helen’s confession of personal fallibility stokes the reader’s curiosity (what is her history?) and reflects Anne Brontë’s own practice of rigorous self-questioning and self-criticism, as revealed in the poetry (‘Despondency’: ‘how many times / My feet have gone astray’ (25–6)). Her concern for the young in a world of betrayal is most powerfully stated in ‘Self-Communion’: ‘How shall it centre so much trust / Where truth maintains so little sway…?’ (61–2).
6. a mere Miss Nancy: in West Riding dialect, an effeminate man, still current in ‘nancy-boy’, with homosexual aspersion. Anne Brontë highlights the function of ridicule in social control, especially in the construction of ‘male’ attitudes and behaviour by making a fool of men’s so-called ‘female’ characteristics.
7. get Mr Mill-ward to talk to you about it: Anne Brontë, herself a clergyman’s daughter, satirically refuses the authority of the church in adjudicating for the individual conscience – a strongly Protestant attitude held in common with her sisters.
8. though one rose from the dead: Luke 16:31.
9. the same argument with regard to a girl: the chapter now becomes a full-scale debate on the double standard for male and female education, conducted as a dialectic, with Helen challenging Markham with the logical (and insulting) implications of his assumptions.
10. to teach her how to sin is at once: The first edition has ‘to teach her how to sin, is it at once’. I accept Hargreaves’s emendation of this convoluted, angry speech, in which either Anne Brontë or the compositor had become hopelessly entangled.
11. incomprehensible discourse: the excess manifested in Helen’s attitude may imply her departure from reason and authorial backing, despite the fact that Helen’s project to warn the young of snares is identical with that of the novelist in the Preface.
12. spoiled by my mother and sister, and some other ladies of my acquaintance: the narrator undermines the validity of the norms maintained by his own household against the stranger’s feminism in a final ironic coup for the author and the newcomer.
CHAPTER 4
1. to do what their soul abhorred: a characteristically frivolous allusion to Scripture by Markham (Psalms 107:18), which, however, carries an ironic resonance of the debate on aversion-therapy from the previous chapter.
2. a crack: brisk chat, or jest.
3. the oracle with a Jove-like nod: Jove (Zeus, or Jupiter) was the authoritarian father-god of classical mythology, not without bibulous and socializing tendencies (hence, ‘jovial’). Mr Millward comically pontificates over the gathering, his prejudices and inclinations all dignified to oracular status by virtue of his priestly office.
4. (… Mr Lawrence’s father had shortened his days by intemperance) : the significance of this fact, slipped in parenthetically, becomes clear later when we learn of Arthur’s father’s alcoholism: if the condition is hereditary, he stands to inherit the tendency on both sides, accounting for the intensity of Helen’s anxiety. George Eliot
alludes to ‘hereditary constitutional craving’ for drugs and laudanum in Middkmarcb (1871–2), Ch. 66.
5. laudanum: a derivative of opium used for medical purposes, freely available from pharmacies. Branwell Bronte’s addiction to laudanum put him in the company of the great Romantic addicts, Coleridge and De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) was a favourite book of the four children. See Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Gollancz, 1960), pp. 179–80. Although alcohol then as now was socially acceptable, Lawrence is able to gain credit for his argument by paralleling alcohol with opium, whose dangerous and antisocial properties were recognized. His decline of a second glass quietly reinforces the distrust of alcohol he shares with Helen.
6. evolutions: ’a wheeling about, a movement in dancing’ (OED).
7. I don’t allow that!: Mr Millward displays a provincial and puritanical antagonism to the waltz, a late eighteenth-century dance in triple time, of German origin, which swept Europe in the early nineteenth century. Its movements and the embrace of partners were considered sensual.
8. Let your moderation be known unto all men!: Philippians 4:5.
CHAPTER 5
1. a painter’s easel: Anne Brontë’s heroine is a professional artist, a painter in a period where women painters were rare, for they could acquire no training. Branwell Brontë had attempted to enter the Royal Academy Schools and had set up as a portrait painter in Bradford, neither of which was a possibility for a young woman: Anne here usurps this privilege for her heroine. However, although Anne Brontë makes her alter ego practise a different art from her own as novelist, she herself was competent at drawing in pencil and ink and water-colour: her sketches survive from the age of nine (see Chitham, Life, p. 29). She tended to prettify her subjects, which, like Helen’s, were chiefly portraits, landscapes and buildings, both representational and imagined. She had a light, soft touch with the pencil, and a classicizing tendency. In her novels, she is fond of word-painting descriptions of localities and seasons. Helen, as an artist on a larger scale than anything to which Anne could aspire, uses the ‘male’ oils in which Branwell had received training. See Gérin, Bran-well Brontë, p. 58.
