In Search of Anne Brontë

by Nick Holland

  Branwell has left Luddenfoot and been a Tutor at Thorp Green and had much tribulation and ill health. He was very ill on Tuesday but he went with John Brown to Liverpool where he now is. I suppose, and we hope, he will be better and do better in future.3

  Branwell’s ‘illness’ of course was the family code for his drinking binges. Within a week of his return to Haworth they had become so extreme, and his behaviour so erratic, that there were fears for his physical and mental health. The sexton John Brown, Branwell’s friend and drinking partner, had seen first hand that Branwell’s drinking was getting out of control, and he needed little persuading from Patrick to take Branwell away for a few days, in the hope that the change of scenery would do him good. This was the hope also expressed in Anne’s letter, and at this point she felt confident that her brother could be weaned off of his love for wine and spirits, just as Helen feels confident about saving Huntingdon from the ravages of drink in chapter thirty of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

  I determined this [addiction to wine] should never be, as long as I had any influence left; and though I could not prevent him from taking more than was good for him, still, by incessant perseverances, by kindness and firmness, and vigilance, by coaxing, and daring, and determination – I succeeded in preserving him from absolute bondage to that detestable propensity, so insidious in its advances, so inexorable in its tyranny, so disastrous in its effects.4

  In the weeks after Branwell’s return from Liverpool, Anne may indeed have felt that they had succeeded in preventing his complete bondage to drink, but an event was about to occur that would quash all hopes of that forever. Whilst Mrs Robinson may have enjoyed her affair with Branwell on purely physical terms, as an escape from the humdrum of everyday life and a last tribute to her fading looks, Branwell harboured hopes of a different kind. He had heard how the Robinson males invariably died young, and Reverend Edmund Robinson, lord of the manor of Thorp Green, was himself often in ill health due to his explosive temper and intemperate manner. If Branwell could bide his time, he would certainly outlive the man who stood between him and his dreams. This thought recurred to him in all his moments of sobriety, even after he had been dismissed from his position.

  His drinking continued throughout the remainder of 1845 and into 1846, but while he was oblivious to life around him to the extent that he did not even know that his sisters had published a book of poetry, he had still not reached his lowest depths. He would often take to drinking in Halifax, where he would meet up with his good friend the sculptor Joseph Bentley Leyland, sometimes in company with his brother Francis Leyland, later to be a biographer of Branwell, Francis Grundy and other friends from his days with the railway. In Halifax he felt free of the confines of Haworth, free to do as he pleased without the risk of upsetting and scandalising his family. He even thought of taking this freedom to its two natural conclusions. On 28 April 1846, he wrote to Leyland and talked about plans to move abroad,5 but in other correspondence he was already talking about how tired he was of life.6

  On 26 May the event occurred for which Branwell had been waiting. Edmund Robinson had died suddenly, and now he could bring his love for Lydia into the open and even perhaps realise his ambition of marrying her. Branwell had complete faith in Lydia’s love for him, so it seemed natural that she should want to marry him as soon as a suitable period of mourning had been completed. Once more, he was completely naive of the way the world really was. It never occurred to Branwell that his deep love was unreciprocated or that the distinction in social class between them would make such a union impossible. This should not have been a shock, as the matches Mrs Robinson strived to make for her daughters showed how she viewed marriage as merely a social form to improve one’s situation in life. In this, we see that Anne understood Mrs Robinson much more than Branwell ever did.

  The Thorp Green Hall coachman was dispatched post haste to Haworth, but when Branwell went to meet him at the Black Bull, the news was not at all what he had been expecting or hoping for. The coachman brought news from Mrs Robinson saying that her late husband had left a will stating that she could not marry Branwell, and that his estate was to be passed on to his children, under the administration of trustees. One trustee was Charles Thorp, the co-founder of Durham University, who, so the coachman avowed, had promised to shoot Branwell if he ever came near Lydia Robinson again.7

  This news came as a devastating blow to Branwell. He pictured his erstwhile employer having one final laugh from beyond the grave as he prevented the union with Branwell that Lydia had so long craved. In fact, the whole story was a falsehood. Although it was not unheard of for wills at the time to contain such codicils, none such existed in the will of Edmund Robinson. The story had been invented by Lydia Robinson, possibly in collusion with Charles Thorp, to keep Branwell away from her and to stop the harassment that she was sure would ensue from him. It had all been a harmless fling to her; she could not help it if he had been unable to control his feelings in the same way. Edmund had been a useful stepping stone for Lydia Robinson, but she now had bigger fish to catch. Before long she had moved back to the Midlands of her childhood and had set her stall before the wealthy Sir Edward Dolman Scott, Member of Parliament for Lichfield. There was only one problem, Sir Edward was married. Lady Scott died in August 1848, and by November of that year, the former Lydia Robinson married Sir Edward. She was then 48, and he was 75.

  All hope was now gone for Branwell. Throughout his life he had been a fantasist, a dreamer who imagined himself as a hero on a grand scale, but now reality had so uncompromisingly intruded. This was reinforced by a string of letters to Branwell between 1846 and 1848 from both Dr Crosby, the Thorp Green physician who was well known to Branwell, and Anne Marshall, who had been a friend of his sister Anne.8 The message was always the same, there is no chance of a reunion with Lydia, she cannot see you, she is rebuilding her life. Branwell now embarked on a scheme not to rebuild his life but to end it.

  Incapable of doing things in small measures, he now took to drinking on an epic, Byronic scale, and an old friend was added to his vices, as he returned to the solace of opium. In this first stage of his decline, he could still be rakish and charming. His Irish lilt and natural eloquence and ebullience made him a favoured raconteur at the Black Bull and the King’s Head, and when further afield at his favourite Halifax watering holes he would often turn his questionable charms on the ladies. In a letter to Ellen of this time, Charlotte warns Ellen, then planning a visit, that she should be prepared to notice a change in Branwell, but she need not be afraid of his conduct towards her. If anything, Ellen is warned, she will find him ‘smooth as oil’.9

  As his drinking continued to gain in ferocity, however, and as opium addiction once more took hold, he started to lose his looks, eloquence and confidence. This is something that Branwell had been afraid of, but by now he was powerless to resist. Once more Anne reflects the dangers of drinking in the words of Huntingdon:

  Don’t think, Helen, that I’m a tippler; I’m nothing at all of the kind, and never was, and never shall be. I value my comfort far too much. I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other; besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity – and moreover, drinking spoils one’s good looks.10

  This was a promise that both Huntingdon and Branwell made, and yet both would fail to adhere to their own warning. By 1847, drink and opium were the only things of importance in Branwell’s life, other than a half memory of a woman who had done him wrong, whether knowingly or unknowingly. He began to suffer the effects of delirium tremens, often fainting upon bar floors and having fits. When not drinking he slept during the day, and his nights were punctuated by screaming fits where he would rail against his visions and the terrifying demons he saw before him.

  It was under these most trying of conditions that Anne and her sisters composed their masterpieces, a
nd yet Anne could never shake off her love for her poor, fallen brother. Charlotte had by now washed her hands of Branwell, and for more than two years refused to speak to him, but his younger sisters could not turn off their emotions in such a way. Emily, by this time the strongest person in the parsonage, would regularly wait up for Branwell’s homecomings, carrying him up the stairs in the wee small hours.

  Anne, too, would like to look in upon Branwell when she retired to her bed, and on one occasion this saved his life. Branwell was beyond the point where he had the patience to read, but one night he attempted to look at a periodical by candlelight, with inevitable consequences. John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer well known to the Brontës, related the story as he heard it. Anne, upon looking into his room, had found that Branwell was asleep but had set his bed on fire. Anne tried to drag her brother out of the bed, but he was a dead weight and would not wake up. With the flames taking hold, Anne ran down the stairs and whispered to Emily for assistance. Emily hauled Branwell out of the bed and threw him into a corner, before she and Anne extinguished the flames with jugs of water.

  They tried to hide this incident from their father, but it was impossible, and it led to him taking a typically brave decision. Branwell, he admitted ruefully, was not safe to be left on his own, so he would have to share a room with him. From here onwards Anne and her sisters often feared for their father’s life, with Branwell screaming threats at his father and promising that in the morning at least one of them would be dead. Nevertheless, Patrick stood firm, although it meant that he was often completely deprived of sleep.

  In his more lucid moments, Branwell would write to his friends Leyland and Grundy, bemoaning his ill health and wishing he could be dead. These letters show, as well as tell, of his illness.11 The script often changes wildly in mid letter, and its untidiness reflects the confusion in his mind. His family had to face the facts: Branwell was not only a hopeless addict, he was also on the edge of insanity.

  His daily threats and curses were not the only strain Branwell would place on his family. He would beg money off anyone who could spare it and then immediately spend it all on gin and opium. He ran up huge debts at Halifax inns, and on more than one occasion debt collectors turned up at the door to the parsonage. Patrick had no option but to make the payment or see his son be taken away to the debtor’s gaol in York. We also read, from letters by both Branwell and Charlotte, that he was also getting money from another unspecified source, the ‘old source’ as it was called. This could have been from the Freemasons, as Branwell had been a member of Haworth’s Three Graces masonic lodge, but is more likely to have been from Lydia Robinson herself, sent via the auspices of Dr Crosby.

  In the midst of this domestic chaos, Anne still found time to write one of her most poignant and reflective poems. ‘The Narrow Way’ is dated 24 April 1848 and has become a popular hymn. She starts by exhorting:

  Believe not those who say

  The upward path is smooth,

  Lest thou should stumble in the way

  And faint before the truth.

  She finishes by revealing the secret of true happiness:

  To labour and to love,

  To pardon and endure,

  To lift thy heart to God above,

  And keep they conscience pure,

  Be this thy constant aim,

  Thy hope and thy delight,

  What matters who should whisper blame,

  Or who should scorn or slight?

  What matters, if thy God approve,

  And if within thy breast,

  Thou feel the comfort of his love,

  The earnest of his rest?12

  After this poem came her visit to London, and then to fulfil the agreement she had made with Thomas Newby, the composition of the famous preface to the second edition of her best selling novel. It took her nine days to write, as Anne wrestled with how much she would reveal and how much she would conceal. Finally she reached the same conclusion she always had, let all be revealed:

  I would not be understood to suppose that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace with his few profligate companions I have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I know that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.13

  For Anne, watching her brother’s decline was especially painful. Branwell made clear, amidst his incoherent ramblings, that his degradation was all down to Mrs Robinson, and while he could never wish her ill, he did wish he had never met her. The plain truth of this point could not be lost on a soul as sensitive as Anne. Without her efforts, he never would have met the cause of his downfall; she therefore saw herself as a sinner as much as her brother. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall she describes how Huntingdon is unable to give up drink and how this finally kills him.14 While writing these dread-filled scenes, she may have harboured some faint hopes that Branwell could be saved, but fact was about to emulate fiction.

  By September 1848, Branwell’s condition had greatly deteriorated. He would spend days on end in bed and was eating so little that he had become thin and shrunken. In the third week of September his friend Francis Grundy, who had grown worried at Branwell’s failure to accept an invitation to meet him in Skipton, rode to Haworth and sent a message to the parsonage inviting Branwell to dine with him at The Black Bull. To Grundy’s surprise it was Reverend Brontë who first came to meet him. Patrick thanked Grundy for the kindness shown to his son but warned him to expect a great change in Branwell.

  The warning was well warranted. Before long Branwell shuffled and stumbled into the inn that he had so often frequented. Grundy described the appalling sight:

  A head appeared. It was a mass of red, unkempt uncut hair, wildly floating around a great, gaunt forehead; the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the thin white lips not trembling but shaking, the sunken eyes, once small now glaring with the light of madness.15

  This monstrous Branwell mumbled about being forced out of his bed, but a glass of brandy from Grundy restored him to something approaching his old self. He ate a meal, saying that it was the first he had enjoyed in many days. He also explained that he knew his death was coming, and that he was glad of it. This death, he professed one last time, would be entirely due to his doomed love for Lydia Robinson.

  A chilling moment then occurred, showing the danger that Branwell was to himself and everyone around him. He produced from his sleeve a long knife that he kept hidden away. He revealed that he thought the invitation had actually come from Satan and that he had planned to stab whoever was waiting for him until Grundy’s kind voice had restored some sanity to him just in time.

  Grundy said goodbye to his hopeless friend, but as he left he turned and took one last look up the hill. Branwell was stood, stooped and shaking in the road, tears streaming down his face. He last walked the streets of Haworth on 22 September 1848, presumably to obtain more gin or opium. He could not mount the step leading from Main Street to Church Lane, and William Brown, brother of his friend John, had to carry him back to the parsonage. The next day, Branwell could not get out of bed, and the surgeon John Wheelhouse was called for. He pronounced it a hopeless case: Branwell was in the last days of his life.

  Despite his decline over the previous twelve months, this came as a surprise to all concerned. Patrick, wiping away tears, began an unrelenting vigil by his bedside. Branwell had long since spurned any form of religious belief, yet now his father exhorted him to return to the faith and repent his sins while he still could. Anne and Emily were by his bedside, wiping the sweat from his fevered brow throughout the hours that passed by, and even Charlotte was now in attendance. At last, on 24 September, a change occurred. A peace seemed to descend upon Branwell, and he talked of how he wanted God’s forgiveness and how he was sorry for the wrong he had done to his sisters, the sisters that he truly lov
ed.

  This was the first death that Anne had witnessed, and it was a moment of both terror and triumph. Her prayers had been answered at last, as she knew that they would. Patrick offered one final prayer for God’s forgiveness, and Branwell was heard to whisper ‘amen’.16 With his last iota of strength, he pulled his starved body from the bed and collapsed into his father’s arms. The man who had borne such promise, such expectation, had died aged 31.

  Notes

  1. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 1, p.507

  2. Letter to Ellen Nussey, 26 January 1848, manuscript now held in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth

  3. The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, p.492

  4. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, pp.204–5

  5. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.238

  6. ‘I am too hard to die and too wretched to live.’ Branwell’s letter to Joseph Bentley Leyland of June 1846.

  7. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.238

  8. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.494

  9. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 1, p.524

  10. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, p.151

  11. Manuscripts of Branwell’s later letters, showing the variance in handwriting, are held in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth

  12. Fraser’s Magazine, December 1848

  13. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, p.4

  14. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, pp.344–5

  15. Orel, Harold, The Brontës: Interviews and Recollections, p.56

  16. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 2, p.124

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