Elizabeth’s childhood in Penzance had moments of loss and sadness, but it also contained delights that stayed with her forever, introducing her to places, people and events she later told her nieces about and that found their way, sometimes disguised, into their work. This was a time when Elizabeth began to show the intellectual ability she became known for, and the kindness, common sense and dependability that proved invaluable to so many people. She had set sail on her voyage through life, a turbulent voyage that would all too soon carry her far away from the Cornwall she knew and loved.
Chapter 4
Blooming and Young and Fair
‘The other was a slender girl,
Blooming and young and fair,
The snowy neck was shaded with,
The long bright sunny hair,
And those deep eyes of watery blue,
So sweetly sad they seem’d,
And every feature in her face,
With pensive sorrow teem’d.
The youth beheld her saddened air,
And smiling cheerfully,
He said “How pleasant is the land,
Of sunny Araby!
Zenobia, I never saw,
A lovelier eye than this;
I never felt my spirit raised with more unbroken bliss!..
So pleasant are the scents that rise,
From flowers of loveliest hue,
And more than all – Zenobia,
I am alone with you!”’
Anne Brontë, Alexander and Zenobia
At the time of Elizabeth Branwell’s birth in 1776, her family were living in a house near to the Penzance quay, with an unspoilt view of Mount’s Bay, the island of St Michael’s Mount, and the seemingly endless sea stretching away beyond it. It was an endlessly fascinating place for an inquisitive young girl like Elizabeth to grow up in. Woken in the morning by the cry of seagulls, and with the fresh sea air filling her nostrils, she could look out of her window and see, however early it was, fishing vessels setting out in pursuit of a catch, or returning with their nets full of pilchards.
The boats have modernised throughout the years, but fishing had been carried on in a similar fashion in Mount’s Bay for century upon century. There was also a more contemporary, and rather less picturesque, industry that met Elizabeth’s gaze as she looked along the coastline just to the south of Penzance, for situated there was a subterranean tin mine known as the Huel Wherry. It was opened in 1778, by an industrious miner named Thomas Curtis1 and was located 240 yards out to sea. Miners had to walk along a plank above the sea to reach the entrance, and a large chimney, billowing smoke, rose 12 feet above the waves. The mine proved highly profitable, but it met an ignominious end in 1798, when it was damaged beyond repair by an American ship drifting in a storm. No doubt this is something that Elizabeth, by that time aged 22, would have discussed with her friends, as it was, after all, the only mine ever to be destroyed by a shipwreck.
The location of the Branwell house near the quay was of course highly convenient for Thomas Branwell, as much of his business was conducted there, and he had his own cellar that held goods later sold at his butcher’s shop. Other bonded warehouses lined the quayside, full of everything from fish to tea, and from snuff to brandy, where they waited until they had been assessed for taxation purposes and passed through the Customs House2. This made it an ideal place for merchants of all kinds to meet, and it was for this reason that the area around Penzance’s quay was the fashionable place to live in the mid-eighteenth century, a time when commerce was beginning to boom.
As a child living near the quay, Elizabeth would have seen and heard a diverse range of people and accents as merchants and sailors from distant lands often landed in Penzance to pick up goods or dispose of their own. She came to know the different types and classes of ships, understood nautical terminology, and looked out towards the sea on particularly stormy nights, hands clasped in silent prayer with her sisters alongside her.
In 1805, a local ship brought mournful news to Penzance, making it the first town in England to hear of the death of Lord Horatio Nelson. The warship HMS Pickle, nearing the end of its journey back from the Battle of Trafalgar, told a passing fishing boat of the death-in-action of the great British admiral. There could be no more thought of fishing that day, the boat immediately turned round and sailed back into the port of Penzance. The news was broadcast from the gallery of the Union Hotel on Chapel Street, and an impromptu parade gathered by the quay before marching to Madron church to pay homage. At the head of the parade was the Mayor of Penzance, Thomas Giddy, and his family. Other councillors also took up prominent positions, so we can be sure that Elizabeth Branwell would have marched alongside her father and her siblings, looking with sad solemnity upon the rapidly made banner that proclaimed: ‘Mourn for the Brave, the Glorious Nelson gone, His Last Sea Fight is Fought, His Work of Glory Done3.’
The great reverence for Nelson held by Elizabeth and the people of Penzance was also shared by Patrick Brontë, who hero-worshipped both Nelson and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. It is thought that one of the reasons Patrick adopted the surname of Brontë is that in 1799, King Ferdinand III of the Two Sicilies rewarded Nelson for his services to Europe by giving him Castello Maniace on Sicily and creating him Duke of Brontë, the nearby town4.
As the century drew on, the leading figures in the world of Penzance commerce and retail expanded and diversified, and many of them moved away from their houses near the quay to quieter surroundings in the centre of the town. Thomas and Anne Branwell and their family joined this exodus too, as although the exact date is unknown we know that by the last years of the eighteenth century they had moved to the home at 25, Chapel Street that bears the commemorative plaque today.
Chapel Street, then, is where Elizabeth Branwell spent her youth and the early part of her womanhood. It is a long and steeply climbing street, providing good practice for when Elizabeth later encountered the similarly inclined Main Street in Haworth, leading from the waterfront through some of the oldest and most picturesque parts of Penzance. The red-brick house in which the Branwell family lived seems unremarkable today, but at the time it was a large and modern residence. Today it stands at the end of a terrace of four houses, but then it was one of three houses, with the middle one now converted into two.
Situated well above sea level, the rear of the house gave a fine view that Elizabeth and the other Branwell children must have loved. The villages of Newlyn and Mousehole could be seen, along with the beautiful fishing hamlet of Gulval, and, always dominating the view and looking even more spectacular from this raised elevation, was St Michael’s Mount.
Within easy walking distance on Chapel Street were the Union Hotel, where the solemn news of the killing of Nelson was first relayed, and the historic Turk’s Head Inn. Dating from the thirteenth century, it had become a favoured destination for many of the well-to-do in the town and where business deals were often decided by the shake of a hand. Further along Chapel Street was another long-standing inn, the Admiral Benbow. A favourite haunt of fishermen, it also had a reputation as a place frequented by smugglers. As evidence of this, 2008 building work revealed a tunnel that led from a quayside warehouse, similar to the one used by Thomas Branwell, running underground for 300 metres before surfacing again at the Admiral Benbow, allowing unscrupulous operators to avoid a taxing visit to the Customs House5.
Also at the rear of the Branwells’ new home in Chapel Street was an outbuilding or cottage that Thomas Branwell turned into a schoolhouse. Elizabeth’s early lessons would have been given largely by her mother and would have centred around study of the Bible, a basic education in the humanities, and skills that could prove useful in later careers as a governess or a teacher, including needlework and art, for which external tutors may have been hired.
An essential rite of passage during a girl’s education was the production of her sampler. This was typically produced by the child at around the age of 9 and demonstrated her skill
at needlework. There would be fine detailing stitched around the borders, along with some artistic embellishments, such as flowers, throughout the whole, and at the centre was a hand-stitched verse. The samplers of the Brontë girls are part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum collection, but we also have a description of the sampler made by the young Elizabeth Branwell. It is dated ‘17th October 17’ – although the final two digits were eaten away by a moth we can calculate the likely year to have been 1786. The wording selected and then sewn by Elizabeth is strangely prescient of the impact she would have on the Brontë children:
‘Charity decent modest kind
Softens the high and sears the abject mind
Not soon provoked, She easily forgives,
And much she suffers, As she much believes,
Soft peace she brings Where ever she arrives,
She builds our quiet As she forms our lives.
Lays the rough paths of peevish nature even
And opens in each heart a little heaven6.’
In many ways, then, the early education that Elizabeth Branwell received, despite coming from a considerably wealthier background, was very similar to that received in the next generation by her nieces. There was also the same expectation of what the future would hold for her, she would either marry a suitable match and become a housewife, or become a governess – in the latter half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century there were few other conventional choices for a woman of her class and standing.
The opening of a schoolroom at the back of his house also reveals a similarity between Thomas Branwell of Cornwall and Patrick Brontë of Ireland and Yorkshire, as both obviously believed in the importance of schooling as both an educational and moral tool. Patrick himself had risen from a relatively poor life in County Down to the highly respectable position as a Church of England minister thanks to the power of education. Wherever he went he tried to set up a Sunday School, and in 1832, twelve years after arriving as the curate of Haworth, he opened the newly built school building there7. The Haworth school was just down the lane from his parsonage, so Patrick could watch the local children marching to attend it. In just the same way, Thomas Branwell could see the children attending his school, for it was a ‘penny school’ that he made available to local children at affordable rates, as well as placing his own children there at the appropriate age.
Whilst the former Branwell home on Chapel Street still stands, and is still lived in as a private residence, the school house at its rear was destroyed during a Second World War bombing raid. Nevertheless, we do have a first-hand account of it given by Muriel Beckerleg, who lived in the house before the war and into the 1960s:
‘The old schoolroom was a delightful place, and as we were a large family it was grand to have our parties there … it was in grand order. The garden is better without it for now we have a clear view of St Michael’s Mount, the Mount’s Bay, Newlyn and Mousehole – the fishing villages, and just now there is a wonderfully clear, blue sea and coast line8.’
Unfortunately, as we do not know the year the Branwell’s penny school was opened, we have no way of knowing if Elizabeth attended it or instead completed all of her education at home, but it is certainly possible that some of her education was spent there, and likely that her younger siblings made the short walk from home and entered through its doors. The second Thomas and a sister Alice that came after Elizabeth were both short-lived, but in 1783, seven years after Elizabeth’s birth, Maria Branwell was born. After a further gap of six years, in 1789, Anne, then in her mid-forties, gave birth to her eleventh and final child. Christened Charlotte, she was twenty years younger than her eldest sister Anne. Elizabeth became very close to both these younger sisters, despite a considerable age difference, and she later lived for extended periods with both Maria and Charlotte after they had married.
Once they had received their own education, whether from their mother and private tutors, in the penny school at the rear of their property on Chapel Street, or a mixture of both, the Branwell girls would then have been set to work helping to teach the pupils at their father’s school. This provided excellent practice for a future career in teaching, and it also helped to foster a philanthropic community spirit that Thomas and Anne Branwell evidently felt was important. The same path was later taken by the Brontë children, who took turns teaching at the new Haworth Sunday school.
The first undertaking of this duty must have been terrifying to both Branwells and Brontës alike, and we get a remembrance of this in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley when vicar’s niece Caroline Helstone, based on the kind yet shy Anne Brontë, fulfilled her first duties as a Sunday school teacher:
‘They made her a Sunday-school teacher when she was a little girl of twelve. She is not particularly self-confident by nature, as you may have observed; and the first time she had to ‘take a tray’, as the phrase is, and make tea in public, there was some piteous trembling and flushing. I observed the speechless panic, the cups shaking in the little hand, and the overflowing teapot filled too full from the urn9.’
Elizabeth’s eldest sister Anne, as might be expected, was the first of the Branwell children to enter employment, but her choice of occupation was something of a surprise for she became not a teacher or a governess but an assistant in a high-quality draper’s shop10. She was 15 years old, and her decision to seek out a job for herself, and such a job, shows a great degree of self-confidence alongside a longing for independence. It may be that Anne Branwell was inspired by her father’s entrepreneurial spirit and commercial successes, and that she dreamed of running her own shop one day, once she had gained first-hand experience of how they operated. Anne’s contribution to the shop must have been valued, for she later succeeded in getting her younger sister, Margaret, a job there as well11.
Thomas recognised a kindred spirit in his first child and approved of it, and we can see her mother’s influence in her choice of position as well. Anne junior accompanied her mother to dinners, meetings and soirées in polite society, and learned from her example the importance of keeping up appearances – of being fashionable both in what you wore and in how you furnished and decorated your home. Working in a draper’s allowed Anne to indulge this passion for all things fashionable and beautiful.
Elizabeth Branwell was 7 when Anne began her job, a time when she naturally would have looked up to her big sister and been greatly influenced by her thoughts and actions. It is important to remember that whilst Elizabeth became famous for, even mocked for, her old-fashioned clothing in Haworth, with black silk gowns, a large hat and dark shawl her habitual wear, her childhood appearance and mode of dress was very different – as we can see from the portrait James Tonkin made of her in her early twenties.
It is likely, coming as she did under the influence of her older sisters who worked in a draper’s shop and living in a well-to-do family who participated fully in Penzance society, that the young Elizabeth would have taken an interest in fashion, but there was one thing she liked even more; books. Novels as an art form were in their infancy in the eighteenth century, and we have only to think of Elizabeth’s contemporary Jane Austen’s tongue-in-cheek description of Catherine Morland’s taste in reading to see what many in polite society of the time thought of women indulging in this activity:
‘If a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; - for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers of … scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust12.’
Both Patrick Brontë and Elizabeth Branwell were avid readers, and both contributed to the library at Haworth, which in turn proved to be very auspicious for the development of the Brontë children, first as readers and then as writers. We know, for instance, that Elizabeth let her nephew and nieces r
ead the periodicals that she subscribed to, including Fraser’s Magazine, featuring lengthy extracts from works of fiction and non-fiction. This magazine may have been of particular interest to Elizabeth as on occasion it featured works by a man well known to her – her second cousin from Penzance, John Carne13.
Elizabeth’s heart swelled with pride as she gathered her young charges at Haworth Parsonage before her and read to them from her own cousin’s work – oh, what it was to have a writer in the family. Especially fascinating to the Brontë children, knowing as we do their childhood love of tales of exploration and adventure in faraway lands, was John’s journal of his voyages across the Middle East, which he described in his 1826 work Letters from the East. It contains lurid descriptions and fantastical tales that had the young Brontës agog with excitement, including his description of the British explorer and archaeologist Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of former Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. Frequently crossing hostile territories, she was feted by locals and hailed as ‘Zenobia, Queen of Syria’ in memory of an earlier Queen:
‘Her restless and romantic mind dwelt with pleasure on the idea of a power to be established in the East, of which she was to be the mistress: - a large fleet was to come from afar to aid this conquest, and her sceptre was to wave with equal glory to that of Zenobia who defended Palmyra14.’
This story is likely to have captured the Brontës’ imagination, and we can be sure that the name of the heroine did, for Zenobia appears time and again in their juvenilia.
In 1792, death visited Chapel Street, Penzance, as the 23-year-old Anne Branwell sickened and quickly died. This was a great blow to Elizabeth, whose eldest sister had been a constant and loving figure throughout her childhood and youth. Now it was time for Elizabeth to enter womanhood herself, time to explore in full the delights that Penzance could offer – religious delights, cultural delights, delights of the heart.
Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy Page 4