Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  Always afraid that her financial future looked bleak, especially when her mother died, Ellen had not wished to dismiss the prospect of a comfortable home out of hand. Charlotte’s visit bolstered her confidence, which had quailed even further at the thought of staying in a haunted house, and at the end of May she set off for Great Yarmouth to pay her ‘experiment visit’. Before her month was up, however, Ellen had had such a ‘hard time of it and some rough experience’ with ‘these strange, unhappy people’, that she sought sanctuary at her brother Joshua’s rectory at Oundle.31

  For Charlotte, the return to Haworth could not be a happy one. Mr Nicholls had still a month to go before he came to the end of his engagement and his presence was a continual source of strain and reproach. Sunday, 15 May, was an ordeal not to be forgotten. ‘It seems as if I were to be punished for my doubts about the nature and truth of poor Mr N—’s regard’, Charlotte wrote to Ellen.

  Having ventured on Whitsunday to stay the sacrament – I got a lesson not to be repeated. He struggled – faltered – then lost command over himself – stood before my eyes and in the sight of all the communicants white, shaking, voiceless – Papa was not there – thank God! Joseph Redman spoke some words to him – he made a great effort – but could only with difficulty whisper and falter through the service. I suppose he thought; this would be the last time; he goes either this week or the next. I heard the women sobbing round – and I could not quite check my own tears.

  What had happened was reported to Papa either by Joseph Redman or John Brown – it excited only anger – and such expressions as ‘unmanly driveller’. Compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for than sap from firewood.

  Charlotte felt ‘somewhat sick physically, and not very blithe morally’ as she recounted this misadventure to Ellen the next day. She could no longer doubt either the strength of Mr Nicholls’ devotion or his own efforts to conceal it; there must have been born, too, a sense of fellow feeling with him. She had once thought that they had no congenial tastes and feelings: she could no longer doubt that they at least shared the capacity for suffering in the face of unrequited love. In handwriting that showed all too vividly the evident distress she felt, Charlotte added:

  I never saw a battle more sternly fought with the feelings than Mr N— fights with his – and when he yields momentarily – you are almost sickened by the sense of the strain upon him. However he is to go – and I cannot speak to him or look at him or comfort him a whit – and I must submit. Providence is over all – that is the only consolation32

  A few days later there was a certain satisfaction in discovering that a subscription was being raised in the township to offer a testimonial of respect to the departing curate. There was much curiosity as to the reasons for his departure, which had never been made public. Obviously, gossip had been rife since Mr Nicholls had broken down so publicly during the communion service, but the curate neither expected nor sought sympathy. The churchwardens felt obliged to interrogate him, putting the question plainly to him, ‘Why was he going? Was it Mr Brontës fault or his own? His own – he answered. Did he blame Mr Brontë? [“]No: he did not: if anybody was wrong it was himself.” Was he willing to go? “No: it gave him great pain.’”33 With more loyalty and generosity of spirit than truth, Mr Nicholls maintained this point to the end of his life, telling Clement Shorter forty years later that there was never ‘any quarrel between Mr Brontë & myself – an unkind or angry word never passed between us – we parted as friends when I left Haworth – my leaving was solely on my own account – I was not driven away by him – I always felt that he was perfectly justified in his objections to my union with his daughter.’34

  While lauding Mr Nicholls’ sense of honour and feeling, Charlotte could not ignore his obstinacy and sullenness. Patrick had spoken to him ‘with constrained civility, but still with civility’ at the Whitsuntide tea-drinkings, only to be cut short by his curate. ‘This sort of treatment offered in public is what Papa never will forget or forgive —’, Charlotte wrote despairingly to Ellen, ‘it inspires him with a silent bitterness not to be expressed.’35

  The long ordeal was now drawing to a close. On the evening of 25 May, a deputation of the local gentry and some of the neighbouring clergy gathered in the National School room where Michael Merrall, on behalf of the congregation, teachers and scholars of the church and its Sunday schools, presented Mr Nicholls with a handsome, inscribed gold watch.36 Conveniently, Patrick was not very well, so Charlotte advised him to stay away. The following evening Mr Nicholls called at the parsonage to hand over the deeds of the National School, which had been his pride and joy, and to say goodbye.

  They were busy cleaning – washing the paint &c. in the dining-room so he did not find me there. I would not go into the parlour to speak to him in Papa’s presence. He went out thinking he was not to see me – And indeed till the very last moment – I thought it best not – But perceiving that he stayed long before going out at the gate – and remembering his long grief I took courage and went out trembling and miserable. I found him leaning again [st] the garden-door in a paroxysm of anguish – sobbing as women never sob. Of course I went straight to him. Very few words were interchanged – those few barely articulate: several things I should have liked to ask him were swept entirely from my memory. Poor fellow! but he wanted such hope and such encouragement as I could not give him. Still I trust he must know now that I am not cruelly blind and indifferent to his constancy and grief … However he is gone – gone – and there’s an end ofit.37

  In the emotion of the moment Charlotte had not even asked Mr Nicholls where he was taking up his next post, so the chances of her learning about his future fate were remote. He left Haworth quietly at six o’clock the following morning: it is possible that he did so without even a new job in prospect, for he was not appointed to the curacy of the little village of Kirk Smeaton, near Pontefract, until August.38 He had performed his duties in Haworth faithfully to the end, taking the services in church the preceding Sunday – ‘it was a cruel struggle’ – and his last duty, appropriately enough a burial, two days before his departure. His successor, the unlucky George de Renzy, had already been appointed and performed his first duties two days later on 29 May.39

  Racked by misery and guilt, Charlotte tried to find consolation, as she had always done, in occupation. Though she had apparently told Mrs Gaskell that she was ‘not going to write again for some time’, she began the rough draft of a new story, ‘Willie Ellin’, hoping to lose herself in her imagination.40 Reading, too, was a refuge and on the evening of Mr Nicholls’ departure a new box of books arrived from Cornhill, a gift which could hardly have been better timed. With it came a letter from a Mrs Holland which touched Charlotte deeply. She had read Villette and found in it a consolation for her own poignant and bitter grief. ‘This hope sustained me while I wrote –’, Charlotte replied the next day, ‘that while many of the prosperous or very young might turn distastefully from the rather sad page – some – tested by what you well term “the pitiless trials of life” – might hear in it no harsh and unsympathetic voice.’ Writing with the scorching memory of Mr Nicholls’ great unhappiness still new upon her, Charlotte poignantly commented that ‘One assurance that we have done good; one testimony that we have assuaged pain – … comes more healingly to the heart than all the eulogiums on intellect that ever were uttered’.41

  More than ever at this time Charlotte needed the companionship of someone of her own age and sex. Ellen Nussey was still at Oundle and unlikely to return for at least another month, so Charlotte applied to Mrs Gaskell, even though it was such a short time since her own visit to Manchester. She was extremely sensitive about the contrast between that visit and what she had to offer her friend. ‘When you take leave of the domestic circle and turn your back on Plymouth Grove to come to Haworth,’ she warned Mrs Gaskell, ‘you must do it in the spirit which might sustain you in case you were setting out on a brief trip to the back woods of America. Leaving behind
your husband, children, and civilization, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness, and liberty. The change will perhaps do good, if not too prolonged …’42

  Before Mrs Gaskell could arrive, Charlotte’s health, which had been remarkably good since she had completed Villette, gave way under the intolerable stress of the last month. She caught a cold which developed into severe influenza, compelling her to take to her bed for ten days, and obliging Patrick to write on her behalf to postpone Mrs Gaskell’s visit indefinitely. By 12 June, she was well enough to write a brief note to George Smith ‘lest my silence should be misunderstood’, though still suffering from acutely painful headaches.43

  The stress also told on Patrick, not least because he must have been aware that his daughter’s illness was a manifestation of an unhappiness for which he was personally responsible. The very thing happened that Charlotte had feared most and which had persuaded her to reject Mr NichoUs in such uncompromising terms. Her father had a second stroke which, for a time, brought on complete blindness: he could not even distinguish between night and day. Though Charlotte was filled with alarm and feared the worst, he gradually recovered some vision but his sight was never fully restored to its former state. ‘I think him very patient with the apprehension of what, to him would be the greatest of privations, hanging over his head’, Charlotte told George Smith a month later, ‘I can but earnestly hope that what remains of sight may be spared him to the end.’44 Out of this evil some good was to come. More than ever dependent on his daughter and his curate for the smooth running of the parish and its many institutions, Patrick was to become increasingly aware of what he had lost in the efficient and hard-working Mr NichoUs.

  The sudden deterioration in his sight obliged Patrick to abandon a somewhat startling half-formed project of his to go to London for a few days in the summer.45 As Patrick’s last expedition from home had been when he escorted his daughters to Brussels in 1842, and he had, since then, turned down invitations from local men as eminent as Richard Monckton Milnes on the grounds that he did not go from home, the scale of the plan is astonishing. It can only have been conceived as an attempt on Patrick’s part to divert Charlotte’s attention from Mr NichoUs’ sorrows and give her pleasure. That he was prepared at the age of seventy-six to undergo the long and difficult railway journeys which would have been involved, not to mention the turmoil and disruption to his quiet home life which a visit to London would entail, is a measure of his love for his daughter and his anxiety to ‘make it up’ to her.

  Though she had dutifully submitted to her father’s wishes, Charlotte had left Patrick in no doubt as to her own view: that he had been unjust and unnecessarily cruel to NichoUs. If she had been left to decide for herself, however, it is not easy to perceive what line she would have taken. One can only guess that she would perhaps have allowed Nicholls to court her so that she could have got to know him better and then taken a more informed decision. The strong suspicion remains, however, that had her father not so overreacted to the proposal and driven Mr NichoUs to such uncharacteristic displays of emotion, she would never have looked further than the ‘statuelike’ exterior and seen the heart of the man.

  As it was, Charlotte’s sense of injustice and pity had made her suddenly far more favourable to Mr NichoUs than she would otherwise have been. His departure brought home to her once again the solitude of her existence and Patrick’s seizure, following so close on its heels, was yet another reminder of his mortality and the horror of an existence as the last survivor of a closely knit family which his death would bring her.

  Miserable and unwell, Charlotte brooded on her wrongs and became touchy and sensitive even with well-meaning friends. A letter from George Smith, who was himself ill and overwrought with work, prompted a sympathetic response with a sting in its tail.

  What you now feel is always I believe felt at some time of life or other by those [who] have much to do or suffer – whose lot it is to bear heavy responsibilities, or undergo severe anxieties, and in whose moral constitution there is that degree of elaborateness which will result in sensitive feeling.

  Notwithstanding your aged sensations – you are far too young to despair for a moment. You will be better: I know you will be better, but in care, in mental rest and moderate physical exercise lie the means of cure. Let no influence, let no exigency, if possible, impose on you the spur or the goad: I am sure you do not need these, nor ever did in your life; not even when you turn with distaste from the task of answering a friendly letter; and let me just say, though I say it not without pain, a correspondence which has not interest enough in itself to sustain life – ought to die.46

  In her present bitter and unhappy state, Charlotte had once again persuaded herself that her publisher’s friendliness was purely business-motivated; though his letters were a lifeline to her, she could not believe that he considered the correspondence anything other than a troublesome necessity to keep his author sweet. There was a certain misanthropic sense of the fitness of things and a savage pleasure in her suggestion that it should end.

  Charlotte’s sense of isolation and deprivation had grown overwhelming in the wake of Arthur NichoUs’ departure. She temporarily lost all sense of proportion and, for the first time – and without consulting Smith, Elder & Co. – answered one of her critics in the press. The Christian Remembrancer had carried an anonymous review of Villette by Anne Mozley, sister of the editor, in April. As an organ of the Church of England, it carried considerable weight with Charlotte’s closest friends, Ellen Nussey and Miss Wooler, and with her domestic circle. Though she had ignored its partisan attacks on her before, in the three months since the publication of this review she had allowed one particular passage to fester in her mind. Still protesting against the ‘outrages on decorum, the moral perversity, the toleration of, nay, indifference to vice which deform her first powerful picture of a desolate woman’s trials and sufferings’ in Jane Eyre, the reviewer concluded that the intervening years had brought the author

  a little happiness and success, for in many important moral points Villette is an improvement on its predecessors. The author has gained both in amiability and propriety since she first presented herself to the world, – soured, coarse, and grumbling; an alien, it might seem, from society, and amenable to none of its laws.47

  Apart from the hurtful but excusable ignorance of the devastation which the intervening years had actually wrought on Charlotte, it was the last sentence which particularly stuck in her throat. To her it seemed like a repetition of that insidious suggestion in the Quarterly Review notice of Jane Eyre that ‘Currer Bell’, if a woman, had ‘for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex’.48 That insult, published when Charlotte’s true identity was not yet known, had provoked her to a bitingly sarcastic response which Smith, Elder & Co. had wisely declined to publish. Now, her veil of anonymity cast aside and her sense of isolation hard upon her, she read into the Christian Remembrancer review an insinuation that there was ‘some disadvantageous occult motive for a retired life’. Once again, she took up her pen in her own name to defend herself, this time offering ‘a few words of temperate explanation’.

  Providence so regulated my destiny that I was born and have been reared in the seclusion of a country parsonage. I have never been rich enough to go out into the world as a participator in its gaieties, though it early became my duty to leave home in order partly to diminish the many calls on a limited income. That income is lightened of claims in another sense now, for of a family of six I am the only survivor.

  My father is now in his seventy-seventh year; his mind is clear as it ever was, and he is not infirm, but he suffers from partial privation and threatened loss of sight; as his general health is also delicate, he cannot be left often or long: my place consequently is at home.49

  The October issue of the periodical carried a notice from the editor acknowledging Charlotte’s letter ‘which claims at once our respect and sympathy’. ‘We wrote in entire ignorance of the
author’s private history, and with no wish to pry into it’, he hastened to assure her, adding, ‘We now learn with pleasure, but not with surprise, that the main motive for this seclusion is devotion to the purest and most sacred of domestic ties.’50

  In the past Charlotte had liked to use the excuse of those ‘domestic ties’ to avoid uncongenial employment or visiting, and Patrick had neither interfered with nor attempted to command her. Now, however, when for once he had laid down the law and stuck rigidly to it, her ‘domestic ties’ had become bonds against which she chafed. She tried to find relief in her writing but ‘Willie Ellin’ did not progress as it should. It seems to have been a reworking of those elements of The Professor left out of Villette. Again, it concerned two strikingly contrasted brothers: Edward Ellin, a grossly abusive and violent manufacturer, given to horsewhipping his brother, who is recognizably the same as his prototype in the earlier novel, Edward Crimsworth; and William Ellin, the gentle and gentlemanly younger son, impoverished and reluctantly dependent on his loathed half-brother. Though the characters – even to their Christian names – had been lifted straight from The Professor and could therefore claim an ancestry all the way back to Branwell’s juvenile story, ‘The Wool is Rising’, Charlotte added poignancy by making the victimized younger brother a ten-year-old child.51 Though she continued with the story in June, she seems to have abandoned it the following month, perhaps feeling that she was simply retreading already well-worn ground or, more likely, fearing that the critics would not take kindly to Edward Ellin, another ‘vulgar’ and ‘profane’ creation from the pen of ‘Currer Bell’.

  Without the solace of writing, Charlotte was driven to her usual expedient when miserable – temporary flight from home. Having fulfilled her duties at home by entertaining the Reverend W.R. Smith, William Morgan’s replacement at Christ Church in Bradford, who came to give the annual Sunday school sermons at the end of July, and the Reverend William Busfeild, vicar of Keighley, who preached for the Oddfellows the following day,52 she felt free to leave.