A thoughtful argument on the subject is advanced by Jean E. Kennard.2 Kennard opens with the question ‘What did Charlotte destroy?’ Answers are ventured. After Emily’s death, Charlotte was her sister’s (unofficial) executor. Charlotte’s care of Emily’s literary remains was anything but curatorial. It seems ‘probable’, says Kennard,
that Charlotte destroyed her sister’s posthumous papers. She published only 17 of the 103 poems extant after death, and those she reworked. There are no remaining letters between Emily and her family, no prose juvenilia, and very few diary entries, although we know that Emily wrote frequently to her sister Anne when they were apart and kept a diary. Charlotte herself acknowledged that manuscripts of her sister’s writings existed after her death.
Kennard goes on to speculate whether Charlotte ‘censored’ material ‘too personal to publish’. She cleaned up the family mess. The Brontë image should be forever unsullied. The truth is, we shall never know. If Emily Brontë’s life was devoted to anything, it was devoted to creating a noli me tangere around herself. Charlotte’s destruction of materials may have been, it would be nice to think, a last act of loving respect for her sister’s lifelong wish. ‘Let me alone.’ Do not touch me.
Footnotes
1. The American Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894) pioneered, among other feminist reforms, ‘rational dress’ – trousers, principally – for women. ‘Bloomerism’ was much ridiculed in the 1850s and after, although, as a cursory look round any street will verify, Ms Bloomer had the last laugh.
2. ‘Lesbianism and the Censoring of Wuthering Heights’, NWSA Journal, (Summer, 1996).
MONONYMITY
Readers often query Heathcliff ’s lack of any Christian name. There is an obvious reason: he’s not a Christian. He belongs to another. As Joseph says, by way of obituary, ‘Th’ divil’s harried off his soul.’1
There is no suggestion, when the mewling six-year-old is brought to Wuthering Heights, that he is religiously baptised. The Holy Water would (as in The Omen) have sizzled like acid on the foundling’s brow. Catherine spits on him by way of blessing.
He is given the name of a previous child who died in childhood. It was, in the 18th century, a common practice. Walter Scott (born at the same period as Heathcliff) was given the same Christian name as a pre-deceased sibling. Infant mortality ran so high (only five out of nine of Walter’s siblings survived) that it was a kind of living memorial to those who came and went before they were even known.
We know nothing about Heathcliff (the first) other than his name and the fact he left the world young. His full name, of course, would have been Heathcliff Earnshaw and his little body is, doubtless, interred where his mother, sister Catherine, and namesake (less half the name) are later buried. Gimmerton Kirk.
The name, ‘Heathcliff ’, is not one routinely found in the baptism registers of the English Church. But it brings with it a windy blast of the moors – as does Hindley (a name since made forever sinister by the ‘Moors Murderer’, Myra Hindley). In the 18th century the Hindley area, round Manchester, was moorish. Earnshaw, etymologically, means ‘eagle shelter’. Emily gave such things thought.
Heathcliff (the second), of course, is not of the family blood and cannot have its surname unless adopted. But everyone is happy, apparently, that Heathcliff should serves him as forename and surname.
What is done, and not done with names always merits consideration in the Brontës’ fiction. Shirley (a male and female name in the 19th century) had no second Christian name because, we are told, her parents were longing for a son. The hardness of her character went only halfway to answering that desire.
Heathcliff ’s mononymity connects him with the animal world (Emily’s ‘Keeper’, for example), and slavery. Does anyone know what Uncle Tom’s surname is, or Jim’s, in Huckleberry Finn? They have none. There is a strong line of speculation that Heathcliff is the offspring of a slave parent – male or female – and is mixed race.
The question of Heathcliff ’s single name bubbles up in the magnificent final sentences of Wuthering Heights. Gimmerton Kirk has fallen into decay (Methodism has made terrible inroads). It has no minister, and is, presumably, deconsecrated. The moor (heath and cliff) is repossessing the graveyard. Lockwood describes it on a warm summer evening, not a ‘wuther’ to be felt:
My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months: many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.
I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonised by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff ’s still bare.
Nameless in death, as he was in birth. No service has been read over his coffin; there is no inscription on his stone. He goes as he came.
Footnote
1. Joseph says ‘harried’, not ‘carried’ because—primitive theologian that he is—he’s thinking of the harrowing of hell: that visit by Christ, between Crucifixion and Resurrection, to the underworld to work out which are his, and which are Satan’s.
MR CHARLOTTE BRONTË
We don’t call her ‘Mrs Nicholls’; nor would she want us to. She left such marital obeisance to ‘Mrs Gaskell’ and ‘Mrs Humphry Ward’, two of her greatest posthumous champions.
Arthur Bell Nicholls (1819–1906) was a curate – assistant to the perpetual Haworth curate, Patrick Brontë, from May 1845 until 1861. Nicholls was Northern Irish Anglican. He was Trinity College Dublin-educated and less intellectual than the Cambridge-educated Patrick.
The epithet applied to Arthur behind his back was ‘ox-like’ – appropriately Homeric. He was recruited as a clerical beast of burden. Patrick was, in his career, severely afflicted with eye problems. But he was unable to retire given his measly pension, stipendiary prospects and the desperate necessity of retaining the only roof over his head (a rather fine one, as it happened) that was available to him. He stumbled blindly on.
There is speculation that the new curate may have inspired Acton, Ellis and Currer’s pen-surname, which they adopted into their ‘Bell’ scheme around the time of his arrival at Haworth. But not much can be made of that idea. Except that Arthur Bell Nicholls may have been a figure of fun rather than any romantic interest for the daughters of the house.
The sisters were not overwhelmed with the big, bull-headed Irishman in his early days at Haworth: they were not overly keen on anything from that nation (he may, plausibly, have inspired something of the vulgar Irish curate Malone in Shirley, but very little of the saintly and theologically clever English curate Weston in Agnes Grey). Charlotte put down very sharply, soon after he arrived, the gossip that she was going to marry the Revd Bell. The loose talk was, in the event, prophetic.
Charlotte, in her thoughts about the man who should be her partner, aspired higher. But Constantin Héger was impossible and George Smith, her publisher, upon whom she also had designs, liked her, but was not in love with her. Alone in the world, all her five siblings gone, with a disabled father to support, she was disposed to find a humbler companion to help her care for Patrick.
Even so, the route to the altar with the woman he aspired to love was not easy for Arthur. His first proposal was made with ‘trepidation’. He shook ‘head to toe’ with apprehension while declaring his love to Charlotte. He was right to be nervous. His putative father-in-law was apoplectic at his curate’s presumption.
Patrick was aged, virtually blind, and increasingly dependent on his one surviving child (she, too, was approaching middle-age, and frail). Charlotte’s income, as one of the country’s most renowned authors, was also necessary to the two surviving Brontës. His age and infirmity would be wretched without the comforts her bestselling books now provided. The fact was that he did not, as Charlotte confided t
o Ellen Nussey, want his last daughter to marry anyone. It would be like kicking the blind man’s dog (Nicholls was kind to dogs, particularly Flossy, now fat and aged herself – one of the things eventually found in his favour).
When he realised how fiercely Patrick opposed the marriage (the veins on his head had stood out like whipcord, and his eyes went bloodshot when he learned of the proposal, Charlotte reported), Nicholls melodramatically applied to take the Christian message to Australia. Let Nicholls go there to convert the transported criminals and God-forsaken aboriginals, Patrick said. There wasn’t enough gold ore in the outback diggings, he declared, (it was the period of the gold rush) to qualify Nicholls as husband for his Charlotte.
The Revd Patrick Brontë late in life. His wife and most of his children are dead, his eyes are failing. He suffers, stoically.
Initially Charlotte turned the importunate curate down. By letter. But Arthur went on to play his cards astutely: he went on a fast unto death. He made it clear that his starvation should be known. He melodramatically collapsed while giving his sermon, in a welter of tears, in front of the bewildered Haworth congregation, who may have thought he had gone Pentecostalist and would start babbling to them in tongues.
The Revd Nicholls was not by nature an emotional preacher, or indeed an emotional anything. ‘Unmanly drivelling’, Patrick’s party proclaimed it. But Arthur’s strategy was shrewd. He applied not for Charlotte’s love (he would never get that) but her pity. She was flattered by his ostentatious woe and genuinely sympathetic. He would die, or go to the ends of the earth, for her. If he remained in Haworth (crippling ‘rheumatic pains’ had come on, getting in the way of the Antipodean scheme) he would die of inanition. It was reported to the parsonage, by the servant telegraphy, that the Revd Arthur pushed away his plate and would eat nothing.
Charlotte kept her woebegone suitor in play for months. Her remarks in letters to friends about him were less than warm. Mrs Gaskell, one adviser, was of the Nicholls party, and pushed the curate’s suit. Ellen Nussey was not a supporter. She, like Patrick, was against any marriage at all for Charlotte, at her age (late thirties) and in her physical condition.
No move was made. It was not entirely indecision. All this while Charlotte had another string to her bow. Her hopes were secretly directed at George Smith, the ‘Prince of Publishers’ (as the book trade called him), who had saved her from the fates of Emily and Anne at the hands of the rogue T.C. Newby (see below, ‘Publishers’, page 137).
George Smith it was who had commissioned the glamorising Richmond portrait (see page 155). Was that not the act of a lover? He also gave Charlotte the other picture which occupied a place of honour alongside hers in the Haworth parlour. It was of Smith’s other top-billed author, and Charlotte’s idol, Thackeray. Was that not the act of a staunch admirer? He underpaid her, granted – the fate of most women writers.1 But he was a judicious adviser, on literary matters, on money (buy annuities, he instructed, not shares) and on how to act as the executor of the Brontë literary estate. Was that not the act of someone with a long-term interest in her?
Charlotte was in the habit of sending her love-letters in the form of fiction. There are two such in Villette. One is to M. Héger, in the fictional person of Paul Emanuel. The other is to George Smith, in the fictional person of ‘Dr John’.
Bluntly, Charlotte fooled herself into thinking George Smith might marry her. She evaded Nicholls’ increasingly embarrassing foolery by taking refuge in Smith’s London household. It cannot have been entirely comfortable. George’s mother had never liked Miss Brontë much, nor the depiction of her son as ‘Dr John’. Least of all had she liked the depiction of herself as ‘Mrs Bretton’. But she was hospitable to the Yorkshire refugee. The old lady would come round, Charlotte must have believed.
Marriage with George Smith would, from the Haworth point of view, have been a perfect match. He was rich, and a man of the world. Thackeray had thought him, initially, somewhat sullied by ‘trade’ (Smith, Elder’s wealth came substantially from Apollinaris mineral water). George had begun as an apprentice in the family firm. A working-man. Thackeray helped frame him into something more gentlemanlike (getting him into the Reform Club, for example).
‘Prince of publishers’ George Smith
Smith, a superb reader of text, quite well knew what Charlotte was getting at in Villette, vis-à-vis himself. But he could never love her: she was not ‘pretty’, she was not young (seven years older than him). And there were those (missing) teeth. His snappers, as described in Villette, along with his glorious aureole of hair, were perfect. Years later, he confided his feelings about Charlotte, with rather distasteful candour, to another of his protégées, Mrs Humphry Ward, author of Robert Elsmere, whose career he tended as solicitously, and imaginatively, as he had tended that of the author of Jane Eyre:
No, I never was in the least bit in love with Charlotte Brontë … I never could have loved any woman who had not some charm or grace of person, and Charlotte Brontë had none – I liked her and was interested in her, and I admired her – especially when she was in Yorkshire and I was in London. I never was coxcomb enough to suppose that she was in love with me. But I believe that my mother was at one time rather alarmed.
In the letters she wrote over these precarious weeks Charlotte observes to her friends how prematurely ‘aged’ Smith looked. She evidently hoped that fact (which may have been imaginary) compensated for the seven-year gulf in age.
Her hopes came to nothing when, out of the blue, Smith became engaged to young and attractive (and unliterary) Elizabeth Blakeway. His mother passed on the news. Charlotte was hurt and furious. She wrote an offensively frigid letter of congratulation, returned unopened the parcels of books Smith regularly sent her, and informed him her books would henceforth go elsewhere. She acted, in short, like a woman scorned. Smith was no longer the Prince of Publishers but a trifler.
She returned to Haworth and Nicholls, still martyring himself for love. His star was in the ascendant. There was no more talk of Australia. But arrangements needed to be made. Charlotte ensured that the annuities Smith had advised her to invest in would remain hers for the benefit of her father, if she died first. She did not want her money, should she predecease her husband, draining away to unknown in-laws in Ireland. Realistically, a life insurance salesman would estimate that he had the better prospects of long life. Although seven years older than Charlotte, Arthur was of sturdy peasant stock and would, it transpired, outlive his chronically sick wife by half a century. Residence after marriage, Arthur was instructed, would continue to be at Haworth, the better to care for Patrick: she domestically, he in church matters. It meant perpetual subordination for Charlotte’s spouse. There should be no publicity about ‘Currer Bell’ getting married.
Arthur deferred, humbly, to all these requirements. ‘Mr Nicholls is a kind, considerate fellow,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘with all his masculine faults, he enters into my wishes about having the thing done quietly.’ The ‘thing’? And what, precisely, were his ‘masculine faults’? But his premarital submission was promising: ‘I trust the demands of both feeling and duty,’ she wrote, ‘will be in some measure reconciled by the step in contemplation.’ It’s a chillingly businesslike tone.
The couple took the ‘step in contemplation’ on 29 June 1854. Patrick did not officiate or attend. It was a tiny ceremony. All Charlotte’s sisters had gone to their graves young virgins. She, now a middle-aged woman of 37, was the only daughter to experience sexual intercourse. It killed her. Along with her unborn child, she died eight months after marriage – possibly, as has been argued, from severe morning sickness.
Arthur remained at Haworth, looking after his father-in-law. When Patrick died, in June 1861, his subordinate expected to take over as perpetual curate. He deserved to, but the vote of the local committee went against him. Congregations had, over the years, always found him rather ‘stiff’. He retired to Ireland, remarried (childlessly) and was, if not cheated, eased out of what con
trol he had over Charlotte’s literary legacy and literary remains. He gave up the cloth and died in 1906. What he knew about the Brontës – more than any critic or biographer has – he took to the grave.
A fine photograph of the Revd Arthur Bell Nicholls in later life but reflecting something of the power of his personality. It was ‘will’ which won Charlotte as his wife.
Footnote
1. Smith paid Charlotte half what he paid his male stars, e.g. £500 for Villette as against, at the same period, £1,000 for Thackeray’s Esmond.
MRS ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS
Charlotte’s taking her business from George Smith (because he married another woman) was pettish, small-minded, and ill-advised.
Arthur was, all evidence suggests, a thoroughly decent and humble man. At least when it came to literature. Charlotte could have done worse. He had been her slave before marriage. But with the rings on their fingers he came into conjugal rights, and exercised them. By law and the sterner dictates of the holy writ he lived by, Arthur Bell Nicholls was now lord and master.
The couple’s honeymoon was passed in Ireland, where his family was introduced. Unlike Patrick, he was not going to disown those he came from; nor should his wife cut them out. He began censoring her letters to friends who had known her for years. He demanded to read them before they were sent and came close to prohibiting any communication at all with correspondents like Ellen Nussey, who he knew disapproved of the marriage and him (after Charlotte’s death she would maintain Arthur was a killer).
Charlotte’s letters reveal her discovery that he had long disapproved of the lack of ecclesiastical stringency in her writing. The curates’ scene at the opening of Shirley, for example, and the cutting satire against the Irish Malone in that novel. He specifically criticised the ‘latitudinarian’ sneers against the stern simplicities of evangelical baptism, and, implicitly, her suggestive sympathy for Rome. The passage which particularly rankled could be read as something aimed directly at him, or curates like him. In the opening paragraphs of Shirley Charlotte wrote:
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