The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest – which implies the greatest good to others – and this path steadily followed will lead I believe in time to prosperity and to happiness though it may seem at the outset to tend quite in a contrary direction –
Your Mother is both old and infirm, old and infirm people have few sources of happiness – fewer almost than the comparatively young and healthy can conceive – to deprive them of one of these is cruel – If your Mother is more composed when you are with her – stay with her – If she would be unhappy in case you left her – stay with her – It will not apparently, as far [as] shortsighted humanity can see – be for your advantage to remain at Brookroyd – nor will you be praised and admired for remaining at home to comfort your Mother – Yet probably your own Conscience will approve you and if it does – stay with her.
I recommend you to do – what I am trying to do myself–90
Though this advice was somewhat disingenuous, in that the problems of living at home could never exceed the privations of being a governess for Charlotte, there is no doubt that she was offering a candid opinion and that she genuinely believed that she was making a sacrifice in staying at Haworth. Ever an active man, both physically and mentally, Patrick’s increasing disablement must have made him not only depressed but also difficult and demanding. When he could no longer read or write for himself, nor even walk down the street to his church without assistance, it is not surprising that he needed more of his daughters’ time. His sense of helplessness could only have been compounded by his physical inability to exert any sort of control over Branwell, whose complete moral and mental breakdown must have caused his father untold anguish. There was frustration, too, that he could not play his full part in the parish. At the beginning of the year there had been a subscription fund to organize in favour of the Quarter of a Million League Fund and a new headmaster to appoint to Haworth Free Grammar School. The long-awaited new peal of bells for the church had arrived and, on 10 March, their installation was celebrated with a change ringing competition and a dinner at the Black Bull in the evening.91 On Whit Monday Patrick had delivered his annual sermon to the Sunday school teachers and children, but had been obliged to forgo the customary processional walk through the village; in the afternoon his place was taken by the Reverend James Cheadle, vicar of Bingley, who preached to 230 members of the Oddfellows in Haworth Church. Again, a couple of weeks later, he was obliged to miss the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for a new National School at Oxenhope, though this was a project that had been very dear to his heart.92 His pastoral duties were also severely curtailed at just the time when they were most needed: though not as bad as during the terrible years early in the decade, the poor state of trade and the consequent decline in wages was a source of misery and privation in the township. Many of his parishioners were unable to pay their rates and, when summoned before the Keighley magistrates, could only plead absolute poverty. One woman had only 4s. 6d. – only marginally more than the price of the sisters’ volume of Poems – on which to support herself, her husband and two children each week.93
On a more positive note, however, Patrick was able to join in the celebrations at the beginning of Haworth Rush-Bearing week. His old Evangelical friend, the Reverend Thomas Crowther, returned to Haworth to give the annual Sunday school sermons on 19 July, raising over twenty-five pounds through the collections, and he stayed overnight in order to attend an oratorio in the church the following day. The oratorio was held for the benefit of Thomas Parker, the celebrated Haworth tenor, who sang with Mrs Sunderland from the Halifax concerts and a great variety of instrumental and choral performers. It was a sad commentary on the bigotry now so rampant in Haworth that the concert was boycotted by all the Puseyite clergy of the district – including, apparently, Patrick’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls – because Parker was a Baptist. For this reason alone it was gratifying that the church was ‘crowded to suffocation’ and Patrick, ‘the venerable incumbent … who is now totally blind’, made a point of sitting prominently in the west gallery with his like-minded clerical friends, Thomas Crowther and Thomas Brooksbank Charnock, and the head of his church trustees, Joseph Greenwood, J.P.94 Though not mentioned in the newspaper reports of the occasion it seems likely that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were also present for they would not have missed an oratorio on their own doorstep. On the Tuesday, 21 July, Patrick had also the gratification of hearing the half-yearly public examination of scholars in the National School at Haworth which furnished proof of the flourishing state of the school he had established. A week later, however, he was a prominent absentee from the Sunday school anniversary celebrations at Newsholme, a tiny hamlet near Oakworth, where the neighbouring clergy, including Arthur Bell Nicholls, Mr Grant of Oxenhope, the vicar of Keighley and his curate, Mr Egglestone, turned out in force.95
Compelled to absent himself from so many of the activities in the chapelry, these were indeed ‘mournful days – when Papa’s vision was wholly obscured – when he could do nothing for himself and sat all day-long in darkness and inertion’. Patrick’s blindness was now so far advanced that an operation had become a necessity and, with this in mind, Charlotte and Emily ‘made a pilgrimage’ to Manchester at the beginning of August to find a suitable surgeon.96 The operation was too delicate to be entrusted to a general surgeon like William Carr, whom Charlotte had consulted in Gomersal earlier in the year, or one of Patrick’s old physician friends in Bradford or Leeds. Manchester had not only a pioneering and nationally famous infirmary, but also flourishing medical schools and a specialist eye hospital. Charlotte and Emily seem to have made their way there and, more by good fortune than choice, they were referred to William James Wilson, a founder of the eye hospital, former President of the Manchester Medical Society and recently elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.97 They could not have fallen into better hands. Mr Wilson was associated with both the infirmary in Piccadilly and the eye hospital in St Mary’s, but he also had a ‘large and highly respectable’ practice in the town. As Patrick was not admitted to either hospital, he must have consulted Mr Wilson privately in his rooms at No. 72, Mosley Street. Not surprisingly, Mr Wilson refused to commit himself to surgery until he had examined Patrick’s eyes for himself, and Charlotte promised to return in about three weeks’ time with her father.98
Charlotte and Patrick arrived in Manchester on Wednesday, 19 August, and saw Mr Wilson immediately; he pronounced Patrick’s eyes ‘quite ready’ for the operation, fixed it for the following Monday and considerably cheered his patient by offering a very favourable prognosis. The first night was spent in a hotel, but the next day they moved into lodgings recommended by Mr Wilson at No. 83, Mount Pleasant, Boundary Street, off the Oxford Road, which were to be their home for at least the next month. The lodgings were kept by an old servant of his but she was away in the country recuperating from a serious illness and, to her consternation, Charlotte found herself in charge of all their boarding arrangements. Though she had helped around the parsonage, particularly with the ironing and bedmaking, she had always been content to leave all the catering to Emily. In a panic she wrote to Ellen for advice.
I find myself excessively ignorant – I can’t tell what the deuce to order in the way of meat – &c
I wish you or your Sister Anne could give me some hints about how to manage – For ourselves
If Patrick was apprehensive, he did not show it. On the day of the operation Mr Wilson and the two surgeons who assisted him ‘seemed surprised’ at his ‘extraordinary patience and firmness’, Charlotte told Ellen.100 Just how extraordinary that patience and firmness
were can only be appreciated when one knows that the whole operation, which lasted a quarter of an hour and involved the complete extraction of the left lens, was conducted without anaesthetic. The courageous old man, nearly seventy years of age, not only endured the physical pain without flinching or complaint, but even took such an interest in the proceedings that he later made notes in the margin of his copy of Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine.
Belladonna a virulent poison – was first applied, twice, in order to expand the pupil – this occasioned very acute pains for only about five seconds – The feeling, under the operation – which lasted fifteen minutes, was of a burning nature – but not intolerable – as I have read is generally the case, in surgical operations. My lens was extracted so that cataract can
‘Mr Wilson entirely disapproves of couching’, Charlotte wrote sternly to Ellen, as if rebuking her for her surgeon cousin’s advice to remove only the cataract.102 Mr Wilson had also explained that he would only perform the operation on one eye in case infection set in and completely destroyed the sight. The greatest care was taken to avoid this.
I was confined on my back – a month in a dark room, with bandages over my eyes for the greater part of the time – and had a careful nurse, to attend me both night, & day – I was bled with 8 leeches, at one time, & 6, on another, (these caused but little pain) in order to prevent, inflammation –
In a marginal note Patrick added, ‘Leeches must be put on the temples, and not on the eyelids.’103
While Patrick lay quietly in his darkened room waiting and praying for the restoration of his sight, Charlotte found herself with time on her hands. The nurse was efficient and, despite her previous fears about the housekeeping, there was little for Charlotte to do; she could not even cheer her father by talking to him, for initially Patrick was to speak and be spoken to as little as possible. She herself was suffering from a raging toothache which had troubled her on and off for over a month; it flared up again as soon as she got to Manchester and added sleepless nights to her already long and wearisome days.104 Charlotte took refuge, as she had always done, in her imagination. She began to write Jane Eyre.
Chapter Eighteen
THREE TALES
Though it is tempting to see Jane Eyre as the result of some inspirational flash of genius, in fact the ideas for the novel had been floating around in Charlotte’s head for some time. Gateshead Hall and the St John Rivers scenario had been the subject of manuscript fragments she had written as long ago as 1844 and Rochester himself, with his pride and sarcastic wit, his string of past mistresses, illegitimate child and overwhelming attractiveness to women was a re-creation of her childhood hero, Zamorna, in all but his physical appearance. A single new element came into play, however, which was to transform this unpromising rehash of Angrian material into one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. Perhaps learning from her Brussels chapters in The Professor, Charlotte began to draw on personal experience to flesh out her characters and scenes. Jane Eyre’s childhood sufferings at Lowood School at the hands of Mr Brocklehurst were a searing and immediately recognizable indictment of Wilson’s Clergy Daughters’ School. In the saintly Helen Burns, too, she drew from life, taking as a model her eldest sister, Maria. Ironically, this was the one character the reviewers were to find fault with, considering her too good to be true, though Charlotte staunchly defended her. ‘You are right in having faith in the reality of Helen Burns’s character:’ she told William Smith Williams, ‘she was real enough: I have exaggerated nothing there: I abstained from recording much that I remember respecting her, lest the narrative should sound incredible.’1
Because the novel began with such an intensely personal re-creation of Charlotte’s deeply harrowing days at the Clergy Daughters’ School, bound up as it was with a reliving of the terrible anger and grief caused by her sisters’ deaths, Jane Eyre opened with a passion that had been totally absent from all her earlier literary efforts. It was an emotion that was to sweep through the entire novel, from the young Jane’s violent denunciations of the injustices inflicted on her to the adult’s equally spirited declaration of her own self-worth:
Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? – You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:- it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, – as we are!2
Through the medium of her creation, Charlotte was at last able to articulate all the pent-up emotion which had been fermenting in her soul for the last four or five years. She could not declare her love for Monsieur Heger in such shameless terms, but her heroine could and would. Like Monsieur Heger, Mr Rochester was married, and Jane, like Charlotte, would take the moral line and flee from temptation; but Jane, unlike Charlotte, would eventually win her man. In the essential morality of the tale – so unlike Charlotte’s Angrian writing – whereby the heroine unwittingly sins by falling in love with a married man, suffers in separating from him and is redeemed and rewarded in the end – it was almost as if Charlotte was trying to prove to herself and Branwell that she had taken the right path. The alternative to tearing oneself away from a married lover was to subject oneself to ‘a constant phantom, or rather two – Sin and Suffering’.3 in Branwell she had an object lesson of her own fate had she given in to her inclinations.
In the uncongenial surroundings of the narrow, red-brick terraces of urban Manchester, Charlotte began the first draft of her new novel in her customary fashion, using a pencil to write in little square paper books which she had to hold close to her eyes because of her shortsightedness.4 She wrote steadily for the five weeks she remained in Manchester, her work providing a welcome relief from anxiety about her father’s slow progress. Mr Wilson had expressed confidence from the start, however, and five days after the operation Patrick’s bandages were removed. He could only see dimly but ‘Mr Wilson seemed perfectly satisfied, and said all was right.’ Two weeks later Patrick’s sight was still weak and his eyes sore, but he was able to sit up for most of the day in his darkened room. By 22 September, after agitating for over three weeks, Charlotte was finally given permission by Mr Wilson to dismiss the nurse, whom she had found ‘too obsequious &c. and not I should think to be much trusted’.5 Within a week they were at home, their release hastened by Mr Wilson’s departure for Scotland. Once on familiar territory, Patrick rapidly regained his strength and, to his infinite joy, gradually recovered his sight. ‘Through divine mercy, and the skill of the surgeon, as well as my D[ea]r Ch[arlotte]’s attention, and the assiduity of the nurse –’, he recorded in the margin of his Modern Domestic Medicine, ‘after a year of nearly total
Once at home – and relieved to find th
at there had been no crisis with Branwell in her absence – Charlotte pressed on with her novel. As the work progressed, her interest grew and by the time she had got Jane to Thornfield Hall, she could not stop writing. Harriet Martineau, repeating what Charlotte herself had told her, described how she was completely caught up in the story.
On she went, writing incessantly for three weeks; by which time she had carried her heroine away from Thornfield, and was herself in a fever, which compelled her to pause. The rest was written with less vehemence, and with more anxious care. The world adds, with less vigour and interest.8
Remembering that her previous attempt to make her hero a son of Adam, sharing Adam’s doom, had signally failed to attract a publisher’s attention, she deliberately reverted to ‘the wild wonderful and thrilling – the strange, startling and harrowing’.9 The inspiration for Rochester’s mad wife, locked up in the attics of Thornfield Hall, came from a number of sources, including a local story of a house on the borders of the parishes of Haworth and Oakworth where, according to the Oakworth curate, James Chesterton Bradley, the insane wife of the owner was kept incarcerated. Her depiction of the nature of Bertha’s madness, with its venom and violence directed chiefly against her husband, seems to have owed at least something to Ellen Nussey’s confidences about her brother George. Recently confined in a private asylum near York run by the enlightened Dr Belcombe, George’s condition varied considerably. He was visited by Ellen just at the time Charlotte was writing the Thornfield chapters and her account of his behaviour obviously intrigued Charlotte: ‘[h]is delusion is one of the most painful kind for his relations – how strange that in his eye affection should be
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