Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Charlotte received this renewal of Nicholls’s suit in a very different mood from that of the previous year. She had, in effect, decided to marry him. In the intervening months between Elizabeth Gaskell’s visit and Monckton Milnes’s visit to Kirk Smeaton, Charlotte’s unhappiness about George Smith had come to a head. His (relative) neglect of her all through 1853 made her suspicious that someone had taken over his affections, and she may have heard rumours about Miss Blakeway, for when she was planning a business trip to London in the autumn—ostensibly to sort out her investments, but cancelled casually, so perhaps it was not very urgent—she pointedly let him know she expected to stay in rented accommodation this time. When this provoked an ambiguous response, written on mourning stationery, Charlotte wrote to his mother for an explanation, and was told that the mourning was for an elderly relation, but hinted that George had joyous news to impart and bright prospects: indeed, he was going to be married.

  Charlotte’s response was not to her credit, but shows the degree to which she had deluded herself, both about her real feelings for Smith (not sisterly at all) and about the reasonableness of being able to monopolise a part, however small, of his heart, as she had demanded. That she felt betrayed by his engagement is clear from the curt and ambiguously worded note that she sent: “My dear Sir, In great happiness, as in great grief—words of sympathy should be few. Accept my meed of congratulation—and believe me Sincerely yours, C. Brontë.” Worse still, she felt impelled to send Williams an even more offensive message, sending back one of the firm’s generous boxes of books with the wish that he not trouble to send any more. “These courtesies must cease some day—and I would rather give them up than wear them out.” Smith of course understood the subtext of these letters very well: he made an acute reference to them fifty years later in his “Recollections” when he said that Miss Brontë “afterwards wrote more at length on the same subject, when informing me of her engagement to Mr. Nicholls.”

  So Charlotte’s change of heart towards Nicholls, or rather towards marriage with him, had an air of calculation about it, of assessing what her options were in a changed landscape. Once she had made up her mind, the obstacles that seemed so insuperable before fell away with relative ease. The main one was of course Papa’s consent, to which end Charlotte challenged him with quiet but irresistible force, as she recounted to Elizabeth Gaskell later, who found the imagined scene “really fine”: “She said ‘Father I am not a young girl, not a young woman even—I never was pretty. I now am ugly. At your death I shall have 300£ besides the little I have earned myself—do you think there are many men who would serve seven years for me?” To his renewed objections about Nicholls’s unworthiness and lack of status, she said, “I must marry a curate if I marry at all; not merely a curate but your curate,” adding that since she could never leave her father, they would all need to live together in one house. This was meant to be conciliatory, but Patrick Brontë’s pride was stung to the quick. He refused point blank to consider having “another man in this house,” stalked out of the room and wouldn’t talk to his daughter for a week. Only when poor old ill Tabby confronted him with the harm he was doing to Charlotte, and asked “if he wished to kill his daughter?,” did the intransigent old man begin to reconsider.

  Nicholls had permission then to come to stay for ten days with his friend Sowden at Oxenhope and walk over every day to meet Charlotte. This was the first time, after almost nine years’ acquaintance, that they had the opportunity to get to know each other closely. Nicholls’s ardour and faithfulness were very touching, and his willingness to do whatever was necessary to consider the needs of Reverend Brontë won Charlotte’s especial admiration. At times he must have wondered which of the two—father or daughter—was being courted. By early April 1854, Charlotte was able to tell Ellen, in the first letter since their quarrel the previous July, that her father’s consent had at last been gained, and some degree of respect too: “for Mr. Nicholls has in all things proved himself disinterested and forbearing. He has shewn too that while his feelings are exquisitely keen—he can freely forgive. Certainly I must respect him—nor can I withhold from him more than mere cool respect. In fact, dear Ellen, I am engaged.” The humorous throwaway is similar to Jane Eyre’s famous announcement of her happy ending, Reader, I married him, but the degree of passion behind it startlingly different.

  When Nicholls proposed the first time, it had only been the parallel with her own one-sided passion for Heger that shocked Charlotte into the recognition that his secret feelings might merit her attention. She remained quite detached and resolutely unsentimental (in accounts to friends at least) all through her engagement. When she went to visit Elizabeth Gaskell in May, Charlotte had a long intimate talk with Catherine Winkworth about her situation and told her, “[I]t has cost me a good deal to come to this…I cannot conceal from myself that he is not intellectual; there are many places into which he could not follow me intellectually.” Then when “Lily” (Mrs. Gaskell) came in, she said again that, though she felt very confident about Nicholls’s reliability and love for her, she feared that “such a character would be far less amusing and interesting than a more impulsive and fickle one; it might be dull!” The creator of Edward Rochester and Paul Emanuel might well say so. It made the two other women uncomfortable to hear Miss Brontë talk so baldly about her husband-to-be, and Catherine attempted to lighten the moment by saying that Charlotte would at least have the chance to “do the fickleness” herself, which made them all laugh. Charlotte sounded even less enamoured when she explained her feelings to Ellen: “I am still very calm—very—inexpectant,” she said, employing a suitably peculiar word. “Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me.”

  It is clear that Patrick Brontë must have pictured Nicholls as a sort of gold-digger, or Charlotte would not have made such careful provision in a marriage settlement dated 24 May 1854 to protect her assets from her husband. This pre-nuptial arrangement was devised to circumvent the normal fate of a married woman’s property at that date, which was to fall to the husband’s control; Charlotte’s money—a tidy sum of £1,678.9s.9d., derived from her earnings as a writer and the residue of Aunt Branwell’s legacies—was to be ring-fenced for her sole use during her lifetime and left to her father if she predeceased Nicholls without issue. This left Nicholls with no claim on her money whatever, and that he agreed to the scheme willingly proves how disinterested his motives in marrying Charlotte really were. One hopes Patrick Brontë felt uncomfortable at the sight. Joe Taylor was to be the sole trustee.

  At home in Haworth, waiting to be married, Charlotte existed in a lonely, abstract state, just at a time when she might have hoped to be feeling happy and triumphant. Relief at placating her father and devising a plan that suited him seemed more dominant than her own feelings, so thoroughly had she interiorised his needs. But whose anger did she really dread more, one wonders, his or her own? When he had almost burst a blood vessel over Nicholls’s decorous first approaches, Charlotte had rightly seen his reactions as ludicrous at some level. It had changed her course of action, but it hadn’t changed her mind—if anything such displays gave her an insight into what she really wanted to do.

  —

  THE WEDDING WENT AHEAD more quickly than Charlotte expected, or even wanted, partly due to the ill-will of the departing temporary curate, George de Renzy, who demanded an early release from duty. The ceremony was to be an exceptionally quiet affair. Charlotte had cards printed to send to a dozen or so close friends, but only two were invited to the wedding itself: Ellen and Miss Wooler. The latter proved her kindness and usefulness in a crisis when, at the last minute, Patrick Brontë announced that he was not going to be able to attend the service, or give the bride away as planned. A hurried consultation of the Prayer Book showed that “a friend” could do that office, so Miss Wooler stepped in kindly and acted as parent in Reverend Brontë’s stead.

  So Charlotte rose early on 29 June, a Thursday, got dressed in
her tiered, unshowy white muslin dress and delicately embroidered bonnet and veil,*3 and went to her wedding at eight o’clock in the morning, looking “like a snowdrop,” as one of the few locals who saw her walk to the church remarked. Nicholls’s friend Sutcliffe Sowden took the service, and the only other people present were Nicholls’s friend Joseph Grant, the churchwarden Mr. Redman and, presumably, Tabby and Martha. The event passed off every bit as quietly as the bride had wished.

  The newly-weds left the Parsonage straight after the wedding breakfast, travelling by train from Keighley to Conwy in north Wales, where they spent their wedding night at an inn close to the spectacular ruins of the thirteenth-century castle. Their route along the north Wales coast to Holyhead during the next week took in some of the great picturesque sights: Snowdon, Conwy Bay, Penrhyn Castle and the grand sweep of the Menai Strait near Bangor, exactly the sort of views Charlotte had spent her youth and ruined her eyesight copying from engravings in books and periodicals—now they all sprang to life vividly before her. Nicholls had chosen their itinerary well, with a drive around Snowdon along the Pass of Llanberis, which “surpassed anything I remember of the English Lakes,” as Charlotte wrote to Catherine Wooler. They almost certainly also saw Caernarfon on their way back from Beddgelert to cross the bridge over to Anglesey, and—from the Conwy-to-Bangor train—the mountain at Penmaenmawr that had inspired a melancholy poem by Branwell on his visit to north Wales in 1845.

  Crossing by steamer from Holyhead to Dublin, they were met at the dock by Nicholls’s elder brother Alan, an engineer in charge of the Grand Canal from Dublin to Banagher, and two of his cousins, Joseph Bell, a 23-year-old student at Trinity College, and Mary Anna Bell, “a pretty lady-like girl with gentle English manners.” Charlotte’s prejudices against Ireland and the Irish had to be rapidly abandoned: Arthur’s relations made a charming group, refined and courteous, and almost everything about the country struck her with pleasant surprise. After two days in Dublin, seeing the university and its library, museums and churches, the party travelled together back to Banagher, home to the younger Bells and former home of the Nicholls brothers, both of whom had been adopted into their uncle’s family in childhood. Cuba House, where the Royal School had been housed since 1818, was on the eastern edge of the town, the first property on the road as it came in from Parsonstown. A carriage had been sent out to the station to meet them—quite a step up in gentility from the rented fly or four-mile walk facing travellers to Haworth—and Charlotte was amazed by her husband’s former home as it came into view up the tree-lined drive. Grey stone, four-square and handsomely pedimented, it looked remarkably “like a gentleman’s country-seat.”

  Inside, the house was rather gaunt, in the provincial Irish manner: “the passages look desolate and bare,” Charlotte reported to Miss Wooler; “our bed-room, a great room on the ground floor would have looked gloomy when we were shown into it but for the turf-fire that was burning in the wide old chimney.” But the reception rooms were spacious and comfortable, and the lady of the house, Arthur’s aunt Harriette, a hostess exactly to Charlotte’s taste, “quiet, kind and well-bred…like an English or Scotch Matron.” Again, Charlotte seemed unwilling to admit much Irishness here, or in the “English order and repose” of the household arrangements: “It seems [Mrs. Bell] was brought up in London.”*4

  The renowned Banagher Royal Free School, which must have been in recess during Charlotte’s visit that July, was housed in buildings adjacent to Cuba House*5 and had been run by Mrs. Bell’s late husband, Dr. Allan Bell, LLD, until his death in 1839, and latterly by her son James Adamson Bell. The Bells’ own five sons and their nephews Alan and Arthur Nicholls had been educated there and all had gone on to Trinity College, making an impressively learned and cultivated group.

  “I must say I like my new relations,” Charlotte reported to Miss Wooler. “My dear husband too appears in a new light here in his own country. More than once I have had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides. Some of the old servants and followers of the family tell me I am a most fortunate person for that I have got one of the best gentlemen in the country. His Aunt too speaks of him with a mixture of affection and respect most gratifying to hear.” Charlotte was seeing Nicholls’s virtues complete for the first time, and was humbled by them: “I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honourable, unboastful man.” The degree to which her husband had been “unboastful” was probably the most striking thing of all. Patrick Brontë’s snobbery about Nicholls and mean-spirited antagonism seemed all the more outrageous in the context of Cuba House and its gentle denizens.

  The couple stayed in Banagher for about a week, then moved on down the course of the Shannon to Limerick and on to Kilkee, a favoured bathing-spot on the west coast, “such a wild, iron-bound coast—with such an ocean-view as I had not yet seen—and such battling of waves with rocks as I had never imagined.” Here, Nicholls passed another test, of great importance. When they went out on to the cliffs on their first morning, Charlotte was so enthralled by the view that she needed to be alone with it, to “take the matter in my own way,” as she expressed it in a letter to Catherine Winkworth: “I did not want to talk—but I did want to look and be silent.” Nicholls intuited this, and left her alone, covering her lap with a rug against the spray. “He only interrupted me when he thought I crept too near the edge of the cliff…this protection which does not interfere or pretend—is I believe a thousand times better than any half sort of pseudo sympathy.”

  Their tour continued across the mouth of the Shannon to Tarbert, then inland to Killarney, where Charlotte had a near-miss with death in the Gap of Dunloe, a spectacular mountain path about six miles long that links five lakes along the River Loe. Arthur was on foot and Charlotte on a hired pony when they came to a rough and narrow part of the track, at which place their guide advised Charlotte to dismount. Uncharacteristically, Charlotte ignored the warning and had got past the difficult section when the pony became unnerved and suddenly “seemed to go mad—reared, plunged.” Charlotte was thrown off, unnoticed by Nicholls, who was trying to lead the animal along. “I saw and felt her kick, plunge, trample round me,” Charlotte recalled dramatically, seeing her own death swooping near. “I had my thoughts about the moment—its consequences—my husband—my father.”

  This vision of her own mortality jolted Charlotte more than the fall itself. It also released intense anxieties about her father, left alone in Haworth for a month by this point, and the very next day she persuaded Nicholls to cut short the rest of their honeymoon and start home. Perhaps there had been a letter from Patrick Brontë at one of their stops along the way, as Charlotte told Ellen “Papa has not been well” and that she had started “longing, longing intensely” to get back to him. Once she had begun to feel her familiar terrors about Papa’s health and well-being, “I could enjoy and rest no more.”

  Her own cough, which was ostensibly one reason for going home, cleared up before they left Ireland, and soon after they got back to Haworth, on 1 August, Patrick Brontë became perfectly well too. “The wish for his continued life—together with a certain solicitude for his happiness and health seems—I scarcely know why—stronger in me now than before I was married,” she told Miss Wooler.

  The odd trio then settled down to life together at the Parsonage. Patrick Brontë rarely took services any more or emerged from his study. Mrs. Gaskell asked what he could possibly have been doing in there all day, and it is a good question. Nicholls strove to spare him any exertion, much to his wife’s approval. “Each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice—I feel comforted to think that this marriage has secured Papa good aid in his old age.”

  Papa had his study; Nicholls had a den made out of the former peat-room, given a coat of paint and a covering of sprigged wallpaper; and Charlotte, as before, had the dining room to work in. But the work she did in it was very different now that her circumstances had changed. As the wife of the curate, Charlotte k
new a level of busyness unprecedented in her life: visiting parishioners and the sick, offering and receiving teas and suppers, writing letters on behalf of her husband and organising charitable initiatives. Britain entered the war against Russia in March of that year, when the combined British and French fleet had already been in the Black Sea for three months, and the hard campaign in the Crimean winter, military setbacks and disease were reported back to the British public in more graphic detail than ever before through William Howard Russell’s famous dispatches to The Times, the first war reporting of its sort in the age of telegraphy. The effect on public opinion was immediate and profound, and Haworth followed much of the country in holding meetings to help the Patriotic Fund, set up to help the families of the many casualties. Charlotte’s own response to the war showed how she had lost all her youthful zest for militarism: she told Margaret Wooler that she felt war was “one of the greatest curses that can fall upon mankind…no glory to be gained can compensate for the sufferings which must be endured.”