The general state of ill health at least provided Charlotte with an excuse to cry off her trip to London with the Kay Shuttleworths. ‘I cannot say that I regret having missed this ordeal’, Charlotte wrote of Sir James’s plan to spend a week travelling down to London via the houses of his friends and relations. ‘I would as lief have walked amongst red-hot ploughshares’. The only thing she did regret was the missed opportunity to attend the Royal Literary Fund Society Dinner. As a woman she was ineligible to attend the actual dinner, but through the kindness of her father’s friend John Driver, she had obtained a ticket for the Ladies’ Gallery, where she would have been able to hear the after-dinner speeches of the great literati and artists, including Thackeray and Dickens. ‘I don’t think all London can afford another sight to me so interesting’, Charlotte sighed to Ellen.29
By the middle of May, Patrick was well enough to be left and was insistent that Charlotte should not defer her visit any longer. Reluctantly, therefore, she arranged to travel down to London on 23 May but, at the last minute, was reprieved again by a sudden and severe relapse in Sir James’s health. Terrified that his literary prize might escape him, Sir James wrote two notes to Charlotte from his sickbed claiming a promise from her that she would wait till he was better and not allow anyone else ‘“to introduce me,” as he says, “into the Oceanic life of London.”’ The promise was willingly given but Charlotte gratefully seized on the fact that his doctors had prohibited company and conversation as an excuse for avoiding the visit altogether. She wrote to Lady Kay Shuttleworth, a less formidable and more tractable person than her husband, to tell her that ‘My visit – I have decided in my own mind – must be postponed indefinitely;’ adding, as if to forestall argument, ‘I feel sure that in this decision I shall have your concurrence.’30
Once more then I settle myself down in the quietude of Haworth Parsonage, with books for my household companions, and an occasional letter for a visitor – a mute society but neither quarrelsome, nor vulgarizing nor unimproving.31
If there was relief in avoiding the Kay Shuttleworths and their introduction to London society, there was also inevitably disappointment and the threat of encroaching depression. A letter from Williams, complaining of being chained to his desk at Cornhill during the warm spring days, prompted a sad reply.
It is a pity to think of you all toiling at your desks in such genial weather as this. For my part I am free to walk on the moors – but when I go out there alone – everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening – My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my/ mind: once I loved it – now I dare not read it – and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency – but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness nor
In such a mood, it was fortunate that Charlotte still had her friends at Smith, Elder & Co. Learning from Williams that Charlotte had had to cancel her London visit, George Smith persuaded his mother to invite her to stay with them at their new home at No. 76, Gloucester Terrace in Hyde Park Gardens. There was a world of difference between the prospect of staying with the Smiths, where she would be comfortably protected and allowed to do as she wished, and staying with the Kay Shuttleworths who only wanted to show her off to London society. Having given her promise to Sir James, however, Charlotte had great difficulty in keeping faith. Writing to Mrs Smith on 25 May, she explained her predicament but said that if she did go to the Kay Shuttleworths she would only do so for a few days and then would be ‘excessively disposed, and probably profoundly thankful to subside into any quiet corner of your drawing-room, where I might find a chair of suitable height’. Enclosing a pair of white knitted baby-socks, which she had begun during her last visit and only just finished, Charlotte remarked, ‘I am sorry you have changed your residence as I shall now again lose my way in going up and down stairs, and stand in great tribulation, contemplating several doors, and not knowing which to open.’33
Despite telling Mrs Smith she could not make any plans for at least a fortnight or three weeks, only five days later Charlotte was comfortably ensconced in Gloucester Terrace. The day before setting off she had written to Lady Kay Shuttleworth to make her excuses for going back on her promise. ‘I am summoned to London to-morrow’, she declared, as though she had been compelled to go, ‘on a little business which it seems cannot well be deferred.’ She would be staying with her publisher, whose address she gave, ‘on condition of being allowed to be very quiet, and not taken into company’, and she would call on the Kay Shuttleworths before she returned to Yorkshire.34 If she had hoped to escape Sir James’s clutches, she was mistaken. Before she had been three full days in London, Sir James had called twice and his wife once: to Charlotte’s ‘great horror’ he talked of taking her to Hampton Court and Windsor – ‘God knows how I shall get on –’, Charlotte wrote in despair to Ellen, ‘I perfectly dread it.’35
Charlotte’s ‘little matters of business to transact’, it need hardly be said, were simply a convenient excuse and had not really required her presence; she had her dividends on her money in the Funds to sort out at the bank and a power of attorney to arrange so that she would not be required to do this in person in future. The only other business which could lay claim to her attention was the publication of the first cheap edition of Jane Eyre which Smith, Elder & Co. had launched in a single volume at the beginning of May. Charlotte had seen and approved an early copy then, so there was nothing to be done in relation to this ‘business’ either.36
Nor was the visit as quiet as Charlotte suggested. In the first three days alone she went to the opera, where she was evidently more impressed by the elegant dresses of the lords and ladies in the audience than by the music, to the exhibition at the Royal Academy, where she particularly admired Landseer’s portrait of Wellington on the field of Waterloo and ‘The Last Man’, ‘a grand, wonderful picture’ by her childhood favourite John Martin, and to the Zoological Gardens, for which the secretary had sent her an honorary ticket of admission. This last excursion seems to have interested her more than the others, for she gave her father a detailed account of the ‘inexpressible noises’ made by the American birds, the great Ceylon toads ‘not much smaller than Flossy’ and a cobra with ‘the eyes and face of a fiend’.37
There were plenty of other outings which George Smith, with his customary good humour and perception, organized to please his visitor. On one occasion he took her to the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons so that she could indulge her lifelong interest in politics. Unable to sit with her, he arranged that she had only to look at him when she got tired and he would come up and fetch her away. George Smith waited and waited for a signal: ‘There were many eyes, they all seemed to be flashing signals to me, but much as I admired Miss Brontës eyes I could not distinguish them from the others.’ Eventually, fearing that he must have missed the signal and realizing that he was probably causing quite a stir by staring into the Ladies’ Gallery, he went round to collect her and apologized for keeping her waiting. Charlotte replied, ‘I made no signal, I did not wish to come away’, and, knowing her handsome host’s liking for a pretty face, added, ‘Perhaps there were other signals from the Gallery.’38
On Sunday, 9 June, George Smith took her to the Chapel Royal, where
he could be fairly sure that she would catch sight of her hero, the Duke of Wellington. As luck would have it, he was there and Charlotte was able to see in the flesh the man whose exploits had inspired her childhood writings and, indirectly, been the cause of her presence in London as an author. Somewhat tamely, all she had to say of him was that ‘he is a real grand old man’, even though her escort had indulged her to the extent of following the duke out of the chapel and so arranging their walk that she met him twice on his way back to Apsley House. Another Sunday was spent less successfully at a Friends’ Meeting House where, displaying that intolerance and sense of the absurd which had marked her perception of Dissenting worship since childhood, she was afforded more amusement than edification. Her host apparently had the good grace to be embarrassed.39
Charlotte was also reintroduced to literary society. G.H. Lewes was invited to lunch one day, having missed the dinner on Charlotte’s previous visit. This was the first occasion when George Smith witnessed ‘the fire concealed beneath her mildness’. Lewes, displaying that complete lack of understanding which had characterized his review of Shirley, had the indiscretion to say across the table, ‘There ought to be a bond of sympathy between us, Miss Brontë; for we have both written naughty books!’ ‘This fired the train with a vengeance, and an explosion followed’, George Smith remembered many years later. ‘I listened with mingled admiration and alarm to the indignant eloquence with which that impertinent remark was answered.’ When they parted at the end of the evening, they shook hands and Charlotte remarked, ‘We are friends now, are we not?’ alluding for the first time to Lewes’ shameful review of Shirley. ‘Were we not always, then?’ Lewes asked, still impervious to her feelings on that subject; ‘No! not always’, Charlotte replied significantly and without elaboration.40
To Ellen, Charlotte was more forthcoming, describing Lewes as ‘a man with both weaknesses and sins; but unless I err greatly the foundation of his nature is not bad’. Curiously – one might even say incomprehensibly – it was his appearance which told in his favour: ‘the aspect of Lewes’ face almost moves me to tears –’, she told Ellen, ‘it is so wonderfully like Emily – her eyes, her features – the very nose, the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead – even at moments the expression’.41 Lewes’ own cruelly dismissive description of Charlotte was worthy of the man who had been unable to see beyond the fact that the author of Shirley was a woman: ‘a little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid’.42
Another author whom Charlotte met on this visit was Julia Kavanagh, the twenty-five-year-old protegée of Williams, who supported herself and her mother by her writings. One cannot help wondering whether Charlotte herself perceived the strange reversal of roles that was now thrust upon her: whereas she had been the tiny trembling stranger looking up, physically and mentally, to Thackeray and Martineau, here she was, the grand literary lady, meeting the ‘little, almost dwarfish figure to which even I had to look down – not deformed – that is – not hunchbacked but long-armed and with a large head and (at first sight) a strange face. She met me half-frankly, half tremblingly.’ As they sat and talked in Julia Kavanagh’s ‘poor but clean and neat little lodging’, Charlotte was once again struck by a resemblance to the dead: ‘it was Martha Taylor in every lineament’.43
Williams, who had made the introduction at Miss Kavanagh’s request, saw a lot more of Charlotte during this visit than he had during her last. He attended a ball given by Mrs Smith at Gloucester Terrace with one of his sons and three of his daughters, the five of them creating something of a sensation with their good looks and graceful manners.44 But the highlight of the visit was, once again, a meeting with Thackeray. This time he made a private morning call at Gloucester Terrace and stayed above two hours alone with Charlotte and George Smith, who was an amused and perceptive witness of the ‘queer scene’ that occurred. ‘I was moved to speak to him of some of his short-comings (literary of course) one by one the faults came into my mind and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence – He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen – that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself.’ ‘She was angry with her favourites if their conduct or conversation fell below her ideal’, Thackeray acknowledged ruefully, while refusing to treat the subject with the seriousness Charlotte thought it deserved. ‘The truth is,’ George Smith declared,
Charlotte Brontës heroics roused Thackeray’s antagonism. He declined to pose on a pedestal for her admiration, and with characteristic contrariety of nature he seemed to be tempted to say the very things that set Charlotte Brontës teeth, so to speak, on edge, and affronted all her ideals. He insisted on discussing his books very much as a clerk in a bank would discuss the ledgers he had to keep for a salary. But all this was, on Thackeray’s part, an affectation: an affectation into which he was provoked by what he considered Charlotte Brontës high falutin’. Miss Brontë wanted to persuade him that he was a great man with a ‘mission;’ and Thackeray, with many wicked jests, declined to recognise the ‘mission.’45
The confrontation ended in ‘decent amity’ and on 12 June, Charlotte was invited to dinner at Thackeray’s house in Young Street. The momentousness of the occasion was felt by everyone present, from Thackeray himself, anxiously pacing the floor before Charlotte’s arrival, to his young daughters in a frenzy of excitement at the thought of meeting ‘Jane Eyre’ herself. Thackeray had invited a brood of women novelists to meet the literary lioness: Mrs Crowe, who specialized in writing on the supernatural, Mrs Proctor, wife of the poet ‘Barry Cornwall’ and mother of the poetess Adelaide Proctor, who was also present.46
Anne Thackeray, then only a girl, described how they watched the carriage arrive, Thackeray himself go out into the hall to welcome his guests, the door opening wide, his re-entrance with George Smith and, between them, ‘a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, pale, with fair straight hair, and steady eyes. She may be a little over thirty; she is dressed in a little barège dress, with a pattern of faint green moss. She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness.’47 Mrs Brookfield, a society hostess of less romantic inclinations, noted that Charlotte, ‘a timid little woman with a firm mouth, did not possess a large enough quantity of hair to enable her to form a plait, so therefore wore a very obvious crown of brown silk’. The hairpiece was a new one which Charlotte had commissioned Ellen Nussey to buy in April in preparation for the London trip: though it might have seemed a good idea at the time, it did not create the desired effect.48
The hairpiece was but one source of amusement for the gathering at Thackeray’s. After the solemnity and breathless excitement of Charlotte’s entrance, the announcement of dinner came as a relief: ‘we all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm’, Anne Thackeray reported, ‘for, genius though she may be, Miss Brontë can barely reach his elbow’. As they walked out together, Thackeray unwisely addressed her as ‘Currer Bell’. Charlotte’s response was typically prickly. ‘She tossed her head and said “She believed there were books being published by a person named Currer Bell … but the person he was talking to was Miss Brontë – and she saw no connection between the two”’.49
Throughout the dinner Charlotte sat gazing at Thackeray ‘with kindling eyes of interest; lighting up with a sort of illumination every now and then as she answered him’. Afterwards, the ladies left the gentlemen to their port and returned to the drawing room, where everyone waited for the brilliant conversation that never began at all. Charlotte herself, without George Smith or Thackeray himself to guard her, retreated into a corner of the study and sat on the sofa exchanging a low word now and then with the only person with whom she felt comfortable, Miss Truelock, the governess. Eventually, realizing that brilliance was not to be forthcoming, Mrs Brookfield leant forward with a little commonplace and asked, ‘Do you like London, Miss Brontë?’ There was a short silence while Charlotte considered the question, then, ‘very gravely’, she replied, ‘Yes and No.’
That put the seal on the ev
ening. The disappointed ladies grew bored and restless. Thackeray himself, oppressed by the gloom and silence, could scarcely contain his discomfort and, as Charlotte left, he quietly crept out of the room, out of the house and retired to the masculine comforts of his club. As George Smith later commented, the failure of the evening was a singular illustration of Charlotte’s want of social gifts and Thackeray’s impatience of social discomfort.50 Though the ladies who had spent ‘one of the dullest evenings of their lives’ made much capital out of relating the anecdote for years afterwards at Charlotte’s expense, it has to be said that Thackeray’s choice of guests showed a remarkable insensitivity to Charlotte’s character and feelings. Having read her books and met her several times, he knew her to be hypersensitive about her appearance, her lack of social graces and her provincialism. He also knew that she was painfully shy in company and was only moved to speak on intellectual subjects or on her own high-flown ideas about the writer’s calling. Nevertheless, he exposed her to a group of society women, mere dabblers in the world of literature, whose interests and lives had nothing in common with her own. The failure of the dinner party was therefore as much his fault as Charlotte’s.
On the way home from Thackeray’s, Charlotte proved that she had kept her eyes open even if she had not said much, by suddenly leaning forward, placing her hands on George Smith’s knees and saying, ‘She would make you a very nice wife.’ ‘Whom do you mean?’ asked George Smith. ‘Oh! you know whom I mean’, Charlotte replied. She had noticed that he had been very taken with the charms of Adelaide Proctor and she knew her companion well enough to know that he was merely bluffing when he pretended not to know what she meant.51
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