by Nick Holland
Branwell was, from birth, the true hope of the family. He was a precocious boy who loved to talk and laugh, and Patrick dreamed of a life for him as an officer in the king’s army (King George IV being then on the throne). Nevertheless, Patrick Brontë was a man of enlightened views on many subjects. He saw education as being important for daughters as well as sons, and he believed that women could make strong and worthwhile careers for themselves, if given the encouragement and tools to do so. This view was at odds with that commonly held in the early nineteenth century, where girls were trained to do housework and little else, or given the skills that would help them attract a husband in later life.
Patrick devised a teaching plan for all of the children except for Emily and Anne, who were still too young at the time, although they soon longed to be included. Aunt Branwell would teach sewing, cookery and household management during the day, as well as reading from the scriptures, but in the afternoon the elder sisters were permitted to join Branwell in their papa’s study, where Patrick would give them lessons on more learned themes, from history to politics and languages.
It soon became evident that one child in particular had a rather brilliant aptitude for learning. The eldest Brontë sister Maria had a remarkable mind. Once something had been said to her, she could remember it forever. That was true with the lessons she learned from her father, and with the lessons she learned when she was later sent away to school. She was ever of a forthright, though kindly, nature and was quick to form her opinions on subjects and to explain her point of view to others.
Patrick would later say how he cherished every moment that he spent teaching his eldest daughter and looked forward to it as a bright spot in the day. He boasted proudly that he could converse with Maria, then only 9 years of age, on any of the leading topics of the day as freely, and with as much pleasure, as with any adult.
Maria took great care of her younger brother and sisters, so that by 10 years old she had become as another mother to them, and it was a role she was happy to fulfil.9 She would sit Anne on her knee, and as her youngest sister gazed up into her kindly hazel eyes, she would read the papers to her siblings and explain the situation in countries across the globe.
Throughout their lives, the surviving sisters would often wonder how things would have been if Maria had lived and whether she would have joined them in their writing endeavours. What works have been lost to history we shall never know, but the contemplation of it grieved Charlotte in particular, before she paid tribute to her twenty-two years after her death. Helen Burns, that kindest, most courageous young girl in Jane Eyre, was a fitting portrait of their loved and lost sister Maria. Years after she had last seen her, Charlotte still recalled her fortitude and calm spirit, as well as the way she was mistreated by her teachers:
Burns immediately left the class, and going into the small inner room where the books were kept, returned in half a minute, carrying in her hand a bundle of twigs tied together at one end. This ominous tool she presented to Miss Scratcherd with a respectful curtsey; then she quietly, and without being told, unloosened her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs. Not a tear rose to Burns’ eye; and, while I paused from my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary expression.10
Charlotte later confirmed to Elizabeth Gaskell that these sections had been drawn from real life, and that Maria had been the constant and undeserving recipient of punishment from one particularly brutal teacher, insisting that ‘not a word of that part of Jane Eyre but is a literal repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher’.11
Patrick was a keen believer in the power of education. It had taken him from a poor village in Ireland, via Cambridge University, to a position of great respect. For these reasons, he spent many summers campaigning to build a Sunday school in Haworth, and at last he succeeded. The school building is still in place alongside the parsonage, and all his children taught there from time to time. It was this same love of education that made him decide to send his daughters to school.
He and his sister-in-law were dedicated to their didactic cause, but if his daughters were to gain roles as governesses or teachers, those being the careers most suited to ladies of their social position, they would need a broader education. Anne’s godmothers, Elizabeth and Fanny, recommended a school called Crofton Hall, near Wakefield. They had both been scholars there and found it to be a perfect stimulus for young minds, and a school where the spiritual and temporal needs of the pupils were taken care of.
Maria and Elizabeth were sent there in the summer of 1823. Elizabeth did not possess the intellectual brilliance of Maria, but she had a kind soul and seemed full of vigour and health. If anything practical needed to be done, Elizabeth would be the first to volunteer her help. She liked nothing more than cleaning and tidying, just as her mother had done; in contrast her elder sister preferred reading to housework.
The two sisters enjoyed their first term at school and were making good progress both in their lessons and in terms of making friends. Maria and Elizabeth were the most gregarious and outgoing of the Brontë girls. They, like their brother, would have been happy to look anyone in the eye and talk to them, whereas even from a young age Charlotte, Emily and Anne were crippled by shyness. Maria and Elizabeth had everything needed to be a success in life, but when they returned home at Christmas 1823, their days were already running out.
Patrick was happy with the schooling they received, but the fees for Crofton Hall reflected its excellent reputation. The cost was £28 per pupil per year. Anne’s wealthy godmother Elizabeth was subsidising this cost but Patrick knew that she could not be asked to pay for the three further sisters who would also need schooling in their turn.
It was at this point that he heard of another school that had been newly formed, and it seemed perfect for his girls. It was called the Clergy Daughters’ School, and it offered schooling on reduced terms for daughters of curates such as Patrick. This seemed a heaven-sent opportunity, but how he would later curse the day that it opened. Charlotte, still grief stricken at the things she saw there, reproduced it faithfully in the harrowing portrayal of Lowood, a school where death was dispensed along with lessons.
The beginning of 1824 saw epidemics of whooping cough and measles sweep through Haworth, and the Brontës were not immune. All of the Brontë children caught it, although the consequences were not as serious as they were for some of the village’s young, who by then lay buried in the graveyard beyond the parsonage’s garden gate. For this reason, the entry of Maria and Elizabeth to their new school was delayed until July of 1824. Their destination was Cowan Bridge, in Westmorland, and their father journeyed with them, keen to inspect the school himself. He stayed a night and shared a meal with his daughters before returning home, professing himself happy with the establishment.12 In September, Elizabeth Firth, or Franks as she was by then called, having just married her reverend suitor, also visited Cowan Bridge and found no cause for concern.13 If only they could have known that the proprietor, a Reverend Carus Wilson, put on a rather different show for visitors than could be expected during the school’s normal daily routine.
Mr Wilson believed that fear and want were better teachers than love and comfort, and his school was perfect in every way for his hypothesis. It was a cold and desolate place, subject to the freezing winds of the north, and unhealthy in every aspect. Food was scarce and lacking any kind of sustenance, and harsh punishments were exacted for sins and offences that were never explained. He was a Calvinist through and through, and he believed that want and suffering were the rightful way of this world that provides but a temporary shelter.
Charlotte joined her older sisters on 24 August, having taken longer to recover from her whooping cough. What she saw and heard would stay with her forever and was later to be poured out into the opening of her famous novel.
Emily was sent to them on 25 November. At just 6 years old, she was the youngest pupil and had been given special dispensation to attend. In the months preceding this, being the only girls at home, Anne and Emily had grown even closer to each other, and both wept as Emily left for the coach that would carry her to Westmorland.
Emily was the darling of the school, and she was shielded from some of the harsh treatments that were handed out to others not so fortunate. Sickness would spread through Cowan Bridge at regular intervals, and typhus and cholera were frequent visitors. The sick slept side by side with the healthy, with inevitable consequences.
Charlotte and Patrick were both vehement in later life that the descriptions of Lowood in Jane Eyre were studies drawn from real life:
That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital.14
Charlotte often asked herself why she, or her sisters, never wrote to their father to reveal the true nature of the Clergy Daughters’ School. In truth they were frightened to do so, and they may not have believed that the letters would be sent, as all mail was opened and inspected before being placed into eager hands. This was, in fact, set in stone by the 8th rule of the official Cowan Bridge regulations that stated, ‘All letters and parcels are inspected by the superintendent’.15
By 14 February 1825, it was already too late. Maria Brontë was sent home from Cowan Bridge in ‘ill health’, as the school register records. Once she reached Haworth it was apparent to her father and the physicians that she was in an advanced and hopeless state of consumption, or tuberculosis. The happy beaming girl, bright in every sense, had been replaced by a living skeleton without the strength to smile. Four other girls were also sent home from the school on the same day, and two of them had reached their heaven before Maria was called there on 6 May. By this date, twenty-eight of the seventy-seven pupils at Cowan Bridge were recorded as being in ‘ill health’.
On 31 May, Elizabeth was also sent home in this all-encompassing ‘ill health’. She was accompanied by the school housekeeper, who promptly presented Patrick with a bill upon her arrival. Elizabeth died on 15 June, and she was buried by her father, next to her mother and elder sister.
By now, even Reverend Wilson had to acknowledge the truth: if the children remained at his school, not one would survive. Cowan Bridge was closed temporarily, and on the day that Elizabeth was sent home, the children were transferred to a lodging that Reverend Wilson owned near to Morecambe on the Lancashire coast.
From the moment the heartbroken Patrick had set eyes on his second dying daughter, however, he had decided to take action of his own. On the day after Elizabeth’s arrival, he took a coach to Morecambe and collected Charlotte and Emily. From now on he was determined to keep an eye on his daughters, come what may, and hold them in the safety of his own keeping. We can only surmise what words he had for Reverend Wilson, but Patrick Brontë was a very forthright man when sorely tried. From that day on, whenever their paths would cross, Reverend Carus Wilson would try to thwart whatever Patrick was doing.
One of Anne’s earliest memories was lining up with her brother and two, now only two, sisters to look into Elizabeth’s open casket.16 We can imagine how Aunt Branwell lifted Anne up and said to her the words that would often be spoken during Maundy Thursday services: ‘Your sister suffers no more, Anne, but look on this and remember, that dust thou art, and to dust thou will return.’ ‘I remember, Aunt,’ she would say for the rest of her days, ‘I remember.’
Where were the bards to offer up an elegy to the sisters, so untimely taken? Who would remember them? Their brother, who had adored his eldest sister, wrote the poem ‘Caroline’, which is actually about Maria, in her memory. His reference to ‘mother’ is the role played by his aunt. The many sufferings he endured as a young child would have a dreadful effect on his later life.
I stooped to pluck a rose that grew
Beside this window waving then;
But back my little hand withdrew,
From some reproof of inward pain;
For she who loved it was not there
To check me with her dove-like eye,
And something bid my heart forbear
Her favourite rose-bud to destroy.
Was it that bell – that funeral bell,
Sullenly sounding on the wind?
Was it that melancholy knell
Which first to sorrow woke my mind?
I looked upon my mourning dress,
Til my heart beat with childish fear,
And frightened at my loneliness,
I watched, some well-known sound to hear ...
My father’s stern eye dropt a tear,
Upon the coffin resting there.
My mother lifted me to see,
What might within that coffin be;
And to this moment I can feel
The voiceless gap – the sickening chill –
With which I hid my whitened face
In the dear folds of her embrace ...
There lay she then, as now she lies –
For not a limb has moved since then –
In dreamless slumber closed, those eyes
That never more may wake again.
She lay, as I had seen her lie
On many a happy night before,
When I was humbly kneeling by –
Whom she was teaching to adore;
Oh, just as when by her I prayed,
And she to heaven sent up her prayer,
She lay with flowers about her head –
Though formal grave-clothes hid her hair!17
So it was that Charlotte, having just turned 9, became the oldest child, and she changed from that moment. Despite being close to her brother and sisters in age, she herself acted like a mother as well as a sister, with all that entails. Charlotte made decisions for them, always doing what she felt was best, however others may judge her actions, but the cost to her was too great. Anne would see how she suffered and understand the reason why. Charlotte’s wild flashes of temper, the dark moods that often overtook her, were the external symptoms of the grief that had been growing within her since she lost the three people she loved most in such quick succession. She had to sit through lessons, suffer chastisements and punishments, while nearby her sisters were perishing before her eyes. ‘Dear Lord God,’ pleaded Anne as she spent her last hours in Scarborough, ‘please let Charlotte find peace after I’ve gone.’
Notes
1. Green, Dudley, Patrick Brontë Father Of Genius, pp.78–9
2. Green, Dudley, Patrick Brontë Father Of Genius, p.79–80
3. Green, Dudley, Patrick Brontë Father Of Genius, p.82–4
4. On 27 November 1821, Patrick wrote to John Buckland: ‘During many years, she had walked with God; but the great enemy, envying her life of holiness, often disturbed her mind in the last conflict.’ Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.104
5. ‘Miss Branwell was, I believe, a kindly and conscientious woman, with a good deal of character, but with the somewhat narrow ideas natural to one who had spent nearly all her life in the same place. She had strong prejudices, and soon took a distaste to Yorkshire.’ Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life Of Charlotte Brontë, p.96
6. Rhodes, Philip, ‘A Medical Appraisal Of The Brontës’, Brontë Society Transactions 1972, pp.101–2
7. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.105
8. ‘I know of no ties of friendship ever existing between us which the last eleven or twelve years has not severed or at least placed an insuperable bar to any revival.’ From Mary Burder’s letter to Patrick Brontë, 18 August 1823. Green, Dudley, Patrick Brontë Father Of Genius, pp.97–8
9. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.111
10. Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, p.45
11. Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life Of Ch
arlotte Brontë, p.104
12. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.20
13. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.24
14. Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, p.65
15. Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life Of Charlotte Brontë, p.98
16. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.26
17. Neufeldt, Victor A. (Ed.), The Works Of Patrick Branwell Brontë: 1837–1848, p.413–4
3
THE BRONTË TWINS
That I might simply fancy there
One little flower – a primrose fair,
Just opening into sight;
As in the days of infancy,
An opening primrose seemed to me,
A source of strange delight.
‘Memory’
‘Papa, come quickly! Papa, please come, there’s an angel standing next to Anne’s cradle!’
Charlotte tugged at her father’s sleeve as he sat behind his writing desk.
Patrick looked at her incredulously. He was a man who valued his privacy, and all his children were taught to knock and wait before entering his study. Yet here was his 5-year-old daughter in a state of agitation, her eyes wide with excitement.
‘Please come quickly, there’s an angel looking over Anne’, Charlotte insisted.
A smile broke out on her father’s face: he would humour his daughter this time.
‘Come on then, dear Charlotte, we can’t keep an angel waiting can we?’