The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  Most volumes of the time were still bound in leather, making books printed matter fastened together with the hides of animals. The terms “calf” and “sheep” appeared in catalogs as shorthand to refer to books, a clear reminder that their covers came from the skins of livestock. Some books even contained animal paper: parchment and vellum derived from animal carcasses. Each type of skin had a distinct smell, and book collectors learned to recognize different bindings using their noses. Puns related books to meat or other types of food. One such joke concerned a pigskin edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s Essays, made juicier when set beside his aphorism “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.” A geography text that had belonged to Hugh Bronte (he didn’t put a mark over his “e”), Patrick’s Irish father, was sloppily rebound by hand. The rough leather that is stretched over the cover of the book still has a patch of hair protruding out of it. Books in such cases held the marks of once being living flesh. 32

  Sentimentalists tucked human mementos into books. Curls of hair were especially suitable for stashing in volumes. Lucy Snowe, the main character in Charlotte’s Villette, has a memorandum book in which she keeps, nestled between its leaves, the plaited lock of hair from a now dead friend. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s red leather diary still has a circle of perfectly preserved hair (anonymous) slipping out from between its pages, sealed with black wax and a kind of crest with an esoteric code. According to legend, Mary Shelley kept the heart of Percy Bysshe, her husband, in a large-format, paperbound copy of his elegy for Keats, titled Adonais. Percy drowned in 1822 when his schooner went down in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia, in Italy. The Italian health authorities insisted that his badly decomposed corpse, washed up days later, could be moved only if it was cremated. His friends Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, and Edward Trelawny arranged for its incineration on the beach at Viareggio, and Trelawny melodramatically claimed that Percy’s heart “remained entire.” Trelawny snatched it from the flames. Mary carried the heart (or a tiny pile of ashes, according to some versions of this tangled legend) back to England, wrapped in a leaf torn from the book (or in silk) and stashed between its covers. Later the remains were buried with their son, and the book went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 33

  Trelawny also claimed to have gathered ash and bone fragments before the burial of Percy’s remains in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. Some of this material made it into libraries. Fragments of his skull, looking like pieces of dried leaves, can be seen in a plastic case, with authentication letters, at the Pforzheimer Collection in the New York Public Library. At the British Library, a red levant morocco–bound book has two glass-covered cavities set inside the front cover, visible when the volume is opened, containing a lock of Percy’s hair and one of Mary’s. Inside the back cover, an urn-shaped cavity holds some of his ash and bone. The book, titled Percy Bysshe Shelley: His Last Days Told by his Wife, With Locks of Hair and Some of the Poet’s Ashes, incorporates manuscript records of his death, such as a letter from Mary detailing his drowning and cremation. A kind of cross between a volume and a crypt, the tome has a fragrance of what seems to be smoke lingering about it. 34

  The Brontë children had a deep interest, along with a ghoulish fascination, in the reuse of body parts, as recorded in many of their Glasstown Confederacy stories, having read of the controversy about the dissection and the recycling of corpses that raged in the 1820s in the newspapers and in Blackwood’s. The busy traffic in corpses and their parts came about because the only cadavers that could legally be dissected before the Anatomy Act of 1832 were those of executed felons. A constant shortage of corpses for students and doctors to use for research and teaching led to “resurrectionists” robbing recent graves for bodies to sell. William Burke and his colleague William Hare, notorious resurrectionists of the time, were hanged in 1829 for murdering people in order to have even more bodies to sell. In a gruesomely fitting gesture, a pocket book was made from the skin of Burke. 35

  Loads of body snatching happens in Branwell’s early writing. He also invented a class of Parisian criminals who flayed their victims alive, tied them to trees, and used their skin as umbrellas to shield them from the elements. They also made tools of their victims’ bones. Charlotte penned a story on June 17, 1830, about Young Man Naughty and his crew being caught exhuming a corpse to illegally recycle. A curious thing happens when they open the coffin. “If I don’t declare it’s full of books instead of bones, and here’s ever so many chests crammed with the same kind of traffic.” Some locals have been plundering the public library, using the coffins for safekeeping. Both corpses and books are worth stealing and reselling. Charlotte ponders the possibility of one transforming into the other: book into body, or body into book.36

  Charlotte, Branwell, and the other sib lings knew all about mortality from their own personal experience, and somehow the body’s survivability became linked in their minds with the book’s. Concrete evidence of death infusing life at all turns surrounded them. The church graveyard, “terribly full of uptight tombstones,” ran right up to the parsonage wall. Forty-four thousand burials were said to have taken place there by 1856, when there were complaints about overcrowding. Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell that she believed the parsonage house was built on top of old graves. Funeral bells frequently tolled, and the “chip, chip” of the mason, as he carved the gravestones in his shed near the churchyard, gave the air around the parsonage a mournful heaviness. Boisterous, drunken funeral feasts, called “arvills,” were thrown at the nearby tavern, the Black Bull. Years later Branwell quoted from a Blackwood’s article that he read around the time his sisters died, probably remembering his own feelings at their funerals: “That hour so far more dreadful than any hour that now can darken us on this earth, when she, her coffin and that velvet pall descended,—and descended—slowly—slowly—into the horrid clay, and we were borne death-like, and wishing to die, out of the churchyard that from that moment we thought we could never enter more.” 37

  Not long after their sisters’ deaths, the remaining children began obsessively crafting their books. Fashioning the tiny volumes probably functioned as a form of consolation, as Brontë biographers surmise. The multiplying booklets and the yarns unfolded in them packed the spaces of absence with inked pages, with worlds replete with people. Death led them to tap a deep well of invention. While it must have become obvious at the start that books cannot replace bodies, the children never stopped trying to find in the act of writing a means to overcome death. One poignant piece of magic appears again and again in their childhood stories. When characters are killed off during the innumerable battles that play out in the tales (especially Branwell’s), they can be “made alive” again. There were various ways of achieving this end. The genies could resurrect characters with their incantations, a plot device used so often it became referred to as “in the usual manner.” Since the genies were the Brontës themselves, there is a neat simplicity to this feat. But other means were also invented, as if death needed numerous sly methods to be got around. The character Doctor Hume Badey, a notorious body snatcher and dissector, has a “macerating tub” that revives dead people if they spend two days and two nights in it. While authorship and miniature publications didn’t hold the magic of the macerating tub, they did bring a certain spirit to the workaday life at the parsonage. 38

  Books offered other consolations. Held, opened, assembled, disbound, doodled on, sewn, repurposed, books were also read. Because of the high rate of illiteracy and the expense of paper during the early nineteenth century, books and newspapers were often shared by reading aloud. An ordinary family entertainment, reading to each other could be a means of collaborative education or of wiling away time together. Their sister Maria used to read the newspapers to the other children in a room upstairs that the servants called “the children’s study.” On Sunday evenings, the household gathered in Patrick’s study for his catechism and declaiming of passages from the Bible. As a young
girl, Emily was known to be excellent at reciting and reading aloud, skills she apparently cultivated. In the summer, Aunt Branwell read in the afternoons to Patrick. 39

  Anne and Charlotte later brought these experiences into their novels. Anne shows the goodness of her character Agnes Grey by describing her reading to poor cottagers. Caroline Helstone, in Charlotte’s Shirley, asks her cousin Robert Moore to read Shakespeare’s Coriolanus one evening to her and Robert’s sister. Caroline, in love with Robert, hopes that he will see parts of his own character in Shakespeare’s hero and reform himself. He excels at reading the haughty speeches and tragic parts, but he gives the book to Caroline to act out the comic bits. This shared reading melds into a love scene: in the “deep, fast flow” of the lines of verse, “the heart and mind of reader and listener” interknit. The activity of reading aloud also holds an erotic charge in Jane Eyre. Rochester often asks Jane to read to him, beginning when they have just met and she works for him, and continuing to the end of the book, when he is partially blind and can no longer read for himself.

  Reading alone also unloosed rich pleasures. Poring over a book silently, caught up in one’s own mindscape, became a deeply important practice for the children. Privacy was difficult to carve out in the parsonage. The girls especially had no room of their own, nor even a bed to themselves. But reading might be done in any room, and could dip the reader instantly into a private world. Window seats, all through the house, provided nooks where sitting absorbed in a book could be mingled with looking out over the expanse of the moors. Emily would often settle on the rug with her nose in a book, her hand resting on her dog Keeper stretched out beside her. If she found herself in need of a title in the parlor and there were guests in the house, Emily had the knack of darting in without looking at anyone, retrieving the volume, and leaving again without a word or glance. Since the girls were often required to do housework, they figured out how to read (and write) while at other tasks. Books were not out of place in the kitchen. They read while watching over the cakes rising, and Emily, who made the bread for the house, could be found “studying her German out of an open book, propped up before her, as she kneaded the dough.” Charlotte had an odd way of focusing intensely on texts because of her shortsightedness. “When a book was given her,” a schoolfellow related, “she dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched it, and when she was told to hold her head up, up went the book after it, still close to her nose, so that it was not possible to help laughing.” 40

  Books were taken along for roaming on the moors. Local weavers remembered the Brontë “lasses” passing on their return from a walk. Out reading, books in hand, they were so lost in their own worlds they didn’t look up. Anne has the heroine of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall start off on leisurely rambles with a book. In Shirley, Caroline Helstone often wanders about outdoors, reading or making sketches. When sad and alone, she sits in the garden, whiling away the time reading “old books, taken from her uncle’s library.” A green hollow is made into a study in Wuthering Heights. Books were used as an excuse for a nap, for daydreaming, for reverie. Characters yawn over newspapers, and Agnes Grey walks about with a book for several hours, “more thinking than reading.” Jane Eyre sometimes endeavors to read, but her thoughts swim between her and the page. Like Jane, Caroline Helstone in Shirley often means to be reading. In one passage, she has lent the servants books “fit for Sunday reading,” and they are silently engaged with them in the kitchen. She has a similar type of book open on the table, “but she could not read it.” Her mind is too busy, “teeming, wandering, to listen to the language of another mind.” 41

  Whether they are read or not, books can further romance. Having a book open in front of one can be a covert means of observing and courting others. Louis Moore, in love with Shirley, the eponymous heroine of Charlotte’s novel, wants to be in her presence even when she is in a sour mood. He manages this by taking his book and sitting quietly in the window seat. As he reads, he steals a look at her now and then, watching for her countenance to soften and open. As a way to woo Helen, Gilbert Markham, in Anne’s Tenant, lends her books. It starts when he purchases an elegant, portable edition of Walter Scott’s Marmion for her. It continues: “So we talked about painting, poetry, and music, theology, geology, and philosophy: once or twice I lent her a book, and once she lent me one in return.” He becomes so desperate to see her at a certain juncture that he takes from his bookcase an old volume, barely presentable in its dilapidated condition, but just good enough as an excuse for a visit. Gilbert doesn’t even learn her first name until he sees it inscribed in her books. Their romance reaches a critical juncture and begins to unravel when he cracks open a copy of Sir Humphry Davy’s Last Days of a Philosopher sitting on her desk and finds written on the first leaf, “Frederick Lawrence,” a man he believes is a rival suitor.

  Jane Eyre opens with a famous scene of reading. Glad that a walk outdoors is impossible because of a penetrating rain, Jane withdraws from the hostile Reeds—relatives who reluctantly raise her after the death of her parents. The Reeds are gathered in the drawing room, but she escapes into the adjoining breakfast room. She soon possesses herself of a volume from the bookshelves and crawls into the window seat. She sits cross-legged, “like a Turk,” and draws the red moreen curtain closed around her, shutting herself into a hidden nook. She further withdraws by slipping into the world of her book. With Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (a volume the Brontës had in their own library) open before her, she finds herself, for once, happy. Reading draws around her a charmed circle. The self-sufficiency she develops in her practice of hiding out with a book, the fund of pleasure found in inwardness, is what later makes her so desirable and mysterious to men like Rochester and St. John.

  The ten-year-old Jane doesn’t have this free space for long. Her cousin John Reed, an expert bully, breaks into her protected space. Calling her out of the window seat, he hits her for “your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!” Knowing that this would sting above all else, he forbids her to use his books. Even though just fourteen, he knows that as the only son, his father deceased, the property of Gateshead really belongs to him rather than his mother. Jane, as a female relative and orphan with no money, is completely dependent on him. John continues his abuse by flinging the heavy book at her, and its sharp corner cuts open her head. Her retaliation comes when she accuses him of being a slave driver, like a Roman emperor, an idea learned from a recent reading of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Rome. When John doesn’t understand the classical reference, he looks like an idiot. This knowledge gleaned from books becomes a rare source of power for a plain, penniless girl.

  In many of their novels, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne depict reading, or pretending to read, as a way to escape difficult situations or impossible households. Helen Burns in Jane Eyre attempts to alleviate the oppressions of Lowood school by retreating to the fireplace. She is “abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers.” Lucy Snowe, in Villette, also finds consolation in her books and papers when at a foreign school. Comfort might be discovered under the lid of her desk, “nestled between the leaves of some book, gilding a pencil-point, the nib of a pen, or tinging the black fluid in that ink-glass.” Women often cry over or behind books, their tears absorbed by the pages. When the marriage of the Huntingdons in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall begins to unravel, the husband hides behind his newspaper, the wife behind a novel. Emily gives her character Cathy, the daughter of Catherine Earnshaw, reading as the only means to elude the brutal, male world of the Heights. She kneels on the hearth and pores over a book by the aid of the blaze while the men around her argue and give orders. When Heathcliff robs her of reading material, she exclaims, “But I’ve most of them written on my brain and printed in my heart, and you cannot deprive me of those!”

  The Brontës’ writing was, in the final analysis, about books. They
handcrafted them, read them, and wrote in, on, and about them. Charlotte and Emily (and Anne, to a lesser extent) were to become famous for authoring them. After all of her siblings had died, Charlotte looked back to this earlier time when “there was no inducement to seek social intercourse beyond our domestic circle, [and] we were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life.” In 1829, their homemade publications, the miniature books that began this chapter, were stuffed with all of living. Despite this, they were also fragile objects. Vulnerable to dissolution and decay, these artifacts could have been destroyed in countless ways, as some of them undoubtedly were. Today, handling and turning the leaves of these testaments to early talent is to open the book of the past, to touch what hands now quiet once touched. 42