Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Marriage certainly suited Nicholls. “[M]y husband flourishes,” she told Ellen; “he begins indeed to express some slight alarm at the growing improvement in his condition. I think I am decent—better certainly than I was two months ago, but people don’t compliment me as they do Arthur—excuse the name—it has grown natural to use it now.” “People” would have been looking out for indicators of Charlotte’s well-being, signs of bridal shock or pleasure, and of the early signs of pregnancy, so their lack of compliments seems significant.

  There is a photograph that is supposed to illustrate Charlotte’s married contentment, and that some people guess was taken on her honeymoon, but that cannot be of Charlotte Brontë. Two copies of this carte de visite exist, neither bearing any studio or production information. One is marked in ink on the reverse, in Ellen Nussey’s hand, “Within a year of C. B.’s death”; the other in pencil, in an unknown hand, “Miss Ellen Nussey, friend of Charlotte Brontë, c. 1860.” This leaves little doubt that it is a picture of Ellen Nussey.*6

  Ellen herself said, when asked by T. Wemyss Reid if there was a photograph of Charlotte to use as a frontispiece for his projected biography, “I am afraid there is not any portrait of Charlotte Brontë but the one by Richmond—I never heard or saw any other that I remember—There was a painting in oils of Emily & Anne by Branwell when a boy, but it was a very poor picture even as regarded [sic] likeness, which sometimes is good, when the painting is very bad.”

  Though there may be no photographic evidence of Charlotte’s contentment in these short months of marriage, her letters are full of it, and of her gratitude to “dear Arthur” and pleasure in his companionship. “I did not expect perfection,” she said with great philosophy, and as the months went by her feelings for Nicholls deepened and her appreciation of his character gave her unsought pleasure. Papa was “settled and content”—which was half the battle won—and her own life too: “May God make me thankful for it! I have a good, kind, attached husband, and every day makes my own attachment to him stronger.” It was hardly, though, the passionate meeting of “true souls” that her novels—and her sisters’ novels—blazoned as the highest goal of the emotional life, and the birthright of every free-spirited woman, regardless of birth, class or looks. Charlotte Brontë had, in some respects, given her imaginative life over to her readers for them to foster and enjoy; she had found she couldn’t live it herself, only write it.

  It was also not a situation that promised well for her writing. In the change of tempo and focus, she had all but given up her work. Nicholls told George Smith about an evening, late in 1854, when he and Charlotte had been sitting together by the fire in the dining room, as the wind howled round the house in truly wuthering fashion, when she suddenly said, “If you had not been with me I must have been writing now.” Did she mean this regretfully, or simply as an introduction to what she did next, which was to go upstairs—“run” as Nicholls recalled—and fetch “the beginning of her New Tale”? More for the pleasure it might give herself, one feels, than to hear or solicit her husband’s criticisms, she read him a pencilled manuscript of about 7,000 words, the fragment known as “Emma,” at the end of which Nicholls ventured to say, “The Critics will accuse you of repetition, as you have again introduced a school.” “O I shall alter that,” she replied unconcernedly. “I always begin two or three times before I can please myself.” It’s an interesting insight into how Charlotte Brontë composed her novels, expecting “always” to go through several false starts and diversions, and a sad last glimpse at her as a writer, for no more work got done on “Emma.”

  “Emma” is narrated by a childless widow called Mrs. Chalfont, whose relation to the story is never revealed and whose usefulness as a device runs out almost immediately. A man called Ellin also appears (the same name as in Charlotte’s “two brothers” fragment of 1853), a deliberately enigmatic character, who might have been intended to act as a sort of amateur detective within a “puzzle” plot. The tone is light and satirical, quite like Thackeray, in fact, and the school plot that Nicholls felt might be repetitive sounds more like the seminary at the beginning of Vanity Fair than anything out of Charlotte’s own experience. “Emma” herself never appears.

  With the recession of her writer-self, everything in the familiar home changed. There were other momentous changes too, as Charlotte tried to convey to Ellen in an oblique letter that hints at her newly acquired knowledge of sex:

  during the last 6 weeks—the colour of my thoughts is a good deal changed: I know more of the realities of life than I once did. I think many false ideas are propagated—perhaps unintentionally. I think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintance to marry—much to blame. For my part—I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance—what I always said in theory—Wait God’s will. Indeed—indeed Nell—it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man’s lot is far—far different.

  By the end of 1854, Charlotte’s London friendships had all but dried up; there were no more letters from Williams, none from Smith. Life concentrated in and around the Parsonage, and Charlotte’s days were taken up with parish matters, teas, visiting, organising. Ellen visited once in the autumn of 1854, but the old intimacy was hard to re-establish under the new order, and Ellen liked Mr. Nicholls no better than she had before, indeed rather worse.

  Charlotte had come to admire Nicholls’s friend Sutcliffe Sowden and was hoping that he and Ellen might start to admire each other too. A marriage between Ellen and her husband’s best friend would have been perfect from Charlotte’s point of view, like the end of a comedy—a drawing-together of allegiances, and protection perhaps against Charlotte and Ellen drifting apart. But Charlotte was above outright matchmaking, and her hints came to nothing. Ellen, meanwhile, cannot have been pleased to receive letters from Charlotte including what “Arthur” felt on various subjects that had only recently become his business, such as the behaviour of Joe and Amelia Taylor, and her own situation. “[Arthur] often says he wishes you were well settled in life,” Charlotte wrote on 11 October, not very sensitively. In the next letter from the Parsonage, it became clear that Nicholls didn’t just feel empowered to intrude his opinion but was actually reading Charlotte’s letter over her shoulder, and not much liking what he saw. Nicholls was impatient to go out on a walk and his wife’s lingering over the writing desk provoked him to say something that must have been on his mind for a while. Charlotte’s letter captures the essence of the conversation that started up as she wrote:

  Arthur has just been glancing over this note—He thinks I have written too freely about Amelia &c. Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication—they always seem to think us incautious. I’m sure I don’t think I have said anything rash—however you must burn [three underlines] it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine never ought to be kept—they are dangerous as lucifer matches—so be sure to follow a recommendation he has just given “fire them”—or “there will be no more.” Such is his resolve. I can’t help laughing—this seems to me so funny, Arthur however says he is quite serious and looks it, I assure you—he is bending over the desk with his eyes full of concern. I am now desired “to have done with it—” so with his kind regards and mine—Good-bye dear Ellen.

  “Fire them” was less a recommendation than an order, from a man who certainly seems every inch the conventional Victorian husband on this occasion, as Charlotte seems the wife. Her protestations that she found it all terribly funny sit rather oddly with the insistence that her husband is serious, and must have confused Ellen (or bored her), because ten days later Charlotte had to send a much more explicit restatement:

  Dear Ellen—Arthur complains that you do not distinctly promise to burn my letters as you receive them. He says you must give him a plain pledge to that effect—or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence.

  He says women are most rash in letter-writing—they
think only of the trustworthiness of their immediate friend—and do not look to contingencies—a letter may fall into any hand. You must give the promise—I believe—at least he says so, with his best regards—or else you will get such notes as he writes to Mr. Sowden—plain, brief statements of facts without the adornment of a single flourish.

  Ellen did as was requested—almost. Sensing trouble ahead, she made a copy of the pledge she addressed sardonically “To the Revd. The Magister”:*7

  My dear Mr. Nicholls

  As you seem to hold in great horror the ardentia verba of feminine epistles, I pledge myself to the destruction of Charlotte’s epistles henceforth, if You, pledge yourself to no censorship in the matter communicated[.]

  This seems to have satisfied Nicholls, who passed on his thanks via Charlotte. “We may now write any dangerous stuff we please to each other,” Charlotte reported; “it is not ‘old friends’ he mistrusts, but the chances of war—the accidental passing of letters into hands and under eyes for which they were never written.” It seems fairly certain that what Nicholls feared was less the general impropriety of private correspondence falling into the wrong hands than the fact that the correspondence in question was Currer Bell’s. Having a much better sense of her local celebrity than either Patrick or Charlotte, Nicholls may have understood better than they the need to protect his wife’s privacy. That this had hardly occurred to Charlotte before is borne out by her comment to Ellen: “Strange chances do fall out certainly. As to my own notes I never thought of attaching importance to them, or considering their fate—till Arthur seemed to reflect on both so seriously.”

  After Charlotte’s death, Nicholls resisted all attempts at publicity, and agreed to the commissioning of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography only under duress. He preserved many of Charlotte’s manuscripts and mementoes as an act of private homage to a woman he remained intensely devoted to, but very few personal letters survive that were written to Charlotte and only one of hers to him (the preservation of which seems accidental), and we have to assume that either she destroyed them herself, or that her widower did, in line with his stated policy. Since her correspondents included Thackeray, W. S. Williams, Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, this is a cause for deep regret to posterity, however understandable and even admirable it was from Nicholls’s point of view.

  Very few letters of Charlotte Brontë would have come down to us if Ellen Nussey had kept her side of the bargain, but she didn’t. On her copy of the promise she wrote later, in pencil, “Mr. N continued his censorship so the pledge was void.” This was obviously a self-justifying manoeuvre, since no censorship by Charlotte’s husband is evident in anything she sent subsequently, and after his sudden laying down of the law, he doesn’t seem to have mentioned the matter again. How misplaced his trust had been came to light only in the decades following Charlotte’s death, when Ellen became very keen to publicise and publish her correspondence from the increasingly famous and revered author. Censorship then really did take place, but of a retroactive kind, and by Ellen, who made many deletions and adjustments to anything that might have shown herself in a bad light. In Charlotte’s second letter about the “pledge,” for instance, Ellen substituted the words “Arthur wishes you would burn my letters” for “Arthur thanks you for the promise,” and suppressed the passage “we may now write any dangerous stuff we please,” to make it look as if Nicholls really had invalidated the agreement. “[H]e never did give the pledge,” Ellen wrote in pencil as a footnote.*8

  —

  SIR JAMES KAY-SHUTTLEWORTH invited himself to visit Haworth in the winter of 1854 and had a scheme in mind for the Nichollses, a living near Gawthorpe worth £200 a year. Nicholls could not accept, out of deference to the needs of Patrick Brontë, a matter “of course” in Charlotte’s eyes, but they did not want to dissuade Sir James entirely. Charlotte had a pipe-dream of her own, which was that Sutcliffe Sowden might benefit from this lucrative position. Partly to keep this possibility open, and partly because of the social pressure that always came to bear on invitations from the Kay-Shuttleworths, Charlotte and Arthur agreed to go to Gawthorpe in the new year. This was despite the fact that Charlotte had been putting off all her other friends’ invitations for months and would much rather have gone to the Gaskells at Plymouth Grove—or to Brookroyd, if it hadn’t been for a typhus outbreak in the area. It had been a hard Christmas: Tabby was so ill with diarrhoea that she was moved to her great-niece’s house to be nursed, and Charlotte had been anxiously seeking advice and medicine on her behalf from the local surgeon, Amos Ingham.

  Within a few days of her return from Gawthorpe, Charlotte herself began to feel sick. “Don’t conjecture—dear Nell,” she wrote to Ellen, clearly thinking she could be pregnant, “for it is too soon yet—though I certainly never before felt as I have done lately. But keep the matter wholly to yourself—for I can come to no decided opinion at present.” She added that she had been feeling very well until this turn of events: “I am rather mortified to lose my good looks and grow thin as I am doing.”

  The terrible symptoms that Charlotte suffered in the last three months of her life have led people, very naturally, to think that the cause of her death was the thing she had been fearing so long, consumption, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. That Charlotte really was pregnant in the early months of 1855 is clear from letters such as hers to Ellen, above, and from the evidence of Mrs. Gaskell’s Life, which puts the matter politely but explicitly by giving the doctor’s opinion that there was “a natural cause” for the sickness that time would cure, and later by mentioning “the baby that was coming.” The severity of Charlotte’s physical distress, though, did not seem to match “morning sickness” as it is normally understood, and so consumption has often crept back into people’s speculations about Charlotte Brontë’s death as an extra factor. Mrs. Gaskell’s linking of Charlotte’s last illness with a lingering cold, contracted “by a long walk over damp ground in thin shoes,” encourages this idea, as if “morning sickness” alone was not enough. The coughing up of blood also confuses the issue, though, in Charlotte’s case, the blood almost certainly came from the stomach, not the lungs.

  It is only very recently, with the publicity given to the condition called hyperemesis gravidarum by one famous contemporary sufferer, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton), that the cause of Charlotte Brontë’s death can be fully appreciated. “HG,” as it is sometimes known, is an extreme reaction to the hormones of pregnancy that affects around 0.5–2.0 per cent of pregnant women, with varying degrees of severity and for varying lengths of time (some sufferers endure the symptoms for the whole forty weeks; more often the condition improves after the first trimester). Unlike the commonly experienced symptoms of ordinary morning sickness—nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light, smells and sounds—the HG sufferer experiences a violent and ceaseless disruption of stomach and senses. One very vivid recent account in a newspaper, by Sarah Button, describes what it can be like. Three days after her pregnancy was confirmed, she relates, nausea kicked in “so aggressively that it was as if I’d run headfirst into a brick wall…at four weeks pregnant, I felt as if I’d been poisoned.” Button describes how, even with all the assistance that modern medicine allows (drugs and a drip are required constantly to prevent renal failure, dehydration and collapse of the major organs due to malnutrition), she was sick fifty times in one day and brought up blood from the traumatised stomach lining: “It was as if someone had taken over my body. I couldn’t imagine ever feeling normal again.” Her case was so severe that by week nine choices narrowed to a potentially harmful course of steroids or a termination: Button anxiously chose the steroids and in due course gave birth to a healthy baby, but was incapacitated by sickness right up to the end of the pregnancy.

  Charlotte Brontë’s sufferings, in an age with so little knowledge of this condition and with so few weapons to fight it, can be contemplated only with the deepest pity. The vomiting that everyone hoped and expe
cted would subside in time got worse, and the patient weaker. “She, who was ever patient in illness, tried hard to bear up and bear on. But the dreadful sickness increased and increased, till the very sight of food occasioned nausea,” Gaskell wrote in the account she drew up later, based on the witness of Arthur Nicholls, Reverend Brontë and Martha Brown. At the time, Gaskell knew nothing of Charlotte’s condition or plight and later bitterly lamented that she had not been able to help; indeed there is a suggestion, in what she said later in a letter to Catherine Winkworth, that she understood Charlotte’s life could have been saved—perhaps by a termination of the pregnancy: “I do fancy that if I had come, I could have induced her—even though they had all felt angry with me at first—to do what was so absolutely necessary for her very life.” But, while Charlotte was bedridden and writhing in agony day and night, there was no one on hand in Haworth able or willing to say this.

  Martha tried to cheer her mistress with the thought of the child, but it was hard for Charlotte to rally. “I dare say I shall be glad sometime,” she told the faithful servant, “but I am so ill—so weary.” She was hardly eating a thing, and being sick constantly. Arthur had to send notes of apology that his wife was currently unable to attend to business, although at the beginning of February they still assumed the trouble would pass in time. Dr. MacTurk, the senior physician at Bradford Infirmary (the best available local doctor), was of the opinion that “in a few weeks she will be well again.” But in a few weeks she was worse. “Let me speak the plain truth,” Charlotte scratched in a message to Amelia Taylor, “my sufferings are very great—my nights indescribable—sickness with scarcely a reprieve—I strain until what I vomit is mixed with blood.”