Of College I am tired I wish to be at home
Far from the pompous tutors voice & the hated schoolboys groan
I wish that I had freedom to walk about at will
That I no more was troubled with my Greek & slate & quill[.]
The books stayed tiny, no doubt both to save on material and to retain privacy. They looked childish, and would not prompt undue adult curiosity if found. Neither Papa nor Aunt Branwell had good enough eyesight to decipher the stories anyway.
By March 1829 the first games were sufficiently developed to warrant chronicling (in ordinary-sized writing), and Charlotte’s “History of the Year” gives a careful account of the daily life from which they had sprung. She wrote it sitting at the kitchen table with a book in front of her, an old atlas that used to belong to Maria and in which her dead elder sister had written “Papa lent me this book.” Perhaps Charlotte was meant to be studying its maps and charts, but ended up reporting to posterity instead, in a manner that she and her sisters often repeated, a sort of log-book style rather than a diary, a taking of co-ordinates:
I am in the kitchen of the parsonage house, Haworth. Tabby the servant is washing up after breakfast and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlour brushing it. Papa and Branwell are gone to Keighley. Aunt is up stairs in her room and I am sitting by the table writing this in the kitchin.
The twelve-year-old felt it was important to say exactly which papers Papa and Branwell had gone to fetch:
We take 2 and see three newspapers a week. We take the Leeds Intelligencer, party Tory, and the Leeds Mercury, Whig, edited by Mr. Baines and his brother, son in law and his 2 sons, Edward and Talbot. We see the John Bull; it is a High Tory, very violent. Mr. Driver lends us it, as likewise Blackwood’s Magazine, the most able periodical there is. The editor is Mr. Christopher North, an old man, 74 years of age. The 1st of April is his birthday.
It is comical to think of Charlotte being so involved as to remember the (fictional) birthday of Blackwood’s pseudonymous editor. Blackwood’s was the leading Tory magazine of the day, published monthly and run from Edinburgh by John Wilson (aka Christopher North), John Gibson Lockhart and William Maginn. Blackwood’s exactly suited the Brontë children’s tastes, even while they could hardly define them; it was both conservative and satiric, mandarin and yet, in its promotion of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, deeply Romantic.
The whole family was passionately interested in news, and Patrick Brontë liked to read his children items from the papers and to air his uninflected views with an enthusiastic audience. Nothing pleased them all better than reports of a vigorous parliamentary debate. Charlotte recalled their excitement in 1829 at the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill, a measure brought in by Peel and Wellington allowing Catholics to hold public office that Patrick Brontë supported for the same pragmatic reasons as the government’s, that it was the lesser of two evils. Charlotte showed genuine delight in following the twists and turns of this contentious legislation:
O those 3 months, from the time of the King’s speech to the end! Nobody could think, speak or write on anything but the Catholic Question and the Duke of Wellington or Mr. Peel. I remember the day when the Intelligence Extraordinary came with Mr. Peel’s speech in it, containing the terms on which the Catholics were to be let in. With what eagerness Papa tore off the cover, & how we all gathered round him, & with what breathless anxiety we listened, as one by one they were disclosed & explained & argued upon so ably & so well…
This was the world that absorbed her.
Charlotte also derived deep pleasure and imaginative stimulus from whatever prints, pictures and even descriptions of art she had access to, giving the evocations of grand buildings, “high life” and exotic locations in her “Glass Town” stories an eerie plausibility. Like Jane Eyre when she reads Bewick’s History of British Birds (a book owned by the Brontës), Charlotte let her mind wander from pictures to the text and back again, augmenting both from her own imagination on the way. One of her favourite artists was John Martin, like Bewick a north-country genius. She loved the grandeur of Martin’s landscapes, the dream-like, often nightmarish qualities of his vision and his taste for apocalypse, with human figures appearing tiny, doomed and helpless in the face of an evolving disaster. Martin was both a Romantic visionary and a man of the Brontës’ very own time and place, putting visual references to contemporary Newcastle and Edinburgh into his depictions of the New Jerusalem or Sodom and Gomorrah, a sublime transfiguration of the industrialisation of both those cities. Patrick Brontë owned several Martin prints, including the bestselling Belshazzar’s Feast, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still, The Deluge, and possibly others such as St. Paul Preaching at Athens. The illustrated Annuals, albums full of the most popular and interesting engravings of the year, were also full of Martin’s mesmerising canvases, alongside fashionable portraitists such as Richard Westall, scenes from Scott and Byron, views of the Brighton Pavilion, or images of Arctic exploration. The Brontë children’s profoundly visual imaginations fed avidly on them all, and by the age of thirteen Charlotte already had a very developed “list of painters whose works I wish to see,” which included “Guido Reni, Julio Romano, Titian, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Annibal Caracci, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolemeo, Carlo Cignani, Vandyke, Reubens, Bartolemeo Ramerghi.”
Branwell transported John Martin into the “Glass Town” personnel in the character of an artist called Edward de Lisle, to live, breathe and paint among the other avatars. Charlotte had already established there the Duke of Wellington, her favourite, though he was more like a comic-book superhero than the retired general who in 1829 had just formed a government. “His vision is uncommonly acute and his finely formed frame is so knit and moulded as to be equal to the greatest hardships of the most terrible campaigns,” Charlotte wrote, in “Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington.” “His mind approaches as nearly to the perfection of greatness and wisdom as human fallibility will allow.” Perhaps because he wasn’t quite fallible enough, Wellington’s sons Arthur and Charles soon took over as the main characters in the “Glass Town” saga (Arthur ennobled to the Marquis of Douro, on his way to greater honours).
“The History of the Year” doesn’t make clear quite how much writing had been stimulated by the “Twelves.” August and September of 1829 were particularly productive months; Charlotte wrote a number of long poems in collaboration with Branwell for his “Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine” (which he had started in January 1829), many under the initials “UT” or “WT” for “Us Two” and “We Two.” She wrote “Tales of the Islanders” (a founding text of the “Glass Town” saga), “An Adventure in Ireland” (a story full of ghosts, caves and fairies) and nine long poems that she made into a “Book of Rhymes.” But this was nothing to the flood of writing the following year, staggering not just in its mass but in its rapidly increasing sophistication. Five months after her first collection of verse, she had written enough to fill another volume, called “Miscellaneous Poems by C. Brontë.”
The physical size of the doll-books masked for years the scope of the compositions they contain. Mrs. Gaskell was the first person outside the family to see the tiny manuscripts and was baffled at the sight of them, in 1856: “an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space; tales, dramas, poems, romances, written principally by Charlotte, in a hand which it is almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass.” The total length of the Brontë juvenilia, it has been calculated, considerably exceeds that of their published works. “The Foundling,” written by Charlotte in 1833, turned out to be 35,000 words long, as did “The Green Dwarf,” of the same year, and the four tales that Charlotte made into a booklet in 1834—containing “The Spell,” “High Life in Verdopolis” and “The Scrap Book by Lord C. A. F. Wellesley”—come to around 62,000 words, a truly prodigious length.
—
IN AUGUST 1830 Charlotte drew up a catalogue of everything she had written in the previous sixteen months, “Making in the whole 22 volumes,” and the flood of writing continued all year: between 10 and 13 November 1830 alone, she composed 468 lines of polished, highly accomplished poetry. Her own production rate interested her intensely, and she was keen to log the details of what amounted to training sessions:
I began this book on the 22 of February 1830, and finished it on the 23 of February 1830, doing 8 pages on the first day and 11 on the second. On the first day I wrote an hour and a half in the morning, and an hour and a half in the evening. On the third [sic] day I wrote a quarter of an hour in the morning, 2 hours in the afternoon and a quarter of an hour in the evening, making in the whole 5 hours and a half.
“I wrote this in 4 hours,” she notes on the manuscript of “Albion and Marina.” At the bottom of the poem “Miss Hume’s Dream” she records, “I wrote this in half an hour”; it is sixty-four lines long.
Branwell was every bit as prolific, writing whole newspapers in the mode of facsimiles,*4 and keen on mapping the territory of their imagined country (ostensibly located on the west coast of Africa, an area they had read about in explorers’ reports), providing details of mercantile life, distances, produce, trade and population to match Charlotte’s interest in political intrigue and romance. He had a whole country’s statistics in his head. Their father was aware of these productions, “little works of fiction, they call’d miniature novels,” as he told Mrs. Gaskell, and was content that the children were harmlessly occupied. He must have taken fright, though, at the shrinking of Charlotte’s handwriting, for one of her notebooks, a good quality one, was a gift from him with the following inscription: “All that is written in this book must be in a good, plain, and legible hand.—P. B.”
The content of the “juvenilia” was never juvenile, the amount of it was phenomenal, and the work continued well into adult life, composed concurrently, in Emily’s and Anne’s cases at least, with published work, “making subject matter rather than the authors’ ages the most useful basis for selection,” as Christine Alexander has said. Perhaps the distinction is also between private and public: the intended audiences. There are self-conscious references all through Charlotte Brontë’s early works to the question of who might be reading them—for instance the joke contained in the title of “The Search after Happiness,” “A Tale by Charlotte Brontë Printed by Herself and Sold by Nobody.” She and Branwell wrote in collaboration, in competition, but not primarily for each other. Aping the forms and styles of real books and magazines, the two elder Brontës both instinctively behaved like unpublished professional writers, trying things out on an endlessly indulgent ideal reader. Perhaps a more useful term for this massive body of writing, rather than “juvenile” writing, would be “hidden.”
—
IN THE SUMMER and autumn of 1830, while Charlotte and Branwell were rapidly developing their intricate “Glass Town” scenarios, Patrick Brontë became ill with a serious and lingering lung infection that he seems to have feared might be consumption. To his old friend Elizabeth Franks he confessed how feeble he had been in body and spirit for six months, hardly able to perform his clerical duties and worrying that he might never recover but “fall into a decline.”
He didn’t need such a prompt to consider his children’s futures; it must have always been on his mind. In the event of his death, they would be not just orphaned but homeless, the Parsonage passing immediately to the next incumbent. Elizabeth Branwell’s private income would not enable her to support any of her nieces and nephews: they would each have to earn their own livings. For the girls, this meant teaching or governessing, and for that they needed some documented, recognisable qualification. Not public exams, at that date, but a record of formal education.
During Patrick’s long illness, his old friends from Thornton were enlisted into helping set up some provision against disaster. Charlotte’s godparents, Thomas and Frances Atkinson, not only came up with a recommended school for her—run by a local woman known to them personally—but may have paid part of the fees. The place was Roe Head School, only a mile from their home in Mirfield in the Spen Valley; Charlotte was to be sent there in the new year, a couple of months before her fifteenth birthday.
What her feelings were at the prospect of going away from home alone, and at a time when her father’s life seemed in danger, can be imagined. And the distress of being separated from her siblings was not much less than the constraints that boarding-school life would inevitably put on the imaginary games she relied on so much already, and the literature that was generated by them. Though Charlotte was a very insignificant-looking creature, so childlike in fact that one of Elizabeth Franks’s friends took her on her knee and dandled her around like a baby (“[she] would nurse me,” the teenager wrote in disgust), she was already the author of such poems as “Reflections on the Fate of Neglected Genius” (1830):
None can tell the bitter anguish
Of those lofty souls that languish!
With Grim Penury still dwelling
Quenched by frowns their sacred fire,
All their powers within them swelling
Tortured by neglect to ire.
Her stories of this date contain passages that Charlotte hardly bettered, such as this description, from “Strange Events,” of Lord Charles Wellesley leafing through the pages of a book in the public library of Glass Town and falling into “the strangest train of thought that ever visited even my mind, eccentric and unstable as it is said by some insolent puppies to be”:
It seemed as if I was a non-existent shadow, that I neither spoke, eat, imagined or lived of myself, but I was the mere idea of some other creatures brain. The Glass Town seemed so likewise. My father, Arthur and everyone with whom I am acquainted, passed into a state of annihilation: but suddenly I thought again that I and my relatives did exist, and yet not us but our minds and our bodies without ourselves. Then this supposition—the oddest of any—followed the former quickly, namely, that WE without US were shadows; also, but at the end of a long vista, as it were, appeared dimly and indistinctly, beings that really lived in a tangible shape, that were called by our names and were US from whom WE had been copied by something—I could not tell what.
She was fourteen years old when she wrote this astonishingly sophisticated passage, penetrating into the thought processes, dreams and fantasies of one of her own inventions, having this adult man in her mind muse on her when he senses the distant power or influence that has brought him into being, but that he can’t imagine is simply a fourteen-year-old girl bending over a tiny scrap of paper in a cold room in Yorkshire.
* * *
*1 Branwell is thought to have had most contact with the local children, but it wasn’t very friendly.
*2 This genie name for Charlotte makes one wonder if she was already known as “Charlie” (pronounced “Sharlie”) by her siblings.
*3 Ann Dinsdale says the smallest is 36 × 55 mm (1.5 × 2.25 in.
) (The Brontës at Haworth, 65).
*4 His “Monthly Intelligencer,” on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, is a lovely example of this.
FOUR
Among Schoolgirls
1831–5
On 17 January 1831 Charlotte arrived at Roe Head, a handsome house on the old Leeds-to-Huddersfield road, recently converted into a school for about ten girls and run by Miss Margaret Wooler and three of her sisters. Roe Head was quite unlike Cowan Bridge, with its Calvinistic harshness and utilitarianism. Miss Wooler was, in her nephew’s words, “a keen-witted, ironical and very independent Yorkshire woman,” sensible, even-tempered and sensitive to the needs of her charges, most of whom were the daughters of local businessmen and manufacturers. The school offered conventional girls’ school fare: history, geography, literature, arithmetic and extras in French, music and drawing. Unlike Cowan Bridge, the new school was within hailing distance of home: Patrick Brontë was clearly not willing to take risks as he had before. But the outlay for this superior establishment was much greater than the subsidised clergy-daughters’ rate, and Charlotte was left in no doubt about her responsibility to get on as fast and as successfully as she could in order to equip herself cost-efficiently for the best career open to her, that of governess.
The fourteen-year-old girl who got down from a covered cart on Roe Head’s curving driveway that winter’s day did not look like a particularly promising pupil. Undersized, undernourished, wearing an unflattering, old-fashioned dress and with her hair unkempt and frizzy, she was miserable and struggling with tears. The other girls must have watched her arrival from the schoolroom window, for when she joined them later, it was noted that “her dress was changed, but just as old.” This was the observation of Mary Taylor, the attractive, energetic and outspoken elder daughter of a local cloth manufacturer, a natural leader and opinion-former among the little society of the school. Her first impressions of Charlotte were of a shy and nervous creature “so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it,” a figure of fun for the way her nose was always almost touching her book, whether the book was lying flat or being held. Mary also noted another of the new girl’s oddities: “[She] spoke with a strong Irish accent.”
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