Elizabeth’s praise of her fellow townsman had encouraged Anne to seek out Davy’s works and she rated him very highly, as we can see from the following extract in Anne’s unfinished treatise in the Brotherton Library archives:
‘Let us take Sir Humphry Davy’s theory, found in his last days of a philosopher: I know not any more sensible or philosophical view of the Geological history of the last stages of the world we inhabit, and it contains not one statement that actually contradicts the concise and simple account given by Moses8.’
The essay then proceeds to an in-depth discussion of geological evolution, explaining how it is compatible with the teachings of the Bible. After eleven pages it comes to a sudden halt, after which the notebook is reversed and used by Arthur Bell Nicholls to transcribe some of his wife Charlotte’s poetry. This provenance, the cessation mid-essay of Anne’s writing, and its link via Davy to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, makes me suspect that it may be the last prose writing ever created by Anne Brontë.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall proved a great success, but it was also a highly controversial novel, dealing unflinchingly with themes such as addiction, infidelity and marital cruelty. This led to a savage critical reception, with The Rambler noting that:
‘The scenes which the heroine portrays in her diary are of the most disgusting and revolting species9.’
Unfortunately for Anne, this was a view that her sister Charlotte shared too. In 1850, Smith, Elder & Co. were planning on re-issuing the three novels written by her sisters, but Charlotte wrote to W.S. Williams of the firm and stated that:
‘“Wildfell Hall” it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake – it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer10.’
Charlotte, as she often did, had misunderstood her youngest sister’s character and greatly downplayed the worldliness of a woman who spent longer in employment than the rest of her siblings put together, but her verdict on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall stuck. It would not be re-published for another decade. Charlotte’s disdain for her sister’s book may have been because she was jealous of the attention, and sales, it was getting, or it may have been that its frank portrayal of alcoholism hit too close to home in a household where Branwell’s addictions were spiralling out of control. One thing she could not have known is that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was about to inadvertently bring tragedy to the parsonage in triplicate.
On the morning of 7 July 1848, a letter addressed to Currer Bell arrived bearing a London postmark. Upon opening it, Charlotte found a letter from her publisher George Smith that caused her terrible anguish. The contents of this missive, and their effect upon the recipient, were recollected by Smith in his memoirs:
‘We were met during the negotiations with our American correspondents by the statement that Mr. Newby had informed them that he was about to publish the next book by the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ under her other nom de plume of Acton Bell – Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell being in fact, according to him, one person. We wrote to ‘Currer Bell’ to say that we should be glad to be in a position to contradict the statement, adding at the same time we were quite sure Mr. Newby’s assertion was untrue. Charlotte Brontë has related how the letter affected her. She was persuaded that her honour was impugned11.’
Both Anne and Charlotte knew instantly that their honesty was being questioned thanks to Anne and Emily’s publisher Thomas Cautley Newby’s unscrupulous approach to business. For Charlotte there was the added trauma of being thought the author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the novel being offered to American publishers by Newby, and a book she considered an entire mistake.
There was only one way they could disprove Newby’s assertion and regain their honour, although it seemed a monstrous move; they would have to travel to London to meet their publishers face-to-face. The time for anonymity was over. Emily gave her consent as long as her identity remained secret, and it is a mark of Charlotte and Anne’s fury at Newby that they set out for London that very day.
Modes of transport had come a long way in the twenty-seven years since Elizabeth Branwell had taken over a week to journey from Penzance to Haworth; the railway system was transforming the nation, and now her nieces caught the 7.55pm train from Leeds, arriving at London Euston at 4.30am the next day, after stops at stations including Barnsley, Sheffield and Rugby12.
Their first task was an unpleasant but necessary one, as, after moving into their lodgings at the Chapter Coffee House behind St Paul’s Cathedral (where Charlotte had stayed with Emily and her father en route to Brussels), they made their way to the Smith, Elder & Co. offices at Cornhill near the Bank of England. Naive as to the ways of business, the sisters had not suspected that the proprietor may be away from his office on what was a Saturday morning, but luckily for them he was in place behind his desk. Smith, a young man who had recently inherited the business, was amazed at the two small, timid women who presented themselves, and was then more than amazed at their story. Charlotte was made to sign her signature, as Currer Bell, and it was at last clear that here, after all, were the feted Currer and Acton Bell; not two mysterious brothers, but a clergyman’s daughters.
The sisters had planned to return to Yorkshire the next day, but Smith would hear nothing of it. He and his assistant, W.S. Williams, the man who’d first spotted the brilliance of Jane Eyre and who became a regular correspondent of Charlotte, showed them some of the most splendid sights of London over the next three days: from the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden to Kensington Gardens and the splendid St Stephen’s church in Walbrook; they even saw the magnificent art collection at the Royal Academy, which was probably more than their brother had managed. Charlotte would visit London several times in the coming years, but this was to be Anne’s only journey outside of Yorkshire, other than moorland walks with Emily that sometimes saw her cross the nearby Lancashire border. It was a joyous four days for Anne, where she experienced the gaieties of society life that her aunt had often told her about. From these four happy days, however, sprang eight desperate months.
By mid-1848 Branwell Brontë’s alcohol and opium addiction had reached epic proportions thanks to the absence of Elizabeth’s controlling influence and his despair over the break-up of his relationship with Lydia Robinson, who had by then been widowed, and was months away from remarrying and becoming Lady Scott13. His behaviour was increasingly erratic; he at one point set fire to his own bed after falling asleep with a candle, and for his own safety he now slept with his aged father. Branwell’s death aged 31 on September 25 may not then seem surprising, but the cause of it was, for he died not as a result of alcohol or opium, but of tuberculosis.
Emily soon showed signs of the disease as well, becoming racked with pain and terribly emaciated. With her typical bravery, and typical stubbornness, she resisted all attempts to help her, and Charlotte wrote to Ellen despairingly to say:
‘She resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will give no explanation of her feelings, she will scarcely allow her illness to be alluded to. Our position is, and has been for some weeks, exquisitely painful. God only knows how all this is to terminate. More than once have I been forced boldly to regard the terrible event of her loss as possible and even probable. But Nature shrinks from such thoughts. I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in this world14.’
The terrible event in question came to pass on 19 December. The worried eyes of Charlotte and Patrick now turned to Anne, and the racking coughs and blood-stained handkerchief showed that she too had tuberculosis. Unlike Emily, Anne tried all the medical cures available, to no avail, and on 24 May 1849, she began her final journey – to Scarborough in the company of Charlotte and their kind, faithful friend Ellen Nussey.
Anne had visited Scarborough, on the North Yorkshire coast, every summer during her five years as governess to the Robinson family, and she fell rapidly in love with what was then a very fashionable resort. Her fi
nal hours, as recounted lovingly by Ellen, were spent sat by the window of 2, The Cliff, Wood’s Lodgings. Anne was contemplating death, and the life to come, but she was also taking one last look at the sea she loved so much. She paid homage to it in a number of her poems, and in both her novels, such as this passage from Agnes Grey:
‘The sea was my delight; and I would often gladly pierce the town to obtain the pleasure of a walk beside it, whether with the pupils or alone with my mother during the vacations. It was delightful to me at all times and seasons, but especially in the wild commotion of a rough sea-breeze, and in the brilliant freshness of a summer morning15.’
Anne Brontë died aged 29 on 28 May 1849. In a rapid space of time tuberculosis had claimed three members of the same family, and yet it was not a disease common in Haworth but rather one of big cities such as London. In the opinion of Professor Philip Rhodes it was Charlotte and Anne’s visit to London in July 1848, that brought the disease to the parsonage with devastating results:
‘[Emily] might have collected an overwhelming dose of tubercle bacilli from Branwell. She seems to have been the practical one about the household and may well have been Branwell’s nurse and so liable to massive infection… It is of especial interest that Charlotte and Anne made a hurried journey to London in July, 1848… Could one or other of the sisters have picked up a further dose of tubercle bacilli which when they returned to Haworth they handed on to Branwell and to Emily? This seems a most likely supposition. Almost certainly one or other of them introduced a new pathogenic element into the closed community of Haworth Parsonage, which wreaked so much havoc so quickly16.’
Anne was buried in St Mary’s churchyard at the foot of Scarborough Castle, overlooking the sea she adored. She had never reached Penzance, but as a child had heard glorious stories of the majesty of the sea around it. Scarborough became Anne’s Penzance substitute; it was where she could feel closest to her beloved Aunt Branwell, even in her final moments.
Chapter 16
Connections in the South
‘Insuperable embarrassment seized Caroline when this demand was made: she could not, and did not attempt to comply with it. Her silence was immediately covered by Mrs. Pryor, who proceeded to address sundry questions to Mr. Helstone regarding a family or two in the neighbourhood, with whose connections in the south she said she was acquainted.’
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
In July 1848, Charlotte Brontë had received the fateful letter from George Smith that sent her and Anne to London, leaving her sister Emily and brother Branwell behind in Haworth. By the start of June 1849, all but she were dead, and her steps now echoed around the parsonage as she continued to walk round and round the dining table at evening time, just as she had when there were others to share her perambulation.
This was a time of mourning for her father too, who now had just one of his six children to comfort him in his old age. Other than Charlotte and Patrick, there was also the young servant Martha Brown and the old servant Tabby Ayckroyd, who had now returned to the parsonage. For Charlotte, it was a building full of ghosts; her mother who had left her when she was just five years old, the eldest sisters Maria and Elizabeth she had looked up to, Aunt Branwell whose pattens clicked no more, the pitiful brother she had once loved, and now the two sisters she had shared her dream of writing with. A walk upon the moors always brought them to her mind, and just looking at their poetry was enough to make her think of taking one final, terrible step:
‘I am free to walk on the moors - but when I go out there alone everything reminds me of the time when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it - now I dare not read it - and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget1.’
Amidst her loneliness and despair, however, Charlotte remembered the final exhortation of her sister Anne: ‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage!2’ Finding solace in the work she had put aside, Charlotte completed her third novel Shirley (the second to be published of course) which had been half finished at the time her brother and sisters fell ill.
Shirley is an unfairly overlooked novel, and it is of particular interest to Brontë lovers as many of the characters are based upon people that the author knew intimately. The Yorke family of Briarmains, for example, represent the Taylors of the Red House at Gomersal. The eponymous Shirley Keeldar is an alternative imagining of Emily Brontë, as Charlotte revealed to Elizabeth Gaskell:
‘The character of Shirley herself, is Charlotte’s representation of Emily… we must remember how little we are acquainted with her, compared to that sister who, out of her more intimate knowledge, says that she “was genuinely good, and truly great,” and who tried to depict in Shirley Keeldar, as what Emily Brontë would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity3.’
Shirley may have the novel named after her, but she does not appear until a quarter of the book is over, so the true heroine of the story can be said to be Caroline Helstone, based upon Anne Brontë. At the commencement of the book, she is being raised by her uncle, the Reverend Matthewstone Helstone. It is commonly thought that Charlotte had planned to kill off the character of Caroline, but by the time she came to that point in the novel Anne had died. Unable to save her sister in real life Charlotte did save her in print, and so whilst we see Caroline seemingly dying of a tuberculosis-like disease, she miraculously recovers, partly thanks to the loving attention of Mrs Pryor.
Mrs Pryor is an older woman who has come to Yorkshire from the south, and is now acting as governess to Shirley. It is in this character that we see a portrayal of Elizabeth Branwell, and during Caroline’s struggle for life it is revealed that Mrs Pryor is in fact her long lost mother. In this we hear a memory of the conversations Charlotte heard her aunt have with Anne, and a tribute to the loving relationship they had together in which the aunt had become a surrogate mother to the niece who shared her room:
‘The evening restored Caroline entirely to her mother, and Mrs. Pryor liked the evening; for then, alone with her daughter, no human shadow came between her and what she loved. During the day she would have her stiff demeanour and cool moments, as was her wont. Between her and Mr. Helstone a very respectful but most rigidly ceremonious intercourse was kept up… Towards the servants Mrs. Pryor’s bearing was not uncourteous, but shy, freezing, ungenial4.’
One passage in Shirley reminds us of Ellen’s description of Elizabeth Branwell habitually wearing the same black silk dress; Caroline asks Mrs Pryor to buy other clothes to wear as well as the black silk dress she always dons, but Mrs Pryor says that she would rather spend the money on Caroline, to which she replies:
‘People say you are miserly; and yet you are not, for you give liberally to the poor and to religious societies – though your gifts are conveyed so secretly and quietly that they are known to few except the receivers5.’
Charlotte completed just one more book after Shirley, her Belgium based novel Villette, which borrowed from, and vastly improved upon, her first novel The Professor. The Heger-like Professor Emanuel looms large throughout its pages, but at its heart it is another story about the importance of family and roots: with a godmother, Mrs Bretton, taking on the mother-role this time.
Now that her family were gone, all but her father, Charlotte’s thoughts were increasingly occupied with memories of them, and in September 1851, an event occurred that once again brought the Brontë and Branwell families together: a visit from Thomas Brontë Branwell6, the 34-year-old son of the woman Charlotte Brontë had been named after, Charlotte B
ranwell. The reason for his visit remains unknown, although he may have been in Yorkshire for business reasons. It may also be that he’d come to visit his cousin Charlotte now that he knew she was a celebrated author, and he may even have had romantic intentions; he was after all unmarried and a year younger than Charlotte, and his father and mother (who had died three years earlier) had themselves been cousins.
Thomas stayed in Haworth for around a week, and doubtless he visited the resting place of his Aunt Elizabeth who had nursed him as a child, although as she left Penzance when he was four he had little recollection of her. This visit of Thomas may be the source of some of the Brontë family relics and papers that came into the hands of the Branwell family, mementoes given by Patrick to the nephew of his long-departed, but much-loved, wife.
Charlotte seemed relieved when her cousin departed once more for Penzance, as she wrote to her erstwhile teacher, employer, and now firm friend Margaret Wooler to say:
‘Our visitor (a relative from Cornwall) having left us, the coast is now clear, so that whenever you feel inclined to come, papa and I will be truly glad to see you7.’
This is not necessarily a slight against cousin Thomas, merely a wish to see Margaret again who was now living in Scarborough. Less ambiguous was Charlotte’s reaction to the only other recorded visit of a Branwell relative to the parsonage. At the start of August 1840, John Branwell Williams and his family came to Haworth to spend time with John’s cousin Elizabeth. It must have been delightful for Elizabeth to hear that familiar, almost forgotten, accent again and to catch up on the latest news from Penzance. Charlotte, however, was now all too acutely aware of the difference in their social status, as revealed in a letter to Ellen:
Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy Page 16