Brontës
Page 108
On 8 December, Charlotte returned home from Brookroyd. The brief visit had, as usual, proved beneficial to her though it resulted in her abandoning her plan to go on to Ambleside. Miss Wooler had also come to stay and she had joined Ellen in arguing that it was quite wrong of Charlotte to go to the house of a self-declared atheist. Under their combined pressure, she gave way, ‘both my Father and my friends in this neighbourhood being so much opposed to the visit – that without giving them pain – I could not please Miss Martineau’.73 It was her friends’ opposition, however, that proved more potent than her father’s. Nevertheless, even to them, Charlotte remained stout in Miss Martineau’s defence. ‘My dear Miss Wooler –’, she wrote to her former headmistress who had returned to the attack,
I read attentively all you say about Miss Martineau: the sincerity and constancy of your solicitude touch
Charlotte’s laudable loyalty, which may have been strengthened by fellow feeling because she herself had been ostracized by certain circles in Birstall and Dewsbury after the condemnation of Jane Eyre, was not to be rewarded. Miss Martineau, highly affronted that Charlotte had suggested she lost friends by publishing her infamous Atkinson letters, demanded the excision of this letter from Mrs Gaskell’s biography.75
With no prospect of an early visit to Ambleside, Charlotte determined to accept Mrs Smith’s invitation and go to London after Christmas.76 Before she could do so, however, a domestic crisis turned her whole world upside down. On 13 December, Arthur Bell NichoUs, her father’s curate for the past seven and a half years, asked her to marry him. The proposal was not entirely unexpected. ‘I know not whether you have ever observed him specially – when staying here –:’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen,
your perception in these matters is generally quick enough – too quick – I have sometimes thought – yet as you never said anything – I restrained my own dim misgivings – which could not claim the sure guide of vision. What Papa has seen or guessed – I will not inquire – though I may conjecture. He has minutely noticed all Mr Nicholls’s low spirits – all his threats of expatriation – all his symptoms of impaired health – noticed them with little sympathy and much indirect sarcasm.
On Monday evening – Mr N— was here to tea. I vaguely felt – without clearly seeing – as without seeing, I have felt for some time – the meaning of his constant looks – and strange, feverish restraint.
After tea – I withdrew to the dining-room as usual. As usual – Mr N sat with Papa till between eight & nine o’clock. I then heard him open the parlour door as if going. I expected the clash of the front-door – He stopped in the passage: he tapped: like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He entered – he stood before me. What his words were – you can guess; his manner – you can hardly realize – nor can I forget it – Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty – he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection where he doubts response.
The spectacle of one ordinarily so statue-like – thus trembling, stirred, and overcome gave me a kind of
I wrote yesterday and got this note. There is no need to add to this statement any comment – Papa’s vehement antipathy to the bare thought of any one thinking of me as a wife – and Mr NichoUs’ distress – both give me pain. Attachment to Mr N— you are aware I never entertained – but the poignant pity inspired by his state on Monday evening – by the hurried revelation of his sufferings for many months – is something galling and irksome. That he cared something for me – and wanted me to care for him – I have long suspected – but I did not know the degree or strength of his feelings.77
Charlotte’s relations with Mr NichoUs had undergone a sea-change in recent times. From holding him in cold contempt, making little distinction between him and the other curates whom she had so viciously lampooned in Shirley, she had begun to refer to him in a more kindly fashion. The previous summer, in 1851, on the eve of his departure for a holiday in Ireland, he had invited himself to tea and behaved ‘somewhat peculiarly for him – being extremely good – mild and uncontentious’.78 This summer, for the first time, she had included good wishes to Mr NichoUs, as well as to Tabby and Martha, in her letters from Filey to Patrick, suggesting that she was beginning to see him as a member of the household circle. Her comments on the little church at Filey, which she would have liked him to see and which would have made him laugh out loud, indicate that their earlier ‘cold, faraway sort of civility’ had given way to a friendlier relationship.79 No doubt, too, his willing assumption of Patrick’s duties after his stroke had made a favourable impression and led to increased intimacy.
Arthur Bell Nicholls is a shadowy figure, not least because he deliberately sought retirement. In itself, Charlotte’s fame meant nothing to him: it was the woman he loved, not the authoress. It was typical of his often overlooked sensitivity, however, that he waited until she had finished Villette before declaring the passion which, he knew, would throw the parsonage into disarray. A big, tall man, with a strong square face, framed by dark hair and formidably long side whiskers, Arthur Nicholls had something of the Rochester physique. Like Rochester, too, he was a man of hidden depths, as his emotional outburst proved. Though frequently portrayed as something of a bigot in religious matters and stern, harsh and unbending in person, there are glimpses of him which show him in a much more favourable light. A former pupil at the church school in Stanbury, which had been his particular responsibility, remembered how he used to visit the school twice a week, accompanied by his brown retriever and always bringing sweets for the children. Another little girl recalled how he would place her on the back of the dog, Plato, which was a cross between a Newfoundland bitch and a water spaniel, and ride her across the fields, to her home, from the parsonage. An even more delightful picture is conjured up by the Haworth man who regularly accompanied Mr Nicholls up on to the moors for trout-tickling expeditions: ‘he was fearful fond of going to Smith Bank’, the sportsman recounted, ‘and we gate mony a lot. We’d no rods or lines … but just put our hands under them as they lay under the stones in the pools and laiked [played] with them, and when we gate hod on them we threw them as far as we could into t’field’.80
The fact that Mr Nicholls had the common touch did him no favours in Patrick’s eyes. He was furious with his cu
rate, not only because he had not sought Patrick’s permission before proposing, which suggested subterfuge on Mr Nicholls’ part, but also for his presumption in daring to propose to Charlotte. ‘I am afraid also that Papa thinks a little too much about his want of money; he says the match would be a degradation – that I should be throwing myself away – that he expects me, if I marry at all – to do very differently; in short – his manner of viewing the subject – is – on the whole, far from being one in which I can sympathize—’. Patrick could not bear the thought that his brilliant and successful daughter, who might, with his approval, have had James Taylor, should succumb to the common lot of clergymen’s daughters and marry her father’s curate. He treated Mr Nicholls with ‘a hardness not to be bent – and a contempt not to be propitiated’, refusing even to speak to him and communicating with him only by letter.81
Patrick’s overreaction to the whole situation was perhaps the one thing calculated to drive Charlotte into Mr Nicholls’ arms. Her sense of justice would not allow her suitor’s motives and character to be unfairly impugned. When Patrick wrote ‘a most cruel note’ to his curate, who was horrifying his landlady, Martha Brown’s mother, by refusing his meals, Charlotte ‘felt that the blow must be parried, and I thought it right to accompany the pitiless despatch by a line to the effect that – while Mr N. must never expect me to reciprocate the feeling he had expressed – yet at the same time – I wished to disclaim participation in sentiments calculated to give him pain’. She also ‘exhorted him to maintain his courage and spirits’, an expression which Mr Nicholls may have interpreted as evidence that all was not yet lost. In any event, having offered his resignation, he then attempted to take it back again. This Patrick would not allow, unless he had a written promise ‘never again to broach the obnoxious subject either to him or to me’.82 Torn between wanting to stay so that he would not lose touch with Charlotte and refusing to give a promise he could not keep, Mr Nicholls found himself in an impossible situation. As everyone lined up behind Patrick in condemning and vilifying the curate, Charlotte was increasingly drawn to his defence: ‘but I am sorry for one other person whom nobody pities but me’, she told Ellen,
Martha is bitter against him: John Brown says he should like to shoot him. They don’t understand the nature of his feelings – but I see now what they are. Mr N is one of those who attach themselves to very few, whose sensations are close and deep – like an underground stream, running strong but in a narrow channel. He continues restless and ill – he carefully performs the occasional duty – but does not come near the Church procuring a substitute every Sunday.83
Mistreated and misunderstood, Mr Nicholls was suddenly a much more interesting person to Charlotte than the quiet clergyman conscientiously but unremarkably performing his parish duties.
With passions in Church Lane running so high and the situation apparently irresolvable, Charlotte was glad to have the opportunity to run away and allow events to unfold in her absence. Gratefully taking up Mrs Smith’s invitation to stay at Gloucester Terrace, Charlotte left Haworth early in the morning on 5 January 1853, and arrived in Euston Square at quarter past four that afternoon.84
It says something for the state of affairs at home that Charlotte could find sanctuary with George Smith and his mother, despite her anxieties about their reaction to their portrayals in Villette. Having come to some sort of an understanding with George Smith by letter, it was his mother whom Charlotte found most difficulty in facing. Her kind letter inviting Charlotte to London had provoked a regretful comment: ‘I almost wish I could still look on that kindness just as I used to do: it was very pleasant to me once.’85 The feeling which had gradually crept over her during the last year, that the kindness of her friends at Cornhill was not personal but merely a business arrangement to encourage her to produce another book, had extended to include Mrs Smith, her publisher’s partisan mother,
Writing to Ellen almost a week after her arrival, Charlotte announced, ‘I have not much to tell you – nor is it likely I shall have – I do not mean to go out much or see many people.’ Sir James Kay Shuttleworth had been as insistent as usual that he should be informed when she was in town so that he could escort her round, but she had no intention of letting him know that she was there until she was nearly at the end of her stay. ‘I really so much dread the sort of excited fuss into which he puts himself – that I only wish to see just as much of him as civility exacts.’ Mrs Smith and her daughters appeared ‘pretty much as usual’, but Charlotte was both startled and concerned to see the change in George Smith:
hard work is telling early – both his complexion, his countenance and the very lines of his features are altered – it is rather the remembrance of what he was than the fact of what he is which can warrant the picture I have been accustomed to give of him. One feels pained to see a physical alteration of this kind – yet I feel glad and thankful that it is merely physical: as far as I can judge mind and manners have undergone no deterioration – rather, I think, the contrary.86
During Charlotte’s visit, she was to witness him going through one of his periodic stints of excessive work, and was later to look back on ‘that week of over-work which occurred when I was in London’ as ‘a thing not to be forgotten’.87
From the Smiths Charlotte was at last able to glean some news of James Taylor. They reported that he was getting on well in India, where his probity and usefulness were held in esteem, but that the hot climate was playing havoc with his temper and nerves: ‘it seems he is bad to live with – I never catch a pleasant word about him’, she reported to Ellen, no doubt privately blessing the providence that had broken off their relationship.88
During this visit to London, which was to last a month, Charlotte passed her time very quietly, having the excuse of needing to correct the proofs of Villette to turn down invitations. She did make some excursions, however, and the fact that these were chosen by herself, rather than her hosts, accounted for their unusual nature. ‘Being allowed to have my own choice of sights this time –’, she told Ellen, ‘I selected rather the real than the decorative side of Life.’ She visited two prisons, the modern Pentonville and the ancient Newgate, where she got into trouble with the warders for taking pity on and talking to a poor girl ‘with an interesting face, and an expression of the deepest misery’ who had killed her illegitimate child. She was also taken to see the financial centres of the City, the Bank of England and the Exchange, to the General Post Office and the offices of The Times newspaper and to both the Foundling Hospital for orphans and Bethlehem Hospital, better known as Bedlam, the institution for the insane. ‘Mrs S— and her daughters are – I believe – a little amazed at my gloomy tastes’, Charlotte told Ellen with some amusement, ‘but I take no notice.’89
Charlotte’s sudden and unprecedented interest in matters of social welfare may have been prompted by a nagging feeling of guilt. The ‘social novel’ was very much in vogue, as Charlotte had recognized when sending George Smith the manuscript of Villette, telling him, somewhat apologetically:
You will see that ‘Villette’ touches on no matter of public interest. I cannot write books handling the topics of the day – it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral – Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme though I honour Philanthropy – And voluntarily and sincerely veil my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs Beecher Stowe’s work – ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.
To manage these great matters
She took up a similar theme in her reply to Mrs Gaskell, whose work was imbued with her concern for the social evils of the day. Mrs Gaskell had written to plead for a delay in the publication of Villette, so that it would not come out at exactly the same time as her own new novel, Ruth, and attract invidious comparisons in the reviews. Charlotte readily persuaded
George Smith to defer the publication, adding, ‘“Villette” has indeed no right to push itself before “Ruth”. There is a goodness, a philanthropic purpose – a social use in the latter, to which the former cannot for an instant pretend’.91 Charlotte’s visits to the prisons and hospitals were perhaps an attempt to remedy what she obviously saw as an omission in her work.
The publication of Villette was deferred until 28 January 1853. ‘I daresay – arrange as we may – we shall not be able wholly to prevent comparisons’, Charlotte had written to Mrs Gaskell, ‘it is the nature of some critics to be invidious: but we need not care: we can set them at defiance: they shall not make us foes: they shall not mingle with our mutual feelings one taint of jealousy: there is my hand on that: I know you will give clasp for clasp.’92 On the day before and the day of publication, Charlotte busied herself in sending out inscribed copies to various friends. Ellen Nussey received one, as did Miss Wooler, inscribed ‘from her affectionate pupil’. John Forbes, the expert on consumptive diseases who had advised her on Anne’s illness and had just escorted her round the Bethlehem Hospital, was also given a copy inscribed ‘in acknowledgment of Kindness’.93 Another recipient was Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, whom she had been unable to avoid and who had been in constant attendance during the last week of her visit. ‘I believe the gift perplexed him a little’, Charlotte reported with malicious glee to Mrs Gaskell,