Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  It is doubtful that Charlotte ever seemed “cheerful & conversible” in her governess work, for she knew that she lacked all the necessary qualities of temperament for it. Many years later, advising her friend W. S. Williams on careers for his daughters, she cautioned that a governess had to be “Of pleasing exterior (that is always an advantage—children like it—) good sense, obliging disposition, cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no prominent master talent to make her miserable by its cravings for exercise by its mutiny under restraint.” Given those rather bland excellences, a governess could indeed be happy and successful, but Charlotte knew herself to be disqualified on several grounds.

  A Mrs. Slade recalled many years later (when Charlotte was dead, and famous as the author of Jane Eyre) that she had a vivid memory of the young governess “sitting apart from the rest of the family, in a corner of the room, poring, in her short-sighted way, over a book.” Her impression was of a person ill at ease, “who desired to escape notice and to avoid taking part in the general conversation”—exactly the character that Charlotte complained of being forced to assume, and that her heroine articulates so well. In the brief holiday she had at home, Charlotte planned avidly to get herself out of this obnoxious existence for good.

  —

  BRANWELL’S NEXT JOB after his dismissal from Broughton was in a totally new direction: he became a booking clerk at Sowerby Bridge Station on the new Leeds-to-Manchester railway in September 1840. It was not quite the sort of transport that his admired Lake poets wrote about, but Branwell seemed happy with the move, as it allowed him time to write and draw. His spirits were buoyant, in fact, and when his friend Leyland’s brother Francis met him for the first time, it was a young man on the way up, not the way down, who emerged from the office, laughing and talking, who “seemed to be qualified for a much better position than the one he had chosen.” Branwell was perfectly cast in the part of undiscovered genius—as long as the discovery didn’t take too long.

  The recollections that Branwell’s acquaintances left of him at this time give some idea of the rushes of energy that frequently possessed him and made him valued company, especially at convivial, all-male drinking sessions. One friend recalled how when Branwell was stirred by “some topic that he was acquainted with, or some author he loved, he would rise from his seat, and, in beautiful language, describe the author’s character, with a zeal and fluency I had never heard equalled.” Francis Leyland witnessed similar vatic outpourings when art and literature were being discussed: “almost involuntarily, [he] would rise to his feet, and, with a beaming countenance, treat the subject with a vivid flow of imagination, displaying the rich stores of his information with wondrous and enthralling eloquence.” “Almost involuntarily” recalls Charlotte’s escapist removals into “the world below,” only here there was an audience, and alcohol. Branwell suffered none of the public shyness of his sisters, so his moments of imaginative flight in the company of others perhaps give us some idea of how the siblings all behaved, when they were together at home. Charlotte was known to have such capacities herself at school, and would very occasionally “dramatise when her spirits rose to the necessary pitch of excitement.” Mary and Martha Taylor’s brother Joe had heard such reports of Charlotte’s flights that on one occasion he determined to orchestrate a demonstration, declaring he was going “to stir Miss Brontë up to the exhibiting point”—but she was forewarned, and refused to oblige. It was exactly this potential to burst out of character that had provoked Mr. Pryce into his proposal.

  Emily was formidable both in her character of “The Major” and socially, withering people with her silences and disapproval. Anne was perhaps the only true introvert in the family, having “a remarkably taciturn, still, thoughtful nature, reserved even with her nearest of kin,” as Charlotte described it. This might have been provoked, and certainly not helped, by her speech defect, which would have made it difficult to get a word in edgewise with her excitable siblings. Emily’s particular care of Anne, and sympathetic silence, shows a sensitivity to this issue.

  Charlotte and Branwell were therefore a natural pair, rivals for the world’s attention, though, as they grew up, Charlotte’s opportunities to be stirred “to the exhibiting point” shrank to almost none, while Branwell paraded a shabby version almost every night in the pub, a village Demosthenes presiding over homespun orations. But, underneath the bluster and egotism, Branwell was possibly more like his sisters than has been recognised and did not feel at home in his fate of having to go out into the world and make masculine noises. William Heaton saw a much quieter side to him: “I shall never forget his love for the sublime and beautiful works of Nature, nor how he would tell of the lovely flowers and rare plants he had observed by the mountain stream and woodland rill.”

  Branwell transferred from Sowerby Bridge to Luddenden Foot in March 1841, a new but insignificant station on the Manchester-to-Leeds line, housed in a temporary wooden hut, with little to do all day but read or write alone in his office, or go to the inn for society.*4 Emily’s sardonic remark was that “it looks like getting on at any rate.” Branwell recalled his year at Luddenden Foot as a “nightmare” of “malignant yet cold debauchery,” and in a rare moment of self-knowledge said he had been “lost…to all I really liked.” He was to surprise everyone, though, just a few weeks into his new post, when he became the first of the siblings to achieve their joint dream—publication—with the appearance in The Halifax Guardian of a poem called “Heaven and Earth.” Branwell had used the pseudonym “Northangerland,” which must have been shocking for Charlotte to see in the local press, as if the personae of her imagination were advancing across the borders of her two worlds.*5

  Branwell was sustained through his tedious work-days by this success and the promise of more to come (he placed another poem, this time a very topical one on the Afghan War, in The Leeds Intelligencer the next year). He had an indulgent circle of friends at Luddenden Foot, including Francis Grundy, a railway engineer working on the new lines in Yorkshire, through whom Branwell hoped for promotion. Grundy was one of few outsiders invited to visit the Parsonage, and he left a vividly unflattering description of its occupants: the father “distantly courteous, white-haired, tall” greeted him with ponderous politeness, whereas the daughters said nothing, possibly because they sensed Grundy’s judgement of their persons—“distant and distrait, large of nose, small of figure, red of hair, prominent of spectacles.” Even Branwell, reputedly the best-looking of the young Brontës, he found “the reverse of attractive at first sight.”

  —

  ON HER BIRTHDAY in July 1841, Emily Brontë sat at home, writing her four-yearly Diary Paper, to be kept for comparison with her lot in 1837 and in 1845. “A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of our own,” she reported, with her characteristic tone of detached interest; “as yet nothing is determined but I hope and trust it may go on and prosper and answer our highest expectations. This day 4-years I wonder whether we shall still be dragging on in our present condition or established to our heart’s content Time will show—”

  I guess that at the time appointed for the opening of this paper—we (i.e.) Charlotte, Anne and I shall be all merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary having just gathered in for the midsummer holydays our debts will be paid off and we shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. papa Aunt and Branwell will either have been—or be coming—to visit us—it will be a fine warm summery evening. very different from this bleak look-out Anne and I will perchance slip out into the garden a [illeg.] minutes to peruse our papers. I hope either this [o]r something better will be the case—

  Anne, writing her own Diary Paper on the same day, far away in Scarborough with the family called Robinson for whom she now worked, also mentioned the school plan, and how she hoped it would happen. She spoke as if it were not in her hands: “nothing definite is settled about it yet, and we do not know whether we shall be
able to or not.”

  Charlotte was the one sister pressing to make the scheme succeed, and she found an ally in Aunt Branwell, who thought it a very reasonable solution to the problem of both living and working for three poor, possibly unmarriageable spinsters. The example of the Misses Wooler was encouraging, and the Brontë girls were intellectually so far above the average that there was no question of their capability. Aunt Branwell generously spoke of lending them £150 to get started, as long as they could get enough pupils to start up and find “an eligible situation.” No one was thinking of siting the school in Haworth Parsonage at this point; Charlotte had a fancy to try Bridlington, where she had had such an enjoyable holiday with Ellen. Ellen herself featured in Charlotte’s hopes for the plan—she wondered if her friend might be persuaded to join her, Emily and Anne. The sentence containing this suggestion was heavily scored through by Ellen later, who for some reason did not want the offer remembered.

  The kind of establishment that Charlotte imagined might have been like the one her heroine Elizabeth envisions for herself in the story “Henry Hastings,” a school for older girls only (not the usual mix of all ages and abilities), “those who had already mastered the elements of education—reading, commenting, explaining, leaving it to them to listen—if they failed, comfortably conscious that the blame would rest on her pupils, not herself.” Like Emily imagining herself debt-free and on permanent holiday, Charlotte’s idea of running a school was not very realistic, but she saw it as the only way to secure a modicum of freedom. She understood by 1841 that she could not survive as a governess and she did not want to go back to teaching in someone else’s school, even though Miss Wooler that year asked her to take over the running of Heald’s House. The example that encouraged Charlotte most was that of Mary Taylor. For some years now, the well-travelled Taylors had been sharing their French newspapers with Charlotte and sending her “bales” of French books (one package contained about forty volumes—an education in itself). Mr. Taylor was especially keen to have his girls finish their schooling abroad and acquire languages. But when he died early in 1841, the family began to break up quickly. Mary did not get on well with her mother and, with her brother Waring, was already thinking of emigrating to the other side of the world—New Zealand. Her brothers Joe and John were going to live at the cottage attached to Hunsworth Mill, and the girls were off to school in Brussels, where Martha had already spent a year.

  Back with the White family at Upperwood House, Charlotte read a letter from Mary describing her travels in Belgium and Holland that summer that seemed to light a fuse in her heart:

  I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her letter—such a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work. such a strong wish for wings—wings such as wealth can furnish—such an urgent thirst to see—to know—to learn—something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute—I was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties unexercised

  The degradations she experienced as an employee and the stifling of potential that led to “estrangement from one’s real character,” as she expressed it poignantly to Ellen, did not, surely, have to be tolerated for ever. The only reasonable escape route was to set up their own school, and the essential qualification to attract pupils would be languages, culture, “finish.” An ardent correspondence with Mary and Martha followed, a careful appeal to Aunt Branwell for funds, an anxious wait before Aunt agreed to lend her two elder nieces the large sum, £150, necessary to cover their expenses for a year. Then, gloriously, Charlotte was able to hand in her notice to Mr. and Mrs. White and announce to them that she and her sister were going abroad, to study.

  * * *

  *1 A heavily annotated volume, now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. It was Patrick Brontë’s health-advice bible.

  *2 Ann Baer has brought to my attention her article in Book Collector ([Summer 2014], 281–2), “Stoning Charlotte Brontë,” in which she repeats her aunt Margie Sidgwick’s recollection of being visited in Oxford “at some unknown date, but probably in the 1920s,” by “a very old man” called Benson Sidgwick, who claimed cousinship and told Margie “that he had once thrown a stone at Charlotte Brontë and hit her.”

  *3 As he does in “Ashworth” too, and most memorably in Jane Eyre, as Rochester’s Pilot.

  *4 The depths of Branwell’s boredom might be suggested by a story John Brown told some visitors to Haworth in 1866: “on one occasion when he was station master, being hurried over some necessary letter writing, two important letters remained to be written before the next train came in. The train was in sight, so Branwell, taking two sheets of paper and two pens, sat down and wrote two letters at the same time on two entirely different subjects” (“A Visit to Haworth in 1866,” BST, 15:78 [1968]).

  *5 The date of publication was 5 June 1841. I am assuming that his sisters did get to know of this feat, as Branwell would have been the least capable person on earth of keeping it to himself.

  SEVEN

  In a Strange Land

  1842

  As late as three weeks before they left for Brussels, Charlotte and Emily had been making plans to transfer to a school in Lille, but by the middle of January they had changed their minds again and come to an agreement with the proprietors of a highly recommended pensionnat des demoiselles within the city of Brussels that was almost within their budget. Charlotte had done the groundwork, and it was the “simple earnest tone” of her letters, carefully inquiring about the costs and every aspect of the curriculum, that persuaded the owner, Madame Zoë Heger, to do what she could to encourage the prospective foreign students. “These are the daughters of an English pastor, of moderate means, anxious to learn with an ulterior view of instructing others,” her husband remembered them saying to each other. “Let us name a specific sum, within which all expenses shall be included.” Monsieur Heger proved a sensitive reader from the first.

  So, on a cold February morning in 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë left Haworth with their father en route for Brussels, via London. They were accompanied by Mary Taylor and her brother Joe, old hands at the journey, whose experience helped the Brontës face some dizzying novelties: their first long-distance railway ride, their first journey by steamship, and not least (for the girls) their first sight of London. Patrick Brontë found them all accommodation at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row in the heart of the city, a tavern frequented by Dr. Johnson and Thomas Chatterton in the previous century and still the haunt of literary hacks and booksellers; a very businesslike hostelry “solely frequented by men,” as far as Mrs. Gaskell could tell when she went to see it in the 1850s. It was where Patrick had stayed in his student days travelling through London, and he was not the man to branch out unnecessarily, however inappropriate it might be as a place to lodge three young ladies.

  The party arrived at night and had their first proper sight of London the next morning, an experience reflected in Villette when Lucy Snowe wakes in the capital for the first time and sees St. Paul’s and the City from her inn window: “Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim—THE DOME. While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.” Mary Taylor, who, like Ellen Nussey, had visited the capital numerous times, was amused at Charlotte’s determination to take in as much as she could of this precious treasure-store: “she seemed to think our business was and ought to be, to see all the pictures and statues we could. She knew the artists, and knew where other productions of theirs were to be found.” After a couple of days of non-stop cultural bingeing, which included visits to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the National Gallery, everyone was exhausted. “I don’t remember what we saw except St. Paul’s,” Mary said later.*1

  Charlotte was sea-sick throughout the fourteen-hour crossing from London to Ostend and staggered ashore to face a long slow coach journey
on to Brussels. But excitement trumped exhaustion, and to her hungry eye the flat, rainy, Flemish landscape they passed through was intensely interesting, just as it was for William Crimsworth, in her novel The Professor, when he makes the identical journey: “not a beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the whole route, yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than picturesque.” Patrick Brontë, as excited as any of them at his first trip to the Continent, had made himself a little phonetic phrasebook so that he could get by in French as the head of their party. The phrases, adapted to his accent, covered the usual travellers’ concerns about accommodation and food, but also gave a little leeway for small talk, and one can imagine him sticking his head out of the window of the coach to ask “Oo somay noo a prazong?” or to observe chattily “La shaump-an-y me paray shaurmaung.” At the inns along the way, he was equipped to be “tre caunetong” with the beds, if appropriate, and able to ask for “me soaliay” from the boot-boy, though one wonders if they had difficulty finding inns in the first place, if “Maungtnaung indiqe moa un bong o’berzh sil voo play Mosyoo” is actually what he said to anyone in the street.