One can therefore presume that it was as a result of this advice that she wrote the following equally ‘brief and business-like’ letter to Aylott & Jones, a small publishing house at No. 8, Paternoster Row, London.
Jany – 28th – /46
Gentlemen
May I request to be informed whether you would undertake the publication of a Collection of short poems in I vol. oct[avo] –
If you object to publishing the work at your own risk – would you undertake it on the Author’s account? –
I am Gentlemen
Your obdt hmble Servt
C Brontë
Address
Revd P. Brontë
Haworth Bradford – Yorkshire21
Aylott & Jones must have replied positively by return of post, for on 31 January Charlotte was writing to them again asking for an estimate of the cost of printing ‘200 to 250 pages’ of an octavo volume ‘of the same quality of paper and size of type as Moxon’s last edition of Wordsworth’. On 6 February she posted them the manuscript, being obliged to divide it into two parcels on account of the weight, and following it with several anxious enquiries as to the safe arrival of both parcels.22
The plan to model the book of poems on Moxon’s edition of Wordsworth had to be abandoned almost immediately for Charlotte’s inexperience had led her substantially to overestimate the published size of the completed manuscript. ‘The M.S. will certainly form a thinner vol. than I had anticipated’, she admitted, before suggesting a reduction in size to a duodecimo format and specifying a long primer type. On 3 March, less than five weeks after her initial enquiry, Charlotte sent a banker’s draft for £3110s. so that printing could commence.23 The fact that the sisters were able to scrape together such a large sum – just over three-quarters of Anne’s annual salary at Thorp Green – is an indication of Charlotte’s ambition to get into print at whatever cost.
As the prospect of achieving her goal grew closer, Charlotte’s spirits rose. Her sense of duty was always stricter and more oppressive when she was miserable but, as soon as she had a purpose in life, it was flung aside. Now, busy and happy for the first time in three years, she suddenly abandoned her resolution neither to go away nor invite her friends to stay while Branwell remained at home and agreed to visit Ellen at Brookroyd. She left home on 18 February24 with the intention of staying for a week or nine days but Ellen, with her usual tenacity, soon undermined this resolution. As she had done when they were staying together at Hathersage, Ellen sought Emily’s permission for a longer stay. The answer came back as laconic as ever.
Dear Miss Ellen,
I fancy this note will be too late to decide one way or the other with respect to Charlotte’s stay – yours only came this morning (Wedensday) and unless mine travels faster you will not receive it till Friday – Papa, of course misses C and will be glad to have her back. Anne and I ditto – but as she goes from home so seldom you may keep her a day or two longer if your eloquence is equal to the task of persuading her – that is if she be still with you when you get this permission
Yours truly EJ Brontë
As an afterthought, she added ‘love from Anne’.25
In the event, Charlotte was able to justify a longer absence from home. One of Ellen’s cousins had married William Carr, ‘an experienced surgeon’ who practised in Gomersal, and Charlotte took the opportunity to consult him about her father’s increasing blindness. His advice was that an operation could be performed and would be successful in restoring his sight but that it should be delayed until the cataract which was causing the problem had hardened enough to be removable.
Returning home on 2 March, Charlotte reported Mr Carr’s opinion to Patrick who was ‘much cheered … but I could perceive he caught gladly at the idea of deferring the operation a few months longer’.26 Less happily, she had a confrontation with Branwell, who had spent the day at the White Horse Tavern on the pretext of organizing a shooting match.
I went into the room where Branwell was to speak to him about an hour after I got home – it was very forced work to address him – I might have spared myself the trouble as he took no notice & made no reply – he was stupified – My fears were not vain Emily tells me that he got a sovereign from Papa while I have been away under pretence of paying a pressing debt – he went immediately & changed it at a public-house – and has employed it as was to be expected – she concluded her account with saying he was ‘a hopeless being’ – it is too true – In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is – what the future has in store – I do not know –27
Charlotte could almost have added that she did not care for she had a far more absorbing prospect on hand. She had sent the money to Aylott & Jones the day after her return from Brookroyd and within a week she was viewing sample proof sheets. This threw her into some alarm about the competence of the proofreader – ‘such a mistake for instance as tumbling stars instead of trembling would suffice to throw an air of absurdity over a whole poem’, she complained. Curbing her impatience to see the book in print, she decided that the authors would have to do the proofreading themselves, despite the delay it would cause. ‘You need not enclose the M.S.’, she told Aylott & Jones, ‘as they can correct the errors from memory.’28
Up to this point the sisters seem to have been successful in keeping their authorship secret. Everyone at the parsonage had been kept in ignorance, as had Ellen Nussey. Even in her correspondence with Aylott & Jones Charlotte had scrupulously referred to the authors in the third person though it required no massive intellect to guess that the ‘C Brontë’ who wrote their letters was likely to be one of the ‘three persons – relatives’ who had contributed some of the poems.29 The comings and goings of large packets of proofs, however, did not escape attention and Charlotte was obliged to write again to her publishers.
Gentlemen
As the proofs have hitherto always come safe to hand under the direction of C. Brontë Esqre – I have not thought it necessary to request you to change it, but a little mistake having occurred yesterday – I think it will be better to send them to me in future under my real address which is
Miss Brontë
Revd P. Brontës &c.
I am gentlemen Yrs trly
CB —
March 28th/4630
The ‘little mistake’ would appear to have been that the parcel of proofs was delivered to one of the male members of the household. As Patrick was now so blind that he was unable to write his own letters and had to use Charlotte as his amanuensis,31 it seems most probable that Branwell was the accidental recipient. Though Charlotte was later to assert that he never knew that his sisters had published a line, this seems unlikely. Initially, of course, his sisters’ pseudonyms would have meant nothing to him, but even if he did not suspect that they were preparing manuscripts for publication, he could not have failed to see the numerous advance copies of their books in the house. He had only to dip into Poems to find verses familiar to him from the days when he and Charlotte had worked together on Angria and it needed little imagination to work out that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. His friends, with more partisan spirit than accuracy, were later to claim that he boasted of his sister’s success with Jane Eyre and even that he was the real author of Wuthering Heights.32
If the parcel of proofs was delivered to Branwell by mistake, it is not surprising that his curiosity should have been aroused and that he made further investigations. Though it is pure supposition, another odd incident may possibly be laid at his door. On 7 May Charlotte told Aylott & Jones, ‘I have to mention that your three last communications and the parcel had all been opened – where or by whom, I cannot discover; the paper covering the parcel was torn in pieces and the books were brought in loose.’33
It has to be said that Charlotte herself clearly did not suspect Branwell or she would not have told her publishers about the mishap. There were, too, other occasions long after Branwell’s death on
which parcels and letters from London to Haworth went astray.34 What makes it possible that Branwell was the culprit this time is that a letter he wrote to J.B. Leyland on 28 April closely reflects the contents of one of the damaged letters from Aylott & Jones. This was a reply to a letter from Charlotte requesting very specific information on how to set about finding a publisher for works of fiction. ‘It is evident’, Charlotte had written,
that unknown authors have great difficulties to contend with before they can succeed in bringing their works before the public, can you give me any hint as to the way in which these difficulties are best met. For instance, in the present case, where a work of fiction is in question, in what form would a publisher be most likely to accept the M.S. –? whether offered as a work of 3 vols or as tales which might be published in numbers or as contributions to a periodical?
Would it suffice to write to a publisher on the subject or would it be necessary to have recourse to a personal interview?
Your opinion and advice on these three points or on any other which your experience may suggest as important – would be esteemed by us a favour35
Only a fortnight after this was written, Branwell wrote miserably to J. B. Leyland bemoaning ‘the quietude of home, and the inability to make my family aware of the nature of most of my sufferings’.
Literary exertion would seem a resourse, but the depression attendant on it, and the almost hopelessness of bursting through the barriers of literary
As I know that, while here, I might send a manuscript to London, and say goodbye to it I feel it
So much for egotism!36
This letter certainly sounds as if Branwell had read Aylott & Jones’ reply to Charlotte and the reference to Moxon, whose edition of Wordsworth’s poems had been the original model for his sisters’ publication, may be more than coincidental.
If Branwell was aware of the publishing plans going on under his nose at the parsonage then one can understand his increasing alienation from his family. Having once been acknowledged as the pre-eminent poet and the unquestioned leader in all their literary endeavours, he was now reduced to such an object of contempt in his sisters’ eyes that they do not seem to have even considered asking him to contribute to their volume. There is no better summary of their attitude to him at this time than the reason Charlotte gave for keeping their publishing ventures a secret from him: ‘we could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied’.37
In fact, Branwell, though still unemployed, was not without occupation. He had been inspired to write a poem on ‘the recent stirring events in India’, where the British had nearly been overwhelmed by a Sikh uprising, their commander Sir Robert Sale had been killed and their position only retrieved through the skill of Sir Henry Hardinge. (Curiously enough, the same events inspired Charlotte to make an appropriate adaptation of one of her Angrian poems for publication.) Branwell had intended to set his poem to music and he had in mind one of his favourite tunes, Gluck’s ‘Mater divinae gratiae’. Recalling an acquaintance from his days on the railways, Branwell wrote to John Frobisher, the organist of Halifax Parish Church, who was also the leader of the Halifax Quarterly Choral Society. ‘I dare say you have forgotten both myself and a conversation in which, some years ago, I alluded to a favourite air’, he began, before suggesting that Frobisher might like to look the lines over and publish them either as ‘Gluck’s air adapted to English words by myself’ or as his own arrangement. ‘I Only chose Gluck’s air as a musical accompaniment to the words’, he later told Frobisher, ‘from a love of the mingled majesty and tenderness of the composition, and not at all from any idea that my rhymes were worthy of the great German composer.’38
Branwell may have followed up his letter with a personal visit to Frobisher, for he was in Halifax at the beginning of April. ‘I cannot, without a smile at myself, think of my stay for three days in Halifax on a business which need not have occupied three hours’, he told Leyland, ‘but in truth when I fall back on myself I suffer so much wretchedness that I cannot withstand any temptations to get out of myself.’ Branwell’s ‘business’ seems to have included a visit to the Halifax Guardian offices where, still vainly searching for employment despite his sister’s jibes, he placed an advertisement for a situation that would take him abroad.39
He also handed in a poem, ‘Letter from a Father on Earth to his Child in her Grave’, written on 3 April, which the paper duly published on 18 April 1846. On first glance, this appears to be simply another Angrian poem, particularly as it is signed ‘Northangerland’ and relates to the death of the writer’s daughter. However, unlike all the other Angrian poems Branwell submitted for publication, this one has no precedent dating from the 1830s. It is actually firmly rooted in the present, with topical references to ‘April showers’ and to ‘India’s wildest wars’. The subject of the poem is treated in a markedly different fashion from the Angrian poems about death: this is no wild lament for the loss of a loved one which leaves the living desolate. Instead, the grief is calm and measured, tempered by the knowledge that death has at least prevented suffering in future life. As in Branwell’s recent poems, like ‘Real Rest’, it is the living who suffer most. Another curious feature is the frequent and almost irrelevant digression into the author’s own feelings.
I write words to thee which thou wilt not read,
For thou wilt slumber on howe’er may bleed
The heart, which many think a worthless stone,
But which oft aches for its beloved one;
Or again:
If, then, thoud’st seen, upon a summer sea
One, once in features, as in blood like thee
On skies of azure blue and waters green
Commingled in the mist of summer’s sheen,
Hopelessly gazing – ever hesitating
’Twixt miseries, every hour fresh fears creating
And joys – whate’er they cost – still doubly dear –
Those ‘troubled pleasures soon chastised by fear’ –
If thou hadst seen him thou wouldst ne’er believe
That thou hadst yet known what it was to live.40
This sounds remarkably like the genuine voice of Branwell Brontë describing his affair with Mrs Robinson – even to the point of quoting the same line he had used in his account to Grundy – and it is therefore tempting to regard the poem as autobiographical. If this is the case, then here we have further evidence for the existence of Branwell’s illegitimate child and an indication of the possible period of her death. The fact that Branwell can have barely known her and was, in any case, far more preoccupied with his enforced separation from Mrs Robinson, perhaps explains the absence of any great feeling of grief.
… thou hadst beauty, innocence and smiles,
And now hast rest from this world’s woes and wiles,
While I have a restlessness and worrying care,
So, sure thy lot is brighter – happier – far!
So may it prove – and, though thy ears may never
Hear these words sound beyond Death’s darksome river
Not vainly, from the confines of despair
May rise a voice of joy that THOU art freed from care!41
In addition to these poems, Branwell had embarked on a major new project which was instigated by J. B. Leyland. This was intended to be an epic poem relating the history of Morley Hall in Lancashire, wh
ich had once belonged to Leyland’s ancestors. The two men had made a ‘friendly compact’ that Branwell would write the poem and Leyland would model a medallion portrait of his friend. Unfortunately, Branwell seems never to have completed his side of the bargain though he was inordinately proud of Leyland’s medallion, which made him look like a Roman emperor.42
Branwell’s output over these months suggests that he was certainly capable of contributing to his sisters’ little book of poems and their action in excluding him seems rather petty and mean. He could not afford to pay for the publication of his own work because, unlike them, he had no legacy on which to draw.
On 7 May 1846 the first three copies of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell arrived at the parsonage. At only 165 pages of text, the little books were even thinner than they had been led to expect and the paper was not the good quality Charlotte had ordered. An errata slip noting four misprints that had slipped through the proofs – all, incidentally, in Charlotte’s poems – had had to be included and there were typographical inconsistencies in the contents page. The price, which Charlotte had originally suggested should be five shillings, was set at four shillings and was prominently displayed in gilt letters on the front cover under the title and their names. The thrill of seeing their first book in print must have more than compensated for these minor disappointments. This was no home-made effort like their juvenilia, written by hand and carefully stitched into paper covers, but a properly printed volume, handsomely bound in bottle green cloth with a geometrical design on the front.43 Here at last was the solid reality resulting from all those years of fevered imagination and frantic scribbling, the culmination of a life’s dream.
For Charlotte, however, it was not enough simply to have got into print. What she craved was recognition and the very day that the sisters received their advance copies she wrote to Aylott & Jones requesting them to send copies and advertisements ‘as early as possible’ to ten leading periodicals and newspapers, including, of course, Blackwood’s Magazine.44 ‘I should think the success of a work depends more on the notice it receives from periodicals than on the quantity of advertisements’, Charlotte told her publishers, and stipulated that they should spend no more than two pounds on advertising. She requested that they would send her copies of any reviews which appeared and only if they were favourable would she consider any further expenditure.45
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