Brontës
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marrow of my bones: in her some fiend has certainly taken up an incarnate home. She is not a woman – she is a snake – she is the—.72
George Smith eventually recovered his presence of mind and interposed; Thackeray made the necessary, ‘half-humorous’ apologies and the parting was a friendly one. As Smith commented, Thackeray had roused the hidden fire in Charlotte’s soul and was badly scorched himself as a result.67
The same day, Charlotte paid her first visit to the Crystal Palace, Sir Joseph Paxton’s enormous glass edifice in Hyde Park, housing the first international ‘Great Exhibition’ which had been opened to the public by Queen Victoria on 1 May. Writing to her father, Charlotte described it as ‘a mighty Vanity Fair … It was very fine – gorgeous – animated – bewildering – but I liked Thackeray’s lecture better’. On Saturday, Charlotte went to see the exhibition at Somerset House, which proved something of a disappointment: ‘about half a dozen of the pictures are good and interesting – the rest of little worth’. The following day, Sunday, she went to hear an afternoon sermon by the great Swiss Protestant preacher, Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigne: ‘it was pleasant – half sweet – half sad – and strangely suggestive to hear the French language once more.’68 This flurry of activity during the first few days of Charlotte’s trip to London was hardly the ‘quiet and obscure’ visit she had described to Mrs Gaskell. Nevertheless, it set the pattern for what was to become the busiest and most public of all Charlotte’s visits.
There were four further visits to the Great Exhibition. The second, a week after the first, impressed Charlotte more profoundly. ‘Its grandeur does not consist in one thing’, she told her father, ‘but in the unique assemblage of all things – Whatever human industry has created – you find there’. The display of manufactured goods was so vast and so varied that it recalled the Arabian Nights or even her own Angrian creations to mind.
It may be called a Bazaar or a Fair – but it is such a Bazaar or Fair as eastern Genii might have/ created. It seems as if magic only could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the Earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus – with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect.
Thirty thousand people visited the exhibition that day and Charlotte herself spent three hours there, returning to Gloucester Terrace ‘very sufficiently bleached and broken in bits’ by the experience.69
Another visit was remarkable only for the fact that Charlotte saw the ex-royal family of France there, and another for the kind attentions of her escort, Sir David Brewster, the Scottish physicist who had invented the kaleidoscope and was one of the foremost scientists of the day. Though Charlotte had rather dreaded his scientific explanations, he spent two hours pointing out the most remarkable curiosities on display and giving information kindly and simply without being asked.70 Charlotte was privileged to be able to visit the Great Exhibition so many times and in such company but in retrospect she decided it was not much to her taste. ‘I never was able to get up any raptures
Appealing more to Charlotte’s heart, and therefore being more to her taste, were two visits to the theatre. Previously she had seen only opera, which left her cold, and the mannered acting of Macready, which she despised. This time, however, she went to the French Theatre to hear and see ‘Rachel’, the thirty-one-year-old actress, Elisa Felix, who was the most famous French actress of the day. On the first occasion, Rachel was taking the title role in Adrienne Lecouvreur by Gabriel Legouvé and Augustin Scribe. ‘I have seen Rachel’, Charlotte wrote in awed tones to Amelia Taylor, ‘ – her acting was something apart from any other acting it has come in my way to witness – her soul was in it – and a strange soul she has – I shall not discuss it.’ Two weeks later, Charlotte saw Rachel again, this time in one of her most famous roles, as the tragic heroine Camilla in Corneille’s classic play, Horace: ‘a wonderful sight –’, she told Ellen,
terrible as if the earth had cracked deep at your feet and revealed a glimpse of hell[”] – I shall never forget it – she made me shudder to the
In that character, Charlotte declared, ‘I shall never forget her – she will come to me in sleepless nights again and yet again.’ She would also provide rich material for Villette where Charlotte would portray her as the actress Vashti, ‘Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate’. ‘She and Thackeray are the two living things that have a spell for me in this great London’, Charlotte told Amelia Taylor, ‘– and one of these is sold to the Great Ladies – and the other – I fear – to Beelzebub.’73
Charlotte’s irritation with Thackeray grew more marked over the period of her stay. She was particularly put out when he deferred his next lecture because ‘the Duchesses and Marchionesses have petitioned him to put it off on account of Ascot Races – wearisome selfish seraphim that they are’. It was anathema to her that she should be deprived of the treat of hearing him lecture again simply on the whim of the women of fashion. Likewise, she was not impressed when he was invited to dine at the Smiths’ and left early because the Duchess of Norfolk, the Marchioness of Londonderry, Lady Chesterfield and Lady Clanricarde were going to the Queen’s fancy dress ball and wanted ‘their pet and darling’ to see them in their costumes. Nevertheless, Charlotte still prolonged her visit to the last possible minute in order to hear one more lecture from Thackeray: ‘Nor was I disappointed; on the theme of Fielding – he put forth his great strength – and though I could not agree, I was forced to admire.’74
On 16 June, Charlotte went to hear another lecture which also fulfilled her expectations: Cardinal Wiseman addressing the Roman Catholic Society of St Vincent de Paul. All her prejudices came to the fore as she gleefully described the cardinal to her father.
He is a big portly man something of the shape of Mr Morgan; he has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin; he has a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it. He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite … The Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher. The audience seemed to look up to him as to a god.
Even the ‘bevy of inferior priests’ surrounding him were ‘very dark-looking and sinister men’ and the speeches, naturally, all turned on the necessity of straining every nerve to make converts to Popery.75 Given her reaction to this meeting, it was perhaps surprising that Charlotte later attended the Spanish Ambassador’s Chapel to observe Cardinal Wiseman holding a confirmation. Having gone to be disgusted and outraged she was not disappointed: ‘The whole scene was impiously theatrical’, she wrote with scorn.’76
The strain of all the excitement and activity began to tell. After two weeks in London, Charlotte began to suffer a series of debilitating nervous headaches. Writing to Ellen one morning in ‘an inexpressibly flat state’ she complained of two days of continuous headache ‘which grew at last rampant and violent – ended with excessive sickness – and this morning I am better but quite weak and washy. I hoped to leave my headaches behind me at Haworth – but it seems I brought them carefully packed in my trunk and very much have they been in my way since I came.’
I cannot boast that London has agreed with me well this time – the oppression of frequent headache – sickness and a low tone of spirits has poisoned many moments which might otherwise have been pleasant – Sometimes I have felt this hard and been tempted to murmur at Fate which condemns me to comparative silence and solitude for eleven months in the year – and in the twelveth while offering social enjoyment takes away the vigour and cheerfulness which should turn it to account.77
In such a mood, Charlotte had seen no reason to further spoil her pleasure by announcing her arri
val to the Kay Shuttleworths who were also in London for the season. Nevertheless, Sir James soon tracked her down and at first was ‘disposed to be much hurt’ that Charlotte had not told him or visited him. With characteristic energy, he tried to sweep her off at once to stay at his house, but he met his match in Mrs Smith who recounted Charlotte’s engagements and made it clear that such a move was out of the question. Charlotte thought she had ‘got off’ with a promise to visit for a day, but was soon proved wrong. ‘Since Sir J.K.S. discovered that I was in London’, she wrote wearily to Ellen, ‘– I have had precious little time to myself.’78
One Monday in particular left her absolutely drained and exhausted. She was summoned to breakfast at ten o’clock with Samuel Rogers, the eighty-eight-year-old ‘patriarch poet’, who had been a friend of Wordsworth, Scott and Byron. This was ‘a most calm refined and intellectual treat’ for though Rogers held regular breakfasts for celebrities, he never invited more than three guests. On this occasion Charlotte shared the honours with a relation of Lady Kay Shuttleworth, the beautiful Mrs Davenport, and Lord Glenelg. After breakfast, Sir David Brewster arrived to take her to the Great Exhibition and after two hours there, ‘when, as you may suppose – I was very tired’, she was escorted to Lord Westminster’s for a further two-hour private viewing of his splendid art gallery.79 While such arrangements did credit to Sir James’s wish to entertain his unwilling guest, they took little account of her lack of stamina.
It was not surprising, then, that Charlotte turned down a number of invitations while she was in London. Thackeray had two or three times pressed her to allow him to introduce her to his great lady friends, but Charlotte had no inclination to be patronized by society hostesses. The Marquis of Westminster, whose pictures she viewed, invited her to a great party, but this she ‘resolutely declined’.80 Richard Monckton Milnes, whom she had met at Thackeray’s lecture, invited her to his house in Pall Mall, but Charlotte declared she had ‘laid down for myself the rule of not going out anywhere during my stay in Town’ and could not infringe that rule. It must have been something of an embarrassment, therefore, when she met him again at the Kay Shuttleworths’ after Sir James bullied her into going to dinner there.81 Only Mrs Gore, the prolific novelist who had presented Charlotte with a copy of her book The Hamiltons the previous year, received a more regretful refusal: ‘if the power had been mine to comply … the will was certainly not wanting’.82
Mrs Smith had been Charlotte’s constant companion on her many outings because George Smith had been too preoccupied with business to be the assiduous escort he had been on previous occasions. ‘Mr S. is somewhat changed in appearance’, Charlotte wrote to Ellen:
– he looks a little older, darker and more care-worn – his ordinary manner is graver – but in the evening his spirits flow back to him – things and circumstances seem here to be as usual – but I fancy there has been some crisis in which his energy and filial affection have sustained them all – this I judge from seeing that Mother and Sisters are more peculiarly bound to him than ever and that his slightest wish is an unquestioned law.83
Charlotte’s acute sensitivity to atmosphere had not betrayed her. Though she was unaware of the facts, she had suspected from the start that there was more to James Taylor’s sudden departure to India than met the eye. What she did not know was that George Smith had been having problems with his quondam senior partner, Patrick Stewart, who ran the firm’s foreign agency. In 1848, Smith had discovered that Stewart had been defrauding the firm and had brought it close to bankruptcy. Not wishing to cause a public scandal, Smith had refrained from prosecution and kept Stewart on, but without a partnership or financial responsibility. This unsatisfactory state of affairs had been allowed to drift on until Stewart’s friends persuaded him to take a job in Calcutta. Taylor’s appointment seems to have been tied in with this as the firm needed someone it could trust to run the lucrative India trade. His departure placed even more pressure on George Smith, however, and more than once during Charlotte’s visit he was detained in the office till three in the morning.84 The occasions when he was free were therefore doubly precious.
Towards the end of Charlotte’s stay she had two outings with George Smith, a day in Richmond with his family85 and, more remarkably, an expedition with him alone to visit a phrenologist in the Strand who pursued the then fashionable vogue for reading character from the bumps and indentations in the cranium. The visit to Dr Browne was paid anonymously, the pair adopting the names of Mr and Miss Fraser, and the resulting analysis of their characters was to provide a fertile subject for future repartee. Like most pseudo-sciences, phrenology had its believers, including Charlotte, who were prepared to overlook the errors in recognizing the truths. Reading ‘Mr Fraser’s’ character when she returned home, Charlotte cried delightedly, ‘it is a sort of miracle – like – like – like as the very life itself’: Smith himself considered the analysis ‘not so happy’.86
He is an admirer of the fair sex. He is very kind to children. Is strongly attached to his home – Is of a very affectionate and friendly disposition … Is fond of the ideal and romantic and possesses a strongly developed organ of language. He has a just sense of the value of time, and is not prone to procrastinate. Is active and practical though not hustling or contentious.87
Charlotte’s character had its share of uncannily accurate assessments – though no more than she herself would have been able to deduce from close observation.
Temperament for the most part nervous … Her attachments are strong and enduring – indeed this is a leading element of her character … She is sensitive and is very anxious to succeed in her undertakings, but is not so sanguine as to the probability of success. She is occasionally inclined to take a gloomier view of things than perhaps the facts of the case justify … She has more firmness than self reliance, and her sense of justice is of a very high order … She is endowed with an exalted sense of the beautiful and ideal, and longs for perfection. If not a poet her sentiments are poetical or are at least imbued with that enthusiastic glow which is characteristic of poetical feeling … In its intellectual development this head is very remarkable. The forehead is at once very large and well formed. It bears the stamp of deep thoughtfulness and comprehensive understanding. It is highly philosophical It exhibits the presence of an intellect at once perspicacious and perspic[u]ous … This Lady possesses a fine organ of language and can … express her sentiments with clearness precision and force –88
Of this analysis, Charlotte had ‘nothing to say – not a word’, and though forbidden to comment further on George Smith’s she could not resist saying, ‘If I had a right to whisper a word of counsel – it should be merely this. Whatever your present self may be – resolve with all your strength of resolution – never to degenerate thence –. Be jealous of a shadow of falling off.’89
Having deferred her return twice, Charlotte eventually left London on 27 June, but even then she did not go straight home. Mrs Gaskell had invited her to stay with her in Manchester for a few days at the end of her London visit and had proved accommodating throughout Charlotte’s changes in plan.90 In the end, however, Charlotte could spare her only two days – it was nearly five weeks since she had left home and she could not put off the evil moment much longer. ‘The visit to Mrs Gaskell on my way home – let me down easily’, Charlotte told George Smith.
She lives in a large – cheerful, airy house, quite out of Manchester Smoke – a garden surrounds it, and as in this hot weather, the windows were kept open – a whispering of leaves and perfume of flowers always pervaded the rooms. Mrs Gaskell herself is a woman of whose conversation and company I should not soon tire – She seems to me kind, clever, animated and unaffected – her husband is a good and kind man too.91
The Gaskells had four daughters, Marianne, who was away at school, Meta, Flossy and Julia, the eldest being fifteen, the youngest only five, ‘all more or less pretty and intelligent’, who filled the house with liveliness and gaiety. Rather to he
r surprise, Charlotte found the Gaskell girls endearing and was deeply touched by the way they responded to her. The youngest child, Julia, swiftly became an especial favourite. ‘Could you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little person – Julia?’ Charlotte asked Mrs Gaskell some weeks after her return. ‘She surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her.’92
After the lively Gaskell household, it was quite a contrast when Charlotte returned home on the last day of June, but she was determined to make the best of it: ‘even Haworth Parsonage does not look gloomy in this bright summer weather: it is somewhat still – but with the windows open – I can hear a bird or two singing on certain thorn-trees in the garden’.93 The house had been thoroughly spring-cleaned by Martha in her absence, though Charlotte was somewhat shocked to find that Patrick had had the piano removed out of the parlour and taken upstairs into one of the bedrooms; ‘there it must necessarily be absurd – and in the Parlour it looked so well – besides being convenient for your books – I wonder why you don’t like it –’. 94 It does not seem to have occurred to Charlotte that the presence of the silent piano in the room where Patrick spent most of his time must have been a painful daily reminder of his three children who had all loved to play it.
Knowing how difficult Charlotte always found it to return to Haworth after the gaiety of London, George Smith had been kind enough to send her at least a couple of long cheerful letters, which she seized upon gratefully.
I had made up my mind to tell you that I should expect no letters from Cornhill for three months to come (intending afterwards to extend the abstinence to six months for I am jealous of becoming dependent on this indulgence – you – doubtless cannot see why, because you do not live my life.) – Nor shall I now expect a letter – but since you say that you would like to write now and then – I cannot say never write without imposing on my real wishes a falsehood which they reject – and doing to them a violence to which they entirely refuse to submit;