Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Just a couple of days before Branwell’s death, Tabitha Brown, Martha’s younger sister, remembered seeing him struggle to mount the steps to the Parsonage’s front door “and…catch hold to the door side—it seemed such hard work for him.” It was the last time Branwell left the Parsonage. When the doctor was called, the family was told to prepare for the worst—an eventuality that seems to have taken them by surprise, worn down as they all were by the years of his degeneration.

  On 24 September his stricken family gathered round Branwell’s deathbed—the first, Charlotte told W. S. Williams, that she had ever attended.*1 Branwell’s atheism, which had been a subject of such moment that it was never mentioned, now reared up as the killing, quelling fact—worse than his death, even, for nothing less than his eternal soul hung in the balance. “The sting of death is sin” is the verse from Saint Paul on the Brontë memorial stone in Haworth Church; Patrick Brontë had preached on that text in his funeral sermon for William Weightman six years before, reminding the congregation that a good Christian should be ever ready for judgement at “the bar of eternity.” Branwell seemed about to face that awful trial doomed to failure, a thought that sent his distraught father into a frenzy of prayer at the bedside, desperate for signs of repentance, and for signs of faith. Most fortunately, a change came over Branwell in his final days that gave his family some relief and hope: he seemed to be amenable to their prayers and spoke kindly to them at last. To his friend John Brown, who must have bitterly regretted his encouragement of Branwell’s past extravagances, Branwell spoke of his family’s love for him and “the depth and tenderness of which affection he could find no language to express.” He didn’t mention Lydia Robinson at all in this final interview but grabbed the sexton’s hand and cried out, “Oh, John, I am dying!” and “In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good.”

  Branwell did do one good thing, as he lay dying on the morning of 24 September, with his sisters and his father gathered round him: he was heard praying softly and when Patrick Brontë offered up a final prayer, replied “Amen.” “How unusual that word appeared from his lips—of course you who did not know him, cannot conceive,” Charlotte told Williams. But the “painful, mournful joy” of hearing it was short-lived: Branwell died in his father’s arms later that day, aged thirty-one. “My Son! My Son!” Patrick cried out piteously, refusing to be comforted, alone in his room. He never thought that his remaining children might have needed his comfort in return after their ordeal. “My poor Father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters,” Charlotte remarked sombrely.

  The horror of Branwell’s death struck in the succeeding days, felling Charlotte in a way very similar to her breakdown in 1838 on return from Roe Head. She took to her bed, incapable of even speaking, waking from fitful sleep into a renewed awareness of what had taken place, a nightmarish state with “impressions experienced…such as we do not put into language.” Anne and Emily were left to support their father alone through the funeral service, which was again taken by William Morgan, Branwell’s godfather.*2 John Brown did his sexton’s offices: prepared the vault under the chancel floor and added Branwell’s name under those of his mother and sisters on the memorial that stood on the east wall.

  Charlotte’s earliest letter about her brother’s death, written a week later, shows how low her feelings for Branwell had sunk in the preceding four or five years, but from what a high platform. It reads more like an indictment than an obituary:

  I do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once—long ago—they have perished mournfully—nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings—There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death—such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe—I trust time will allay these feelings.

  Time did begin to allay them, replacing her anger and resentment with a miserable vacancy. She tried to squeeze consolation from faith, but it did not console her in the way in which Patrick Brontë, for instance, stemmed his misery at the loss of his son and heir. Charlotte may have been much more like godless Branwell and heretic Emily in this regard, though she struggled so vehemently against it. “When I looked on the noble face and forehead of my dead brother,” she wrote to Williams, “and asked myself what had made him go ever wrong, tend ever downwards, when he had so many gifts to induce to, and aid in an upward course—I seemed to receive an oppressive revelation of the feebleness of humanity; of the inadequacy of even genius to lead to true greatness if unaided by religion and principle.” To Ellen, she spoke more familiarly: “The final separation—the spectacle of his pale corpse gave more acute, bitter pain than I could have imagined—Till the last hour comes we never know how much we can forgive, pity, regret a near relation—All his vices were and are nothing now—we remember only his woes.”

  Charlotte answered her friend’s concern about her state of mind and health with “I feel much more uneasy about my sisters than myself just now.” Emily had caught a chill, it seemed, on the day of the funeral, and had a persistent, racking cough. Charlotte at first blamed the weather and the stress of Branwell’s death, but the cough persisted, worsened, and she began to be deeply alarmed: “Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate; I fear she has a pain in the chest—and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly—she looks very, very thin and pale.” But her sister was not a good patient—not patient at all. “Her reserved nature occasions one great uneasiness of mind—it is useless to question her—you get no answers—it is still more useless to recommend remedies—they are never adopted.” By early November, when Anne and Tabby were also ill, Emily’s harsh dry cough and breathlessness, and her frightening emaciation, were getting worse. “[M]y sister Emily has something like a slow inflammation of the lungs,” Charlotte told Williams on 2 November, apologising for her preoccupation with personal matters; “I kept waiting for a cheerful day and mood in which to address you.”

  Charlotte at first described Emily as “a real stoic in illness,” trying to see her intransigence in the best possible light, but the sick woman’s refusal to accept any help or sympathy or to make any adjustments to her daily routine became increasingly distressing to her sisters: “you must look on, and see her do what she is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word.” “I have again and again incurred her displeasure by urging the necessity of seeking advice, and I fear I must yet incur it again and again.” This recalls “the unconscious tyranny” that Constantin Heger observed in Emily’s treatment of Charlotte that may not have been unconscious at all. “When she is ill there seems to be no sunshine in the world for me,” Charlotte told Williams. “I think a certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes one cling to her more.” Indeed, Emily seems to have fully understood her power over Charlotte—over the whole household—and been strangely determined to test it at this juncture, imposing on them what Charlotte later called “forced, total neglect.” “Stern selfishness” is how Mrs. Gaskell described Emily’s conduct during her last illness, then she had second thoughts and crossed the phrase out. But it remains a persuasive opinion.

  Did Emily think she could will herself through a fatal illness, did will mean more to her than survival? Perhaps her grim, sardonic “stoicism” was a form of rage against the disease which she fully understood was killing her, and against which her family’s concern appeared to her futile, puny and insulting. When Charlotte passed on a book about homoeopathy, sent by Williams, Emily looked it over and denounced it as “quackery”; conventional medics seemed to her no better than poisoners. And when Charlotte wrote in secret to a London doctor recommended by Williams, she told him that the patient “has never consented to lie in bed for a s
ingle day” but rose at seven every morning, as usual, and went to bed at ten.

  The weather that autumn was very wet and cold. There were hard frosts and snow by early November; “a good deal of snow” in the middle of the month; and rain, snow and hoarfrost through December—with scarcely a day marked “clear.” Emily’s cough and fever did not subside; she had a pain in the chest and struggled to breathe, but, taking their cue from the patient’s fierce refusal to see any “poisoning doctor,” her sisters continued to hope against hope for a recovery. Patrick Brontë, on the other hand, saw the similarities between Emily’s symptoms and those of Maria and Elizabeth, and shook his head.

  George Smith’s gifts of books and periodicals diverted the household during these awful months, though the growing notoriety of the brothers Bell, the guessing games about their true identities and the temptation to rank them as competitors were signs of notice more agitating than gratifying. From her later remarks about Wuthering Heights, it is clear that Charlotte thought it an immature work that Ellis Bell would improve on, given time; the undervaluing of Ellis Bell’s poetry, on the other hand, was a source of increasing annoyance to her. Smith had bought the unsold, unloved stock of the 1846 volume and reissued it in 1848 after the success of Jane Eyre. But still there was insufficient appreciation, in Charlotte’s view, for the genius of Ellis Bell, especially now that Currer’s novel, the most successful of the four by far, always seemed to dispose critics in his favour. It was hard to read aloud to her ailing sister notices that spoke of Ellis’s and Acton’s “comparative inferiority…from the greater quietness of a small or the triteness of a common subject.” Charlotte thought such critics “blind…as any bat—insensate as any stone.”*3

  Among the articles that Smith, Elder forwarded to Haworth was one from North American Review, considering all four of the Bell novels in the light of the “Jane Eyre fever” currently sweeping the eastern United States. A feverish confusion certainly surrounded the authorship of each novel—the American editions attributed Wuthering Heights to “the author of Jane Eyre” and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the “author of Wuthering Heights”—and taken together, the Bells, powerfully clever though they were, seemed to embody all that was brutal and offensive. The reviewer deplored the fact that Heathcliff’s creator “seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing a full and complete science of human brutality,” while Acton Bell succeeded in depicting profligacy without making virtue pleasing. Charlotte enjoyed describing to Williams the actual home life of this depraved crew:

  As I sat between them at our quiet but now somewhat melancholy fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis the “man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose,” sat leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted—it is not his wont to laugh—but he smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he listened—Acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly pourtrayed [sic].

  Charlotte found particularly amusing the reviewer’s suggestion that the Bells might be a brother-and-sister or husband-and-wife team (their work bearing “the marks of more than one mind, and one sex”): “Strange patch-work it must seem to them, this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband—that other by the wife! The gentleman of course doing the rough work—the lady getting up the finer parts.” But one can sympathise with the reviewer, trying to make sense of the new phenomenon represented by the Bells. No one had written novels like this before, with so much unaccountable power.

  Charlotte wrote in wrenching anxiety to Ellen on 23 November that Emily’s “deep tight” cough had got worse, her pulse was racing, her form wasted. “[S]he is very ill: I believe if you were to see her your impression would be that there is no hope,” Charlotte said, incapable of expressing her own loss of hope directly. Emily still refused to see a doctor and did not want her illness even alluded to, insisted on attempting her usual chores, but collapsed in the cold passageway from the main kitchen to the back kitchen on her way to feed Flossy and Keeper. “God only knows how all this is to terminate,” Charlotte wrote. “More than once I have been forced boldly to regard the terrible event of her loss as possible and even probable. But Nature shrinks from such thoughts—I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in this world.”

  On the evening of 18 December, Charlotte read to Emily from one of Emerson’s essays, that had arrived in the latest parcel from George Smith. Emily drifted off to sleep and Charlotte put the book down, thinking they would continue the next day. But the next day, “the first glance at her face” assured Charlotte her sister was dying.

  Martha Brown told Mrs. Gaskell that on her last morning, Emily got up, “dying all the time—the rattle in her throat while she would dress herself; & neither Miss Brontë nor I dared offer to help her.” Emily’s violent display of denial went as far as trying to take up her sewing, though the servants saw that her eyes had already begun to glaze over. This was the fight that Charlotte described later to Williams, and that Emily forced her to witness, “the conflict of the strangely strong spirit and the fragile frame…relentless conflict—once seen, never to be forgotten.”

  Charlotte told Mrs. Gaskell that she went out on to the moor on that bleak December day, desperate to find any small spray of heather to take to her dying sister, though the flowers were all brown and withered at that time of year. Emily did not recognise them. Two hours before she died, she said, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now,” but of course it was too late. Dr. Wheelhouse may not even have got to the Parsonage in time to see Emily die “in the arms of those who loved her.”*4

  She was buried three days later, on a clear, frosty morning. Arthur Nicholls took the service, and the chancel flagstones, hardly settled from Branwell’s funeral less than three months earlier, were levered up again. The coffin was the narrowest that William Wood ever recalled making for a grown person. It measured five foot seven by only sixteen inches wide. Keeper, who had stayed by Emily’s deathbed and followed her coffin to the church, now lay outside the bedroom door, howling.

  Emily suffers no more either from pain or weakness now. She never will suffer more in this world—she is gone after a hard, short conflict…Yes—there is no Emily in Time or on Earth now—yesterday we put her poor, wasted mortal frame quietly under the Church pavement. We are very calm [a]t present, why should we be otherwise?—the anguish of seeing [he]r suffer is over, the spectacle of the pains of D[ea]th is gone by—the funeral day is past—we feel she is at peace—no need now to tremble for the hard frost and keen wind—Emily does not feel them.

  Charlotte did not take to her bed as she had done after Branwell’s death. Anne’s cough, weakness and the pains in her side were all too clearly indicative of the same disease, though no one wanted to believe it possible. When Ellen Nussey came to visit at the turn of the new year, she found the family “calm and sustained” but very anxious about Anne. Reverend Brontë had inquired after the best Leeds doctor, and a Mr. Teale subsequently came to examine the invalid, whom Ellen thought was looking “sweetly pretty and flushed and in capital spirits.” But when the doctor left and Patrick Brontë came into the room, it was clear that the news was bad. This most undemonstrative of fathers sat next to his youngest child on the sofa and drew her towards him, saying, “My dear little Anne,” as if they were already parting.

  Charlotte tried to convince herself that the doctor could be wrong, but Anne’s own terrors at the diagnosis were expressed with heartbreaking poignancy in the poem she wrote the following day:

  A dreadful darkness closes in

  On my bewildered mind;

  O let me suffer and not sin,

  Be tortured yet resigned.

  Through all this world of whelming mist

  Still let me look to Thee,

&
nbsp; And give me courage to resist

  The Tempter till he flee.

  Weary I am—O give me strength

  And leave me not to faint;

  Say Thou wilt comfort me at length

  And pity my complaint.

  With her new understanding of consumption, Charlotte guessed rightly that the family had been harbouring it for years, “unused any of us to the possession of robust health, we have not noticed the gradual approaches of decay; we did not know its symptoms; the little cough, the small appetite, the tendency to take cold at every variation of atmosphere have been regarded as things of course—I see them in another light now.” Anne submitted to all the treatments that Emily would never countenance: she was examined with a stethoscope, she used a respirator, she was blistered, she took cod-liver oil (that smelt “like train oil”) and iron tonics, she accepted help walking round the room, she rested (in what used to be Emily’s chair), but still she did not improve. Charlotte’s instinct was to take the patient somewhere warmer, but travel was not recommended by the doctor until the weather improved, so they waited out the coldest months of the year on the edge of the frozen moor, hoping to get to the seaside—Scarborough was Anne’s longing—as soon as the weather improved. Charlotte probably had in mind somewhere more temperate than the bracing east coast resort; the place recommended for consumptives in Thomas John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine was Penzance, the Branwells’ soft, southern, sunny native town. “It is well known that many persons far gone in consumption have perfectly recovered from a lengthened stay at Penzance,” the oracle by the sickbed said. It was queerly as if the ghosts of Anne’s mother and aunt were calling her home.