by Deborah Lutz
But crafts and fancywork were for the privileged few. Most working women practiced “plain” needlework as a necessity. The pay for such work was scandalously low, and women who attempted to eke out a living by sewing were forced to do it all day and well into the night, often ruining their health in the process. By the 1860s they had to compete with machine-made needlework, making their tasks even more arduous. The exploitation of the seamstress was a perennial topic in the Victorian press, and an inspector in 1842 found that there was “no class of persons in this country, living by their labour whose happiness, health, and lives are so unscrupulously sacrificed as those of young dress makers.” The seamstress’s labor was not usually “visible” as it was for more privileged women. The pieces she made were rarely treasured and kept, and if they were, the woman who did the stitching slipped into anonymity. It is unlikely that someone sat with her admiring her hands at work, as we have seen with middle-class women, and she probably couldn’t afford a workbox, unless of the most basic kind. The divide between fancy and plain work was a gap in quality of life most profound. 25
The Brontës did both types of needlework (although as adults, Charlotte seems to have done more fancy work than her sisters, perhaps simply because she lived longer and had more friends for whom to make fancy things). Sewing drudgery filled many hours for the girls. There were the mountains of work for the parsonage household. In 1839 we find them “busy as possible in preparing” for Branwell’s departure for a private tutoring job, “shirt-making and collar-making” for him, which occupied all their time. A few years later, on the eve of her trip to Brussels, Charlotte writes Ellen that she has “lots of chemises—nightgowns—pocket-handkerchiefs & pockets to make—beside clothes to repair.” On some of their clothing that still exists can be found small mended or darned patches, such as Charlotte’s black silk stockings with a hole that has been carefully closed. In addition to the regular mending and turning, they also made many of their dresses. Anne writes in her diary paper of July 31, 1845, that “this afternoon I began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at Keigthley [sic]—What sort of hand shall I make of it?” A common refrain in the diary papers follows, about the seemingly endless pile of needlework to do: “E. and I have a great deal of work to do—when shall we sensibly diminish it?” Worse than sewing for oneself and one’s family was being required to do it for others, which had a degrading tinge of the lower orders about it for middle-class women struggling to maintain their gentility. Charlotte complained when she was asked to do needlework at governess jobs. When she took a temporary post in the family of John Benson Sidgwick in Lothersdale, near Skipton, she found that Mrs. Sidgwick overwhelmed her “with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress.” Being forced to make dresses for some charge’s dolls was a particularly galling waste of time. 26
In their novels, the Brontës made plain sewing carry varied shades of significance. Sometimes it is used as a way of contrasting a serious, dutiful girl with a frivolous, empty-headed one, as Anne does in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with the sisters Mary and Eliza Millward. 27 The reader is clearly meant to approve of Mary, who sits “mending a heap of stockings” for the family or hemming a “large, coarse sheet,” while Eliza, who we discover is a crafty liar, works on “some piece of soft embroidery” or adds a deep lace border to a cambric handkerchief. Charlotte also makes sewing carry this moral message, such as when the shallow Ginevra Fanshawe gets Lucy Snowe, in Villette, to do her “needle-drudgery” like hose mending, and sticks to such vanity work as embroidering fine cambric handkerchiefs, apparently a practice that should make the reader suspicious of the character of the woman at it.
Yet Charlotte gives needlework a more sweeping social weightiness in Shirley, her most feminist novel. Caroline Helstone is a middle-class woman who has nothing to do, which strikes her as infinitely burdensome. She lives with her uncle, a misogynist who ignores her, and she has been banned from seeing the man she loves. She tries to stay occupied with the tasks genteel women were expected to do—needlework, reading, drawing, and charity work. The latter involves a great deal of sewing for poor women or making fancy-work to sell at bazaars, with the money going to those in need. The endless hours of stagnation at home become grim. Trying to dutifully fill up the hours, she plies her needle “continuously, ceaselessly,” but breaks down, crying on her “busy hands.” She comes to realize she must find an occupation outside the home, and she asks her uncle to let her look for a governess job. He forbids it because it might lower their worth in the eyes of their neighbors. This leads her to question the justice of a society where men can go out for professions, while “their sisters have no earthly employment, but household work and sewing.” Stuck at home in tedium, their “minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness.” The independent and strong-willed Shirley sews, but “by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarcely threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs: perhaps she goes to seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older china-topped workbox.” We might say she is too good for the work of sewing, or at least Charlotte thinks so.
A well-known scene in Jane Eyre begins with Jane pacing the roof of Thornfield, wishing she could throw herself out into the stirring world, rather than be shut up in a gloomy mansion in the countryside working as a governess. She thinks of women of all sorts, in rebellion against their lots:
Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
While Jane is thinking this, she hears a maniacal laugh, coming from, she is led to believe, the servant Grace Poole, who sits in a third-story room sewing. Perhaps sewing has unhinged her? Only later does Jane discover that the laugh comes from Rochester’s mad wife, locked away permanently in the little room upstairs, another illustration of the house as prison for women.
Refusing to do needlework became a recognized means for women of the time to show their iconoclasm. In the early nineteenth century, the unconventional Ellen Weeton, who attempted to escape the domestic sphere by taking long walking tours alone throughout Britain and Ireland, became fed up with sewing. She wrote in her diary, “I have, for some years, entirely given up all kinds of needlework which has no real utility to recommend it. I do not say anything in condemnation of ornamental needlework, although I could say much, and I think, justly.” A little later in the century, in the 1850s, a cousin described the feminist Bessie Raynor Parkes (who became Madame Belloc), a leader in the fight for the vote and university education for women: “She will not wear corsets, she won’t embroider; she reads every heretic book she can get hold of, talks of following a profession.” 28
Considering samplers in this different light, they gain an oppressive quality. In the case of schoolgirls at charity institutions, making samplers or doing other types of arduous sewing was often an exercise, in part, in instilling humility: lessons in the worth of hard work for its own sake. At Lowood institution, in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, the orphan girls are required to make all their own clothes, and sewing for hours every day is part of the curriculum. Jane, who is around nine at this point in the plot, has a teacher put in her “hands a border of muslin two yards long, together with needle, thimble, etc, . . . with direction to hem the same.” Such menial work is made more degrading when the cruel head of Lowood, the evangelical Mr. Brocklehurst, buys bad needles and thread, to save money. 29
To return to Anne’s sampler pictured at the beginning of this chapter, its message fits well with the enforced submissiveness of many Victorian girls, w
ith its acceptance of correction and chastisement. Thankfully, for the Brontës and posterity, these particular girls had writing to turn to when the sewing could be put down, when the pudding was made and eaten, and the pile of mending appreciably diminished. As mentioned earlier, Anne’s novels can, from a certain standpoint, be read as teacherly and didactic in the approved way for Victorian women. Did Anne ever escape her samplers?
Anne was of a different cast of mind than her sisters. Behind her retiring and shy demeanor, she was more reasoning and rational, altogether more hardheaded. The only one of all the siblings to hold down a job outside the house for any length of time, Anne worked as a governess for the Robinsons at Thorp Green, near York, for five years, only leaving when the youngest child grew too old for a governess. (Charlotte’s longest teaching job lasted less than three years and involved a mental breakdown; Emily’s, six months.) There are no flitting ghosts in her novels, no madwomen in attics. Demonic heroes do not stalk her realistic plots; indeed, the men of her books are never grand, stirring, or mysterious. Some of them are honest, hard workers, such as Agnes Grey’s Edward Weston. But most of them are petty and small-minded, even when heroes, such as Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In her character study of Arthur Huntingdon, Anne takes the tormented, self-destructive hero and seriously deflates him into a tedious, cruel alcoholic. She makes the reader question the attraction (and plausibility) of the popular sentiment, expressed by a flighty girl who makes a bad marriage in Agnes Grey, that “reformed rakes make the best husbands, everybody knows.” In Anne’s hands, the rake and the Romantic hero are exposed as no more than selfish cads who force women to run their houses and keep them in clothes, while they are out hunting, gambling, and sleeping with other women.30
An argument can be made that Anne’s novels speak out against the unjust elements of a Victorian woman’s lot. Agnes Grey chronicles the dull, dreary life the governess was forced to lead, like Jane Eyre does, but in a much more detailed, unremitting manner. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall works as a sustained critique of the laws that made it difficult for a woman to leave an abusive husband and impossible if she wanted to keep her children by her side. There is something steadily subversive about Anne’s books, as if a hidden spring of resistance runs just underneath the conventional ground of the plot. They represent a Victorian woman’s working life, free of much of the fantasy and passion of her sisters’ plots. Indeed, this is how life was for Anne, for most of her adulthood, except perhaps when she was writing.
The Brontës sewed, peeled, made puddings, did some writing, then went back to household duties. Domestic arts made them women of their time, lending a dash of the real to their novels. They undoubtedly found some of their labor wearisome, although it provided meat for novel plots (and the table). One suspects that novel crafting could itself be monotonous toil at times, hard work with only flashes of inspiration and romance. We readers are given windows into the lives of Victorian women not only through their plots but also through the swatches and cloth fragments they stitched, turned, and hemmed: the physical monuments to the business of their days.
CHAPTER THREE
Out Walking
Come, the wind may never again
Blow as now it blows for us.
—EMILY BRONTË, “D.G.C. TO J.A.”
Woods you need not frown on me
Spectral trees that so dolefully
Shake your heads in the dreary sky
—EMILY BRONTË, UNTITLED POEM
WALKING OUT ON the moors was, by all accounts, a necessity for Emily as a teenager. Gentler landscapes wouldn’t do. In July 1835, less than a year after penning the diary paper with Anne, sixteen-year-old Emily was sent to school at Roe Head—all green pastures and soft curves—with Charlotte, who returned as a teacher. Anne stayed home for the time being, and Branwell, who wanted to train as a professional artist, went to London to enroll at the Royal Academy. Emily lasted at school for only three months. Charlotte wrote (years later) that Emily’s pining for liberty, for the vision of the moors that rushed on her every morning when she woke, caused her to sicken. Charlotte saw her “white face, attenuated form” as evidence of a rapid slide to the grave and insisted she be sent home. Emily’s poems attest to the unfettering of mind and body that came from setting out into wide-open spaces of moorland. After her return home, she wrote of escape from a “drear dungeon” by following, in spirit, the resounding flux of the “high waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending.” Midnight, moonlight, and bright shining star blend with the “mighty voice” of the “life giving wind” into a glory that leads to rejoicing and swift change. Cleared of clutter by keen gales, the heights swept open the mind. 1
Rambles on the moors were a near-daily ritual. Ellen Nussey claimed—surely exaggerating—that the Brontës didn’t really live in their house except for eating, drinking, and resting: “They lived in the free expanse of hill moorland, its purple heather, its dells and glens and brooks.” Sometimes all the siblings set off together, but more often walks were done singly or in twos. Anne and Emily regularly hiked to favorite spots, like the confluence of South Dean Beck with an unnamed stream, about three miles into the Pennine mountains, which they dubbed the “Meeting of the Waters.” Here they would sit “hidden from the world” with only “miles and miles of heather” and the broad sky in view. It was seclusion they were after, and a certain rugged play, nothing like the delicacy associated with the conventional idea of womanhood at the time. They forded streams instead of picking their way around them, and delighted in cliff, crag, and bog. They knew their mosses, skylarks, grouse, and bluebells, and studied the seasonal changes of the tundra-like flora and fauna. References to the landscape of high-altitude heathland are found everywhere in the poetry and fiction of all the Brontë siblings. Emily begins a poem with a list of experiences to be had on an everyday tramp, as if the walk itself produced the poem: “The linnet in the rocky dells, / The moor-lark in the air, / The bee among the heather bells.” When Jane Eyre walks out on Rochester—bereft, homeless, and in penury—she finds herself on great moors, where the heather “grows deep and wild.” She has no friend but the “universal mother, nature.” Striking out straight into the heath, she finds a “moss-blackened granite crag,” where she spends the night, with a turfy swell for a pillow. Nature, for this moment, is to her a benign home. 2
When Emily couldn’t endure the airlessness of school, Anne was sent to replace her. Not long after Charlotte and Anne left for Roe Head in the middle of October of 1835, Emily began composing poems for herself alone, surely not coincidentally. With both her sisters gone, Emily started on a career of slow study, a specialty of the walker and poet. Her first poem, an early 1836 fragment that begins, “Cold clear and blue the morning heaven / Expands its arch on high,” is probably grounded in solitary moor roaming. Many of her poems that can be accurately dated reflect the weather in Haworth at the time: they spring directly from lived experience, from the precise moods of a day. She tells in a poem of exchanging fantasies of wealth and learning for something actual, tangible: a walk. This is no grand sojourn or communion with the heroic past, but a simple act compelled by her own nature and her “first feelings.” “I’ll walk,” she says, “Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding; / Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.” These lonely mountains reveal to her “more glory and more grief” than she can encounter anywhere else. 3
Branwell was another serious walker in the family. As with Emily’s short stay at school, he also returned quickly, failing to thrive away from home. Were the features of the home landscape also a requirement for him? His experience in London is shrouded in mystery: no one knows why he didn’t enter art school, and some biographers argue he didn’t go to London at all. Whatever happened to Branwell in London or wherever he went, he was at home with Emily and their father by January 1836. Anne and Charlotte, at school, were homesick, not so different from Emily when there, but they focused more forcefully on thei
r duty to learn and to teach. Both also fell ill, Anne with some sort of fever that brought her near death and Charlotte with what she called “hypochondria,” her name for a nervous depression, referencing the term’s Greek etymology, which related it to melancholy rather than paranoia about illness. This would become a serious mental illness that would plague her periodically throughout her life. Meanwhile, at Haworth, Branwell continued to scribble the tales of Angria, to work on becoming an established portrait painter, and to try to get the editors at Blackwood’s to publish his works, with little success. He went out on walks, with Emily or alone, savoring a “little lonely spot” retired among trees, which, according to a fragment of a poem written during this spell at home, is happily “by all unknown and noticed not / Save sunshine and the breeze.” 4