Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Charlotte’s fine pencil drawing of Weightman survives as a memento of lively days at the Parsonage, but also of her own persistent interest in the young curate. The sittings “became alarming for length of time required,” which Weightman was obviously happy to give her. They also allowed short-sighted Charlotte the opportunity to get up close and gaze for hours on end at this handsome, good-natured youth, with his carefully curled hair, genial smile and fine figure. No wonder she strung out the sittings. It’s one of her best drawings.

  But, at the same time, Charlotte was keen to tease Ellen about the new curate as often as possible, and at a later date—when nothing ignited there—she nurtured the idea that Weightman was smitten with Anne (who had been away from home at Blake Hall on his arrival in the parish): “He sits opposite to Anne at Church sighing softly—& looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention…& Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast—they are a picture.” Anne certainly seems to have had tender feelings for Weightman, but can only have been made uncomfortable by Charlotte’s showy teasing of everyone but herself over his interest.

  There’s another aspect to Weightman’s presence that can’t be overlooked, and that seems to have dawned on Charlotte gradually during 1840 and 1841. He was said to be attached to a girl back in Appleby, and carried on correspondences with a young woman in Swansea and another in Keighley, leading Charlotte to remark that “the evident wandering instability of his mind is no favourable symptom at all.” She came to the conclusion that he was a “thorough male-flirt,” “perfectly conscious of his irresistibleness & is as vain as a peacock on the subject.” The increasingly satirical edge to her remarks about Weightman indicate a developing theory, and Charlotte’s repetition of her joke name for him, “Miss Celia Amelia,” and her use of the feminine pronoun when reciting his deeds become more pointed all the time. “She thought you a fine-looking girl and a very good girl into the bargain,” Charlotte told Ellen, stoking Ellen’s interest while warning her that “Miss Celia Amelia” might be almost too good to be true. Her conclusion that he was a vain heartbreaker seems clouded here with other speculations or intuitions. When in the draft version of a letter Charlotte wrote the following winter, she joked about the modern confusability of gender—“Several young gentlemen curl their hair and wear corsets—and several young ladies are excellent whips and by no means despicable jockies”—she may well have had in mind the confusing signals sent out by unconventional types such as Anne Lister, William Weightman or even her own sister Emily.

  —

  EMILY’S VIOLENTLY SUPPRESSED FEELINGS and her strong personality were a source of awe to Charlotte, who later described her nature as “standing alone” from all others. Keeper, with his intimidating bulk and strength, was her devoted familiar, and Ellen Nussey remembered how Emily used to agitate the dog on purpose to show off his ferocity, “making him frantic in action and roaring with the voice of a lion”—a violent exhibition for a Victorian sitting room. Ellen passed the test of “unresisting endurance” of Keeper’s presence, was sat on and squashed by his considerable bulk on the sofa, and watched with interest as Emily and Anne ate their porridge with Keeper and Anne’s spaniel Flossy at their sides, the two dogs waiting for the moment when the young women would hand down the bowls to be finished off.

  But the incident that Charlotte witnessed (at an unspecified date) of Emily disciplining Keeper is the one that reflects her character most strangely. The dog had incurred her wrath by going upstairs once too often and dirtying the beds’ clean counterpanes with his gigantic muddy footprints. When Tabby came in to report the crime, Emily’s face whitened and her mouth set. The story was told later by Mrs. Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte: “[Charlotte] dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily’s eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone.” She dragged the dog downstairs, he “growling low and savagely all the time,” and, having no stick to hand, set about him with her fists, punching him in the eyes before he could spring at her, until he was “half-blind, stupefied”—at which point she took him off to his bed in the kitchen and bathed the injuries she had so brutally inflicted. Mrs. Gaskell tells this story—as it had been told to her—as an example of Emily’s noble strength of character. Its dreadful sadism is all that the modern reader sees—that, and the terror that Emily must have sometimes engendered in all members of the household.

  —

  WEIGHTMAN’S DESCENT ON Haworth highlighted the difficulties in love that beset Charlotte, her friends and sisters—prime among which was a notable absence of suitable men and the undignified frenzy around the available stock. Already the veteran of two proposals, Charlotte felt moved to advise Ellen in mock-comic mode “as if it came from thy Grandmother” about how to conduct herself vis-à-vis Reverend Osman Parke Vincent, a friend of Henry Nussey, who seemed on the brink of proposing. His dithering, and his inappropriate discussions of his feelings with Henry rather than with Ellen, led Charlotte to suspect he was a fool, but she told her friend to weigh the case dispassionately and not “have the romantic folly to wait for the awakening of what the French call ‘Une grande passion.’ ” Brave words, and very surprising ones from the part-time resident of a fantasy land ruled by erotic forces and the creator (unknown to Ellen) of so many torrid love scenes.

  “Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity,” she recollected, “ ‘I thought Charlotte—no young ladies should fall in love, till the offer was actually made.’ ”

  I forget what answer I made at the time—but I now reply after due consideration—Right as a glove—the maxim is just—and I hope you will always attend to it—I will even extend and confirm it—no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted—the marriage ceremony performed and the first half year of wedded life has passed away—a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution—very coolly—very moderately—very rationally—If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look from her husband cuts her to the heart—she is a fool—if she ever loves so much that her husband’s will is her law—and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes she will soon be a neglected fool.

  “On one hand don’t accept if you are certain you cannot tolerate the man—on the other hand don’t refuse because you cannot adore him.”

  Though Charlotte said she was “not quite in earnest” about parts of her letter, one wonders at the deep cynicism of her message here. Passion in women, the Grandmother concluded, renders them utterly vulnerable. Vividly in mind was a recent incident involving the most passionate female she knew, Mary Taylor, whose exceptional personality and high intelligence had roused Branwell’s interest on the Taylors’ visits to Haworth in 1839 and 1840. But as soon as Branwell had begun to realise that Mary might be just as interested in him as he was in her, he “instantly conceived a sort of contempt for her,” as Charlotte confided to Ellen. Charlotte was appalled and fascinated by Mary’s predicament, “the contempt, the remorse—the misconstruction which follow the development of feelings in themselves noble, warm—generous—devoted and profound—but which being too freely revealed—too frankly bestowed—are not estimated at their real value.” This tragic imbalance between what men and women could reveal of their feelings was to be one of Charlotte Brontë’s most striking themes, her anger at it a call to arms.

  —

  ONE REASON WHY Aunt Branwell might have been so put out about the midnight coffee episode, and all matters of household management, was that from the winter of 1839 the Brontës had to face the loss of Tabby. Her health had not recovered sufficiently after an accident in 1836, when she slipped on ice and dislocated her leg, and it was no longer possible for her to keep on working. Much to the sorrow of the family, it looked as if she would have to retire permanently to her sister’s house in the village, and, though the girls insisted on maintaining the closest care of their old fr
iend, the household was left with only John Brown’s daughter Martha to serve it. Martha was strong, intelligent, able and loyal—as time amply showed—but she was only eleven years old. The Brontë sisters now had to perform the majority of the housework themselves.

  Charlotte took over the cleaning and ironing, while Emily did the baking and managed the kitchen. Presumably, the family’s diet became as simple as possible in this period: they were all fond of porridge, fortunately. “We are such odd animals that we prefer this mode of contrivance to having a new face among us,” Charlotte told Ellen, and indeed it was rather peculiar for an ostensibly middle-class family to look after themselves so entirely. They didn’t want Tabby “supplanted by a stranger,” who would break up the sacred ease of home: “Human feelings are queer things,” Charlotte mused; “I am much happier—black-leading the stoves—making the beds and sweeping the floors at home, than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere else.” That said, her first attempts at doing the ironing were dangerously unsuccessful and “excited Aunt’s wrath very much.” What is noteworthy here is that they were her first attempts.

  On the first day of the new decade, Branwell went as a tutor to a family called Postlethwaite in Broughton-in-Furness. As his sisters busied themselves getting his linen ready for departure, making him shirts and collars, Charlotte contemplated how she would miss his enlivening presence, but was doubtful that his new position would suit, knowing his “variable nature” and “strong turn for active life.”

  In the half-year he was in Broughton, Branwell lodged in a farmhouse outside town, the home of a surgeon called Fish. His charges at Broughton House were the eleven- and twelve-year-old sons of a local magistrate, but he spent most of his time in the Lake District working on his own poetry, walking, sketching and drinking. In a cheerful, bragging letter he wrote to his Haworth boon-companion John Brown, Branwell reported how he had taken part in a drunken brawl at an inn on his journey to the Lakes, but now in his post passed as “A most calm, sedate, sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher,—the picture of good works, and the treasure-house of righteous thoughts.” At his landlord’s house, they put away glasses and playing-cards when he entered the room, out of respect for his apparent temperance, and he was often to be found drinking tea with old ladies, a model of respectability. But “as to the young ones!” he boasted, “I have one sitting by me just now—fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen—she little thinks the devil is so near her!”

  Perhaps this young lady, or one like her, led to Branwell’s dismissal in June following some scandalous, unrecorded revelation about his conduct. He had certainly been found by the Postlethwaites to be negligent of his duties and “visibly the worst for drink” on more than one occasion, but Juliet Barker has made a strong case for Branwell having possibly fathered an illegitimate child during his Lancashire soujourn, based on Richard Monckton Milnes’s note after talking to John Brown’s family in 1859: “[Branwell] left Mr. Postlethwaites with a natural child by one of the daughters or servants—which died.”

  Branwell was not at all committed to a career as a tutor, and while in Broughton had written more soliciting letters, one to Thomas De Quincey and another to Hartley Coleridge, well known to the Brontës from his 1833 volume of poems and through his appearances in Blackwood’s Magazine as “The Old Bachelor.” Branwell’s approach was much less brash and swaggering than in his letter to Wordsworth and paid off when Coleridge responded in a friendly manner, inviting Branwell to call on him in Rydal, just as Southey had invited Charlotte to Greta Bridge the previous year. Unlike Charlotte, it was easy and possible for Branwell to accept, and he set out from Broughton in the highest excitement on the first of May to meet the man he believed could be his conduit to “that formidable personage, a London bookseller.” Branwell had originally sent Coleridge a long poem, “At dead of midnight—drearily,” and some versions of Horace’s Odes. On the day they met, Coleridge encouraged him to continue with the latter, in which he found “merit enough to commend without flattery.”

  Branwell’s dismissal in June cut short his chances to hob-nob with Coleridge again, but doesn’t seem to have bothered him a bit. His sights were set on higher things now, and he returned home wiser but not sad at all. Whatever it was that he was accused of in Broughton, he concealed the worst of it and no one at home believed him to have been in the wrong. He was still “my poor brother,” an underappreciated golden boy, in Charlotte’s eyes and in those of her sisters.

  Branwell’s successful connection with Hartley Coleridge encouraged Charlotte to solicit the writer’s attention too, and she wrote to him sometime in late 1840, sending an early version of her attempted novel “Ashworth” under the initials “CT”—which fitted either her Angrian pseudonyms Captain Tree and Charles Townshend, or the persona of “Charles Thunder” that she pursued with Ellen—and which concealed, most importantly, her sex, the issue that had distracted Southey so much. Coleridge sent CT’s manuscript back with a note (now lost) that might have been brusquely candid, for Charlotte used the opportunity to reply in satirical vein, thanking him for having bothered to read her “demi-semi novelette” but also suggesting that he had dismissed it too quickly: “I do not think you would have hesitated to do the same to the immortal Sir Charles Grandison if Samuel Richardson Esqr. had sent you the first letters of Miss Harriet Byron—and Miss Lucy Selby for inspection.” His opinion left her little choice but to put the manuscript away “till I get sense to produce something which shall at least aim at an object of some kind and meantime bind myself apprentice to a chemist and druggist if I am a young gentleman or to a Milliner and Dressmaker if I am a young lady.” She felt she had earned the right to tease him, and, under cover of CT’s genderless initials, did so mercilessly. “It is very pleasant to have something in one’s power,” she wrote, refraining to divulge how she had got hold of his address (from Branwell, of course). To puzzle him further, she also seems to have introduced more special knowledge, not just of Hartley Coleridge’s close relation to Wordsworth (which any fan might have found out) but of the complex imaginary kingdom that Coleridge had created for himself and retreated to obsessively as a child, called Ejuxria, so similar in kind to Angria and Gondal.

  It is very edifying and profitable to create a world out of one’s own brain and people it with inhabitants who are like so many Melchisedecs—“Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life”…If you have ever been accustomed to such society Sir you will be aware how distinctly and vividly their forms and features fix themselves on the retina of that “inward eye” which is said to be “the bliss of solitude.”

  Coleridge might well have told Branwell about Ejuxria at their friendly meeting in May; its importance to him, just like Angria and Gondal to the Brontës, was a source both of comfort and of anxiety. It must have been odd to have this stranger, “CT,” hit on something so close to his own heart, and one can sense Charlotte relishing the power she had over him here, playful and mischievous, but also punishing him for his mistake in dismissing her.

  Narratives like “Ashworth,” “Caroline Vernon” and “Henry Hastings” (jointly authored with Branwell) show Charlotte’s strategic push away from the old Angrian tropes in the hope of breaking into the real world of letters with an acceptably realistic style of story. She made her intentions clear in a little manifesto, named by her later editors “Farewell to Angria,” the survival of which seems amazing, given its insignificant look. It is written in faint pencil on a scrap of paper in size and type like the ones she used at Roe Head to write on surreptitiously during lessons, and the tiny writing floats off-line occasionally, as do the other manuscripts that were written with her eyes shut. She is addressing a “Reader” who is familiar with the works she speaks of putting aside:

  It is no easy thing to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it so long. They were my friends & my intimate acquaintance
& I could with little labour describe to you the faces, the voices, the actions, of those who peopled my thoughts by day & not seldom stole strangely even into my dreams by night. When I depart from these I feel almost as if I stood on the threshold of a home & were bidding farewell to its inmates. When I but strive to conjure up new inmates, I feel as if I had got into a distant country where every face was unknown & the character of all the population an enigma which it would take much study to comprehend & much talent to expound. Still, I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long.

  But it would take a while longer to put the shadow-world behind her and forgo the heat and excitement of that “burning clime.”

  —

  CHARLOTTE FELT OBLIGED to look for another job, but did so with obvious reluctance. “I wish [the Misses Wooler] or somebody else would get me a Situation,” she complained to Ellen. “I have answered advertisements without number—but my applications have met with no success.” She was looking for jobs near home and in small families, to avoid the difficulties of Stonegappe, for, as she told Henry Nussey the following year, “it is indeed a hard thing for flesh and blood to leave home—especially a good home—not a wealthy or splendid one—my home is humble and unattractive to strangers but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world—[?the] profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source—when they have clung to each other from childhood and when family disputes have never sprung up to divide them.”

  The post she went to in March 1841 was as governess to the White family of Upperwood House, Apperley Bridge. It was very near to Woodhouse Grove, where her mother Maria had been living with the Fennells in 1812 when she met Patrick Brontë, so the associations should have been comforting. Mr. White was a merchant, and Charlotte liked him well enough (she did always have a tendency to judge men less harshly than their wives); Mrs. White struck her as shallow and snobbish. Her charges were a girl of eight and a boy of six, but, again, it was the extra duties, and endless amounts of sewing, that annoyed the governess most, and that emphasised her servant status humiliatingly. Though she had hoped the Whites would be less condescending towards her than the Sidgwicks had been, she knew from the start she could not be comfortable under “the heavy duty of endeavouring to seem always easy, cheerful & conversible with those whose ideas and feelings are nearly as incomprehensible to me, as probably mine (if I shewed them unreservedly) would be to them.”