Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Charlotte had abandoned poetry altogether. ‘Once indeed,’ she writes to Henry Nussey early in 1841, ‘I was very poetical, when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, but now I am twenty-four, approaching twenty-five, and the intermediate years are those which begin to rob life of its superfluous colouring. I have not written poetry for a long while....’ But in peace at Haworth she had been busy during 1839 on Caroline Vernon and on a Richardsonian novel, and just as Branwell and she, when they were children, had agreed to send their poetical compositions to Wordsworth and Southey, so now, clearly by arrangement, when Branwell sent his Odes to Hartley Coleridge, she sent the opening chapters of one of these stories to Wordsworth. She signed her letter to him ‘C. T.’, the initials of Charles Townsend under whose name she wrote Caroline Vernon and the unnamed story.

  She received an answer from him, which is not extant, but the substance of it can be gathered from her reply to it. Wordsworth must have been at least as discouraging about her prose as Southey had been about her verse, and have recommended her to give up writing, for she answers him:

  Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am not so much attached to them but that I can give it up without much distress. No doubt, if I had gone on, I should have made quite a Richardsonian concern of it.... I had material in my head for half a dozen volumes. Of course, it is with considerable regret I relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched.

  She wishes she had lived fifty or sixty years ago, when the Ladies’ Magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree.

  In that case I make no doubt my literary aspirations would have met with due encouragement, and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and doings in double-columned, close-printed pages.

  She decidedly resented Wordsworth’s letter, for she continues, deeply sarcastic:

  I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney’s clerk or a novel-reading dressmaker. I will not help you at all in the discovery; and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike touches in my style and imagery, you must not draw any conclusions from that — I may employ an amanuensis.

  Evidently Wordsworth touched her on the raw on this question of her sex, just as in later years, when Jane Eyre had made Currer Bell famous, she bitterly resented any conjectures as to whether she was a man or a woman.

  The notion of sending part of an immense novel to Wordsworth (of all arbiters!) was as infelicitous as his reply seems to have been, and, failing to win encouragement for the second time in the eyes of the mighty, Charlotte again gave up all idea of a literary career, and for the next five years, till the autumn of 1845, she never set pen to paper except to write her French exercises at Brussels and letters to her friends. To go out as a governess again seemed the only thing to do, and during this year (1840) she made one or two applications for posts of the sort, but they came to nothing. She paid visits to Ellen and Mary Taylor; Mary Taylor and her sister Martha came to Haworth, and with no alien faces to render her tongue-tied and miserable, her letters abounded in geniality and enjoyment, and in the intensest interest in Celia Amelia’s amours. But the moment strangers came to Haworth, even though they were relations, she was quick to observe and to recount their deficiencies. Of such were some family connections from Cornwall, John Branwell Williams and his wife and daughter, and Charlotte’s gimlet eye bored ruthlessly into their pretensions.

  They reckon to be very fine folks indeed, and talk largely — I thought assumingly. I cannot say I much admired them; to my eye there seemed to be an attempt to play the great Mogul down in Yorkshire.... Mrs. Williams sets up for being a woman of great talents, tact, and accomplishment: I thought there was more noise than work. My cousin Eliza is a young lady intended by Nature to be a bouncing, good-looking girl: Art has trained her to be a languishing, affected piece of goods.

  This visit seems to have been brief.

  Branwell in the summer completed his engagement at Mr. Postlethwaite’s and returned home with his Horatian Odes. Painting and poetry alike had failed, but he was anxious, or at least willing, to employ himself somehow, and in September he became the booking-clerk at a small station called Sowerby Bridge. It was a dismal dégringolade from the brilliant promise of his boyhood and from the bright hopes which Charlotte, above all, had entertained about his career, and there is more than a touch of sarcastic contempt in her announcement of this to Ellen Nussey. She writes (September 1840):

  A distant relative of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railroad.

  So off went Branwell to his ticket-office, and the three girls remained at Haworth. Throughout Charlotte’s voluminous correspondence during this year, we get no glimpse at all of their relations to each other, for Emily’s name is never mentioned at all; Anne suffered from a cold, and Celia Amelia made eyes at her in church. As for Aunt Branwell, all we know of her is that she was vastly pleased with the knitting-needle case which Ellen sent her, and on more than one occasion was ‘precious cross.’ But the autumn winds blew across the hills, filling Charlotte with rapture.

  I see everything [she wrote] couleur de rose, and am strongly inclined to dance a jig. I think I must partake of the nature of a pig or an ass — both which animals are strongly affected by a high wind. From which quarter the wind blows I cannot tell, for I never could in my life, but I should very much like to know how the great brewing tub of Bridlington Bay works, and what sort of yeasty froth rises just now on the waves.

  Other causes besides the freedom and seclusion of Haworth contributed to this joyful serenity, for that hysterical religious disquiet arising out of her adolescent passion for Ellen had calmed down completely, and in her letters, now and henceforth, there is not the smallest trace of those spiritual aspirations and excitements. The blaze of that volcanic human attachment, which gave the other birth, had cooled down also, and a firm crust of friendship, never to be broken, had formed over these fires, and now, when Ellen consults her about her own matrimonial possibilities, it is indeed a grandmother (as Charlotte calls herself) who tells Ellen that ‘the majority of these worldly precepts whose seeming coldness shocks and repels us in youth are founded in wisdom.’ With a somewhat ponderous humour, she pictures herself advising Ellen’s swain who, with a lover’s diffidence, is slow to come to the point, and bids him

  begin in a clear, distinct deferential, but determined voice. ‘Miss Ellen, I have a question to put to you, — a very important question to put to you, Will you take me for your husband for better for worse? I am not a rich man, but I have sufficient to support us. I am not a great man but I love you honestly and truly. Miss Ellen, if you knew the world better you would see that this is not an offer to be despised, a kind attached heart and a moderate competency.’ Do this, Mr. Vincent, and you may succeed. Go on writing sentimental love-sick letters to Henry and I would not give sixpence for your suit.

  Then with a solemnity not less portentous she adjures Ellen not to wait for une grande passion.

  My good girl, une grande passion is une grande folie.... No young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word, or a cold look, cuts her to the heart, she is a fool....

  The poor grandmother, so calm, so edifying, so pathetically ignorant of the entire subject on which she was giving such comprehensive oracles from the secluded shrine of Haworth! Presently she was to become very much younger.

  CHAPTER VII

  Charlotte’s determination that she and her sisters should teach, should have a career, should ‘get on,’ was not only due to special necessities in their individual case, but
, not less, to her general principle that girls as well as boys should stand on their own feet and make their way in the world. The early Victorian view (and, indeed, the mid-Victorian view) was that marriage was the only career for them, but Charlotte was far in advance of her age. She wrote, for instance, a few years later to her friend Mr. Williams, saying: ‘Your daughters, as much as your sons, should aim at making their way honourably through life. Do not wish to keep them at home. Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst paid drudge of a school.’ Considering how miserable she had been in such situations, this is a most remarkable utterance. Charlotte was indeed the pioneer of the movement for the independence of women. No one before her, and none after her for at least fifty years, thus stated that girls would be better off if working in the most uncongenial surroundings than if they stayed at home.

  So the caravans had to leave their oasis of peace, to travel once more across alien sands, and in the spring of 1841 both Charlotte and Anne went forth to new situations among strangers, while Emily remained at Haworth. Anne went as governess to the children of the Reverend Edmund Robinson, an invalid clergyman at Thorp Green, near York. Here she remained for over four years, coming home for the holidays, disliking the place from the first, but patiently and mildly enduring it without complaint, and solacing herself with the adventures of Gondaland, and secretly writing a story called Solala Vernon’s Life. Hitherto Anne’s literary efforts had been entirely poetical; some poems she had written under the name of Olivia Vernon. Of this story we know nothing, except that by July 1841 she was engaged on the fourth volume or notebook of it. Probably it was autobiographical.

  Charlotte’s situation was as governess to the two children, a girl of eight and a boy of six, of Mr. and Mrs. John White of Upperwood House, in the village of Rawdon, near Bradford. At once the misery that her shyness among strangers caused her began to descend on her. She expected them to behave shabbily to her; she was on the look out for slights and want of consideration, and within a day of her arrival she wrote to Ellen Nussey, ‘I have as yet had no cause to complain of want of consideration or civility.’ She hated her employment in itself. She immediately noted that her pupils were wild and unbroken, though apparently well disposed, and it does not bode well for the success of a governess if, as Charlotte writes, ‘she finds it hard to repel the rude familiarities of children.’ Her shyness was not less than an obsession, of which she was aware, but against which she was powerless.

  I find it so difficult [she continues] to ask either servants or mistress for what I want, however much I want it. It is less pain to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to request its removal. I am a fool. Heaven knows I cannot help it.

  However, it was not so bad as Stonegappe. Charlotte liked Mr. White extremely; also Ellen’s home was within nine miles of Rawdon, and meetings might be possible. But, rather ominously, she says, ‘Respecting Mrs. White I am for the moment silent. I am trying hard to like her.’ The effort was not successful. Charlotte asked her whether she might go to spend a couple of nights with Ellen during term time, and Mrs. White said ‘“Ye — e — es” in a reluctant cold tone,’ adding that she had better go on Saturday and return on Monday, so that the children should not miss their lessons. That was enough: ‘You are a genuine Turk’ thought Charlotte, and it is evident there were no more efforts to like her. Ellen’s brother drove her back to Rawdon on Monday, and because he did not go into the house Mrs. White got ‘quite red in the face with vexation.’ Instantly Charlotte perceived that Mrs. White’s cook, when dressed, had much more the air of a lady than her mistress.

  Well can I believe [she writes] that Mrs. White has been an exciseman’s daughter, and I am convinced also that Mr. White’s extraction is very low. I was beginning to think Mrs. White a good sort of body in spite of all her bouncing and boasting, her bad grammar and worse orthography, but I have had experience of one little trait in her character which condemns her a long way with me. After treating a person in the most familiar terms of equality for a long time, if any little thing goes wrong, she does not scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse, unladylike manner. I think passion is the true test of vulgarity or refinement.

  Then Mr. White wrote to Mr. Brontë begging him to come and spend a week at his house. But Charlotte would not permit that: ‘I don’t at all wish papa to come; it would be like incurring an obligation,’ and so papa did not come.

  This ungraciousness, this acutely censorious eye, was the result very largely of her abnormal and invincible shyness, and the two throughout her life reacted on each other. She was ill at ease with strangers, and attributed the discomfort their presence caused her to their disagreeable qualities. No efforts on their part, however well-meaning, could deliver her from the prison of her unhappy temperament, and she sat silent and unapproachable while they abandoned themselves to their unfeeling gaieties, and noted their ‘coarse imbecilities.’ Her occupation, moreover, was most uncongenial; ‘no one but myself,’ she writes, ‘is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature is to the employment,’ and though she had chosen it for herself and for her sisters with a definite object in view and gallantly stuck to it, she found it invariably odious. No one was ever less suited to be a governess, for she took the same gloomy view of her charges as of their parents, and the little Sidgwicks were devils incarnate, and the little Whites ‘noisy, over-indulged, and hard to manage.’ The truth was that she did not like children, and repelled their ‘rude familiarities’; in other words, when they manifested affection towards her, she did her best to shut them up. She had, it is true, a tenderness for Mrs. White’s baby, but her admission of this softness takes the form of a confession. ‘By dint of nursing the fat baby,’ she writes, ‘it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect myself of growing rather fond of it. Exertion of any kind is always beneficial.’ Mrs. Gaskell and others have divined from this an exquisite tenderness in her nature towards the young; but was there ever a queerer expression of it than the admission that by dint of nursing the fat baby she had got fond of it, and that exertion is always beneficial? She was surprised that she was growing fond of it: it was odd to her.

  Branwell meanwhile, after three months of ticket-collecting at Sowerby Bridge, had been transferred to another station on the Leeds and Manchester line called Luddenden Foot. Trains and passengers were few, the station buildings consisted of one wooden hut, and the staff of Branwell and a porter. Charlotte, writing to Emily, agrees that this ‘looks as if he was getting on at any rate.’ What kind of progress might be expected of a young man of social tastes and alcoholic tendencies at a place where there was nothing for him to do and only a porter to talk to, she does not specify. A more disastrous environment could hardly be conceived.

  After a while things shaped a little better at Upperwood House; Charlotte wrote to Henry Nussey, her ex-suitor, that her employers were ‘kind, worthy people in their way,’ and returned to Haworth on the last day of June for three weeks’ holiday, after a tussle with Mrs. White, who thought ten days would be enough. She found it was Paradise to be at home again. Anne had already had her holiday and gone back to her situation, and a small black kitten of the Parsonage was dead; ‘every cup,’ Charlotte commented, ‘however sweet, has its drop of bitterness in it.’ But Aunt Branwell was in high good humour, and this just now was a most fortunate circumstance, for the project of the three girls setting up a school, long cherished in secret, especially by Charlotte, was now being discussed by their elders, and Aunt Branwell’s help was necessary to supply funds to start their enterprise. She had an invested capital of about £1,500, which brought her in £50 a year, and though Charlotte had always considered she was the last person who would offer a loan for the purpose in question, Miss Branwell was willing to advance a sum of £100 or £150, provided that a suitable situation for the school could be found and pupils were forthcoming; this offer Charlotte c
onsidered ‘very fair.’ At last, and at long last, there seemed a definite chance that the long-cherished scheme of setting up a school might be realised. She went back to Underwood House, after three weeks’ holiday, full of new hope. A long time might yet elapse before it could be carried out, but sufficient capital was now forthcoming, and she began to consider where the school should be started.

  At this point we get, owing to a rare felicity, something that has long been lacking — namely, a glimpse, vivid and authentic, into the life of the Parsonage as seen by those two inhabitants of it, hitherto so shadowy, Emily and Anne. It came to Mr. Clement Shorter in the shape of four folded pieces of paper sent him in a small box by Charlotte’s husband forty years after her death. These papers were covered with the minute handwriting of Emily and Anne, two of each. As has been already seen, they formed a group among the four children, with secrets of their own and chronicles of Gondaland, and from these papers it appears that it was their habit every four years separately to write a summary of their doings and of the family affairs during that period, to be opened four years later on Emily’s birthday, July 30. Thus in the year 1841 they wrote the two summaries which first concern us, and which would be opened on July 30, 1845. Again, on July 30, 1845, they wrote the summaries of the years 1841-1845 which, had they lived, would have been opened in due course. Emily’s paper of 1841 is as follows: