We have just seen something of the mighty power of God: he has unsheathed his sword, and brandished it over our heads, but still the blow is suspended in mercy – it has not yet fallen upon us. As well might he have shaken and sunk all Haworth, as those parts of the uninhabited moors on which the bolts of his vengeance have fallen. Be thankful that you are spared. – Despise not this merciful, but monitory voice of Divine Wisdom.70
Patrick’s warnings were not treated with uniform respect. A correspondent from Haworth, signing himself ‘JPJ’, wrote to the newspapers:
That it may have alarmed our worthy minister, terrified the clerk, electrified our grave-digger, and have been a subject for all women in the parish both now, and probably as long as they live after, to talk about, are truths, according to hearsay, that I am not now about to dispute: but that any reasonable person should construe a simple thing like [this] into an earthquake, or an irruption, or what not, is really preposterous.71
This cynic had not dared to publish in a local newspaper, however, but in the Liverpool Mercury, reflecting the widespread interest and controversy that Patrick’s letters had sparked off. This justified Patrick in having the sermon printed for wider circulation by Thomas Inkersley, the Bradford printer and publisher, who printed some of Patrick’s earlier works.72 At the same time he rewrote the sermon in simpler terminology, added a verse description of the bog-burst, and published it as a reward book for the higher classes in Sunday schools. A major shift of emphasis, dictated by the fact that the poem was intended for children, was that the poem ended, not with the threat of the end of the world, but with the promise of the Second Coming.
But, O! what heavenly joy will then impart
Its strongest impulse to the pious heart,
When the great Judge will loud approving say –
‘Come with me, to the heaven of heavens, away!’
Whilst the seraphic choirs strike all their strings,
And sing Hosannah to the King of kings!
And the new earth and heavens wide echo round,
The sweet, triumphal, loud, immortal sound!73
If the bog-burst caused such excitement and trauma to Patrick, one wonders what effect it had on his children, particularly as the apocalyptic interpretations could not have been lost on them. None of their writings for this period are extant, however, and only one poem by Emily, written twelve years later, even approaches the experience,74 so we cannot tell what they felt about their own brush with death.
As interest in the bog-burst gradually faded, Emily’s approaching departure for the Clergy Daughters’ School became the most urgent problem. On 10 November, Patrick wrote to his banker, Mr Mariner, a worsted manufacturer of Keighley:
I take this opportunity to give you notice that in the course of a fortnight it is my intention to draw about twenty pounds out of your savings bank: I am going to send another of my little girls to school, which at the first will cost me some little – but in the end I shall not loose [sic] – as I now keep two servants but am only to keep one elderly woman now, who, when my other little girl is at school – will be able to wait I think on my remaining children and myself.75
This letter suggests that Patrick believed he had at last found a satisfactory solution to his family’s future. With four daughters established at school and knowing that a place would be available for Anne when she was old enough, he had only himself and his son to consider. There was no one better qualified than himself to teach Branwell, either academically or morally; with a servant to look after the running of the house, they would be provided with everything they needed. Aunt Branwell would be free to return home to Penzance and the Garrs girls could be dismissed. Nancy had been engaged for some time and would be glad to be able to leave and marry her young man who, by coincidence, was also called Pat. When one of his daughters told Patrick this, he came especially into the kitchen to speak to her,
and said, in his pleasant way ‘Why, Nancy, is it true that you are going to marry a Pat?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, ‘it is, and if he only proves one-tenth as kind a husband as you have been, I shall think myself very happy in having made a Pat my choice.’76
Sarah, the nursemaid, was less fortunately placed. Patrick took it upon himself to provide her with new employment and, at his recommendation, she found a post travelling for two years with a wealthy widow and her daughter. Unfortunately, her mother objected so strongly to the plan that Sarah was obliged to give it up and had to return to her old home in Bradford. She became apprenticed to a dressmaker and, in 1829, married William Newsome with whom she later emigrated to the United States. Both the Garrs girls left with the affection of the whole Brontë family and they, in their turn, remained devoted to them. Sarah even took with her to America a lock of hair from each member of the family, ranging in colour from the pale gold of Anne to the dark brown of her sister Maria.77
In place of Nancy and Sarah Garrs, Patrick engaged a fifty-three-year-old widow from Haworth, Tabitha Aykroyd, who was to remain with the family for the rest of her life and, in the process, outlived all but Patrick and Charlotte. For the moment, however, she was an unknown quantity and Emily, leaving home for the first time, had to say a final farewell to the two servant girls who had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember.
On 25 November 1824 Patrick took Emily to Cowan Bridge to join her sisters. For the third time in five months, he had the opportunity to observe the running of the school and to see how his daughters were faring.78 Maria may, by this stage, have had a slight cough but then his children were always susceptible to colds and coughs. None of them can have been so unhappy that they complained to their father as he would not have left without making some reference to this to the superintendent. He returned home unaware of the tragedy that was brewing.
The six-year-old Emily, ‘a darling child’ and ‘little petted Em’, as Miss Evans, the new superintendent of the school, called her, was an immediate favourite. Even her entry in the admissions register reflected her position as ‘quite the pet nursling of the school’. It simply said ‘Reads very prettily & Works a little’. Though it was obvious she did not have the other acquirements, she nevertheless escaped the usual damning litany ‘Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography or History and nothing of Accomplishments’. Like all three of her sisters she had had whooping cough, but there is no record of her having been vaccinated; this may simply have been an omission on the part of the school, as Patrick is unlikely to have had some and not all of his children vaccinated. Like Maria and Charlotte, she was to be educated as a governess and Patrick paid the extra fees necessary.79
As the weather grew colder with the approach of winter, the hardships of the pupils intensified. Wearing only pattens over their thin shoes, instead of changing into boots, they regularly suffered wet feet, particularly in the trail across the fields to and from church each Sunday. Charlotte, in the voice of Jane Eyre, described the ‘torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into my shoes’ and another pupil at the school ascribed her own, near fatal illness at Cowan Bridge to having had to sit in church all Sunday with wet feet.80 In December, Maria began to show signs of being consumptive, but her father was not informed. This was not an isolated case. The former pupil who complained of her wet feet later wrote:
I suffered so severely from the treatment that I was never in the schoolroom the last three months I was there until about a week before I left and was considered to be far gone in a consumption. My Mother (whose only child I was) was never informed of my illness and I might certainly have died there without her being informed of it had not a severe illness of her own caused her hastily to summon me home. She was so much shocked at my appearance that she refused to allow me to return although pressed to do so. I was some time before my constitution recovered the blow it then received.81
Charlotte herself suggested that her own sister, Maria, was the original of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. She later told her editor, William Smith Williams:
If Helen Burns was a literal portrait of Maria Brontë, Charlotte’s eldest sister was truly a model of fortitude. Patient and long-suffering in her illness, Helen bore the casual cruelties inflicted on her by Miss Scatcherd in a spirit of martyrdom. When Miss Scatcherd made her wear the ‘slattern’ or ‘untidy’ badge or whipped her for not having clean fingernails, she refused to see this as persecution, admitting that she was indeed careless, untidy and forgetful. Her punishment was therefore just and it was her duty to suffer the consequences of her misdemeanours; ‘it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear’, Helen told the rebellious Jane Eyre.83
One genuine incident which occurred between Maria Brontë and Miss Andrews seems typical of the sort of treatment the fictional teacher meted out to her pupil, though it did not appear in Jane Eyre. There was a day when Maria was so ill that the doctor had applied a blister to her side. In great pain and feeling very ill, she wished to remain in bed but, fearing Miss Andrews’ wrath, had got up and slowly begun to dress. Before she could do so, Miss Andrews had pounced on her, pulled her into the centre of the room, regardless of her blistered side, and loudly abused her for her dirty and untidy habits. Begging some of the more indignant girls to keep calm, Maria had slowly continued to dress, gone downstairs and was then punished for being late. Mrs Gaskell’s unnamed informant, who had witnessed the whole scene, ‘spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flashed out undying indignation’.84
It seems unfortunate, to say the least, that Miss Evans did not put a stop to Miss Andrews’ persecutions. The superintendent was highly thought of by all the girls at the school, including Charlotte, but ‘she had her energies severely tasked and I believe did not at all times know the manner in which we were treated’. Nor did the Reverend William Carus Wilson intervene, though later pupils expressed gratitude for the personal interest and concern he showed over their state of health.85
Perhaps this was just as well, for his form of religion might have distressed the dying child. Like her father, Wilson was an Evangelical. Unlike Patrick, he was also a Calvinist86 and believed in predestination: that only a small band of ‘the elect’ had been chosen by God for salvation and that, even before they were born, most men were condemned to eternal damnation. Such a doctrine left no place for the individual to earn a place in heaven through genuine piety, repentance or the performance of good works. The emphasis of his religion was on sin and the certainty of punishment, not on conversion or the hope of salvation. Nor did he feel any necessity to soften or lighten this message for the children in his care.
Like Patrick, he wrote many pieces for schoolchildren. His Child’s First Tales, published in 1836, was a typical example. The stories were all deliberately written in monosyllables and were short, usually less than two pages long, so that they were easy for children to read. Each one had an accompanying woodcut but the illustrations were of unpleasant subjects like dead children, dead mothers and executions. A typical story was ‘Child in a pet’.
Do look at that bad child. She is in the pet. She would have her own way. Oh! how cross she looks. And oh! what a sad tale have I to tell you of her. She was in such a rage, that all at once God struck her dead. She fell down on the floor, and died. No time to pray. No time to call on God to save her poor soul. She left this world in the midst of her sin. And oh! where do you think she is now? I do not like to think of it. But we know that bad girls go to hell when they die, as well as bad men. I do not think that this poor girl’s rage is now at an end, though she is in hell. She is in a rage with her-self. She is in a rage to think of her bad deeds here on earth.
My child, take care of such sins. Pray that you may be meek and low-ly in heart, like your dear Lord and Sa-vi-our.87
Wilson’s most famous and most widely read book was The Children’s Friend, which was published locally each month and was in use at the Clergy Daughters’ School. A familiar Evangelical mix of missionary tales and exemplary stories, much like Buckworth’s Cottage Magazine, the issue of December 1826 contains the story of the death of Sarah Bicker, who had died at Cowan Bridge on 28 September, aged eleven. She had been at the school since 21 February 1824 and was therefore well known to all the Brontës. She died of an extremely painful inflammation of the bowels but her faith in Christ never faltered. When asked if she should like to die, she answered ‘Not yet’ because ‘I should wish to have time to repent, and be a better child.’ Wilson ended his account of her elevating death-scene with the comment:
I bless God that he has taken from us the child of whose salvation we have the best hope and may her death be the means of rousing many of her schoolfellows to seek the Lord while he may be found.88
Other books at the school reveal the same attitude towards and preoccupation with infant mortality. In the little library at Cowan Bridge, for instance, was a newly purchased copy of Richard Baxter’s Dying Thoughts, with Meditations from Owen; a seventeenth-century Puritan divine, Baxter’s works cannot have made easy reading for young schoolgirls.89 Even the prize books awarded at the school were morbid in the extreme. Hymns for Infant Minds, awarded to Isabella Turner ‘for attention to Spelling’ in the second class on 19 December 1826, sounds innocent enough. The frontispiece, however, was a woodcut illustration of a little girl weeping over her mother’s grave in the churchyard with the caption, ‘Oh! if she would but come again, I think I’d vex her so no more.’90 Though death, and death in childhood, was an ever-present threat at the time, Wilson and his school seem to have shared an extreme and even unhealthy obsession with it.
Fortunately for her, Maria was spared Wilson’s deathbed ministrations. By the middle of February 1825 it was obvious that she was seriously ill. Patrick was at last informed of his daughter’s condition. He came immediately to Cowan Bridge and, when he saw the state of his eldest daughter, he took her straight back home.91 The distress and confusion which Maria’s sudden removal from the school must have caused her sisters was compounded by the fact that they were never to see her again. For just over eleven weeks she lingered on in the final stages of consumption, nursed, as her mother had been nursed such a short time before, by Patrick and Aunt Branwell. Comforted by her father’s more benevolent faith, ‘She exhibited during her illness many symptoms of a heart under divine influence.’92 On Friday, 6 May 1825, Maria died. She was eleven years old. Six days later, appropriately enough on Ascension Day, she was buried in the vault under Haworth Church, next to her mother. William Morgan again came to officiate, burying the child he had baptized eleven years before. Patrick, Aunt Branwell, Branwell and Anne were able to make their last farewells and attend the funeral but Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, still at school, were denied the comfort of observing these last ceremonies.93
While Patrick was nursing one dying child, he was presumably unaware that Elizabeth, too, was sickening. Her own fatal symptoms may have been masked by the general outbreak of ‘low fever’, a sort of typhus probably caused by the insanitary conditions and practices in the kitchen. So many girls went down with it that the doctor was called in. He recommended the removal of the girls from the seat of infection and all those who were fit enough for the journey were sent to Silverdale, a pleasant sandy cove on the Lancashire coast near Morecambe, where Wilson had a holiday house.94 Among those too ill to benefit from the sea air was Elizabeth Brontë. On 31 May, the day her sisters travelled with the other girls to Silverdale, Elizabeth was quietly put in the charge of a confidential servant, Mrs Hardacre, and sent home. They travelled by public coach to Keighley and then by private gig to Haworth.95 For the
second time in just over three months, Charlotte and Emily could only watch helplessly as a beloved elder sister was taken away from them.
Patrick probably had no forewarning that Elizabeth was returning home, for he would undoubtedly have insisted on his younger daughters being sent home with her. One can only guess at his feelings when a second daughter was brought home to die. Seeing the signs of consumption on Elizabeth’s face, his thoughts immediately flew to his remaining daughters still at the school. Perhaps they, too, were in danger. The very next day he went straight to Silverdale and carried away both Charlotte and Emily.96 They were never to go back. Their joy at escaping from the hardships of the Clergy Daughters’ School and returning to their beloved home would be tempered by the knowledge that it was a home without Maria and soon to be without Elizabeth. All Wilson’s dire predictions and stories of the deaths of small children must have sprung to mind as they watched Elizabeth die. Perhaps fortunately for them all, the process was not prolonged. She was already far gone in consumption and on Tuesday, 15 June 1825, at the age of ten, she followed her sister to an early grave. William Morgan returned yet again to Haworth on 18 June to perform the melancholy task of burying the third member of his friend’s family.97
The deaths of Maria and Elizabeth had a traumatic effect on the remaining children. It was not simply that they lost two of their sisters, but that they lost their two eldest sisters. The younger children had naturally looked to them for the leadership and support which elder children provide. In their case this role had taken on even greater importance because Maria, and to a lesser extent Elizabeth, had helped to fill the void caused by their mother’s death so early in their lives. Once again they had been deprived of the maternal figure in the family.
The profound nature of their loss was to be reflected in all their later work. Motherless children and orphans were a feature not only of their juvenile writings but also of their novels. All Charlotte’s heroines, from Frances Henri in her first novel, The Professor, to the schoolgirl in Emma, her last, unfinished work, were orphans. The absence of maternal love is a major factor in determining not only their future prospects but also their sense of loneliness and deprivation. In Shirley, this was of particular significance as the discovery of her long-lost mother is the crucial factor in Caroline’s recovery from an apparently hopeless illness. ‘My own mamma,’ Caroline says, ‘who belongs to me, and to whom I belong! I am a rich girl now: I have something I can love well, and not be afraid of loving.’98
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