Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  “Every trivial accident sad or pleasant reminds me of her & of what she went through,” Mary told Ellen three weeks later, when she went to visit the grave with the Brontës. But, battening down her terrible feelings of loss, she went ahead with her plan to move to Germany alone—an even colder plunge now than she had anticipated.

  Just a few days later, on 2 November, a letter arrived for Charlotte and Emily from their father informing them that Aunt Branwell was seriously ill. The girls decided to go home immediately, but on the heels of the first letter came another telling them that Aunt Branwell was dead. However quickly they set off, it was clear they could not be in time for the funeral, but there was no question of staying in Brussels: the pull of home at this crisis was overpowering, and Emily, at least, was glad to be drawn back by force majeure. The interruption to their schooling would be considered later, as the Hegers made haste to reassure them. The couple, always very sympathetic to matters of family duty, saw the Brontë sisters off with every kindness, and each of them wrote to Patrick Brontë offering sincere condolences and expressing the hope that his daughters’ education could be resumed at an appropriate time.

  On their hasty departure from the Pensionnat, and with the awful feeling that they might not be able to return, Charlotte gave Madame her fine drawing of the watermill, with a dedication written so small that it is barely visible, interwoven with the foliage—“Madame Heger from one of her pupils”—to which the artist has added for clarification (but impossible to read with the naked eye), “A token of affection and respect.” Emily gave her a watercolour, “most spirited and beautiful,” of a female figure arrested in flight. It was an adaptation of one of Richard Westall’s illustrations to Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron and perfectly expressed Emily’s eagerness to depart.*4

  Emily and Charlotte travelled home by the next Sunday’s steam packet from Antwerp to London, spent another full day travelling overland and reached Haworth on 8 October, five days after Elizabeth Branwell, 65-year-old spinster of a parish she had never wanted to live in, was buried, according to her wishes, “as near as convenient to the remains of my dear sister.”

  It was a sombre reunion of the siblings. Anne had not got home from Thorp Green in time to see her aunt alive, but Branwell had been there to witness “such agonising suffering as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure,” as he told his friend Francis Grundy, and spent many sleepless nights at his aunt’s sickbed as she endured the rapid advance of what seems to have been a bowel or stomach cancer. Branwell had always been his aunt’s favourite, and now felt that he had lost someone as dear as a mother to him, “the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood.” Already wrought up to a pitch of emotionalism by the death of William Weightman, he felt oppressed by “gloomy visions either of this world or another” (casual wording that would have shocked his father to hear), and doubtless his pain over his aunt’s death was exacerbated by feelings of guilt that he had not managed to reward her faith in him with better results.

  Branwell was presumably prepared for the contents of his aunt’s will, since it did not consternate him. He was left a japanned dressing case as a personal memento and that was all. The four legatees were Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their cousin Eliza Kingston (the only child of Elizabeth’s younger sister Jane Branwell, who had suffered an abusive marriage and returned to Penzance from America years before). The will had been drawn up in 1833, when Branwell was sixteen and had bright prospects ahead of him. Elizabeth Branwell clearly believed that a young man could make his own way, but girls without patrimony, like his sisters and Eliza, deserved to have family assets directed towards them, just as Elizabeth herself and her sister Maria had benefited significantly from the annuities left them by their father decades earlier. Not least, an inheritance would give the girls more choice over whether or not to marry.

  Elizabeth Branwell had managed to put by quite a bit of money as well as pay her way at the Parsonage all the years she lived with her brother-in-law. Her independent, rigorously scrupulous behaviour had been a source of pride to her and a powerful example to her nieces. Though middle-class females of the period are so often thought of as having been financial burdens on their male relations, the stereotypes were reversed in the case of the Brontës; Patrick Brontë and his son were the ones needing to be subsidised by their womenfolk’s frugality, hard work and careful stewardship of resources.

  Aunt Branwell had invested over £1,000 in the York and North Midland Railway Company, promoted vigorously in the 1830s by “The Railway King,” George Hudson, as a portal to the future. The first part of the line from York to London opened in 1839 with huge success, and Aunt’s investment was doing remarkably well, yielding around 10 per cent in each of the first four years. The Brontë sisters decided to hold on to the shares rather than cash them in—for the time being, at any rate—but the volatility of the railway business, requiring massive capitalisation as well as returns, unnerved Charlotte, who told Miss Wooler that “any day a small share-holder may find his funds shrunk to their original dimensions.” Emily, on the other hand, was a risk-taker and found it extremely exciting to have a stake in the market. She took over the management of the investments on behalf of all three sisters and became obsessed with checking “every paragraph & every advertisement in the news-papers that related to rail-roads”; not that she moved any of the stock in the years they owned it, but watching it rise so often as it did gave her deep pleasure. None of the sisters dwelt too long on the fate of Aunt’s other speculation—in a Cornish tin-mining business that had collapsed entirely.*5

  Probate on Elizabeth Branwell’s will was granted at the end of December, but in the weeks since their aunt’s death the three sisters had taken stock of their changed situation and made some important decisions. They now each possessed a nest-egg worth about £300, the equivalent of twelve years’ income at Anne’s governess job. Patrick Brontë was ageing, his sight was deteriorating, and his spirits had been dashed by the recent bereavements; one of his daughters would be expected to stay at home and take their aunt’s place as his companion and housekeeper. Anne was well established in her post with the Robinsons (and determined, moreover, to stick at it); she had also helped Branwell to get a job with the same family, starting in January 1843, as tutor to their twelve-year-old son, Edmund. Emily was the obvious candidate to stay at home. The only question was, would Charlotte stay with her?

  —

  THE DASH HOME in November had been a jarring interruption of the Brussels experiment, which Constantin Heger and his wife had regretted sincerely. Monsieur Heger had sent the sisters home with a letter addressed to their father, to make sure that there was some chance of a return: it was both a progress report and a suggested plan for the coming term. Heger paid tribute to the girls’ “love of work and their perseverance”—clearly learnt from home—and lamented that his own “almost fatherly affection” was touched by their sudden departure: “and our distress is increased by the realization that there are so many incomplete tasks, so many things which have been well begun, and which only need a little more time to be satisfactorily completed. In a year’s time, each of your daughters would have been fully prepared for all future contingencies; each was both improving her knowledge and learning how to teach.” Emily had been about to have piano lessons “from the best teacher we have in Belgium” (who happened to be Heger’s first wife’s brother-in-law); Charlotte had begun to give lessons in French “and to gain the assurance and aplomb so essential in teaching.” A total interruption of their studies would be inadvisable, Heger felt, since they were within sight of reaping real rewards; one or the other of them would be welcome as a full-time teacher in time. “This is not a question of our personal advantage,” he wrote, “but a question of affection; you must pardon me if we speak to you of your children and concern ourselves with their future as if they formed part of our family; their personal qualities, their good will, their extreme zeal are the only reasons leading
us to venture in this way.”

  The reference to “one of them” possibly finding permanent employment at the Pensionnat was aimed of course at Charlotte, not Emily. She had a special place in Heger’s affections, and knew it. His delight in her progress was heartfelt—she had been, in effect, his perfect pupil, clever, subordinate, vulnerable. He could see her intelligence and sense her genius, but it seemed his to awaken and, unlike Emily’s, gratifyingly malleable. With this testimony to Heger’s regard, and repeated encouragement from Madame, in kind and affectionate letters, to return and continue her studies, there was little doubt what Charlotte wanted to do. Three years later, she looked back on her decision with searing self-condemnation as “selfish folly,” indulged against the promptings of her conscience and punished “by a total withdrawal for more than two year[s] of happiness and peace of mind.” But at the time the impulse to fly back to Brussels at the first opportunity was, as she admitted, “irresistible.”

  If Aunt Branwell had been alive, Charlotte would never have been allowed to undertake the journey as she did, completely alone. She left home on Friday, 27 January 1843, travelling from Leeds to London by train and arriving in the capital so late—ten o’clock at night—that she decided not to go as planned to the Chapter Coffee House but to take a cab and head straight for London Bridge wharf and try to board the steamship that she was booked on to leave the next morning. When the cabbie left her in an alarming scrum of foul-mouthed watermen, all jostling for custom, it dawned on Charlotte how dangerous her situation was, but she persisted in being rowed out to find the boat, a hard task in the inky darkness. They had to go from one vessel to another, holding up a lantern until the Earl of Liverpool was found. The crew were at first very dubious at the sight of a tiny young woman in heavy winter travelling dress standing in a rowing-boat among her valises and demanding to be let on board so many hours before time, but the “quiet simple statement of her wish, and her reason for it” swayed the officer on duty, and she was hauled up and shown to a berth, where she collapsed in relief. “I had no accident,” she told Ellen later, “but of course some anxiety.” Any sense of danger had been eclipsed by a feverish and growing excitement. Elizabeth Gaskell later said that Charlotte’s recollection of her journey back to Brussels was “pretty much as she has since described it in ‘Villette,’ ” but Villette offers no explanation for the heroine’s sense of quiet exultation, which turns her apprehensions into a dark source of pleasure:

  Down the sable flood we glided; I thought of the Styx, and of Charon rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades. Amidst the strange scene, with a chilly wind blowing in my face, and midnight-clouds dropping rain above my head; with two rude rowers for companions, whose insane oaths still tortured my ear, I asked myself if I was wretched or terrified. I was neither. Often in my life have I been far more so under comparatively safe circumstances. “How is this?” said I. “Methinks I am animated and alert, instead of being depressed and apprehensive?” I could not tell how it was.

  * * *

  *1 Charlotte complained many years later (when she was feeling out of sympathy with him) that Joe Taylor had dragged them from sight to sight exhaustingly, but at the time Mary said it was the other way round and that Charlotte was the relentless one.

  *2 Now that the old quarter has been largely obliterated by even more extensive remodelling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rue d’Isabelle exists only as a fragment of the medieval street that itself was unknown to the Brontës, buried in the foundations of the current Palais de Coudenberg. The whole area round where the Pensionnat used to stand is oddly jigsaw like and confusing, but the connections between the contemporary quarter and the one the Brontës knew have been brilliantly illustrated by Eric Ruijssenaars in Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land and The Pensionnat Revisited, with maps drawn by Selina Busch.

  *3 CB’s essay “L’Ingratitude” came to light in 2012, having been lost for almost a hundred years. It is dated 16 March 1842. See London Review of Books, 8 March 2012, and Brian Bracken’s notes.

  *4 Emily’s picture is now lost, but a photograph of it remains (see Art of the Brontës, 385–7). It was in the Heger family until the 1880s, then given to a former pupil and bequeathed to her niece. It is known as The North Wind, though whether or not EJB gave it that title is uncertain. Charlotte’s Watermill hangs at the Brontë Parsonage Museum; see Art of the Brontës, 260.

  *5 Elizabeth Branwell might also have owned some property in Cornwall, as CB makes a reference to rent paid in May 1846 by Eliza Kingston, the Cornish legatee, to Patrick Brontë, which seems to be connected to Miss Branwell’s estate (LCB 1, 472).

  EIGHT

  The Black Swan

  1843

  Charlotte returned to the Pensionnat as both student and teacher. She still took French classes with some of the pupils whom she now taught English, and they liked her no better than they had the previous year. As fellow student, they felt she was at an unfair advantage because of her age (twenty-six) and maturity—and because she was teacher’s pet (Monsieur Heger often read her work aloud in class as an example). In classes such as dancing, she was ridiculed mercilessly for her ineptitude and lack of grace, and then these very same girls were presented at desks in front of her, to be taught English. Frederika Macdonald, interviewing some of the pupils who had been at the Pensionnat in 1842–3 many years later, found one “Mlle C” who testified that the girls played up in Mademoiselle Brontë’s class on purpose, because they scorned her lack of authority. One girl who was “extremely difficult to manage” precipitated a crisis in an already rowdy class after throwing a knotted handkerchief across the room that hit Miss Brontë on the arm. “Instead of showing anger or amusement, [she] appeared greatly distressed and embarrassed,” the former schoolgirl recalled, but Charlotte got her revenge at the next lesson when she brought in Monsieur Heger to reprimand the whole form, threaten the malefactors with expulsion if they did not improve their behaviour and exclude the ringleader from the English class.*1

  Another former pupil said that Miss Brontë “was known to be very clever, but she had no sympathy with young people and no authority over them.” They despised her because she was ill-dressed, thin and sickly looking (“maigrelette” was the word), and also because she worked so hard. Charlotte was learning German this year and making both English and French translations of Schiller.*2 She did a polished translation of “Les Petits Orphelins” by Louis Belmontet, one of “L’Idole” by Auguste Barbier and versions in French of her own old favourites Scott and Byron. “L’Idole” (about Napoleon’s ruthless pursuit of glory to his country’s ruin) was an interesting choice, possibly Heger’s. Charlotte and he were in friendly rivalry about the late emperor and his nemesis, Wellington, and when Charlotte came to write an essay “The Death of Napoleon” later that spring, she made it into something of a partisan set-piece about the Duke. Heger was so pleased with it that he retained it for declamation at the school prize day.

  On her return to Brussels, Charlotte made a valued new friend in Mary Dixon, the 34-year-old-cousin of Mary Taylor whom she had met after Martha’s death the previous October. Mary, a mature and intelligent woman, in delicate health, lived on the rue de la Régence in a cheerful household headed by her father Abraham, a failed banker and former foreign commission agent who was trying to make a living in Brussels as an inventor. Charlotte took to spending Sundays with Mary, a substitute elder sister perhaps for the one she had lost so long ago.

  Charlotte felt sufficiently at ease with Mary Dixon to submit to her request to sit for a portrait. “I surrender my unfortunate head to you with resignation,” she wrote good-naturedly; “the features thereof may yield good practice as they never yet submitted to any line of regularity—but have manifested each a spirit of independence, edifying to behold.” Charlotte advised her not to send any resulting portrait to Mary Taylor, however: “she likes me well enough—but my face she can dispense with—and would tell you so in her ow
n sincere and truthful language if you asked her.” This was all too true. Mary Taylor had been making rude remarks about Charlotte’s appearance ever since they met at Roe Head, and later complained that George Richmond’s 1850 portrait of Charlotte was far too flattering of “an ugly woman.”

  A small chalk, ink and wash drawing of a young woman wearing a bonnet came to light in the 1990s, formerly in the possession of William Law, an avid collector of Brontëana, who had bought it from the Brontës’ servant Martha Brown some time before 1880. It has the words “Portrait of Charlotte Brontë given to Martha Brown 1839” in pencil on the back and is assumed to be of Charlotte, assumed to be, in fact, the portrait by Mary Dixon that she agreed to sit for in 1843. Subsequently, its date has been adjusted to “Brussels, c. 1843” in line with the letter quoted above. It seems much more likely that Mary Dixon’s picture of Charlotte (if indeed she went ahead and made one) is now lost, and that the chalk drawing at the Parsonage is of Mary Dixon herself, executed at the same period and given to Charlotte as a memento. That Charlotte had such a memento is evident from the fact that she told Mary in October of 1843 (when Mary had left Brussels) that she had “disinterred your portrait from the bottom of a trunk” because she was low-spirited and craved “a little society”: “I was comforted by discovering a certain likeness—notwithstanding what yourself and William Henry affirmed to the contrary.” The “William Henry” she refers to was William Henry Taylor, another cousin of the Dixons, fifteen years old, who was living with his Brussels relatives at the time. “If it were a little slenderer and paler—it would be very much like.” Charlotte is clearly not talking about taking comfort from an image of herself.*3 The chalk drawing is rather sentimental, of a sweet, conventional-looking woman with extremely regular features—not fitting any description of Charlotte Brontë. Commentators have remarked that it makes “Charlotte” look older and more matronly than one would expect of a 26-year-old, but Mary was seven years her senior.