our oratiorio and was much approved CT’.75 Charlotte, too, seems to be responsible for the next short piece, a letter addressed to Branwell in the old tongue of the Young Men, signed by ‘Good’, Good Man being her character in Our Fellows. ‘Bany do ought not to – Punit de Doung moan for having rebelled agains[t] do – for dhey did deir Duty – Good –’. Finally, the little magazine ends with ‘Travels No 1’, an unfinished account of a voyage across the South Atlantic.76
This tiny magazine, only five and a half by three and a half centimetres, written in the special book print with – it has to be remembered – a quill pen, set the pattern for the forthcoming monthly issues which were to appear regularly for the next two years. Most of them took only a couple of days to write, so they were often written several months before the supposed date of issue, and they followed closely the genuine Blackwood’s Magazine format of prose tales, reviews of books and pictures and poetry. Branwell wrote the magazines for the first six months, contributing most of the material himself under a variety of pseudonyms, including Captain John Bud, the historian of Glasstown and later Angria, and Young Soult, the poet based on the real Marshal Soult, one of Napoleon’s commanders. Sometimes, like a real editor, he reproduced works by ‘other authors’, that is, Charlotte. The June issue of 1829, for example, contains Branwell’s transcript of her short story ‘The Enfant’.77 Another innovation was Branwell’s own version of Noctes Ambrosianae, the series first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in March 1822 and still appearing in 1829. Branwell’s ‘Nights’ were set in Bravey’s Inn in Glasstown and the participants included some of the characters associated with each child, suggesting that the conversations may have been ‘played out’ first by the children and then recorded. After six months of ‘editing’ his ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, Branwell decided enough was enough and it was time to go on to pastures new. In a concluding address to his July 1829 issue, Branwell announced:
We have hitherto conducted this Magazine & we hope to the satisfaction of most. (No one can please all) but as we are conducting a Newspaper which requires all the time and attention we can spare from ot[h]er employiments we hav[e] fouund it expedient to relenquish the editorship of this Magazine but we recomend our readers t[o] be to the new Editor as they were to me the new one is
This was a typical pattern of events. Branwell initiated a new idea, dominated its early development and then, getting bored, would go off to do something else. Charlotte was to keep the general outline of Branwell’s magazine, which she renamed the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’, adding more of her own short stories and giving greater weight to her characters, Arthur Wellesley and his younger brother, Charles.
Charlotte’s editions of the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’ reflected her own preoccupations. The Duke of Wellington becomes a distinct character in his own right, one more firmly based on the real duke. Arthur becomes the duke’s eldest son, the Marquis of Douro, a romantic and idealized hero, while his younger brother, Charles, more interestingly, becomes an increasingly waspish and sarcastic observer of events. Hero-worship of the duke emerges time and again, even in seemingly irrelevant passages. His tomb is described, set in the middle of a desolate plain:
Over his
A little later, she compiled a series of laudatory anecdotes about the life of the duke, culled from a variety of sources, including Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon.80
Charlotte’s editions of the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’, written in the second half of 1829 and throughout 1830, are full of tales of magic, mystery and the supernatural. They included large-scale adaptations from the Arabian Nights, such as her story of Houssain, an old man from Isphahan in Persia, who sought an heir to his fortune by considering the candidates’ reactions to a revelation of Paradise through a magic silver tube.81 Other, less exotic stories, which feature spectral apparitions, premonitory dreams and fairy transformations, owe more to Blackwood’s Magazine which, since 1818, had been running irregular serials on superstitions, legends and traditions from Wales, Ireland and Scotland.82 In one particularly macabre story, inspired by an article on ‘The Buried Alive’, Charles Wellesley dreams he loses all powers of speech and motion and is taken for dead and buried alive by his family.
Now I dreaded that they would suppose I was dead & tried in vain to give some sign of life, the emotions of horror which filled my mind are unutterable indescribable as I heard my father say he is gone & both he & Arthur burst into tears … mortal lips must not attempt the relation of my sufferings as the idea of being buried with dead bodies amid stench & putrefaction, while my soul yet held & animated its tenement, took possession of my mind.83
In this case, as in all the children’s stories, the ‘corpse’ is revived and all is well again.84 The power of restoring to life may reflect the Brontë children’s deep-seated need to be able to give life back to their creations after the irreversible deaths of their sisters, but it also owes a great deal to their reluctance to part permanently with their favourite characters.
Much of Charlotte’s writing at this time is given up simply to descriptive passages – something which had inevitably been missing from the plays but which in the magazines she could indulge in to her heart’s content. Again, the Arabian Nights was a fertile source for exotic settings and, in imitation, Charlotte set her stories in the deserts and lush vegetation of the East. The Duke of Wellington, for example, lives in a white marble palace, surrounded by olive trees, myrtles, palms, almonds, vines, jasmine, lilies and roses, in an oasis three days’ journey into the Sahara desert.85 Interiors are just as fabulous: the Genii sit
upon thrones of pure and massive gold in the midst of an immense hall surrounded by pillars of fine & brilliant diamond the pavement sparkles with ameythst jasper & saphire a large & cloudlike canopy hangs over the heads of the geni all studded with bright rubies from which a red clear light streams irradiating all around with its burning glow & forming a fine contrast to the mild flood of glory which pours from the magnificent emerald dome & invests every thing with a solemn shadowy grandeur
The tongue-in-cheek remark at the end of the passage is a reminder that Charlotte was usually aware when her hyperbole threatened to get the better of her. The joy of the imaginary kingdoms was that different elements, no matter how incompatible or incongruous in real life, could be brought together to form the backdrop for the stories. Descriptions of rural Britain provided a salutary check on the more fantastic elements of African and Eastern scenery though, in their own way, they are just as exuberant and florid. Charlotte describes a summer morning walk in Ireland:
snails & worms luxuriate in
The descriptive passages were not always a simple indulgence. In ‘Conversations’ in Bravey’s Inn the characters of the two Wellesley brothers are deftly illuminated by their different perceptions of winter:
Marquis of Duro
O I like such weather when the snow is drifted up into great curling wreaths like a garland of lilies woven for the coffin of a giant or to crown his head with when he is wrapped in his shroud when the crystal icicles are hanging from the eaves of the houses & the bushy evergreens are all spangled with snow flakes as if twas spring & they were flourishing in full blossom –
Lord Charles Wel
lesley
when all the old women traverse the streets in great woollen cloaks & clacking iron pattons. When apothecarys are seen rushing about with gargles & tinctures & washes for sprained ancles chilblains & frost bitten noses. When you can hardly feel your hands & feet for the cold &
The sheer sense of fun which leaps off every page makes it clear that the imaginary worlds were not simply a retreat from reality but a hugely enjoyable frolic. Charlotte frequently used her characters to poke fun at her brother and sisters – and they responded in kind. In a review of the Causes of the Late War, a book which purported to be written by the Duke of Wellington himself, Charlotte detected the hand of Branwell in his character of Sergeant Bud:
Firstly, because the margins are uncommonly narrow; secondly because the style is like that of a rule to show cause why a prosecution for libel should not be tried against some unhappy individual; thirdly, because Bud, at the time when it was writing, was often out of the way when we wanted him … fourthly and lastly, because we are sure His Grace never would have the patience to write such a long dry thing.89
Emily and Anne were targeted in ‘A Day at Parry’s Palace’, Parry being Emily’s chief character. Clearly, Emily and Anne had already broken away from Glasstown even at this early period, to the extent of forming their own distinct and separate country. The sardonic Charles Wellesley
was imediately struck with the changed aspect of every thing. instead of tall strong muscular men going about seeking whom they may devour, with guns/ on their shoulders or in their hands – I saw none but little shiftless milk-and-water-beings, in clean blue linen jackets & white <?> aprons <?> all the houses were ranged in formal rows, they contained four rooms each with a little garden in front. No proud Castle or splendid palace toweres insultingly over the cottages around.90
Their neat, ordered and ordinary world was apparently inhabited by dolls rather than soldiers and even the meals (roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mashed potatoes, apple pies and preserved cucumbers) are unexciting compared to the feasts at Glasstown. Charlotte, in her Wellesley character, is very patronizing of her younger sisters. They speak a ‘scarcely intelligible jargon’ which is a mix of baby talk and Yorkshire dialect, the conversation is all of the new clothes they have made for their dolls and Parry offers Wellesley a napkin at dinner to pin to his clothes saying ‘that he supposed they were my best as I had come on a visit & that perhaps my mama would be angry if they got stained’.91
On 18 June 1830, Charlotte wrote a piece by Charles Wellesley about the resurrectionists disturbed in their digging up corpses for anatomical dissection by a group of Glasstown worthies bent on recovering the public library books they have stolen and hidden in coffins in the churchyard. Branwell was so incensed at this scurrilous attack on so many of the chief characters that the next day he wrote an answer to it, ‘The Liar Detected’.
Homer had his Zoilus Virgil his Meavius – and CAPTAIN TREE his Wellesly all these were & are alike contemptible in character and Influence and like vipers can do no more than bite the heels of their Enimies92
After effectively demolishing the lies of ‘the little shop boy’, he also attacks Wellesley’s conceit:
O how I fancy I can see the yong Author brimfull of himself after having finished this passage rise up take the Manuscript in his greasy hand rubb his head stick out his shirt frill give a few hems pop into Popes homer to see if their was a passage their equal to it then sit down his self esteem/ no way abated and fag
Only a few weeks later, Charlotte responded with a similar but much more prolonged attack on one of Branwell’s favourite characters, Young Soult, a poet with grandiose aspirations. Insultingly caricaturing him as ‘Henry Rhymer’, she dedicated two whole volumes to the ‘Poetaster’, as she called him, mocking his pomposity and his exalted sense of his own calling. Rhymer, sitting alone in his garret, starts at a sudden noise:
what’s that? O! ’twas but the wind mournfully serenading me on its passage through the sky – methinks I will apostrophise it – yea the thoughts are crowding into my mind – dost thou O wind look from thy ever resounding halls with pity on me – The Forsaken? – dost thou send forth thy blasts to moan thy compassion in my disconsolate ears – I will beleive that thou dost though not articulate response comes on the winged breeze. Let me see that’s good poetry I’ll versify it –
Thinks. No it’ll not do the thoughts should come spontaneously as I write or there not the inspirations of Genius But I’ll try again
seizes a bit of paper – pen & ink. How my hand trembled – I’m certainly in a Consumption – brought on by excessive drinki – study – I mean – Or was it only the effect of those fervid flashes from one of the Muses lamps that just the[n] passed through my mind.94
Though this long play owed much, including its title, to Ben Jonson, Charlotte was also taking the opportunity to get her own back. With sarcasm bordering on savagery, she depicts the hapless Rhymer on the gallows offering his writings as his legacy. A voice from the crowd cries ‘thank you lad they’ll do to light our pipes.’ The final insult is that Rhymer is only saved from execution on condition that he becomes Charles Wellesley’s secretary, reducing Glasstown’s greatest poet to the mere amanuensis of his rival.95
There were two serious points behind the heavy irony of ’The Poetaster’. One is that the Brontës were widening their scope in their writings, drawing on new forms and styles for imitation and inspiration; the other is that they had become interested in investigating and analysing the whole nature of the arts and literature.
It was Branwell again who led the way. After handing over ‘Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine’ to Charlotte, he had turned to newspaper writing. Although there is only one extant, later example of this, his ‘Monthly Intelligencer’ of March to April 1833,96 it is clear that the newspaper format gave Branwell greater opportunity to explore the political scene in Glasstown, reporting debates and the progress of events as they unfolded with an immediacy to which the monthly magazines could not aspire. As early as June 1829, Bravey’s Inn took ‘the Young Mans Intelligencer’, ‘the Opposition’, ‘the Greybottle’, ‘the Glasstown Intelligencer’, the ‘Courier du francais’ and the ‘Quatre Deinne’ any one of these could have been taken up and developed by Branwell as a vehicle for his political interests.97
His literary ambitions were developing too. On 30 September 1829 he ‘published’ two volumes of poems by Young Soult which were extensively annotated by Monsieur de la Chateaubriand, a fictitious version of the real French writer and statesman whose work had been featured in Blackwood’s Magazine. The flippant style of some of the notes – ‘this Poem is an exeedingly rambling and irregular <?> meter and contains a great many things for which he ought to be punished Yong Soult – wrote it while drunk’98 – masks an extensive knowledge of France under Napoleon. A similar venture was his edition, supposedly in twenty-eight volumes, of the poems of Ossian, edited by Sergeant Bud. In a splendidly satirical send-up of learned commentaries, which he was no doubt obliged to use in his classical studies with his father, Branwell added dull and obvious notes to virtually every line. A note to the word ‘thistle’, for example, reads ‘the thistle latin carduus Greek a prickley weed abounding in Scotland & chiefly growing in cornfields’. He ends his review ‘this is one of the most long winded Books that have ever been printed we must now conclude for we are dreadfuly tired’.99
Between 18 and 23 December 1829, Branwell produced his first verse play, ‘Laussane: a Dramatic Poem’ by Young Soult, set in France in 1423 and charting the restoration to power of the exiled Count Laussane. Once again the subject, style and language seem to have been inspired by Blackwood’s Magazine, in this case by the ‘Horae Germanicae’ series of translated extracts from German tragedies.100 More poems were to follow in the same mould. Six months later, as Young Soult, he wrote anot
her dramatic poem, ‘Caractacus’, telling the story of the ancient Briton’s betrayal to the Romans. Six months after ‘Caractacus’ he produced ‘The Revenge’, another medieval ‘tradgedy in 3 Acts’, similar to but much more sophisticated than ‘Laussane’.101 On the title page of ‘Caractacus’ and ‘The Revenge’, he quoted himself, as Captain John Bud:
In dramatic poetry the cheif thing to be attained Is an excellence in describing the passions and in proportion as this excelence is attained so are we To judge of the merits of the peice. J BUDS synop[s]is of The Drama Vol I p130102
In all three dramas but especially in the last two, the thirteen-year-old Branwell achieved some moments of genuine poetry, despite using archaic language and borrowing heavily from Byron, Milton and Shakespeare. While Charlotte may have mocked his pretension to heroic verse and his choice of grandiose subjects in ‘The Poetaster’ (significantly her only large scale verse drama), there is no escaping the fact that Branwell’s work was both more mature and more adventurous than her own at this time.
Glasstown was not forgotten, but Branwell did find a new way of approaching it. On 6 September 1830 he began the first in a series of six ‘Letters from an Englishman’, which described the travels and adventures of James Bellingham in Africa.103 The letter format allowed Branwell to write in character but, because his author was an outsider, they were also a convenient vehicle for describing what amounted to first impressions of the scenery and characters he encountered.
Throughout their little books in the fertile period of 1829 to 1830, Charlotte and Branwell were continually exploring the idea of creative art and the role of the artist. It is, for instance, no accident that the juvenilia is full of references to drunkenness. Biographers have taken this to mean that Branwell was a habitual drunkard from his teenage years,104 but in fact the references date back as early as 1829 when the boy was only twelve years old and it defies the imagination to believe that he was already a hardened drinker. In addition, there are just as many allusions to drinking in Charlotte’s poetry and prose of this period, though no one has yet suggested she, too, was an alcoholic. The apparent obsession with drunkenness can be traced to two sources, Blackwood’s Magazine and the classics. In both cases, alcohol is the source or at least the backdrop to creativity. The Noctes Ambrosianae were set in Ambrose’s public house and the convivial poets, writers and artists meeting there take plenty of Madeira, whisky, punch and brandy during their gatherings. The mood is set by the motto which appears at the beginning of each session, quoting from the Greek of Phocylides:
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