Brontës
Page 23
In Wuthering Heights, Emily too seems to have created an orphan world. Virtually every child, including Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley in the first generation and Linton, the young Catherine and Hareton in the second, loses at least one parent, usually the mother. Though the effect is less crucial on the development of the personalities of her characters than in Charlotte’s novels, the motherless state of so many of them must be significant. The relationship between the two cousins, Linton and Catherine, particularly, is essentially that of a mother surrogate and her child.99
By contrast, Anne, the youngest child, who was also closest to her aunt, creates the most normal families. Agnes Grey has a happy home with father, mother and sister and, unlike Jane Eyre, only goes to be a governess at her own insistence. Helen Graham, the heroine of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, has an ordinary home life with her uncle and aunt even though her parents are apparently dead.100 Her suitor, Gilbert Markham, is fatherless, but not from childhood, and enjoys a robust and normal family life with his mother, brother and sister. Anne, who was only five when Maria and Elizabeth died, seems to have been the least affected, if only because she still had older sisters to look up to in Charlotte and Emily.
Though Branwell never published a novel, the loss of his sisters made a deep and abiding impression on him. For him there was no confusion between the loss of his mother and his two eldest sisters. It was the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth that made most impact. Ten years later, writing to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, Branwell described the delight he had taken in the magazine as a child and quoted from memory the following lines:
‘Long Long long ago seems the time when we danced hand in hand with our golden haired Sister whom all that looked on loved long long long ago the day on which she died. That hour so far more dreadful than any hour that now can darken us on this earth – When She her coffin and that velvet pall descended – and descended – Slowly – slowly – into the horrid clay and we were born[e] deathlike and wishing to die out of the churchyard that
In a long poem he wrote about the same time, he described the death of a beloved sister and her funeral solemnities. While it is dangerous to consider the poem autobiographical, as it owed more to Blackwood’s than to the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, there are certain graphic and haunting lines which suggest that Branwell was drawing on actual experience. When lifted to see the dead child in her coffin, for instance,
And, to this moment, I can feel
The voiceless gasp – the sickening chill –
With which I hid my whitened face
The funeral, too, is described in terms redolent of personal experience:
All else seems blank – the mourning march,
The proud parade of woe,
The passage ’neath the churchyard arch,
The crowd that met the show.
My place or thoughts amid the train
I strive to recollect, in vain –
I could not think or see:
I cared not whither I was borne:
And only felt that death had torn
My Caroline from me …
Long years have never worn away
The unnatural strangeness of that day102
But it was Charlotte who was the most vulnerable and probably the most affected. She had witnessed her sisters’ sufferings at the Clergy Daughters’ School and she was closest to them in age. She must have felt a bewildering sense of divine injustice in the deaths of sisters she considered so eminently superior to herself. More importantly, having always been one of the ‘little ones’, her sisters’ deaths promoted her to the role of eldest child. It was a responsibility she was always to feel and her own sense of inadequacy as to the way she filled that role may help to explain her subsequent veneration for Maria. A later schoolfriend described how
She used to speak of her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died at Cowan Bridge. I used to believe them to have been wonders of talent and kindness. She told me, early one morning, that she had just been dreaming: she had been told that she was wanted in the drawing-room, and it was Maria and Elizabeth … she wished she had not dreamed, for it did not go on nicely; they were changed; they had forgotten what they used to care for. They were very fashionably dressed, and began criticizing the room, etc.103
As late as 1849, Charlotte still refused to believe that a fellow pupil at Cowan Bridge might remember her, rather than her sisters:
none of them can possibly remember me. They might remember my eldest sister, Maria; her prematurely developed and remarkable intellect, as well as the mildness, wisdom, and fortitude of her character, might have left an indelible impression on some observant mind amongst her companions. My second sister, Elizabeth, too, may perhaps be remembered, but I cannot conceive that I left a trace behind me.104
It was not Charlotte but Elizabeth who left least impression on her contemporaries at the school. Obviously less brilliant than Maria, Charlotte or Emily, as Patrick had recognized when entering her for the lower level of education, she shared their outstanding moral fortitude. The only incident concerning her which anyone brought to mind was the way she suffered ‘with exemplary patience’ a cut on the head so severe that she had to spend several days and nights in the superintendent’s room.105
On 23 September 1825, Patrick received the final settlement of his account with the Clergy Daughters’ School in a long letter of condolence from the superintendent, Miss Evans. She had been ill herself, she told him, and the school had still not recovered fully from the outbreak of typhus in the spring:
though cast down we have not been in despair but enabled to look beyond the dark valley of the shadow of death to that glorious life and immortality which are brought to light by the Gospel. May we but be enabled to hold on and to hold out to the end and the tears which now so often dim our eyes by reason of the sorrow which saddens our hearts, shall all be wiped away then when there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither shall there be any more pain seeing the former things are passed away.106
Miss Evans had no inkling of the resentment Charlotte harboured against the school, for there was no connection in her mind between Cowan Bridge and the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. She ended her letter, ‘Our circle unite in kind respects to yourself with love to dear Charlotte and little petted Em.’ Patrick was to be credited with £2 14s. 2d. One year of education at the Clergy Daughters’ School had cost him £80 2s. 2d., nearly half his annual income.107 It had also cost him two beloved daughters.
Chapter Six
SCRIBBLEMANIA
For Charlotte and Emily the summer of 1825 was a welcome return to Haworth and the family. While all the household mourned Maria and Elizabeth, there was at least the consolation of grief shared and of certainty in believing that they had gone to a better world. These would be months of physical and mental recovery from the sufferings of Cowan Bridge, watched over by Patrick, Aunt Branwell, who now had to give up all hope of returning to Penzance, and Tabby Aykroyd. With good food, daily walks in the fresh air of the moors and the re-establishment of a routine of lessons with their father and aunt, the children would gradually return to something like normality.
No doubt Patrick kept his anxiety about their finances to himself but, despite the brave words to his friends, his position and future were not as secure as they might have seemed. On 25 August, some two months after bringing his daughters home from Cowan Bridge, he wrote once more to the governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty. He had looked at the deeds for the parsonage and found that the trustees were not bound in law to let the incumbent live there but could rent it out or otherwise do as they liked with it. Even his salary was uncertain as the trustees had ample excuses for withholding it, in part or as a whole, ‘however circumspectly he may wa
lk’. Worst of all, Patrick was personally responsible for paying for any repairs or maintenance work carried out on the Church lands: this he had recently found out to his cost, when the trustees presented him with several bills ‘to a very large amount, rendering the salary inadequate to support my family, even with the most rigorous economy’.1 Despite being urged to pursue his case by Henry Heap, the vicar of Bradford, Patrick once again came up against an immovable block. Whatever the real merits of the case, the fact that his annual salary was valued by his archbishop at over £150 made it impossible for the governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty to intervene. Patrick had to struggle on and economize wherever possible.2
He had founded an Auxiliary Bible Society in Haworth in 1823 and on 19 September 1825 it held its second anniversary meeting in a packed church. Patrick, as President, took the chair and delivered a ‘very animated speech’, followed by twelve others, including ones by the Reverends Henry Heap and William Morgan from Bradford and Moses Saunders, minister of the newly built Baptist chapel at Hall Green at the bottom of Main Street. The Haworth Auxiliary had raised the amazing sum of £350 and distributed eighty copies of the Bible during the previous year. One newspaper report stated:
We never saw speakers more in earnest, nor any Meeting of the kind more attentive. And we venture to predict, that Haworth which has been so long blessed with the light of the gospel, will increase its labours in diffusing that light among the benighted inhabitants of the universe.3
A few weeks later, Patrick, supported by his two secretaries, James Greenwood, a manufacturer, and Thomas Andrew, the surgeon, wrote to the Parent Society to express deep concern about the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Bibles issued by the society. This practice was
pregnant with the seeds of Discord, and if not speedily, and forever abandoned, will counteract, whatever partial good it may do, by a vast preponderance of evil; and will entirely dissolve that spell, which can exist, only as long as the Inspired Books alone, shall be distributed.4
At the end of November 1825, under orders from the vicar of Bradford, every minister in the parish had to present to his congregation for signature a requisition to Mr Fontayne Wilson, requesting him to stand as a candidate for Parliament in the next election because he was opposed to Roman Catholic Emancipation. Most ministers made the requisition available for signature in the vestry after the service but some of the more zealous, including William Morgan, introduced and read it during divine service.5 As Patrick was in favour of partial reform by 1829, he is unlikely to have adopted such a provocative stance.
Politics were also intruding into the working life of his parishioners. At the end of September, fifty-six mill owners and manufacturers in Keighley followed Bradford’s example and declared that they would dismiss any combers or weavers who joined or supported trade unions. The effect of this, combined with poor trade and the collapse of a number of banks throughout the country, was to increase unemployment dramatically. At the end of December the failure of a private bank in Keighley, Butterworths, had such a terrible knock-on effect that many small businesses in the area also collapsed. A committee for the relief of the suffering poor was set up, but a public subscription in the district failed because the distress was too general, among masters as well as the men.6 By May, out of 6691 factory operatives surveyed in Keighley, 4524 were completely unemployed and the remainder were only working a three-day week. Two months later, six mills were shut altogether, and the poor rates had risen to sixteen shillings in the pound. The situation in Haworth, though unrecorded, must have been similar.7
The poverty and unemployment were to continue throughout the year, adding considerably to Patrick’s workload because, as the incumbent, he was partly responsible for organizing the raising of poor rates and their distribution. In addition, he did what he could to help individuals. In a judgement of Solomon, for instance, and ‘owing to the hardness of the times, and very nearly an equality of merit’, he appointed not one but two parish clerks who were to officiate in alternate months and share the dues and Easter collection between them. Both men could therefore look forward to a certain, if reduced income for the forthcoming year. This was a highly unorthodox settlement of what had obviously been a long-running and acrimonious dispute. With quiet humour, Patrick observed, ‘I think I see Mr Taylor smile whilst he reads it.’8 Patrick’s charities were, of necessity, small-scale and unobtrusive. He did not have the financial status to enable him to perform grand gestures, like Theodore Dury who annually treated 500 Sunday-school children and their teachers to a fete and tea at the vicarage at Keighley.9 The two men were friends, however, and committed to the same ends. Later in the year Dury preached a sermon at Haworth on behalf of the Sunday school and Patrick reciprocated by addressing the Keighley Auxiliary Bible Society. On the latter occasion Patrick had the dubious honour of sharing the platform with William Carus Wilson, the first time he had met the man since the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. One can only guess at his thoughts, particularly as by this time he must have been made aware of Charlotte’s views on the Clergy Daughters’ School. It may perhaps be significant that he does not appear to have attended the following year, when Wilson was once again one of the principal speakers.10
Distress in the manufacturing districts continued unabated. Violent electrical storms throughout the summer, which had set fire to many of the surrounding moorlands, gave way to a harsh winter. On 9 December, Patrick buried Timothy Feather, the schoolmaster at Heptonstall, who had got lost on the moors returning from a visit to his father; his body had been discovered in trackless snow seven miles out of his way.11 Typhus fever was virulent in the neighbourhood: one of Patrick’s parishioners, Benjamin Burwin of Far Oxenhope, lost his wife, four daughters, three sons and a grandson in under three months. Conditions were so bad that Haworth merited its own separate grant of £100 for the relief of the poor in February 1827.12 It was to be three full months after that before the woollen trade began to revive.
On 12 July 1827, William Wilberforce arrived in Keighley for a four-day visit to Theodore Dury. The presence of ‘The African’s Friend’ was marked by a pink flag flying from the church tower and peals of bells.13 Given his friendship with Dury and his own connections with Wilberforce, it seems more than likely that Patrick was one of those fortunate enough to be invited to Keighley vicarage to meet the great man. The Sunday after Wilberforce’s departure, the vicar of Bradford came to Haworth and preached on behalf of the Sunday school to an overflowing church. In scenes reminiscent of Grimshaw’s days, several hundred people were said to have crowded the churchyard in an attempt to hear his sermon.14 The Brontë children were doubtless prominent in the congregation. A great deal more exciting for them was the balloon flight from Keighley to Colne of Mr Green, ‘the celebrated aeronaut’. Huge crowds gathered in Keighley to watch his ascent, but the Brontës would have enjoyed a perfect view of the intrepid balloonist from their own home or the moors behind it. The event clearly made an impression on them, as balloon flights feature frequently in the juvenilia.15
Throughout the terrible years of distress and the reprieve that followed, life at Haworth Parsonage continued in its daily routine of lessons, walks and play. From the books that we know the Brontës possessed, it is possible to deduce something of the education Patrick offered his children. Standard educational texts of the day which they owned included Thomas Salmon’s New Geographical and Historical Grammar, Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume History of England condensed into one volume, Rollins’ History and J. Goldsmith’s A Grammar of General Geography.16 The last is heavily annotated throughout by all the Brontë children and obviously provided inspiration for the maps and place names of the fictional kingdoms they were soon to invent. There was also a copy of Hannah More’s Moral Sketches, purchased by Patrick while he was at Thornton, which was required reading in all literate households at the time.17 Three other favourite books of the period were in their little library: a 1743 edition of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a 1791
edition of the hymn writer Isaac Watts’ Doctrine of the Passions and a 1797 edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. All three were to be seminal influences on the young Brontës and a constant source of quotation, just as they had been for their father.18
The fact that so many of the Brontës’ books were second-hand reflects not only the high price of books at the time but also their own lack of funds to spend on such extravagances. Patrick still had his classical texts from Cambridge – his Homer, Horace, Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica – and his copy of Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. Maria had a small collection of books from Penzance, which had survived the shipwreck of her box just before her marriage. Among these were her copy of Thomas à Kempis’ Extract of the Christian’s Pattern, a well-thumbed edition of The Seasons by the poet James Thomson, and The Union Dictionary, a compilation of the dictionaries of Johnson, Sheridan and Walker.19
Rather less worthy, but infinitely more exciting, as the twenty-four-year-old Charlotte later wistfully recalled, were Maria’s copies of the Lady’s Magazine.
I read them before I knew how to criticize or object – they were old books belonging to my mother or my Aunt; they had crossed the Sea, had suffered ship-wreck and were discoloured with brine – I read them as a treat on holiday afternoons or by stealth when I should have been minding my lessons – I shall never see anything which will interest me so much again – One black day my father burnt them because they contained foolish love stories. With all my heart I wish I had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s Magazine.