Do I love Henry Nussey as much as a woman ought to love the man her husband? Am I the person best qualified to make him happy? – Alas Ellen my Conscience answered ‘no’ to both these questions. I felt that though I esteemed Henry – though I had a kindly leaning towards him because he is an amiable – well-disposed man Yet I had not, and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him – and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband55
The difficult letter of refusal had to be written. Charlotte was careful to avoid wounding what feelings Henry Nussey possessed, but her answer was as decided as Mary Lutwidge’s.
My dear Sir
Before answering your letter, I might have spent a long time in consideration of its subject; but as from the first moment of its reception and perusal I determined on which course to pursue, it seemed to me that delay was wholly unnecessary.
You are aware that I have many reasons to feel grateful to your family, that I have peculiar reasons for affection towards one at least of your Sisters, and also that I highly esteem yourself. do not therefore accuse me of wrong motives when I say that my answer to your proposal must be a decided negative. In forming this decision – I trust I have listened to the dictates of conscience more than to those [of] inclination; I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you – but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. It has always been my habit to study the characters of those amongst whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original – her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her [spirits] even and cheerful, and her ‘personal attractions’ sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know me, I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose – you would think me romantic and [eccentric – you would] say I was satirical and [severe – however I scorn] deceit and I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.56
With these brave and considered words the almost twenty-three-year-old Charlotte turned down what she acknowledged was likely to be the only marriage proposal she would ever get.57 The whole episode was later to prove fruitful material for her writing. The third volume of her story about Elizabeth Hastings, written immediately after she had turned Nussey down, introduced just that passion which was so lacking in his proposal. Ultimately, too, it would form the basis for St John Rivers’ proposal to Jane Eyre, he, like Nussey, needing a wife to support him in his work. If the character of St John Rivers is also drawn from that of Nussey, then Charlotte was indeed wise not to marry him. That this was the case is suggested by the sang-froid with which the rejected suitor recorded in his diary on 9 March, ‘Received an unfavourable reply fm C. B. The will of the Lord be done.’58
Branwell had also taken a decisive step in determining his future. The hard reality of trying to earn his living by painting portraits had finally put paid to his dreams of becoming a great artist. He is usually assumed to have given up his studio in May 1839 after slightly less than a year in Bradford but it is more likely that he came back to Haworth after just six months. Between 21 and 23 February, he wrote a long chapter in his new work on Angria which he clearly dated from Haworth.59 At the beginning of March he began to reread his father’s precious prize volume of the works of Horace, noting in the margin that he had read the first nine odes of Book 11 by 5 March and that he had completed the book four days later. As Patrick did not allow Branwell to borrow his Horace when he needed it as a tutor in the classics, it seems extremely unlikely that he would have allowed him to take it to Bradford when Branwell was supposed to be painting for a living.60 Finally, in a letter dated 17 May to a friend from Bradford, J. H. Thompson, Branwell began by telling him that in response to Thompson’s ‘last’ communication he had resolved to visit Bradford ‘for certainly this train’ of Misconceptions and delays must at last be put a stop to’.61 Branwell must have already been home for some time if he had exchanged more than one letter with Thompson and a ‘train of misconceptions had built up since his departure.
Branwell had come to the end of his career as a portrait painter. Despite William Morgan’s patronage, he had failed to make any great impact. Though he had had a number of commissions, probably enough to just about pay for his lodgings, his keep and his professional expenses, he was not earning enough to live upon comfortably or to give him a secure future. As his friend Francis Leyland pointed out, it was scarcely to be expected that he should succeed in competition with the older, more experienced and well-established artists of the neighbourhood. The 1843 directory lists twenty painters for Bradford alone and any man wealthy enough to commission his portrait would also have been able to afford to travel to the better-known artists based in Halifax or Leeds.62 The difficulty of earning a living in this field, even for someone endowed with considerable talents, had been forcibly illustrated the previous autumn by the sudden death of Branwell’s tutor, William Robinson, at the early age of thirty-nine. Robinson’s obituary starkly pointed out the contrast between his artistic and his financial success:
His eminent success, as a portrait painter, introduced him at one period of his life to the highest circles, and the exquisite specimens of his pencil, which adorn the walls of the Royal Palace and the residences of many of the principal nobility, bear testimony to his superior talents. His powers continued unimpaired to the last, and his latest productions show the same high state of finish and beauty. We are sorry to add that he has left a widow and six children totally unprovided for.63
If Robinson, a Royal Academician and pupil of Thomas Lawrence, with all his talent and all his contacts, could leave his family destitute, dependent on a charitable subscription for their survival, what hope had Branwell of success? Given the odds against him, his failure was predictable. Nor can his lack of commitment have helped. Given the choice, he would have far preferred to follow his literary bent, and his writing, which he kept up throughout his time in Bradford, must have been a constant distraction from seeking clients and executing commissions.
Most biographers of Branwell would have us believe that he spent his time in Bradford in wild dissipation and that he returned to Haworth a drunkard and an opium-eater, in debt and in disgrace.64 That there were some elements of truth in this seems likely, but the degree to which Branwell so abased himself is very much open to question. In a letter to J. H. Thompson, written some months after he returned home, Branwell confessed he had incurred ‘several Depts’ of which his father and aunt had no knowledge.65 These were clearly not debts due to his landlady, whose only concern after Branwell’s departure was that he should return to ‘finish’ some of her pictures. This Branwell viewed in a poor light: ‘I am astonished at Mrs Kirby – I have no pictures of hers to finish But I said that if I returned there I would varnish 3 for her and I do not understand people who look on a kindness as a duty’. Mrs Kirby’s pictures remained unvarnished, though she was still sending messages about them through Thompson three months later.66
The debts, then, if not to Branwell’s landlady and not the sort which could be mentioned to the elders of the Brontë household, may well have been incurred by drinking. However, it is worth bearing in mind the comments of one of Branwell’s contemporaries, Anthony Trollope, who spent seven years in London working for the Post Office on an annual salary of ninety pounds rising to one hundred and forty. During the whole period, he was ‘hopelessly in debt’, apart from two brief intervals when he lived with his mother, and he was twice arrested for debt by sheriffs’ officers. Looking back, from a respectable and comfortable old age, he asked himself whether his youth had been very wicked and whether there had been any reason to expect good from him.
When I reached London no mod
e of life was prepared for me, – no advice ever given to me. I went into lodgings, and then had to dispose of my time. I belonged to no club, and knew very few friends who would receive me into their houses. In such a condition of life a young man should no doubt go home after his work, and spend the long hours of the evening in reading good books and drinking tea … It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man. Of course if the mind be strong enough, and the general stuff knitted together of sufficiently stern material, the temptations will not prevail. But such minds and such material are, I think, uncommon. The temptation at any rate prevailed with me.
Trollope concludes his account by pondering, ‘I wonder how many young men fall utterly to pieces from being turned loose into London after the same fashion.’67 One can see similarities with Branwell’s first taste of freedom, albeit in the less glamorous surroundings of Bradford.
In Bradford Branwell was actively involved in a circle of artistic friends, many of them young and struggling like himself. Some of them were already known to him, like John Hunter Thompson, who had been a fellow pupil of William Robinson at Leeds and was now working as a professional painter from the premises of Mr Aglen, a carver and gilder.68 Others were established artists in Bradford such as the well-known landscape painter, John Wilson Anderson, who had exhibited through the Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Leeds, Richard Waller, the portrait painter, and William Geller, an engraver whose work was mainly done in London. Branwell also made the acquaintance of the Halifax sculptor, Joseph Bentley Leyland, a young man of dazzling talent who had taken both Leeds and London by storm in the last few years. Leyland was to become probably Branwell’s closest friend, sharing his literary tastes as well as his artistic inclinations. Like Branwell, too, his spectacular early promise went unfulfilled and he died an early death, only three years after Branwell, but already on intimate terms with the debtor’s prison.69 Branwell was introduced as well to a number of local writers, some of whom enjoyed comparatively wide success. Among these were Robert Story, the poet of Gargrave in the Yorkshire Dales, who was regularly published in the local press and already had at least two volumes of poems to his name, and John James, a local antiquarian who was later to publish a definitive history of Bradford.70
In the company of men such as these, Branwell was undoubtedly in his element. Intelligent, witty and mostly young, the circle frequented the George Hotel in Bradford, where drink as well as conversation flowed freely. Branwell, ever anxious to please and probably flattered by the attentions of established writers and artists, would not have held back in paying for the bowls of whisky punch which circulated all evening. Like many another headstrong young man launching out into the world on his own for the first time, he probably did drink too much with his newly found and congenial companions. However, whatever debts he had incurred were all paid off before the end of August – and that without recourse to his father and aunt.71 Margaret Hartley, the niece of his landlady, Mrs Kirby, who lived with the family in Fountain Street while Branwell was a lodger there, recalled him quite vividly.
He was low in stature, about 5ft 3 inches high, and slight in build, though well proportioned. Very few people, except sitters, came to visit him; but I remember one, a Mr Thompson, a painter also. I remember his sister Charlotte coming and I remember her sisterly ways. She stayed a day, and I believe that was her only visit. They left the house together, and he saw her off by the Keighley coach. I am not aware that his other sisters or that his father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë ever came to Mr Kirby’s. It was young Mr Brontës practice to go home at each weekend, and I remember that while sometimes he took the coach for Keighley, he on other occasions walked to Haworth across the moors. He was a very steady young gentleman, his conduct was exemplary, and we liked him very much.72
Whatever excesses Branwell may or may not have got up to in Bradford, they did not impinge on those with whom he lodged. It seems inherently unlikely, too, that he can have had much opportunity for debauchery if, as Margaret Hartley says, he went home every weekend. Her evidence is supported by Leyland, who seems to be quoting Thompson, when he says that Branwell ‘certainly was not a drunkard; and that, if he took anything at all, it was but occasionally, and then no more than the commonest custom would permit’.73
When Branwell gave up his studio in Bradford, he did not return home in disgrace or even deeply chastened by his experience. He had tried, but failed, to earn his living as an artist and though this could not be anything but a disappointment to his family’s ambitions for him, Branwell was unperturbed. Though the years of financial outlay on his artistic training with Bradley and Robinson had turned out to be wasted, at least there had not been the additional, crippling expense of the Royal Academy or a European tour. Even more important, Branwell had not struggled on in the profession to a point beyond which it would be impossible to retreat. It was undoubtedly a wise decision to cut his losses after a trial period and return home to work out an alternative plan for his future.
Branwell’s return to Haworth was followed, almost immediately, by that of Emily, and Patrick once more found himself with four adult and dependent children on his hands. Emily had gone back to Law Hill after the Christmas holidays but her resolution to endure began to falter as the school year stretched out endlessly before her. The winter months would inevitably curtail the amount of time she was able to spend outside, walking on her own or in the company of her pupils, and probably brought the usual colds and coughs, often combined with asthmatic attacks, which so frequently afflicted the Brontës at that time of year. To add to her troubles, she seems to have found herself unable to write. After the plethora of poems she had written in the autumn, there is only a single extant poem for the new year and that was written in the holidays.74 Between 12 January and 27 March 1839, she apparently wrote nothing, indicating a depression of mind that made writing impossible. This, in its turn, could only have added to her misery for if she had no poetry, she had no means of expressing her unhappiness and obtaining relief. Deprived of the time to indulge in Gondal fantasies by the rigidity and all-pervasive nature of boarding school life and deprived of the power to write by her homesickness and unhappiness, Emily broke down. In a repeat of her brief days as a schoolgirl at Roe Head, her health gave way and she was obliged to return home to Haworth. Though the exact date of her return is not known, it must have been some time in March or early April. Her six short months as a teacher at Law Hill were to be her first and last experiment in earning her own living.75
It must have been a matter of considerable concern to Patrick that within three months all three of his children who had ventured out into the world had given up their employment, two of them having succumbed to ill health. Nevertheless, he showed a quite remarkable leniency and did not push them into seeking new posts: rather the reverse. By the second week in March, Charlotte had two options before her. Henry Nussey had informed her of a school in his parish at Donnington in Sussex which she could take over but, as she regretfully told him, she had not the necessary capital to make a success of it.76 More realistically, she had the prospect of going as a private governess into the family of Thomas Brooke at Huddersfield, and though she felt it was time she should take up employment again, it was Patrick who urged her to stay at home a little longer.77 The offer from Mrs Brooke never materialized and in the meantime it was Anne who, in her customary quiet, efficient way, set about making her contribution to the family coffers. At the beginning of March she found herself her first post as a governess with the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield. She left home on 8 April and, at her own request, went alone by coach to Mirfield ‘as she thought she could manage better and summon more courage if thrown entirely upon her own resources’.78 If her picture of the young Agnes Grey also leaving home for the first time to be a governess is a true portrait of her own feelings at the time, she did not go unwillingly.
How delightful
it would be to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister, besides exonerating them from the provision of my food and clothing; to show papa what his little Agnes could do; to convince mamma and Mary that I was not quite the helpless, thoughtless being they supposed.79
Charlotte, too, needed some convincing that her nineteen-year-old sister was capable of holding a post as governess.
Blake Hall was a splendid mansion, far more aristocratic than anything the Brontës had ever had contact with before. Three storeys high, it had an imposing eighteenth-century frontage.80 Though only a few miles from Roe Head, it did not enjoy such an elevated position, lying in the Calder Valley just beyond Mirfield. A small wooded park separated it from the busy main road between Dewsbury and Huddersfield, giving it an air of rural seclusion. Anne may even have seen the house before when, as a pupil at Roe Head, she attended services at Mirfield Church, which lay only a quarter of a mile away on an elevation overlooking Blake Hall park.
The Inghams of Blake Hall were an old and wealthy family, well known in the Mirfield area. Joshua Ingham, a Justice of the Peace, was thirty-seven and had connections with the Nussey family, his second cousin, Mary, having married Ellen’s brother John, the court physician. Mary Nussey was on close terms with her relations at Blake Hall and had stayed with them there. It was possibly through this connection that Anne first heard of the post, though the Inghams were also well known to the Woolers and the rest of the Dewsbury circle. Interestingly, Mrs Ingham was the daughter of Ellis Cunliffe Lister, the reforming Member of Parliament for the relatively new borough of Bradford, and her sister Harriet was the ‘clever but refractory’ Miss Lister who had so plagued Charlotte at Roe Head.81
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