Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Thackeray left his own accounts of their conversation: “Twice I recollect she took me to task for what she held to be errors in doctrine…She spoke her mind out. She jumped too rapidly to conclusions…Often she seemed to me to be judging the London folk prematurely: but perhaps the city is rather angry at being judged. I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person.”

  Thackeray’s admiration for “Currer Bell” was less critical than hers for him, and his curiosity about her character and history was intense. Knowing hardly anything yet of Miss Brontë’s circumstances and personal history, Thackeray brought his superb novelist’s eye to bear on “the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes” that met his. “An impetuous honesty” was his wonderful phrase to describe her presiding characteristic. He saw her ardour for the truth, however inconvenient or abruptly expressed it might be. “New to the London world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her own; and judged of contemporaries, and especially spied out arrogance or affectation, with extraordinary keenness of vision.”

  Smith devised a treat entirely suited to her tastes when he took Charlotte the following Sunday to the Chapel Royal in St. James’s, where the Duke of Wellington was a regular attendant. The previous week she had been admiring Landseer’s portrait of her hero on the field of Waterloo at the Royal Academy—here he was large as life, walking just a few yards in front of her after the service. “I indulged Miss Brontë by so arranging our walk that she met him twice on his way to Apsley House,” Smith recalled later. For Charlotte, it was understandably one of the “chief incidents” of her visit, and possibly of her life—a close encounter with the man she had idolised so intensely in her youth and whose Angrian avatar had been her earliest obsession. One senses Smith’s pleasure in arranging such an event and her pleasure in it must have been palpable. “I indulged Miss Brontë” could well have been his motto on these visits. He was treating her a little like an exotic pet, which responded only to the most expert handling.

  Smith’s esteem for Charlotte was deep, and his desire to please and praise her was of course a first for her, made so wary by experience. She had had recognition of her ability and intelligence before—from Constantin Heger—but she had never been really admired for them until now. Her peculiarities didn’t bother Smith, because he had no interest in judging her socially (though he realised that his mother and sisters felt otherwise and found Miss Brontë “a somewhat difficult guest,” for her self-consciousness as much as anything). “Strangers used to say that they were afraid of her,” Smith wrote many years later. “For my own part, I found her conversation most interesting; her quick and clear intelligence was delightful. When she became excited on any subject she was really eloquent, and it was a pleasure to listen to her.”

  After three weeks in his company and staying in his home, Charlotte had reached a state of intimacy with Smith that seems to have taken her somewhat by surprise. Her reason told her—severely—that there was no romantic content in his behaviour, but her heart responded warmly to the attention he lavished on her, his sincere admiration, his good looks and his “buoyant animal spirits.” But when he began to talk, as if it were simple and inevitable, of taking her with him on a trip to Edinburgh (where he was going, in the company of his sister Eliza, to fetch his younger brother Alick home for the holidays), Charlotte sensed that—whether he knew it or not—her publisher was crossing some line into a different category of connection. Mrs. Smith certainly thought so: Charlotte could tell from her manner and her readiness to support Charlotte’s opposition to the plan. But the more the women objected, the more Smith warmed to his own scheme and soon he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Writing to warn Ellen not to read too much into the fact that she was about to go travelling with her handsome young publisher, Charlotte made clear how significant, or tricky, she found the situation: “I believe that George and I understand each other very well,” she said, surely making Ellen sit up at the use of Mr. Smith’s Christian name and the great list of extenuating circumstances that followed—“[we] respect each other very sincerely—we both know the wide breach time has made between us—we do not embarrass each other, or very rarely—my six or eight years of seniority, to say nothing of lack of all pretensions to beauty &c. are a perfect safeguard—I should not in the least fear to go with him to China—I like to see him pleased—I greatly dislike to ruffle and disappoint him—so he shall have his mind.”

  Her readiness to put herself in a category of absolute “safety” due to age and “lack of all pretensions to beauty &c.” sounds rather abject, until one reads what Smith said about her in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward many years later, a matter-of-fact judgement about Charlotte Brontë’s personal charms:

  No, I never was in the least bit in love with Charlotte Brontë. I am afraid that the confession will not raise me in your opinion, but the truth is, I never could have loved any woman who had not some charm or grace of person, and Charlotte Brontë had none—I liked her and was interested in her, and I admired her—especially when she was in Yorkshire and I was in London. I never was coxcomb enough to suppose that she was in love with me. But, I believe that my mother was at one time rather alarmed.

  “Especially when she was in Yorkshire and I was in London” was an ungallant way to admire a lady. In his memoirs, written forty years later, he was equally forthright about his first impression of Charlotte Brontë as being “interesting rather than attractive”:

  She was very small, and had a quaint old-fashioned look. Her head seemed too large for her body. She had fine eyes, but her face was marred by the shape of the mouth and by the complexion. There was but little feminine charm about her; and of this fact she herself was uneasily and perpetually conscious.

  Charlotte must have been aware of Smith’s judgement from the start, at some level or other. His charming manner confused her, though, and she accepted the invitation to go to Edinburgh with him at the end of June not quite sure of his intentions.

  One of the highlights of this trip to London in the summer of 1850 was meant to be the dinner that Thackeray held in Currer Bell’s honour at his home in Young Street, Kensington, but it turned out comically badly. The family had been looking forward excitedly to meeting the author of Jane Eyre, and on the evening in question Thackeray’s elder daughter Anny, her sister, and governess, Miss Trulock, were lined up ready for “the great event”: “we all sat silent and expectant; my father, who rarely waited, waiting with us.” The carriage arrived, Smith jumped down, and in came Miss Brontë, “in mittens, in silence, in seriousness.” “This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all London talking, reading, speculating,” Anny recalled, in a marvellous evocation of the sorceress’s celebrity:

  To say that we little girls had been given Jane Eyre to read scarcely represents the facts of the case; to say that we had taken it without leave, read bits here and read bits there, been carried away by an undreamed-of and hitherto unimagined whirlwind into things, times, places, all utterly absorbing and at the same time absolutely unintelligible to us, would more accurately describe our states of mind on that summer’s evening as we look at Jane Eyre—the great Jane Eyre—the tiny little lady.

  But the excitement dissipated quickly. Miss Brontë was stiff and formal with everyone but the governess, and told Smith later that she found the girls’ manners too lively. At dinner, she listened intently to whatever her host said, but barely spoke or ate, and when the ladies all retired to the drawing room a dreadful constraint descended: “Every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all…The room looked very dark, the lamp began to smoke a little, the conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat round still expectant.” One guest bravely tried to open up a conversation by hoping that the famous authoress liked London, only to be told curtly, �
�I do and I don’t”—followed by silence. Another, Mrs. Procter, thought her introduction to the great Currer Bell had been “one of the dullest evenings she ever spent in her life,” and Thackeray himself found it all such a strain that at the first opportunity he escaped to his club. Anny came upon him in the hall, with his hat on and a finger to his lips.

  What did Charlotte feel about the evening? Oddly enough, for one so self-conscious, her own social shortcomings don’t seem to have bothered her much. Perhaps she felt it absurd that anything might be expected of her, even at a reception given for her, when Thackeray was of the company. Perhaps it was her modesty as much as social ineptitude that made her such hard work to be seated next to at dinner. She certainly began to get a reputation, though, from occasions such as this for being chilly, possibly difficult and judgemental.

  Smith was fully aware of what a failure the dinner had been, but in the carriage on the way back to Gloucester Terrace, Charlotte had something else entirely on her mind and startled Smith by leaning forward from her seat opposite him, putting her hands on his knees and saying, “She would make you a very nice wife.” At first, he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but Charlotte replied, “Oh! you know whom I mean,” and Smith realised she was referring to Mrs. Procter’s charming and beautiful 25-year-old daughter Adelaide, the author of a book of poems. Smith had certainly admired Miss Procter that evening, but not in the pointed way Charlotte detected, and one can’t help thinking she was presuming too much all round here and that her signalling of approval was impertinent. Touching him like that was a strangely inappropriate gesture. There seems something studied about it—as if she were staking a claim in an alternative kind of intimacy (like that of a sister or friend) to have when Miss Procter, or some other girl like her, finally did catch Smith’s eye and whisk him away.

  Charlotte’s close observation of him cannot have been entirely pleasant for George Smith, who was no flirt. When he said that he found her “uneasily and perpetually conscious” of her own looks, he seemed puzzled and sorry that his admired author was, in effect, vain, that “the possession of genius did not lift her above the weakness of an excessive anxiety about her personal appearance. But I believe that she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful. Perhaps few women ever existed more anxious to be pretty than she, or more angrily conscious of the circumstance that she was not pretty.” One would like to hope this was not true for Charlotte, that the creator of Jane Eyre had more faith in herself, but the more she went into society, the more she was worn down by an extreme self-consciousness. Lucy Snowe in Villette, distracted by an awareness that she is not pleasing for Monsieur Paul to look at, seems to speak directly for the author when she says, “I never remember the time when I had not a haunting dread of what might be the degree of my outward deficiency…Was it weak to lay so much stress on an opinion about appearance? I fear it might be—I fear it was; but in that case I must avow no light share of weakness. I must own a great fear of displeasing.”

  Charlotte’s awareness of her looks can hardly have been put under more strain on this eventful London visit than when Smith decided that she should sit for a portrait by the fashionable and expensive George Richmond, whom Smith knew through John Ruskin and whose chalk and crayon likenesses of writers and artists, including Martineau, Gaskell, Ruskin, Swinburne and Charlotte M. Yonge, were much admired. One can imagine Miss Brontë raised strong objections when this plan was first mooted, but Smith’s stated intention—to make a present of the portrait to Charlotte’s father—quickly trumped any of her personal misgivings.

  She made three trips to Richmond’s York Street studio for the sittings over a period of nine days in June. The artist’s son later said that his father got the impression of “some early hip trouble” from her slightly ungainly carriage, and that she was “not remarkable in appearance except for having eyes of extraordinary brilliancy & penetration.” The sittings didn’t start auspiciously when Richmond asked his subject to remove a wad of brown merino wool that had stayed on top of her head when she took her bonnet off and that he imagined was connected with it. This was a hairpiece bought in Leeds preparatory to her visit, not performing as hoped, and of course Charlotte was mortified (to the point of tears) to have attention drawn to it. Richmond said that it took until the last of the sittings to get her to relax, and then only through the accident of the Duke of Wellington’s servant having left the house just as she arrived. The thought that she could have been introduced to the Duke himself fifteen minutes earlier enthralled Charlotte and distracted her from the ordeal of being scrutinised so that Richmond was able to catch the expression in the portrait. He shows her thoughtful and intense, animated not with high spirits, but with a brooding inner energy—an expression difficult for a society portraitist to flatter into pleasantness.

  Richmond’s portrait is of great importance as it is the only one of Charlotte Brontë taken from life by a professional artist and so our best guide to what she really looked like. Branwell’s depiction of his sisters in The Brontë Sisters and the sketches remaining from the destroyed Gun Group have great iconic power but are hardly good records of the sitters’ actual features: Branwell’s Charlotte has the squareness of face described by Mary Taylor and the “general impression of chin” that Anne Thackeray noticed, but the expression is stolid and dough-like, which even people who despised Charlotte’s lack of beauty never accused her of. Richmond’s portrait managed both to flatter his subject and to record the “data” of her face, so to speak: his chalk highlights indicate the prominence of her noble brow, her large nose, the twist at the right side of her mouth and the length of her chin (minimised by the angle at which he posed her)—but his composition focuses attention on her large and luminous eyes, which he recognised as her outstanding feature, “illuminating features that would have otherwise been plain.”

  It wasn’t Richmond’s practice to allow sitters to view his work in progress, but on the last day he showed the picture to Miss Brontë and stood waiting for a verdict, only to find to his surprise that she was silently in tears. She turned to him “half in apology” and explained that her emotional response was nothing to do with the likeness to herself but because the picture looked so much like her sister. Which sister is not clear, as two versions of the story exist, one citing Anne and the other Emily, but it was another incidence of Charlotte seeing ghost faces all around her in the new London scene she had entered, and when one stands in front of Richmond’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery today, it is strange to think of the subject seeing dead Emily or dead Anne there, rather than herself.

  —

  GEORGE SMITH’S inspired generosity changed Charlotte Brontë’s life in ways she had not imagined possible, but she retained a clear sense of her own social limitations, and fended off many of his initiatives on her behalf, knowing that they would exhaust her physically and mentally. The more she saw of the effects of fame (on Thackeray, for instance, whom she thought in danger of losing his head over it), the less she wanted it herself. She turned down invitations to meet Dickens socially, though the two seem to have been introduced, fleetingly, after a play that Smith took her to. In later life Smith said he had introduced them, and Charlotte told John Stores Smith, an early fan, that she had met Dickens but didn’t like him (although she admired his books). The contact of their imaginations, however, went much deeper. Dickens’s depiction of systematic negligence and cruelty in Nicholas Nickleby had impressed Charlotte and, as we have seen, probably contributed to her picture of Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Dickens told Lockhart that he had never read Jane Eyre, “and never would,” but he didn’t need to read such a talked-about book in order to be influenced by it in turn. His friend Forster, who had read Jane Eyre and was struck by the astonishing power of the early chapters being told from the oppressed child’s point of view, suggested to Dickens that it would be an interesting experiment to try the same thing, and Dickens, with his keen appetite for novelty,
took up the idea immediately in the composition of David Copperfield. Between them, these two great novels marked a sea-change in how the developing consciousness was represented in art and how writers showed adult psychology being forged from childhood experience. We think nothing now of stories told from a child’s point of view, but Charlotte Brontë was the first to do it, and Dickens the second.

  Charlotte’s friendships with fellow writers in these years gave her pleasure but did not make it easier for her to write—rather the contrary. She could not match the productivity of Martineau or Gaskell, and did not sufficiently trust her own ability to meet a deadline to accept the few offers she had to write for the commercial press. Her friendship with Martineau had started very promisingly with an invitation to her home in Ambleside in 1850; there Charlotte observed an enviably orderly and productive single writer’s life. Miss Martineau rose early, took a cold bath, went for a walk, had breakfast and was at work by eight thirty. Guests were expected to amuse themselves until two, when they would “meet, work, talk and walk together till 5.” Then dinner was followed by an evening of fluent and frank conversation, and after guests retired, Miss Martineau stayed up writing letters until midnight. “She appears exhaustless in strength and spirits, and indefatigable in the faculty of labour,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen, clearly awed and envious of this smoothly satisfying routine. Harriet Martineau had health, energy and “social cheerfulness” all far beyond Charlotte’s capacities, and her strong intellect was a pleasure to engage. One evening she showed Charlotte the work she was writing on the Peninsular War for Charles Knight’s History of the Thirty Years’ Peace and was surprised at the emotional reaction she got to a passage about the Duke of Wellington. “[S]he looked up at me and stole her hand into mine, and, to my amazement, the tears were running down her cheeks,” she told Mrs. Gaskell later. “I saw at once there was a touch of idolatry in the case, but it was a charming enthusiasm.” Charlotte’s impulse to take her hostess’s hand also shows the demonstrative, tactile spirit that was so often held in check.