Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  The second volume, drawing heavily on newspaper accounts of the 1830 revolutions in Paris, Belgium, Poland, Germany and Italy, gives an account of the transformation of Alexander Rogue into a demagogue, including a verbatim report of his speech to Parliament, which results in his expulsion. It also vividly describes, from Bellingham’s point of view, the resulting revolution and destruction of the Great Glasstown. Peace is only brought about by the intervention of the venerable patriarch, Crashey, one of the original Twelves.37 Though his future importance was not yet apparent, in Alexander Rogue, whom he consistently calls ‘Rougue’, Branwell had created one of the greatest figures in all the juvenilia and one who was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

  By contrast, Charlotte seems to have used the summer holiday as a period of relaxation from her self-imposed burden of education. The fact that she did not seize the opportunity to rush straight back into the affairs of Glasstown suggests that she had found her first term both intellectually demanding and fulfilling. There is only one extant piece of writing from her holiday in 1831 and that is a fragment. Far from referring to Branwell’s destruction of Glasstown or advancing the fates of her own preferred characters, the fragment is a desultory and half-hearted descriptive piece, an excuse for a long poem by Marian Hume lamenting her abandonment by her lover, the Marquis of Douro, who has fallen in love with another woman. The love affair and the marquis’s subsequent attraction to Lady Zenobia Ellrington had already been the subject of Charlotte’s short story ‘Albion and Marina’, written in the October before she went to school, so this was little more than a reworking of an old story.38

  Similarly, in the Christmas vacation, Charlotte produced only two poems. ‘The trumpet hath sounded’ is generally portrayed as the death knell for Glasstown, representing the fulfilment of the children’s decision to destroy their whole imaginary world. This is to give the poem an arbitrary and isolated importance, however, which is not justified by subsequent events in the juvenilia. It would seem that Charlotte was simply toying with an idea suggested by Branwell’s devastation of the city of Great Glasstown by Rogue and his revolutionaries. Charlotte, who had always preferred the magic and supernatural element in their stories, simply reinterpreted his story, attributing the destruction to a biblical-style visitation from the Angel of Death. The Genii, too, who had disappeared from Branwell’s most recent work, reappear in Charlotte’s poem, even if it is only so that they can be swept away with all the living souls of the Glasstown. The poem reflects Charlotte’s passion for Isaiah, which Ellen Nussey had noted at school, and her growing love for Byron, upon whose poem, ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, it is based. It did not, however, mark the end of the kingdoms or characters of Glasstown, which were to continue to flourish long after the creation of Angria.39 Within two weeks Charlotte was writing a second poem extolling the beauties of her imaginary Africa as if nothing had happened.40 Again, however, she had neither the time nor the inclination to pursue her fictional writings in the month between her second and third terms at Roe Head.

  In June 1832, at the end of her third term, Charlotte had to announce that she would not be returning after the summer holidays. She had had eighteen months’ schooling but, through her own determination and self-discipline, had achieved far more than the syllabus would normally have allowed. She left the school covered with glory. She had won the silver medal for achievement three terms in succession and it was now presented to her to keep as a permanent memorial of her success. She had never had to wear the black sash for breach of rules, unladylike manners or incorrect grammar, and she had only once been awarded a black mark for failing to learn what Miss Wooler finally admitted, on protest from her other pupils, was an excessively long portion of Blair’s Belles-Lettres.41 After preparation by the Reverend Edward Carter, who was curate of Mirfield and engaged to Susan Wooler, Charlotte had been confirmed, probably during September 1831 when the Archbishop of York had visited the locality.42 In every aspect of her life she had made dramatic improvements during those eighteen months.

  Not the least important of these was in her social life. Alone among the Brontë girls, Charlotte made friends with several girls of her own age and class which were to last a lifetime. (Emily would apparently briefly befriend a fellow pupil in Brussels; Anne’s sole recorded friend, Ann Cook, died only a year or so after she left Roe Head.)43 Charlotte’s two closest friends were Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. The quiet, ladylike and kind Ellen, who had comforted her when she had been in the throes of homesickness in her first weeks at school, became her bed-fellow in the dormitory and a spur to further achievement in the classroom. Even while they were both still at school, Charlotte and Ellen were already exchanging letters, probably, it must be admitted, as part of a school exercise. Ellen’s older sister, Mercy, had invited them both to hear Mr Murray’s lectures on Galvanism but, as it would have meant asking for an extra half-holiday, Charlotte observed that they would have to refuse, ‘compelled “to bend our inclinations to our duty” (as Miss Wooler observed the other day)’; ‘besides’, she added, ‘we should perhaps have got behind-hand with our lessons.’44

  In the Christmas holidays, ‘knowing that when School girls once get home they willingly abandon every recollection which tends to remind them of school’, Charlotte was surprised and gratified to receive letters from both Ellen and Mary. It is a measure of the comparative importance of each friendship that Charlotte’s reply to Ellen was taken up with messages to Mary: she was glad Mr Taylor had liked Mary’s drawings but was somewhat alarmed to hear that she was reading the ‘lucubrations’ of the Radical, William Cobbett.

  I beg she will on no account burden her Memory with passages to be repeated for my edification lest I should not justly appreciate either her kindness or their merit since that worthy personage & his principles whether private or political are no great favourites of mine [.] 45

  Ellen was not unintelligent but neither was she mentally adventurous. Mary, on the other hand, could follow Charlotte intellectually where Ellen could not and, though differing wildly in their views and thoughts, the two had much in common. Charlotte’s two friends represented the two halves of her life. Ellen, with her quiet domesticity, unquestioning conformity to social and moral codes of behaviour and complete conventionality, was a model which Charlotte strove to emulate in order to achieve a peaceful acceptance of her fate as a clergyman’s daughter and middle-class spinster. In her friendship Charlotte found a certain restfulness and the ease of companionship. Throughout the many years of correspondence between them, Ellen was Charlotte’s confidante for family problems and an emotional prop.

  Mary, on the other hand, with her intellectual curiosity, utter disregard for appearances or the opinions of others and fearless pursuit of self-improvement, was a stimulus to Charlotte’s longing to do and be something in the world. Mary was a born fighter and her example was both a frequent reproach to Charlotte and a constant reminder that she should use her abilities and talents to the full. Nothing gives a better indication of the characters of the three friends than their reactions to the fate which overcame each of them in turn: the necessity of facing a future without the security of family wealth or marriage. Ellen Nussey retreated into genteel poverty, keeping up appearances but entirely (and often querulously) dependent on the charity of her brothers. Mary Taylor, or Polly as she was affectionately known to her friends, packed her bags and emigrated to set up shop in New Zealand where she made enough money to return home and live in comfortable independence. Charlotte, torn between duty and inclination, lacking the courage to stand on her own two feet but afraid of the consequences of not doing so, submitted to second best, taking a series of hated governessing posts before giving in to literary ambition. It is more than unfortunate that virtually all Charlotte’s letters to Mary Taylor have been destroyed. Their different emphasis would have given us more insight into Charlotte’s development, particularly as a writer, than the commonplaces of her correspondence with Ellen.46


  In early June 1832, Charlotte returned home to Haworth, parting with some reluctance from her friends. On her last day at Roe Head, she flung off her studious character, telling Ellen:

  I should for once like to feel out and out a school-girl; I wish something would happen! Let us run round the fruit garden (running was what she never did); perhaps we shall meet some one, or we may have a fine for trespass.47

  Nothing did happen, however, and Charlotte left school in the same quiet manner she had spent her time there. Her homecoming was no doubt boisterous enough. She was now sixteen and old enough not only to take charge of her own studies but also to direct those of her fourteen- and twelve-year-old sisters.

  It must have been a relief to Patrick to relinquish the supervision of his daughters’ education to Charlotte. The demands on his time were so great that he can have had little or no time to indulge in private reading and his health had never fully recovered from the attack on his lungs in 1830. Despite this, he was relentless in his campaigns. Like his old friend and vicar, John Buckworth, he tried to encourage pious men in his parish to go for ordination. He wrote several times on behalf of one, Anthony Metcalfe, who was the brother of a Keighley schoolmaster, but the archbishop refused to bend his rules to ordain a non-graduate who was already over thirty years of age.48 Another campaign, of much wider significance to his district, was more successful.

  In the summer of 1831 he had obtained a grant of eighty pounds from the National School Society towards the building of a Sunday school in Haworth. The church trustees had given some land adjacent to the parsonage for the site of the school and the remainder of the money was to be raised by a public subscription. Foreseeing future problems with his belligerent trustees, Patrick requested that the National School Society should ‘peremptorily demand’ that the incumbent should always have a considerable share in the management of the school. To add to the funds, Patrick invited local preachers of distinction to address his congregation and donate the collections to the subscription: among those who came were Edwin Smith of Keighley, who was soon to go as a missionary to India, and Thomas Crowther of Cragg Vale, the champion of factory children, who was to become a regular preacher at Haworth. The new building was erected and opened in the summer of 1832 with a plaque, surely devised by Patrick, which noted that ‘this National Church Sunday School is under the management of trustees of whom the Incumbent for the time being is one’.49 All the Brontës were to take their turn as teachers in the Sunday school, a duty they could hardly escape as children of the minister. Anne ‘looked the nicest and most serious like’ and Branwell was notorious for his impatience:

  He was very rapid and impulsive in his manner: he could not bear slowness of reading from the scholars; he could hardly wait till they got through their verses; he wanted to be getting on. Well, there was one scholar in the class who was extremely slow, and who spelled his way through almost every word. On one occasion Branwell got quite out of patience with him, and sharply remarked, ‘Get on, or I’ll turn you out of the class.’ The boy’s answer was characteristic of the rough and outspoken character of the Haworth people of the period. In angry tones he replied, ‘Tha’ willn’t, tha’ old Irish –.’ And having had his say, he took his cap and walked out of the school … After school hours we were taken to the church, and placed in a large square pew under the north gallery. Branwell accompanied us. He used to retire to one corner close to the window, where he read with avidity during the service some book which was not the Prayer-book. If any of us disturbed him he was very cross. He would come to the interrupter, and, twining a lock of the lad’s hair round his finger, he would lift the offender from the floor and finish by giving him a sharp rap with his knuckles.50

  Given the amount of time the Brontës would have to spend in the Sunday school, it is not surprising that one of Charlotte’s first duties on returning from Roe Head was to entertain the female teachers to tea.51

  It was over a month after leaving school before Charlotte got a letter from Ellen Nussey. How much she had missed her friend and longed to hear from her is an indication of how happy she had been at Roe Head.

  My dearest Ellen

  Your kind and interesting letter gave me the sincerest pleasure – I have been expecting to hear from you almost every day since my arrival at home and I at/ length began to despair of receiving the wished-for letter … I do hope my dearest – that you will return to School again for your own sake though for mine I had rather you would remain at home as we shall then have more frequent opportunities of correspondence with each other … accept all the fondest expressions of genuine attachment, from Your real friend

  Charlotte Brontë

  P.S. Remember the mutual promise we made of a regular correspondence with each other … Farewell my dear dear dear Ellen.

  Ellen’s letter had been full of chat about their school-friends and their circle, almost all of whom Ellen saw on a regular basis, in the holidays as well as at school to which she did return for the next term. Charlotte felt the contrast with her own life very deeply.

  You ask me to give you a description of the manner in which I have passed every day since I left School: this is soon done as an account of one day is an account of all. In the Morning from nine o’clock till half-past twelve – I instruct my Sisters & draw, then we walk till dinner after dinner I sew till tea-time, and after tea I either read, write, do a little fancy-work or draw, as I please. Thus in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course my life is passed.52

  It may have pleased Charlotte to give her friend a dull account of her life which would inspire sympathy, but this was scarcely the whole truth. In the same letter she admits to having been out to tea twice in the last month, expecting company at the parsonage that afternoon and the following Tuesday and to having had a letter from Leah Brooke, a former pupil at Roe Head.53 Charlotte was fortunate in receiving letters from her school-friends, however intermittent, as this was an extravagance the family could ill afford; in these days before the introduction of the Penny Post system, it was the recipient, not the sender, who had to pay the postage, which was often quite arbitrarily and extravagantly high.

  Part of Charlotte’s sense of dullness may be attributable to her inability to work up any enthusiasm for the fictional world of Glasstown at this time. Far from allowing her to plunge back into the imaginary worlds with all the renewed vigour of someone who had been deprived of them for the last eighteen months, her release from school routine seems to have left her feeling only regret and lack of purpose. It was a month after her return before she tried her hand at any writing and even then her verse play, ‘The Bridal’, was only a half-hearted reworking of her ‘Albion and Marina’ of nearly two years before. Telling of Lady Zenobia Ellrington’s efforts to win the Marquis of Douro from his fiancée, Marian Hume, by invoking magical and demonical arts, the story shows little advance in subject or style on Charlotte’s previous efforts. It lacks even the interest of being seen through the eyes of the malicious and amusing Charles Wellesley.54

  Though it is always dangerous to argue from absence of evidence, since manuscripts may well have been lost or destroyed, the six months following Charlotte’s return from Roe Head appear to have been remarkably barren. Apart from ‘The Bridal’, which she had completed by 20 August, Charlotte seems to have written only two poems during the rest of 1832 – neither of them on Glasstown subjects. ‘St John in the Island of Patmos’, written on 30 August, is a competent but conventional poem of fifty-six lines based on the Revelation of St John. ‘Lines on the Celebrated Bewick’, completed three months later, is a longer and more evocative poem conjuring up the much loved woodcuts by Thomas Bewick which the young Brontës had copied so often.55 Both poems are a departure from Charlotte’s earlier efforts, not only in subject matter, but also in showing signs of being carefully thought out and worked upon. It seems likely that they were written for ‘public’ consumption rather than for inclusion in the juvenilia like her earlier poetry. T
hese were poems she could show openly to her father and aunt as tangible proof of the benefit her education at Roe Head had bestowed on her.

  Charlotte’s lack of interest in the fictional worlds is in sharp contrast to Branwell’s undimmed enthusiasm. Typically, he had found a new way of describing events in Glasstown, inspired by his reading of the classics and of John Milton. In ‘The Fate of Regina’, a poem of over 400 lines divided into two books, Branwell imitated the heroic verse of Homer’s Iliad and Milton’s Paradise Lost to describe the bloody battle for the city of Regina between the four kings and Rogue’s revolutionary followers. He followed this with two odes, in the classical tradition, both written on his fifteenth birthday. ‘IIId Ode on the Celebration of the Great African Games’ is interesting as one of the most direct comparisons between the world of the ancients and that of the Glasstown confederacy.56 Not only are there parallels in landscape but, more importantly, the role of the Genii is seen as directly comparable to that of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome.

  Awful Branii gloomy giant

  Shaking oer earth his blazing spear

  Brooding on blood with drear and vengeful soul

  He sits enthroned in clouds to hear his thunder roll

  Dread/ Tallii next like a dire Eagle flies

  And on our mortal miseries feasts her bloody eyes.

  Emmii and Annii last with boding cry

  Famine and war fortell and mortal misery57

  The role of the Twelves, too, is seen as similar to that of the heroes of the ancient world, fighting against the vengeful whims of the gods, voyaging far and wide and leading their people to found a new civilization.

  ‘Ode to the Polar Star’ is probably the finest Branwell had yet produced. It sings the praises of the travellers’ ‘guardian in the sky’ which guides sailors through the stormy seas.