Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy

by Aunt Branwell

  Elizabeth and Patrick had made a fortuitous decision, for Tabby became far more than just a servant within the household, she was also a friend to the children and much loved by them. This affection was forged during her early years at the parsonage, when as she was cleaning floors or baking bread she would relate stories of local folklore and legend. It is commonly accepted that these stories had an influence on the girls, an influence that is most apparent in the gothic tones of Wuthering Heights. Undoubtedly, Tabby’s tales were one step along the road to the Brontë novels we love today, but just as important and just as evident are the stories told them by their Aunt Branwell.

  Elizabeth’s idle hours were often spent in solitary reflection upon the life she had known in Penzance, but she was also a loquacious woman who would talk about it whenever she had a willing audience, and to her delight she found that her nephew and nieces were always ready to listen to a good story, even if it was one she may have told once or twice before. This trait was so central to Elizabeth’s character that Ellen Nussey could not help but notice it whenever she visited the parsonage, but she talked not only of the balls and ‘gaities of her dear native town8’, but also of the strange stories and legends that she had grown up with, some of which were very close to home.

  A building near to the one Elizabeth had grown up in on Chapel Street was widely reputed to be haunted by the ghost of its previous inhabitant Mrs Baines. The widow of a Captain Baines, she occupied a large house at 20, Chapel Street with an even larger orchard, and she was particularly proud of the apples that grew there. Mrs Baines was also aware that local children often stole into her orchard and crept away with armfuls of apples, and for this reason she set her servant John as a night watchman. Armed with a blunderbuss he sat in hiding within the orchard waiting for apple thieves to arrive. Given that he was charged to wait there all through the night it is little wonder that he sometimes fell asleep. Catching him dozing one night in 1803, Mrs Baines shook some apples from a tree to confront her guard with in the morning, but the rustling sound awoke John who, half-asleep, shot his mistress from close range.

  Mrs Baines never recovered from her injuries, and the shocking story is sure to have been discussed within the neighbouring home of the Branwell family. Soon, however, a different kind of story began to circulate. It was said that the ghostly figure of an old woman now walked the Chapel Street orchard at night. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, local historian William Bottrell recounted her fate:

  ‘The ghost of Mrs. Baines was often seen under the tree where she was shot, or walking the rounds of her garden. Everybody knew the old lady by her upturned and powdered grey hair under a lace cap of antique pattern; by the long lace ruffles hanging from her elbows; her short silk mantle, gold-headed cane, and other trappings of old-fashioned pomp… Sometimes she would flutter up from the garden or yard (just like an old hen flying before the wind), and perch herself on the wall9.’

  Bottrell then recounts how eventually a priest had to exorcise the ghost by chasing her to the Penzance beach, and binding her to spin ropes of sand for a thousand years. It is a fantastical tale based upon a real life tragedy, and one the Brontë children would have loved to hear, especially when Elizabeth explained how she and their mother had often walked past the orchard, hand in hand and afraid to cast a backward glance.

  A ghost story involving their own family was a sheer thrill to the children, and it remained fresh in Charlotte’s memory at the time she placed a ghostly nun into her novel Villette:

  ‘Yes; there scarce stirred a breeze, and that heavy tree was convulsed, while the feathery shrubs stood still… With a sort of angry rush – close, close past our faces – swept swiftly the very NUN herself! Never had I seen her so clearly. She looked tall of stature, and fierce of gesture. As she went, the wind rose sobbing; the rain poured wild and cold; the whole night seemed to feel her10.’

  Mrs Baines wasn’t the only ghostly presence associated with Chapel Street at the time Elizabeth Branwell lived there. A ghostly figure clad in white was often seen in the graveyard of St Mary’s church11. Locals often refused to walk past it at night, but as it was just a few steps from Elizabeth’s house she would have had little choice but to.

  There was one further graveyard story the young Brontës heard; a tragic event etched in Elizabeth’s mind. Philippa Tyack, the wife of Robert Matthews Branwell, died on 28 August 1818. It is said that at Philippa’s funeral her husband was so overcome with grief that he threw himself on top of the coffin as it was being covered with soil, and then scraped the soil away crying out her name inconsolably12. As Elizabeth was at that time living with Joseph and Charlotte, the deceased’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, it seems most likely that she would have been at the funeral to witness this terrible outpouring of grief.

  The story of a wild man tearing away soil from a coffin is familiar to us today, not from the true story of Robert Matthews Branwell but from one of the greatest fictional stories of all time, set down on paper by his first cousin once removed, Emily Brontë:

  ‘It scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down. “If I can only get this off,” I muttered, “I wish they may shovel in the earth over us both!”13’

  Wuthering Heights is an almost unparalleled work of genius, and yet there are many clear influences upon it, from James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, but we should not underestimate the importance of the tales she first heard at her aunt’s knee. Walter Scott’s influence can also be felt in Emily’s prose and poetry, and he was hero-worshipped by Charlotte Brontë who wrote:

  ‘For Fiction - read Scott alone, all novels after his are worthless.14’

  Brontë lovers have a lot to be thankful for to the Edinburgh poet and novelist, and the Brontës in turn were thankful to Aunt Elizabeth, for it was she who first introduced them to his work in 1828. At Christmas of that year, she presented her nephew and nieces with a new work by Scott entitled Tales of a Grandfather and this thoughtful act would go on to have a huge impact on the history of literature.

  Tales of a Grandfather is a selection of stories relating events from Scottish history from the time of Macbeth onwards, and its tales of adventure and intrigue set among the Scottish highlands and moorlands gripped the children’s imagination from the first page; soon they were recreating scenes from the book on their daily walks, with the purple heather-clad moors of Haworth substituting for similar landscapes north of the border. This, along with Patrick’s gift of a set of twelve wooden soldiers to his children in June 1826, proved a catalyst for the famous little books that the children made, based upon the imaginary lands of Angria, created by Charlotte and Branwell, and Gondal, created later by Emily and Anne.

  They may have lacked the formal education many of their peers enjoyed, but they more than made up for this by the access to their father’s library. Patrick had an extensive collection of books and he let his children, son and daughters alike, have free access to it. Many parents of this time would have found it scandalous that young girls were allowed to see works by the likes of Byron and the atheist Percy Shelley, but Patrick had more enlightened views and believed greatly in the power of education for both boys and girls, and that books should not be restricted to one sex rather than another. This opinion is also espoused by Anne Brontë in her preface to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in which she hits back at her critics:

  ‘In my own mind, I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that should be really disgraceful for a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and bec
oming for a man15.’

  Just as important as Patrick’s laissez-faire attitude when it came to reading matter is that it was wholeheartedly endorsed by Elizabeth. Remembering the joy that she had taken in reading books given to her by her parents or borrowed from the Penzance Ladies Library, she also did all she could to inculcate a love of reading in her nephew and nieces. It was this that lay behind Elizabeth’s decision in 1832 to start a subscription to Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country. The magazine commented upon the political issues of the day, but it also contained reviews of the latest books, poetry and extracts from novels. It was also Fraser’s Magazine that published two poems by Anne Brontë, ‘The Three Guides’ and ‘The Narrow Way’, making her the only sister who had her poetry printed without having to pay for it.

  When Elizabeth informed her nieces of her new subscription they were delighted, although Charlotte’s announcement of it in a letter to her brother is characteristically muted:

  ‘I am extremely glad that Aunt has consented to take in Fraser’s Magazine for though I know from a description of its general contents that it will be rather uninteresting when compared with “Blackwood” [Blackwood’s was a similar magazine the Brontës especially loved as it was printed in Edinburgh] still it would be better than remaining the whole year without sight of any periodical publication whatever, and such would assuredly be our case as in the little wild, moorside village where we reside there would be no possibility of borrowing, or obtaining a work of that description from a circulating library16.’

  The books she bought and the magazines she subscribed to were just some of the many financial commitments she made on behalf of her sister’s children, commitments that kept her in the same old-fashioned clothing year after year. Seeing her nieces reading, and later writing, together, however, made these sacrifices worthwhile. Elizabeth found that raising a family brought rewards she had never dreamed of in Penzance, and there was nothing she liked more than to see smiles play across the faces of her nieces; especially when such a smile spread across the face of the girl she had grown to love more than any other; Anne.

  Chapter 11

  My Kind, Prim Aunt

  ‘At last, to my great joy, it was decreed that I should take charge of the young family of a certain Mrs Bloomfield; whom my kind, prim aunt Grey had known in her youth, and asserted to be a very nice woman.’

  Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

  Charlotte Brontë’s great friend, Ellen Nussey, first visited Haworth Parsonage in the summer of 1833, and her recollection of this visit is fascinating in many ways, detailing among other things how the garden was bare except for a few currant bushes, and how clean the house was as the hallway and stairs had been cleaned with sand stone1 (in true Penzance fashion). Ellen also gave a description of Anne Brontë, then aged 13, that is particularly revealing about her relationship with her Aunt Branwell:

  ‘Anne, dear, gentle Anne, was quite different in appearance from the others. She was her aunt’s favourite. Her hair was a very pretty, light brown, and fell on her neck in graceful curls. She had lovely violet-blue eyes, fine pencilled eyebrows, and clear, almost transparent complexion2.’

  There are a number of reasons why Anne may have been the favourite of Elizabeth’s nieces, and Ellen has touched upon one in her description of the youngest Brontë – she didn’t look like her dark eyed, heavy featured sisters, but had instead inherited the Branwell traits of her mother. There is a noticeable similarity between portraits of Anne and her mother Maria, and with her grandfather Thomas Branwell, so this must have been even more evident to Elizabeth. As she watched Anne grow up, she was reminded more and more of her loved and lost sister Maria, and this is sure to have strengthened Elizabeth’s feelings for her, as would the fact that she had the same name her mother had borne.

  Elizabeth’s protective nature was also stirred by Anne’s frailty as a child, and into adulthood. Anne suffered from asthma, and the cold and blustery conditions of Haworth often brought on a wheezing, gasping attack. Without today’s medication to control or prevent such attacks, they must have been terrifying both for Anne and for those who had to witness them, as we can see from Charlotte’s description of one particularly savage bout of asthma:

  ‘She [Anne] had two nights last week when her cough and difficulty of breathing were painful indeed to hear and witness, and must have been most distressing to suffer; she bore it, as she does all affliction, without one complaint, only sighing now and then when nearly worn out3.’

  Elizabeth witnessed many such attacks, and was often the first to comfort her niece during them, as for much of Anne’s life she shared a room with her aunt4, and in her childhood they shared the same bed. Such arrangements were common for the time, and a necessary expediency in the parsonage that at times housed up to ten people. A similar arrangement existed with Emily and Charlotte who also shared a room throughout their childhood and youth.

  For Charlotte and Emily this was a particularly welcome arrangement, as it allowed them to continue to invent and act out stories, whispered from one sister to another, long after the candles had been snuffed. Charlotte wrote of these night time adventures in her ‘History of the Year’ of 1829:

  ‘Our plays were established: Young Men, June 1826; Our Fellows, July 1827; Islanders, December 1827. These are our three great plays that are not kept secret. Emily’s and my bed plays were established the 1st December 1827, the others March 1828. Bed plays mean secret plays. They are very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones. Their nature I need not write on paper for I think I shall always remember them5.’

  Anne’s evenings were very different of course, as there was no playing or story telling after the light went out in the room she shared with her aunt. That is not to say, however, that Elizabeth tried to stifle Anne’s creativity; on the contrary, she was delighted to see and hear the stories her nephew and nieces were creating, as we can tell from the books that she bought them, and from her encouragement of their reading.

  Sharing a room brought aunt and niece ever closer to each other, and a life-long love grew between them. Anne gives a hint of this in her first novel Agnes Grey. It is a great, if underrated, work of fiction, but it is largely autobiographical, dealing as it does with a young northern woman, the daughter of a clergyman, and her two positions as a governess. The novel mentions a kind and prim Aunt Grey, but we can also take the references within the novel to ‘mother’ to relate to Elizabeth Branwell also, as Anne had no memories of her actual mother Maria. One passage in the book reveals the closeness in childhood of Agnes and her mother, for which we should read Anne and Elizabeth:

  ‘In my childhood I could not imagine a more afflictive punishment than for my mother to refuse to kiss me at night: the very idea was terrible. More than the idea I never felt, for, happily, I never committed a fault that was deemed worthy of such penalty; but once I remember, for some transgression of my sister’s, our mother thought proper to inflict it upon her: what she felt, I cannot tell; but my sympathetic tears and suffering for her sake I shall not soon forget5.’

  This then is how Anne’s childhood evenings were spent; she would retire to bed, say a prayer alongside her Aunt Elizabeth, wait for a kiss on the forehead, after which the candles would be blown out and they would settle down together to sleep. In this way Anne received the love and warmth from her aunt that cruel fate had denied her from her mother.

  Whether by nature, or because of this nurture, Anne grew up to be highly religious like her aunt, although we shall see how her deep study of religion led to a physical and mental breakdown. One of Elizabeth’s treasured possessions bought during her years at Haworth was a brown glazed teapot. One side of the teapot contains a large lettered quotation reading, ‘To Me to live is Christ, To die is Gain’, and on the reverse side is the name of the man who said it: ‘Wm. Grimshaw, Haworth6.’

  William Grimshaw was a famous eighteenth century Wesleyan preacher, who had been one of Patrick Brontë’s predecessors as Hawor
th’s parson from 1742 to his death in 1763, and a man renowned for his sincerity and zeal, as well as for the extreme length of his sermons. During one Sunday morning service he fainted, but revived enough to tell the parishioners to wait in the church until he returned. He was carried to his house, and when he came round his first words were ‘I have had a glorious vision from the third heaven7’, after which he went back to the church and preached until seven in the evening.

  Another story relating to Grimshaw’s time in Haworth was that he sometimes asked for a long psalm to be read; during the reading he walked into the public houses surrounding St Michael and All Angels’ church carrying a horse whip, and flogged the people within into the church. His piety could not be questioned, even if the renowned poet Robert Southey doubted the state of Grimshaw’s mental health:

  ‘In his unconverted state this person was certainly insane; and, had he given utterance at that time to the monstrous and horrible imaginations which he afterwards revealed to his spiritual friends, he would deservedly have been sent to Bedlam8.’

  Despite his horsewhipping of loiterers, his interminable sermons, and his talk of visions, or possibly because of them, William Grimshaw became immensely popular in Haworth, and on occasion held services out on the moors as the crowds were too big to fit into his church. Grimshaw’s fame had reached Cornwall, and as the purchase of the teapot shows, one of the things that brightened Elizabeth’s time in Haworth was the thought that she was living next to, and worshipping in, William Grimshaw’s church.

  Elizabeth Branwell was a devout woman who believed in the importance of studying the Bible, and she was not afraid of debating matters of politics and religion with her esteemed brother-in-law, as Ellen Nussey recalled: