Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  43. LI, 19 July 1834 p.4;Leyland, i, 132–3; Susan Foister, ‘The Brontë Portraits’, BST:18:9:342–3.

  44. WG, PBB, 79. I have been unable to find a contemporary source for this claim. Leyland, ii, 131, 133 suggests that Branwell’s sister(s) shared his lessons but this seems inherently unlikely. Charlotte’s portraits of Anne (see below n.49) predate both the 1834 exhibition and Robinson’s employment as tutor.

  45. Leeds Mercury, 27 Oct 1834 p.4; Leyland, i, 135–6. One critic at the exhibition in 1834 commented that his portraits of children had ‘very expressive, but somewhat hard features. Considering them as groups, they are formal and matter of fact; there is an absence of the imaginative which we are sure the artist can supply if he pleases. We would point to the works of Reynolds’: LI, 19 July 1834 p.4.

  46. EN, Reminiscences [LCB, i, 598]. See above, n.38.

  47. ECG to unidentified, [Sept 1853] [C&P, 249. Charlotte ‘brought down’ the portrait to show Gaskell on her visit in 1853, implying it was not prominently displayed at the parsonage. The image of Branwell was not then visible and Gaskell fancied that the ‘great column, lit by the sun’ divided Charlotte from her sisters’ melancholy fate… She described it as ‘not much better than sign-painting, as to manipulation; but the likenesses were, I should think, admirable … from the striking resemblance which Charlotte, upholding the great frame of canvas, and consequently standing right behind it, bore to her own representation’: ECG, Life, 106. Too much significance has been attached to the painting out of Branwell’s portrait which has variously been ascribed to dissatisfaction with his own image, a later fit of self-disgust and even to his family’s wish to obliterate him from their collective memory by arranging for him to be painted out after his death. Conservators. at the National Gallery are convinced that the same hand painted the image in and out and that the painting out was done at the same time as the rest of the portrait: Susan Foister, ‘The Brontë Portraits’, BST:18:95:354 n.13. Branwell’s image is undamaged and carefully painted over so it cannot have been removed in a fit of pique or anger. The land-scape format of the second portrait (see below, n.48), which lends itself to a much less crowded composition, suggests that Branwell, perhaps on his tutor’s advice, removed his self-portrait to create a more balanced grouping.

  48. T.P. Foley, ‘John Elliott Cairnes’ Visit to Haworth Parsonage’, BST:18:94:293. C.K. Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and her Circle (London, 1896), 123–4note, states that Nicholls told him, when Shorter visited him in Ireland in 1893, that he had destroyed all but the profile portrait. Speculation that the profile portrait is actually of Anne, because it is ‘too pretty’ to be of Emily, is unwar-ranted. The discovery of Martha Brown’s photograph of the complete portrait confirmed the identifications made by Greenwood on his tracings of the original: this proved the profile was that of Emily and that Ellen was wrong in her initialled identifications on the highly inaccurate reproduction of the full portrait in J. Horsfall Turner, Haworth Past and Present (Bingley, 1879), opp.137: see Juliet Barker, ‘The Brontë Portraits: A Mystery Solved’, BST:20:1:3–11.

  49. CB, portraits of Anne Brontë, pencil, 17 Apr 1833 and watercolour, 17 June 1834: HAOBP: P.Br. C17.5 and C21, BPM; a third, undated watercolour [1834] in private hands is on loan as HAOBP: P.Br. C107, BPM [A&S nos.91, 119 and 92].

  50. PB to Charles Dudley, 20 July and 3 Sept 1833: MSS in archives of Bible Society, ULC [LRPB, 84].

  51. PB to Archbishop of York, July 1833: MS in Borthwick [LRPB, 83], signifying his intention to appoint Bardsley his curate but leaving the salary and date blank. For the story of Bardsley’s non-appointment see C.W. Bardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames (London and New York, 1901), v. I am grateful to Margaret Smith for this reference. Bardsley officiated once in Haworth at the burial of 4–year-old Suzanna Feather on 2 September 1833: Burials, Haworth. Bardsley was curate of Keighley by 19 May 1834 when he attended the ceremony to lay the foundation stone of the new Keighley Church Sunday School: LI, 24 May 1834 p.3.

  52. Crowther preached at the afternoon and evening services on 21 July 1833 and Morgan 2sermons on 20 July 1834: Haworth Church Hymnsheets, 21 July 1833: MS BS x, H, BPM; LM, 26 July 1834 p.5.

  53. See, for example, ibid., 28 Dec 1833 p.7.

  54. John Winterbotham’s letter in ibid., 8 Mar 1834 p.6 says he is responding to ‘three letters of my friend to the Editor of the Intelligencer’ but I have only been able to identify one, a letter of 7 January signed ‘P.B.’ published in LI, 18 Jan 1834 p.4. Winterbotham, replying in a detailed letter in LM, 25 Jan 1834 p.6, says this was Patrick’s second one. Another letter signed ‘P.BRONTE’ and dated 17 February was published in ibid., 22 Feb 1834 p.6. but on content it does not appear to be the one Winterbotham called Patrick’s third. I have been unable to find any letters or articles in the Leeds Intelligencer, Leeds Mercury or Leeds Times, either under Patrick’s name, initials or a pseudonym which fit Winterbotham’s description of and quotation from Patrick’s first and third letters. Patrick cannot be ‘A Yorkshire Rector’ who had letters in the Leeds Mercury and Bradford Observer defending the Established Church as he dates at least one from ‘E—. nr Wakefield’: LM, 4Jan 1834 p.8. Nor can he have been ‘A Churchman’ as he had already written 2letters before the one Winterbotham identified as Patrick’s second: see LI, 23 Nov 1833 p.4; 4Jan 1834 p.3.

  55. John Winterbotham, LM, 8Mar 1834 p.6[LRPB, 350]. Wintherbotham was equally vitriolic and personal in his attack on ‘the factory child’s friend’ Revd George Bull: see below, n.65.

  56. PB, LM, 22 Feb 1834 p.6[LRPB, 92].

  57. John Winterbotham, LM, 8Mar 1834 p.6[LRPB, 350].

  58. Three days after his reply to Winterbotham was published in LM, 22 Feb 1834 p.6[LRPB, 92–4] Patrick wrote again to the paper stating that ‘Having already taken my friendly leave of the Rev. John Winterbotham, and being willing to throw a mantle of charity over him, and all his motives and actions, I would farther observe, that unless forced by unexpected circumstances, I will not reply to any article bearing his signature, whether that article might, perchance, be the product of his own mind, or the result of a neighbourly co-operation of heads more learned than his own’. Renewing his attack on the severity of the criminal code, Patrick declared that a statesman who advocated such reform would, ‘like Howard and Wilberforce … erect for himself a monument more durable than brass, and more precious than gold’: LM, 8Mar 1834 p.3[LRPB, 94–6].

  59. PB to Church Trustees, 1 Feb 1834: MS Heaton B143 p.5, WYAS, Bradford [LRPB, 88]; PB, deed between Incumbent and Church Trustees, 28 July 1834: MS BS 155, BPM. Patrick had complained of the problems that gave rise to this agreement in his letters to the Governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty: see above, pp.165–6.

  60. PB to Earl of Harewood, 11 Aug 1834: MS in Box i, Lieutenancy Papers, WYAS, Leeds [LRPB, 96–7].

  61. PB to Henry Heap, 27 Nov 1834, for-warded to Earl of Harewood with Henry Heap to Earl of Harewood. 2 Dec 1834: MSS in Box i, Lieutenancy Papers, WYAS, Leeds [LRPB, 98–9]. Joesph Greenwood was sworn in at the Skipton Sessions on 28 June 1836: Justices’ Qualification Oaths, 1819–37: MS in WYAS, Wakefield. I am grateful to Sarah Fermi for this last reference.

  62. PB to Henry Heap, 27 Nov 1834 (see n.61). Contraventions of the Act were dealt with as far away as Skipton: see, for example, Jonas Hird of Royd House, Haworth, caught by factory inspectors and fined at Skipton Assizes for employing children in excess of 12 hours daily and allowing his foreman to fabricate records of hours worked: LM, 13 Sept 1834 p.8. Hartley Merrall was similarly fined for working his Haworth mill children beyond the hours specified in the Factory Act: LI, 4 Apr 1835 p.3.

  63. George Bull, LM, 13 Sept 1834 p.5; John Winterbotham, ibid., 20 Sept 1834 p.6. Revd George Stringer Bill, vicar of Bierley, whom Winterbotham characteristically and unfairly dubbed ‘the pugnacious parson’ was better known as ‘the factory child’s friend’. Though a Tory by conviction, like Patrick, he was also a friend of the reformer Richard Oastler and the Ra
dical and Chartist Abraham Wildman. He worked tirelessly with them for the Ten Hours Bill, writing to the press and addressing public meetings, like the one in Keighley on 3 Mar 1835 where all three spoke in favour of the bill: LI, 7 Mar 1835 p.3. Patrick was one of the signatories of a memorial to Bull praising his campaign: BO, 17 Sept 1840 p.2.

  64. Ibid., 20 Nov 1834 p.333; LM, 22 Nov 1834 p.7; Haworth Temperance Society membership cards no.77 (Jonas Gregson) and no.94 (Mary Binns), 26 Dec 1834; no.191 (Thomas Pickles), Mar 1835: MSS BS 146 (a-c), BPM. The average consumption of beer per head of population in Haworth was about a ninth of a pint daily (Babbage, 11–12) but Nancy Garrs complained that Aunt Branwell only allowed the parsonage servants half a pint a day which she considered ‘close’: see above, p.1009 n.73. The parsonage must have brewed its own beer as ‘Brewing Utensils’ were lot 32 in Catalogue of the Sale at Haworth Parsonage, 1 Oct 1861: MS BS, x, H, BPM.

  65. CB to EN, 19 June 1834: MS n.l. [LCB, i, 128].

  66. CB to EN, 4July 1834: MS HM 24408 pp.2–3, Huntington and CB to EN, 10 Nov 1834: MS MA 2696 R-V p.3, PM [LCB, i, 130, 133].

  67. CB to EN, 4July 1834: MS HM 24408 p.2 crossed, Huntington [LCB, i, 130].

  68. Charlotte’s wide reading of Byron is reflected, for instance, in CB, High Life in Verdopolis, 20 Feb–20 Mar 1834: MS Add 34255, BL [CA, ii, pt ii, 3–81] where she quotes from both Shakespeare and Byron at the head of each chapter. The high value the Brontës attached to Byron is indicated by Branwell’s spending some of his meagre savings on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Paris, 1827) on a trip to Liverpool in May 1835: HAOBP:bb15, BPM.

  69. CB to EN, 4July 1834: MS HM 24408 p.3crossed, Huntington [LCB, i, 130–1].

  70. EJB/AB, Diary Paper, 24 Nov 1834: MS Bon 131, BPM [JB BLL, 53–4; JB ST no.11].

  71. CB to EN, 13 Mar 1835: MS n.l. [LCB, i, 136].

  72. LI, 11 Apr 1835 p.3.

  73. John Foster, LM, 18 Apr 1835 p.8.

  74. CB to EN, 8 [May] 1835: MS Bon 160, BPM [LCB, i, 138].

  75. ‘O.P.Q.’, LM, 23 May 1835 p.7.

  76. PB, The Signs of the Times; or a Familiar Treatise on Some Political Indications in the Year 1835 (Keighley, R. Aked, 1835), price 6d. [Brontëana, 220–32].

  77. Patrick was not purely self-interested in his defence of the church establishment: his own salary was not dependent on tithes or church rates so their abolition would not affect his personal finances. He defended the ‘fair commutation’ of tithes, rather than their abolition, on the grounds that clergy-men had ‘as fair a claim on their dues, as any landed proprietor can have on his rents’: ibid., 12 [Brontëana, 226]. Branwell reflected his father’s views in making Zamorna, disguised as Colonel Hartford, defend the Established Church of the Glasstown Union: ‘I am a Member of the Church of Africa because I think it the best church in the Universe but poor is the best compared with the loftiness of the truth. And though I think that to seperate from my church because many of its Doctrines and much of its government is and are eronous would be to do more injury to religion than to uphold even its faults yet I will never cease to advocate the Doctrines I have founded and too endeavour to spread them as wide as my name may extend’: PBB, [Angria and the Angrians I(d)], [c.Dec 1834–Jan 1835: MS p.9, Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 294].

  78. PB, The Signs of the Times, 16, 19 [Brontëana, 229, 231].

  79. Northangerland’s attacks on the ministry by letter and in Parliament are contained in PBB, [Angria and the Angrians I(b)], 12 Sept 1834]: MS pp.1–2, Brotherton and [Angria and the Angrians I(c)], [Oct 1834]: MS pp.4–8, Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 242–9, 259–71].

  80. PBB, [Angria and the Angrians I(d)], 15 June–25 July 1835: MS p.4, Rutgers [Neufeldt, ii, 390–1].

  81. Ibid., p.8 [Neufeldt, ii, 409–10].

  82. CB to EN, 2 July 1835: MS HM 24410 pp.1–2, Huntington [LCB, i, 139–40].

  CHAPTER NINE: THE INFERNAL WORLD

  Title: Referring to Angria, from CB ‘All this day I have been in a dream [RHJ]’, 11 Aug–14 Oct 1836: MS Bon 98(8) p.1, BPM [Glen, 452].

  1. CB to EN, 2July 1835: MS HM 24410 p.3, Huntington [LCB, i, 140].

  2. PBB, draft letter to the Secretary for the Royal Academy, [Summer 1835]: MS in 3 fragments, MS Bon 147 pp.1v, 2v, 3v, BPM [LCB, i, 140 n.1].

  3. The story was first aired in 1914 by Chadwick, 114. ‘That he went to London is certain, though Mrs Gaskell did not know this; but he soon got through all the money his father had allowed him, giving useless excuses, such as that he had been robbed by a fellow-traveller. The old Vicar saw that Branwell was not to be trusted in London, and he was brought back’. Chadwick offers no authority or source for her information, but this tale, which WG PBB, 111 confidently attributed to ‘Haworth folk who still remembered that deplorable return’, is the basis for Gérin’s long and elaborate account of Branwell’s supposedly disastrous trip to London: ibid., 97–111. Gérin also states categorically ‘That he went there, his friends Leyland, Grundy and Searle Phillips and many others later heard directly from him-self’ (ibid., 95) but the evidence of Leyland, Grundy and Searle Phillips is, as we shall see, at best second-hand and amounts to no more than that Branwell spent a few days in London. Far from there being ‘many others’ who later heard the story from Branwell himself, no one else at all ever corroborated this version of events. Nevertheless, Gérin’s account has been accepted unquestioningly by all subsequent biographers.

  4. PBB, draft letter to the Secretary for the Royal Academy, [Summer 1835]: MS in 3fragments, MS Bon 147 pp.1v, 2v, 3v, BPM [LCB, i, 140 n.1]. I am grateful to Helen Valentine, Curatorial Assistant of the Royal Academy, for checking its records on my behalf.

  5. CB to EN, 2July 1835: MS HM 24410 p.3, Huntington [LCB, i, 139–40]; PB to Mrs Franks, 6 July 1835: MS BS 184 p.1, BPM [LRPB, 100]; EN to ECG, 22 Oct 1856: MS n.l. [Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and her Circle, 15].

  6. PB to William Robinson, 7Sept 1835: MS BS 185 p.2, BPM [LRPB, 102].

  7. PBB and PB to William Robinson, 16 Nov 1835: MS BS 185.5, BPM [JB BLL, 33–4].

  8. Leyland, i, 142–3.

  9. Grundy, 80. The heavily annotated Brontë copy of A Description of London (London, 1824) is HAOBP: bb35, BPM. An engraving of Westminster Abbey appears between pp.12–13.

  10. January Searle [George Searle Phillips], ‘Branwell Brontë’, The Mirror, 28 Dec 1872 p.278. Far from being confirmation of Branwell’s supposedly disastrous trip to London as WG PBB, 95 asserts, this account explicitly makes clear that the visit never happened.

  11. [H?] Woolven to F. A. Leyland, 8Sept 1875: MS E.2008.3, pp.1–2, BPM. Leyland, i, 144–5, 202 cites this letter and Grundy as sources for his account of Branwell’s visit to London. Woolven’s letter disproves Du Maurier, 51, 119, 121, 132 which identifies Woolven as Branwell’s subordinate and a ticket-collector.

  12. BM, v-xii (1819–22). WG PBB, 107 says that Bell’s Sporting Life was taken by Thomas Sugden at the Black Bull but gives no source for her information. This is contradicted by Binns, who was sent by Branwell to collect it from the Shake Hands public house between Haworth and Oakworth every Sunday: [Benjamin Binns], BO, 17 Feb 1894 p.6. Egan began the journal in 1824 under another title and in 1859 it was incorporated into Sporting Life. See also Pierce Egan, Book of Sports (London, 1832) for accounts of the Castle Tavern and its customers.

  13. PBB to the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, pm 8Dec 1835 and 8April 1836: MSS 4040 and 4042 p.1, NLS [L&L, i, 133–4, 135].

  14. Neufeldt, ii, 424, 443, 454, 479, 495, 496.

  15. Feather, A Centenary History of the Three Graces Lodge, 43; MS Masonic Records, in private hands. See below p.285.

  16. PBB, [Angria and the Angrians II (g)], 28 May 1836: MSS in Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 533–43, esp. 538]. Du Maurier, 51–2, WG PBB, 98–106 and Fraser, 101 all cite the story as autobiography.

  17. Wentworth appears only in the second volume of Branwell’s great history of Angria which is dismembered and scattered over numerous locations: PBB, [Angria and the Angrians II], 7
Jan–22 June 1836 [Neufeldt, ii, 454–560, esp.533–60]. It is a measure of the lack of importance Branwell attached to Wentworth that he did not attribute a single poem to him, though he did to less likely figures such as the pragmatic Warner Howard Warner.

  18. PBB, [Angria and the Angrians II (g)], [May 1836]: MS p.1, Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 533].

  19. Ibid., pp.1–2[Neufeldt, ii, 538]. Branwell took ‘a half year’s farewell of old friend Whisky’ and drank ‘whisky-toddy as hot as hell’ at Kirkby Lonsdale: PBB to John Brown, [13 Mar 1840]: MS n.l. but see below, p.1052 n.6 [L&L, i, 198–9]; two years later he ‘can now speak cheerfully and enjoy the company of another without the stimulus of six glasses of whisky’: PBB to Francis Grundy, 22 May 1842: MS n.l. [L&L, i, 263]. In what is presumed to be his last letter before his death, Branwell asked Brown to get him 5d. worth of gin: PBB to John Brown, [1848]: MS in Brotherton [L&L, i, 124].

  20. PBB, [Angria and the Angrians IV (g)], [Aug 1837]: MS Ashley 187 pp.4r–4v, BL [Neufeldt, iii, 138–9].

  21. PBB, [Angria and the Angrians II (g)], 28 May 1836: MS p.2, Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 540ff].

  22. Hastings belonged to the ‘Devil’s Own’, the 19th Infantry Regiment of Angria; though a loyal supporter of Zamorna in the summer of 1837 he joined Northangerland and the Revolutionists, earning himself proscription as a rebel: PBB, [Angria and the Angrians IV(g)], [Aug]–20 Oct 1837: MSS Ashley 187 pp.5r–5v, BL and MS Bon 149(1) p.2, BPM [Neufeldt, iii, 132ff].

  23. The events after the battle of Loanga are described in a continuous section of ms which is divided among numerous locations: see VN Bib, 8–9; Neufeldt, ii, 411–43].

  24. PBB, THE LIFE of Field Marshal the Right Honourable ALEXANDER PERCY, vol ii, 3 June–17 Nov 1835: MS p.7, Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 164]. For the existence of a third volume, now lost, see VN Bib, 37.

  25. PBB, THE LIFE of Field Marshal the Right Honourable ALEXANDER PERCY, vol ii, 3June–17 Nov 1835: MS p.16, Brotherton [Neufeldt, ii, 1836].