by Deborah Lutz
On his wanderings, Branwell probably took along a walking stick. The fells around the parsonage could make for rough travel, and a stout staff was of great use. In some spots they were steep, with slippery rock, cliffs, defiles, and, in wintertime, frozen pathways. Perhaps he took along the stick pictured here, said to have belonged to him, although it is possible his sisters used it. Family tradition had him giving this stick, toward the end of his life, to a local acquaintance, J. Briggs, while at his favorite drinking spot, the Black Bull. Made of one piece of blackthorn or hawthorn, both trees indigenous to Yorkshire, the stick has a knob handle, possibly from a burl (a knot in a tree), and distinctive bumps, with the bark intact, where side branches once grew. Blackthorn sticks were coveted for their straightness and toughness, and when cut and cured properly with the bark maintained, they lasted so long they often became family heirlooms. The making of thorn sticks, originally a traditional Irish craft, was mastered by English woodworkers in the nineteenth century. Blackthorn walking sticks were already classics by the 1830s; a gentleman walker in the country was bound to have at least one. Patrick himself carried one so faithfully that friends called him “Old Staff.” Charlotte gives one to an Irish curate, Mr. Malone, in her novel Shirley, which he treats as a type of weapon, or “shillelagh.” Branwell’s knob stick may have been cut and cured by the local carpenter, who did other woodworking and joining for the Brontës. His name was, aptly enough, William Wood. 5
Branwell and Patrick carried sticks on most outings, but did the girls carry them? Most nineteenth-century men used walking implements of some sort, whether they were city men strolling with silver-tipped Malacca canes or farmers with oak staffs that kept sheep in line, knocked apples off trees, and supported them on long treks. Women rarely carried canes, unless they were elderly; instead parasols or umbrellas served a similar purpose. Some daring women carried flexible switches—as Anthony Reál reported in his 1876 history of the walking stick—“in the street, at the promenade, and at the races.” An active woman on a serious hike in the country might take along a staff, especially if she didn’t care much about fashion and was willing to be viewed as eccentric. Emily fit this profile. While Anne, with her violet eyes, was thought the prettiest by most who met them and was never sartorially criticized, Charlotte and Emily were described throughout their lives as awkward dressers. Charlotte experienced anxiety about her “plain—high-made, country garments,” especially when she visited London as an adult, and she made adjustments to try to appear unremarkable. Yet when Emily was teased about her relish for puffy leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts that clung to her thin legs—styles that had fallen out of fashion decades before—she didn’t seem to care. Haworth townsfolk also noted heavy boots upon the three, a tomboyish eccentricity. Such mannish footwear would have gone well with walking sticks, and Emily did not shy from using accessories considered to be solely for men: Patrick taught her to fire his pistols, according to some sources, and she was a good shot. If a walking staff helped her to scale the heights up to the dear and remote Top Withins farmhouse, then Emily probably had one often in her hand.6
Straying outside when the spirit moved them, the Brontës also walked more deliberately. They didn’t have a choice but to walk to go places. They couldn’t afford to own horses, nor did they have a carriage, although they did occasionally hire conveyances of various sorts, like gigs and covered carts, including a double-phaeton that the wealthier and more conventional Ellen Nussey found “shabby-looking,” “a rickety dogcart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard.” While the railway through Leeds (twenty miles away) opened in September 1834, it wasn’t until 1846 that a train could be caught at nearer Bradford. An extension to Keighley wasn’t opened until March 1847 and didn’t reach Haworth until after the entire family had died, in 1867. So they trudged eight miles round trip to Keighley over steep hills to pick up and return library books and to attend lectures and other events, sometimes returning in the dark. They also took these moorland tracks and field paths to catch the regular coach (like a bus with set routes but pulled by horses that were changed at coaching inns along the way) from Keighley to Bradford or Leeds, major connecting points for other destinations. When Branwell moved in 1839 to Bradford to set up a studio as a professional portrait painter (an endeavor that also didn’t work out for him), he would often walk back to Haworth over the moors, which was about twelve miles each way. This is nothing compared to a legendary walk he took when he was thirteen or fourteen to visit Charlotte at Roe Head School: twenty miles each way. Charlotte’s letters to Ellen Nussey are full of details about the complications of their visits to each other. On one visit, Charlotte walked four miles to Keighley, took the coach to Bradford, arranged to have her box carried, then walked five and a half miles to Ellen’s house in Gomersal in the evening. Patrick walked all over the parish to do his work, often covering, by his own account, forty miles a day, stick in hand. Emily depicts a “long spell” of a walk in Wuthering Heights with a mysterious, overdetermined significance: Mr. Earnshaw treks sixty miles each way to Liverpool, in three days. On the way back he carries, “bundled up” in his greatcoat, a dark child picked up freezing on the streets of Liverpool, whom he names Heathcliff after his boy who died. Half dead with fatigue, Earnshaw declares he “would not have such another walk for the three kingdoms.” 7
Under these conditions, a walking stick quickly gained miles of use. The relationship between walker and stick was intimate. A good stick was made with the height and weight of the walker in mind, and with much use the wood became molded to reflect the gait and lean of the walker’s body. The handle took the shape of the hand. As the poet and ardent walker Edward Thomas saw it, “In slow course of years we acquire a way of expression . . . gradually fitted to the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand that has worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our strength, of our blindness as of our vision.” Canes were expressive of the person, like Thomas Hobbes’s, which had an inkhorn and pen in its handle so he could record ideas that came to him while meandering. Staffs or canes that had steadied the way of saints were treated like precious relics when the saints died, as if the smoothing of the grasp infused them with blessings. The faithful believed that to touch the walking stick of Saint Catherine of Siena, for instance, who traveled around the Italian city in the fourteenth century attending to the poor, was to touch her flesh, a tangible contact with the eternal. A splinter of the walking stick of Saint John of God is said to be encased in his statue. The legend of the staff of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, encapsulates the mythic vitality of such objects as living symbols. He planted his staff in the ground upon the instructions of Christ, and, the story goes, the next day it flowered, like Aaron’s rod in the Bible, which sometimes turned into a serpent and at other times grew blossoms and edible almonds. 8
Authors who loved walking had sticks that became characters in their writing lives, something like saints’ staffs and their legends, but tools aiding composition rather than connection to God. The heroic walking tours of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were part of his poetic process and a way to live his philosophy of the divinity of nature. Well before mountaineering became widely adopted, conventionalized through standardized clothing and equipment, Coleridge developed special gear for his travels afoot. For an early tramp through Wales, while he was a student at Cambridge, Coleridge bought a five-foot walking stick that, he claimed in a letter, was carved on one side with the head of an eagle, eyes representing the rising sun and ears meant to evoke Turkish crescents. On the other side was carved a portrait of himself. He lost this stick at Abergele but got it back when he discovered that it had been “borrowed” by a lame elderly man staying at the same inn. Rambling about in rugged workmen’s jackets and trousers, Coleridge and the college friend who accompanied him, Joseph Hucks, looked like “two pilgrims performing a journey to the tomb of some wonder-working saint.” They covered ove
r five hundred miles by foot on this particular trip alone. Later Coleridge went on epic hikes in the fells of the Lake District, carrying a portable inkhorn, notebook, and stick. One of these sticks was a broom handle fashioned into a climber’s staff. 9
A writer’s cane could sometimes gain a quasi-relic status. Dickens would go off on tramps around London, or whatever his locale was at the time, to burn off the hours he had sat writing. Few could keep up with his frenetic pace, and he would often cover twenty miles in a single sojourn. He would “swing his blackthorn stick” as he went along, and sometimes act out his characters, as a way to write while walking. Naturally, his pocket compass and his ivory-handled walking stick, with a timid dog’s face carved into the top of the shaft, entered collections. Charles Darwin, whose travels across the seas would be so important for evolutionary theory, was known to stride with his whalebone and ivory walking stick, its pommel in the form of a skull. Virginia Woolf, who reported that the whole of To the Lighthouse came to her in an involuntary rush while ambling around Tavistock Square, left behind her crook-handled cane when she drowned herself in the river Ouse. One can almost imagine the stick, now a prized object in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, as a material witness to the terrible event. 10
Walking sticks pick up meaning as they roam. Pilgrims’ staffs are the best examples of this accretion of value with miles and handling. Before the Protestant Reformation, pilgrims journeyed to sacred sites such as Canterbury and Walsingham to pray at the saints’ shrines, to ask for pardon for sins and for divine intervention in illness and bad luck. For some the traveling itself, often lengthy, arduous, and even dangerous, as thieves lurked along the much-used pilgrims’ routes, worked as a form of penance, the staff serving as a prop and a companion. Even for those who saw the trek as an excuse for a holiday, ale at the inns along the way, and convivial storytelling as Chaucer depicts it in The Canterbury Tales, a walking stick had an integral place in the ritual. Pilgrims’ staffs were often painted with images of the saint being visited, and at the pilgrimage site badges or tiles were purchased and nailed to the walking stick, a form of proof of arrival. Pilgrims of extensive experience had staffs paved with badges, handy semaphores of virtue. Some staffs had compartments to hold relics gathered at shrines, becoming traveling reliquaries, themselves imbued with the sacred. Pilgrims’ sticks were early versions of tourist souvenirs, and the practice became secularized in some parts of Europe, especially Germany, where long-distance trekkers bought little shields at key sites along their routes, to attach to their walking sticks, or had the names of towns they passed through carved into their sticks. The well-traveled stick then spoke for itself, like stamps in a passport but visible to all who passed. 11
Loving their souvenirs and their walking sticks, nineteenth-century Britons often merged the two, one example being a sycamore stick with a band of copper inscribed, “Commemorating the Death of Lord Nelson, Oct. 21, 1805. Made from Copper from H.M.S. Victory, given by the Lords of the Admiralty.” A material trace of the death of Lord Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar—the fatal musket ball entered his shoulder on his ship the HMS Victory—this keepsake is deeply nostalgic, as are all souvenirs. It is an attempt, doomed to fail, to keep present and stable an event that can be remembered but never recovered. Turning the memento into a walking stick makes it, rather strangely, a portable memory device and reliquary. Branwell’s walking stick under discussion here was kept for the same nostalgic reasons at play with these other souvenirs, as an attempt to reconstitute the Brontë story. Yet using physical remains to retrieve history functions imperfectly, if at all. The attempt to treat such keepsakes as witnesses founders, turning them instead into poignant testimonials to the irretrievability of the past. All biographies and histories—including the one held right now by the reader—endeavor to cheat time, just as souvenirs do. 12
Those who cared about unique places, times, and events treasured these souvenirs as a means to save that specificity. Pilgrimages and other kinds of meaningful foot travel fulfilled similar needs; they were insistently local. They pulled inspiration out of place. One must travel to the exact location where the saints’ relics were kept, the precise site of the miracle. The routes to shrines were overlaid with rich history, and walking them was a means to have communion with that history through the body. For those who considered nature itself as having a sacred quality, which was the case for Emily and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of her family, an amble along well-loved pathways was like a small-scale pilgrimage. Daily meandering revived a personal history: the memory of past walks along the same ground, of thoughts, events, and life epochs. This sort of ruminating foot travel served the writing process, especially for Emily. She would go out walking to “get into a humor” for scribbling. Details of birdsong, cloudscape, or fern frond garnered while roaming were the sourcebook for much of her writing. “Every leaf speaks bliss to me,” she said in an 1838 poetic fragment. The female speaker of a later poem finds visions and hope come to her with the “pensive” night winds and the “tender fire” of the stars, calling up a manifold desire. Emily even carried out onto the moors the small wooden footstool that she sat on while writing. If her daily walks can be considered as pilgrimages, then the blessings received were those of artistic inspiration. Her stick, if she carried one, was then a type of writing instrument, not so literal as Thomas Hobbes’s pen-and-ink stick, but still part of the array of tools that assisted composition. It was also a pilgrim’s staff, brought on solo searches for an inner sanctum, discoverable by moving over moorland. 13
Walking as an aesthetic pursuit, as a taking in of nature to spur creativity, may have come naturally to Emily and her siblings, but it was also a practice they learned from the English Romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth and his close friend and walking companion Coleridge. The Brontë children were all born during the last decades of the Romantic period, which ended in 1830. Queen Victoria was crowned in July 1837 (an event mentioned in Emily’s diary paper of the same month and coupled with the ascension of one of her Gondal queens), when the siblings were all past adolescence. The Brontës were bred by the Romantics rather than the Victorians, a literary influence transparent in Emily’s writing. They all read Byron, as has already been mentioned—his satanic but appealing heroes are a source of the brooding Heathcliff and Rochester—but they also absorbed ideas about the natural world as the highest inspiration, a hallmark of Romanticism. Both Branwell and Charlotte wrote letters to major Romantic figures, asking for advice and help. Branwell sent some of his poetry to Wordsworth in 1837, and later to Thomas De Quincey. Charlotte’s letter to Robert Southey brought the now notorious March 12, 1837, reply that warned her off writing because the minds of female writers became “distempered”: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” he counseled. 14
Wordsworth was the Romantic who, even more than Coleridge, made walking in remote and rustic landscapes a recognized part of the aesthetic education of writers of the next generation. For Wordsworth, the rhythm of his steps brought out the cadence of his verse. But excursions out into the natural landscape also had more abstract meanings for him. When he was a student at Cambridge in 1790, preceding Coleridge there by a few years, he “took his staff” and set off with his friend Robert Jones to cover France and cross the Alps into Italy, all on foot. They caught a boat to Calais and then set a pace of about thirty miles a day. Wordsworth later wrote in a poem that when crossing the Alps he saw in the “winds thwarting winds,” the “unfettered clouds” and other unfathomable beauties, the “types and symbols of Eternity / Of first and last, and midst, and without end.” This feeling of stepping into the universe was found on many walks throughout his life. On a tour to Bristol with his sister, Dorothy, when they walked over fifty miles in three days, he had the experience described in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a [Walking] Tour, July 13, 1798,” to give the full title of this legen
dary poem. The steep and lofty cliffs and the wild secluded scene of the area around the ruined abbey brought on a “blessed mood” that pushed him, he believed, to “see into the life of things.” During this simple act of a trip by foot, he found a reflection of his own mind in the “light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air.” The walk and the poem that grew out of it led him to deeper self-knowledge and a sense that his spiritual home could be found anywhere on earth. Anywhere, but also in this one specific place: his emotional intimacy with the natural sphere arose from unique objects in singular localities, on particular walks. This specificity is what resonated for Emily. She would be what Thomas Coryate, celebrated in early-seventeenth-century England for his epic walking tours, called a “traveller in little things,” or someone who roamed in order to note minutiae. While she never wrote to any of the Romantics, Emily internalized their belief that the true home was found in the land known well. 15
Like Emily and many of their contemporaries, Branwell was inspired by the pedestrianism of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Finally realizing he couldn’t make a living as an artist, he took a job in 1840 as a private tutor to the two sons of Robert Postlethwaite, in Broughton-in-Furness, a small town in the Lake District. The area most associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge because of their residence there, it was the ideal place to walk in their footsteps (quite literally) and to inhabit the character they invented: the writer-pilgrim. Branwell, with a copy of Wordsworth’s sonnets in his pocket, went on lengthy rambles along the River Duddon, a favorite haunt of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Dorothy. He penned a sonnet himself, in Wordsworth’s style, addressed to Black Combe, a mountain that filled the sky on his excursions. Branwell’s sonnet lacks Wordsworth’s rapture and is altogether darker. It contrasts the “invincible” mountaintop, “huge and heath clad,” which rejoices in stormy skies, to man, who, losing “vigour in unstable joys,” is ultimately lost.