The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  The numerous creatures about the parsonage made up a part of the fabric of the home life that was missed when the siblings left during this period, attempting to hold onto jobs. Anne was with the Robinsons at Scarborough when she wrote her diary paper of 1841, which included, like all the diary papers, a survey of the animals at the parsonage, along with the people. Sighing for the parsonage life, Anne wrote that “we have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it, and also got a hawk. Got a wild goose which has flown away, and three tame ones, one of which has been killed.” Even though Emily’s time away at Roe Head had failed so completely, she tried leaving Haworth again, and she was either making friends with animals where she was or missing the ones at home. She took a job teaching in 1838 at Law Hill School in Halifax, not long after Keeper first arrived in Haworth. She did some moor walking here (perhaps crossing paths with the renegade Anne Lister, or at least hearing stories about her) and developed a friendship with the school’s house-dog, once announcing to a classroom of undisciplined girls that the only individual she cared for in the whole place was said mutt. She lasted six months this time. 28

  Charlotte, who had been trying out various governess jobs for the last couple of years, went away again with Emily in 1842 to a school in Belgium, and while they were gone, some of their animals were given away or disappeared. After nine months at the Pensionnat Heger, they rushed home when their Aunt Branwell died, in November 1842. Emily discovered that her hawk Nero had been “given away” along with their geese. She felt sure Nero was dead, “for when I came back from Brussels I enquired on all hands and could hear nothing of him.” After this trip, Emily would stay at home with the animals, save for a few short trips around northern England, for the rest of her life. 29

  Charlotte returned alone to Brussels to work as a teacher. Sunk in a “gulf of low spirits,” she wrote in a letter to Emily, she wished she could be back at the parsonage, especially in the back kitchen cutting up the hash, with Emily standing by to make sure she added enough flour, not too much pepper, and, “above all, that I save the best pieces of the leg of mutton for Tiger and Keeper, the first of which personages would be jumping about the dish and carving-knife, and the latter standing like a devouring-flame on the kitchen-floor.” 30

  Anne and Charlotte expressed a simpler view than Emily of the relationship of human and animal, one with which it is easier to agree. Characters are judged by the way they treat animals. In Agnes Grey, it is obvious what the reader should think about the little boy who traps birds in order to roast them alive. Mr. Weston’s kind treatment of Agnes’s wire-haired terrier Snap starts him on the road to romantic hero-dom. Arthur Huntingdon, the drunken husband in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, strikes his cocker spaniel Dash a smart blow, while the hero Gilbert Markham, contrastingly, has a much-loved black-and-white setter named Sancho. In Shirley, the title character’s closeness to her half mastiff, half bulldog Tarter, with his “tawny and lion-like bulk,” is based, Charlotte claimed, on Emily’s intimate relationship with Keeper. The character Caroline finds that animals are the “true oracle” to test the temperament of the man one might marry. As she explains to Shirley, she knows that Robert will be a good husband because he is the “somebody” in the following: “We have a black cat and an old dog at the rectory. I know somebody to whose knee that black cat loves to climb, against whose shoulder and cheek it likes to purr. The old dog always comes out of his kennel and wags his tail, and whines affectionately when somebody passes.” We know that the tide has turned for the harsh little professor M. Paul, in Villette, when we find him fondling the spaniel Sylvie and calling her tender names in a tender voice; Lucy falls for him completely.

  A story about Anne at the very end of her life sums up her feelings about animals. When she was in Scarborough, dying of tuberculosis, Anne was being pulled around in a donkey cart at the beach. Worried about the donkey being urged to go faster than might be comfortable by the boy driver with a whip, she took the reins herself, despite being weak from illness. As she left the donkey, she charged the boy to treat it well. When Charlotte was visiting the seaside near there, to tend Anne’s grave, her thoughts turned to Anne’s dog. “I saw a great dog rush into the sea yesterday—and swim and bear up against the waves like a seal—I wonder what Flossy would say to that.” 31

  Keeper and Flossy didn’t seem to have lives of strife, notwithstanding Keeper’s harsh punishment from Emily and the dogfights he rushed into. Flossy fathered a puppy, also called Flossy, “a most forward passionate little animal,” which was given to Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey in 1844. He behaved “discreditably and gets his mistress into scrapes,” such as one “catastrophe” that involved the ruination of a book-muslin dress. Anne wrote to Ellen in 1848 that Flossy senior “is fatter than ever, but still active enough to relish a sheep hunt.” 32

  Both dogs outlived their mistresses. Charlotte tells of Keeper lying at the side of Emily’s “dying-bed,” following her funeral to the vault, and “lying in the pew couched at our feet while the burial service was being read.” He visited her little bedroom day after day, for a long time after her death. After Anne died at Scarborough, Charlotte returned home to her father and the dogs, who “seemed in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger of others—the dumb creatures thought that as I was returned—those who had been so long absent were not far behind.” 33

  It must have been their father, Patrick, who taught his children to revere canine friends. When he faced an operation for cataracts and worried he might not make it through, what bothered him most was this: “I shall never feel Keeper’s paws on my knees again!” We don’t know his reaction when Keeper died in 1851. Charlotte wrote about it in a letter to Ellen: “Poor old Keeper died last Monday Morning—after being ill one night—he went gently to sleep—we laid his old faithful head in the garden. Flossy is dull and misses him. There was something very sad in losing the old dog; yet I am glad he met a natural fate—people kept hinting that he ought to be put away which neither Papa nor I liked to think of.” Flossy passed away three years later, and again we know about it because Charlotte informed Ellen: “Did I tell you that our poor little Flossy is dead? He drooped for a single day—and died quietly in the night without pain. The loss even of a dog was very saddening—yet perhaps no dog ever had a happier life or an easier death.” 34

  A few months after Charlotte, Patrick’s last surviving child, died, he purchased two dogs from Mr. Summerscale, the Haworth teacher, for three pounds each. They were descendants of dogs belonging to Bingley acquaintances, the Busfield Ferrands. One he called Cato, a year-and-a-half-old Newfoundland-retriever mix that he believed Charlotte had admired. The other he named Plato, a mix of water spaniel with Newfoundland. A third brass collar at the Brontë Parsonage Museum may have belonged to one of these dogs, although tradition has it that Keeper wore it and then grew out of it. The two larger collars might have been reused—on Keeper first, then on Plato and Cato—especially since the engravings didn’t include dog names. It’s even possible future owners of the collars used them on their dogs. This third collar has a hank of soft, black dog hair still caught in the lip of the curled-over edge. From which dog body did it come? 35

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Fugitive Letters

  I began to study the outside of my treasure: it was some

  minutes before I could get over the direction and penetrate

  the seal; one does not take a strong place of this kind by

  instant storm—one sits down awhile before it, as beleaguers

  say . . . The seal was too beautiful to be broken, so I cut it

  round with my scissors.

  —CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Villette

  SAILING BACK FROM Brussels in January 1844, Charlotte joined Emily and the animals at home. For a while now she had been pondering ways to send her writing out into the world, rather than keeping it within the circle of family. One step toward this came through letters. With much practice, Charlotte
had learned to make a letter, even one sent to someone hundreds of miles away, an act of intimacy. She had long developed a vivid sense of the page’s talismanic qualities, sewing together those miniature books as a child. Handwriting and the autograph transmitted personality, perhaps a bit of the soul. The touch and warmth of the writer’s skin could be carried in a letter, Charlotte thought, a belief worked out in much of her correspondence.

  It was in letters to Ellen Nussey that Charlotte shared her sorrow when the family dogs died; to Ellen, Charlotte mailed all those needlework crafts. Their friendship flourished through the post. They generally saw each other two or three times a year as adults, but letters often passed between them once a week. Ellen kept most of the letters that Charlotte wrote her, while those Charlotte received have disappeared. Ellen claimed soon after Charlotte’s death that she had close to five hundred of Charlotte’s letters, but later, after she had been sharing the letters with various Brontë fans, she fretted she had lost around a hundred. Today about 340 items of correspondence can be traced, including some envelopes with their contents missing.

  It all began when Charlotte was fifteen and Ellen fourteen—Charlotte’s birthday was April 21, Ellen’s April 20—just a few months after they met at Roe Head School. It didn’t cease until Charlotte wrote from her deathbed, in very faint pencil, ending with the words “Write when you can.” In her first letter to Ellen, Charlotte declined the invitation proffered by Ellen’s sister to attend Mr. Murray’s lectures on galvanism (electricity created through chemicals, often demonstrated by stimulating the muscles of dead animals). These first schoolgirl notes, brief and stiff—beginning with such formalities as “I take advantage of the earliest opportunity to thank you for the letter you favoured me with last week” and “the receipt of your letter gave me an agreeable surprise”—slowly relaxed and expanded in register and range. 1

  Charlotte learned to be witty or even clownish, like calling dancing “shaking the shanks,” and she sometimes signed off with variations on her name, like Charlotte Scrawl or Charivari, probably in this case meaning discordant music, both self-effacing references to inelegant letters. One message she signed, “your affectionate Coz” (cousin), another with a row of CB’s getting ever smaller: CB, CB, CB, CB. She took a man’s name—Charles Thunder (the Greek word bronte means “thunder”) or Caliban, the tormented creature from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Ellen she calls Mrs. Menelaus, a reference to Menelaus’s wife, Helen of Troy, whose abduction by Paris started the Trojan War. One note toys with Ellen’s name: Helen, Eleonora, Helena, Nell, Nelly. Charlotte’s pedantic, bossy side sometimes came out, such as when she pushed for their exchange to be in French: “I beg and implore your reply to be in the universal language.” Some messages took a gossipy, chatty tone; others showed an interest in plumbing her own painful mental states. This she did with a developing skill, illustrated in a letter sent in the winter of 1836 about “the melancholy state I now live in, uncertain that I have ever felt true contrition, wandering in thought and deed, longing for holiness which I shall never, never obtain.” Penning these letters schooled her in the language of the delicate colorings of the psyche, a searching depth she would master by the time she set out to write Jane Eyre. 2

  With her letters to Ellen and others, Charlotte worried about their aesthetic appeal—the handsomeness of the line of text, its spacing and elegance—not so different from how she was anxious about the neatness and fashion of her dress and the way she wore her hair. For many of her contemporaries, caring about one’s personal appearance and caring about how one’s letters looked went hand in hand. She sometimes ended letters to Ellen with apologies for her “execrable Penmanship” or for “all faults in this wretched scrawl” or, worse, this “most horrid scrawl ever penned by mortal hands.” In one postscript she explains that her “paper has I see got somehow disgracefully blotted, but as I really have not time to write another letter, I must beg you to excuse its slovenly appearance—pray let no one else see it—for the writing into the bargain is shameful.” In another she comments, cheekily, “Preserve this writing as a curiosity in Caligraphy—I think it exquisite—all brilliant black blots and utterly illegible letters.” Charlotte sometimes illustrated her letters, like one she sent to Ellen from Brussels that has an unflattering portrait of herself waving across the sea to an elegant Ellen, who holds the hand of a gentleman labeled “The Chosen” (a man who was courting Ellen at the time). Charlotte’s last line reads, “Good-bye to you dear Nell when I say so—it seems to me that you will hardly hear me—all the waves of the Channel, heaving and roaring between must deaden the sound—G-o-o-d—b-y-e CB.” 3

  Charlotte developed the idea of the edible letter early on, writing to Ellen in 1836 of their life-sustaining correspondence: “your notes are meat and drink to me.” One of her letters to Ellen came out such a jumble that it is more akin to something to eat than to read. “I feel constrained to sit down and tack a few lines together . . . now if the young woman [Ellen] expects sense in this production, she will find herself miserably disappointed. I shall dress her a dish of salmagundiand,—I shall cook a hash—compound a stew—toss up an omelette soufflé . . . and send it to her with my respects.” Lucy Snowe, in Villette, imagines a letter from the man she loves—Dr. John Graham Bretton—as something to eat, “the wild, savoury mess of the hunter, nourishing and salubrious meat, forest-fed or desert-reared, fresh, healthful, and life-sustaining.” Or drink: for the young Paulina, Lucy’s friend who is also in love with Bretton, his letter is like clear water from a well to a thirsty animal, a “thrice-refined golden gurgle.” 4

  The deliciousness of a letter had to do, in part, with its ability to hold a spiritual or physical portion of the self. Letters might be linked to bodies because, for Charlotte and others of her time, they mattered as palpable things. She has Lucy, for instance, revel in the material feel of her first letter from Dr. Bretton. She gives it a sentience with its white “face” and its seal, a “single Cyclop’s-eye of vermillion-red.” The address tells of “a clean, clear, equal, decided hand”; the “deftly dropped” wax, of his “untremulous fingers.” This is an object that has been intimate with his body: the ink, paper, and wax seal impressed with his initials eloquent with individuality. Just as one might kiss another’s closed eye, she presses the seal to her lips. Handwriting especially speaks of the writer’s person, as Paulina points out when she begins to receive letters from the same source: “Graham’s hand is like himself . . . a clean, mellow, pleasant manuscript, that soothes you as you read. It is like his face—just like the chiseling of his features.” 5

  As we’ve seen with books and boxes, the Brontës and their contemporaries could be literal-minded in their putting of the person (or a part of the person) into various sorts of containers. In an early note, Charlotte asked Ellen to enclose in her next letter a lock of her hair. A pledge of future friendship, this exchange of mementos could also hold a dash of the romantic, even the talismanic. Caroline begs a lock from the man she loves in the already discussed passage in Shirley, a snippet that eventually ends up in a locket around her neck. At times, giving one’s hair worked as an erotic promise of the body. In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby cuts a curl from Marianne Dashwood’s head, and family members assume this means a solid engagement. When he returns the tress in a rejection letter, she is crushed. 6

  Branwell practiced a similar piece of caddishness when he sent a paring of hair in a letter. After he lost the job as a railway clerk because of discrepancies in the finances under his care, he was hired by the Robinsons, Anne’s employers, to tutor their son. Branwell embarked on a secret sexual adventure with Mrs. Lydia Robinson, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of his employer, within a few months of his hiring (more about this in the next chapter). He wrote to his friend John Brown, the Haworth sexton, to tell him about his lover, sending—perhaps as a way of bragging about his conquest—a “lock of her hair, which has lain at night” on his breast. “Would to God,” he l
aments, “it could do so legally.” 7

  Ellen Nussey doesn’t comply with Charlotte’s request for a tress, using the mailing expense as an excuse, although she may have felt that Charlotte moved too fast into an ardent friendship. Charlotte, petulant, replies, “I was very much disappointed by your not sending the hair. You may be sure my dearest Ellen that I would not grudge double postage to obtain it but I must offer the same excuse for not sending you any.” This little fight couldn’t have happened in the same way just eight years after this, when major reforms swept the post office. The cost of sending a letter in the early nineteenth century depended on its weight and distance traveled, and the system was not only prohibitively expensive but also slow and unreliable. A second page or an enclosure, such as a lock of hair, doubled the postage. Adding to the snail pace was the fact that the receiver, rather than the sender, paid the postage to the letter carrier who came to the house door. So, in this case, Ellen’s refusal to send her hair could be disguised as a politeness to Charlotte, who would have been the one to pay double postage. Under this system, the arrival of a letter could be unwelcome for no other reason than the receiver’s lack of money. Having to turn away the postal carrier with an undelivered letter was a humiliating fact of life for many. 8