‘We had, a fortnight ago, a visit from our South of England relations, John Branwell and his wife and daughter… They reckon to be very grand folks indeed, and talk largely – I thought assumingly. I cannot say I much admired them. To my eyes there seemed to be a great attempt to play the Mogul down in Yorkshire. Mr. Branwell was much less assuming than the womenites; he seemed a frank, sagacious kind of man, very tall and vigorous, with a keen active look. The moment he saw me he exclaimed that I was the very image of my Aunt Charlotte. Mrs. Branwell sets up for being a woman of great talent, tact and accomplishment. I thought there was much more noise than work. My cousin Eliza is a young lady intended by nature to be a bouncing, good-looking girl… I would have been friendly with her, but I could get no talk except about the Low Church, Evangelical clergy, the Millennium, Baptist Noel, botany, and her own conversion. A mistaken education has utterly spoiled the lass8.’
It is important to note that this Eliza is not the one later remembered in Elizabeth Branwell’s will, but a more distant relation as John Branwell Williams was the son of another John Williams and Alice Branwell, sister of Thomas Branwell, Elizabeth and Maria’s father. It is interesting, however, that this Eliza is interested in botany, as this is also something that became associated with another distant relative from Cornwall: Elizabeth Carne.
Elizabeth Carne was born in 1817 to Joseph Carne, whose father William Carne shared a grandfather with the Brontë’s own grandmother Anne Carne Branwell9. Elizabeth Carne was one of the nineteenth century’s great renaissance women, the author of a number of books, she also served as head of the Batten, Carne and Oxnam Bank, and she became one of the leading naturalists and geologists of her day. It’s interesting to note that her first book, Three Months Rest at Pau in the Winter and Spring of 1859, was written under the male pseudonym of John Altrayd Wittitterly; perhaps taking the idea from her distant cousins in Yorkshire.
If Thomas Brontë Branwell had made his trip from Cornwall to Haworth in 1851 with romance in mind, he was given short shrift, but he married Sarah Hannah Jones a year later. In 1854, Charlotte did something that none of her siblings, her aunt Elizabeth, or her great friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor ever did; she married. In the preceding years she had mingled in exalted company, mixing with the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau and Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth, but her husband was found a little closer to home.
Arthur Bell Nicholls, originally from County Antrim, had been assistant curate to Patrick Brontë since May 1845. He provided exemplary service to the family, including conducting Emily’s funeral10, but they seemed to be oblivious to his growing attachment to one of their number, and when he finally proposed to Charlotte he was given a very frosty reception, with the father furious and daughter bewildered. Feeling he had made a fool of himself Arthur announced that he was leaving Haworth for life as a missionary in Australia. His last sermon saw him shaking in the pulpit unable to speak, until he was helped out of the church by his parishioners. Charlotte wrote to Ellen of what she expected to be her last meeting with him:
‘He left Haworth this morning at 6’ o clock… He went out thinking he was not to see me – And indeed until the very last moment – I thought it best not. But perceiving that he stayed long before going out at the gate – and remembering his long grief I took courage and went out trembling and miserable. I found him leaning again the garden-door in a paroxysm of anguish – sobbing as women never sob11.’
Galvanised by this meeting, Arthur left not for Australia but Kirk Smeaton near Pontefract, from where he continued to correspond with Charlotte. He returned to Haworth on 29 June 1854 to wed her; Charlotte soon realised, against all her expectations, that she had fallen in love with her new husband. It was a happy but all too brief marriage. Charlotte fell pregnant, but suffered from the excessive morning sickness, hyperemesis gravidurum. Unable to eat or drink, she wasted slowly away, dying in her new husband’s arms on 31 March 1855.
The Brontë line was over, and Patrick had the sad fate of outliving his wife and all six of his children. There are Brontës today who are descended from Patrick’s siblings and cousins in Ireland who, following his lead, adopted the spelling of Brontë rather than Brunty. What, however, became of the Branwell line? It is the Branwell influence rather than the Brontë influence, after all, that can be seen most clearly in the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne, thanks to their upbringing at the hands of their Aunt Elizabeth. This line of the family becomes even more important if we accept the opinion given by J. Hambley Rowe, chair of the Brontë Society Council, in 1923:
‘While much has been written and more conjectured regarding the ancestry of the Brontës on the paternal side, their maternal forebears have been uniformly neglected. This seems the more inexplicable as it is generally considered that the distaff influences are the more important in the moulding of capabilities and temperament12.’
Out of Thomas and Anne Branwell’s offspring, born between 1769 and 1789, only four had children, and many of those children in turn died young or unmarried. This is most noticeable in the family of Benjamin Branwell, one-time mayor of Penzance and the only brother of Elizabeth to survive into adulthood. He and his wife Mary had five daughters and three sons, not one of whom married. His son Thomas grew into adulthood and served as a solicitor, and three of his daughters ran their own school except for the reclusive Lydia who preferred a solitary life.
The family of Charlotte Branwell and her cousin Joseph endured longer, even though out of their ten children, only Thomas Brontë Branwell, the visitor to Haworth, married. Thomas and his wife Sarah, in turn, had but one child who married; Arthur Milton Cooper Branwell who, keeping up the family tradition, married a cousin in 1897. She was Charlotte Brontë Jones, daughter of a brother to Thomas Brontë Branwell’s wife Sarah Hannah Jones. With forenames of Charlotte Brontë it is perhaps fitting that Miss Jones married the son of a cousin of the original Charlotte Brontë.
Arthur Branwell became a captain in the British army, and he and Charlotte had one son, christened Patrick Arthur Brontë Branwell, born in 1904. At the time of his mother Charlotte’s death in 1942 he was the sole surviving descendent of Thomas and Anne Branwell alive in England. An interesting story regarding Charlotte Branwell’s will appeared in a Leeds newspaper shortly afterwards, under the headline ‘Brontë Relics and Will Lost in Raid’:
‘Charlotte Brontë relics were mentioned to Mr. Justice Langton in the probate court in London to-day. The judge granted probate of the copy of the late Mrs. Charlotte Brontë Branwell, of Brompton Road, London, to her only son, Patrick Arthur Brontë Branwell, the sole surviving devisee and legatee… Mrs. Branwell left to the Brontë Museum (if her son predeceased her) the Branwell miniatures, a picture of Miss Branwell (who sent the Brontë sisters to Brussels), a picture painted by Charlotte Brontë, four pictures worked in silk by the aunts of Charlotte Brontë, a workbox which belonged to Charlotte Brontë, and a letter signed by Mr. C. Brontë framed in oak. The son of Mrs. Branwell did not predecease his mother. Mrs. Branwell’s will fell to ashes after being taken from the strongroom of her solicitor after an air raid, but the solicitor had copies of all the wills in their charge deposited at their bankers13.’
Patrick Branwell did not marry Anthea Mary Hunt until he was 53, and when he died in 1964 the Branwell family line that had produced the Brontës came to an end in England. That does not mean that the Branwell story came to an end. Jane and Eliza Kingston, remembered alongside Charlotte, Emily and Anne in Elizabeth Branwell’s will, had fascinating and tragic lives that could have come from a Brontë novel, yet it is thanks to Jane, the prototype of Helen Graham, that there are Branwell descendants thriving today on another continent.
Chapter 17
Going on a Voyage
‘One day, nearly seven years ago, a Mr. Eyre came to Gateshead and wanted to see you; Missis said you were at school fifty miles off; he seemed so much disappointed, for he could not stay: he wa
s going on a voyage to a foreign country, and the ship was to sail from London in a day or two.’
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
When Elizabeth Branwell made her will in April 1833, it was only natural that she made provision for the three girls she was raising as if they were her own children, but she also left an equal share to Elizabeth Jane Kingston in Penzance. Nothing was left to her other nephews and nieces, the sons and daughters of her brother Benjamin and her sister Charlotte, so why did she single out Elizabeth Jane, henceforth referred to as Eliza, in this way? The answer reveals a lot about Elizabeth Branwell’s character, and it also opens up one of the most heartbreaking stories in the Branwell-Brontë family history.
As with her nephew Branwell, Elizabeth expected that the children of Benjamin and Charlotte would have little need of financial assistance in their adult lives, so she instead concentrated on helping the most obviously needy in the form of her sister Jane and her daughter Eliza.
Jane Branwell, as we have seen, married the celebrated Wesleyan preacher John Kingston in Penzance in June 1800, but by 1807 he had been dismissed from the Wesleyan movement in disgrace, and he, his pregnant wife Jane and their four children left for a new life in the new world of America.
The nature of John’s offence remains a mystery, but there are tantalising clues. In his memoirs published in The Methodist Magazine in the year prior to his marriage, Kingston talks of weaknesses in his character, and hints at having led a dissolute life before being struck by a religious conversion:
‘My parents, who lived at Towcester in Northamptonshire (the place of my nativity) were greatly alarmed when they heard of the change which had commenced in my life and conversation, till I assured them, that I had only forsaken the mad and frantic ways of an evil world … After a season, I began to discover the root of inbred sin, which brought me into various trials and distresses. My natural flow of spirits exposed me to manifold temptations, but band-meetings … helped me to break thro’ the snares of the wicked one1.’
By 1797, as he prepares to return to England from the West Indies, he is still battling his demons:
‘I found great cause for gratitude to my heavenly benefactor … but at the same time I felt the great need of purity of heart, and groaned for deliverance from pride and evil tempers. And altho’ my desires were engaged to serve the Lord above all things, yet I found many hindrances; difficulties, and dangers were before me, being surrounded by war, and many temptations within and without2.’
Temptations were certainly the downfall of John Kingston, but of what particular nature did they take? In 1807 he was tried by his peers and then dismissed summarily, losing both his reputation and his livelihood. An offence leading to this sentence, rather than an admonishment or suspension, must have been serious, but the nature of it remained unspecified3, so we are left wondering if he had misappropriated monies, or been guilty of offences particularly frowned upon by the Wesleyan church such as marital infidelity or drunkenness.
His daughter Eliza later wrote that her father ‘was a man of strong passions, and had, no doubt, great temptations4.’
Eliza’s opinion of John Kingston must have been based upon the recollections of her mother Jane, as they took their leave of him when she was less than a year old. It was a sad, rather pathetic farewell, as mother and baby separated from father and three children. John was left with just one treasured memento of his daughter Eliza; a slip of paper containing a cutting of her hair, upon which he wrote:
‘Hair from the head of my little daughter Eliz. Jane 10 months old who left me this morning with her mother for New York in order to embark for old England. J. Kingston, April 25th, 18095.’
Upon their arrival in Baltimore a year earlier, John Kingston and his family took up residence at 25, Market Street, which as well as being a living place he turned into a book shop and publishing house. It was a precarious industry, and far removed from the life of a respected preacher he had enjoyed when he last entered the city in October 1795. The climate and lifestyle of Baltimore were particularly alien to his wife Jane who had never left England before, and she must have endured terrible hardships to make her turn her back on her husband and four eldest children; we can only assume that John Kingston’s temptations had returned.
John Kingston was both a bookseller and a book publisher in America, but he was also a book writer and, at first, a successful one. His pocket biographical dictionary rapidly sold out of its initial run of 1,500 copies6, leading him to create a second edition in 1811, ‘improved’ and ‘embellished with portraits’. This book reveals a learned man with a huge breadth of knowledge, but it may also give us a clue as to the demons he faced.
The biographical dictionary deals with figures throughout history, so that we see three pages dedicated to the Caesars of Rome, for example. A figure largely forgotten today, however, gets fifteen pages; the Swiss philosopher and scientist Johann Georg Zimmermann. His entry discusses his time as court physician to George III of England, and also his writing of his hugely successful (at the time) book Solitude. There is also an extended and rather odd passage that details Zimmermann’s struggles against a secret order known as the Illuminated, with a dire warning that:
‘To destroy the Christian religion, and to overthrow every throne, and every government, has been from the year 1776, the constant aim of the Secret Order of the Illuminated7.’
Zimmermann suffered increasingly from ‘disorder’ which rendered him incapable of any action, from eating to sleeping, and his life is summed up thus:
‘Zimmerman, on the whole, was very amiable in his private manners: and at times he was cheerful, even to gaiety. But the afflictions of Europe were his… There are those who have felt with Zimmerman; and like him have fallen! Many excellent men – men whose wisdom was high, but unassuming, and grounded too on the basis of piety, have sunk under the increasing pressure of this dark and distorted day8.’
Was John Kingston’s high regard of Zimmermann because he himself was one of those pious men who had fallen and sunk under the pressure of a dark and distorted day? It could be that, for all the charges whispered against him down the centuries, John Kingston’s real crime was that he suffered from what we would today recognise as a depressive disorder or a mental psychosis.
The Kingston book business soon foundered, and John was left with little money to raise his four children. In 1818, he returned briefly to London to visit his sister there, in the hope of raising funds for a new business venture. She was unable or unwilling to help, but John must also have informed his estranged wife of his journey to England – probably with the hope of obtaining some Branwell family money – for she travelled to London to see not him, but her children. It was nine years since she had last laid eyes upon them and she was shocked by what she saw; they were impoverished and half-starved, and Jane begged John to allow her to take them back to Penzance with her. He refused, and they returned with him to Baltimore9.
It was a bleak return, and Jane’s firstborn daughter, named Maria after her sister, died of fever shortly after arriving back in Baltimore. Sometime in 1823 or 1824, John Kingston made a last desperate move to New York city, but his slide into complete and utter poverty continued and he died of pleurisy in April 182410. This sad end to a once-celebrated life led to the fragmentation of his family. His son, also named John Kingston, like many others of this time headed to new territories in the west of America, but as there are no records of him after this point it is likely to have been an unsuccessful, and short, endeavour. Thomas returned to London to live initially with the aunt he had met in 1818, but he too descended into poverty before dying in 1855. Middle daughter Anne Branwell Kingston remained in New York earning a living as a seamstress, where her fortunes improved as in 1830 she married a man from a well-respected German Pennsylvanian family called Joseph Bergstresser, who was on the verge of becoming a successful businessman. Anne’s happiness was short lived, for in 1835 she died of a fever leaving behind two young
children.
The tale of the Kingstons in America then seems to be a tragic one, but the Kingstons of Penzance were protected, at least at first, by the financial support of Elizabeth Branwell. Her will, written in 1833, refers to ‘having advanced to my sister Kingston the sum of twenty-five pounds11’, and this payment helped Jane and Eliza turn their home at 10, Morrab Place into a guest house. It was at this address that they received a letter from Joseph Burgster (like the Bruntys and Brontës and the Bramwells and Branwells, he had changed the spelling of his name) informing Jane and Eliza of the death of their daughter and sister. Jane wrote back offering to take his children, Maria and Joseph junior, and raise them in Penzance, but Joseph instead took them with him back to Pennsylvania.
This correspondence went cold for nearly two decades but in 1854, for reasons unknown, Joseph wrote again to his sister-in-law Eliza in Penzance, and the letters that then flowed between them reveals a tale of pathos and sadness.
Eliza was still living with her mother Jane, by this time 81, but the guest house was not paying their way; it was the annuity from Thomas Branwell and the legacy from Elizabeth that allowed them to lead relatively comfortable lives. Eliza gave a description of herself to Joseph Burgster, and her self-deprecating frankness is very redolent of her cousin Charlotte Brontë:
‘My dear Brother, you ask me do I look like Anne. Alas, no! I fear I am neither like her in features, form, or disposition. My mother thinks she was her best child, and I am about the worst, but you shall judge for yourself. I am of middle stature, rather large boned, but not very fleshy, high shouldered, short necked, neither fair nor dark, high cheek bones, large mouth, irregular teeth, grey eyes, brown hair, very grey on the front part of my head… of an irritable temper, but frank and open with those I like, rather impudently so sometimes. To crown all, I am an Old Maid of 46, or shall be so on the 23rd of this month12.’
Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy Page 17