Wilson was an avid promoter of his own bracing brand of Christianity and published a magazine called The Children’s Friend, full of hellfire and horror, in which God was quite likely to strike a child dead mid-tantrum to prove how high the stakes were, conduct-wise. In one of his stories a little girl applauds her teachers’ habit of whipping the pupils: “It is because they love us, and it is to make us remember what a sad thing sin is. God would be angry with them if they did not whip us.” Child’s First Tales (1836) was another Wilson composition, written in monosyllables to help the very youngest readers, with stark woodcut illustrations: “Look there! Do you not see a man hung by the neck? Oh! It is a sad sight. A rope is tied round his neck to what they call the gal-lows: and there he hangs till he is quite dead.” Other stories dealt with “Mother’s Sick-bed,” “Mother Dead” (“The big girl takes the sheet off the face, to have one more look”) and “Dead Boy,” the story of a lad who died when he went skating on the Sabbath: “He thought he should go to hell for all this. I fear he would go there. How sad it is to think of!”
This was standard fare in pious literature for children of the time, but must have appalled Charlotte Brontë almost as much as it does twenty-first-century readers, or she would not have satirised it so sharply in Jane Eyre. In the novel, The Child’s Guide is the conduct book given to Jane by Mr. Brocklehurst with the instruction to study “an account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G—, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit,” but the fate of “the Liar” seems to apply not to herself but to John and Mrs. Reed, and provokes in the child not remorse for her own faults but “a passion of resentment” at others’.
There were many things about the regime at Cowan Bridge that grated on Charlotte Brontë’s nerves and tiny, skinny, eight-year-old body: the cold, the scant, bad food, the rote learning, the strict discipline, the soul-stifling air of Calvinism. Prayers and church services dominated the school week, and on Sundays, come rain or shine, the pupils had to walk to Wilson’s church at Tunstall, two miles away across country. It was too far to walk back in the middle of the day for lunch, so the girls ate bread and cheese at the church before the afternoon service, and in the winter suffered a great deal from these long, cold, hungry Sundays, much like the Lowood girls in Jane Eyre. Although the Lune valley is outstandingly beautiful, Charlotte later blamed the school’s low and damp position for the outbreaks of typhus, scrofula and consumption that periodically broke out, and just as culpable in her eyes was “the diet, the discipline, the system of tuition”—everything about it, in other words, was hazardous to its “ill-fated pupils.”
The picture of life at her fictional “Lowood” in Jane Eyre, published twenty-two years after the author’s own schooldays, reminded many readers of Charles Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9). Already a by-word for grimness, it was based on first-hand research by Dickens in the 1830s into “The Yorkshire schools.” These were notorious north-country boarding establishments where boys of poor families (or poor relations, whom families wished to get rid of) could be roughly educated at the lowest possible price per capita. Dickens, with characteristic theatricality, had gone undercover in 1838 to see for himself the conditions at Bowes Academy, near Greta Bridge, and is said to have based Wackford Squeers, Nickleby’s infamous pedagogue sadist, on the headmaster, William Shaw. Shaw would almost certainly have been known to the Brontës by repute, but it is interesting that there was an equally notorious local example of the type known to them personally: Hammond Roberson of Heald’s Hall, whose name appears on a fragmentary list drawn up by Charlotte in the late 1830s with the words “boy-destroyer” next to it, and followed by “Mr. Squeers/Dotheboys-Hall/Greta-Bridge/Yorkshire. Favoured by Charles Dickens Esq.”*7 The conditions in these schools—one real and one fictional—clearly could be classed together in Charlotte’s mind and seem to have contributed, along with her own memories of boarding school, to her creation of Lowood and Mr. Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre’s “girl-destroyer.”*8 It was no surprise that when Elizabeth Gaskell drew out the similarities in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, Cowan Bridge was widely assumed to have been exactly like Lowood, and as bad as “a second Dotheboys’ Hall” by inference.
Cowan Bridge remains hard to separate from its fictional counterpart. There’s little information about the discipline at the school, but it is likely that the punishments meted out to Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre (being birched on the neck and having to endure public shaming) were similar to those the Brontë girls encountered, whether they experienced them or not. Every school had its “scourgemistress,” often worse than the novel’s Miss Scatcherd,*9 and it is perhaps notable that Charlotte allowed her heroine to be so outraged at such a very common practice. It implies that Patrick Brontë was not a very strict disciplinarian at home.
There is no record of Charlotte having been punished for anything at school. One former teacher, Miss Andrews, remembered her as “a bright, clever, happy little girl never in disgrace.” But witnessing others being punished would have been almost more distressing to Charlotte; her own sorrows had made her, even at this age, profoundly sympathetic to anyone oppressed. Jane Eyre’s fury on behalf of Helen Burns is an example of just such sympathetic outrage: Jane says she would take the rod and break it under Miss Scatcherd’s nose, and when Helen is made to walk round wearing a sign saying “Slattern,” Jane takes the first opportunity to tear it off and throw it in the fire: “the fury of which [Helen] was incapable had been burning in my soul all day, and tears, hot and large, had continually been scalding my cheek; for the spectacle of her sad resignation gave me an intolerable pain at the heart.”
The food at Cowan Bridge was, by every account, disgusting. One former pupil remembered grease swimming on top of the girls’ warm milk from the dirty copper and seeing the housekeeper once pausing from cutting up raw meat to stir a teacher’s tea with her finger. Mrs. Gaskell heard numerous stories about the disgusting conditions under which the food at Cowan Bridge was kept and prepared. You wouldn’t need to be a fussy eater to balk at tainted meat, rancid fat, burnt porridge, “bingy” milk or anything cooked, as everything was, in water from the rain-tub, full of dirt that had run off the roof. Another expupil said that the paucity of edible food at school ruined her health for years.
Elizabeth Gaskell laid the blame for Charlotte’s later ill-health and “stunted” physique squarely at the door of Cowan Bridge, but, as Reverend Wilson’s son pointed out in 1857, when moved to defend his father (who was still alive), the Brontë children were all “naturally very delicate” to begin with and subject to a home regime every bit as influential as the school could have been, under an “austere and peculiar” father; “is it fair to trace all [Miss Brontë’s] sufferings in after life, as Mrs. Gaskell does, to the very short time she was at that establishment?” Miss Andrews backed him up vigorously, saying that Wilson senior was “an excellent and eminently useful clergyman” whose school was of “inestimable value” to poverty-stricken clergymen (with the implication that the Brontës might have been more grateful). When the two elder Brontë girls were presented in July 1824 they were “so delicate that there were doubts whether they could be admitted into the school,” but they were admitted and throve so much that Reverend Brontë brought “two more” (Charlotte and Emily) later in the year: “They all inherited consumption from their mother, and were taken home”—before, not after—“any attack of fever,” as she is careful to claim. Mrs. Gaskell also heard that the elder Brontës were convalescent on arrival and that Maria’s cough lingered. Could this have been the beginning of consumption? The poor girl was blistered on her side, presumably to treat chronic wheezing or coughing, and one of Mrs. Gaskell’s most painful stories (related to her by an unnamed pupil at the school) is of how Maria felt so ill after the treatment that her schoolfellows urged her to stay in bed, but she insisted on trying to get up to placate the teacher, only to be manhandled sadistically and shouted at for her trouble. It’s not hard to
see where Maria’s reputation for saintliness came from, nor Charlotte’s seething sense of injustice towards the staff bullies at Cowan Bridge.
The experiences Charlotte had at school were not extreme for the time, but they were extreme for her. She and her sisters were far away from home and unused to being with strangers under any circumstances: boarding school could not have been anything other than an ordeal. Charlotte tried to keep her head down, as she later told her publisher: “My career was a very quiet one. I was plodding and industrious, perhaps I was very grave…but I think I was remarkable for nothing.” Interestingly, the kind teacher upon whom Miss Temple is based, Ann Evans (later Mrs. Connor), remembered only one of the Brontës well, Elizabeth, and that was because the little girl had had such a severe cut to the head that for safety’s sake, and “for the sake of greater quiet,” Miss Evans took her into her own room for a few days and nights. This is mirrored in Jane Eyre when Miss Temple nurses the dying Helen Burns in her room, which makes one think that Charlotte must have observed Elizabeth’s removal to the haven of the teacher’s room, or heard about it from her sister. Miss Evans herself seems to have literally not noticed Charlotte Brontë at all. “Of the two younger ones (if two there were),” she told Mrs. Gaskell, “I have very slight recollections, save that one, a darling child, under five years of age, was quite the pet nursling of the school.” That was Emily, who was six before she went to Cowan Bridge, but still among the very youngest pupils. As the previous superintendent, Miss Andrews, remarked, when thinking of their case many years later, “How far young and delicate children are able to contend with the necessary evils of a public school is, in my opinion, a very grave question.”
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IN SEPTEMBER 1824, when they had been at school for just a few weeks, the Brontë girls had a visit on her wedding tour from Elizabeth Firth (now Mrs. James Franks) and were given a half-crown each. Nothing at this point seemed amiss, nor when Patrick Brontë returned on 25 November, bringing Emily to join them. In the older girls’ absence from home, on 2 September, an extraordinary thing had happened. Patrick had sent the three younger children out for an airing on the moor in the company of the servants, Sarah and Nancy Garrs. They had all been ill, he recorded (perhaps with the whooping cough that the elder three girls had just had), but it had been a fine day and Reverend Brontë didn’t notice how long they had stayed out until about six o’clock, in itself a rather telling detail. When he began to be concerned and went to look for them from an upstairs window, he saw the sky darkening and heard the approach of a storm. “My little family had escaped to a place of shelter, but I did not know it,” he related. “I consequently watched every movement of the coming tempest with a painful degree of interest.” Then, to his great surprise, he heard an explosion and felt the room pulse with what he believed afterwards to have been an earthquake.
Out on the moor, as the storm broke violently, the children had taken shelter under Sarah Garrs’ cloak and then the same explosion that their father heard back in the Parsonage shook the ground and a torrent of peat, rocks and water appeared from the direction of Crow Hill. A bog had burst, exploding under the pressure of methane building up during a long dry spell followed by this drenching. At the site, as crowds of curious tourists later discovered, tons of matter had been thrown into the air like an earthy volcano, leaving two huge craters, while waves of “black moory substance” thirty to forty yards wide flowed downhill towards the town, uprooting trees and carrying boulders with it. As The Leeds Mercury reported later, “The torrent was seen coming down the glen before it reached the hamlet, by a person who gave the alarm and thereby saved the lives of several children, who would otherwise have been swept away.” William Atkins speculates whether these children were Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë, who were found, with Nancy and Sarah Garrs, cowering “in a Porch” later, too terrified to proceed. The damage done by the eruption was indeed catastrophic, with fields and houses flooded by filthy debris, bridges broken, mills stopped and the River Aire polluted with mud as far as fifteen miles away. Though Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte were away at Cowan Bridge when this drama was being played out on Crow Hill, they would surely have heard about it when their father and Emily joined them in November, and in later years Charlotte would have become familiar with the moralising poem Patrick published on the subject, “The Phenomenon; or, An Account in Verse, of the Extraordinary Disruption of a Bog”:
…onward rolls the dark, resistless tide,
Pale, trembling mortals flee on either side.
The clanking engines, and the busy mill,
In thick obstruction, deep immersed, stand still.
“Extraordinary Disruption” was certainly in store for the little family. Early in the new year of 1825 typhus fever broke out at Cowan Bridge. Wilson called in a professional nurse, ordered extra food and medicines and, on discovering the cook’s filthy habits, sacked her, but his measures came too late to save several of the girls, two of whom died at the school and eleven of whom left because of ill-health before the end of the school year. The unnamed former pupil who remembered the dirty copper and greasy milk was saved from probable death, she believed, only by an accidental return home that alerted her parents to the seriousness of her own condition. The school had said nothing about her symptoms, and this lack of communication almost certainly harmed Maria and Elizabeth Brontë, for Maria had been ill for two months in the winter before her father went to fetch her home on St. Valentine’s Day 1825. She didn’t have typhus, but pulmonary tuberculosis, probably masked in its earlier stages by the persistent cough that whooping cough leaves in its wake, and perhaps triggered by that virus. Eight-year-old Charlotte seems to have been painfully aware of the situation from day to day, but powerless to do anything about it, saying later, “I suffered to see my sisters perishing,” and one can only imagine how difficult it was for the older sisters to comfort her and six-year-old Emily. Patrick Brontë was slow to wake up to the dangers himself, leaving Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily at the school when he removed Maria to Haworth, where she ailed for the next two and a half months and then, shockingly, died on 6 May.
While their elder sister was taken home and the next eldest lay ill at Cowan Bridge with a very similar cough, Charlotte and Emily were among a group of girls sent away from the school to Silverdale on the coast—in the wrong direction from home, with adults whose preoccupation with the typhus crisis at the school must have been evident. It was a time of dread and confusion: news of Maria’s death must have taken a long time to reach them and may even have been delayed until the end of May, when Patrick Brontë, now obviously very concerned that Elizabeth’s lingering chest illness might, like Maria’s, be consumption, arrived to gather up his daughters. He probably went on from Cowan Bridge to Silverdale to fetch the younger ones himself, since Elizabeth is known to have travelled back to Haworth with a school servant. The two younger girls got home (it was the midsummer holiday) just two weeks before Elizabeth also died.
The children were stunned and terrified at these two swift, devastating departures. Elizabeth had been only ten years old, Maria eleven. Charlotte recalled the horror of Elizabeth’s death in a fragmentary story of 1837, in which her heroine thinks of her elder sister’s funeral-day, “of the rigid & lengthened corpse laid in its coffin on the hall-table, of the servants pressing round to gaze on Miss Harriet for the last time, of the kiss that she herself was bidden to give the corpse, of the feeling which then first gushed into her childish & volatile heart that Harriet had left them for ever.” Branwell, who had seen both Maria and Elizabeth die, also retained his memories of it with hallucinatory vividness. In a poem he wrote in the 1830s, the narrator remembers being lifted up to see his dead sister in her coffin:
And, to this moment, I can feel
The voiceless gasp—the sickening chill—
With which I hid my whitened face
One presumes that the children were spared Elizabeth’s funeral itself, and the sight of the vault u
nder the south aisle opened up again to receive a third coffin, when the lime mortar can have barely set from the previous occasion, only six weeks before. The officiator was, as it had been for Maria and her mother, William Morgan. Patrick Brontë could not be expected to oversee his own family’s interments.
Very surprisingly, after this calamity, Patrick Brontë seems to have decided that it was in everyone’s best interests to send Charlotte and Emily back to Cowan Bridge to see out the quarter’s notice that each pupil was required to give of withdrawal. He had paid the tuition fees in advance, which may have influenced his decision. A tight ship was run at Haworth Parsonage: Patrick explained to his banker the previous winter that, although sending “another of my little girls” (Emily) to school necessitated the withdrawal of £20 from his account, “in the end I shall not loose [sic],” because his household would be reduced to just himself and the two remaining children, making it possible to replace Nancy and Sarah Garrs with “one elderly woman,” a 53-year-old local widow called Tabitha Aykroyd. Given that the fees at Cowan Bridge included board and lodging through the holidays, the arrangement seemed just worth stretching to meet.
On her return to Cowan Bridge, Charlotte found a protectress in one of the oldest pupils at the school, Mellaney Hayne, a seventeen-year-old orphan from Devon, whom Patrick Brontë remembered “frequently espoused her cause against the encroachments of the elder girls.” Mrs. Gaskell heard that Mellaney was “a hungry, good-natured, ordinary girl,” no substitute for Maria or Elizabeth, but a welcome companion for Charlotte, and the first person outside her own family to recognise her as an individual. She was likely the model for Mary Ann Wilson in Jane Eyre, the kindly older girl who shares “racy and pungent gossip” with the young heroine, and with whom she spends long days of freedom out of doors while fever disrupts the usual school routine. Charlotte later told Mary Taylor that she used to go to stand on a stone alone in the middle of the burn and watch the water flow by, another very lonely image of the traumatised child.
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