Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Now the trouble arose from Mrs. Gaskell’s forgetfulness that she was now writing a biography and not a romance. There is every reason to suppose that Mr. Brontë had a high, even a violent, temper, but she had obtained her instances of it from a tainted source, and they seem to have been unfounded. She did what she could, by withdrawing them, to repair the needless pain they had given, and having done that she had made such amends as were in her power for having published them at all. But the mischief did not end there, and these stories are believed by many Brontë students to this day, for regardless of the fact that she cancelled them, as being untrue, biographers who have followed her have had no hesitation in disinterring such discredited stuff from her unexpurgated editions and giving it renewed currency with comments. Sir T. Wemyss Reid, for instance, who, chronologically, is the next successor to Mrs. Gaskell, repeats the legend of the pistol firing, exuberantly adding fresh details. The villagers, he tells us, were quite accustomed to the sound of pistol shots ‘at any hour of the day’ from their pastor’s house: Mr. Brontë not only deliberately cut to bits his wife’s pretty dress but ‘presented her with the tattered fragments.’ He tells us that it was Mrs. Brontë’s lot to ‘submit to persistent coldness and neglect,’ and that she lived ‘in perpetual dread of her lordly master.’ This is falsification, for since he got these stories of violence from Mrs. Gaskell’s book, he must have found there also her record that Mrs. Brontë used to say, ‘Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?’ Unkindness to his wife was thus incorporated into the Brontë-Saga, and a monstrous disregard of the proper diet for young children has been deduced from the apocryphal story that they had only potatoes for dinner. My only object in referring to what Mrs. Gaskell withdrew is that, though it was withdrawn, it has been served up again by others.

  Mrs. Brontë lived only eighteen months after the family came to Haworth, and died of internal cancer in September 1821. It is curious that Charlotte, whose childish memories were so extraordinarily vivid, and who was five and a half years old when she died, could remember practically nothing of her mother. She could recall only the picture of her playing with Branwell, then aged four, in the parlour. Towards the end, when too weak to move, Mrs. Brontë used to ask her nurse to raise her in bed, so that she might see the grate being cleaned, for the servant cleaned it in the way it was done in Cornwall. She was buried at Haworth, and practically the whole of what we know of her is derived from those letters she wrote to Mr. Brontë when she was engaged to him.

  He was now left with six children, the youngest of whom, Anne, was still little more than eighteen months old, and in the course of the next year there came to live at Haworth, in order to look after them, Miss Elizabeth Branwell, Mrs. Brontë’s eldest sister, and the Parsonage was her home until her death. She lived much in her bedroom, where she taught her nieces to sew, and where there were grouped round her a spinster’s household gods — an Indian workbox, a workbox with a china top, and a ‘Japan’ dressing-box: she took snuff out of a small gold box. After the warmth and sunny climate of Penzance, where snow and frost were as unknown as in the valley of Avilion, she hated this bleak and wintry upland, and habitually wore pattens in the house for fear of the chill of the stone stairs stabbing through her shoes. The Branwell family in Penzance mixed much in social circles, but here there were no circles of any sort: it was a dismal change, and we must credit her with having been a woman with a strong sense of moral obligation to have given up all that constituted life’s amenities at the call of duty. She had an income of her own, derived from investments, of £50 a year, out of which she contributed to household expenses, and shortly before her death she showed that she was a woman of generous impulses. Her favourite among the children was Branwell, and he of them all was the only one who ever wrote of her with affection, and, after her death, with regret. She seems to have been lacking in lightness and geniality. We can find, at any rate, no hint of the gentle gaiety and tenderness of her sister, and in the absence of such evidence she has been fashioned into a grim, forbidding personage. Commentators, with the passion for identifying all the characters in Charlotte’s novels with people whom she had known, have pounced on this poor lady as being the ‘original’ of Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre, and have suggested that in the bedroom where she taught her nieces to sew, she kept a switch with which she used ‘to lace the quivering palm or shrinking neck’ for misdeeds they had never committed. The evidence rests entirely on the fact that Charlotte and her sisters used to sew in Miss Branwell’s bedroom, and Jane Eyre used to be whipped in Mrs. Reed’s bedroom.

  Mr. Brontë, after his sister-in-law’s advent, made two attempts to marry again. Miss Elizabeth Firth, who had been friends with the family at Thornton, was his first choice, but the lady was already engaged to the Rev. James Franks, Vicar of Huddersfield. Then he harked back to the days of his curacy at Wethersfield, and wrote a quite amazing letter to Miss Mary Burder, to whom he had once been engaged, but whom he had subsequently thrown over, informing her how he had improved in the last fifteen years, how popular he was in his parish (the Vicar of Dewsbury would bear him out), and how eager to make up to her for the disappointment he had caused her. She replied with singular clarity, piously thanking God that He had already preserved her from the fate of being his wife, but she wished him nothing but well. A second appeal produced no sign of softening, and he resigned himself to celibacy.

  CHAPTER III

  For a little while yet as regards the early history of Mr. Brontë’s children, we have, before we get to firmer ground, to continue to get our information from what he told Mrs. Gaskell. They were studious and highly intelligent children: Branwell, perhaps, was the most promising of them all, but at the age of ten Maria used to study the Parliamentary debates in the newspapers, and could discuss with her father the leading topics of the day, with the grasp and perception of an adult. He suspected that all of them thought more deeply than appeared on the surface, and knowing that they were very shy, he adopted the strangest device that ever entered a father’s head to encourage fluency and frankness in the mouths of these babes and sucklings. He found a mask in his study; he set his children in a row, and bade them each assume it in turn, so that they might speak boldly under cover of it, and answer the cosmic questions he put to them. This unique plan, instead of terrifying them, produced the most gratifying results. He began with the youngest, and question and answer ran as follows:

  Mr. Brontë. Anne, what does a child like you most want?

  Anne (aged four). Age and experience.

  Mr. Brontë. Emily, what had I best do with your brother Branwell, when he is a naughty boy?

  Emily (aged five). Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.

  Mr. Brontë. Branwell, what is the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of man and woman?

  Branwell (aged six). By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.

  Mr. Brontë. Charlotte, what is the best book in the world?

  Charlotte (aged seven or eight). The Bible.

  Mr. Brontë. And what is the next best, Charlotte?

  Charlotte. The Book of Nature.

  Mr. Brontë. Elizabeth, what is the best mode of education for a woman?

  Elizabeth (aged eight or nine). That which would make her rule her house well.

  Mr. Brontë. Maria, what is the best mode of spending time?

  Maria (aged ten or eleven). By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.

  Now Mr. Brontë vouched for the substantial exactness of these answers to his questions; they made (and no wonder) ‘a deep and lasting impression’ on his memory, and the story must therefore be treated with the utmost respect. But we cannot help wondering whether his memory of the manner of the questions was as exact as that of the answers. We admit that they were very remarkable children. We know, on indisputable evidence, that at a very early age Charlotte and Branwell wrote prodigious quantities of poems, tales, art
icles, dramas, magazines and novels, but we find difficulty here in accepting the literal truth of Mr. Brontë’s account. Take Anne. Anne, we have already seen, is recorded to have walked on the moors with her brother and sisters when she was only twenty months old. A baby who did that was almost capable de tout; but could even she, at the age of four, when asked what a child like her most wanted, answer straight off ‘Age and experience’? There was surely a little prompting, something like this:

  Mr. Brontë. Now, Anne, take the mask and remember you are only four years old. Other people are much older. What do you lack?

  Anne. Age.

  Mr. Brontë. Excellent. And you have seen little of the world yet, nothing much has happened to you. What else do you lack?

  Anne. Experience.

  Our craving for probabilities demands something of this sort. Mozart, it is true, composed fugues at the age of four, but then Mozart fulfilled the promise of his extraordinary precocity, while Anne, gentle and pious, gave birth to nothing worthy of her spontaneous insight at the age of four. The replies of the other children are hardly less amazing, Branwell’s in particular, though it is difficult to see exactly what he meant. Maria’s reply is infinitely pathetic, for her preparation for eternity was nearly accomplished.... With this episode Mr. Brontë makes his last contribution to the chronicles of his family.

  II

  There had been established in the year 1823 at Cowan Bridge in the West Riding of Yorkshire a boarding-school for the education of the daughters of indigent clergymen. The fees charged were £14 a year, with certain small supplements, and the girls wore a uniform which was provided for them: £3 was charged for this. So small a sum for board and education did not cover the running expenses of the place, and the Reverend William Carus Wilson, who was mainly responsible for its establishment, had got together a body of annual subscribers, and their contributions paid for the salaries of the mistresses and other outgoings. Mr. Brontë no doubt had heard well of the school, and in July 1824, a year after it had been opened, he entered his two eldest daughters as pupils. Maria and Elizabeth had lately suffered from measles and whooping-cough, and it was doubtful whether they were well enough to go.

  Mr. Brontë took them there himself: he stayed at the school, he ate his meals with the children, and he was shown over the whole establishment. He must presumably have been satisfied that the pupils were well looked after and cared for, for he returned there again in August, bringing with him Charlotte, aged eight, and again in November, bringing Emily, aged six. His four eldest daughters were thus all at Cowan Bridge together. Of them individually during their schooldays we know little. Maria was constantly in disgrace, owing to habits common to children who have not sufficient physical control, and was often punished by a junior mistress called Miss Andrews in a harsh and excessive manner. Elizabeth had some accident in which she cut her head, and Miss Evans, the senior mistress, looked after her with the greatest care, taking her to sleep in her own room. Charlotte was described as a bright, clever little child; the youngest, Emily, was the pet of the school. During the ensuing spring of 1825 there broke out some epidemic spoken of as ‘low fever,’ and probably allied to influenza. Mr. Carus Wilson did everything possible for the girls sick of this ‘low fever’ in the way of diet and medical attendance, and evidently the epidemic was not of any severe or malignant type, for only one girl died, and that from after-effects. None of the four Brontë girls caught it, but in February 1825, while it was prevalent, Maria became seriously ill, and Mr. Brontë, who had not known that she was ailing, was sent for, and he took her back to Haworth, where she died of consumption on May 6. He certainly did not attribute her illness to ill-treatment or neglect, for the other three girls remained at Cowan Bridge. Then, at the end of May, Elizabeth was seen to be suffering from the same symptoms as Maria, and was taken back to Haworth, and Charlotte and Emily went home a week afterwards. Elizabeth died, also of consumption, on June 15.

  The school continued to prosper, and was subsequently moved from Cowan Bridge to Casterton, where in 1848 it was doing excellent work, providing the pupils with places as governesses and starting them on their careers. During these intervening years Charlotte, in her very voluminous and intimate correspondence, never alluded to her own schooldays at Cowan Bridge, nor to those of her sisters. But she was pondering certain things in her heart, keeping them close, as in a forcing-glass, and letting none of the heat and the bitterness in which she grew them escape in trivial utterance. Then, in 1846, she took up the forcing-glass of her silence and her concentration, and, in Jane Eyre (published the next year), branded with infamy the school which she had left at the age of nine. Nowadays we know to some extent what the psychological effect of such suppression is. Painful impressions made on a child’s mind grow to monstrous proportions, and the adult mind fully believes in the actuality of its own distortions.

  There is no need to go, with any detail, into those chapters in Jane Eyre which deal with the Orphan Asylum at Lowood. It suffices to say that Charlotte Brontë avowed that they were drawn accurately and faithfully from life. ‘Lowood’ was Cowan Bridge; ‘Helen Burns’ was her sister Maria; the black marble clergyman, ‘Naomi Brocklehurst,’ was Mr. Carus Wilson; the epidemic was typhus, and it caused many girls to die at their homes when they were removed there, others to die at school. But by no possibility can the ‘low fever’ which broke out at Cowan Bridge, when she was at school there, have been typhus; for typhus is an exceedingly deadly fever, a plague of the Middle Ages, and the rate of mortality among its victims is, in spite of the most skilled attendance and nursing, about twenty-five per cent. Here, however, out of forty cases there was, as a matter of fact, only one death, and that from after-effects, and these in typhus are unknown. When once the crisis is past, if the patient lives through it, convalescence is swift and uninterrupted. Jane Eyre describes the infection as having been due to damp air coming into the open windows of the school and the dormitories.

  Charlotte expressed regret that Cowan Bridge was instantly identified, on the publication of Jane Eyre, as being Lowood, but if a very vivid and gifted writer uses the utmost of her skill to render unmistakable the features of the place she describes, she has no business to be surprised if recognition follows, and her regret must be suspect. Indeed, it is clear that so far from regretting it she was pleased with the identification, for she wrote to her friend, Mr. Williams, saying:

  I saw an elderly clergyman reading it (Jane Eyre) the other day, and had the satisfaction of hearing him exclaim, ‘Why they have got —— School, and Mr. —— here, I declare, and Miss — —’ (naming the originals of Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss Temple). He had known them all. I wondered whether he would recognise the portraits, and was gratified to find that he did, and that, moreover, he pronounced them faithful and just. He said too, that Mr. —— (Brocklehurst) deserved the chastisement he had got!

  Since the age of nine she had nursed her bitterness of heart at the death of her sisters till it became an obsession to her, for not only in Jane Eyre, under the more licensed imagination of fiction, but in a private letter to her old friend and mistress, Miss Wooler, who had asked her for her opinion on Cowan Bridge, she made the following indictment:

  Typhus fever decimated the school periodically and consumption and scrofula in every variety of form, which bad air and water, and bad, insufficient diet, can generate preyed on the ill fated pupils.

  It is impossible to accept such a statement; it bears on the face of it its own refutation, for no school periodically decimated by typhus can possibly continue to exist. Years of bitter brooding had caused Charlotte to imagine a state of affairs that was wildly exaggerated.

  On the other hand, the awful moral precepts, the threats of hell and damnation, which she put into the mouth of Mr. Brocklehurst, the ‘black marble clergyman’ and effigy of Mr. Carus Wilson, were founded on fact. He published, for instance, in 1828, an appalling little volume called Youthful Memoirs, and edited and contributed poem
s to a magazine called the Children’s Friend, which teems with just such sentiments as she attributed to him. A verse from one of these runs:

  It’s dangerous to provoke a God Whose power and vengeance none can tell; One stroke of His almighty rod Can send young sinners quick to hell.

  These volumes were, of course, accessible to Charlotte long before she wrote Jane Eyre, but, whether she saw them or not, the man who wrote them was certainly capable of the harangues of Mr. Brocklehurst.

  Then came Mrs. Gaskell with the first edition of her Life, and her definite disclosure that Lowood in Jane Eyre was an accurate picture of Cowan Bridge: it was no wonder that the hornets came about her. The porridge for breakfast was often burned and had offensive foreign fragments in it, the beef was high, the house morning, noon, and night reeked of rancid fat, the water in which the rice was boiled was rain water, drained from the roof into a wooden tub and thence drawn off for the kitchen, the little Brontës, craving for food, could often eat nothing whatever, and when Mr. Carus Wilson heard complaints about such inedible diet he replied that the children were to be trained up to regard higher things than dainty pampering of the appetite, and lectured them on the sinfulness of their carnal propensities. The epidemic of typhus is duly recorded, and its cause definitely assigned to the state of semi-starvation in which the pupils were kept. Mrs. Gaskell did not, she expressly tells us in a later edition of her book, get her information from Charlotte Brontë, who never spoke to her about Mr. Carus Wilson at all, and only once alluded to Cowan Bridge and the careless way in which the food was prepared, but she based her narrative on Jane Eyre, collecting also stories that suited her picture without verifying them or finding out whether there was rebutting evidence. She was threatened with a libel action, she was bombarded with letters from old pupils at Cowan Bridge, expressing the highest regard and affection for Mr. Carus Wilson, and their appreciation of the admirable way in which the school was conducted. As for the revolting diet, all that could be substantiated was that there had once been a careless cook who spoiled the porridge and was dismissed.