I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest sister . . . is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlour, brushing the carpet. Papa and Branwell are gone to Keighley [the nearest large town]. Aunt is upstairs in her room, and I am sitting by the table writing this.
Emily recorded people’s actions as they were happening in one of her diary papers. She also captured a trace of Tabby’s rustic accent:
Anne and I have been peeling apples for Charlotte to make an apple pudding. . . . Aunt has come into the kitchen just now and said where are your feet Anne[?] Anne answered On the floor Aunt[.] Papa opened the parlour door and gave Branwell a letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte. . . . Tabby said on my putting a pen in her face Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling [peeling] a potate[.] I answered O Dear, O Dear, O dear I will directly with that I get up, take a knife and begin pilling.
One night in June 1826, the Reverend Brontë returned from a trip to Leeds, bringing Branwell a set of toy soldiers. The next morning, Branwell took the soldiers to the bedroom that Charlotte and Emily shared. “I snatched one up and exclaimed, ‘this is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!’” Charlotte recalled years later. Emily chose one, too, and when Anne woke up, so did she. “Emily’s was a grave-looking fellow. We called him Gravey,” Charlotte said. “Anne’s was a queer little thing very much like herself. He was called Waiting Boy. Branwell chose Bonaparte.” (Branwell had read The Life of the Emperor Napoleon.) The children later renamed Gravey and Waiting Boy after two Arctic explorers, Sir William Parry and Captain John Ross.
This simple gift of wooden soldiers inspired a world of activity. The children invented intricate games, or “plays,” to be acted by their soldier characters. In the first one, “Young Men,” the soldiers conquered lands in Africa, that strange, far-off continent that the children read about in Blackwood’s Magazine. The soldiers clashed with one another for power, but they eventually united to form the “Glass Town Confederacy.” The four children were the “Genii,” who could restore any soldier to life, to have him ready for the next game.
The games grew complex as the children created more characters to play out their fantasies: kings, dukes, explorers, and elegant women for the men to love and fight for. Charlotte and Branwell imagined a kingdom called Angria, where these figures acted their dramas. Emily and Anne got tired of the small roles assigned to them by their older siblings and withdrew to start their own saga. Their imaginary adventures happened in Gondal, an island nation in the Pacific. Gondal’s ruler, King Julius, loved the beautiful but treacherous Augusta.
All four children knew how to draw, so they made maps of their territories and portraits of their favorite characters. They also wrote stories, poems, and imaginary histories of Angria and Gondal. In an action-packed story titled “The Pirate,” Branwell described a battle between one of his invented heroes, Alexander Percy, and Satan:
Crying, “I have done with thee, thou wretch”, [Percy] took the ugly heap of mortality and hurled it into the sea. When it touched the water a bright flash of fire darted from it, changed it into a vast genius of immeasurable and indefinable height and size, and seizing hold of a huge cloud with his hand, he vaulted into it, crying: “And I’ve done with thee, thou fool” and disappeared among the passing vapours.
It is easy to imagine a boy acting out scenes like this with his toy figures, speaking their words aloud and adding sound effects.
Such tiny books! Charlotte Brontë bound her childhood writings into volumes no taller than a woman’s thumb.
Charlotte wrote on tiny pages in letters so minuscule that some could be read only with a magnifying glass. She then sewed these sheets into books. She often wrote from the characters’ points of view, as if they were the real authors of the stories and poems she produced. She created historical accounts of Angria and its people, and she wrote out long scripts, imagining the poetic lines her characters would speak to each other.
Much of Branwell’s and Charlotte’s childhood writing has survived the passage of time, but most of Emily and Anne’s early Gondal chronicles were either lost or destroyed. Emily copied forty-four of her Gondal poems into a notebook, but she was already eighteen years old when she wrote the first of these. (The Brontës continued to imagine life in Gondal and Angria even after they were grown.) Emily was a gifted poet, and the beauty and emotional power of her lines can affect even readers who have never heard of Gondal:
Come, the wind may never again
Blow as now it blows for us
And the stars may never again, shine as now they shine.
Long before October returns
Seas of blood will have parted us
And you must crush the love in your heart
And I, the love in mine!
The writing and games continued undisturbed until the Reverend Brontë came down with a cold in the summer of 1830. The infection settled in his lungs, and for a time it seemed that he might die. Haworth’s minister was too strong-willed to give in to illness, though, and slowly, in the months that followed, he recovered. But being sick taught him that his life could end at any moment, and if he were to die, his children would be left without support.
For this reason, he arranged for fourteen-year-old Charlotte to go to school once more, to be prepared to teach. He sent her to Roe Head, in Mirfield, twenty miles to the southeast. Recommended by Charlotte’s godmother, an old family friend named Mrs. Atkinson, Roe Head was known as a clean place that welcomed pupils from respected families. So in January 1831, Charlotte journeyed in a covered cart to Roe Head School.
two
“Bend Inclination to Duty”
AT first, Charlotte felt sick at heart with longing for Haworth. She would steal away when the other girls went out for exercise and sit in the schoolroom’s wide bay window, crying for home. One day she thought she was alone, but another homesick new girl had sought privacy in the schoolroom, too. Ellen Nussey approached the tiny figure on the window seat and offered comfort, admitting that she needed consoling in return.
Charlotte found a lifelong friend in pretty, brown-eyed Ellen. She valued Ellen’s calm cheerfulness, writing, “When you are a little depressed it does you good to look at Ellen and know she loves you.” Charlotte would continue to suffer from spells of depression even after her homesickness faded.
“She had ever the demeanour of a born gentlewoman,” Ellen said about Charlotte. “She never seemed to me the unattractive little person others designated her.” The other girls laughed to themselves when they first saw Charlotte’s shabby green dress and crimped, old-womanish hairstyle, and heard the Irish accent she had picked up from her father. Charlotte was thin when she came to Roe Head, Ellen Nussey later recalled, so thin that she seemed “dried in.” She looked funny holding books close to her nose, but the girls soon grew used to her, and they learned to admire her quick mind.
Charlotte Brontë flourished as a student at Roe Head School from January 1831 through June 1832. The schoolroom where she and Ellen Nussey met was on the main floor, on the side of the building that had a bowed exterior.
Roe Head was a healthier, happier place than the Clergy Daughters’ School. It was a school for young ladies, where Miss Margaret Wooler and her four younger sisters taught classes in French, grammar, and geography. Their main purpose, though, was to give the girls a polishing, to make them shine in company and attract worthy husbands. This was why the pupils practiced poise and manners and refined their skills in dancing and music. Most of these girls would never have to teach. Knowing how to draw and do delicate needlework would fill idle hours when they were married and spent most of their time at home, so they perfected these accomplishments, too.
Most Victorian girls were schooled in “accomplishments” rather than knowledge. This young woman has been trained by her teachers to be skilled
at needlework. She also plays the harp and paints.
The school drew pupils from nearby industrial towns, where their fathers were prosperous mill owners. Their families belonged to the growing middle class that had money enough to stuff its homes with the heavy furniture, draperies, and carpets that were coming into style.
Affluent Victorians filled their homes with heavy, dark furniture, curios, and the many decorative items that factories had begun producing for sale.
Short, stout Miss Wooler dressed in white. She braided some of her hair into a crown on top of her head and let the rest fall to her shoulders in ringlets. “Bend inclination to duty,” she preached to the girls. In other words, a lady must stifle her instincts and do what others expected of her.
Nonsense, declared Charlotte’s other new friend, Mary Taylor, who had no intention of obeying this rule. Ellen’s friendship gave comfort, but Mary’s offered excitement. Mary was loud and fearless and loved the outdoor games that Charlotte avoided. She was independent and never shy about speaking her mind. Once, when Miss Wooler assigned her a long passage to memorize, Mary refused to do it. She chose to accept her punishment—a month of going to bed without supper—rather than waste time on such a useless task. Mary had vowed never to wed, not as long as a woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage. Women were wrong to choose husbands for financial security or a place in society, she believed. She also thought that all professions should be open to women who wanted to pursue them.
Mary had “a fine, generous soul, a noble intellect profoundly cultivated, a heart as true as steel,” Charlotte observed. Charlotte, in turn, impressed Mary with the knowledge she had acquired before coming to Roe Head. She knew “things that were out of our range altogether,” Mary said.
Studying mattered more than showy accomplishments to Charlotte Brontë, who was preparing to be a governess, not a wife. Her love of learning flourished at Roe Head. “She picked up every scrap of information concerning painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc., as if it were gold,” Mary Taylor recalled. Ellen Nussey added that “she chose in many things to do double lessons when not prevented by class arrangement or a companion.” Charlotte especially liked learning French. In the evening, she would sit on one of the school’s broad window seats, reading by the last rays of light. The other girls wondered how she could see the words with her weak eyes.
Sometimes at night, when the girls should have been going to sleep, Charlotte entertained them by telling stories. Once she invented a tale about a sleepwalker roaming the world and stepping unaware into all kinds of danger. She had him balancing atop castle walls, reaching the edge of a high cliff, and barely avoiding a deep chasm. It was “all told in a voice that conveyed more than words alone can express,” Ellen Nussey remembered. The sleepwalker’s next terrifying adventure—standing on a shaky, sky-high tower—proved too much for one listener, a girl who had recently been ill. She started to shiver uncontrollably, and the others had to summon a teacher for help.
The school year was divided into two terms that ended at Christmas and summer. Charlotte went home at the end of each term, but during briefer vacations visited friends from school. Once Branwell escorted Charlotte to the Nussey estate, called The Rydings, where Ellen lived with her widowed mother and sisters and brothers in a great house with turrets like a castle. Charlotte sat beside a brook that flowed through the grounds and walked among ancient chestnut trees that grew nearby. One of the trees had been violently split in two by a powerful bolt of lightning. This stunning picture of nature’s power imprinted itself on her mind.
Her brother enjoyed the visit, too. “Branwell,” said Ellen, “had probably never been far from home before! He was in wild ecstacy with everything.” Branwell “was then a very dear brother, as dear to Charlotte as her own soul: they were in perfect accord of taste and feeling, and it was mutual delight to be together,” Ellen observed.
Mary Taylor’s home offered different diversions. Called the Red House because it was built of brick, it rang with the voices of six high-spirited children, all close in age. Mary’s father was a cultured man who had traveled in Europe. His opinions were as strong as his daughter’s, and he loved nothing better than to argue about politics. He sometimes drew Charlotte into the debate, goading her into defending her hero, the Duke of Wellington.
Politeness required Charlotte to visit her godmother and others of her father’s friends, but she hated this duty. Her shyness made her afraid to talk, and her small size confused some people. Like other teenagers, Charlotte was eager to appear grown up. She returned to Roe Head furious after one visit because the mistress of the house had treated her like a young child.
Charlotte made such rapid progress that in only eighteen months at Roe Head, she mastered the entire curriculum. She also won the silver medal for proper manners and speech at the end of each term. The medal was a trophy that the winner possessed until the term ended, when another girl might win it. When she left the school in June 1832, Miss Wooler gave her the silver medal to keep. Charlotte went home to Haworth, happy to be living at home again with her brother and sisters.
“In one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course my life is passed,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey about her days back at Haworth. In the morning she taught Emily and Anne. She passed along to them the knowledge she had gained at Roe Head, because they, too, might need to teach for a living one day. The three sisters walked in the afternoon and spent their free time reading, drawing, and adding to the legends of Angria and Gondal. They sought inspiration at night, after their father and aunt went to bed. Then they would silently walk around the dining table, again and again, often arm in arm.
When Ellen visited the Haworth parsonage in July 1833, she saw that Emily and Anne were “inseparable companions.” Unlike Charlotte, they had never made friends with other girls. They had drawn closer together while Charlotte was away, and a year after her return they remained “in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption,” Ellen said.
Emily, at fifteen, possessed a “lithesome, graceful figure,” Ellen observed, and beautiful eyes. “Sometimes they looked grey, sometimes dark blue but she did not often look at you, she was too reserved.” Still, Ellen wrote, “One of her rare expressive looks was something to remember throughout life, there was such a depth of soul and feeling, and yet shyness of revealing herself, a strength of self-containment seen in no other.”
Anne, who was thirteen, “had lovely violet-blue eyes, fine pencilled eye-brows, a clear, almost transparent complexion,” according to Ellen. She had curls, like Aunt Branwell, but hers were real, whereas the older woman’s were part of a hairpiece.
Ellen learned where Charlotte had acquired her knack for storytelling when she met her friend’s father. White-haired and formal, he made sixteen-year-old Ellen shudder and shrink with his “strange stories . . . full of grim humour & interest.” The Reverend Brontë told eerie tales about peculiar characters living long ago in forgotten places on the moors. His odd morning habit of firing a pistol out his bedroom window alarmed Ellen even more.
Ellen discovered that the sixth member of this eccentric household, redheaded Branwell, had decided to be a painter. His father had no doubt that Branwell would become a great artist, so he hired a tutor named William Robinson to come to the parsonage and teach him to paint. Robinson was a successful portrait artist who had painted a number of famous people, including the Duke of Wellington. Charlotte loved the lessons as much as Branwell did, and for a time she spent her days drawing.
Anne Brontë, age fourteen, painted by her sister Charlotte.
Branwell also wanted to write poetry for Blackwood’s Magazine. He sent letter after letter to the editor, explaining why he should be hired. “I know that I am not one of the wretched writers of the day, I know that I possess strength to assist you beyond some of your own contributors,” he wrote. He reminded the editor that those contributors were going to die off, and younger writers would need to take
their places. “Now Sir, to you I appear writing with conceited assurance, but I am not,” he stated. “My resolution is to devote my ability to you, and for Gods sake, till you see wether or not I can serve you do not so coldly refuse my aid.” The editor never actually refused the brash eighteen-year-old’s offer; he simply ignored it.
For Charlotte, the delightful sameness of daily life in Haworth ended in the summer of 1835, when she returned to Miss Wooler’s school to teach grammar. It ended as well for Emily, who went with her this time, because the cost of a sister’s education was to be part of Charlotte’s earnings. Although they were together at Roe Head, neither sister was happy there.
Charlotte hated teaching because it stifled her mind and left her no time to write. “Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning,” she wrote in the journal that she kept at this time. Charlotte privately called her pupils “dolts.” In her journal she condemned them for lacking imagination. They also demanded too much attention. If she tried to work on her Angrian stories while they did their lessons, they were forever interrupting. On one particular day, her mind had carried her to Africa, where she envisioned a Byronic hero named Zamorna dismounting his black horse. The schoolroom disappeared, and Charlotte stood beneath a sky that was “quivering & shaking with stars.” Then she heard an annoying voice calling her back. Africa faded, and she was back at her desk, looking into a pupil’s questioning face.
The Bronte Sisters Page 2