‘Haworth, August 17th, 1857.
‘I beg leave to state to all whom it may concern, that Nancy and Sarah Garrs, during the time they were in my service, were kind to my children, and honest, and not wasteful, but sufficiently careful in regard to food, and all other articles committed to their charge.
P. Brontë, A.B.,
‘Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire.’
Three whole pages were devoted to the dramatic recital of a scandal at Haworth, and this entirely disappears from the third edition. A casual reference to a girl who had been seduced, and had found a friend in Miss Brontë, gave further trouble. ‘I have altered the word “seduced” to “betrayed,”’ writes Mrs. Gaskell to Martha Brown, ‘and I hope that this will satisfy the unhappy girl’s friends.’ But all these were small matters compared with the Cowan Bridge controversy and the threatened legal proceedings over Branwell Brontë’s suggested love affairs. Mrs. Gaskell defended the description in Jane Eyre of Cowan Bridge with peculiar vigour. Mr. Carus Wilson, the Brocklehurst of Jane Eyre, and his friends were furious. They threatened an action. There were letters in the Times and letters in the Daily News. Mr. Nicholls broke silence — the only time in the forty years that he has done so — with two admirable letters to the Halifax Guardian. The Cowan Bridge controversy was a drawn battle, in spite of numerous and glowing testimonials to the virtues of Mr. Carus Wilson. Most people who know anything of the average private schools of half a century ago are satisfied that Charlotte Brontë’s description was substantially correct. ‘I want to show you many letters,’ writes Mrs. Gaskell, ‘most of them praising the character of our dear friend as she deserves, and from people whose opinion she would have cared for, such as the Duke of Argyll, Kingsley, Greig, etc. Many abusing me. I should think seven or eight of this kind from the Carus Wilson clique.’
The Branwell matter was more serious. Here Mrs. Gaskell had, indeed, shown a singular recklessness. The lady referred to by Branwell was Mrs. Robinson, the wife of the Rev. Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green, and afterwards Lady Scott. Anne Brontë was governess in her family for two years, and Branwell tutor to the son for a few months. Branwell, under the influence of opium, made certain statements about his relations with Mrs. Robinson which have been effectually disproved, although they were implicitly believed by the Brontë girls, who, womanlike, were naturally ready to regard a woman as the ruin of a beloved brother. The recklessness of Mrs. Gaskell in accepting such inadequate testimony can be explained only on the assumption that she had a novelist’s satisfaction in the romance which the ‘bad woman’ theory supplied. She wasted a considerable amount of rhetoric upon it. ‘When the fatal attack came on,’ she says, ‘his pockets were found filled with old letters from the woman to whom he was attached. He died! she lives still — in May Fair. I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronise the Christmas balls; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms’ — and so on. There were no love-letters found in Branwell Brontë’s pockets. When Mrs. Gaskell’s husband came post-haste to Haworth to ask for proofs of Mrs. Robinson’s complicity in Branwell’s downfall, none were obtainable. I am assured by Mr. Leslie Stephen that his father, Sir James Stephen, was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of lies or hallucinations. The subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed almost redundant in any biography of the Brontës; but it is of moment, because Charlotte Brontë and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded that a woman was at the bottom of their brother’s ruin; and this belief Charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were nearest and dearest to her. Her letters at the time of her brother’s death are full of censure of the supposed wickedness of another. It was a cruel infamy that the word of this wretched boy should have been so powerful for mischief. Here, at any rate, Mrs. Gaskell did not show the caution which a masculine biographer, less prone to take literally a man’s accounts of his amours, would undoubtedly have displayed.
Yet, when all is said, Mrs. Gaskell had done her work thoroughly and well. Lockhart’s Scott and Froude’s Carlyle are examples of great biographies which called for abundant censure upon their publication; yet both these books will live as classics of their kind. To be interesting, it is perhaps indispensable that the biographer should be indiscreet, and certainly the Branwell incident — a matter of two or three pages — is the only part of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography in which indiscretion becomes indefensible. And for this she suffered cruelly. ‘I did so try to tell the truth,’ she said to a friend, ‘and I believe now I hit as near to the truth as any one could do.’ ‘I weighed every line with my whole power and heart,’ she said on another occasion, ‘so that every line should go to its great purpose of making her known and valued, as one who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave and faithful heart.’ And that clearly Mrs. Gaskell succeeded in doing. It is quite certain that Charlotte Brontë would not stand on so splendid a pedestal to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer.
It has sometimes been implied that the portrait drawn by Mrs. Gaskell was far too sombre, that there are passages in Charlotte’s letters which show that ofttimes her heart was merry and her life sufficiently cheerful. That there were long periods of gaiety for all the three sisters, surely no one ever doubted. To few people, fortunately, is it given to have lives wholly without happiness. And yet, when this is acknowledged, how can one say that the picture was too gloomy? Taken as a whole, the life of Charlotte Brontë was among the saddest in literature. At a miserable school, where she herself was unhappy, she saw her two elder sisters stricken down and carried home to die. In her home was the narrowest poverty. She had, in the years when that was most essential, no mother’s care; and perhaps there was a somewhat too rigid disciplinarian in the aunt who took the mother’s place. Her second school brought her, indeed, two kind friends; but her shyness made that school-life in itself a prolonged tragedy. Of the two experiences as a private governess I shall have more to say. They were periods of torture to her sensitive nature. The ambition of the three girls to start a school on their own account failed ignominiously. The suppressed vitality of childhood and early womanhood made Charlotte unable to enter with sympathy and toleration into the life of a foreign city, and Brussels was for her a further disaster. Then within two years, just as literary fame was bringing its consolation for the trials of the past, she saw her two beloved sisters taken from her. And, finally, when at last a good man won her love, there were left to her only nine months of happy married life. ‘I am not going to die. We have been so happy.’ These words to her husband on her death-bed are not the least piteously sad in her tragic story. That her life was a tragedy, was the opinion of the woman friend with whom on the intellectual side she had most in common. Miss Mary Taylor wrote to Mrs. Gaskell the following letter from New Zealand upon receipt of the Life: —
‘Wellington, 30th July 1857.
‘My dear Mrs. Gaskell, — I am unaccountably in receipt by post of two vols. containing the Life of C. Brontë. I have pleasure in attributing this compliment to you; I beg, therefore, to thank you for them. The book is a perfect success, in giving a true picture of a melancholy life, and you have practically answered my puzzle as to how you would give an account of her, not being at liberty to give a true description of those around. Though not so gloomy as the truth, it is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it. I have seen two reviews of it. One of them sums it up as “a life of poverty and self-suppression,” the other has nothing to the purpose at all. Neither of them seems to think it a strange or wrong state of things that a woman of first-rate talents, industry, and integrity should live all her life in a walking nightmare of “poverty and self-suppression.” I doubt whether any of them will.
‘It must upset most people’s notions of beauty to be told that the portrait at the beginning is that of an ugly woman. I do not altogether
like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness. I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose.
‘I had the impression that Cartwright’s mill was burnt in 1820 not in 1812. You give much too favourable an account of the black-coated and Tory savages that kept the people down, and provoked excesses in those days. Old Robertson said he “would wade to the knees in blood rather than the then state of things should be altered,” — a state including Corn law, Test law, and a host of other oppressions.
‘Once more I thank you for the book — the first copy, I believe, that arrived in New Zealand. — Sincerely yours,
‘Mary Taylor.’
And in another letter, written a little later (28th January 1858), Miss Mary Taylor writes to Miss Ellen Nussey in similar strain: —
‘Your account of Mrs. Gaskell’s book was very interesting,’ she says. ‘She seems a hasty, impulsive person, and the needful drawing back after her warmth gives her an inconsistent look. Yet I doubt not her book will be of great use. You must be aware that many strange notions as to the kind of person Charlotte really was will be done away with by a knowledge of the true facts of her life. I have heard imperfectly of farther printing on the subject. As to the mutilated edition that is to come, I am sorry for it. Libellous or not, the first edition was all true, and except the declamation all, in my opinion, useful to be published. Of course I don’t know how far necessity may make Mrs. Gaskell give them up. You know one dare not always say the world moves.’
We who do know the whole story in fullest detail will understand that it was desirable to ‘mutilate’ the book, and that, indeed, truth did in some measure require it. But with these letters of Mary Taylor’s before us, let us not hear again that the story of Charlotte Brontë’s life was not, in its main features, accurately and adequately told by her gifted biographer.
Why then, I am naturally asked, add one further book to the Brontë biographical literature? The reply is, I hope, sufficient. Forty years have gone by, and they have been years of growing interest in the subject. In the year 1895 ten thousand people visited the Brontë Museum at Haworth. Interesting books have been written, notably Sir Wemyss Reid’s Monograph and Mr. Leyland’s Brontë Family, but they have gone out of print. Many new facts have come to light, and many details, moreover, which were too trivial in 1857 are of sufficient importance to-day; and many facts which were rightly suppressed then may honestly and honourably be given to the public at an interval of nearly half a century. Added to all this, fortune has been kind to me.
Some three or four years ago Miss Ellen Nussey placed in my hands a printed volume of some 400 pages, which bore no publisher’s name, but contained upon its title-page the statement that it was The Story of Charlotte Brontë’s Life, as told through her Letters. These are the Letters — 370 in number — which Miss Nussey had lent to Mrs. Gaskell and to Sir Wemyss Reid. Of these letters Mrs. Gaskell published about 100, and Sir Wemyss Reid added as many more as he considered circumstances justified twenty years back.
It was explained to me that the volume had been privately printed under a misconception, and that only some dozen copies were extant. Miss Nussey asked me if I would write something around what might remain of the unpublished letters, and if I saw my way to do anything which would add to the public appreciation of the friend who from early childhood until now has been the most absorbing interest of her life. A careful study of the volume made it perfectly clear that there were still some letters which might with advantage be added to the Brontë story. At the same time arose the possibility of a veto being placed upon their publication. An examination of Charlotte Brontë’s will, which was proved at York by her husband in 1855, suggested an easy way out of the difficulty. I made up my mind to try and see Mr. Nicholls. I had heard of his disinclination to be in any way associated with the controversy which had gathered round his wife for all these years; but I wrote to him nevertheless, and received a cordial invitation to visit him in his Irish home.
It was exactly forty years to a day after Charlotte died — March 31st, 1895 — when I alighted at the station in a quiet little town in the centre of Ireland, to receive the cordial handclasp of the man into whose keeping Charlotte Brontë had given her life. It was one of many visits, and the beginning of an interesting correspondence. Mr. Nicholls placed all the papers in his possession in my hands. They were more varied and more abundant than I could possibly have anticipated. They included MSS. of childhood, of which so much has been said, and stories of adult life, one fragment indeed being later than the Emma which appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for 1856, with a note by Thackeray. Here were the letters Charlotte Brontë had written to her brother and to her sisters during her second sojourn in Brussels — to ‘Dear Branwell’ and ‘Dear E. J.,’ as she calls Emily — letters even to handle will give a thrill to the Brontë enthusiast. Here also were the love-letters of Maria Branwell to her lover Patrick Brontë, which are referred to in Mrs. Gaskell’s biography, but have never hitherto been printed.
‘The four small scraps of Emily and Anne’s manuscript,’ writes Mr. Nicholls, ‘I found in the small box I send you; the others I found in the bottom of a cupboard tied up in a newspaper, where they had lain for nearly thirty years, and where, had it not been for your visit, they must have remained during my lifetime, and most likely afterwards have been destroyed.’
Some slight extracts from Brontë letters in Macmillan’s Magazine, signed ‘E. Balmer Williams,’ brought me into communication with a gifted daughter of Mr. W. S. Williams. Mrs. Williams and her husband generously placed the whole series of these letters of Charlotte Brontë to their father at my disposal. It was of some of these letters that Mrs. Gaskell wrote in enthusiastic terms when she had read them, and she was only permitted to see a few. Then I have to thank Mr. Joshua Taylor, the nephew of Miss Mary Taylor, for permission to publish his aunt’s letters. Mr. James Taylor, again, who wanted to marry Charlotte Brontë, and who died twenty years afterwards in Bombay, left behind him a bundle of letters which I found in the possession of a relative in the north of London. I discovered through a letter addressed to Miss Nussey that the ‘Brussels friend’ referred to by Mrs. Gaskell was a Miss Lætitia Wheelwright, and I determined to write to all the Wheelwrights in the London Directory. My first effort succeeded, and the Miss Wheelwright kindly lent me all the letters that she had preserved. It is scarcely possible that time will reveal many more unpublished letters from the author of Jane Eyre. Several of those already in print are forgeries, and I have actually seen a letter addressed from Paris, a city which Miss Brontë never visited. I have the assurance of Dr. Héger of Brussels that Miss Brontë’s correspondence with his father no longer exists. In any case one may safely send forth this little book with the certainty that it is a fairly complete collection of Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence, and that it is altogether a valuable revelation of a singularly interesting personality. Steps will be taken henceforth, it may be added, to vindicate Mr. Nicholls’s rights in whatever may still remain of his wife’s unpublished correspondence.
CHAPTER I: PATRICK BRONTË AND MARIA HIS WIFE
It would seem quite clear to any careful investigator that the Reverend Patrick Brontë, Incumbent of Haworth, and the father of three famous daughters, was a much maligned man. We talk of the fierce light which beats upon a throne, but what is that compared to the fierce light which beats upon any man of some measure of individuality who is destined to live out his life in the quiet of a country village — in the very centre, as it were, of ‘personal talk’ and gossip not always kindly to the stranger within the gate? The view of Mr. Brontë, presented by Mrs. Gaskell in the early editions of her biography of Charlotte Brontë, is that of a severe, ill-tempered, and distinctly disagreeable character. It is the picture of a man who disliked the vanities of life so intensely, that the new shoes of his children and the silk dress of his wife were not spared by him in sudden gusts of passion
. A stern old ruffian, one is inclined to consider him. His pistol-shooting rings picturesquely, but not agreeably, through Mrs. Gaskell’s memoirs. It has been already explained in more than one quarter that this was not the real Patrick Brontë, and that much of the unfavourable gossip was due to the chatter of a dismissed servant, retailed to Mrs. Gaskell on one of her missions of inquiry in the neighbourhood. The stories of the burnt shoes and the mutilated dress have been relegated to the realm of myth, and the pistol-shooting may now be acknowledged as a harmless pastime not more iniquitous than the golfing or angling of a latter-day clergyman. It is certain, were the matter of much interest to-day, that Mr. Brontë was fond of the use of firearms. The present Incumbent of Haworth will point out to you, on the old tower of Haworth Church, the marks of pistol bullets, which he is assured were made by Mr. Brontë. I have myself handled both the gun and the pistol — this latter a very ornamental weapon, by the way, manufactured at Bradford — which Mr. Brontë possessed during the later years of his life. From both he had obtained much innocent amusement; but his son-in-law, Mr. Nicholls, who, at the distance of forty years still cherishes a reverent and enthusiastic affection for old Mr. Brontë, informs me that the bullet marks upon Haworth Church were the irresponsible frolic of a rather juvenile curate — Mr. Smith. All this is trivial enough in any case, and one turns very readily to more important factors in the life of the father of the Brontës. Patrick Brontë was born at Ahaderg, County Down, in Ireland, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1777. He was one of the ten children of Hugh Brunty, farmer, and his nine brothers and sisters seem all of them to have spent their lives in their Irish home, to have married and been given in marriage, and to have gone to their graves in peace. Patrick alone had ambition, and, one must add, the opportune friend, without whom ambition counts for little in the great struggle of life. At sixteen he was a kind of village schoolmaster, or assistant schoolmaster, and at twenty-five, stirred thereto by the vicar of his parish, Mr. Tighe, he was on his way from Ireland to St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was in 1802 that Patrick Brontë went to Cambridge, and entered his name in the college books. There, indeed, we find the name, not of Patrick Brontë, but of Patrick Branty, and this brings us to an interesting point as to the origin of the name. In the register of his birth his name is entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as ‘Brunty’ and ‘Bruntee’; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as Dr. Douglas Hyde has pointed out, the original name was O’Prunty. The Irish, at the beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as were the English of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see variations in the spelling of the Brontë name — it being in the case of his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt ‘Brontee.’ To me it is perfectly clear that for the change of name Lord Nelson was responsible, and that the dukedom of Brontë, which was conferred upon the great sailor in 1799, suggested the more ornamental surname. There were no Irish Brontës in existence before Nelson became Duke of Brontë; but all Patrick’s brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more attractive surname. For this theory there is, of course, not one scrap of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick’s native parish gives us Brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies is Brontë.
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 481