I am sure he has estimable and sterling qualities – but with every disposition – with every wish – with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit – it was impossible to me in my inmost heart to
Interestingly, Patrick took James Taylor’s part against his daughter.
I discover with some surprise that Papa has taken a decided liking to Mr Taylor. The marked kindness of his manner to the little man when he bid him good bye – exhorting him to be ‘true to himself his Country and his God’ and wishing him all good wishes – struck me with some astonishment at the time – and whenever he has alluded to him since it has been with significant eulogy. When I alleged that he was ‘no gentleman’ – he seemed out of patience with me for the objection.46
Neither his daughter nor her suitor had offered him an explanation for Taylor’s sudden visit to Haworth but, with his usual penetration in such matters, Patrick had seen its purpose. ‘I have told him nothing – yet he seems to be au fait to the whole business –’, Charlotte complained; ‘I could think at some moments – his guesses go farther than mine. I believe he thinks a prospective union, deferred for 5 years, with such a decorous reliable personage would be a very proper and advisable affair –’. Only the previous autumn, Charlotte had dismissed gossip about her imminent marriage as ‘twaddle’, alleging that her father found ‘the least allusion’ to the idea of her marrying ‘most offensive’.47 His reaction to a genuine offer of marriage belies this statement. Clearly he was still concerned about his daughter’s future: in five years’ time he would probably be dead and it would be a comfort to him in the meantime to know that when Taylor returned from India, his daughter would be provided with a decent home, income and husband. The prospect held no fears for him and he had no intention of standing in the way of her making an advantageous marriage. He even told Charlotte that if she married and left him he would give up housekeeping and go into lodgings. As his daughter refused to confide in him, he could only guess her intentions and hint his approbation. ‘I ask no questions and he asks me none,’ Charlotte told Ellen, ‘and if he did, I should have nothing to tell him – nor he me for he & Mr T— were never long enough alone together to have had any communication on the matter’.48
James Taylor gave Charlotte a book at parting, requesting that she would keep it for his sake and adding that he hoped she would continue to write to him in India: ‘your letters have been and will be a greater refreshment than you can think or I can tell’, he had told her sadly as he left. ‘And so
As if to emphasize the fact that in turning down James Taylor’s offer of marriage Charlotte had committed herself to a lonely and uncertain future, on the very evening of his departure, Patrick was struck down with a sudden sickness and she had to put him to bed early. When he at last fell into a doze she left him: ‘I came down to the dining-room with a sense of weight, fear and desolation hard to express and harder to endure.’ ‘A wish that you were with me did cross my mind’, she told Ellen, ‘but I repulsed it as a most selfish wish – … to think that
Patrick continued unwell for some time, feeling feverish and sickly and, unusually for him, not getting up for breakfast. It was only when it became clear that the illness was an inflammation of the stomach, rather than a recurrence of his dreaded bronchitis, that Charlotte’s anxiety receded a little.51 That her fears were understandably exaggerated is suggested by the fact that Patrick himself was still campaigning vigorously on several fronts. On 12 February 1851 he had written to the General Board of Health, pointing out that it was long since he had first applied for assistance in gaining a supply of pure water for the township: ‘We are greatly surprized and grieved that nothing has yet been done towards the furtherance of this desirable end’, he complained. It was not simply that London was being dilatory, however, for opposition to the inspector’s recommendations had been quietly gathering momentum. In response to a public meeting at the end of March, Patrick had to request the removal from the scheme of several outlying farms because the expense of supplying them with piped water was too high and also that the churchyard should not be closed until a new burial ground had been found to replace it.52
If Patrick had hoped to unite the people of Haworth behind him by making these concessions, he failed signally. Within days of the meeting, several of the wealthiest and most powerful inhabitants – most of them members of Patrick’s own congregation – were writing behind his back to seek exemption from the new water rate which would have to be imposed to pay for the reforms. Patrick, ever the champion of the underdog, was almost driven to despair. ‘There has already been long, and tedious delay –’, he thundered,
there has been a deal of sickness amongst us, and there is now a great want of pure water, which ills might have been prevented, or palliated, had the remedial measures we hope for, been duly applied. A few interested individuals, might try to throw difficulties in the way, but by the large majority, consisting chiefly of the working people, there is an anxious desire that the work should on the earliest opportunity be done –
He closed his letter with a peremptory ‘Please to send me an early answer.’53 Patrick was also at loggerheads with the Church Pastoral Aid Society which had effectively paid for him to have a curate since 1838. Despite numerous letters, however, they had not confirmed the grant for the forthcoming year and Patrick was deeply concerned. Without the grant he could not pay Arthur Bell Nicholls’ salary and without him he could not perform his parish duties. It was to be nearly two months more, causing Patrick ‘long, and powerful suspense’, before he finally heard that his grant had been renewed. Even then, it seems it was largely owing to the intervention of the Reverend A. P. Irvine, the district secretary based in Manchester. Writing to thank him on 15 April, Patrick announced that he had taken heart from the renewal of his grant and had also applied for a lay reader with the object of rooting out reactionary High Church Puseyism in the chapelry. Displaying all his old energy and vigour, he declared:
I thoroughly detest it both root and branch, Yea, in all its bearings and habits, whether under the pretence, of decency, it appears in formal dresses, or with the plea of conscience, it talks of carrying out the Liturgy – (in order that it may carry in the Breviary) or whether it, may shew itself in candles or in crosses, or in vigils or in fastings, whatever colour or form it may assume, it is equally odious to me –
Patrick was therefore seeking ‘a judicious, pious, Evangelical young man’ who, ‘by entering into every house and doing his best, might, under providence, be an instrument of much good, and no evil’. Though he still took tw
o services every Sunday himself, ‘I am unable to run over these hills, as I once did – And my Curate though an active and diligent young man, cannot do all that ought to be done.’54 Though Patrick’s health might be failing in this, his seventy-fifth year, his spirit was as strong as ever.
Charlotte, on the other hand, was becoming more and more miserable at home. On 12 April, she turned down an invitation to stay at Hunsworth with Joe and Amelia Taylor on the grounds that ‘I don’t like to carry low spirits from home’. As this had been her main excuse for travelling away from Haworth in the past, it seems more likely that Charlotte simply could not face the prospect of staying with Amelia who, after a fraught pregnancy, was not far off her confinement. The fuss and concern over every little alteration in Amelia’s condition was more than Charlotte could bear and she had once or twice been provoked to a sharp retort in private to Ellen.55 This suspicion is confirmed by Charlotte’s positively joyful acceptance of an invitation from Mrs Smith only five days later.
Before I received your note, I was nursing a comfortable and complacent conviction that I had quite made up my mind not to go to London this year: the Great Exhibition was nothing – only a series of bazaars under a magnified hothouse – and I myself was in a pharisaical state of superiority to temptation. But Pride has its fall. I read your invitation and immediately felt a great wish to descend from my stilts. Not to conceal the truth – I should like to come and see you extremely well.56
Writing to inform George Smith of her ‘somewhat egregious failure’ to stay at home until she had written her next book, she confessed, ‘One can’t help it. One does not profess to be made out of granite.’ She also admitted to being somewhat nettled – even a little pained – by Mrs Gaskell’s and Harriet Martineau’s insistence on treating her like an invalid and securing her invitations to stay in the milder climate of southern counties with ‘kind but misled strangers’. ‘Why may not I be well like other people?’ Charlotte asked him. ‘I think I am reasonably well; not strong or capable of much continuous exertion, (which I do not remember that I ever was) and apt no doubt to look haggard if over-fatigued – but otherwise I have no ailment and I maintain that I am well, and hope (D.V.) to continue so awhile.’ Despite her constant exhortations to the gentlemen of Smith, Elder & Co. that they should only write when they had time, Charlotte could not resist a sally that revealed just how dependent she was on their letters: ‘Please to tell Mr Williams that I dare on no account come to London till he is friends with me, which I am sure he cannot be, as I have never heard from him for nearly three months.’57
In preparation for her London visit Charlotte again renewed her wardrobe. On her next trip to Leeds, Ellen was commissioned to ask in the stores for a selection of black and white lace cloaks and some small size chemisettes for every day and best wear to be sent to Haworth so that she could make her choice in the privacy of her own home. Having chosen a black lace shawl, however, she discovered that when she wore it against her black satin dress the beauty of the lace was lost and it looked brown and rusty. She therefore wrote to Mr Stocks, the storekeeper, who obligingly sent to London for a white replacement. ‘The price is less – being but says he would have lent me a sovereign if he had known. I believe if you had been there you would have forced me to to get into debt/.’59
In view of her extensive preparations, it was therefore in an ironic mood that she told George Smith, ‘Of course I am not in the least looking forwards to going to London – nor reckoning on it – nor allowing the matter to take any particular place in my thoughts: no: I am very sedulously cool and nonchalant.’60 Even though the visit was again to be ‘quiet and obscure as usual (any other style of procedure disagreeing with me mentally and corporeally)’, Charlotte was suffering from extremities of nerves which manifested themselves in headaches and occasional sickness.61
Charlotte’s visit to London was fixed for Thursday, 29 May – just nine days after James Taylor’s departure for India. He had written requesting a last interview in London, but Charlotte had refused, saying that her visit was already fixed for June ‘and therefore in all human probability we shall see each other no more’.62 Nevertheless, rumours were rife that Charlotte was going to London to get engaged or even married – rumours to which even Patrick, Martha and Tabby subscribed, much to her irritation.
In the event, Charlotte travelled to London on Wednesday, the day before she had originally planned, arriving at ten p.m. at Euston station where George Smith and his mother were waiting for her. The alteration in the plans had been made so that the next day she could attend one of Thackeray’s lectures on ‘The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century’.63
The lecture proved to be one of the high points of Charlotte’s visit. She wrote enthusiastically to both her father and Ellen, describing the experience in unusual detail. The very saloon in which the lecture was held was splendid: ‘the walls were all painted and gilded the benches were sofas stuffed and cushioned and covered with blue damask, the audience was composed of the very élite of London Society – Duchesses were there by the score –’. ‘I did not at all expect that the great Lecturer would know me or notice me under these circumstances – with admiring Duchesses and Countesses seated in rows before him – but he met me as I entered – shook hands – took me to his Mother whom I had not before seen and introduced me.’64 What Charlotte did not tell her father or Ellen was that the introduction had caused her immense embarrassment and anger. With his usual high spirits and thoughtlessness, Thackeray had said in a loud voice ‘audible over half the room’, ‘Mother, you must allow me to introduce you to Jane Eyre.’ Naturally, heads had turned in every row and everyone stared at the ‘disconcerted little lady’ who grew confused and angry when she realized every eye was upon her. During the lecture itself Charlotte was too absorbed to notice the attention she herself was receiving; amidst all his grand surroundings, Thackeray ‘just got up and spoke with as much simplicity and ease as if he had been speaking to a few friends by his own fireside’. The lecture was ‘truly good’, painstakingly compiled, finished without being studied and enlivened with quiet humour and graphic force.65
At its close, Charlotte’s ordeal began. Someone came up behind her, leaned over and said, ‘Will you permit me, as a Yorkshireman to introduce myself to you?’ After a moment’s hesitation Charlotte recognized the Earl of Carlisle, who had the courtesy to enquire after her father, recalling the time they had shared an election platform at Haworth back in 1834, and begging to be remembered to him. Moments later, Richard Monckton Milnes, a writer, friend of Mrs Gaskell and Yorkshire Member of Parliament, introduced himself on the same grounds. He was followed by Dr Forbes, the London doctor whom Charlotte had consulted about Anne’s symptoms and who had sent her copies of his books: this was their first meeting, but, given their previous contacts, Charlotte could truthfully say he was someone ‘whom I was sincerely glad to see’. Thackeray himself accosted Charlotte again, demanding to know her opinion of the lecture, a request which left her tongue-tied with embarrassment. Mrs Smith, who had accompanied Charlotte to the lecture, was making her customary surveillance on her guest’s behalf and was aware that while they talked the audience were gradually forming into two lines on each side of t
he aisle to the door. Realizing that the longer they delayed the worse the ordeal would become, Mrs Smith put her arm through Charlotte’s to steady her nerves and swept her, trembling, from the room.66
The next day Thackeray paid an afternoon call at 76, Gloucester Terrace. ‘I had a long talk with him/ and I think he knows me now a little better than he did’, Charlotte airily told Ellen. George Smith’s description of the visit was somewhat different. He had arrived home from work shortly after Thackeray was announced and entered the drawing room to discover a scene in full progress.
Thackeray was standing on the hearthrug, looking anything but happy. Charlotte Brontë stood close to him, with head thrown back and face white with anger. The first words I heard were, ‘No, Sir! If you had come to our part of the country in Yorkshire, what would you have thought of me if I had introduced you to my father, before a mixed company of strangers, as “Mr Warrington”?’ Thackeray replied, ‘No, you mean “Arthur Pendennis.”’ ‘No, I don’t mean Arthur Pendennis!’ retorted Miss Brontë; ‘I mean Mr Warrington, and Mr Warrington would not have behaved as you behaved to me yesterday.’ The spectacle of this little woman, hardly reaching to Thackeray’s elbow, but, somehow, looking stronger and fiercer than himself, and casting her incisive words at his head, resembled the dropping of shells into a fortress.
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