Brontës
Page 40
Such a scenario would once have provoked a sharp retort from Charlotte and a swift turning of the tables on her brother’s abasement of her great hero. It is an indication of the profound lethargy which had her in its grasp that Charlotte did not respond or react, but accepted Branwell’s dictation of events. One spark of interest remained. In a long and dreary poem of 576 lines, completed on 19 July just before she returned to Roe Head, she depicted Zamorna on board the ship taking him into exile mourning the fate of his wife and son and being comforted by his mistress, Mina Laury, who had chosen to accompany him.99 Then, like her hero, she returned to her own, self-imposed exile at Roe Head.
The hopeless and bitter state of her defeated and exiled hero seems to have suited Charlotte’s mood in the autumn of 1836. The reluctance with which she resumed her second year as a teacher at Roe Head soon deepened into revolt. She continued to add to the diary fragments which she had jotted down in her notebook at odd moments over the past year100 but their tone became increasingly harsh and resentful. Instead of finding relief in spending her precious leisure moments in writing reflective vignettes of Angria, her impatience and frustration were vented in splenetic outbursts against her pupils. On 11 August, a few weeks into the new term, she wrote:
All this day I have been in a dream half-miserable & half-ecstatic miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly, ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. I had been toiling for nearly an hour with Miss Lister, Miss Marriott & Ellen Cook striving to teach them the distinction between an article and a substantive. The parsing lesson was completed, a dead silence had succeeded it in the school-room & I sat sinking from irritation & weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fatheaded oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?
must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned with in these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing/
Charlotte’s own quick intellect made her unsympathetic to her slower-minded pupils, so that sometimes she would almost boil with rage and frustration at their ‘asinine stupidity’. The need to keep such feelings hidden beneath the patient demeanour of the schoolmistress simply added further tension to her already taut nerves.
In the afternoon Miss E L[ister] was
Angria could still provide some solace and there were moments of quiet daydreaming, even in the classroom.
I’m just going to write because I cannot help it Wiggins might indeed talk of scriblemania if he were to see me just now encompassed by the bulls (query calves of Bashen) all wondering why I write with my eyes shut – staring, gaping hang their astonishment – A C[oo]k on one side of me E L[iste]r on the other and Miss W[oole]r in the back-ground, Stupidity the atmosphere, school-books the employment, asses the society, what in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought.103
The sound of the wind gusting round Roe Head conjured up thoughts of home:
that wind I know is heard at this moment far away on the moors at Haworth. Branwell & Emily hear it and as it sweeps over our house down the church-yard & round the old church, they think perhaps of me & Anne –
Sometimes, however, as Charlotte herself realized, the golden dream of Angria could be oppressive. One evening, lying on her bed in the school dormitory, she became so wrapt up in the scene her imagination had conjured up that she could not physically rouse herself.
I knew I was wide awake & that it was dark, & that moreover the ladies were now come into the room to get their curl-papers – they perceived me lying on the bed & I heard them talking about me. I wanted to speak – to rise – it was impossible – I felt that this was a frightful predicament – that it would not do – the weight pressed me as if some huge animal had flung itself across me. a horrid apprehension quickened every pulse I had. I must get up I thought & I did so with a start. I have had enough of morbidly vivid realizations. every advantage has its corresponding disadvantage –105
If even Angria could not bring relief, then where could Charlotte turn?
Chapter Ten
LOSING BATTLES
While Charlotte fought a losing battle to keep up a semblance of normality at Roe Head, her father was also coming under increasing pressure at Haworth. Patrick’s beloved Auxiliary Bible Society had become the latest victim in the antipathy between Baptists and Anglicans. General meetings had become impossible, due to ‘unpleasant differences between the officers and friends’, though it was still hoped to salvage something by holding a meeting sanctioned by Patrick and the Wesleyan Methodists.1 The hard-line sects were flourishing in Haworth. The Baptists had raised over £1500 to establish a school for the religious instruction of their children and the Primitive Methodists were engaged in building a brand new chapel, which was formally opened on 20 November 1836.2 Worse still, the vexed question of church rates had come to the fore again as the date of the meeting adjourned from the previous year approached. Patrick seems to have been determined to keep a low profile. He allowed a meeting to take place in the church, which was advertised by placard as an ‘opportunity of stating in vestry assembled whether they did really consider it right for one sect to tax all others to support its own religion’. He appears to have t
aken no part in the meeting, which was chaired by John Hartley, and voted almost unanimously to adjourn the laying of the 1835 rate to September 1837, despite vociferous interventions by George Taylor, one of the churchwardens. Nor did Patrick allow his churchwardens to attempt to raise a new rate for the current year.3
The softening of his attitude, which had gradually taken place over the year, was made apparent in a letter he wrote to the Leeds Mercury at the end of October. He declared once more that he had never favoured church rates in their present form but that he still considered that they were necessary as long as the church was ‘a kind of public property’. He argued that vestry meetings, which organized parish affairs, were held for the benefit of all denominations, Dissenters owned pews in the church for which they received rents and all the parish benefited from the giving out of public notices in church, the church clock and the church bells. Most telling of all, so long as Dissenters had burial places in the church and churchyard, which had to be kept in good repair, then they should make a contribution to their upkeep.4 Instead of relying on arguments from the Scriptures, Patrick had turned to the pragmatic considerations which could justify laying a rate.
Despite his defence of the system, Patrick clearly no longer desired any confrontation. A few weeks later, at the beginning of December, he quietly opened a voluntary subscription to defray the expenses of the church. If he had hoped to avoid publicity, this was denied him, for one of the Dissenters, probably John Winterbotham, who was then agitating to start an Anti-Church Rates Society in Bradford, wrote to the Leeds Mercury trumpeting ‘the Death of a Church Rate’. While taking the opportunity to praise Patrick and the Dissenting ministers for pledging themselves to a peaceful pursuit of their vocations, the anonymous author attacked Patrick’s curate, William Hodgson.
The only drawback … arises from the wild zeal and boisterous denunciations of a certain young man, who has lately assumed the gown, and who discredits his holy vocation by repeated tirades and invective against those who do not attend the place where he is permitted to officiate. Having been suddenly raised from a very humble situation in life, his head seems too weak to bear the elevation … There is nothing more seemly in young men, and especially young ministers, than modesty. There is nothing more unbecoming the pulpit than a bold, condemnatory spirit.5
This succeeded in provoking Hodgson into an indignant and defensive reply. While acknowledging his own humble birth, he emphatically denied that he had anathematized the Dissenters:
The reason, I believe, of these accusations, is my preaching on certain doctrines, which have not a place in [his] creed; which are on Ecclesiastical Establishment, Episcopacy, Infant Baptism, the use of a Liturgy, and the purity of our Formularies.6
Hodgson somewhat undermined his defence against the accusations by then submitting the same letter to the Tory Leeds Intelligencer, requesting its inclusion as ‘an exhibition of a few “pious frauds” of a Dissenter’.7
The Christmas vacation, which reunited the Brontë family at the end of December 1836, was marred when a terrible accident befell Tabby Aykroyd, their servant for the last ten years. A few days after Charlotte and Anne’s return home, Tabby had gone down the village on an errand, slipped on a patch of ice and fallen heavily. As it was dark, it was some time before she was able to attract attention and was carried into the druggist’s shop nearby. There it was discovered that she had completely shattered and dislocated her leg. No surgeon could be got to set the fracture till six o’clock the following morning, so she was brought back to the parsonage in ‘a very doubtful and dangerous state’. ‘Of course we are all exceedingly distressed at the circumstance’, Charlotte told Ellen, ‘for she was like one of our own family’. The girls rallied round, performing all her household tasks between them, with the occasional assistance of ‘a person [who] has dropped in now and then to do the drudgery’, and taking Tabby’s nursing upon themselves.8 This Aunt Branwell strongly deprecated, urging that Tabby should be sent to her sister’s house until she was fully recovered. The girls insisted that it was their duty to nurse Tabby in her old age and infirmity when she had looked after them so well for so many years. There then followed a dramatic clash of wills, Aunt Branwell urging practical difficulties and economy, the sisters urging compassion and sentiment. The war of words turned into a war of action: the girls went on strike, refusing to eat until their aunt at last gave way and allowed them the privilege of nursing Tabby back to health in their own house. Tabby remained in a very delicate state throughout the holiday, so that Charlotte was reluctantly obliged to cancel a visit by Ellen: ‘I would urge your visit yet, I would entreat and press it – but the thought comes across me “Should Tabby die while you are in the house?” I should never forgive myself –’.9 Fortunately, and probably due to the careful nursing of her former charges, Tabby did eventually recover and was able to resume most of her household duties.
Despite the extra burden of work caused by Tabby’s illness, the Christmas holidays saw a flurry of literary activity. Anne’s earliest extant poem, which, from its polished nature, was clearly not the first she had ever written, dates from this time. ‘Verses by Lady Geralda’ is also the first of many poems by both Anne and Emily depicting a typical Gondal scenario: an orphan girl lamenting the fact that the beauties of nature no longer have power to soothe her troubled spirit.
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.10
Resonant with echoes of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode, the poem is the only glimpse we have of Gondal at this time. It shows that Emily and Anne had not allowed their stories to lapse in Anne’s absence and that Gondal, like Angria, had a setting which owed at least something to the moorlands around their own beloved home.
Meanwhile, Branwell was bringing the affairs of Angria to a new climax: Northangerland’s reign of terror was coming to an end. Inspired by a powerful speech by Warner Howard Warner, those Angrians still loyal to Zamorna won a great victory over Northangerland and were now bent on redeeming Angria from his clutches.11 Branwell did not envisage Zamorna’s return from exile till the summer, but for the first time in many years, Charlotte intervened and forced the pace of events. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not the fact that Branwell had sent her beloved Zamorna off into exile which goaded her into a response, but that he had killed Zamorna’s wife, Mary Percy. She had died of grief and loneliness in exile, divorced and disgraced by her husband and ruined by her father. Branwell had described her deathbed quite movingly, in terms foreshadowing Cathy’s death in Wuthering Heights.
This was not like the death bed of her Mother there was no mingling of Heaven with earth nothing of that Angelic hope of glory, that real triumph over death This was the end of a Child of earth all whose soul and spirit were
– It does not matter where I am going I know I am going and I know from whom I am going –
Death in such a state is more terrible than
Charlotte, away at Roe Head, had not believed it possible that Branwell would kill his favourite heroine and had waited in some suspense to know whether he would actually do so.13 It had evidently taken some steeling of his nerve, though the deathbed scenes were among the best
he had ever written. ‘Reader I cannot do otherwise than drop a tear to her memory’, he wrote, ‘for recollect that I it was whose pen first brought her to your notice who from her rising to her setting have so long recorded the different phases of her glory.’14 Branwell was ruthless enough to sacrifice Mary for the effect it would have on his two protagonists, Northangerland and Zamorna: for him, it was a necessary part of their story. Charlotte, however, was appalled and dismayed by Mary’s fate. Just as she had done in their earliest childhood writings, she determined to make Mary come to life again. It was no longer acceptable to ascribe this to magical means, so Charlotte justified Mary’s resurrection by declaring that Branwell’s author, Lord Richton, had spread the rumour of Mary’s death to rouse the Angrians to greater fury against their oppressor, Northangerland. ‘In our land we take methods such as were never known in the political world before for exciting a party to our wish.’15
In the first long narrative she had written for over two years, she described how Mary had been saved from death by the brief reappearance, in disguise, of Zamorna whom she had thought drowned at sea on his voyage into exile. Having given Mary a reason to live, Zamorna then moved on to reveal himself to his faithful allies and inspire the Angrians to victory once more.16 The story is confidently told and, despite changes of scene and character, is much more closely interwoven than many of her previous efforts. This time Charlotte had no trouble choosing her subject, nor in following it through to its conclusion.
There is no doubt that Branwell regarded Charlotte as playing a very subsidiary role in the partnership. His reaction to Charlotte’s intervention was to ignore it almost completely. Mary remained dead, as Charlotte was soon forced to acknowledge, though Zamorna’s return from exile to lead his troops to victory over Northangerland does seem to have been brought forward.17