Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  Curiously enough, Mrs Gaskell herself had foreseen this problem. ‘Do you mind the law of libel’, she had asked George Smith the previous autumn. ‘I have three people I want to libel – Lady Scott (that bad woman who corrupted Branwell Brontë) Mr Newby, & Lady Eastlake, the first & last/ not to be named by name, the mean publisher to be gibbetted.’88 When she submitted her manuscript, George Smith immediately raised objections to her treatment of both Lady Scott and Thomas Newby. Mrs Gaskell, somewhat disingenuously, declared herself unaware that she had indicated Lady Scott’s identity so obviously: ‘The part where I point her out most clearly seems to me to be “Lady – in May-Fair.” I thought when I wrote this that she lived in May-Fair, – I have since learnt that she does not, – but certainly there are plenty of “Lady –’”s in May Fair, though we will hope not so many as bad as she is.’ To this she added, with the novelist’s disregard for historical accuracy, ‘I put that in as I have said, to point the contrast of her life, & Branwell’s death.’ ‘About Newby’, she freely admitted, ‘I was quite aware that, as you saw the MS, my expressions were actionable … I should like to warn others off trusting to him as much as I cd.’89

  George Smith was able to dissuade her from the libellous statements about Newby, but on Lady Scott she was immoveable. ‘I see you think me merciless’, she told him, but she had heard so many corroborative accounts of Lady Scott’s bad behaviour from her cousin and another relation, Lady Trevelyan, she felt sure of her ground. Nor did she believe that Lady Scott would risk bringing an action that would only further damage her reputation. Had Mrs Gaskell been at home when Lady Scott threatened legal action, it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that she would have submitted to the publication of the uncontested retraction which her husband and lawyers concocted in her absence and without her knowledge. The retraction of’every statement … which imputes to a widowed lady … any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, or of her social duties, and more especially of the statements … which impute to the lady in question a guilty intercourse with the late Branwell Brontë’ appeared in The Times on 30 May 1857, together with a letter from Newton & Robinson, Lady Scott’s solicitors, acknowledging that Mrs Gaskell had acted in reliance on information she believed to be well founded.90

  Mrs Gaskell herself arrived home in the midst of this crisis to find Lady Scott’s action settled, but another one threatened by William Carus Wilson’s son. This, however, she was determined to resist, not least because in this instance a fierce correspondence was being carried out in the press which, albeit on one side only, fully justified her comments about conditions at the Clergy Daughters’ School. Unfortunately for him, Arthur had been provoked into defending his wife in what was to become an increasingly acrimonious and vituperative correspondence. ‘I do think Mrs Gaskell has been rash;’ he had declared in reference to Lady Scott’s action, ‘she seems to have forgotten that she was dealing with living persons – I shall ever regret that I did not ask to see the MS. as I think I could have convinced her of the injudiciousness of some things in it.’

  Nevertheless, he too felt confident that ‘she has only done justice in that case – Mr Wilson says that he is told it is actionable – I do not however think that there is much danger in that quarter – He and his friends have been most industrious in circulating through the press & privately an adverse review, containing an attempt at refutation of the statements regarding Cowan Bridge; and making a vile attack on my poor wife – I was so provoked that I wrote an answer, which has appeared in the Manchester papers & some others.’ Mr Wilson’s supporters had even sent copies of their ‘Vile attack’ to Patrick anonymously through the post, an action which further incensed his son-in-law.91

  For almost three months the controversy raged in the press, the local papers being particularly assiduous in printing allegation and counter-allegation. Unwisely, Arthur could not allow the derogatory remarks about his wife and the veracity of her portrayal of Cowan Bridge to pass unchallenged. He, too, took to copying his replies to the Leeds Intelligencer, Leeds Mercury and Halifax Guardian, answering his opponents point by point with increasing irritation and anguish. When the Wilson camp carried the campaign into The Times, Arthur sent a copy of his reply there too, telling George Smith that if the paper refused to print it, Patrick ‘seems determined to have it inserted as an advertisement’.92 This was the course of action they decided to take when confronted by a pamphlet refuting the charges against the school which the Wilsons had printed and circulated. Only George Smith himself, whom they had asked to insert the advertisement as ‘we really do not know any other person in town, was able to dissuade them. It was Patrick who replied, Arthur having gone to Ireland for a few weeks of well-deserved holiday. ‘Owing to what you have said we have made up our minds, not to advertise in the “Times’”, he wrote, ‘Enough has been written, to justify “Currer Bells” intimations, in regard to what has been stated, under the garb of fiction, in “Jane Eyre”.’ There was a condition attached to this withdrawal from the combat, however, which made it clear how much Charlotte’s family regretted the public retraction over the Lady Scott affair.

  I hope, therefore, that Mrs Gaskell, having strong proofs on her side, will, make no concessions to Messrs Shepherd, and Wilson, whether they cajole, or threaten. There ought to be no more concessions – Errors may be legitimally corrected, but nothing more should be done by Authors.93

  In a letter to George Smith a few days later, he commented, ‘Mrs Gaskell, in her third Edition, of the “Memoir”, will require, the full exercise, of her talents, taste, and judgement.’ Patrick clearly regarded the last as fallible for he added, ‘I hope, that you will put in a word, now and then—’.94

  If Arthur had hoped that the controversy would die away in his absence, he was singularly mistaken. Another combatant had entered the fray, reaching new heights of personal invective, for she was an acquaintance, if not a personal friend. Sarah Baldwin, wife of the incumbent of Mytholmroyd, was also the daughter of Thomas Crowther, the vicar of Cragg Vale, who had preached so often in Haworth Church and was a friend of both Patrick and Arthur. Though she had been a pupil at Cowan Bridge, she had not, as Arthur wearily and repeatedly pointed out, been there at the same time as Charlotte and had completely escaped the troubles of the early years.95 As a vociferous defender of the school, she was particularly upset when Arthur said that her own father had made disparaging remarks about it when he had withdrawn his youngest daughter. After an exchange of some half dozen increasingly vituperative letters, the editor of the Halifax Guardian intervened. He wrote to Patrick, securing his consent to drop ‘this interminable, and not very pleasant, controversy’ and, with the judgement of Solomon, ably summed up the arguments:

  There were certain hardships and irregularities at the Cowan Bridge School when Miss Brontë was there, which were remedied as soon as they became known to its Reverend and benevolent promoter. Miss Brontë made a novelist’s use of this incident of her life, in which, as always occurs with minds that brood silently on their wrongs, the shadows had been deepened and darkened by reflection. Mrs Gaskell, in that spirit of hero-worship with which modern biographers are infected, accepted the exaggerated caricature for the reality; and hence the controversy in which so much warmth has been displayed, and so many hard words exchanged.96

  Sarah Baldwin was not to be deprived of the last word, however, and the following week inserted a lengthy letter as an advertisement.97 The editor, whose sympathies appear to have lain with Charlotte’s family, allowed Arthur to insert one last response on 8 August. Repeating once again that the whole question revolved around the state of the school ‘during the time that Miss Brontë was there’, Arthur closed his letter with stiff dignity. ‘I have discharged a painful but necessary duty.’ he declared. ‘Henceforth Charlotte Brontës assailants may growl and snarl over her grave undisturbed by me.’ Sarah Baldwin had prepared another response, ‘much stronger than any previous one’, but a private letter from Arth
ur to her husband, containing ‘one or two explanatory remarks’ and a ‘candid tribute to Mr Crowther’s character’, persuaded her to let the matter rest.98

  Arthur’s relief was to be short-lived. The very day that William Baldwin wrote to accept the ending of the Cowan Bridge controversy, a letter appeared in the Bradford Observer which raised a fresh and equally bitter dispute. The letter was from William Dearden, an old friend of the Brontë family, who had visited Patrick with Joseph Leyland’s brother Francis, on 8 July.99 They had, inevitably, discussed Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which Patrick had praised while also complaining of the ridiculous anecdotes purporting to illustrate his character and of his treatment by the reviewers.

  There was nothing unusual in this, for Patrick was accustomed to disown the anecdotes to all his visitors, and had written to both Mrs Gaskell and George Smith telling them that ‘I never was subject to those explosions of passion ascribed to me, and never perpetrated those excentric and ridiculous movements, which I am ashamed to mention.’ He himself had deliberately refrained from public comment on these issues because he was reluctant to cast further doubt on Mrs Gaskell’s veracity in the wake of the Lady Scott libel threat and the Cowan Bridge controversy; he had simply asked Mrs Gaskell to remove them from the forthcoming third edition, which she agreed to do. His letter to her, written on 30 July, is a model of its kind, revealing not only his self-deprecating sense of humour but also his remarkable forbearance.

  I may have been troublesome to you, … but, I was roused a little, by the impertinent remarks, of a set of pennyaliner, hungry, pedantic, and generally ignorant reviewers – No, one, despises them, and their productions more than I do; but the misfortune is, that the multitude, see not as we see, and not judging for themselves are often misled, by the false judgement of others. I do not deny that I am somewhat excentrick. Had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should, in all probability, never have had such children as mine have been. I have no objection, whatever to your representing me as a little exccentric, since you, and other learned friends will have it so; only don’t set me on, in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife’s silk gown … It is dangerous, to give credence hastily, to informants – some may tell the truth, whilst others from various motives may greedily, invent and propagate falsehoods … I am not, in the least offended, at your telling me that I have faults! I have many – and being a Daughter of Eve, I doubt not, that you also have some. Let us both try to be wiser and better, as Time recedes, and Eternity advances.100

  William Dearden, however, took it into his head that Mrs Gaskell had traduced his old friend and that he should be publicly vindicated in the press. He therefore wrote to the Bradford Observer twice, furiously attacking Mrs Gaskell for her calumny of ‘this venerable clergyman, now on the verge of the grave’ whom she had ‘tarred and feathered by the malice of an ignorant country gossip’. He castigated her for giving credence to a sacked nurse instead of the long-serving and faithful servants, Martha Brown and Nancy Garrs, denounced her portrayal as a travesty of the truth and, worst of all, quoted Patrick himself as saying, ‘I did not know that I had an enemy in the world; much less one who would traduce me before my death. Everything in that book … which relates to my conduct to my family, is either false or distorted.’101

  Patrick wrote immediately to Mrs Gaskell to set the record straight:

  with this article, I had nothing whatever to, do – I knew nothing of it till I saw it in print, and was much displeased when I saw it there. Though hard press’d by some ruthless critics, as well as Mr Wilson and his party, I held both my tongue and my pen – believing, that you were a friend to my Daughter Charlotte, and no enemy to me, and feeling confident that whatever you found to be mistakes, you would willingly correct in the third Edition.102

  The matter might and should have ended there had not yet another officious ‘friend’ intervened. Under the pretext of defending Mrs Gaskell from Patrick’s supposed accusation that she was an enemy, Harriet Martineau declared that she had seen two of his letters praising the memoir in terms which made it impossible for him to have so completely changed his mind in the interval. The real reason for writing her letter, however, was to vent her spleen about Charlotte’s remarks on herself and Mrs Gaskell’s portrayal of their quarrel. ‘When I find that, in my own case, scarcely one of Miss Brontës statements about me is altogether true, I cannot be surprised at her biographer having been misled in other cases of more importance.’103

  Two days after Harriet Martineau’s statement in the Daily News was copied in the Bradford Observer, William Dearden returned to the parsonage in high dudgeon, anxious to take up the cudgels once more on Patrick’s behalf. Patrick tried to dissuade him, but there was little he could do to restrain his self-appointed champion. A couple of days later he wrote an eloquent plea for peace which came little short of an express prohibition on further comment.

  I trouble you with a few lines merely to state, that I wish nothing more should be written against Mrs Gaskell, in regard to the ‘Memoir.’ She has already encountered very severe trials, which generally falls to the lot of celebrated authors. She has promised to omit, in the third Edition, the erroneous statements respecting me; which is all, I can now, reasonably expect or desire, as no more, I think can be safely, or prudently done. As for myself, I wish to live in unnoticed and quiet retirement; setting my mind on things above in heaven, and not on things on the earth beneath, and performing my duty to the utmost of my power; esteeming myself after all, but an unprofitable servant, and resting my hopes for salvation, on the all-prevailing merits of the Saviour of a lost world, and considering, that the passing affairs of this life – which too much occupy the attention of passing mortal man, are but dust and ashes, when compar’d with the concerns of Eternity.

  Lest Dearden should be in any doubt, he added a postscript. ‘I never thought otherwise of Mrs Gaskell, than that she was a friend of my Daughter, and no enemy to me. In alluding to enemies, I meant false informants, and hostile Critics.’104 Aware that his pleas were likely to fall on deaf ears, Patrick wrote again to Mrs Gaskell to put the record straight. ‘My real, or pretended friends,’ he wrote with unaccustomed bitterness, ‘seem in their gossiping skill, to have combined, to paint me not as a single but a double Janus, looking, and smiling or frowning, with my four faces, in opposite directions, as may best suit my own selfish convenience. They would please me better, by minding their own affairs, and letting mine alone.’105

  Dearden, of course, could not let Harriet Martineau’s statement pass without comment, and ill-advisedly rushed off a reply to the Bradford Observer which wrongly accused Harriet Martineau of not having seen the whole of Patrick’s letters.106 The whole terrible cycle of ill-informed accusation and counter-accusation was about to begin again. Matters were made worse by an article in the Spectator which the Bradford Observerobligingly reprinted for the edification of the Brontës’ home circles. Pointing out how Mrs Gaskell’s accounts of the Clergy Daughters’ School, Branwell’s affair and now Charlotte’s father had all been denounced as untrue, it picked up Harriet Martineau’s unpleasantly suggestive comment that ‘It is a perilous task to write the history of a singularly imaginative person, during the lifetime of contemporaries.’ ‘Interpreting this passage in the ordinary way,’ declared the Bradford Observer, ‘we might understand that Charlotte Brontë dealt less in fiction when she was writing “Jane Eyre” and other romances than when she professed to be stating plain facts.’107

  It says much for Patrick’s patience and restraint that he was able to resist the temptation to reply. What seems to have tipped the scale, however, was the continuing circulation of Harriet Martineau’s charges against Charlotte combined with the publication in September of the long-awaited third edition of the Life of Charlotte Brontë. Mrs Gaskell had done her best to please everyone, despite feeling aggrieved
that her version of events had been disputed. ‘I did so try to tell the truth,’ she wrote miserably to Ellen Nussey, ‘& I believe now I hit as near the truth as any one could do.’ To George Smith, she complained more robustly: ‘I hate the whole affair, & every thing connected with it.’108 Nevertheless, she had removed the offending passages about Patrick, Lady Scott and the ‘plenty and even waste’ in the Brontë household under the Garrs sisters and had toned down references to an easily identifiable Haworth girl who had been seduced. She had even placed a denial from Harriet Martineau alongside Charlotte’s statement that she had lost friends by writing the Atkinson letters and allowed her to give her own version of the quarrel between them. It was this that particularly irked Patrick and Arthur, though Patrick had been generous in his praise of the new edition. ‘With the work as it now stands, all reasonable persons must be satisfied; since in it, there is much to praise, and little or nothing to blame. It has, I think, arrived at a degree of perfection, which was scarcely attainable, in a first, and second Edition.’ He expressed the somewhat forlorn hope that there would now be a period of calm and that there would be no faultfinders, adding, with unfortunately prophetic words:

  unless some one like Miss Martineau should arise, determine! to be hostile, and to put the worst construction, on the best intentions, both in words and actions. Notwithstanding Miss Martineau’s strange and unhappy illusions, which mystify, and bewilder, her Atheistical Brain, I had thought she was a Woman, naturally kind, and just and generous, who would not knowingly, or willingly injure the memory of any one, especially that of the dead, who were unable to defend themselves.109

  He was soon to find out just how wrong he had been. As Harriet Martineau continued to complain loud and long in print that Charlotte’s statements about her were not true, Patrick wrote to her privately to remonstrate, pointing out that ‘I have ever heard her speak of you, in terms of kindness, and veneration, and when any one spoke of you otherwise, she took your part.’ Miss Martineau dashed off a dismissive reply, repeating her accusation with the added sting that Charlotte’s remarks about her were ‘more like hallucinations