After an early dinner, which Miss Martineau had made a condition of the visit so that she could get her delicate guest home before nightfall, the ladies returned to The Knoll where the proofs of Miss Martineau’s new book had just arrived. This was her Letters on the Law of Man’s Social Nature and Development, which she had co-written with Henry Atkinson, and it was the first exposition of’ avowed Atheism and Materialism’ Charlotte had ever read. Miss Martineau read some of the Letters to Charlotte, and though she strongly disagreed with their doctrine, she was impressed with ‘the tone of calm power’ in the writing. Her view of the completed book, given privately to James Taylor, was one of instinctive horror. To one who had lost so many members of her family, the ‘unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a Future Life’ was a prospect not to be borne. ‘The strangest thing is that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank – to receive this bitter bereavement as great gain – to welcome this unutterable desolation as a state of pleasant freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do it if he could?’18
It was hardly surprising that Charlotte felt Miss Martineau had lost her way in writing this sort of book, or that she urged her to return to novel-writing and to produce another Deerbrook. On another occasion, Miss Martineau read the opening chapter of her Introduction to the History of the Peace out loud to her guest. Its subject was Wellington and the Peninsular War and, after two or three pages, Miss Martineau was amazed when Charlotte looked up at her, stole her hand into hers and said, with tears running down her cheeks, ‘Oh! I do thank you! Oh! we are of one mind! Oh! I thank you for this justice to the man.’ As Miss Martineau remarked, ‘I saw at once there was a touch of idolatry in the case, but it was a charming enthusiasm.’19
On the evening before her departure, Charlotte finally persuaded Miss Martineau to try the experiment of mesmerizing her. Harriet Martineau was one of the most vocal exponents of this nineteenth-century fashion for relieving mental and physical illness through hypnotism, but even she was reluctant to try its effects on Charlotte, in whose nerves she had no confidence. Charlotte was ‘strangely pertinacious’, however, and on that final Sunday, when Miss Martineau could no longer plead her own tiredness as an excuse, she insisted that the experiment should be made. They began the process, but at the moment when Charlotte cried out that she was under the influence, Miss Martineau’s own nerve failed her and she abandoned the attempt, softening the blow to Charlotte by telling her that in time she might prove to be an excellent subject.20
The visit passed off remarkably well, considering the disparate natures of the two literary lions. ‘I trust to have derived benefit from my visit to Miss Martineau’, Charlotte wrote to Williams, on her return, ‘– a visit more interesting I certainly never paid: if self-sustaining strength can be acquired by example, I ought to have got good – but my nature is not hers – I could not make it so though I were to submit it seventy times seven to the furnace of affliction and discipline it for an age under the hammer and anvil of toil and self-sacrifice.’21 However much she had enjoyed her visit, Charlotte had no wish to extend it beyond a week: Miss Martineau had relatives and friends coming for Christmas so there would be no more delightful tête-à-têtes by the fireside, Miss Martineau talking and Charlotte sitting mute. The Kay Shuttleworths pressed her to stay with them, but Charlotte made her excuses and went instead to Birstall and the more congenial company of Ellen Nussey, leaving her father to spend Christmas alone at Haworth.22
Charlotte returned home on New Year’s Eve, relieved to find her father well, but already beginning to be oppressed with sickness and headache herself as she struggled to come to terms with the unaccustomed silence of the house. Two packets ‘directed in two well-known hands’ from Cornhill were waiting for her and provided a much-needed distraction; ‘– You are all very – very good’, she wrote gratefully to Williams.23 In one of the packets was a small pile of newspaper reviews of the cheap edition of Wuthering Heights & Agnes Grey, which had been published on 10 December. The general tone of the reviews was remarkably similar: all were more interested in the Biographical Notice than in the reprinted novels and many of them, quite rightly, took exception to Charlotte’s blanket assertion that the critics had failed to do her sisters’ novels justice, quoting their own earlier reviews to prove the point.24
On 1 January 1851, Charlotte seems to have given herself a mental shaking and made a New Year’s resolution to reply to all her letters. Williams and James Taylor each received a measured appreciation of her visit to Miss Martineau, and Mrs Gaskell a letter of thanks for sending Charlotte a copy of her Christmas book, The Moorland Cottage, ‘which I find to be as sweet, as pure, as fresh as an unopened morning daisy’.25 A humorous letter from George Smith, bemoaning his difficulties with Thackeray, who was still promising ‘really to set about writing’ the Christmas book whose publication had already been officially announced, prompted a longer response in like vein. ‘Allow me to suggest an appropriate revenge’, Charlotte told him:
Put out of your head the cherub-vision of the ‘innocent and happy Publishers’ sitting on clouds in Heaven and thence regarding with mild complacency the tortures of perjured authors – descend from this height – turn author yourself and write ‘The Lion’s History of the Man’ or ‘A Revelation of the crimes of popular A—th—rs by a spirited P—sh—r’. Here is an idea which, properly handled, might ‘mark an epoch in the history of Modern Literature’.26
As had become a habit over the last year, Charlotte sent George Smith’s original letter to Ellen Nussey, telling her to read it ‘because it gives a very fair notion both of his temper and mind’. Ellen, of course, immediately perceived the undercurrent of affection beneath the easy badinage, prompting Charlotte once again to have to deny that she was about to marry her publisher. In so doing, however, she tacitly admitted that she must have contemplated the prospect. ‘Were there no vast barrier of age, fortune &c. there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which now are impossible’, she told Ellen. ‘Meantime I am content to have him as a friend and pray God to continue to me the commonsense to look on one so young so rising and so hopeful in no other light.’27
Ellen herself was now being pursued by John Taylor, who, as Charlotte had predicted, had suddenly discovered that he, too, wanted a wife when his brother Joe had married Amelia Ringrose. Charlotte ‘loudly applauded’ Ellen’s resolution not to let herself be fooled by his attentions: ‘All you say about John T— is written with capital sense – stick to it – if he fails to come on like a man – he is not in the slightest degree worthy of you – and therefore not to be regretted.’28 At nearly thirty-five, both friends were enjoying an unexpected renaissance of the flirtations of their youth.
Charlotte’s circle of correspondents had now far outgrown the usual letters from Cornhill, Ellen Nussey and Laetitia Wheelwright. A notice in the Bradford Observer that Miss Brontë had lately been on a visit to Miss Martineau at Ambleside prompted her old schoolfellow, Amelia Walker, to get in touch. She had recently returned from the Continent and was now at Torquay, from where she wrote ‘a longish letter – full of claptrap sentiment and humbugging attempts at fine writing – in each production the old trading spirit peeps out – she asks for autographs – … specimens of [Miss Martineau’s] handwriting and Wordsworth’s & Southey’s and my own –’.29
Other correspondents were complete strangers. One, signing himself ‘A Mountaineer of the Wild West’, had gathered from her Biographical Notice that she had decided not to republish The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and urged her to reconsider. ‘It may be quite true that the subject was not of natural growth in Acton Bell’s mind; of this you alone can judge … – but it is none the less true that the book throughout tells of a mind whose productions we cannot afford to lose.’ The book, he declared, ‘bears the stamp of great genius’, its close was ‘instinct with deep feeling’ and it was ‘full of a quiet reflective power, that the titanic energy of Ellis Bell
did not admit of’.30 By a curious coincidence, another man describing himself as a ‘mountaineer’, John Abbott of McGill College, Montreal, wrote to Charlotte from Canada in February. All the tales of the moors and mountains by the Bells had been his special favourites long before he had discovered the identity of the authors, he declared. He wrote, however, because he was ‘intimately acquainted with both your father and mother with the latter more especially
The problem of her next book was weighing heavily on Charlotte’s conscience. She had still made no real start on it, more than a year after the publication of Shirley, and was haunted by the fear that her dilatoriness disappointed both her father and Cornhill. In an attempt to appease them both, therefore, she suggested yet again that a revision of The Professor might serve. Williams gently rejected the proposal once more, adding that Smith, Elder & Co. were quite prepared to wait as long as it took for her new book. His ‘kind and friendly letter’ gave Charlotte both ‘heartfelt satisfaction – and such a feeling of relief as it would be difficult to express in words’.32 The sincerity of this brief note was in marked contrast to the flippant tone in which she wrote to George Smith, explaining that The Professor had now had the honour of being rejected nine times by the trade, three of the rejections going to his own share. Comparing her own affection for it to that of ‘a doting parent towards an idiot child’, she refused to allow George Smith to take the manuscript into his custody. ‘Ah – No!’ she exclaimed:
His modest merit shrinks at the thought of going alone and unbefriended to a spirited Publisher. Perhaps with slips of him you might light an occasional cigar – or you might remember to lose him some day – and a Cornhill functionary would gather him up and consign him to the repositories of waste paper, and thus he would prematurely find his way to the ‘buttermen’ and trunkmakers. No – I have put him by and locked him up – not indeed in my desk, where I could not tolerate the monotony of his demure quaker countenance, but in a cupboard by himself.33
George Smith, like Williams, was understanding and encouraging about Charlotte’s inability to take up her work again. He offered her two invitations for the summer, one to accompany him on a trip down the Rhine and the other to stay with him in London. The very hint of the continental trip had been enough to throw Charlotte into a fever, but she was wise enough to see that it was unlikely to come about: ‘all London would gabble like a countless host of geese’ and Smith’s mother and sisters would certainly step in to prevent it.34 The London invitation was a more practical proposition, but, as Charlotte pointed out from the bitterness of experience, ‘one can lay no plans three or four months beforehand’. ‘Besides –’…, she added in a lighter vein,
I don’t deserve to go to London; nobody merits a treat or a change less. I secretly think, on the contrary, I ought to be put in prison and kept on bread and water in solitary confinement without even a letter from Cornhill – till I had written a book.
The result of such treatment, she suggested, would either be a three-volume manuscript or else she would be in ‘a condition of intellect that would exempt me ever after from literary efforts and expectations’.35
In the light of her subsequent portrayal of George Smith and his mother in Villette, it is interesting that it was Smith himself who suggested to Charlotte that she might find a subject for her novel at his firm. ‘Do you know that the first part of your note is most dangerously suggestive?’ she asked him.
What a rich field of subject you point out in your allusions to Cornhill &c. – a field at which I myself should only have ventured to glance like the Serpent at Paradise; but when Adam himself opens the gates and shews the way in what can the honest Snake do but bend its crest in token of gratitude and glide rejoicingly through the aperture?
But – no: don’t be alarmed. You are all safe from Currer Bell – safe from his satire – safer from his eulogium. We cannot (or at least I cannot) write of our acquaintance with the consciousness that others will recognize their portraits, or that they themselves will know the hand which has sketched them.36
For the moment, however, Charlotte could not write at all and, nothing else being in prospect, she invited Ellen to Haworth in the second week of March to stay ‘just so long as you could comfortably bear the monotony’.37 A week into Ellen’s visit, Charlotte had a letter from Mrs Gaskell inviting her to stay in Manchester. Reluctantly turning the invitation down, Charlotte expressed the hope that Ellen would not leave her for some weeks: ‘her attentions – her affection – her very presence give me a sort of new life – a support and repose for which I cannot be too thankful. Then it does me good to have to look after her comfort in return, to be called on to amuse her and make her happy; my rest at night has been calmer and more continuous since she came – she benefits me indeed in many ways.’38
During Ellen’s stay, Charlotte received an overture of friendship from Sydney Dobell, the twenty-seven-year-old poet, author of The Roman, who had reviewed the Brontës’ novels in the Palladium the previous year. In view of his appreciation of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte had requested that he should be sent a copy of the new single-volume edition when it was published in December. The book and Charlotte’s covering letter took three months to arrive, causing Dobell to write in frustration and anxiety lest his unavoidable failure to reply had caused offence. ‘Surely we are marked out for friendship’, Dobell had stated, pointing out that they were both young, that as unknowns they had both achieved success with their first literary works and that much was expected of them in future. ‘Friendship … among those who share the same gifts, responsibilities and dangers becomes almost a duty of self-preservation’, he announced, adding an invitation to visit him in Gloucestershire, where the serenity and mildness of the countryside might restore her health. Apologizing for seeming over-familiar in a letter, he urged her to remember, ‘I have long been a brother to you in my thoughts’, and that his words unconsciously betrayed him.39 Charlotte’s response was cool but not unfriendly. ‘I feel sure you must be some years my junior, because it is evident you still view life from a point I have long out-travelled. I believe there is a morning light for you on the world … I am a journeyer at noon-tide.’ If ever they met, he must regard her as ‘a grave sort of elder sister’. Dobell replied with the gallant comment, ‘That you are not “young” I cannot believe, even on your own testimony. The heart of Jane Eyre will never grow old’.40
Another friendship which had been almost entirely nourished by correspondence was that with James Taylor, the managing clerk of Smith, Elder & Co. Out of the blue, however, Charlotte learnt from George Smith that Taylor was going out to India to take charge of the firm’s interests in Bombay. Charlotte’s opinion of Taylor had always been equivocal. His letters had been a source of interest and amusement which she had missed when deprived of them, but Taylor himself she had instinctively found repulsive. As early as December 1849 she had complained to Ellen that he was ‘of the Helstone order of men – rigid, despotic and self-willed … he has a determined, dreadful nose in the midd[l]e of his face which when poked into my countenance cuts into my soul like iron.’ In January of this year, 1851, Charlotte had defended herself against Ellen’s charge that George Smith might propose to her by declaring that there was more likelihood of her marrying ‘the little man’, as she always referred to Taylor, ‘if “matches” were at all in question, which they are not’. ‘He still sends his little newspaper’, she told Ellen,
– and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgement and knowledge, worthy to have been the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please – but the fact is there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired/ friend, which adds a foot to
his stature – turns his sandy locks, dark and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my estimation41
As soon as she learnt of his going abroad, Charlotte wrote to wish him health and prosperity in his undertaking, but her letter crossed in the post with one from him requesting permission to call at Haworth on 4 April, on his return journey from Scotland.42
As her earlier comments had indicated, Charlotte was well aware that the reason for this visit was to make her a formal offer of marriage, the third she had received. It was one she could not accept.
An absence of five years – a
The very things which Charlotte had tried so many times to convince Ellen were all that were necessary for a happy marriage were not enough for Charlotte herself. It was not simply that she did not and could not love James Taylor, but that she had an overpowering physical aversion to him. It would have been strange for a woman so sensitive to her own plainness to reject a man purely on the grounds of his appearance: what lay at the bottom of that aversion was deeply revealing. Small in stature, red-headed, with his ‘determined, dreadful nose’, James Taylor reminded her irresistibly of Branwell. It says much about Charlotte’s relationship with her brother that this was the only occasion on which a resemblance to one of her dead siblings did not predispose Charlotte in that person’s favour but had the opposite effect. ‘I saw him very near and once through my glass –’, she wrote to Ellen on the evening of Taylor’s visit, ‘the resemblance to Branwell struck me forcibly – it is marked.’44 As a reason for rejecting Taylor, Charlotte could not even admit this to herself, let alone anyone else. A couple of weeks later, when she had had time to consider her response more fully, she offered Ellen another explanation.
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