Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  If I could always live with you, and daily read the bible with you, if your lips and mine could at the same time; drink the same draught from the same pure fountain of Mercy—I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better, than my evil wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit, and warm to the flesh will now permit me to be…My eyes fill with tears when I contrast the bliss of such a state brightened by hopes of the future with the melancholy state I now live in, uncertain that I have ever felt true contrition, wandering in thought and deed, longing for holiness, which I shall never, never obtain.

  Because Charlotte expressed the conflict she was feeling in terms of sin and guilt, her crisis at Roe Head has often been described as “religious”—a sort of spiritual watershed—though it seems much more to do with self-doubt, and has as much suffocated erotic content as doctrinal. Charlotte had become alarmed by the possibility that she was temperamentally incapable of being contented, a sinful state, in effect, of resistance to God’s will. The fear gripped her that she might be, in Calvinist terms, not one of the Elect at all, but damned. “I know not how to pray—I cannot bend my life to the grand end of doing good,” she wrote to Ellen needily. “I go on constantly seeking my own pleasure pursuing the Gratification of my own desires, I forget God and will not God forget me?”

  This stark divide followed fairly easily from the polarising effects of her Angrian obsession, and its insidious, deeply pleasurable, interruptions of everyday duties. Her conscience plagued her, and yet: “I keep trying to do right, checking wrong feelings, repressing wrong thoughts,” she told Ellen, “but still—every instant I find—myself going astray…I abhor myself—I despise myself—if the Doctrine of Calvin be true I am already an outcast—You cannot imagine how hard rebellious and intractable all my feelings are—When I begin to study on the subject I almost grow blasphemous, atheistical in my sentiments.”

  Ellen did visit Charlotte at Roe Head that term, but very late and only after a barrage of pleading letters. Ellen’s responses were full of platitudes—essentially that one must submit with resignation to the will of a higher power—and it shows what a low state Charlotte had reached that she clung to them for comfort. When Ellen cancelled a visit to Haworth at Christmas due to the weather, Charlotte felt the disappointment keenly, but no longer felt she really deserved such a treat: “it seems as if some fatality stood between you and me, I am not good enough for you, and you must be kept from the contamination of too intimate society.” One time that autumn, Charlotte had admitted that she felt too much for Ellen, and was censoring her own post when it became too sentimental. “I will not tell you all I think, and feel about you Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment.” “I am thine Charles Thunder,” she said in a moment of semi-levity, adopting one of her masculine personae from “Glass Town.” “I wish I could live with you always, I begin to cling to you more fondly than ever I did. If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own I do think we might live and love on till Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness.” Retreat, peace, safety; Ellen in a cottage—it was an alluring dream.

  Charlotte’s impotence affected even the sustaining dream world, for while she was isolated at Roe Head, Branwell had started a series of Angrian wars that threatened to destabilise the whole Verdopolitan Union: invasions, coups and turmoil ensued, to which Charlotte had little power to respond apart from a shift to trying to monopolise the romantic storylines and to dominate the invention and development of the female characters. She was delighted to receive, inside a letter from Branwell, a letter from Northangerland to his daughter, Mary Percy, Duchess of Zamorna, announcing an imminent return from exile. “I lived on its contents for days,” Charlotte said, enthralled by the images it conjured of the Duchess reading and handling the very paper before her. But other bulletins from Branwell could be purely alarming. Had he really killed off the Duchess with whom she so strongly identified? “Is she alone in the cold earth on this dreary night?” Charlotte asked herself, with no acknowledgement of how imaginary the deceased had been. “I can’t abide to think how hopelessly & cheerlessly she must have died.”

  The power of her imaginary other-world was in proportion to its pleasure, and if she risked a sort of madness in its pursuit, Charlotte liked to play with that possibility. What else was as vivifying? As she sat at her desk in the classroom, eyes closed and feeling the edge of the paper for guidance, behind her eyelids Charles Thunder was carried away on the wings of a glorious, liberating storm:

  There is a voice, there is an impulse that wakens up that dormant power, which in its torpidity I sometimes think dead. That wind, pouring in impetuous current through the air, sounding wildly, unremittingly from hour to hour, deepening its tone as the night advances, coming not in gusts but with a rapid gathering stormy swell. That wind I know is heard at this moment far away on the moors at Haworth. Branwell & Emily hear it, and as it sweeps over our house, down the church-yard & round the old church, they think perhaps of me & Anne.

  Glorious! That blast was mighty. It reminded me of Northangerland. There was something so merciless in the heavier rush that made the very house groan as if it could scarce bear this acceleration of impetus. O, it has awakened a feeling that I cannot satisfy! A thousand wishes rose at its call which must die with me, for they will never be fulfilled. Now I should be agonized if I had not the dream to repose on. Its existences, its forms, its scenes do fill a little of the craving vacancy. Hohenlinden! Childe Harold! Flodden Field! The burial of Moore! Why cannot the blood rouse the heart, the heart wake the head, the head prompt the hand to do things like these?

  Back home, during the Christmas holidays, Charlotte’s anger and frustrations disappeared in the company of her siblings. Talking over their setbacks and plans, Charlotte and Branwell reached a crest of impatience about their chances of joining the world of letters and decided to take matters into their own hands with a series of bold initiatives, cheered on by Emily and Anne. Charlotte was going to solicit the opinion of the Poet Laureate himself, Robert Southey, and Branwell was going to approach Wordsworth. No one could accuse these two young people of thinking small.

  Charlotte recalled her letter to Southey as a “crude rhapsody” that caused her some embarrassment retrospectively. She sent him a poem (which one isn’t known) and told the Laureate that she wanted nothing less than “to be for ever known,” asking him to stoop from his “throne of light & glory” to tell her whether or not her aspirations were vain. She didn’t withhold her name or gender, so was exposing herself and her ambitions fully, but her letter went beyond bounds in other ways too, with a description, obviously not essential to her purpose, of the state of heightened imagination she habitually lived in and the way in which the intensity of her ambition made the “ordinary uses of the world” seem, to borrow Hamlet’s words, “flat & unprofitable.”

  Charlotte returned to Roe Head with no answer from Southey, but her mind whirring with poetry. In January of 1837 alone, she wrote at least 700 lines of verse, much of it a continuation of her Angrian epic, as well as shorter poems and fragments that found their way into her first published collection almost a decade later. She was thinking on a grand scale and working with extreme focus and dedication; this was the discipline that might rescue her from the conventional world of oafs and asses.

  Meanwhile, Branwell had written to the editor of Blackwood’s again, taking him to task—in what he clearly thought was an engaging way—for never answering his letters: “Is it pride which actuates you—or custom—or prejudice?—Be a man—Sir! and think no more of these things! Write to me.” A week later, and in much the same confident mood, he wrote directly to William Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, sending the opening passages from an (unfinished) poem called “The Struggles of Flesh with Spirit” and pressing his credentials as a natural bard, brought up among “secluded hills where I could neither know what I was or what I could do,” a
Wordsworthian character, in other words.

  Not surprisingly, there was no answer from either Blackwood’s or the bard, but we know of Wordsworth’s reaction by chance, as Southey and he must have made the connection between their different correspondents in Haworth Parsonage. Southey told his friend Caroline Bowles (who had been with him when Charlotte’s original “flighty” letter arrived) that Wordsworth had been “disgusted” by Branwell’s petition, “for it contained gross flattery to him, and plenty of abuse of other poets, including me.” Under the circumstances, it seems odd that Wordsworth bothered to complain about Branwell’s letter, or even to preserve it—he must have received many such.*2 Charlotte’s letter to Southey did receive a reply, though, forwarded from Haworth to Roe Head. That he answered at all is remarkable, as is his apology—a whole paragraph long—for the ten-week delay in doing so. Southey was obviously intrigued by both the letter and the verses Miss Brontë had sent, which “bear the same stamp” as each other, expressing a state of mind that he could well understand, though didn’t share. “You live in a visionary world,” he said, with acuity.

  His warning to his young correspondent was as much against this over-heated state of mind as anything else. Getting published was not in itself a worthwhile aim, he told her, and would not necessarily make her happy: “Many volumes of poems are now published every year without attracting public attention, any one of wh, if it had appeared half a century ago, wd. have obtained a high reputation for its author. Whoever therefore is ambitious of distinction in this way, ought to be prepared for disappointment.” He advised her to write for its own sake: the less she aimed at celebrity, “the more likely you will be to deserve, & finally to obtain it.” The Laureate makes it clear that he gives this advice to “every young man who applies as an aspirant to me”:

  You will say that a woman has no need of such a caution, there can be no peril in it for her: & in a certain sense this is true. But there is a danger of wh I wd with all kindness & all earnestness warn you. The daydreams in wh you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind, & in proportion as all the “ordinary uses of the world” seem to you “flat & unprofitable,” you will be unfitted for them, without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, & when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.

  The quelling phrase about literature not being the business of a woman’s life has been held up, understandably, as an egregious example of unwarranted discouragement and prejudice, but in truth Southey’s response, taken as a whole, was full of genuine kindness and interest in the unknown writer’s work. He sensed (by the end of the letter) that what he was saying was unlikely to go down well with a young woman who possessed real gifts, and who displayed clear signs of the disturbance that goes with knowing it. “It is not because I have forgotten that I once was young myself that I write to you in this strain—but because I remember it,” he told her (note that the gender issue has been set aside here). “You will neither doubt my sincerity, nor my good will…Tho’ I may be but an ungracious adviser, you will allow me therefore to subscribe myself, With the best wishes for your happiness, here & hereafter, Your true friend, Robert Southey.”

  Charlotte opened this letter at Roe Head with the sort of fervid attention one would give to examination results or long-awaited life-changing news, a desire to know the contents instantly. As she took in the gist of it, her spirits plummeted: “I felt a painful heat rise to my face, when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but which now was only a source of confusion.” On further perusal, though—and it’s clear that she pored over it many times—she saw that there was food for encouragement, of a sort, and the reply she wrote Southey a few days later glossed his message thus: “You do not forbid me to write; you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit. You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures.”

  In her reply, Charlotte protests how grateful she is for Southey’s advice, but does so in a tone that rides the line between sarcasm and sincerity. She seems actually more piqued than advised: “You kindly allow me to write poetry for its own sake,” she writes, “provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do, in order to pursue that single absorbing exquisite gratification.” But he was wrong to assume she was an “idle dreaming being” who simply wanted permission to dabble and had been protected from life’s buffets:

  My Father is a clergyman of limited, though competent, income, and I am the eldest of his children…I thought it therefore my duty, when I left school, to become a governess. In that capacity, I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head & hands too, without having a moment’s time for one dream of the imagination. In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation, and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits…I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself; and my Father’s approbation amply rewarded me for the privation. Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter, and suppress it.

  Southey wrote back a second time, a brief but sincere letter, obviously relieved that she had—as he thought—taken his advice so well, and regretting the dogmatic tone of his first communication. He regretted it so much, indeed, and was so cheered by her response, that he made an astonishing offer: “Let me now request that if you ever should come to these Lakes while I am living here, you will let me see you. You will then think of me afterwards with more good will.” Southey was extending the hand of friendship!

  Charlotte did not answer this for fear of imposing too far on his attention; nor was she ever able to act on the invitation to call on the Poet Laureate at home, not having the freedom or resources to do so. But his friendly gesture, offered in such a respectful way, as equals, was something to treasure and delight in. Her sly jibes in her second letter must have come to seem rather misdirected, given the almost naïve sincerity of his parting advice that she should “Take care of over-excitement, & endeavour to keep a quiet mind; even for your health it is the best advice that can be given you. Your moral & spiritual improvement will then keep pace with the culture of your intellectual powers.” It was probably the heartfelt concern he expressed that caused her, alone at Roe Head on her twenty-first birthday, 21 April 1837, to write on the envelope: “Southey’s Advice/To be kept for ever,” for of course she had no intention of giving up her ambition to be forever known.

  * * *

  *1 Christine Alexander has brought readers’ attention to an interesting passage in one of Charlotte’s Angrian stories, written in the summer of 1838, in which the speaker, Macara Lofty, is discovered slumped in a chair, wreathed in smiles as he comes to from an opium-induced trance and explains that he took the drug to escape a feeling of unendurable despair. He has no qualms about it: “Now, Townshend, so suffering, how far did I err when I had recourse to the sovereign specific which a simple narcotic drug offered me?” (Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 173).

  *2 After the poet’s death in 1850, it passed to his son-in-law Edward Quillinan. At that date the name Brontë was not yet famous (his sisters having published pseudonymously), but it seems a sad reflection on the thoroughness of Branwell’s failure that his name has been glossed on the manuscript as “?Peter Bradwell—deceased—Bronte” (LCB 1, 161, textual note).

  SIX

  Labour in Va
in

  1837–41

  As the Brontë siblings grew to adulthood, they did not integrate successfully with their Haworth neighbours—or strive to. A notable example of their isolation was at the election in 1837, when the family found themselves in a decided Tory minority in the town, against the Whig candidate, Lord Morpeth, an old Etonian who had held a pre-Reform family seat. One of Haworth’s traditions was open-air debate in the area in front of the Black Bull and the church at the top of Main Street, where “many remarkable discussions” took place over the years, sometimes turning violent at sensitive times such as elections. The election of 1837 proved one such. The Whigs had a much larger turnout than the Tories, the candidate having brought in supporters from the outskirts, and when Patrick Brontë tried to speak against him he was rudely shouted down. Branwell, in his impetuous way, “rushed to the front crying, ‘If you won’t let my father speak, you shan’t speak,’ ” and as a punishment for his presumption, an effigy of the parson’s son was carried along Main Street later and burned, while Branwell watched aghast from inside a shop. It was made recognisable by the addition of a herring in one hand and a potato in the other—enough to signify an Irishman.

  Feelings in the parish were running high over the issue of church tithes too. No one had really believed that Dissenters would be prosecuted for non-payment, but when the first cases were brought at the end of 1838, Patrick Brontë’s unpopularity and the family’s isolation reached new levels. This coincided with violent disturbances in the area in the first years of the Chartist movement, with “ultra-Radicals” organising huge public gatherings such as the one in Manchester in September, when an estimated 300,000 people turned up to demand universal suffrage (for adult men) and a ballot vote, among other measures. The events were mirrored in Angria in Charlotte’s story called “Stancliffe’s Hotel,” in which the city of Zamorna (named after the Duke, and ostensibly an African location) seems to be taking on more and more of the attributes of a West Riding industrial town like Bradford or Leeds, and its citizens the aspects of the disaffected working men of 1838. In the story, an assemblage of “mad mechanics and desperate operatives of Zamorna” are dispersed by sword-wielding cavalry in a scene reminiscent of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, an event much referenced by the contemporary Chartists. Thus Charlotte and Branwell played out in “the world below” the turbulence that surrounded them so uncontrollably day to day.