by Deborah Lutz
Later she made fair copies of this host of little leaves in a notebook, revising as she transcribed. The notebook’s non-chronological order made some sort of sense to her, and it fulfilled her need to see the poems together as a body of work. A few years on, she decided to revise and rearrange the best ones and to add some new poems, in two fresh notebooks, one for the Gondal poems and another for the others. This meant tearing sheets out of the first notebook and discarding them once they were rewritten (and generally revised) into one of the new notebooks, or merely crossing them out in the first notebook if they shared a leaf with a poem not deemed worthy to be copied into a later notebook. One, “Gondal Poems,” has a red paper cover retaining its original price of 6d and a title page that mimics a published book, decorated with twisting vines. These notebooks stood as Emily’s version of publication, final copies with just herself as an audience.3
Emily likely stored her poetry scraps and notebooks in her portable desk, along with letters, stationery, seals, ink, and metal nibs—all of the latter were found there after her death. The desk locked, and she may have kept it that way, with a key she carried on her person. All three of the Brontë sisters had these portable writing desks (Charlotte’s is pictured at the beginning of this chapter). Branwell must have had one too, bigger than his sisters’—women’s desks were made more “delicate” than men’s—but it has not been located. Emily called them “desk boxes,” as in her 1841 diary paper, which begins, “It is Friday evening, near 9 o’clock—wild rainy weather. I am seated in the dining-room, having just concluded tidying our desk boxes, writing this document.” 4
On the page next to her writing, Emily sometimes drew portraits of herself using her banged-up rosewood desk, her sheet (the one she was actually writing on just then, visibly pictured) propped on the ink-stained, purple velvet that covers the writing slope. When closed, the desks became rectangular cases, not much larger than shoeboxes. Divided on a slant and hinged together, when opened the lid and bottom lay flat, forming a continuous sloped surface for writing and reading. Even when unfolded, the desks were small, so they were sometimes called lap desks, although they were also known as table desks. In the portrait already mentioned of Emily in her little bedroom (pictured here), she is sitting on her wood stool, penning a diary paper on her desk as it rests on her lap. Keeper is stretched out on the rug near her and Flossy on the bed. In another picture of herself composing, she scribbles on the writing slope as it sits on a table. Another, drawn on the same page, has her standing at the window, gazing out, with the desk open on the table, a page sitting on it, ready.5
No pictures of Charlotte using her desk exist, but the nature of its service can be surmised from the desk itself. Ink bottles sat in slots at the top of the opened desks, and one of Charlotte’s still has dried ink crusted on the bottom. The brown-velvet writing slope, stained like Emily’s with ink, is especially blackened on the upper right-hand corner, where Charlotte dipped her pen into the bottle, the ink having dripped as she moved the pen to the page. The slopes on these desks opened to reveal storage areas. Charlotte squirreled away in these nooks all sorts of oddments. A braid of Anne’s hair, tied with a blue ribbon and stuffed in a little envelope, cut by their father when Anne was thirteen, found a place there. Charlotte also stored in it hand-drawn patterns for collars, cuffs, and wallpaper, pointing to the use of the desk for domestic work and artwork along with writing. Needlework and desk boxes were more than close cousins—letters and papers were stored in both, as were sewing patterns and bits of cloth. Even the paper for manuscripts showed this lack of separation: in the center of a paper pattern for a coin purse, Charlotte penned a little poem about long-lasting love, titled “I can never forget.” 6
Given the Brontës’ penchant for tiny text, it is fitting that they would have miniature desks to make and store their specks of scribbling. These wood boxes have an affinity with the tin box, about two inches long, where Emily and Anne kept their folded diary papers. In turn, they put the tin box into one of the desk boxes. Arthur Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband, who inherited many of their things, turned it out from the bottom of a Brontë desk in 1896 to show an early biographer. Writing boxes went into trunks when the sisters traveled. Seemingly part of their process of composition, the folding and putting of texts into containers, and then those containers into other ones, carried over to the manuscripts of their novels. Sections of Charlotte’s fair copy of The Professor, for instance, show signs of being folded in two or four, so it is likely that it underwent a boxing process of some sort. Emily bought another tin box in 1847 in order, her biographer Edward Chitham thinks, to hold the manuscript of Wuthering Heights.7
Charlotte has her character Lucy Snowe mirror this practice. The letters she receives from the man she loves, while not of her own writing like the Brontës’ texts were, still need, compulsively, to be encased in many layers, as explored in the previous chapter. First they are wrapped in silver paper and put into a casket. The casket then goes into a locked box, all of which is hidden in a drawer. When that doesn’t keep out the prying eyes of Madame Beck, there is the oiled silk bound with twine, then the bottle stoppered and sealed, and finally the burial that includes a slate and cement. Given this scenario, one can imagine the kind of excavation that had to happen for the Brontës to get their writing into print.
The sisters’ predilection for hiddenness was shared during this time. Victorians favored special boxes for all sorts of activities. They not only relished the practice of keeping things boxed up but also had a penchant for putting these boxes into other ones. Characters in many a Victorian novel can be found sedulously putting things into things. The novelist George Eliot, who herself had a box for storing lace that contained “false” drawers opening out in strange and secret ways, gives an illustration of this common ritual in her book Mill on the Floss. The character Mrs. Pullet draws a bunch of keys from her pocket, choosing one to unlock a wing of a wardrobe. From among layers of linen she extracts a door key. Moving to another room, she unlocks another wardrobe. After she takes out sheet after sheet of silver paper, a bonnet is disclosed.8
Despite seeming to be specially made for them because of their fairy littleness, the Brontë desk boxes were unremittingly average, of the sort ordinary middle-class women possessed. With their basic inlays and simple designs, they were nothing like the dreamy desk that Charlotte imagined in an early story, constructed of satinwood and containing a diamond pen, gold inkstand, and a vase to hold letter wafers. The penny post made such desks nearly ubiquitous, used for writing all those letters and for storing materials for correspondence, like stamps, wafers, and the new-fangled envelopes. Keeping apace with innovations in the post office, desk boxes became cheaper, some even made of papier-mâché. George Eliot had a black one of these, decorated with mother-of-pearl. Florence Nightingale also owned a black papier-mâché desk, with a still life painted on the top that includes dead birds. A gift from well-wishers in Derbyshire, near where she grew up, it has a plaque affixed on the front reading, “Presented to Florence Nightingale on her safe arrival at Lea Hirst from the Crimea / August 8 1856 / as a token of esteem by the inhabitants of Lea, Holloway, and Crich.” 9
Some desk boxes of the day had so many parts and uses and could be so transformed by hidden springs, levers, and buttons that they seemed straight out of fairy tales. Department stores, where one could also buy needlework boxes, sold desk boxes of all sorts, as did jewelers and cutlers, like Thomas Lund’s 1820s “Cutlery Warehouse” at 56 and 57 Cornhill, London, which advertised “Portable Writing Desks, Dressing Cases, and Morocco articles of every description.” In 1830 a maker named Michi of 4 Leadenhall Street, London, advertised mahogany desks in nine sizes. Ladies’ desk boxes, sometimes simply called “stationery cases,” could be purchased pre-stocked with luxury items such as rose-scented paper and wafers, called “Papier d’Amour,” and even colored and perfumed inks. One shown at the Great Exhibition by Eliza Byam of Soho Square had many roles to pla
y: “Compound stationery case: traveling, writing, working, dressing and refreshment case; lady’s carriage companion.” Some portable desks had mirrors added to the top, thus doubling as vanity cases; others had fire screens, to keep the heat off the face of the writer while penning letters. One type of lady’s traveling desk worked also as a needlework table, with a pleated bag for storing items in process, but it also featured an adjustable reading stand, with a hinge so it could be stowed, and a pullout writing slide. Elizabeth Gaskell had one of these multi-use, portable desks, much fancier than what the Brontës used. An upright box with doors, one of which opened to disclose a steep writing slope, it included a wooden support for a timepiece and a forest of dividers, cubbies, and drawers. No wonder Lewis Carroll’s unsolved puzzle, asked by the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, gained such traction: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” 10
The plot device of the locked desk as personal space safeguarding secrets was a favorite of many Victorian novels, like Anne’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which the abusive husband holds his wife prisoner in her own home. After reading her plans to escape him in her diary, he takes the keys to her writing desk, thus spiriting away a significant portion of her privacy. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair—Charlotte’s favorite novel—the clever, scheming governess Becky Sharp has a desk box, her “private museum,” where she hides all the tokens of her adultery: love letters, cash, and jewels given to her by rich lovers. When her husband forces open her desk, their marriage is over. The character Amelia Sedley, who gave Becky this desk, puts, in the “secret drawers” of her own writing desk, the gloves left behind by the man she loves. Another character, the spinster Briggs, has similarly hidden away in her old lap desk the “lock of yellow hair” of her “hectic young writing-master” from twenty-four years before and his letters, “beautiful in their illegibility,” further underlining the equation of desks and the recesses of the heart. In a potential mix of fact and fiction, Mary Shelley, traveling with her portable desk earlier in the century, was rumored to have stored there that book containing her husband’s heart. 11
In another jumbling of desk and body, Charlotte eroticized the contents of her character Shirley’s desk. Louis Moore, standing in Shirley’s drawing room alone, thinks over how much he adores “all her little failings,” how she “enchains” him hopelessly. He notices she has left her desk open, with the keys hanging in the lock, even though here are “all her repositories . . . her very jewel-casket.” He dwells on the charm of what he finds there: “a pretty seal, a silver pen, a crimson berry or two of the ripe fruit on a green leaf, a small, clean, delicate glove.” These things, “her mark,” lead him to exclaim, “Why does she leave fascination in her footprints?”
The Brontë sisters probably took their desk boxes with them to their teaching and governess jobs. Anne described a horrid situation with a desk in Agnes Grey, likely based on her own experience. Her charges, brats all, find the most outrageous possible abuse to visit on their mild-mannered governess. One yells to the other, “Mary Ann, throw her desk out of the window!” Agnes explains that “my precious desk, containing my letters and papers, my small amount of cash, and all my valuables, was about to be precipitated from the three-story window.” In Jane Eyre, the moneyed and snobbish complain about the “nuisance” of governesses, and how the children took joy in driving theirs, “the poor old stick, ” to extremities. One pliable governess would “bear anything; nothing put her out . . . we might do what we pleased” such as “ransack her desk.” Lucy Snowe’s employer in Villette sneakily has the keys to Lucy’s desk and workbox copied so she can nose around in them whenever she wants. Such violations were all the more hateful since the interior of the governess’s desk provided one of the few private spaces at a job that was lived, except for sleeping, almost always in public. “A private governess has no existence,” Charlotte wrote to Emily (whom she calls here “Lavinia”) from her first governess job. Charlotte viewed these duties as little more than wiping “the children’s smutty noses” or miscellaneous “drudgery,” and her charges as, variously, “fat-headed oafs,” “riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs,” “small, petted, nuisances,” or “pampered spoilt and turbulent,” so it comes as no surprise she felt a governess needed all the privacy she could get.12
Another precious desk was Jane Austen’s mahogany one, its writing slope covered in leather, that she took along when traveling. When she stayed at the Bull and George Inn in Dartford on one trip in 1798, the desk, given to her by her father and now at the British Library, was accidently placed in a chaise whose luggage was bound for the West Indies. It was saved just in time when she sent off a horseman to stop the carriage. “No part of my property,” Austen remarked, “could have been such a prize before, for in my writing box was all my worldly wealth.” She probably kept her money in the secret drawer in the bottom right-hand corner, which opens with a hidden bolt set into the top of the writing slope. Such concealed recesses became dear to the Victorians, some desks had three or four of them tucked away, and mechanisms for opening these drawers included stiff springs released by catches, themselves concealed by wooden covers. While the Brontës couldn’t afford desks with hidden compartments, they did admire such boxes, like an ivory casket in an early story by Charlotte that opens “by means of a secret spring” and holds a piece of paper recording a scandalous secret: two female friends were so intimate that they decided to switch babies and raise their friend’s child as their own.13
Dickens’s portable desk, now at the New York Public Library, is more than twice as large as one that belonged to Charlotte Brontë, which sits next to it in a display case. Charlotte’s is a plain Jane, while Dickens’s has elaborate inlaid brass and a manly writing slope that could never fit on a lap. It has secret drawers in a hidden section opened by first unlocking the whole desk, then unlocking the top part of the slope. A long wooden panel, part of the pen tray and ink bottle compartment, is next removed by nudging it up, which releases it from a catch, causing it to pop out, owing to a tense brass strip that works as a spring. Behind this are three shallow drawers, discreetly tucked away with pale-green ribbon pulls. The brass plate on the top engraved “CD / Gads Hill” marks this expensive desk as a luxury item associated with Dickens’s country mansion and his wealth more generally.14
Another novelist known for his mobile equipment was Anthony Trollope, who wrote a good deal of his many works on a “tablet” while commuting by train to his day job at the post office. Perhaps it was this desk—where he, like Austen, kept all of his money when traveling—that was smashed into pieces by a porter at a railway station in America when Trollope went there in 1861 to write a book about the area and its people. “I shall never forget my agony as I saw and heard my desk fall,” Trollope recalled, as he watched the porter toss it seven yards to where it landed on the hard pavement. “I heard its poor weak intestines rattle in their death struggle.” The experience almost made him convinced that the country, full of savages, was irredeemable. When he traveled by ship, Trollope had carpenters build special desks in his cabins. A later writing box must have been quite large, because on one trip “some wretch had pitched the desk down like a ball,” shattering a bottle of ink. It tinted not only “all my beautiful white paper” but his three shirts stored on top “to keep things steady.” And then there were the one hundred loose cigars: “I have not yet tried how cigars, bathed in ink, smoke;—but I shall try.” 15
Also portable in the sense that they could be moved to different parts of the house (along the lines of today’s laptop computers), depending on which room was quietest or warmest, or best lit, such desks belonged even to those who never traveled outside the home. Characters in Victorian novels often carried lap desks from here to there and back again, or had servants do it for them, reflecting actual practice. The slope often moved rather than the person. In Anne’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Mr. Hargrave “sent for his desk into the morning room,” where the ladies se
wed and read. When the heroine can’t sleep, she “got my desk and sat down in my dressing-gown to recount the events of the past evening.” A man sick in bed needs to write a note canceling an appointment. He asks his guest for help, who responds, “Most willingly I consented, and immediately brought him his desk.”
The Brontë desks stayed mostly inside the parsonage as the winter of 1845 came on. All the siblings found themselves unemployed. Not long after Anne left her job with the Robinsons, Branwell was fired (from the third job in the last five years), probably because his employer figured out what he was up to with his wife. Branwell tried to blunt the agony of a broken heart with alcohol, or as Charlotte put it, he kept “stunning or drowning his distress of mind.” His beer, gin, and, perhaps, laudanum habits were partially funded by the wealthy Mrs. Robinson, who sent him money, probably to keep him silent. He also tried writing as a way to block out “almost killing cares,” he called them, mostly poems with suicidal themes. In one a corpse floating on water is envied, with its untroubled calm and the “healing balm” of its cold oblivion. He even started a novel, a reworking of an earlier Angrian tale, about—what else?—troubled love.16
Charlotte, meanwhile, attempted to launch the school project she had been planning for so long, aided by the small legacies each of the girls had inherited from their Aunt Branwell. A school at the parsonage would keep them all home, a state they desired above all else. The three had a prospectus printed, and enlisted the help of their friends to spread the word. But no one sent their children, probably because of Haworth’s inaccessibility. “If you were to persuade a Mamma to bring her child to Haworth,” Charlotte explained to Ellen, “the aspect of the place would frighten her and she would probably take the dear thing back with her instanter.” 17