Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  But when Martineau’s jointly authored book, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development, was published the next year, Charlotte was painfully conflicted about her new friend. She had seen part of the book in proof at Ambleside, and gave Martineau the impression that, although she did not at all agree with its religious position (Martineau frankly admitted her agnosticism), “this did not prevent her doing justice” to its social objectives. This led Martineau to suspect Charlotte of hypocrisy and double-dealing later, when she found that Charlotte was as horrified as many readers and reviewers at the aggressive secularism of her vision and had written expressing it to her publisher, saying that Letters gave “a death-blow to [Martineau’s] future usefulness.” “Who can trust the word or rely on the judgment of an avowed Atheist?” Charlotte could not contemplate a life empty of faith; without it, the afterlife disappeared, and the hope of being reunited with her loved ones. If “a better place” did not exist, how could anyone face the “utter desolation” of this world?

  —

  CHARLOTTE’S TWO DAYS in Edinburgh with Smith after her stay at his house in June 1850 and his equally extraordinary invitation to her the next spring to join him on a cruise down the Rhine (which she felt she had to refuse), created the impression, in everyone else’s head but his own, that the handsome young publisher and Currer Bell were becoming significantly close. Ellen Nussey had seen with her own eyes how excited Charlotte was by her visit to London in June and the prospect of Edinburgh: Charlotte spent the week between these two trips at Brookroyd, not going home to Haworth. Even after her visit to Edinburgh (where Smith and his sister Eliza took her all round the capital, looking at sites connected with Walter Scott; they went out to Abbotsford to see the great man’s house), she didn’t go straight home but spent another few days with Ellen, exhausted by her travels and undoubtedly having one of her emotional collapses too. Being almost alone with charming “George” for three days had given Charlotte “some hours as happy almost as any I ever spent,” and Ellen needed no more encouragement to hear the distant sound of wedding bells. Charlotte poo-pooed the idea, but clearly considered it a possibility, and Patrick Brontë had somehow picked up on the possibility too, though he knew Smith only by name and as the sender of well-chosen parcels of books to the Parsonage. While Charlotte was still at Brookroyd, Patrick began to get nervous about her protracted absence from home (six weeks by this time) and feared her “somehow about to be married to somebody—having ‘received some overtures.’ ”

  But at the same time that Smith was getting so friendly, Charlotte became aware of another possible admirer in the Cornhill office: Smith’s intense young colleague James Taylor. Quite what Taylor felt for Miss Brontë was hard to gauge, as he never got round to articulating it clearly, but their correspondence in 1850 had become important to both parties (though not witty and bantering like Charlotte’s letters to Smith), and when he announced that he would soon be leaving England to go to run a branch of the firm in Bombay—a post that necessitated at least five years’ absence—Charlotte found herself surprisingly sad and perturbed. Her letter of farewell conveyed this, and next thing she knew Taylor was asking to pay her a call at the Parsonage—he would happen to be passing, he said.

  Taylor had been to the Parsonage before—when he picked up the manuscript of Shirley in the autumn of 1849—but this second visit was one of confused expectations and pregnant silences. Taylor looked older, stranger and very nervous—not surprisingly, perhaps, now that he was on the brink of declaring himself to the famous authoress. Quite what he said is unclear—even to Charlotte—but he seems to have suggested that on his return from India in five years he would like to marry her. His manner of expressing himself, however, was as repellent as ever, as Charlotte described to Ellen:

  each moment he came near me—and that I could see his eyes fastened on me—my veins ran ice. Now that he is away I feel far more gently towards him—it is only close by that I grow rigid—stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger—which nothing softens but his retreat and a perfect subduing of his manner. I did not want to be proud nor intend to be proud—but I was forced to be so.

  One would think the matter decided by this powerful antipathy, but Charlotte brooded on it for weeks and resented Taylor’s removal to the other side of the world, depriving her of a support in her solitude. More than his letters even, she felt she would regret “the exclusion of his idea from my mind,” showing a strange propensity to feel pain in almost abstract ways, like an old virus coming out in her nerve endings. She understood from hints Taylor had given that there had been some breach in relations between him and George Smith (who might have deliberately wanted him out of the London office for several reasons), and in her mind she couldn’t help wondering if the two entertained some rivalry over her. This shows a certain blindness about the feelings of both men—Taylor’s so strong (if unwanted); Smith’s so careless (if desired).

  Rather alarmingly, Taylor’s motives seemed crystal clear to Patrick Brontë as soon as he heard that the visit was in the offing. He had taken a liking to “the little man” as Charlotte called him, bade him the sort of formal farewell he reserved for approved persons and referred to him afterwards “with significant eulogy,” as Charlotte wryly noted. “I have told him nothing—yet he seems to be au fait to the whole business—I could think at some moments—his guesses go farther than mine.” This penetration of the situation had made Patrick Brontë very disturbed on the day of the visit itself, and after Taylor had left, his smile collapsed and he was taken immediately ill in anticipation of an imminent proposal. The idea of Charlotte suddenly leaving him was his worst fear. But, over the succeeding weeks, Patrick Brontë quite made up his mind that a long engagement to James Taylor would be just the thing for his daughter; it meant he wouldn’t have to face the prospect of losing her yet, but that she would be supported by a husband in a future he might not live to see. The fact that she didn’t want to marry Taylor was not relevant as far as he was concerned and put him “out of patience.”

  Charlotte had tried to explain to her father that, despite Taylor’s cleverness, she thought his mind essentially “second-rate” and his character lacking an essential element, “something of the gentleman,” as she told Ellen in a characteristically candid letter. Ellen hardly needed her friend to explain that she meant “the natural gentleman—you know I can dispense with acquired polish—and for looks—I know myself too well to think that I have any right to be exacting on that point.” But, regretfully, in Taylor she could not find “one passing glimpse of true good-breeding…it is hard to say—but it is true.”

  It is interesting that Charlotte spent so much emotional energy refusing a man she quite disliked when almost under her nose was one so naturally gentlemanly as to not have imposed his feelings for Miss Brontë on her at all. Arthur Bell Nicholls nurtured his devotion, with decreasing hope, one imagines, all through these years when Charlotte was becoming famous locally and going up and down to London with hairpieces and bonnets in her luggage. He would have noted as keenly as anyone the second visit to the Parsonage of the agitated red-haired Londoner, and no doubt spent some anxious weeks waiting to hear of an engagement. He carried on his duties with admirable efficiency, but he was not very much appreciated or admired by the parson and his daughter, nor by the parishioners; his campaign to get the local Haworth women to stop drying their laundry in the churchyard made some of them wish he would not come back from his annual holiday in Ireland.

  Charlotte did begin to notice Nicholls, gradually. She found him “good—mild and uncontentious” when invited to tea, and he had been surprisingly sporting about the caricature of him she had put into Shirley, along with (much worse) depictions of the other local curates. “Mr. Macarthey” in the novel labours faithfully in the Sunday School and day-school, and has only “proper, steady-going, clerical faults”; “finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would unhinge him for a week” and burying an unba
ptised person “could make strange havoc in [his] physical and mental economy; otherwise, he was sane and rational.” Nicholls found this so amusing (or so flattering) that his landlady, Martha’s mother, heard him roaring with laughter as he read the book; “he sat alone—clapping his hands and stamping on the floor” with pleasure at it.

  —

  Shirley’s mixed reception in the winter of 1849/50 had been much as Charlotte feared: even the most well-disposed critics seemed disappointed not to have a suitably exciting sequel to Jane Eyre. One reviewer, in Fraser’s Magazine, described how he expected to be kept awake all night, as he had been by Currer Bell’s first novel, only to find that the new story had quite the opposite effect and sent him quickly to sleep; others complained bitterly about the “cool and solid” realism that had been Charlotte’s express aim to depict. One savage review in The Times appeared in December 1849, when Charlotte was staying at the Smiths’. George Smith had tried to hide the paper from his guest but failed, and when he saw her later with tears streaming down her face he knew she had seen its condemnation of her book as “at once the most highflown and the stalest of fictions.”

  Charlotte’s confidence, shaky at the best of times ever since she had lost her armour of invisibility, took a battering from these salvos, and she struggled to find the will to start another book. Given the amount of writing she used to do in the years when she had no hope of an audience, this was ironic, to say the least. In her desire to have something to work on, she turned back to her manuscript of The Professor, regardless of Smith, Elder having rejected it so decisively just four years before. The fair copy, which has survived (a patchwork of different-aged papers and handwriting styles), presumably contains a set of significant further changes from this period, or she would not have dared to resubmit it to the firm in the spring of 1851. She may have cut the beginning of the book drastically, to reduce the rival-brothers plot that had owed so much to Branwell’s recycled Angrian story. And she certainly at this date wrote a preface explaining what she had intended to do: show the real struggles of a protagonist who “as Adam’s son…should share Adam’s doom—Labour throughout life and a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment.” Williams felt the changes had some merit, but he may have exaggerated this to compensate for the fact that George Smith still very much thought otherwise. The upshot was that The Professor was rejected for a ninth time overall, and Charlotte regretfully had to put it by—not in her desk, she told Smith, for she would see its unloved face peep out at her too often, but in a cupboard all by itself.

  Charlotte was prepared to joke with Smith about her tenacious affection for her much-rejected book, saying “my feelings towards it can only be paralleled by those of a doting parent towards an idiot child…You may allege that [its] merit is not visible to the naked eye. Granted; but the smaller the commodity—the more inestimable its value.” She locked it out of sight, but the themes of the book—and its dramatisation of so much of the Brussels experience that had changed the course of her life—had come fresh to her mind again. Instead of tinkering with The Professor, she began to think of writing an entirely new novel around some of the same material, a novel that would confound the admirers of Jane Eyre and the critics of Shirley alike by taking realistic eventlessness to a new extreme.

  Charlotte made a number of starts at Villette, casting and recasting her net around all the things she still wished to say about Brussels, the Pensionnat, Catholicism and Monsieur Heger, adding to them impressions and incidents from her more recent experiences in London, and her close, admiring observation of George Smith. Madame Heger appeared as the subtle, scheming directrice of the school, Madame Beck, whose jealousy of her impoverished English underling, Lucy, blights Lucy’s chances of love at every turn, but whose healthy egotism and instinct to dominate wins a grudging respect from her victim. George Smith appears as “Dr. John,” an Englishman abroad, whose healing temperament is suggested by his profession, but who exists in a world of sunny fortune so alien to Lucy that they can never quite co-exist, and, in a book bizarrely full of scenes when people fail to recognise each other, mistake identity, veil themselves, forget, deceive and change beyond recall, these two potential lovers are fated to share one glance of mutual understanding (not a loving glance, but a penetrating stare) and then part.

  Constantin Heger, who was only introduced into The Professor obliquely as Zoraïde Reuter’s kinsman, appears in Villette in a startlingly literal portrait as Monsieur Paul Emanuel, the dark-haired, choleric, demanding but brilliant and charming teacher of French literature at Madame Beck’s pensionnat. His mannerisms, his speeches, his bons-bons, paletot, Greek cap and cigars are set down with daring explicitness: no one reading the novel who knew anything about the Brontës’ two years in Brussels would have had any trouble tracing the character back to its original. Charlotte’s use of him—and of their relationship—was like a gauntlet thrown down. In life he had cut her off—it was as if they had never known each other. What secret, then, was there to keep? In the novel, she could answer his silence with scenes remembered and imagined, details invented and forensically re-created: he would know exactly what she meant, but now had forfeited the right to reply.

  To begin with, Charlotte had intended her narrator to be a “sensible, unimaginative” girl called Elizabeth Home, but this very un-Brontëish character soon departed, leaving in her place a disturbing, hypersensitive alter ego, a ticking bomb of emotions called Lucy Snowe. Lucy has suffered so much before the story even begins—in ways that are never specified—that she appears before us disinvested from life; orphaned, unloved, overlooked, her only objective is to subsist as best she can. She is a person without hope, without illusions and armoured against love; a soul, or a self, to use the coming term, pared back to essentials. She is a heroine who does not care what we think of her, who wants to be left alone, who stands by at the book’s appalling ending and watches our response to reading it.

  —

  WITH JAMES TAYLOR safely out of the way in India, Charlotte accepted another invitation from the Smiths, arriving at 112 Gloucester Terrace on 28 May 1851. Mrs. Smith took her to one of Thackeray’s lectures the next day, where Charlotte was alarmed to be not only an object of general interest in a very fashionable crowd, but singled out for notice by the lecturer at the end of his talk: he had been publicising the presence of “Jane Eyre,” and introduced her as such to one or two people, much to her discomfort. On the way out of the rooms, Charlotte had to pass through a bevy of admirers, whose deferential smiles made her tremble on her hostess’s arm—but with what mixture of fear, anger and excitement it is not possible to say.

  The next day she was taken to the season’s unmissable wonder, the Great Exhibition, brainchild of the Prince Consort. This brilliant showcase for British manufacturing, design and engineering drew enormous crowds to the jewel-like “Crystal Palace” that had risen in the middle of Hyde Park; on the day that Charlotte first visited, she was awed to be among “thirty thousand souls,” a dreamlike swathe of humanity, among whom “not one loud noise was to be heard—not one irregular movement seen—the living tide rolls on quietly—with a deep hum like the sea heard from a distance.” The Exhibition included items from all round the world and aspired to promote world peace—a consumerist answer to the spirit of 1848, perhaps—but the overall effect was triumphantly nationalistic and aggressively commercial, a mesmerising vision of the riches technology had already produced and the promise of more to come. “The brightest colours blaze on all sides—and ware of all kinds—from diamonds to spinning jennies and Printing Presses are there to be seen,” Charlotte wrote home to her father. “It was very fine—gorgeous—animated—bewildering”:

  Whatever human industry has created—you find there—from the great compartments filled with Railway Engines and boilers, with Mill-machinery in full work—with splendid carriages of all kinds—with harness of every description—to the glass-covered and velvet spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the
goldsmith and silversmith—and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

  Charlotte’s protests that this sort of thing was “not much in my way” seem surprising, not just because her description of its being “a mixture of a Genii Palace and a mighty Bazaar” sounds so Angrian (Branwell Brontë would have been in heaven among the mixture of steam and gems) but also because she made five visits to the site during her three-week stay chez Smith. Was Charlotte thinking in terms of “research” as much as of pleasure? The last of her visits was in the company of Sir David Brewster, the distinguished optics inventor*6 (and a friend of the Kay-Shuttleworths), who gave Charlotte a personal tour and explained the science behind many of the exhibits. She seems to have been enthralled (as well she might have been) by the lush beauty of many objects in Paxton’s great glass halls: the fabrics, the silks, the Koh-i-noor diamond, the exiled French royal family (wandering around like any other bourgeois group there) and extraordinary novelties such as the bed that had an alarm fitted and tipped its occupant out at the appropriate hour—Thackeray should have one, she joked to George Smith, to help him finish Henry Esmond.