But she never adjusted to her place in the household. Charlotte had known of Mrs. Sidgwick before her marriage, when she was Hannah Greenwood of Keighley, the daughter of a cotton manufacturer. She expected to be greeted as an equal and given the respect owed to her as the Reverend Brontë’s daughter. Instead, Mrs. Sidgwick treated Charlotte almost like a stranger. Charlotte wrote to Emily that her employer “does not intend to know me.” Charlotte took care of the children from morning until night. Once they were asleep, she had to work on the mountain of sewing that Mrs. Sidgwick had given her to do.
A governess like Charlotte held an awkward place in England’s complex social structure. As a minister’s daughter, she came from a higher class than her employers, who had earned their money in trade. Yet no true lady worked, so by taking a job she had lowered herself socially. There was one standard for men and another for women, as the English writer Sarah Stickney Ellis explained: “Gentlemen may employ their hours of business in almost any degrading occupation and . . . may be gentlemen still; while, if a lady but touch any article, no matter how delicate, in the way of trade, she loses caste and ceases to be a lady.”
A governess was forbidden to have suitors or to show affection to her pupils. She was to wear drab clothes to avoid attracting the notice of unmarried uncles, older brothers, and even straying husbands. “She may be known from her plain and quiet style of dress; a deep straw bonnet with green or brown veil and on her face a fixed sad look of despair,” noted a ladies’ magazine from 1840.
A book is this sad, lonely governess’s only friend.
Charlotte complained about the Sidgwicks, but they found fault with her as well. They thought she was too touchy. She became angry if the Sidgwicks asked her to walk to church with them, because she thought they were ordering her around. Yet if they failed to invite her, she sulked about being ignored. Then, if a spell of depression fell on her, she would spend the day in bed, leaving the pregnant Mrs. Sidgwick to do her work. It was fortunate for both Charlotte and the Sidgwicks that the regular governess returned in July.
Upon coming home, Charlotte received a second proposal of marriage. This one came from David Bryce, an Irish clergyman, who asked her to marry him after visiting the Haworth parsonage and meeting her only once. Charlotte turned him down, and the unlucky Mr. Bryce died several months later. “I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all,” Charlotte confided to Ellen Nussey.
Before the weather turned cold, two of the Brontës did some traveling. Branwell and a friend took a sightseeing trip to the busy port of Liverpool, on the Irish Sea. Liverpool “owes its fame to its commerce,” decided a writer of Branwell’s time. Every day, ships left Liverpool carrying the products of English factories to foreign buyers. Other ships arrived from the New World with tobacco, rice, sugar, and rum. Passenger vessels came and went as well, transporting people to and from North America. Branwell was bothered by a facial tic during this trip and took opium to relax his muscles. Opium was legal and easy to find in nineteenth-century England, where people used it as a medicine.
Charlotte had a bigger adventure when she and Ellen Nussey went to the eastern seaside resort of Bridlington. Charlotte had never been to the seashore and was enthralled with “the idea of seeing the SEA—of being near it,” and watching things she had only read about, “its changes by sunrise, Sunset—moonlight—& noonday—in calm—perhaps in storm.” The two friends went by train, which was still a new way to travel, and by horse-drawn coach. The sea was mightier and more magnificent than Charlotte could have imagined. When she and Ellen first walked to the shore, she stood there silently, in tears. “Its glorious changes—its ebb and flow—the sound of its restless waves—formed a subject for Contemplation that never wearied either the eye, the ear, or the mind,” she commented.
Charlotte and Branwell spent the autumn and early winter with Emily, writing stories and poems. When Anne came home for Christmas, she informed her family that she would not be going back to the Inghams in the new year; she had been dismissed. The Brontë sisters were completely unsuited for teaching and caring for children, in Ellen Nussey’s opinion. “There never could have been temperaments less adapted to such a position,” she concluded. When Tabby Aykroyd, the family’s longtime servant, fell and broke her leg, the sisters busily nursed her themselves. They took over Tabby’s household chores and threw themselves into this new work. Emily, who loved the kitchen, did all the cooking and baking; Anne oversaw the housecleaning; and Charlotte did the ironing, although she burned several garments before she got the knack of it.
The sisters also spent the last days of December sewing shirts for Branwell, who had been hired as a tutor for two boys, ages eleven and ten. They were the stepsons of Robert Postlethwaite, a landowner living in the Lake District, near the poet William Wordsworth. The Postlethwaite family had made its money building ships and selling timber. On December 31, Branwell said goodbye to his family and took a coach to the town of Kendal, where he bade “farewell of old friend whisky,” as he told his pal John Brown. Brown was the Reverend Brontë’s sexton, the man who maintained the church building and graveyard.
The farewell was temporary, because upon reaching the Lake District, Branwell joined a group of men drinking at the Royal Hotel. Before the wild night was over, an Irish squire and “a native of the land of Israel” got into a barroom brawl. Branwell joined the fight on the side of Ireland and reported that “a regular rumpus ensued.” He bragged, “I found myself in bed next morning with a bottle of porter, a glass, and a corkscrew beside me.” That day he went on to Broughton, where the Postlethwaites lived.
Branwell made a good first impression, as he reported to John Brown: “I take neither spirits, wine nor malt liquors, I dress in black and smile like a saint or martyr. Everybody says, ‘what a good young Gentleman is Mr Postlethwaite’s tutor!’” Branwell lodged in the town, so when he was not teaching, his time was his own. He took long rambles in the countryside, which he loved to do, and he again sent his writing to poets, asking for advice.
He was thrilled to get a letter back from the writer Hartley Coleridge, the author of biographies and poems. Coleridge’s father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was one of the great English Romantic poets, known for writing mystical, symbolic works like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. The younger Coleridge’s letter has been lost, but in it he invited Branwell to his home, Nab Cottage. Branwell made this visit on May 1; after spending a day with Hartley Coleridge, he returned to his room to translate Homer’s Odes from classical Greek into English. Coleridge had promised to read Branwell’s translation when it was finished.
Life seemed to be going well for Branwell until Mr. Postlethwaite fired him two months later. No one knows for certain why Branwell lost his job. He may have been spending too much time writing poetry and not enough time teaching. Or he may have made too many trips to the tavern, despite his boast of being sober. He did remark that his landlord, a Mr. Fish, was drunk “two days out of every seven.” Also, some years later, a local nobleman wrote in his commonplace book, or notebook, that Branwell was dismissed for having an affair with a woman in his employer’s house, which led to a pregnancy. The woman was either a daughter or a servant, and the child, born months after Branwell had gone, later died. Whatever the reason for his firing, Branwell packed up his things and headed for home, having failed again.
Emboldened by Branwell’s successful contact with Hartley Coleridge, Charlotte sent Coleridge a portion of a novel that she had started. She signed her letter “C.T.,” to keep her identity a secret and to prevent Coleridge from knowing whether she was a woman or a man. She wanted to be judged simply as a writer. But, like Robert Southey, Coleridge offered this eager writer no encouragement.
While Branwell was away, his sisters had been enjoying the company of another young man. All the Brontës liked handsome William Weightman, who came to Haworth to be the Reverend Brontë’s curate. A curate serves as an assistant to a priest or mini
ster. Curates are often young, newly ordained, and in training to lead their own congregations one day. Weightman was “agreeable in person and manners, and constitutionally cheerful,” Patrick Brontë observed. “His character wore well.” The families of Haworth also grew fond of the kindly curate who baptized their children, buried their dead, and called on their sick and lonely.
Weightman’s gentle teasing of Aunt Branwell made the Brontë sisters laugh. Charlotte playfully called him “Miss Celia Amelia Weightman.” She decided to sketch his portrait and had him pose in his clerical gown.
Charlotte Brontë sketched the good-natured William Weightman.
Acting anonymously, Weightman sent the three women their very first valentines, each with verses written for its recipient. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne knew right away who had sent these charming love notes. They put their heads together and wrote a poem for him in return:
Believe us when we frankly say
(Our words, though blunt are true),
At home, abroad, by night or day,
We all wish well for you.
And never may a cloud come o’er
The sunshine of your mind;
Kind friends, warm hearts, and happy hours,
Through life we trust you’ll find.
Weightman playfully flirted with all three sisters, but he may have felt most attracted to Anne. Charlotte remarked in one of her letters to Ellen that the curate “sits opposite to Anne at church sighing softly and looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention—And Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast—they are a picture.”
No romance developed, however, because Anne left the happy circle in May 1840 to be a governess again. She was to teach four children, three girls and a boy, in the Robinson family, near the city of York. The Robinsons’ estate was called Thorp Green. Their mansion was more than twice the size of the Inghams’ home, and they needed a large staff of servants to run it. Born into wealth, Mr. Edmund Robinson was a minister, but chronic ill health kept him away from the pulpit. His wife, Lydia Robinson, was dark haired and full of life.
Branwell, too, tried again to make his way in the world. In autumn 1840 he went to work for the Leeds and Manchester Railway. He was assigned to the station in Sowerby, a bustling textile-manufacturing town near Halifax. The station was brand-new, and the railroad line would not be complete until work finished on the 1.6-mile Summit Tunnel, which runs beneath the Pennine Mountains of northern England. Then the longest railroad tunnel in the world, the Summit Tunnel represented speed and progress.
As an assistant clerk, Branwell kept a record of the trains that stopped at the Sowerby station and the freight they carried. He also looked out for passengers’ safety. Charlotte thought that this low-level job was beneath her brother’s ability, but railroads were expanding, and Branwell looked forward to being promoted. Indeed, after six months he rose to clerk-in-charge of the Luddendenfoot Station and received a raise.
At this time Branwell befriended Francis Grundy, a young man he could impress with his knowledge and talent. Grundy described Branwell as “small and thin of person” and “the reverse of attractive at first sight.” Branwell “had a mass of red hair, which he wore high off his forehead—to help his height, I fancy; a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour; small ferrety eyes, deep sunk, and still further hidden by the never removed spectacles.”
Then, as always happened with Branwell, something went wrong. In March 1842, the railroad’s auditors looked at his account books and discovered that money was missing. Branwell had lost more than eleven pounds, a little more than he earned in a month. No one accused him of stealing the money, but it had been his job to keep track of it, so Branwell was fired once more.
four
“Who Ever Rose . . . Without Ambition?”
SHORTLY before Branwell moved to Luddendenfoot, Charlotte tried once more to be a governess. She worked for the family of a merchant named John White, teaching and caring for a girl and boy, ages eight and six. She still had mounds of sewing to do, but the White children behaved better than the young Sidgwicks had. Their parents treated Charlotte kindly, giving her time off to visit Ellen and offering to let her father spend time at their home. They even said yes when Charlotte asked to extend her summer holiday from one week to three.
None of this mattered to Charlotte, who had made up her mind to hate her new job. “No one but myself can tell how hard a governess’s work is to me,” she declared, “for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are to employment.”
That summer, when Anne and Charlotte spent their holidays at home, the sisters devised a plan to free themselves from working for others. As Emily wrote in a diary paper on her twenty-third birthday, “A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of our own.” Aunt Branwell was to lend her nieces money to rent a building and equip it as a school for girls. Miss Wooler even offered to let them take over the school at Dewsbury Moor, which would lower the cost of starting up.
On the same day that Emily wrote her diary paper, Anne wondered “what will be our condition and how or where shall we all be on this day four years hence.” Emily, thinking along the same lines, imagined the sisters “all merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary.”
Then Charlotte found a better way to use some of Aunt Branwell’s money. Her unconventional friend, Mary Taylor, was studying with her sister, Martha, in Brussels, Belgium, where their uncle Abraham lived. Mary urged Charlotte to do the same, but Charlotte needed little coaxing. Here was a chance to travel, to live far from home amid new sights and faces. Here was an opportunity to learn! With luck, the teachers in Brussels would challenge her eager mind. “Papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme;” but, Charlotte asked, “who ever rose in the world without ambition?” This statement would have shocked many people, because for a woman to be ambitious went against the Victorian ideal. Still, Charlotte boldly admitted that when her father left Ireland to go to Cambridge University, “he was as ambitious as I am now.”
To persuade her father and aunt, Charlotte stressed the practical side of the venture. Spending time abroad refining her French would make Charlotte stand out from the many other Englishwomen running schools, she said. Also, in Brussels she might meet Belgian families wanting to educate their daughters in England and recruit these girls as pupils. The Reverend Brontë and Aunt Branwell agreed to the plan, to Charlotte’s great joy. It was decided that Emily would study with Charlotte in Brussels while Anne remained with the Robinsons.
As far as their father and aunt knew, Emily and Charlotte would be gone for six months. But Charlotte whispered to Emily, “Before our half year in Brussels is completed, you and I will have to seek employment abroad.”
The Reverend Brontë escorted his daughters, although they traveled as well with Mary Taylor, who had made a brief trip to England, and her brother Joe. Together this group went by boat to the Belgian port of Ostend and journeyed inland past fertile plains. Mounting a hill, they saw in the distance the towers and steeples of the Belgian capital.
The Taylors’ school was too costly for the Brontës, so Charlotte and Emily had chosen instead the Pensionnat Heger, a girls’ boarding school in the old part of Brussels. The long, low school building appeared unadorned and even grim when viewed from the narrow cobblestone street, but it had a pleasant, well-tended garden hidden from view. Once inside the door, the sisters received a warm greeting. The director, Madame Claire Zoë Heger, lived at the school with her children and husband, Monsieur Constantin Heger, who taught literature to the girls. He and the other teachers taught exclusively in French, one of Belgium’s principal languages. (Flemish and German are the other two.)
Students pose in the garden of the Pensionnat Heger. This photograph was taken in 1883, some years after Charlotte and Emily Brontë left the school.
Constantin Heger, age thirty-three, wa
s “a little black ugly being,” Charlotte observed. He might have been “a man of power as to mind,” but he was “irritable in temperament.” Another student recalled, “In talking perhaps he made his profoundest impression by a steadfast often mocking gaze.”
This forceful teacher quickly noted that his two new students had unusual ability. He saw how much Charlotte loved to learn. He recommended books for her to read, and he reviewed her compositions with extra care. He taught her to improve her writing, telling her to “sacrifice, without pity, everything that does not contribute to clarity.” He spurred her on to find le mot juste—exactly the right word to express what she wanted to say.
Monsieur, as he was called, would read to the sisters from works by great French authors. After discussing a passage, he would ask them to write—in French—a composition of their own, sometimes inspired by the famous author’s subject or words. Charlotte accepted the challenge. Under Monsieur’s direction, she also wrote on religious topics like “the Death of Moses” or “the Immensity of God.” In a paper titled “The Nest,” a subject of her own choosing, she described how watching a mother bird tending her hatchlings had revealed God’s presence. She wrote, “The bird’s nest is but a line, a word in the huge book that Nature opens for the instruction of the entire human race, a book whose every page abounds with proof of the existence of God.”
Emily refused to write like anyone but herself. It was her own idea to write about King Harold, who died defending England from Norman invaders in 1066. She breathed life into this ancient king who was transformed into a hero by war:
The Bronte Sisters Page 4
