Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  On 25 August 1864, at the age of forty-five and nearly nine and a half years after the death of Charlotte, he married again. His second wife was Mary Bell, his cousin, the ‘pretty lady-like girl with gentle English manners’ whom Charlotte had met on honeymoon. The marriage was affectionate and companionable but childless, and the second Mrs Nicholls seems to have been under no illusions about her husband’s undying devotion to the first. Their house was a shrine to the Brontë family: the parsonage grandfather clock stood on the stairs near Leyland’s medallion of Branwell; Patrick’s gun and a photograph of Haworth Parsonage hung in the dining room; the drawing room was given over to Richmond’s portrait of Charlotte, the engraving of Thackeray and a large number of framed drawings by the Brontës.76 When he died, on 2 December 1906, a few weeks before his eighty-eighth birthday, Mary had his coffin placed beneath the portrait of Charlotte until it was carried from the house. He was buried in the churchyard at Banagher, surrounded by his Bell relations: over his grave Mary erected a simple marble cross carved with the inscription ‘Until the day break and the Shadows flee away’ and the legend ‘In Loving Memory of The Revd Arthur Bell Nicholls, formerly Curate of Haworth Yorkshire’.77

  Desperately short of money, Mary Nicholls reluctantly had to sell the bulk of what remained of the collection of Brontëana which her husband had so lovingly preserved for nearly half a century, selling the manuscripts and books in two large sales at Sotheby’s in 1907 and 1914 to a world eager to preserve anything connected with the remarkable Brontë family. She herself died on 27 February 1915 and was buried next to her husband in Banagher churchyard.78

  By retiring to Ireland, where he was largely forgotten, Arthur effectively protected himself against much of the unpleasantness which was to arise from the pursuit of Brontë fanatics. On the whole, he was able to maintain his dignity to the end and achieve a peace of mind that would not have been possible had he stayed in Haworth or its neighbourhood.79

  Apart from Mrs Gaskell, who never attempted another biography and died suddenly in 1865,80 most of Charlotte’s friends rivalled her father and husband in their longevity. Of her publishers, James Taylor survived the climate of India till 1874, dying in Bombay, William Smith Williams died the following year and George Smith, who went on to found the Dictionary of National Biography and become the grand old man of English publishing, died in 1901.81 Constantin Heger, unlike his fictional counterpart, Paul Emanuel, enjoyed a long career of outstanding academic success, becoming one of the most eminent professors of the Athénée Royal in Brussels and dying, six years after his wife, in 1896.82

  Of Charlotte’s friends from school, Miss Wooler lived to a ripe old age, dying in her nineties, in 1885. Though spared the worst excesses of Brontë fanatics, to the end of her life she was harassed by Americans who came to interview her about her most famous pupil. ‘I cannot refuse to see them’, she told her great-nephew. ‘It is very trying, but I will do my best.’83

  Mary Taylor, on the other hand, remained serenely indifferent to the lure of fame as Charlotte Brontës friend. She returned from New Zealand in i860, having earned enough money through her shopkeeping in Wellington to build a house for herself, High Royd, at Gomersal, where she lived in sturdy independence till her death in 1893. Unconventional to the end, she published a number of what would now be called feminist articles, defending the right of women to think, work and employ themselves in purposeful activity. These ideas were expanded in her novel, Miss Miles, which she was working on while Charlotte was writing Shirley. Though their themes were similar, the fact that Mary did not finish and publish her book till 1890, forty years after her friend, meant that the originality of its message was lost. It sank without trace. Nevertheless, Mary continued to live by her own creed, even organizing a ladies’ walking tour in Switzerland which culminated in an ascent of Mont Blanc when she was nearly sixty years of age.84 She and Ellen discovered that age and experience had only widened the gulf between them; they had little in common and their friendship foundered soon after Mary’s return from New Zealand. Like Ellen, she never married, but unlike her former friend, lived a practical, useful and happy life, unburdened by regrets. She was, as Ellen bitterly complained, ‘dead to any approach on the Brontë subject’, wisely refusing to be drawn into the inexhaustible demand for further information, and therefore earning the reputation of being ‘peculiar’.85

  It was Ellen Nussey, however, who was universally recognized as the fount of all knowledge where the Brontës were concerned. Though thinly disguised as ‘E’ throughout the Life of Charlotte Brontë, her role as Mrs Gaskell’s informant was immediately and widely known. One can hardly avoid the impression that she had preened herself because Mrs Gaskell turned constantly to her for information, rather than to the hated husband and father; it was her version of events which would be made immortal by Mrs Gaskell’s pen. Ellen had expected nothing but praise and gratification for this role and was genuinely shocked and appalled when she incurred considerable censure for supplying Mrs Gaskell with information which, it was suggested, should never have been published. Ironically, the very people whose good opinion she most cared for, the clergymen and her Anglican friends in Birstall and Gomersal, proved to be the most critical.

  Alarmed at this unexpected turn of events, Ellen wildly tried to justify herself, mainly by blaming Charlotte’s husband and father: she had told them they ought to have oversight of the book, she had only lent her letters because they had insisted, she had supplied information on the sisters ‘only’. As early as 1860 she was already uttering the complaint she was to reiterate for the rest of her life: ‘What I have reaped has not been pay of gold or of praise – It has been neglect from the father whose dying child I bore in my arms down two flights of stairs (when at Scarboro’) – Of blame from the husband whose feelings I strove to spare …’86

  It was Charlotte’s husband who bore the brunt of her increasingly hysterical accusations. He had been in ‘a savage humour’ with her ever since the publication of the Life of Charlotte Brontë, though ‘he never had any just reason to be so’: she had not had a line from him since Mr Brontë died, and then she had only received ‘a most ungracious reply’.87 Judging Arthur’s behaviour by her own, she was unable to believe that he had not kept her own letters to Charlotte and frequently denounced him to anyone prepared to listen. Believing that she had been betrayed by Mrs Gaskell, Ellen made several attempts to ‘set the record straight’, as she saw it, by writing her own biography of Charlotte. Like Mrs Gaskell, however, she discovered to her horror and indignation that she could not quote from Charlotte’s letters without her husband’s approval, but this she could not bring herself to ask.

  The fact that she was thus effectively gagged turned Ellen’s hatred towards Arthur into paranoia. Writing to George Smith, for whom she had hoped to produce a Cornhill article on Charlotte, she let loose the full venom of her nature: ‘it would be wise of him to be civil even at some [cost?] to himself—’, she threatened. ‘I have a letter respecting him which I would in his place give almost a fortune to possess … if you think it right you can give him a hint that he has not all the power on his side’.88 In sharp contrast to Ellen’s vitriolic outpourings, Arthur made very few comments on the situation, privately confessing only, ‘I find it hard to “forget & forgive” her for her proceedings in reference to my dear Wife.’89

  Ellen made several attempts to circumvent Arthur and publish her letters from Charlotte but met with little success.90 In the end, she had to be content with her role as the oracle to be consulted by all who wished to learn more about the Brontës. Ironically, this probably gave her more influence than any account she might have penned as, despite increasingly slender means, she held open house to biographers, reporters and admirers of her friend. Sinking into a querulous, embittered and impoverished old age, her only pleasure became her ‘little chats’ with visitors who would listen spellbound to the reminiscences of one who had been the friend of Charlotte Brontë.91 She died a
t the end of November 1897, aged eighty, and was buried in the churchyard of St Peter’s Church at Birstall. Her obituary declared her to have been ‘a woman of exceptional intellectual power and personality’.92 Ellen Nussey had finally become a part of the myth of the Brontës which she had done so much to create and perpetuate.

  That the myth has survived is a tribute to the emotive power of Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which surely lives up to Patrick’s expectation that it ‘will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time’.93 It is, however, a flawed masterpiece. Mrs Gaskell was a supreme writer of fiction but she too easily identified what she perceived to be the facts of Charlotte’s life with the themes of her own novels: Charlotte and her sisters thus became the dutiful, long-suffering daughters and Branwell the wastrel son of a harsh, unbending father.94 The portrayal of Charlotte as the martyred heroine of a tragic life, driven by duty and stoically enduring her fate, served its purpose at the time. Charlotte’s wicked sense of humour, her sarcasm, her childhood joie de vivre which enlivens the juvenilia, are completely ignored. So, too, are her prejudices, her unpleasant habit of always seeing the worst in people, her bossiness against which her sisters rebelled, her flirtations with William Weightman and George Smith and her traumatic love for Monsieur Heger. What remains may be a more perfect human being, but it was not Charlotte Brontë. Mrs Gaskell’s Emily, too, reduced to a series of vignettes illustrating her unusual strength of character, betrays nothing of the obsession with Gondal which made her almost incapable of leading a life outside the sanctuary of her home but led her to the creation of the strange and wonderful world of Wuthering Heights. Anne is simply a cipher, the youngest child, whose boldness in defying convention by adopting a plain heroine in Agnes Grey and advocating startlingly unorthodox religious beliefs and women’s rights in The Tenant ofWildfell Hall finds no place in Mrs Gaskell’s portrait. Most of all, however, it was the men in Charlotte’s life who suffered at her biographer’s hands. The Patrick Brontë who took such tender care of his young children, campaigned incessantly on behalf of the poor of his parish and espoused unfashionable liberal causes is unrecognizable in her malicious caricature of a selfish and eccentric recluse. Similarly, the Branwell who was his family’s pride and joy, the leader and innovator, artist, poet, musician and writer, is barely touched upon, despite the fact that, without him, there would probably have been no Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell.

  For all her faults, Mrs Gaskell at least ensured that the lives of the Brontës would be as perennially fascinating to future generations as their novels. The trickle of visitors to Haworth, which began in the 1850s, has now become a mighty flood: hundreds of thousands of Brontë enthusiasts, from every part of the globe, come each year to walk the moors which were such an inspiration to the family and to visit the once obscure parsonage which housed such febrile talent. The very ordinariness of the surroundings makes the Brontës’ achievements all the more extraordinary. They had neither wealth nor power and therefore lacked the richness and diversity of experience which these can bring; what they did have was the vicarious experience of books and an irrepressible creativity which more than supplied their place. More than anything else, however, they had each other. As children they had needed no other companions and in the sometimes heated, often intense, but always affectionate rivalry between them, they had each found a place and a voice. Even as adults they tended to exclude others: though self-sufficient as a unit, they were dependent on each other for the mutual support and criticism which underpinned their lives and illumined their literary efforts. Without this intense family relationship, some of the greatest novels in the English language would never have been written.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Line drawings.

  p. vi: Ruined castle by Emily, c. 1835 (Princeton University Library)

  p. xvi: The results of Sorrow; by Branwell, autumn 1846 (Mary Pearson’s Commonplace Book, in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)

  p. 1: Country Scene by Anne, 15 December 1836

  p. 35: Kirkstall Abbey by Charlotte, undated

  p. 72: Mother and Child by Charlotte, undated (Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  p. 103: ‘The Whinchat’ by Emily, 1 April 1829 (Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  p. 134: Lady on a Bridge by Anne, undated

  p. 165: Lord Byron by Charlotte, c. 1833 (private collection)

  p. 198: ‘Grasper – from life’ by Emily, January 1834

  p. 234: ‘Angrians Arise!’ armorial triumph from the manuscript of The Rising of the ‘Angrians’ by Branwell, 7 January 1836 (Princeton University Library)

  p. 263: ‘Countess Blessington’ by Charlotte, 1833 (private collection)

  p. 298: ‘Alexander Percy Esqr M.P.’ by Branwell, autumn 1846 (Mary Pearson’s Commonplace Book, in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)

  p. 332: ‘Bendigo “taking a sight’” by Branwell, 10 September 1845 (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds)

  p. 373: Self-portrait by Branwell, autumn 1846 (Mary Pearson’s Commonplace Book, in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)

  p. 408: Merlin Hawk by Emily, 27 October 1841

  p. 448: Continental Castles by Anne, 22 March 1836

  p. 484: Marquis of Douro by Charlotte, c. 1833 (private collection)

  p. 521: ‘Our Lady of greif’ by Branwell, 28 April 1846 (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds)

  p. 564: ‘Gondal Poems’ notebook heading by Emily, February 1844

  p. 601: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell autographs, sent to Mr F. Enoch, 23 July 1846

  p. 641: ‘Patrick Reid “turned off”, without his cap’ by Branwell, January 1848 (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds)

  p. 673: Mary Percy at Alnwick by Charlotte, undated

  p. 709: ‘Ashburnham Church On the Valley-Land’ by Charlotte, August 1845

  p. 744: ‘English Lady’ by Charlotte, 15 October 1834

  p. 777: Mill by a Stream by Charlotte, c. 1842–3 (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)

  p. 814: ‘The North Wind’ by Emily, undated (Mrs Felicity Craven)

  p. 850: ‘Zamorna. 35’ by Branwell, undated

  p. 883: ‘The Cross of Rievaulx’ by Charlotte, 23 June 1836

  p. 916: Pine Tree by Emily, c. 1842

  p. 954: ‘Resurgam tombstone by Branwell, 15 May 1842 (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds)

  Plate Section One

  p. 1. Pillar portrait. Branwell’s painting of the three sisters (National Portrait Gallery)

  p. 2. Maria Branwell (Brontë Society)

  p. 3. Aunt Branwell (Brontë Society)

  p. 4. Patrick Brontë (Getty Images)

  p. 5. Church Lane, Haworth (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 6. Haworth Parsonage (Brontë Society)

  p. 7. Charlotte’s early ‘little books’ (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 8. A watercolour by Charlotte (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 9. ‘Young Men’s Magazine’, written by Charlotte in 1830 (Brontë Society)

  p. 10. Map of the Glasstown Confederacy, drawn by Branwell (British Library)

  p. 11. Roe Head School

  p. 12. Miss Wooler, headmistress of Roe Head

  p. 13. Ellen Nussey (Brontë Society)

  p. 14. Mary Taylor (Brontë Society)

  p. 15. Portrait of Anne, drawn by Charlotte in 1833 (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 16. The Gun Group, painted by Branwell (Brontë Parsonage Museum/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 17. Emily’s diary paper, 1837 (Brontë Society)

  Plate Section Two

  p. 18. ‘Liberty or Bondage’, one of Patrick’s campaigning letters, 1837 (British Newspaper Library)

  p. 19. Grasper, drawn by Emily in 1834 (Brontë P
arsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 20. Keeper, drawn by Emily in 1838 (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 21. Blake Hall, Mirfield

  p. 22. William Weightman, drawn by Charlotte (Brontë Society)

  p. 23. A self-portrait drawn by Branwell in 1840 (Brontë Parsonage Museum/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 24. Lydia Robinson (Walsall Area Health Authority)

  p. 25. ‘On Ouse’s grassy banks, last Whitsuntide’, by Branwell (Brontë Society)

  p. 26. The Heger family (by courtesy of Monsieur René Pechère, Brussels)

  p. 27. Pensionnat Heger, Brussels

  p. 28. Charlotte’s caricature of herself in a letter to Ellen Nussey (Brontë Society)

  p. 29. Prospectus for the proposed school at Haworth Parsonage (Brontë Society)

  p. 30. George Smith (Brontë Society)

  p. 31. William Smith Williams (Brontë Society)

  p. 32. Charlotte Brontë, drawn by Richmond (National Portrait Gallery)

  p. 33. Mrs Gaskell, drawn by Richmond (National Portrait Gallery)

  p. 34. The Dining Room at the Brontë Parsonage (Brontë Parsonage Museum/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 35. Arthur Bell Nicholls (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  p. 36. Charlotte’s going away dress (Brontë Parsonage Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  All uncredited reproductions are from the author’s collection, out of copyright, or untraceable.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  I: NAMES

  AB Anne Brontë (1820–49)

  ABN Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls (1819–1906), Charlotte’s husband

  CB Charlotte Brontë (1816–55)