Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  The idea of “research” certainly seems to have been behind Charlotte’s interest in gathering information in London that summer about the surge in popularity of Roman Catholicism (much promoted by the conversion of John Henry Newman in 1845 and the Oxford Movement to re-establish High Church traditions within the Church of England). Charlotte had seen and admired (while not agreeing wholeheartedly with her politics) the way in which Elizabeth Gaskell had addressed the plight of workers in the cotton trade in her first novel, Mary Barton, and she knew of Gaskell’s work-in-progress, Ruth, which controversially dealt with the fate of “fallen women” (among whom, as an urban minister’s wife, Gaskell had done much charitable work). Dickens’s effectiveness as a public educator was an even more impressive example, and perhaps Charlotte felt she too could use her position as a bestselling novelist to influence public opinion by featuring or dramatising the Catholic threat in her next book. On this 1851 visit to London, she attended a hardcore lecture on the subject by Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné, a French Protestant preacher; she also infiltrated a meeting of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society led by Cardinal Wiseman, of whom she sent a splenetic caricature to her father:

  he has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin; he has a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it. He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite…All the speeches turned on the necessity of straining every nerve to make converts to popery. It is in such a scene that one feels what the Catholics are doing. Most perserving [sic] and enthusiastic are they in their work! Let Protestants look to it.

  Charlotte was more of one mind (and voice) with her father here than over anything else in her life, and might well have thought it was an area in which she was qualified to speak. Villette didn’t end up with much—or any—topical relevance, mostly because the action is set (as all Brontë’s novels are) just out of range of the present day. But in the sheer amount of anti-Catholic polemic in the final volume of the novel, its hysterical nature (casting Madame Walravens, a grotesque dwarf, in the role of a papist witch) and its tenuous relevance to the plot one can perhaps see the relics of a different agenda.

  That she was thinking about Constantin Heger in connection with her London excursions that summer is evident. It was “strangely suggestive to hear the French language once more” at d’Aubigné’s lecture, she told Ellen Nussey, and the very name of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society would have attracted her attention, since Monsieur Heger was a member of it.

  —

  GEORGE SMITH WAS overworked and preoccupied during much of Charlotte’s 1851 visit and left her to the care of his mother and sisters more than she would have chosen. As with James Taylor, she responded to signs of withdrawal with renewed tenacity, and as she sensed Smith treating her more and more like an aunt, so her spirits sank. Just as in Villette, when Lucy Snowe acknowledges the strength of her feelings for Dr. John only when she feels them slipping away, Charlotte began both to mourn the loss of a never-realised love for George Smith and to cling to signs of what it had almost been. When they visited a phrenologist together in June (the interpretation of bumps on the skull being a highly fashionable pseudo-science of the day), it must have been hard not to bask in the conspiratorial closeness of everything to do with this lark, or to see significance not just in the “readings” produced, but in the desire of Smith to have glimpses into the hidden depths of her character. They went to Dr. Browne’s studio on the Strand in the guise of a brother and sister, “Mr. and Miss Fraser.” Miss Fraser’s head was “very remarkable,” the doctor’s report concluded, exhibiting “the presence of an intellect at once perspicacious and perspicuous.” Browne detected a nervous temperament and a warmly affectionate nature, but not a sentimental one. “Her attachments are strong and enduring…Her sense of truth and justice would be offended by any dereliction of duty, and she would in such cases express her disapprobation with warmth and energy.”

  She is sensitive and is very anxious to succeed in her undertakings, but is not so sanguine as to the probability of success…[she] should guard against the effect of this where her affection is engaged, for her sense of her own importance is moderate and not strong enough to steel her heart against disappointment.

  George Smith read this “estimate” a short while later when Charlotte sent it on to him, but whatever he made of its revelations he kept to himself, and his benevolence, like that of Dr. John in Villette, remained at one remove from its object. Charlotte adopted a much warmer tone in her correspondence with him in the autumn of 1851, but he did not respond in kind, just as, when he took Charlotte to see the great tragedian Rachel (the stage name of Eliza Félix) act in Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur and as Camille in Corneille’s Horace, he seemed unwilling to submit to the power of the actress’s art in the way that Charlotte did. It was as if he was consciously holding back from the meeting of minds and spirits that she sensed was possible between them and that she had begun to crave.

  Charlotte’s instinct was to proceed cautiously; she could of course not judge the validity of her own hopes and expectations. But it is strange to see her, in July 1851, imposing on herself exactly the sort of restrictions Constantin Heger had once demanded. “Before I received your last,” she wrote to Smith, “I had made up my mind to tell you that I should expect no letters from Cornhill for three months to come (intending afterwards to extend the abstinence to six months for I am jealous of becoming dependent on this indulgence—you—doubtless cannot see why, because you do not live my life.)—Nor shall I now expect a letter—but since you say that you would like to write now and then—I cannot say never write.”

  She seems again to have been thinking of her experience with Heger when she made clear to Smith, later that autumn, that whatever else happened, she felt she had earned a permanent right to part of his attention. To Smith this can only have seemed inappropriately demanding, and he turned a blind eye to it, preferring a tacit continuation of business as usual with his intense and needy author. “Can I help wishing you well when I owe you directly or indirectly most of the good moments I now enjoy?” she wrote to him in September, in apology for not feeling able to oblige him by writing her next novel in serial form:

  You do not know—you cannot know how strongly [Currer Bell’s] nature inclines him to adopt suggestions coming from so friendly a quarter; how he would like to take them up—cherish them—give them form—conduct them to a successful issue; and how sorrowfully he turns away feeling in his inmost heart that this work—this pleasure is not for him.

  But though Currer Bell cannot do this—you are still to think him your friend—and you are still to be his friend. You are to keep a fraction of yourself—if it be only the end of your little finger—for him, and that fraction he will neither let gentleman or lady…take possession of—or so much as meddle with. He reduces his claim to a minute point—and that point he monopolises.

  One “minute point,” under these terms, was of course a vast commitment. Well disposed as he was, generous, gregarious and gentlemanly to a fault, George Smith could never submit to it. By making this ostensibly minimal demand, Charlotte had unwittingly written the relationship’s death sentence.

  * * *

  *1 Possibly he was suggesting one of his own daughters, though this isn’t clear from CB’s side of the correspondence (CB to WSW, 26 July 1849, LCB 2, 232).

  *2 Ellen Nussey’s self-identification with Caroline Helstone is not very convincing.

  *3 She wrote of the heroine, “we know her—we have lived with her, we shall meet her again” (letter to Julia Ward Howe, 28 July 1848, Laura E. Richards [ed.], “Letters of Florence Nightingale,” Yale Review, 24 [December 1934], 342–3).

  *4 Nightingale wanted to be thought of as her parents’ “vagabond son” (Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 160).

  *5 The
re is a photograph of G. H. Lewes from almost this period that makes CB’s ardent identification of his and Emily’s features all the more interesting. Lewes was known as one of the ugliest men in London, it seems with justice, but there is something about his stare, and perhaps his defiant look, that could have spoken to Charlotte.

  *6 He had invented the kaleidoscope in 1816.

  FOURTEEN

  The Curate’s Wife

  1851–5

  Charlotte’s fast-growing friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell was the most rewarding of all she made in the years following her sisters’ deaths, despite their difference in religion (an issue Gaskell, as a Dissenter, was always sensitive to). Charlotte’s first visit to the Gaskells’ home in the summer of 1851 was brief—just a couple of days on the way back to Haworth from London—but assured Charlotte of a warm welcome there in the future, and by 1853 the two women had come to a friendly understanding that whenever Charlotte craved society and Elizabeth quiet, they would know where to turn. The Gaskells’ home at 42 Plymouth Grove was a large, airy villa in the Victoria Park area “quite out of Manchester Smoke,” with a large garden and orchard and French windows that were kept open all the long summer days (though it was one of William Gaskell’s indulgences also to keep a fire blazing in his study whatever the weather). The Gaskells’ four charming daughters, Marianne, Meta, Florence and Julia, flitted through the house; seven-year-old Julia Gaskell was Charlotte’s particular favourite, and she observed the little girl’s beauty and sprightliness with a strange awe—more like one child with a crush on another than an adult acquaintance (a covert doting very much like Lucy Snowe’s attitude to Paulina in Villette). When she tried to explain this feeling to Elizabeth Gaskell a year or so later, she said the girls made her feel like “a fond but bashful suitor who views at a distance the fair personage to whom—in his clownish awe—he dare not risk a near approach.” “[T]o what children am I not a stranger?” she said, as if she had never been one herself. “They seem to me little wonders—their talk—their ways are all matter of half-admiring—half-puzzled speculation.”

  Elizabeth Gaskell had written her first novel, Mary Barton, during 1846, at the same time as Charlotte had been staying in Manchester with her father for his eye operation. Her husband had suggested writing as a distraction after the death of their only son the previous year, and her subsequent career as a novelist had been conducted under the full demands of a very busy domestic life, extensive social work connected with William Gaskell’s ministry (Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, in the centre of the city, was one of Manchester’s most thriving churches) and an enthusiastic pursuit of literary friendships, which included Dickens, the Carlyles, the Arnolds and the Brownings. Gaskell was also a friend of the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, and of the Nightingale family, and was an indefatigable letter-writer to them all. Charlotte looked with amazement on her friend’s life of activity; she could never match it, but it provided a valuable example of what was possible for a normally energetic and healthy woman to achieve and showed that a disciplined but lonely regime like Harriet Martineau’s was not the only way to pursue a writing career.

  The winter of 1851/2 was, however, spent more at home than away. Charlotte’s health was very poor the whole season, with a long-lasting bilious condition that was made much worse by mercury poisoning from a medicine prescribed for it. Her spirits were also very low, not just because her book was progressing slowly and with difficulty, but because, for all the excitement of her new friendships, her essential loneliness seemed to have hardened and grown. She had invitations from the Gaskells, the Kay-Shuttleworths, Harriet Martineau and George Smith, but, in her depressed state, found the contrast between one mode of life and another too difficult to accommodate, as she tried to explain to Smith:

  What is it you say about my breaking the interval between this and Christmas by going from home for a week? No—if there were no other objection—(and there are many) there is the pain of that last bidding good-bye—that hopeless shaking hands—yet undulled—and unforgotten. I don’t like it. I could not bear its frequent repetition. Do not recur to this plan. Going to London is a mere palliative and stimulant: reaction follows.

  When the anniversary of Emily’s death came round again, she made sure that Ellen Nussey came for a visit and that she could have the comfort of sharing a bed with someone, a reminder of her sisters’ warmth and love, and the “calm sleep” that went with it. Keeper had died that month, in enfeebled old age. People had suggested both to Charlotte and to her father that the blind old dog should be put down, but neither had the heart to hasten by a single minute the departure of this last link to Emily.

  Charlotte was also disturbed by the breaking off of relations with James Taylor, who by May 1852 had been in India almost a year and had written to her only twice. Having applied confidentially to Williams for his opinion of the man’s character, she had been unhappy to learn that Taylor was thought by his colleagues to be volatile and argumentative; her subsequent letters to him in Bombay were stiff and formal, almost guaranteeing an end to their friendship. “I am not sure myself that any other termination would be better than lasting estrangement and unbroken silence,” she wrote to Ellen (who had tactfully stopped inquiring about this particular person of interest), “yet a good deal of pain has been and must be gone through in that case.” She hated abandonment, even by a man to whom she was not very attached.

  The painstaking return in memory to the sights, sounds and events of 1842–3 that Charlotte was living day to day in the composition of Villette also took its toll. The book—so different in mood from The Professor as to seem like the same story written by two entirely different people—was far more explicit, forensic even, about her feelings for Constantin Heger (and for George Smith). But it was the underlying feelings, the loveless condition from which Lucy emerges and lapses back into, that gave the book its grim power, the unexplained hopelessness at the base of her existence, so closely reflecting Charlotte’s deprived and bereaved state since the deaths of Emily and Anne and her own fears of dying. All her life’s suffering went into Villette, a cumulative account, as one of the reviewers, in The Examiner, later seemed to guess: “we find it difficult to disconnect from [the book] a feeling of the bitterness of experience actually undergone, and that a real heart throbs at such times under the veil of Lucy Snowe.” Indeed, Lucy’s tides of feeling flow as near to despair as a believer can go:

  A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me—a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly. Alas! When I had full leisure to look on life as life must be looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert: tawny sands, with no green field, no palm-tree, no well in view.

  “[I]s there nothing more for me in life?” Lucy asks herself, when the hope of love has been indisputably removed, “nothing to be dearer to me than myself?” “Very good. I see a huge mass of my fellow-creatures in no better circumstances.” Her conclusion constitutes an alternative Creed: “I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.”

  Charlotte had given up the idea—obviously discussed with Smith and Williams at some point—of bringing explicit topical interest to the book; her great contemporaries in that field were too intimidatingly good. “I cannot write books handling the topics of the day,” she warned her publisher, “it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral—Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme though I honour Philanthropy—And voluntarily and sincerely veil my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s work—‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ”*1 Villette could never pretend to such seriousness, she felt; besides, the book had gathered its own peculiar momentum and unity of purpose. It travelled inward, not outward. But by choosing this unusual path, Charlotte Brontë ended up addressing public interest of a new sort and the pre
occupations of the coming age. Villette, forged from such personal and painful material, reached psychological depths never attempted in fiction before and became, unwittingly, a landmark in the depiction of states of mind and self-perception, a thoroughly, peculiarly and disturbingly Modernist novel.

  —

  THAT SUMMER Charlotte did not visit the Smiths in London but went on her own to the seaside instead, taking her unfinished manuscript with her. She felt guilty about not informing Ellen of her trip—or suggesting they went together—but there were private reasons for wanting to be alone. As well as working on her novel, Charlotte intended to make a pilgrimage to Anne’s grave in Scarborough (coinciding with the anniversary of her death) and to inspect the stone that she had ordered in 1849 but never seen. There were five errors on it, a shameful mess in the sorrowing sister’s eyes, almost like proofs from Newby. Stricken by feelings of negligence, she ordered the corrections to be made immediately.

  Charlotte went on to Filey, to the same lodging house where she and Ellen had stayed after Anne’s death, and spent a melancholy month there, going on coastal walks (or “trudges,” as she described them cheerlessly), bathing once in the sea and attempting to recruit her strength. “The Sea is very grand,” she wrote to her father. “Yesterday it was a somewhat unusually high tide—and I stood about an hour on the cliffs yesterday afternoon—watching the tumbling in of great tawny turbid waves—that made the whole shore white with foam and filled the air with a sound hollower and deeper than thunder.” It was cold and lonely, and her thoughts went back to Anne’s death, and to anxieties about Martha and her father, both of whom had been ill. She also thought about Mr. Nicholls: when she was at church in Filey, an absurd bit of shuffling about by the choir and congregation (when both ended up facing away from the pulpit during a hymn) had almost managed to amuse her, and she knew it would have amused him. “[H]ad Mr. Nicholls been there—he certainly would have laughed out,” she told her father, asking at the end of her letter to be remembered kindly to that person.