Charlotte and Emily were only back at Cowan Bridge for a month, but it has been suggested that this return to the scene of disaster gave rise to Emily’s later phobias about any removal from home and engendered the animus that Charlotte channelled into her portrait of Lowood School in Jane Eyre. There is indeed a special quality of loathing in the Lowood episodes of the novel that goes above and beyond a fictional exposé of a badly run institution. Lowood kills Helen Burns with its pestilential atmosphere, but its spirit-stifling dogmas are seen to be worse still, leading a saintly girl like her (or Maria Brontë) to believe that “by dying young I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world. I should have been continually at fault.”
Charlotte Brontë’s anger at the harm done to herself and her sisters bursts forth in her novel in Jane Eyre’s outrage on her friend’s behalf, all the more potent because articulated by a small girl. “If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust,” Jane says, “the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.”
The first readers of Jane Eyre were, understandably, bowled over by such passages. In 1847 nothing like it had been seen before. No one had ever dramatised the injustices of childhood so vividly; no one had thought to do so as “an autobiography” (the novel’s subtitle)—Jane Eyre was in fact the very first novel to use a first-person child narrator. Jane’s anger and bewilderment and pain therefore were like dispatches from a new frontier, a territory that everyone knew about but that until then had no maps or coordinates.
* * *
*1 Mary Burder admired him; see her letter to PB of 8 August 1823, SHB 1, 66.
*2 The women of Haworth were said to be as rough as the men: at bare-knuckle fights, the combatants’ mothers often stood well to the front of the crowd, threatening a licking at home to anyone showing signs of weakness (“The Brontës and the Brontë Country: A Chat with One Who Knew Them,” The Bradford Observer, 17 February 1894).
*3 Which may have inspired Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights.
*4 Firth in 1815, Morgan in 1836, Dury in 1822 and John Fennell in 1830.
*5 Bradford was for a time the largest wool-processing town in the world. By 1841 it had thirty-eight worsted mills and by 1850 the population had soared to 100,000.
*6 Perhaps to Crofton Hall, which is where Elizabeth Firth had gone to school in 1812–13.
*7 The list, cut off at the top, is on the reverse of the autobiographical fragment known as “Farewell to Angria,” and obviously post-dates 1838/9, when Nicholas Nickleby was first published in serial form.
*8 Could it be that Branwell Brontë had some inside information about the local boarding establishments for boys? His friend Grundy later said that Branwell had had some brief and bad experience as “an usher in a school” (Interviews, 47), though he could have been confused with Branwell’s Sunday school teaching.
*9 Corporal punishment was a common feature of British school life until at least the 1960s.
THREE
The Genii of the Parsonage
1825–31
The home that Charlotte and Emily came back to in 1825 had had a change of personnel. The Garrs sisters were both gone, and in their place was Tabitha Aykroyd—gruff, tender-hearted and “very quaint in appearance.” “Tabby” remained the only full-time servant at the Parsonage for many years, with occasional help with tasks like the washing from a number of local girls, all of whom were very young and very cheap hands. She was a native of the village and had known it long before any mill disturbed the beck in the valley or pavement “causey” stretched across the fields to keep the factory workers out of the mud, and she had thrilling tales of the old days, of sprites and “fairishes” that folk she knew had seen: “It wur the factories as had driven ’em away,” she said. Tabby was no great cook and was later described by Charlotte as boiling the potatoes “to a sort of vegetable glue,” but the family valued her for qualities other than that. Her fund of local wisdom, her colourful dialect speech and her rough motherliness were balm to the little Brontës, and Emily’s later teasing tone when she mimicked her—“O Dear, O Dear, O Dear”—testifies to the deep affection they all came to feel for this rock-solid goddess of the Parsonage kitchen.
Elizabeth Branwell was still in charge of the housekeeping. The Garrs sisters hadn’t liked her much, and called her “a bit of a tyke” for keeping them strictly to only a half-pint of home-brewed beer each day, fetched herself from the cellar. She was generally thought rather narrow in her ideas and stiff in her beliefs, though “kindly and conscientious” at heart, “with a good deal of character.” It is said that Aunt Branwell felt the cold through the Parsonage’s stone flags so much that she took to wearing pattens—strap-on wooden platforms designed to keep one’s feet above mud and puddles outdoors—indoors, a marked eccentricity, though one that the children might have appreciated, since it made her approach slow and audible. She was never seen outside the Parsonage anywhere other than at church, and, like Patrick Brontë, took most of her meals alone in her room, meaning that the children must have almost always eaten with the servants in the kitchen in that oddly compartmentalised household.
Habit was of the utmost importance to Patrick Brontë. He still had his coats made in Cambridge, though they were mended in Haworth. The neckcloth popular in his youth was also Mr. Brontë’s preferred style all his life, wound larger and larger under his chin, it seems, as the years went by. The local tailor’s son retained for a long time the memory of having to broach this formidable personage in his study: “there old Brontë, in accordance with his wont, was sitting in a plain, uncushioned chair, upright as a soldier.” Nine o’clock was his unchanging bed-time (even when attending a concert at the church or an evening gathering, he would leave at this time). As he went up to bed, he would always stop on the half-landing to wind the grandfather clock.
The children had chores to do in the house and study hours, and were encouraged to go out for walks as frequently as possible (always choosing the direction of the moor rather than the town), but most of the time they were left entirely on their own. There is no record of any one of them making friends with children from the village,*1 and, on one occasion, when they were invited to a party, they stood around like aliens, utterly at a loss as to what to do, as a local woman told Elizabeth Gaskell many years later. “[They] had no idea of ordinary games that any village child could play, such as ‘hunt the slipper’ and ‘here we go round the gooseberry bush.’ ”
So the family at the Parsonage lived in isolation, an odd household, certainly: at its head a solitary egotist, accustomed to being listened to but not seeking much by way of dialogue, with his somewhat agoraphobic maiden sister-in-law standing in as a pallid substitute for a wife and mother, and the four remaining children dependent on their own resources, with Charlotte thrown into the role left empty by the paragon Maria.
—
AFTER THE DISASTER of Cowan Bridge, Patrick Brontë was in no hurry to send any of his children to school again. In Branwell’s case, there was no need to: Patrick himself was an expert teacher, and the opportunity to shape his young son’s wildly active mind gave him pride and pleasure. The saving of scant resources was of course one powerful motive, but Patrick must also have relished the home-schooling experiment as a way of proving the worth of both teacher and pupil. Branwell made impressive progress in the classics—prodigious, it seemed—under the demanding eye of his father; he had a phenomenal memory, was irrepressibly enthusiastic about history, geography and all manner of literature; he was also very musical and precociously good at art. No wonder he was treated as “a sort of idol” at the Parsonage. But in other ways the intense tutelage Branwell had at home did him irreparable har
m, depriving him of a peer group to measure himself against and engage with. The only person to be measured against was his awe-inspiring parent, and those long hours in the study alone with Papa must have been very quelling to Branwell’s childish spirits.
Miss Branwell taught the girls in her room upstairs. Sewing and household skills took up a large amount of their time (all the basic shirt- and underclothes-making, and hemming of sheets and linen was done at home), and each girl passed the landmark of embroidering a sampler—a sort of textile certificate of dexterity and patience. These efforts hung on the wall next to those of their late sisters: Charlotte’s was a text from Proverbs 22:4, “My humility and the fear of the Lord are riches honour and life.” Aunt Branwell read to the girls and heard them read. She may have taught them French too, as Maria had known some before she went to Cowan Bridge. Though Charlotte protested as late as 1842 that her understanding of spoken French was rudimentary, she was so good at the language by the age of fourteen that she was able to translate the whole first volume of Voltaire’s La Henriade—a rather spectacular proof of proficiency. Charlotte’s efforts might have been in competition with Branwell’s acquisition of Greek and Latin at the same time. Though the girls had some lessons with their father, intensive study of the classics was reserved for the boy, who could read both Homer and Virgil by the age of ten.
The children were all very familiar with Aesop’s Fables, Tales of the Genii, The Arabian Nights, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels and of course the Bible (Charlotte’s favourite book was Revelation). They had the free run of their father’s library, which included Paradise Lost, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Rome, Reverend J. Goldsmith’s Grammar of General Geography and David Hume’s History of England. There were also editions of Shakespeare, Cowper, Southey and anthologies of contemporary poetry. When Charlotte went to school, aged fourteen, she amazed her classmates by already knowing by heart most of the pieces they were set to learn: “[she] would tell us the authors, the poems they were taken from, and sometimes repeat a page or two, and tell us the plot.” Most surprisingly, Patrick Brontë seems to have made no attempt to keep Byron away from his children, and the results were very marked. Charlotte was so familiar with the scandalous atheist’s works by the age of ten that she quoted them freely in her own stories, and both she and Branwell came to admire him—for his style, bravado, wit and sensual excesses—more than any other contemporary writer.
The only reading material that Reverend Brontë is known to have censored was one equally to Charlotte’s taste, the collection of old copies of The Lady’s Magazine that had belonged to her mother and that were still stained with salt water from their survival of the shipwreck in 1812. Perhaps Patrick Brontë had not inspected these publications very closely until Charlotte took a fancy to them. “One black day,” as she later recalled, he decided to burn them all for the very reason she valued them, “because they contained foolish love-stories.” The aggression of this is notable—against the girl, obviously, but also against his late wife’s taste and romance in general. And in burning them Patrick was destroying one of the few relics of Maria Branwell Brontë left in the house.
Once the hours of instruction were over, both adults in the family seemed best pleased to retreat into solitude. The tedium on winter’s nights could be terrible, as Charlotte re-created vividly in her account of how the game “The Islanders” began, in December 1827:
One night, about the time when the cold sleet and dreary fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms, and high, piercing, night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying, in a lazy manner, “I don’t know what to do.” This was re-echoed by Emily and Anne.
Tabby: Wha ya may go t’bed.
Branwell: I’d rather do anything [than] that.
and Charlotte: You’re so glum tonight, Tabby. [? Well] suppose we had each an island.
Branwell: If we had I would choose the Island of Man.
Charlotte: And I would choose Isle of Wight.
Emily: The Isle of Arran for me.
Anne: And mine should be Guernsey.
This wasn’t the children’s first joint fantasy: imaginary games had been their main resource for years, though it was only in 1829 that Charlotte began to chronicle them. Branwell’s toys had inspired earlier ones. He was given some wooden soldiers around the time of his seventh birthday, in the summer of 1824 (when his elder sisters had just gone away to Cowan Bridge), and received several more sets in the next two years, although the casualty rate was high: one whole boxful was “maimed, lost, burned or destroyed.” Branwell augmented the soldiers with some Turkish musicians and later a band of Indians, and something of his loneliness can be caught from his careful account of the ebb and flow of these possessions: “[I had] a band of Turkish musicians which I continued to keep till the summer of AD 1825, when Charlotte and Emily returned from school, where they had been during the days of my former sets.” It sounds as if as soon as his sisters were home, they made free with his toys, knowing how much he valued them as playfellows. The date of this first sharing is significant, though: it was just after the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth.
In June of the following year, when Reverend Brontë came home one day from Leeds with gifts for everyone, Branwell allowed his twelve new soldiers, the most coveted present, to be treated as the children’s common property, as Charlotte recalled:
it was night and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed and I snatched up one and exclaimed, “This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!” When I said this, Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers. When Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole and perfect in every part. Emilys was a grave-looking fellow. We called him Gravey. Anne’s was a queer little thing, very much like herself. He was called Waiting Boy. Branwell chose Bonaparte.
In the vast, complex games that followed, the four children retained an Olympian manner, and Gulliver-like changes of scale and focus. They cast themselves in the roles of powerful genii called Tallii,*2 Branii, Emmii and Annii, or sometimes as the little King and Queens. As Charlotte recorded, the first three “great plays” they devised in these years were “The Young Men,” based on the twelve wooden soldiers’ travels and adventures, “Our Fellows,” which was based on characters from Aesop’s Fables (and which melted into “The O’Dears”) and “The Islanders,” which featured the Duke of Wellington and his two sons Arthur Augustus Adrian Wellesley and Charles Wellesley—key figures in the mass of stories to come.
To chronicle the adventures of the “Twelves” and the “Genii,” Branwell and Charlotte began to produce a series of tiny magazines for the toys, complete with editorials, advertising and publication details, stories, poems and histories for and about the characters who peopled “Sneaky’s Land,” “Parry’s Land,” “Wellington’s Land” and the “Great Glass Town Confederacy.” In tiny writing, squared off to look as much as possible like print, and in booklets sometimes only an inch or so high,*3 bound with thread inside old sugar wrappers and scraps of wallpaper, the children laboured over the years to produce a wild, weird literature of their own.
Their making little books was not new. Charlotte’s first surviving manuscript is just such a production for her youngest sister, an illustrated story, “There was once a little girl and her name was Ane,” written when she was about ten. But the booklets connected with the “Twelves” soon evolved from props to something much more central, very consciously a way of bolstering the reality of the games they played, and making their everyday world a little less real, creating a zone where the two could coexist. The earli
est stories of the “Twelves” are often delightfully inconsequential and silly, with a large cast of characters behaving very much as if they were children. “The Voyage of Discovery” describes their initial expedition:
Thus having made everything ready we retired to the cabin, and everyone looked as sheepish as possible and no way inclined to meet our fate like men. Some of us began to cry, but we waited a long time and heard no sound of the wind, and the cloud did not increase in size.
At last Marcus O’Donell exclaimed, “I wish it would either go backward or forward.”
At this Stewart reproved him, and Ferdinand gave him a box on the ear. O’Donell returned the compliment. But just then we heard the sound of the wind, and Ronald bawled out, “The cloud is as big as me!”
Other early pieces show Charlotte’s taste for the surreal and exotic, and her quick identification with the characters that were emerging. In “Description of the Duke of W’s small palace situated on the Banks of the Indirce,” written in January 1830, her narrator, Charles Wellesley, is “reclining under the shadow of an immense chestnut tree, playing upon a small Spanish guitar, with a nightingale perched upon his shoulder.” The song he sings is signed “CB CW”—a collaboration between the author and her creature:
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