Interestingly, Aunt Branwell did not share Patrick’s opinion: ‘she thinks the tales of the Lady’s Magazine infinitely superior to any trash of Modern literature. So do I for I read them in childhood and childhood has a very strong faculty of admiration but a very weak one of Criticism’.20
It is likely that Maria or Aunt Branwell also brought copies of The Methodist Magazine from Penzance: the 1799 edition, for example, contained a memoir of the life of John Kingston who had married their own sister, Jane, in 1800. Charlotte had clearly read these too, describing them as ‘mad … full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism’.21
In addition to the wilder side of religion, there were any number of the basic religious texts. In all his teaching and writing Patrick had emphasized the importance of reading the Bible and his children knew their Bibles inside out. In addition to their father’s copies, the children each had their own Bible and Prayer Book. 13 February 1827 must have been a day worth commemorating, for Emily was given a Bible ‘by her affectionate Father’ and Anne a Book of Common Prayer by her godmother, Fanny Outhwaite. Anne had already been given a Bible by her other godmother, Elizabeth Firth, in October 1823, when Elizabeth and her father ‘renewed their acquaintance’ after Patrick’s disastrous proposal. Charlotte’s New Testament was a gift from the Morgans. Jane Morgan, Maria’s cousin, died in the last week of September 1827 and was buried in her father’s churchyard at Cross Stone. Patrick was too busy in Haworth to stay with the bereaved family, but he must have attended the funeral at Cross Stone and visited again two days later, when Morgan presented him with his wife’s copy of the Prayer Book in Greek as a memorial of her.22
Patrick was to use the various copies of the Bible and Prayer Books as a tool for instructing his children in the classics. Their familiarity would make it easier to learn the new language in which they were written. In his vernacular copy of the New Testament, for instance, Branwell marked his progress in translating to and from the Latin text.23 Though it is generally supposed that only Branwell received instruction in the classics from his father, there is evidence to suggest that his sisters shared at least some of his lessons. When William Makepeace Thackeray read Jane Eyre in 1847, he commented, ‘Who the author can be I can’t guess; if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a classical education.’24
While it was commonplace for ladies to speak and write the modern languages, it was rare to find one who was familiar with Latin, Greek and Ancient History. Unlike Branwell, Charlotte never quotes from the Greek and only rarely uses Latin tags, but her work is littered with classical references, which suggest more than a passing acquaintance with the writings of the ancient world. At the very least she was thoroughly familiar with the translations from the classics, like John Dryden’s English verse version of the works of Virgil, which was already at the parsonage at this time.25 Emily and Anne, too, were familiar with classical language as well as literature. Emily was adept enough at Latin to be able to translate and make notes on Virgil’s Aeneid and Anne bought a copy of a Latin text book in November 1843, presumably as an aid to teaching her pupil, Edmund Robinson.26
The books available to the young Brontës at home were to be the core of their reading and were to shape their ideas for the future. In addition, they had access to books outside the parsonage, as their astonishingly wide range of reading makes clear. Much weight has been given to two particular sources, the library of the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute and the private library at Ponden Hall, near Stanbury, which belonged to the Heaton family who were among the trustees of Haworth Church lands.27 It is often suggested that the young Brontës spent hours browsing through these libraries and that this was where they saw the periodicals, biographies, travel books and works of fiction which had such an impact on their intellectual development.
The role of both libraries has been greatly over-emphasized; indeed, it has not been proven in either case that the Brontës ever used them at all, let alone on a regular basis. The Keighley Mechanics’ Institute was founded in 1825, setting up a programme of fortnightly lectures, which included practical demonstrations of chemistry and talks on subjects as diverse as physical astronomy and the wheel and axle. Though primarily intended for the working classes, the lectures were open to ladies and gentlemen, so Patrick and his children had the opportunity to improve their scientific knowledge cheaply and conveniently. This was not the case with the library, however, which would not have been available to them until Patrick became a member in 1833. Though he kept up his membership for ten years, his children clearly had access to books beyond those in their own home for many years long before this. The rules of the Institute, too, were not calculated to encourage family usage; only two books could be borrowed at one time if the member lived more than a mile from Keighley and only sons (not daughters) could accompany their father to the library.28 The collection was in any case heavily biased towards the sciences and though it contained many books which the Brontës read and enjoyed, their interests were not particularly served by it.
The same is true of the library at Ponden Hall. Again it contained books which the Brontës undoubtedly read, but the collection as a whole was dominated by eighteenth-century literature. This was the period with which the Brontës were least familiar and with which they had least affinity. Among the books mentioned in the Brontës’ juvenile writings are many which were at Ponden Hall: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, the poetry of Burns, Moore and Butler. These were, however, standard works which any good library would have possessed and there is virtually no overlap between the rest of the collection at Ponden Hall and the Brontës’ known sources.29 In all probability they did borrow books occasionally, but the simple fact that a library existed at Ponden Hall does not mean that it was regularly used by the Heatons’ literary-minded neighbours.
The most likely source of books was, in fact, the circulating libraries in Keighley. Mrs Gaskell herself said that the Brontës had used one, though the idea has been dismissed by later biographers on the grounds that Charlotte told her friend Ellen Nussey ‘we do not subscribe to a circulating library at Haworth’.30 This does not, however, preclude the idea that they used one in Keighley, for which there is strong circumstantial evidence. Mrs Milligan, wife of the Keighley surgeon, was from Haworth herself and claimed that the sisters called in at her house on their way ‘to change books at a Keighley Circulating Library’.31 The son of the Haworth tailor also said that ‘he frequently saw the sisters trudging down to Keighley’ he added that Charlotte procured her books, periodicals and reviews from a lending library kept by Mr Hudson, a bookseller in the High Street, who also published the short-lived Keighley and Haworth Argus.32 Another newspaper connection, Robert Aked, the printer of The Keighley Visitor, Haworth Church hymnsheets and, among other things, two of Patrick’s pamphlets, also kept a circulating library, established as early as 1822.33 Although there are no extant catalogues for their collections, they were undoubtedly similar to other circulating libraries of the time and offered the usual diet of history, biography and travel books with a leavening of fiction, poetry and periodicals. A library of this kind, with its emphasis on the arts and on nineteenth-century publications, would seem to be a more likely source for the Brontës’ reading.
Of all the books and periodicals that the Brontë children read, one truly did change their lives. This was Blackwood’s Magazine, a monthly journal published from 1817 by William Blackwood of Edinburgh. They borrowed it from a Mr Driver, who may have been the Reverend Jonas Driver who lived in Haworth and died at the end of December 1831.34 A potent miscellany of satire and comment on contemporary politics and literature, Blackwood’s Magazine formed the tastes and fed the interests of the Brontës for many years. They absorbed its Tory politics, made its heroes, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron, into their own heroes and copi
ed its serio-comic style. Its tremendously long and detailed reviews of new works of biography, history, travel, politics and, to a lesser extent, fiction, gave them access to books and knowledge which were otherwise beyond their reach, especially as extensive quotations were given from the books under review. The soon-to-be thirteen-year-old Charlotte described it as
the most able periodical there is the editor is Mr Christopher North an old man 74 years of age the 1st of April is his Birthday his company are Timothy Ticklar Morgan Odoherty Macrabin Mordecai Mullion [?Warrell] and James Hogg a <12 Mar> man of most extraordinary genius a Scottish Sheppherd.35
The fictitious names she quotes were, with the real James Hogg, a poet also known as the Ettrick Shepherd, members of an informal drinking club whose rumbustious imaginary conversations at Ambrose’s Tavern, Elysium’ were recorded under the title Noctes Ambrosianae. These were tremendously influential on the young Brontës and were responsible for the conversational style and tavern setting of many of their own writings. No doubt the Noctes lent themselves to being performed as plays by the children too, or at least read aloud in character. One can imagine their delight when a version of their own unusual surname appeared in the character of O’Brontë, even if it was only as the Ettrick Shepherd’s dog.36
In addition to these rather precocious tastes, the young Brontës enjoyed the usual children’s books of the time. They had copies of Aesop’s Fables, for example, and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, both of which provided inspiration for their early writings. They would also seem to have had Dyche’s Spelling Book, which recounted familiar fables for children, and another immensely influential model for future writing, an edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, which was a particularly thoughtful present to her nephew and nieces from Aunt Branwell.37
They had several books illustrated with the charming woodcuts of Thomas Bewick, including his most famous History of British Birds, but also, in all probability, his editions of Fables for children. Bewick’s vignettes are delightful scenes of human and animal life but they have an additional appeal for observant children in that they often contain irrelevant but crudely funny details, such as a man relieving himself behind a hedge. The simple lines but great detail of the vignettes were endlessly copied by the young Brontës with varying degrees of success.38 As most of the Brontë drawings seem to date from 1829, it seems likely that this was the year that they began to have art lessons from John Bradley of Keighley. Bradley was one of the founder members and first secretary of the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute, later becoming the architect of its new building. He was also a well-known local artist who exhibited regularly throughout the 1820s at the annual summer exhibition in Leeds of the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. William Dearden, a schoolmaster in Keighley, remembered meeting Patrick, Charlotte and Branwell ‘many times’ in Bradley’s studio, ‘where they hung with close-gazing inspection and silent admiration over some fresh production of the artist’s genius’. Perhaps it was Bradley who encouraged the young Brontës to copy Bewick’s vignettes and, recognizing Branwell’s particular talent, urged him to more difficult work, such as copying Hogarth’s portrait of the Idle Apprentices.39
Keighley not only provided the children with an art master but also a music master, Abraham Sunderland, the parish organist. It is even possible that Branwell had an academic tutor in the Reverend Thomas Plummer, headmaster of the Free Grammar School at Keighley.40 Despite his straitened circumstances, Patrick did everything he could to promote the education and talents of his children.
It would be wrong to create the impression that life for the young Brontës was all work and no play. They had plenty of toys. They had painted wooden alphabet blocks, a wooden lion, a toy barrel and a set of ninepins. For the girls there were wax-headed dolls with hats and frocks, a wickerwork doll’s cradle, a children’s tea service and even a tiny working model of an iron in brass.41 Branwell, too, acquired at least three sets of wooden soldiers from Bradford, Keighley and Leeds, two sets of Turkish musicians from Keighley and Halifax and one set of Indians from Haworth in only four years.42
Like any normal children, the Brontës played with their toys, gave them characters and invented stories around them. Their wide range of reading, especially in Blackwood’s Magazine, gave them endless scope for adventure and a constant stimulus to their imaginations. Just as they had done with Maria and Elizabeth in the days before Cowan Bridge, they made up plays and acted them out with unrestrained enthusiasm. Despite the best efforts of Aunt Branwell to instil some decorum into her female charges, the Brontës, like any children of their age, were full of energy and their games were noisy and exciting. Such was their glee in these performances that on one occasion their servant, Tabby Aykroyd, was driven to take refuge in her nephew’s house, declaring
‘William! yah mun gooa up to Mr Brontës, for aw’m sure yon childer’s all gooin mad, and aw darn’t stop ’ith hause ony longer wi’ ’em; an’ aw’ll stay here woll yah come back!’ When the nephew reached the parsonage, ‘the childer set up a great crack o’ laughin’,’ at the wonderful joke they had perpetrated on faithful Tabby.43
Their childhood plays were about to take on a new dimension, for they were now old enough and literate enough to be able to record their adventures in writing. In 1829, Charlotte looked back over the most important plays they had invented.
Our plays secret plays they are very nice ones
The Young Men plays would develop into the complex imaginary world of Glasstown and, ultimately, Angria. The bed plays, which have given rise to much prurient speculation, were simply secret because they excluded Branwell and Anne, not because they had any sexual element. Charlotte and Emily shared a bed, as was commonplace at the time and a necessity in the cramped conditions at the parsonage. Perhaps inevitably, they invented plays together to while away the hours of darkness and probably, if Emily and Anne’s later partnership is anything to go by, their characters were feminine rather than the soldiers and politicians who dominated the daytime plays.
We know more about the play of the islanders, as Charlotte later wrote a graphic account of their origin.
The play of the Islanders was formed in December 1827 in the following maner. One night about the time when the cold sleet and <?> dreary/ fogs of November are succeeded by the snow storms & high peircing nightwinds of confirmed <?> winter we where all sitting round
T wha ya may go t’bed
B Id rather do anything [than] that
& C Your so glum tonight T
B if we had I would choose the Island of Man
C & I would choose Isle of Wight
E the Isle of Arran for me
A & mine should be Guernsey
C the D[uke] of Wellington should be my cheif man
B Her[r]ies should be mine.
E Walter Scott/ should be mine
A I should have Benti[n]ck
here our conversation was interupted by
&n
bsp; The ‘Tales of the Islanders’ went on for several years and were chronicled by Charlotte in four volumes, but eventually they were absorbed into the plays of the Young Men.46
Only one story is extant from Our Fellows, Branwell’s ‘History of the Rebellion in My Fellows’, which he wrote in 1828, when he was eleven. Written on music paper, it begins, ‘Good man was A Rascal and did want to Raise a Rebellion’ and tells the story of events in the autumn of 1827. The play was set in Lorraine, which was ruled by Branwell’s character, Boaster, and follows the rebellion, besieging at Loos and defeat in battle of Good Man, Charlotte’s character. After sending embassies to ‘Charlotte’s’ Country’ and negotiating a peace, Boaster ‘began to fortify my country I built c[h]urches castles and other publick Buildings in abundance’. The fact that the children enacted the parts of their characters is quite clear; the story even includes a letter addressed to ‘little Branwell’ by Charlotte as Good Man, declaring war on him.47
All the elements of the Brontës’ juvenile writings are already present in this story: battles, rebellions and politics were to be their staple diet, reflecting not only their origins in the toy soldiers but also Branwell’s dominant role in the plays. The story also presaged future efforts in form as well as subject, for it was written in a hand-made little book less than thirteen centimetres square. At first it was probably the fact that paper was expensive and in short supply that persuaded the young Brontës to write their stories in such tiny books, which they made themselves from scraps of paper, sewn into covers made from odd bits of sugar bags, parcel wrappings and wallpaper. The handwriting was proportionately tiny and, as the children grew older and more skilful, they developed a minuscule hand, designed to look like bookprint, which allowed them to write many more words to the page. The writing cannot be read easily without a magnifying glass, but as all the young Brontës were shortsighted, this would not have been so much of a problem to them. The tiny hand also had the advantage of being illegible to their father and aunt, so the children enjoyed the delicious thrill of knowing that the contents of the little books were a secret shared only among themselves.
Brontës Page 24
