by Nick Holland
The smallness of the books served two purposes. Firstly, they were designed to be small enough for the soldiers to read, and secondly, they provided a veil of secrecy, as they would have been completely unreadable to their short-sighted father.
This gave the children free reign over what they wrote, and they made the most of it. Their tiny books were imagined along the lines of Blackwood’s magazine and were originally titled Branwell’s Blackwoods Magazine, after the first editor. A year later Branwell relinquished editing duties to Charlotte, although still contributing, and she changed the title to Young Men’s Magazine. The four children themselves often appeared in the stories under their guises as the four genii that dwelled on Mount Aornos and ruled the kingdoms with a rod of iron.
Branwell is the ‘Chief Genius Brannii’ who is a ‘gloomy giant’ who sits enthroned in the clouds. Charlotte is ‘Chief Genius Tallii’, revealing that her childhood nickname must have been Tally, who ‘like a dire eagle flies’. We then learn that ‘Emmii and Annii with boding cry, famine and war foretell and mortal misery’.
A vast range of characters spring up throughout the tales of Glass Town and Angria, and soon the stories were gathered on sheets of paper as well as in the self-made books and magazines. All of these tales were written by either Charlotte or Branwell, but it’s clear that the younger children Emily and Anne provided stories which were then set down by the older siblings. Tales set in Parrysland and Rossesland have a character of their very own, and indeed the books are full of light-hearted rivalries between the four authors, with Charlotte attacking Emily’s Parrysland for being too like Yorkshire and lacking the exciting African feel of Wellingtonsland and Sneakysland.12
These early stories saw the development of themes that Charlotte would carry through into her adult novels, and the four young Brontës would eagerly gather around their dining table before bed discussing new tales and relating the latest news from the kingdom, just as if it was a real place. In 1831 this was to come to an abrupt end. Charlotte’s godparents, the Atkinsons, had offered to pay to send her to boarding school again. The school suggested was very different to Cowan Bridge, and eventually an initially reluctant Patrick agreed that it was for the best if Charlotte was to become properly equipped for a future career as a governess. On 17 June 1831 she made the journey to Roe Head school at Mirfield, around 14 miles from Haworth. No more would the four Brontës sit around their table composing thrilling stories about the kingdom of Angria.
Although parted, the children would still continue to compose escapist prose and poetry in their own way. Branwell would use the name of his Angrian counterpart Northangerland for poetry that would later be printed in local newspapers. For Anne and Emily, the event marked a liberation and an opportunity finally to unleash their own creativity to the full.
Once more, Anne and Emily were thrust into each other’s company, and they revelled in it. During their daily walks on the moors they would continue to conjure up stories about Angria, but before long they decided that this new beginning needed a new kingdom. They wanted a blank canvas to populate with people, towns and events completely of their own choosing, and they soon settled on a name for it: Gondal.
As if to emphasise the break with the African setting of Angria, Gondal was an island in the North Pacific and had a rivalry with the neighbouring island kingdom of Gaaldine. It was now, at last, that the youngest Brontës put pen to paper, initially in their own little books, none of which survive today, and then in prose and poetry that together made up complex and interweaving tales of the heroes and heroines of the islands.
These poems were written under the pseudonyms of Gondalian characters, but then signed and dated by either Anne or Emily. The first surviving poem that we have of Anne’s is from December 1836 and is titled ‘Verses by Lady Geralda’. It begins:
Why when I hear the stormy breath,
Of the wild winter wind,
Rushing o’er the mountain heath,
Does sadness fill my mind?
For long ago I loved to lie
Upon the pathless moor,
To hear the wild wind rushing by
With never ceasing roar;
Its sound was music then to me
Its wild and lofty voice
Made my heart beat exultingly
And my whole soul rejoice
But now, how different is the sound?
It takes another tone
And howls along the barren ground
With melancholy moan.13
We can see here that while Gondal was ostensibly a Pacific paradise, its landscape greatly resembled that which Anne and Emily loved to explore around their home. Readers may also find it strange that Anne talks of how ‘long ago I loved to lie upon the pathless moor’ at a time when she was only 16 years old.
The truth is that Anne immersed herself in the Gondalian characters, imagining how she would feel if in their shoes. Thus we read in her poetry of this time of love thwarted, people in exile longing for their former lives and people trapped in dungeons reminiscing about the landscapes and people they have left behind.
Lady Geralda was just one of the recurring characters in the Gondal chronicles, alongside women such as Olivia Vernon and Marina Sabia. Anne’s main heroine, however, was Alexandrina Zenobia who was embroiled in a complicated love affair with Alexander Hibernia. Such love lay at the very heart of the many intrigues that ran throughout Gondal. Confinement was another common theme in both Emily and Anne’s poetry, representing both the confinement of their characters and the physical and mental confinement of the young writers. We can find an example of this in the 17-year-old Anne’s ‘A Voice From The Dungeon’, in which miseries and woes weigh the narrator down.14
Like any developing writer, Anne and Emily tended to focus on dramatic events and deeper feelings, which is why grand love and even grander despair feature so heavily in their Gondal poetry. Nevertheless, there are hints of the inner turmoil that Anne was beginning to experience, and this composition dates from the time that Anne herself, by then as we shall see also at Roe Head School, was about to experience a physical and mental breakdown.
Although composed solely by Anne and Emily, these writings were also shared with Charlotte whenever she was back in Haworth, but as the years went by, Emily became more secretive about her own Gondal compositions. Whilst both Anne and Emily would continue to write on Gondal themes into their adulthood, Anne was no longer always privy to Emily’s work. In a diary paper written on 30 July 1841, Anne looks ahead to the next diary paper that she planned to write in four years’ time and writes: ‘I wonder whether the Gondaliland will still be flourishing and what will be their condition? I am now engaged writing the 4th volume of Sofala Vernon’s life.’15
Sofala was one of the inhabitants of Gondal, and the fact that at the age of 21 Anne was on a fourth volume of her life story shows just how prodigious her Gondal output was. For Emily it was an obsession that she could never shake off. She would write tales of the kingdom until her last days, and for her the divides between Gondal and real life became irrevocably blurred. Anne, in adulthood, would occasionally return to tales of Gondal and Gaaldine, as much out of love for her sister Emily as anything else, but she would soon find a more compelling subject for her writing. Real life was about to intrude.
Notes
1. Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p.94
2. Brontë, Charlotte, The History of the Year, 12 March 1829
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Leyland, Francis, The Brontë Family, pp.63–4
6. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.49
7. Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, p.4
8. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, p.381
9. Ibid.
10. Alexander, Christine, Introduction to Tales of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal, p.28
11. Alexander, Christine and Sellars, Jane, The Art Of The Brontës, p.155 manuscript now held in the Brontë Parsonag
e Museum, Haworth
12. Alexander, Christine, Introduction to ‘Tales Of Glass Town, Angria And Gonda’, pp.19–20
13. The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, pp.441–4
14. The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, pp.453–4
15. The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, pp.489–90
5
THE HAWORTH THAT ANNE KNEW
We crossed the valley, and began to ascend the opposite hill. As we were toiling up, I looked back again: there was the village spire, and the old grey parsonage beyond it, basking in a slanting beam of sunshine – it was but a sickly ray, but the village and surrounding hills were all in sombre shade, and I hailed the wandering beam as a propitious omen to my home. With clasped hands, I fervently implored a blessing on its inhabitants, and hastily turned away; for I saw the sunshine was departing; and I carefully avoided another glance, lest I should see it in gloomy shadow, like the rest of the landscape.
Agnes Grey
Haworth today is a beautiful village with a thriving tourist industry, bringing visitors from all corners of the globe. The attractions are centred around Main Street, the steep cobbled road that rises up the hill. It is home to a number of inns, a selection of guest houses, fine bistros bearing names like ‘Villette’ and small shops selling art and craft items alongside antique books. Main Street runs from Bridgehouse Lane at the bottom of the hill, with the imposing Haworth Old Hall on the opposite side of the road, to West Street at the top, and near to the summit itself is St Michael and All Angels’ church, behind which lies the building that brings all the visitors to the village: the Brontë Parsonage, now a splendid museum run by the Brontë Society.
Being next to the moors, the village is a slave to the vagaries of northern English weather, but on a good sunny day it is an idyllic setting. For the throngs of tourists enjoying an ice cream in the bright Haworth sun it’s easy to imagine that it was ever thus, but in fact the Haworth that Anne Brontë and her sisters knew was a very different place indeed. In fact, an official report of the time condemned Haworth as one of the unhealthiest places to live in the whole of England and comparable to the very worst slums of industrial London.
Even the name of the street itself has changed. At the time that the baby Anne was brought by her family to Haworth it was called Kirkgate, meaning the street that led to the church. The change in name to Main Street was a reflection of a change in Haworth itself: it was a village that was growing, that was becoming ever more industrialised. Streets were being created and dwellings were being built, running off Main Street like the becks that ran off the streams on the moors to the south and the west.
The driving factor behind the transformation of Haworth in the early decades of the nineteenth century was the Industrial Revolution. Textile mills surrounded the town, and many Haworth inhabitants found employment in the mills or as wool combers working in cramped houses. The moors, previously home to peat production and sheep farming, were now transformed by stone quarries based around the Penistone Crags.
Records show that the population grew from around 2,350 in 1838 to 2,629 in 1849, the year of Anne’s death. This represents a rise of nearly 12 per cent in just over a decade, and the percentage increase is likely to have been just as sharp in the preceding decades of the century. This put an enormous strain on the village’s resources and infrastructure, so that whilst some of the traditional families of the village, such as the farmers and landowners on the outskirts of Haworth, lived in comfort, others had to endure extreme poverty and deprivation.
The reason that we know so much about the Haworth of this time is an official report into the village carried out in April 1850 by Benjamin Herschel Babbage, a Superintending Inspector of the General Board of Health.1 The government had sent Babbage to Haworth to answer petitions from the villagers, and leading these calls was Reverend Patrick Brontë himself.
By October 1849, Patrick had been the Church of England priest in Haworth for nearly thirty years, and in that time he could not fail to notice the astonishing death rate that the village had. Indeed he himself had had to bury his own wife and four of his six children there, with another, Anne, having recently died and been buried in Scarborough. Patrick, and many of his parishioners, believed that it was the unhealthy nature of the village itself that was leading to many deaths that could be prevented, and that’s why on 9 October 1849 they sent their first petition to the General Board of Health’s headquarters in London. Patrick organised and sent the petition, containing 220 signatures, but this was met with the reply that it could not be considered unless 10 per cent of the rate payers in the village signed it.
As in all things, when Patrick Brontë had set his mind to something he did not let it rest easily, and so he then began a correspondence with the General Board of Health and sent a second petition in October 1849 containing the required amount of signatures. The board wrote back that an inspector would be sent, but months went by without any sign of him. On 5 February 1850, Patrick wrote again:
Having long since petitioned for an authorised agent, to come and look into our situation, with regard to a sufficient supply of pure water, we are much disappointed at not having seen any such agent, nor having got any satisfactory answer to our petition: we would therefore request that you would be so kind as to inform us what we are to expect, or do; and we are the more anxious on this head, as spring and summer are drawing nigh, when the want of pure water would be extremely detrimental.2
At last the board were stirred into action and Mr Babbage arrived in Haworth on 4 April 1850. He spent three days in the school room next to the parsonage talking to the villagers, before inspecting conditions himself. His report makes shocking reading,3 but it was to mark a turning point for Haworth that would save countless lives in the future.
Times were tough and lives were short across the north of England in the mid-nineteenth century, yet Haworth stood out even against this background. The average life expectancy in Haworth at the time that Babbage’s report was compiled was 25.8 years,4 although even that was an improvement on some of the years leading up to it. In 1848, the year of the publication of Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the average age at death in the village was just 21.7 years. Ten years earlier, in 1838, it had been a mere 19.6 years. One reason that life expectancy was so low was the very real likelihood of infant mortality, with more than 40 per cent of children dying before they reached their 6th birthday.
Babbage calculated that the death rate for Haworth was 44.3 per cent worse than that of neighbouring villages such as Stanbury and Oxenhope. National health laws at this time stated that a mortality rate of 23 in every 1,000 indicated an unhealthy place requiring special remedies to be put in place. Haworth had an average death rate per 1,000 of 25.4, classing it officially as ‘a very unhealthy place’ and comparable with areas such as Whitechapel in the heart of the London slums.
Patrick Brontë could not help noticing this problem, as it was he who was burying many of these dead, but he had also recognised the source of the problem: sanitation and the village’s water supply. At the time of the inspection, Haworth had eleven water pumps, but only nine were in working condition. There were less than seventy toilets for a population of around 2,500 people, and twenty-four houses shared just one toilet. Seven houses were found to have no access to a toilet at all.5
In these conditions, ‘night soil’, as it was called, was simply thrown out of the windows. There were no sewers in the village, so the human waste was left to slide down open gutters that ran along the steep street at the heart of Haworth. There was a slaughter house at the top of the village next to the King’s Arms Inn, and some households had a pigsty or kept chickens, so animal waste and remains would mix with the human waste collecting in the gutters.
Even worse than this was the fact that in many cases it was the water itself that was killing the residents, once again owing to the unique situation the village found itself in. The w
ater that collected in the wells, ready to be pumped out, would first run down the hills and across the graveyard next to Reverend Brontë’s church. There are believed to be as many as 40,000 bodies buried in this cemetery, many in hidden mass graves. This graveyard had no trees around it at the time and was covered in flat stones. Babbage singled this out as a particular concern, claiming that it prevented air getting into the ground and aiding decomposition, and that the lack of trees and vegetation meant that there was nothing to prevent the disease ridden gases that rose up from the graves.
On particularly wet days, of the kind Haworth often enjoys, foul black liquid would pool on the flagstone floor of the church itself. This was one of the reasons that much of the church was demolished and rebuilt after the time of the Brontës. The water the villagers used on a daily basis would have crossed this vale of contamination on the way to the pumps, and this was a major reason why the death rate was so unusually high in Haworth.
After the report was completed, there was more silence from the General Board of Health, but after yet more prompting from Patrick, at last action was taken. The cemetery was extended and trees were planted all around it. Sanitation and water supply to the village was improved, and a purpose built reservoir was created to serve Haworth. The slaughtering of animals was forbidden in all but one specific area. The deadliest days were coming to an end, but too late for Anne and her siblings, and too late for countless others whose names history has forgotten.
The greatest area of deprivation in Haworth lay through a narrow entranceway opposite the church called Gauger’s Croft, at the time spelled ‘Guager’s Croft’. This was an area of ramshackle, quickly built houses that was given the grand name of ‘Piccadilly’. It quickly became notorious as the Pick, a place where people worked and died in appalling conditions. This was the area where the villagers worked as wool combers. It was hard, laborious, unremitting work, as Babbage found: