Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  ‘Tell your Mother’, she added at the end of a very long letter, ‘I shall try to cultivate good spirits as assiduously as she cultivates her geraniums.’95 This was easier said than done, however, especially when there was no Emily to whom she could recount all her adventures. As she had to unburden herself to someone she turned once more to her surrogate sister, Ellen Nussey, and invited her to stay. She had also invited Margaret Wooler: ‘The pleasures of Society – I cannot offer you, nor those of fine scenery, but I place very much at your command the moors – some books – a series of quiet “curling-hair times” – and an old pupil into the bargain.’ Miss Wooler was already engaged, however, and offered to come later in the year. ‘In truth it was a great piece of extravagance on my part to ask you and Ellen Nussey together’, Charlotte admitted; ‘it is much better to divide such good things. To have your visit in prospect will console me when hers is in retrospect.’96 Ellen’s visit was equally quiet, enlivened only by walks on the moors and the by now customary annual visit of the Reverend Thomas Crowther, vicar of Cragg Vale, who came to preach the two Sunday school sermons on 20 July.97 There was also a visit from a ‘stiff little chap’, Henry Robinson, a manufacturer of Keighley, who had called to enlist Patrick’s support over an epitaph for his cousin, but who self-importantly took the opportunity to tell Charlotte he had discovered that she had got the name ‘Jane Eyre’ from a sign in Kirkby Lonsdale. When he got home his wife had corrected him, telling him the sign read ‘J. Eyre’ and referred to a James, not a Jane. Much to Charlotte and Ellen’s amusement, he wrote an elaborate letter of contrition saying that he regarded Charlotte as ‘an Angel borne aloft, hovering and scanning the vicissitudes concomitant to humanity in all her various forms’.98

  Once Ellen had gone, life at Haworth was quieter than before. Even Mr Nicholls had departed for a holiday in Ireland, having invited himself to take a ‘farewell tea’ at the parsonage the evening before he left, somewhat to Charlotte’s surprise. She was unable to resist the sardonic comment to Ellen that he had ‘comported himself somewhat peculiarly for him – being extremely good – mild and uncontentious’.99

  As the late summer drew to a close, the weather turned unpleasant. Keighley Parish Feast was washed out with heavy rain and there were violent thunderstorms. The rapid changes from hot to cold which took place over the next few weeks brought illness in their wake, the old and the weak being especially affected.100 Charlotte’s own health deteriorated under the strain of her enforced seclusion. ‘It is useless to tell you how I live –’, Charlotte wrote to Ellen, ‘I endure life – but whether I enjoy it or not is another question.’101 Ellen Nussey’s mother, too, fell ill, seriously enough for Ellen to call her brother John, the court physician, from London to her bedside. The family bickerings and her mother’s own ingratitude for Ellen’s patient nursing were all relayed to Charlotte, who doled out sympathy and good advice from the safe distance of Haworth. As Mrs Nussey’s death appeared imminent, Charlotte, with her own memories of her brother’s and sisters’ deaths still raw in her mind, could do no more than tell her friend that ‘I well know what you are now going through.’102 When she unexpectedly recovered after several months of debilitating illness, however, Charlotte was the first to be delighted. ‘I am very glad your Mother is so cleverly cheating the doctors – I do like to hear of their croakings being at fault’, she exulted, adding a little later, ‘the Doctors cannot now deny that she has fairly given them the slip – I admire her as a clever old lady’.103 It was perhaps fortunate that, in her own delicate state of health, Charlotte had the cheering example of Mrs Nussey’s recovery before her.

  It was not so much her physical weakness that was a trial to Charlotte, however, as her own increasingly morbid mood. This was not helped by her inability to settle to her new novel. Her guilty conscience about this poisoned all her relations with Smith, Elder & Co., though everyone there was remarkably understanding. Perhaps in an effort to galvanize her into writing by offering her a less intimidating prospect than a three-volume novel, George Smith suggested that she should undertake a serial, but Charlotte was adamant. ‘My dear Sir – give Currer Bell the experience of a Thackeray or the animal spirits of a Dickens and then repeat the question. Even then he would answer “I will publish no Serial of which the last number is not written before the first comes out”.’104

  Unable to offer her publishers a novel of her own, Charlotte tried to assuage her guilt by securing them the opportunity to publish Harriet Martineau’s next book. She had taken up Charlotte’s suggestion that she should return to novel-writing and, believing that she was conferring a favour on both parties, Charlotte acted as broker between Miss Martineau and Smith, Elder & Co. It was agreed that the novel could be published anonymously, though Charlotte soon realized that ‘Secret-keeping does not agree with her at all’ and began to have qualms about how good the novel might be. She wrote to George Smith:

  You must not be too sanguine about the book – for though, it seems to me, there are grounds for anticipating that she will produce something superior to what she has yet written in the same class – yet perhaps the Nature and bent of her genius hardly warrant the expectation of first rate excellence in fiction.105

  While Harriet Martineau set to work with her usual energy, Charlotte could settle to nothing. She had her excuses in that there was an unusual number of visitors to the parsonage that autumn. At the end of August, William Morgan came to call, arriving in time for a nine o’clock breakfast; ‘fat – well and hearty’, he brought Charlotte ‘a lot of tracts as a present’. Though Charlotte disliked Morgan and was clearly unimpressed with his gift, the gesture showed the same ‘latent feeling’ which had been roused by his reading of Shirley earlier in the year. ‘I was especially struck by his remark about the chap. entitled “The Valley of the Shadow &c.’” Charlotte had observed to Ellen at the time, ‘he must have a true sense of what he read or he could not have made it’.106 Morgan’s visit had a dual purpose: to tell Patrick that his newly built Christ Church day schools, accommodating 600 children and infants, had opened the previous day and, more importantly, to inform him that he had decided to end his ministry in Bradford. He had been in Bradford for forty years, thirty-six of them as minister of Christ Church, and at the age of sixty-nine, he now felt it was time to hand over his parish to a more active minister and retire to a quieter one where the duties would be within his capabilities. He preached his farewell sermon on 26 October and was presented with twenty pounds by his Sunday school teachers and the magnificent sum of £256 by his parishioners at a soirée the following evening. He then left Bradford for Buckinghamshire, where he had been appointed rector of the quiet rural parish of Hullcott.107 For Patrick this was the severance of a friendship which had lasted more than forty years. Though his children had always held William Morgan in contempt, he and Patrick had been bound together since they first embarked on the ministry with a shared faith and mission; since then they had forged new and closer links through marriage and over the years they had performed the sacred offices for one another’s families. Their parting must have been a source of immense sadness, particularly as both men were well aware that they were unlikely to meet again.

  Within a month of parting from his wife’s cousin-in-law, Patrick was called upon to meet his wife’s nephew for the first time. Thomas Brontë Branwell, the son of Maria’s youngest sister, Charlotte, came to visit unexpectedly in the third week of September. His mother had died in 1848 but his father, Mrs Brontës cousin, had married again and was still alive; Thomas had been born the same year as Branwell Brontë and, given the interchange of patronymics, it seems likely that Thomas was Patrick’s godson. This in itself could hardly have been responsible for the visit, though it might have provided an excuse for it. The most probable reason was that the Branwells of Penzance had discovered that their relative was a literary giant and despatched Thomas to investigate and report back; this would explain Charlotte’s reluctance to commit her impressi
ons of him to paper.108

  Charlotte was somewhat peeved at this unexpected disruption to her plans. Thomas Brontë Branwell stayed several days at the parsonage and, as soon as he left, she wrote immediately to Miss Wooler telling her that ‘the coast is now clear’ and urging her to come before the spell of fine weather ended. She arrived a week later, on 29 September, on her first visit to Haworth. To Charlotte’s evident surprise, their former, sometimes prickly relationship had mellowed. ‘Miss Wooler is and has been very pleasant’, she wrote to Ellen a few days after her guest’s arrival.

  She is like good wine; I think time improves her – and really – whatever she may be in person – in mind she is younger than when at Roe-Head. Papa and She get on extremely well I have just heard Papa walk into the dining-room and pay her a round compliment on her good sense.109

  Patrick had always had a penchant for intelligent women, and Miss Wooler was no exception. When she left he sent his best wishes and expressed the hope that they would see her again at Haworth soon. ‘He would not say this unless he meant it’, Charlotte felt obliged to point out and urged Miss Wooler to return for a fortnight or three weeks instead of the brief ten days she had stayed this time. ‘You very kindly refer with pleasure to your brief stay with us. My dear Miss Wooler – the visit was an enjoyment to me too – a true enjoyment; your society raised my spirits in a way that surprised myself – and which you could only appreciate by seeing me as I am alone – a spectacle happily not likely to come in your way.’ It also came as something of a surprise to Charlotte, who had always regarded her former headmistress as a model of spinsterhood, to learn just how much the visit had meant to Miss Wooler. ‘She seems to think so much of a little congenial company – a little attention and kindness – that I am afraid these things are rare to her.’110

  With Miss Wooler’s visit in the past, Charlotte no longer had an excuse to prevent her writing, yet the task was as uncongenial as ever. As the anniversary of her brother’s death passed and that of Emily’s approached, her spirits altogether failed her. Instead of giving way to her inclination and leaving home, she resolutely turned down every invitation that came her way. As to running away ‘from home every time I have a battle of this sort to fight – it would not do’, she told Mrs Gaskell, who had offered her one of the invitations. ‘Besides the “weird” would follow. As to shaking it off – that cannot be.’ Harriet Martineau and Ellen Nussey were also turned down, as were the Forsters, her unwelcome visitors from Bradford, to whom Charlotte, somewhat brusquely, wrote, ‘I find it is not in my power to leave home.’111

  In the deepening gloom that afflicted her, the only ray of light was her correspondence with Smith, Elder & Co., bringing a taste of the world outside Haworth. There were two letters from James Taylor in Bombay, the second of which Charlotte sent to Ellen for her perusal: ‘in its way – it has merit – that cannot be denied – abundance of information – talent of a certain kind – alloyed (I think) here and there with errors of taste – He might have spared many of the details of the bath scene – which – for the rest tallies exactly with Mr Thackeray’s account of the same process.’ It was scarcely honest, therefore, when replying to Taylor, for Charlotte to devote a whole paragraph of her reply to an appreciation of this description, particularly as she prefaced her remarks with the comment, ‘The Bath-Scene amused me much.’112 ‘This little man – with all his long letters – remains as much a conundrum to me as ever –’, Charlotte had told Ellen. Before replying to his letters, she took the unusual step of writing to Williams to ask for his ‘impartial judgement of Mr Taylor’s character and disposition’ because she did not like to continue the correspondence without further information. His reply praised Taylor’s judgement, sense and principle but drew attention to his faults of manner and temper. This merely confirmed what Charlotte herself believed, particularly as she had heard more open complaints about Taylor’s irritable temper since his departure for India. Deciding that he was ‘a little too harsh, rigid, and unsympathising’ to be anything more to her, Charlotte replied to Taylor in ‘a calm civil manner’ which could not be misinterpreted as offering anything more than simple friendship.113

  Far more important to Charlotte than Taylor’s letters were those of George Smith. Uniformly kind, cheerful and encouraging, their bantering tone provided much-needed relief from her own depression, creating a comfortable sense of intimacy and forcing her to reply in kind. ‘I will tell you a thing to be noted, often in your letters, and almost always in your conversation –’, Charlotte told him,

  … I mean an undercurrent of quiet raillery – an inaudible laugh to yourself; a not unkindly but somewhat subtle playing on your correspondent or companion for the time being – in short – a sly touch of a Mephistopheles with the fiend extracted … I by no means mention this as a fault – I merely tell you – you have it. And I can make the accusation with comfortable impunity – guessing pretty surely that you are too busy just now to deny this or any other charge.114

  It was perhaps the fear that he had gone too far in one of his letters that prompted George Smith to write a hurried apology for his ‘flippancy and impertinent license’. ‘Allow me to say that you never need to mention these words because (it seems to me) that your nature has nothing to do with the qualities they represent – nothing in this world’, she hastened to assure him.

  I do not believe that except perhaps/ to people who had themselves a good deal of effrontery and hardness – you could be otherwise than kindly and considerate – you are always so to Currer Bell – and always have been, which is one chief reason why he has a friendship for you.115

  Here again, fearful of overstepping the bounds of propriety, or rather, freed from them to express herself sincerely, Charlotte assumed her masculine pseudonym. She did this again when turning down his suggestion that she should write a serial.

  though Currer Bell cannot do this – you are still to think him your friend – and you are still to be his friend. You are to keep a fraction of yourself – if it be only the end of your little finger – for him, and that fraction he will neither let gentleman or lady – author or artist … take possession of – or so much as meddle with. He reduces his claim to a minute point – and that point he monopolizes.

  Just how much George Smith’s friendship meant to her she further hinted in the same letter, responding to his invitation to come to London for a week before Christmas with a distinct negative.

  No – if there were no other objection – (and there are many) there is the pain of that last bidding good-bye – that hopeless shaking hands – yet undulled – and unforgotten. I don’t like it. I could not bear its frequent repetition. Do not recur to this plan. Going to London is a mere palliative and stimulant: reaction follows.116

  Winter, she explained, was a better time for working than summer, because it was less liable to interruption. ‘If I could always work – time would not be long – nor hours sad to me – but blank and heavy intervals still occur – when power and will are at variance. This however is talking Greek to an eminent and spirited Publisher. He does not believe in such things.’117 Only a week after explaining that she had started to write again, she had abandoned her book once more and was obliged to tell George Smith that it would not be ready for publishing next season. ‘If my health is spared’, she told him,

  I shall get on with it as fast as is consistent with its being done – if not well – yet as well as I can do it: Not one whit faster. When the mood leaves me (it has left me now – without vouchsafing so much as a word of a message when it will return) I put by the M.S. and wait till it comes back again; and God knows, I sometimes have to wait long – very long it seems to me.118

  Charlotte’s caveat about her health was to prove all too prophetic. They had been beset with illness at the parsonage throughout October. First Tabby had caught influenza, which she passed to Martha, then Martha suffered two separate attacks of quinsy (a sort of ulcerated inflammation of th
e throat) and finally Patrick caught cold: ‘so far I keep pretty well – and am thankful for it –’, Charlotte told Ellen, ‘for who else would nurse them all –’.119

  Towards the end of November, however, the weather grew more severe and Charlotte, out walking one day, was smitten with a sudden pain in her right side. ‘I did not think much of it at first – but was not well from that time’, she told Mrs Smith two months later. ‘Soon after I took cold – the cold struck in, inflamatory action ensued, I had high fever at nights, the pain in my side became very severe – there was a constant burning and aching in my chest.’ Not surprisingly, as these were the same symptoms that Emily and Anne had suffered in their final illnesses, Charlotte was unable to sleep and completely lost her appetite. ‘My own conclusion’, she confessed, ‘was that my lungs were affected – but on consulting a medical man – my lungs and chest were pronounced perfectly sound, and it appeared that the inflammation had fallen on the liver.’120

  With hindsight, Charlotte was able to recognize that the diagnosis was correct but at the time she was unconvinced. ‘The doctor speaks encouragingly’, she told Ellen gloomily, ‘but as yet I don’t get better.’121 Convinced in her own mind that she herself was now suffering from the consumption which had afflicted her sisters at exactly this season three years before, Charlotte did not rally. The death of Keeper, Emily’s beloved dog, on 1 December was a further blow, coming as it did less than three weeks before the anniversary of his mistress’s death. He was ill for a single night and then ‘went gently to sleep’ the following morning; ‘we laid his old faithful head in the garden’, Charlotte told Ellen, adding that Anne’s dog, Flossy, was ‘dull and misses him’. ‘There was something very sad in losing the old dog; yet I am glad he met a natural fate – people kept hinting that he ought to be put away which neither Papa nor I liked to think of.’122