Looking at the apparently painstakingly written pages and the hundreds of thousands of words they contain, it is easy to fall into the same trap as Mrs Gaskell and assume that the Brontë children’s interests were ‘of a sedentary and intellectual nature’. The popular image is of young children with a compulsion to write, pouring out precocious and mature literary works at an age when most children can barely form their letters.48 This is only a very small part of the story and, indeed, in some ways a major distortion of the truth.
The invention of fantasy kingdoms and the chronicling of imaginary adventures in little books was not unique to the Brontës. At the age of seven, their exact contemporary, John Ruskin, wrote over fifty pages of a little book, measuring only fifteen by ten centimetres, in a minuscule print similarly modelled on book print. Like the Brontës, his own reading, in his case the Scientific Dialogues of Joyce and the dramatic poem Manfred by Byron, provided the inspiration for his stories and poems.49 Equally literate, though less eminent than Ruskin, were the four Winkworth children, who were growing up in Manchester at about the same time as the Brontës. They, too, were highly imaginative and, because they were allowed to read very few works of fiction, they drew their inspiration from travelogues and histories. Every game they played had an associated story behind it. They took to dividing up the realms of Nature among themselves and developing stories round their own special possessions. ‘Thus each of the children had a Continent and a kingdom of Natural History, each choosing their representative beast as “king” of the animals.’50 The young Catherine Winkworth, who was later to become Charlotte’s friend, also kept a personal journal which was written in minute printed characters.51 For whatever reason, bright children at this period were drawn to writing little books and inventing fictitious kingdoms.
It is easy also to over-emphasize the maturity of the young Brontës by drawing attention to the complexity of their childhood writings, the elaborate and exotic descriptive passages, the wide range of references and the rich vocabulary used. Less often mentioned is the highly imitative nature of much of the writing, in both style and subject matter. Their slap-dash writing, appalling spelling and non-existent punctuation well into their late teenage years is usually glossed over,52 as is the frequent immaturity of thought and characterization. These elements in the juvenilia do not detract from the Brontës’ achievement in producing such a volume of literature at so early an age, but they do extensively undermine the view that they were born novelists.
The Brontës were unique in their total absorption in the fantasy worlds they had created – an involvement that was at times to bring them into conflict with the real world. Equally unique is the fact that the play element continued to be an important part of the creative process even into adulthood. As late as 1845, when they were in their middle twenties, Emily and Anne whiled away a train journey by pretending to be Royalist prisoners escaping from Gondal.53
The play origin of the books and the mixing of fact and fiction is perhaps best illustrated by the story of the Young Men, also known as the Twelves, which gradually came to dominate the children’s imaginations. Both Charlotte and Branwell recorded their origin. On 5 June 1826,
papa bought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds when papa came home it was night and we where in Bed so next morning Branwell came to our Door with a Box of soldiers Emily and I jumped out of Bed and I snat[c]hed up one and exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! Arther/ when I said this Athur/ Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole and perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave Looking ferllow we called him Gravey Anne’s was a queer litle thing very much like herself. he was called waiting Boy Branwell chose Bonaparte54
The children invented a previous history for their soldiers, which was recorded by Branwell in his ‘History of the Young Men’. The Twelves were a brave band of Englishmen who had sailed from England, fought against and slaughtered the Dutch on Ascension Island and then landed in the kingdom of Ashantee on the coast of Africa. While exploring the interior they were seized by
an Immense and terreble monster his head touched the clouds was encircled with a red and fiery Halo his nostrils flashed forth flames and
The monster, as Branwell explained in a footnote, turned out to be the redheaded and nightgown-clad Branwell himself, bringing the soldiers to show his sisters on that morning of 5 June.
the taller of the 3 new monsters seized Arthur Wellesly the next seized E W Parry and the least seized J Ross For a long time they continued looking at them in silence which however was broken by The monster who brought them
Branwell’s own soldier, Bonaparte, was also called Sneaky; later he developed into Rogue and ultimately into Branwell’s alter ego, Northangerland. Emily’s Gravey swiftly became Sir William Edward Parry, the Arctic explorer who had just returned from his third expedition to find the North-West Passage. Anne’s oddly named Waiting Boy similarly turned into the more charismatic Sir James Clarke Ross, who had accompanied Parry on his expeditions. Both explorers had featured prominently in Blackwood’s Magazine.57 Charlotte, already obsessive about her hero, the Duke of Wellington, named her soldier after him. He was to feature as ‘her man’ in most of the plays, regardless of their origin, and her fixation with him as a fictional character did not really end until he was superseded by his more malleable sons, the fictional Arthur and Charles Wellesley.
Blackwood’s Magazine provided not only the characters of many of the Young Men but also the setting for the plays. In 1819 it had printed an eighteen-page review of T. Edward Bowditch’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee; with a statistical account of that kingdom, and geographical notices of the other parts of the interior of Africa. The Brontës placed their Young Men on the west coast of Africa in the kingdom of Ashantee and they adopted not only its capital, Coomassie, but also at least two of its Ashantee kings, Sai Too Too and Sai Quamina, as their enemies.58 The rivers Gambia and Niger flowed through their imaginary land, which was divided up into a confederacy of states, each belonging to one of the soldiers of each child: Wellingtonsland, Sneakysland, Parrysland and Rossesland. A number of islands just off the coast belonged to other soldiers, Monkeysland and Stumpsland playing the most prominent role. The lands, their populations and their characteristics were faithfully recorded not only in stories but also in maps and censuses.59
Each state had its own capital, called a Glasstown, and at the mouth of the Gambia was the Great Glasstown itself. Under Branwell’s classical influence it was translated into Verdopolis and under Charlotte’s French influence it became a hybrid, Verreopolis. Whatever its name, the city was a heady mixture of London, Paris and Babylon. Dominated by the Tower of All Nations, which was inspired by the biblical Tower of Babel, the Great Glasstown had all the excitement and bustle of a great metropolis. Public buildings on the scale of John Martin’s biblical paintings vied with mills drawn from the Brontës’ own experience. The city had its fashionable aristocratic society, like the London of which they read in the newspapers, and its low life haunting the inns in the manner of pre-revolutionary France. All life was here depicted, arts, learning, politics, fashionable and unfashionable scandal, thrown together in a potent brew that could never be matched in reality.
Branwell’s fictional interpretation of real events in ‘The History of the Young Men’ is indicative of the Brontës’ whole approach to the plays. The battles were played out for real in the garden or on the moors, where the toy soldiers could shoot down their enemies with cannon and wash them away by damming the streams. The parsonage ce
llars, with their peeling walls and atmospheric darkness, could be turned into dungeons for political prisoners or cells for punishing naughty schoolchildren.60 The enthusiasm, amounting to violence, with which the children played with the Twelves is reflected in the fate of the toy soldiers themselves. During the year his sisters were away at Cowan Bridge, Branwell ‘Maimed Lost burnt or destroyed’ two dozen soldiers. Of the Twelves themselves, bought in June 1826, only two or three lasted until 1830, when Branwell wrote their history, and the ‘Ashantees’, a set of ninepins, fared even worse.61 The children even invented an ancient language for their heroes, ‘the old young men tongue’, which they reproduced phonetically in their stories. It appears to have been Yorkshire dialect spoken out loud while holding the nose.62
Real events impinged on the fictional world. The king of the Young Men, Frederick Guelph, Duke of York, was allowed to be killed in battle because ‘at the time we let this battle take place (ie in the beggining of AD 1827) The real Duke of York died of a mortification’. The arrival of a party of Peninsular War veterans in Ashantee, under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington, was caused by Branwell’s purchase in Halifax in 1827 of a new set of Turkish Musicians who had to be given a role in the plays. Even more dramatically, the children themselves sometimes appeared in the stories, either as Genii intervening to save their Young Men from a nasty fate or even to restore them to life,63 or in their own persons. We have already seen how ‘little Branwell’ and Charlotte appeared alongside Boaster and Good Man in ‘The History of the Rebellion in My Fellows’. In Charlotte’s first volume of ‘Tales of the Islanders’, the fictional aristocratic pupils of the Islanders’ school are kept in order by Branwell who has ‘a large black club with which he thump’s the children upon ocasion and that most unmercifully’; ‘the most unjust torturing might go on without any fear of detection if it was not that I keep the key of the dungeon & Emily keeps the key of the cell’s.’64
So real were their imaginary characters and worlds to the young Brontës that the two frequently became confused. Emily, writing one of her occasional diary papers in November 1834, places equal emphasis on both; she moves from describing the practicalities of daily life to her imaginary world of Gondal as if there is no discernible difference between the two: ‘papa opened the parlour Door and
An even more graphic demonstration of this is given in Charlotte’s second volume of ‘Tales of the Islanders’. Having described how a school had been established by the Islanders, Charlotte suddenly breaks off – just as the young Brontës clearly broke off from their play – distracted by the burning issue of Roman Catholic Emancipation.
O those
The passions aroused in the children by the possibility of Roman Catholic Emancipation, which would give Catholics the right to sit in Parliament, hold civil office and vote, providing they met the necessary property qualifications, was inspired in them by their father. Patrick had already written three letters to the Leeds Intelligencer on the subject, which were published in as many weeks, between 15 January and 5 February 1829. The letters, calmly reasoned and remarkably liberal in attitude, belie his popular image as a rabid Tory. His stance was completely out of line with that of his contemporaries and friends on the Evangelical wing of the Church: Hammond Roberson and William Morgan, for instance, were violently opposed to any concessions to the Catholics.67 So unusual was Patrick’s advocacy of emancipation, especially in a Tory newspaper, that the editor felt obliged to point out that he was not a subversive or a Radical. ‘This much is due, from us to Mr Brontē to declare – that, whatever his speculative opinions, he has, to our knowledge, been always at his post, as a practical supporter of Church and State.’68 It must have taken some courage to come forward publicly and, under his own name, declare his support for emancipation, particularly as, being an Irishman, he was an easy target for charges of suspect loyalty.
Like the opponents of emancipation, Patrick believed that no Catholic oath of loyalty to the state could be trusted because the Pope had the power to release his subjects from their obligations. He also took it for granted that a Catholic state was an evil to be avoided at all costs. Where he differed from his friends was in believing that Catholics, like Dissenters, should have civil rights, providing that the Protestant establishment was secured by allowing the Protestant monarch or legislature to remove Catholics from ‘all places of trust or influence’ if danger threatened. Speaking with the authority of one who had witnessed the last bloody Irish rebellion of 1798, Patrick declared:
we cannot continue as we now are, even for a few years longer, without the manifest danger of a general convulsion, that might shock the whole empire to its centre, and dissever for ever Ireland from Great Britain.69
In his second letter, he reiterated his views and defended his own attachment to the establishment.
I am in no way changed in reference to this mighty subject. A warm and true, but liberal friend to Church and State, I still am, and, I trust, ever will be. – But I would not suffer prejudice to mislead me, nor error to warp my judgement, or turn it aside from the path of justice and truth.70
In his last letter, he emphasized the pragmatism of offering Catholics some measure of emancipation as an antidote to the sort of extremism, embodied in the Roman Catholic Association, which could only lead to popular violence. Again, however, he pointed out that, ‘without the safest securities, it would be rash, it would be hazardous in the extreme, to permit Roman Catholics to have any share in our Legislation’.71 Given Patrick’s unpopular but publicly stated views, it is easy to see why his children took such a fervent interest in the subject and to understand their relief in seeing emancipation pass through Parliament with the safeguards their father deemed necessary.
At almost the same time, Patrick was also writing to the newspapers on another favourite subject of his: the severity of the criminal code. In a letter to the Leeds Mercury, written on 22 December 1828 but not published till 10 January 1829, he offered support to the paper’s attempt to start a campaign for liberalization. Patrick now took one stage further the views he had expressed in The Maid of Killarney. It was not only morally wrong to make no differentiation between stealing a sheep and murdering a fellow human, by hanging a man for either crime:
Shame and guilt rest on the heads of those who enacted such laws, and of those who connive at them, or willingly endure their continuance. Nor can they be innocent who execute them. The counsel who argues against the criminal is not innocent – the jury that convict, and the judge who delivers the fatal sentence, are not innocent – the reckless wretch that ties the fatal noose is not innocent. On the bench, on the jury-box, on the snowy ermine, on the fatal platform, there is a bloody stain, which
no fancied duty of submission to the higher powers, can ever wash away.72
Patrick’s sudden outburst into print at the beginning of 1829 was reflected in an explosion of literary activity in his children. There are only three extant little books for the preceding years,73 but there are at least eighteen for 1829 alone. While, to some extent, this may be because the Brontës kept only the pieces they considered worth preserving, it also demonstrates the more conscious creation of literary works rather than simple records of what had happened in their plays. Though the extant works are all by Branwell and Charlotte, the dominant pair in the plays, it is inconceivable that Emily and Anne, already nearly eleven and nine, did not have their own plays and books. These, like all their later prose books in the Gondal sagas, appear to have been lost or destroyed.
In January 1829, Branwell launched the first issue of ‘Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine’. It was, as its name declared, an outright imitation of Blackwood’s Magazine and, although Branwell staked his claim to having founded it in its very title, Charlotte was almost certainly a contributor right from the start. The first issue, its cover made from an advertisement for The Life of John Wesley and Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, began with a short account of gigantic mythical fish. It is headed ‘Natural History O Dear’, which suggests that it originated in the play of the ‘O Dears’, giant men based on characters from Aesop’s Fables inhabiting islands.74 It is followed by a poetry section which contains a seven-line adaptation for the Americans of the National Anthem, urging them to abolish slavery and end their disputes with Britain. Beneath it, Branwell has copied out a comment from Charlotte in her Young Men character of Captain Tree: ‘this was sung at the
Brontës Page 25
