Though the air was full of talk of love and marriage, at least for Charlotte and Ellen who had the time to indulge in such pleasantries, Patrick and Weightman were hard at work. Contrary to the impression of idleness given by Charlotte, they were deeply involved in trying to relieve the increasing distress in the township. Throughout the winter trade had been greatly depressed, leading to falling wages and rising unemployment. The weather had also been particularly harsh and the hardship had been compounded by the almost total failure of the peat crop, due to the unusually wet summer the previous year, which meant that the poor were deprived of their main source of fuel. They were unable to afford to keep themselves and their children either warm or well fed. The growing discontent manifested itself in a petition from Haworth to Parliament seeking the repeal of the Corn Laws, which kept the price of grain artificially high. The suffering could only be alleviated by charity, administered by Patrick and the Dissenting ministers of the chapelry. The bulk of the work fell on Patrick and his curate – and there was a great deal to do. The sum of £260 was raised by subscription and gifts, including £150 from the London Committee for the Relief of the Distressed Manufacturers. This money was used to purchase 1800 yards of cotton shirting, 180 pairs of blankets, thirty to forty loads of oatmeal and sixty or seventy loads of potatoes, which then had to be distributed according to need.33 Despite the additional duties which the depression in trade forced upon him, including an inevitable increase in sick-visiting, and the now customary row over the imposition of church rates, Patrick still found time for other activities. In April he gave both a lecture to the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute and the afternoon sermon in aid of the Sunday schools at William Morgan’s Christ Church in Bradford.34
Anne, too, had gone back to work after allowing herself only the briefest of holidays after her dismissal from Blake Hall. This was in stark contrast to Charlotte, who had been unemployed since July 1839 and still showed a marked reluctance to find a new post. She had dithered over an offer to be governess to relatives of her father’s old friends, the Halliley family, but, despite Mrs Halliley’s best endeavours, had ultimately decided against it.35 The new-found attractions of Haworth, with an attentive and amusing curate in residence, overpowered any sense of duty which demanded that she ought to return to work. As if to prove that lack of will alone stood in the way of Charlotte obtaining a new post, Anne, though less well qualified, had found herself a new place without any difficulty. Had she really been in love with Weightman, she would no doubt have been as reluctant to leave Haworth as Charlotte.
Anne was now to be governess to four of the five children of the Reverend Edmund Robinson, a wealthy clergyman of independent means, who lived at Thorp Green, near York. This was the furthest away from home that any of the girls had gone as governess. It was also the most prestigious appointment that any of them had ever held. The Robinsons lived in grand style. Their house lay in the centre of a great estate in the rich agricultural triangle of the Vale of York between York, Ripon and Harrogate. Set in acres of parkland, half a mile from the banks of the River Ouse, the house must have been a mansion of some size as the Robinsons employed three male and seven female servants, as well as a governess, all of whom lived in. This was the second-largest establishment in the area, more than double the size of Blake Hall where Anne had previously been a governess. Edmund Robinson was lord of the manor of the nearest village, Little Ouseburn, and owned most of the land round Thorpe Underwoods; twenty-five years later the whole estate would be sold for the enormous sum of £116,750.36 Apart from the Thompsons at nearby Kirkby Hall and the craftsmen in Little Ouseburn and the hamlet of Thorpe Underwoods, virtually all their neighbours were wealthy farmers.37 The nearest settlement of any size – and that smaller than Haworth – was the ancient and busy market town of Boroughbridge, which lay six miles to the northwest of Thorp Green on the Great North Road.
Anne went to take up her post in this quiet rural retreat in May 1840.38 Her own first impressions of the place and her new employers have not survived and Charlotte was too wrapped up in William Weightman even to mention her youngest sister in her correspondence. We know, however, that the Reverend Edmund Robinson was about forty-four years old and a chronic invalid who rarely officiated as a clergyman. His wife, Lydia, the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Gisborne, was four years younger, a dark-haired, vivacious woman whose portrait does not suggest she possessed any extraordinary good looks.39 The Robinsons had five children: Lydia, aged fourteen, Elizabeth, aged thirteen, Mary, aged twelve, Edmund, the only son, aged eight, and the baby, Georgina Jane, aged eighteen months, who was to die within the year.40 Like the Inghams, Anne’s new charges were pampered and demanding, but at least they were old enough for her to escape the nursery duties of dressing and feeding them and keeping them clean.
While Anne set to work with a will, determined to overcome her undoubted homesickness and make a success of her new post, Branwell found himself rather too comfortable in his position at Broughton-in-Furness. Unlike Anne, who had to live in the house at Thorp Green and was therefore with her charges day and night, Branwell had only to put in a certain number of hours a day teaching the two Postlethwaite boys and then he was free to do as he wished. Lodging at High Syke House, his comings and goings were not as noticeable as they would have been had he had to live with his employers. Branwell took full advantage of his freedom.
Always a keen walker, he embarked on many excursions in and around the southern lakes. On one such expedition, he unexpectedly fell in with an acquaintance from his days in William Robinson’s studio who was driving round the area. In order to prolong their conversation, Branwell drove some ten miles further on the road with him, regardless of the long walk he would have back to Broughton-in-Furness.41 More productively, he explored the length of the River Duddon, his copy of Wordsworth’s sonnets in his hand. At least four years later, he looked back with such affection on this journey, or series of journeys, that he purchased a copy of James Thorne’s Rambles by Rivers, which he annotated with his own observations. From these we learn that Branwell enjoyed ‘a happy day’ at the public house at Ulpha – not because he was able to indulge his propensity for drink but because ‘the late Landlord was a character – he knew Greek very respectably and was a proficient in Latin.’ He evidently attended divine service at Seathwaite Chapel, adding to Thorne’s comments on Robert Walker, the incumbent for sixty-seven years who had died in 1802, that the present incumbent ‘Priest Tyson’ had had the cure for forty years, ‘so that two men have held it for the unexampled time of 105 years!’ Thorne’s remark that there were now several Methodists and two or three Baptists at Seathwaite roused Branwell’s wrath. ‘This is since I left –’, he wrote in the margin, ‘I am sorry for it – the pests!’ He also corrected the author’s remarks on the tameness of the Duddon between Ulpha and the sands: ‘He evidently never passed that part of the valley, where the Scenery is most delightful and it does there possess what he says it does not – A Gentlemans house – Duddon Grove the seat of Miss Miller – now very likely Mrs Sawrey of Broughton Tower.’42
If Wordsworth’s sonnets inspired Branwell to explore the Duddon, they also encouraged him to put pen to paper. In what is possibly his only original composition while at Broughton, he wrote a sonnet to Black Combe, the mountain across the Duddon estuary which dominated the surrounding country.
Far off, and half revealed, ’mid shade and light,
Blackcomb half smiles, half frowns; his mighty form
Scarce bending in to peace – more formed to fight
A thousand years of struggles with a storm
Than bask one hour, subdued by sunshine warm,
To bright and breezeless rest; yet even his height
Towers not o’er this world’s sympathies – he smiles –
While many a human heart to pleasure’s wiles
Can bear to bend, and still forget to rise –
As though he, huge and heath clad, on our sight,
Again rejoices in his stormy skies.
Man loses vigour in unstable joys.
Thus tempests find Black Comb invincible,
While we are lost, who should know life so well!43
His proximity to the Lake Poets clearly inspired him to further poetic effort and, despite the failure of his previous efforts to obtain critical comments on his work, he determined to try again. On 15 April he re-edited and made a neat transcription of the long poem he had written two summers ago in Bradford, calling it ‘Sir Henry Tunstall’. The name, which he used for the first time, may have been suggested by his journey to Broughton when he had passed the old Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge and seen the signs to Tunstall where the Reverend William Carus Wilson was still the vicar. The poem, though over-long at 540 lines, was decidedly the best of the narrative genre which Branwell had so frequently adopted over the last few years. It depicted, in typical Angrian terms, the longed-for return to his ancestral home of Henry Tunstall, after sixteen years spent as a soldier in India. The family joy turns rapidly to disillusionment as Tunstall finds himself unable to pick up the threads of his old life:
They fancied, when they saw me home returning,
That all my soul to meet with them was yearning,
That every wave I’de bless which bore me hither;
They thought my spring of life could never wither,
That in the dry the green leaf I could keep
As pliable as youth to laugh or weep;
They did not think how oft my eyesight turned
Toward the skies where Indian Sunshine burned,
That I had perhaps left an associate band,
That I had farewells even for that wild Land;
They did not think my head and heart were older,
My strength more broken, and my
That spring was hastning into autumn sere –
And leafless trees make loveliest prospects drear –
That sixteen years the same ground travel oer
Till each wears out the mark which each has left before.44
Branwell sent the fair copy of this poem and five of his translations from Book I of Horace’s Odes to Thomas De Quincey, one of the early contributors to Blackwood’s Magazine, who now resided at Wordsworth’s old home, Dove Cottage at Grasmere. A note to the text of the translations reveals not only Branwell’s love for, but also his knowledge of, the Odes: ‘There are doubtless many mistakes of sense and language – except the first – I had not when I
Five days after writing to De Quincey, Branwell addressed another Lake Poet, Hartley Coleridge, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived at Nab Cottage on Rydal Water. Branwell’s letter reveals how much he had matured since the days of his intemperate demands on the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine and Wordsworth.
Sir,
It is with much reluctance that I venture to request, for the perusal of the following lines, a portion of the time of one upon whom I can have no claim, and should not dare to intrude; but… I could not resist my longing to ask a man from whose judgement there would be little hope of appeal.
Since my childhood I have been wont to devote the hours I could spare from other and very different employments to efforts at literary composition, always keeping the results to myself, nor have they in more than two or three instances been seen by any other. But I am about to enter active life, and prudence tells me not to waste the time which must make my independence; yet, sir, I love writing too well to fling aside the practice of it without an effort to ascertain whether I could turn it to account, not in wholly maintaining myself, but in aiding my maintenance, for I do not sigh after fame and am not ignorant of the folly or the fate of those who, without ability, would depend for their lives upon their pens; but I seek to know, and venture, though with shame, to ask from one whose word I must respect: whether, by periodical or other writing, I could please myself with writing, and make it subservient to living.47
With this letter, Branwell enclosed a poem of over 300 lines, ‘At dead of midnight – drearily –’. Like ‘Sir Henry Tunstall’, this was a poem he had written some time ago: the first version was drafted in July 1837, the second on 14 May 1838 and this, his third revision, on 20 April 1840.48 Branwell was thus setting the pattern he was to continue with most of the poems he later sent for publication, taking a piece he had written in the 1830s and reworking it in the 1840s. He described it to Hartley Coleridge as ‘the sequel of one striving to depict the fall from unguided passion into neglect, despair, and death. It ought to show an hour too near those of pleasure, for repentance, and too near death for hope’. With the poem Branwell enclosed two of the translations he had sent to De Quincey. They were given, Branwell said, ‘to assist an answer to the question – would it be possible to obtain remuneration for translations for such as these from that or any other classic author?’49
Having sent out so many letters of this nature over the past few years, without eliciting a response, one can only imagine Branwell’s wild delight when he received a reply from Coleridge. Though the letter has not survived, it must have expressed some approbation, for it also contained an invitation to visit Nab Cottage.
The moment he received Coleridge’s letter, Branwell must have dropped everything and hurried over to Rydal Water, on the outskirts of Ambleside. He spent the whole of May Day there with Coleridge and, though no account of the visit survives, the two certainly discussed and read to each other their own translations. Branwell was sufficiently encouraged to embark on a complete translation of the first book of Horace’s Odes, which Coleridge promised to read upon its completion.50
Less than two months after the excitement of his meeting with Coleridge, which had seemed to demonstrate that a poetic career was at last within his grasp, Branwell was suddenly brought sharply down to earth again. Mr Postlethwaite dismissed him from his post as tutor to his sons. The reasons for his dismissal are obscure. According to one tradition, Branwell followed Coleridge’s advice to pursue his literary efforts to the extent that he neglected his pupils. Another has it that when he did not return to Broughton House as expected one day, William Postlethwaite was sent off to find him and brought him back ‘visibly the worse for drink’.51 These explanations seem odd, given that Branwell was well aware of his need to keep his job at least until he had established his poetic reputation.
A recently discovered source offers another, totally new explanation which puts the dismissal in a very different light. In October 1859, a friend of Mrs Gaskell’s, Richard Monckton Milnes, then Lord Houghton, visited William Brown, the sexton of Haworth, and was shown a number of letters written by Branwell to William’s brother John. Among them was the letter addressed to ‘Old Knave of Trumps’ from Broughton, which Brown had clearly not censored as Branwell had requested and which Houghton was therefore able partially to transcribe. Beneath his transcript, Houghton noted that Branwell ‘left Mr Postlethwaites with a natural child by one of the daughters or servants – which died’.52
This revelation, which Houghton gleaned either from other letters or verbally from William Brown, is almost impossible to verify but is not unlikely. On 3 April 1846, Branwell wrote a poem entitled ‘Epistle from a Father on Earth to his Child in her Grave’. All the evidence points to this being an autobiographical poem rather than an imaginative or Angrian one.53
Branwell was nearly twenty-three years old and possessed considerable charms: though he wore glasses, he was good-looking, with a shock of red hair brushed forward over his high forehead, long sid
e-burns and a straight and prominent nose. Vivacious and witty, he excelled at conversation and was impressively erudite. A writer and a poet, too, he was quite capable of sweeping a young girl off her feet. It is only surprising, perhaps, given the moral climate of the day which allowed young men considerable licence, that this would appear to have been his first sexual experience.54
There are a number of possible candidates for the mother of Branwell’s child. The most obvious is Margaret Fish, the eighteen-year-old daughter of his landlord at High Syke House, whose beauty Branwell had already admired in his letter to Brown. However, unless she had a child which died, unbaptized, at birth, or it was taken away from her and fostered, this is most unlikely. She was still living, unmarried and childless, with her family at High Syke House in June 1841 when the population census was taken.55 The Postlethwaites had no daughter, so we are left with only servants as a possibility. Three women in the parish of Broughton-in-Furness gave birth to illegitimate children in the relevant period, any of whom could have been fathered by Branwell. Robert Pearson, assistant curate, baptized all three: James, son of Eleanor Nelson, ‘single woman’, on 2 August 1840, Frances, daughter of Frances Atkinson, ‘single woman’, on 9 December 1840 and Mary, daughter of Agnes Riley, ‘spinster’, on 21 March 1841.56
The census returns for June 1841, almost a year after Branwell left, give us some further clues. Eleanor Nelson was then nineteen and lived at Sykehouse, the cottages between Broughton House and High Syke House. She is likely to have been a Postlethwaite servant as the census reveals that her brother, John, was a sixteen-year-old male servant at Broughton House, a post he retained ten years later. As an unmarried mother, she would, of course, have been automatically expelled from her employment when her condition became obvious, which may explain why she was living at home with her parents and her son. However, for James Nelson to have been Branwell’s child he would have had to be conceived almost immediately upon Branwell’s arrival and even then, presuming he was baptized immediately which was not usual practice, he would have been a seven-month baby. Eleanor married Thomas Armer, a farmer from Cartmel, on 2 October 1841 and though she had more children, her first-born, James, was apparently dead when the next census was taken in 1851.57
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