Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  I had fire in my bedroom evening and morning – two wax candles – &c. &c. and Mrs S & her daughters seemed to look on me with a mixture of respect and alarm – but all this is changed – that is to say the attention and politeness continue as great as ever – but the alarm and estrangement are quite gone – she treats me as if she liked me and I begin to like her much – kindness is a potent heart winner.60

  Of George Smith himself, Charlotte would only say ‘he pleases me much: I like him better even as a son and brother than as a man of business’, a comment that instantly drove Ellen to romantic speculations which Charlotte just as quickly quashed.61 The first four or five days in the ‘big Babylon’, as Charlotte termed London, passed in ‘a sort of whirl … for changes, scenes and stimulus which would be a trifle to others, are much to me’. Her days were spent in sightseeing, her evenings ‘in society’, an arrangement which swiftly wore down her slender stock of animal spirits. ‘Nothing charmed me more during my stay in Town’, she later wrote to Miss Wooler, ‘than the pictures I saw – one or two private collections of Turner’s best water-colour drawings were indeed a treat: his later oil-paintings are strange things – things that baffle description.’62

  She was also taken to see the great actor, William Charles Macready, whose performances in Shakespearean tragedy were the talk of London. Charlotte saw him twice, in Macbeth and Othello, and was not impressed. ‘I astounded a dinner-party by honestly saying I did not like him’, she told Miss Wooler with the quiet satisfaction of one who was proud of her dissent. ‘It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting – anything more false and artificial – less genuinely impressive than his whole style I could scarcely have imagined.’ She had added to the general consternation by attacking the stage system itself: actors could manage farce well enough but they knew nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare and the theatre was therefore a failure. ‘I said so – and by so saying produced a blank silence – a mute consternation.’63

  Williams took her on a tour of the new Houses of Parliament and later invited her for a quiet evening at his home, where she was at last introduced to his wife, who had been ill on her previous visit, and renewed her acquaintance with his daughters.64 The Wheelwrights, too, though Charlotte seems to have abandoned her plans to stay with them, invited her to lunch at their home.65 Though grateful for these kindnesses, her first meetings with the stars of the literary firmament meant far more to Charlotte than the renewing of old friendships.

  The highlight of her stay was the Smiths’ dinner party on the evening of 4 December when, for the first time, she came face to face with her hero, Thackeray. She had spent the whole day in a mixture of dread and anticipation, too nervous even to eat. By the time Thackeray was announced at seven in the evening, she had been fasting since breakfast, and was faint from hunger. ‘Excitement and exhaustion together made savage work of me that evening’, she told Ellen miserably. Recalling that meeting later, it seemed unreal: ‘when Mr Thackeray was announced and I saw him enter, looked up at his tall figure, heard his voice the whole incident was truly dream-like – I was only certain it was true because I became miserably destitute of self-possession … Had I not been obliged to speak, I could have managed well, but it behoved me to answer when addressed and the effort was torture – I spoke stupidly’.66 Thackeray himself seems to have been touched by Charlotte’s evident nervousness, her vulnerability emphasized by her tiny size compared to his own great height and bulk. What he remembered was ‘the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes’, declaring that ‘An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterize the woman.’67 He was later to be a victim of that honesty but, on this occasion, Charlotte was so overawed by her ‘Titan’s’ presence that she remained subdued and silent. Writing to her father the next day, she gave him a graphic account of that evening.

  yesterday I saw Mr Thackeray. He dined here with some other gentlemen. He is a very tall man – above six feet high, with a peculiar face – not handsome – very ugly indeed – generally somewhat satirical and stern in expression, but capable also of a kind look. He was not told who I was – he was not introduced to me – but I soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles and when we all rose to go down to dinner – he just stept quietly up and said ‘Shake hands’ so I shook hands – He spoke very few words to me – but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way.68

  Thackeray’s satirical conversation both fascinated and baffled Charlotte, who found it almost impossible to tell when her hero was joking. When the gentlemen entered the drawing room, for instance, he asked her ‘if she had perceived the secret of their cigars’. Charlotte answered literally and then realized, as several people smiled, that Thackeray had been alluding to a passage in Jane Eyre. ‘It is better – I should think to have him for a friend than an enemy –’, she told her father, ‘for he is a most formidable looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen – all he says is most simple but often cynical, harsh and contradictory.’69

  Five days later, on Sunday, 9 December, Charlotte paid a visit to another of the great and equally formidable literary figures of the day, Harriet Martineau, a novelist and author of essays on political economy. Charlotte herself seems to have requested the interview on learning that Miss Martineau was staying with her cousins, Richard and Lucy Martineau, in Westbourne Street, just round the corner from the Smiths’ residence. Charlotte had long admired Miss Martineau, chiefly on account of her novel Deerbrook. In the letter accompanying the copy of Shirley she had sent her, Charlotte had inadvertently referred to herself as ‘she’ but crossed this out and replaced it with ‘he’. This mistake only confirmed Miss Martineau in her belief that ‘a certain passage in “Jane Eyre”, about sewing on brass rings, could have been written only by a woman or an upholsterer’. She had therefore responded by addressing her reply externally to ‘Currer Bell Esqre’ but had begun her letter ‘Madam’. Charlotte had not reciprocated by admitting Miss Martineau to her confidence as she had Mrs Gaskell, so when ‘Currer Bell’s’ note arrived the Martineaus were still no wiser. The note expressed ‘a very strong wish to see you’ and declared, ‘Do not think this request springs from mere curiosity. I hope it has its origin in a better feeling. It would grieve me to lose this chance of seeing one whose works have so often made her the subject of my thoughts.’70

  In great excitement, the Martineaus invited ‘Currer Bell’ to join them for an early tea at six o’clock and spent the interval trying to guess what their visitor would be like. Harriet, who was very deaf and relied on an ear trumpet, insisted that her cousins should shout the name to her when the visitor was announced so that she was not left in doubt a moment longer than necessary. Lucy Martineau described Charlotte’s entrance in a letter to her son the next day:

  I lighted plenty of candles that we might see what manner of man or womankind it was, & we sat in wondering expectation … The hand pointed to 5 minutes past six, & we said it is a hoax after all! When lo! a carriage stopped at the door, the bell rung, and Yelland flung open the door announcing – –! & in came a neat little woman, a very little sprite of a creature nicely dressed; & with nice tidy bright hair – Tho’ the cat was out of the bag here, we are bound not to tell her name, for she does not wish it to be made generally known, sooner than it of necessity will be – & that will not be long I expect. Her voice and way of speaking, somehow in the upper part of her nose, is extremely like the Miss Mitchells …71

  Harriet Martineau herself thought Charlotte ‘the smallest creature I had ever seen (except at a fair) and her eyes blazed’. Like Lewes, and possibly through him, the Martineaus had heard the gossip identifying ‘Currer Bell’ as Charlotte Brontë and therefore, when her name was announced, they already knew something of her history. What Harriet Martineau had not anticipated was a moment she graphically described in her Autobiography.

  When she was seated by me on the sofa, she cast up at me such a look, – so loving, so appea
ling, – that, in connexion with her deep mourning dress, and the knowledge that she was the sole survivor of her family, I could with the utmost difficulty return her smile, or keep my composure. I should have been heartily glad to cry.72

  After tea, the two authoresses were left alone together and discussed the reviews of Charlotte’s books, ‘the little sprite’ going ‘red all over with pleasure’ when Miss Martineau declared Jane Eyre to be a first-rate book. Their hosts rejoined them a couple of hours later, Lucy Martineau reporting that ‘she was so pleasant & so naive, that is to say so innocent and un Londony that we were quite charmed with her … Her age we imagined to be about 32, some of us think younger, some older.’73

  The news that ‘Currer Bell’ had visited Harriet Martineau spread like wildfire. Lucy Martineau’s already exaggerated version of Charlotte’s life – ‘This is her 1st visit to London, & she lives in a most retired part of England, never seeing any body, & her Father has not slept out of his own/ house for the last 20 years’ – was further garbled in the telling, though at least the Martineaus preserved the secret of Charlotte’s name. Thackeray, however, despite the delicate discretion he had shown at their first meeting, did not, and so Charlotte Brontë was unmasked before the literary coteries of London.74

  ‘I get on quietly –’, Charlotte told her father, ‘most people know me I think, but they are far too well-bred to shew that they know me – so that there is none of that bustle or that sense of publicity I dislike.’75 On the last night of her visit, the Smiths held another dinner party in her honour to which they invited seven gentlemen, including the five literary critics of The Times, Athenaeum, Examiner, Spectator and Atlas. Charlotte had fortified herself morally and physically for the occasion by lunching with the Wheelwrights so that she was able to await the eight o’clock dinner with resignation. Nevertheless, when it came to actually facing the ‘literary Rhadamanthi … Men more dreaded in the world of letters than you can conceive’ over dinner, she abandoned the prominent place set for her at the bottom of the table and went to sit next to the comforting and protective Mrs Smith.76

  Among the eminent critics present were John Forster, editor of The Examiner, and Henry Chorley, the literary and musical reviewer of the Athenaeum, but it was the presence of someone from The Times which must have caused Charlotte most anguish. The Times had published its review on 7 December, while she was in London, and it was one of the most overtly hostile she had yet received. Describing Shirley as very clever, as a matter of course’, the reviewer had then gone on to lambast the story as ‘commonplace and puerile’, the characters as ‘creatures of the author’s brain – certainly not of our every-day world’ and the dialogue as ‘such as no mortal lovers ever spoke, or, we trust, ever will speak in Miss Currer Bell’s books again’. At the end of an extremely sarcastic notice, the critic had dismissed the book as ‘at once the most high flown and the stalest of fictions’. Not surprisingly, the morning that this review appeared The Times unaccountably disappeared from the Smiths’ morning room. Charlotte was not to be fooled, and quietly insisted that Mrs Smith should show her the paper. Mrs Smith took up her work while Charlotte read the review, but she could not help observing the tears stealing down her guest’s face and falling into her lap.77 Later, telling Miss Wooler about her dinner with the critics, Charlotte remarked with something like contempt, ‘some of them had been very bitter foes in print but they were prodigiously civil face to face –; these gentlemen seemed infinitely grander, more pompous, dashing, shewy than the few authors I saw…’78 She liked John Forster, who would later, and without her knowledge, play such an important part in her life, but described the distance between his ‘loud swagger’ and Thackeray’s ‘simple port’ as being like the distance between Shakespeare’s writing and Macready’s acting. It was Henry Chorley, however, who fascinated her: he was a ‘peculiar specimen’ and she was unsure whether to react to him with utter contempt and aversion or, for the sake of latent good, to forgive his obvious evil. ‘One could well pardon his unpleasant features, his strange voice – even his very foppery and grimace – if one found these disadvantages connected with living talent and any spark of genuine goodness – If there is nothing more than acquirement, smartness and the affectation of philanthropy –’, she added sardonically, ‘Chorley is a fine creature.’79

  One of the good things to emerge from this meeting with her critics was that Charlotte lost her awe of them. Having met them, observed their own failings and found them to be mortal after all, she would in future no longer feel any obligation to be bound by their judgement. The evening passed off better than she had expected. She was able to endure the unaccustomed length of the dinner ‘quite courageously’ and was not too overwrought to converse. It was only when she got to bed and was unable to sleep that she discovered how much their presence and conversation had excited her. Next day she was so worn out that, having said her farewells to the Smiths and set off for home, she was obliged to break her journey overnight at Derby and spend the night at an inn.80 She reached home on Saturday afternoon, 15 December, to find her father and the servants all well. On the Monday morning she wrote her thank-you letters to Laetitia Wheelwright, Mrs Smith and, most especially, George Smith. After telling him how much his mother’s ‘considerate attention and goodness’ had enhanced her visit, she added:

  As to yourself – what can I say? Nothing. And it is as well: words are not at all needed: very easy is it to discover that with you to gratify others is to gratify yourself; to serve others is to afford yourself a pleasure. I hope this may long be the case, and I wish the Leigh Hunts and the Jameses may never spoil your nature. I suppose you will experience your share of ingratitude and encroachment – but do not let them alter you. Happily they are the less likely to do this because you are half a Scotchman and therefore must have inherited a fair share of prudence to qualify your generosity, and of caution to protect your benevolence.

  Currer Bell bids you farewell for the present

  CB–81

  This curiously formal letter, so different in style and tone from the ones sent to his mother and Laetitia Wheelwright, was obviously carefully drafted before being sent and is all the more revealing for that, suggesting an anxiety to please and impress. The use of her ‘Currer Bell’ pseudonym was significant too, for, as we shall see, George Smith was the only one of her correspondents with whom she continued to use it consistently. The masculine nom-de-plume freed her from the constraints that would normally be expected in letters between a young unmarried man and woman and enabled her to write in a flirtatious way wholly inappropriate to the spinster daughter of a clergyman.

  The easy and teasing relationship that had developed between George Smith and his authoress during her fortnight in London was amply illustrated in the letters which followed. On 26 December, for instance, she wrote:

  My dear Sir

  Your note reminded me of the ‘cross portrait’; it is exceedingly wayward. You shall have the full benefit of the character you give of yourself; I am willing to look on you as a ‘hard-headed and close-fisted man of business’, only – remember – your conduct must be consistent with the claim you prefer to these epithets; if you are ‘close-fisted’, shut your hand against Currer Bell, give him no more books …82

  George Smith’s ‘man of business’ image was to be a shared joke which would recur frequently in future correspondence. The whole basis of their new intimacy was revealed in the same letter: ‘one should study human Nature under all aspects’, Charlotte told her publisher, ‘one should see one’s friends, for instance, in Cornhill as well as in Westbourne-Place; one should hear them discuss “discounts” and “per-centages” as well as converse at their own fireside’. As a sample of this intimacy, she gave him a tongue-in-cheek description of the proceedings of what she archly called a group of gentlemen commissioned to choose ladies’ bonnets for East Indian exportation.

  You do not know the anecdote, but it is quite authentic, and the little circumstance
to which it refers took place in the City – not far from C—h—ll. The bonnets were carefully chosen, and subsequently – with a conscientious desire to have all right – they were tried on. and judgement duly passed as to their merits. Imagination cannot resist the impulse to picture this scene – it rises before her, and she looks at it with delighted eyes. She sees a back-room crowded with bonnet-boxes; she sees three umpires whom she knows well; P— stands in the back-ground waiting to pack. Opinions vary and tastes differ just sufficiently to give interest to the discussion. A gentianella blue satin is found most becoming to Mr T—y—r; Mr W—m’s artist’s eye finds a special/ charm in the rich tint of a ‘chapeau grenat’ (anglice a garnet-coloured velvet bonnet) while Mr G—e S—th divides his preference between the prettiest little pink drawn-silk and the neatest white chip with a single drooping ostrich feather.

  Here ensues the packing scene –. P— is now the principal figure – and he is beheld – not without anguish – applying to fabrics of satin, velvet, chip and straw those principles of compression and compactness on which he acts with such skill and success in the stowage of books and stationary.

  There is a third scene – the unpacking at Calcutta or elsewhere – but from hence Imagination turns her face with dismay and covers her eyes with her wings83

  Writing again to George Smith on 15 January, Charlotte teasingly forbore to thank him for sending a replacement copy of a book that had been lost in the post. ‘I leave the correction of such proceedings to the “man-of-business” within you’, she told him, ‘on the “close-fisted” Head of the Establishment in Cornhill devolves the duty of reprimanding Mr G—e S—th; they may settle accounts between themselves – while Currer Bell looks on and wonders but keeps out of the melée.’ Assuring him that Caroline Helstone had no original and was ‘a native of Dreamland, and as such can have neither voice nor presence except for the fancy’, she added, ‘N.B. that last sentence is not to be read by the “Man of business”; it sounds much too bookish.’84 Clearly the relationship with George Smith, even when conducted only by letter, added a much-needed sparkle to Charlotte’s life.