The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  About seven months after starting Jane Eyre, Charlotte was close to completing it. She began making a fair copy (now at the British Library) of early chapters in March 1847 and polished it off by August. In July, Emily and Anne had finally found some success with their first novels, although it was, at best, a mixed accomplishment. The publisher Thomas Cautley Newby agreed to shepherd their novels into print, in the three-decker format, with Wuthering Heights taking up the first two volumes, Agnes Grey the last. Yet they again had to pay out of their own pockets: the hefty sum of fifty pounds, more than a year’s salary at one of their previous teaching jobs. Newby promised to repay them once enough copies were sold, but he never did, even though they sold well enough to earn back their money. Both Emily and Anne died without realizing any profits from their novels. Charlotte, meanwhile, couldn’t find anyone to take The Professor on any terms whatsoever. She did receive an encouraging rejection from Smith, Elder and Co.; they requested she send the manuscript of any future novel she might write. This she could do easily enough, since Jane Eyre was so close to completion. She put Jane Eyre on that train in August. In a couple of weeks they had accepted it and offered to pay her one hundred pounds for the copyright, a common way at the time of paying authors, although it had the drawback of preventing Charlotte from receiving royalties.32

  The ease of Jane Eyre’s composition meant she didn’t need to use a tool she would later employ on her manuscripts: scissors, kept in either the desk box or the workbox. With other novels, including The Professor when she went back to revise it, she practiced some literal cutting and pasting, as can be seen on the manuscripts themselves. She would snip out, with great care and craft, part of a page (written on one side only), then paste on another partial sheet of paper, sometimes blank and other times with new text. In a couple of cases, she tore the page rather than using scissors, as if with urgency or emotion. This paper craft descended directly from the handmade books of her childhood, not to mention other crafts—needlework and quilling on that tea caddy for Ellen. Not only did she master storytelling, but the manuscript as a tangible entity also needed her skills: its paper and ink, its cutting, pasting, and wrapping.33

  Charlotte was lucky with her publishers, but her sisters, especially Anne, were not. Smith, Elder and Co. rushed Charlotte’s book into print, while Newby let Anne’s and Emily’s novels languish, not printing them until a couple of months after Jane Eyre appeared, and probably only doing so because of the runaway success of this other work by a “Bell brother.” In plum bindings, with cheap paper, and with advertisements for other books bound at the very beginning titled “New works by popular authors in the press and published by Mr. T.C. Newby,” the three volumes abounded with errors and affronts to the authors. Probably the most galling for Anne was that the title page of the first volume read “Wuthering Heights. A Novel by Ellis Bell, in three volumes,” not even mentioning Agnes Grey, which filled the third volume. Yet Anne didn’t let this discourage her; she even used Newby again for her second novel, despite his shabby treatment of them. While Charlotte blazed through Jane Eyre, Anne had begun working on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, probably starting in early 1847. Showing heavy influences from Wuthering Heights just as Jane Eyre did, Tenant didn’t, however, follow the lead of Emily’s novel; rather, Anne’s new novel criticized its central principles, turning the passionate, handsome man, who could have been a Heathcliff, into a drunken, abusive husband. Jane Eyre also received some revision in Tenant, the two novels probably under discussion at the same time during those evening colloquies. Anne’s heroine also finds herself in a country mansion with a mysterious man, like Jane with Rochester, and she must flee and find her way. But Anne sucked all the romanticism out of the situation, all the depth out of the shadowy man, presenting the cold, hard facts of a woman in an abusive relationship during a time when the laws overwhelmingly favored the husband.34

  Another influence on Anne’s novel was Branwell, who provided a model for the drunken dissolution of Arthur Huntingdon. Some have argued that Emily and Charlotte drew on Branwell’s brokenhearted despair for their depictions of men in love, such as Heathcliff and Rochester. While they may have woven some of his characteristics into their heroes, the influence could have been only partial and indirect. Branwell appeared pathetic to his sisters, as Charlotte makes clear in letters to Ellen that are full of resentment for his lack of restraint and his emotional and financial drain on the family. His hopeless mental state and drunkenness were nothing like the strong-willed determination of Heathcliff and Rochester, Byronic types that Emily and Charlotte had brought into their fiction since they were young girls.

  Emily may also have been bringing a new novel to these nocturnal sessions. No draft of a second novel exists, but many have speculated that after Emily’s death Charlotte destroyed whatever beginning Emily had made. Charlotte’s belief that Wuthering Heights had been too shocking, coupled with her wish to protect her sister’s reputation, all support the argument that she burned work she felt was disturbing to notions of Victorian propriety. A letter and an envelope from Newby found in Emily’s desk go a long way toward proving the existence of a partial draft of a second novel. Among reviews of Wuthering Heights clipped from papers, receipts for clothing from Brussels merchants, a program for a concert in Brussels, and some Belgian coins—evidence that Emily may have taken this desk to Europe—the note and envelope, addressed to Ellis Bell and with a blob of red sealing wax, have generated much speculation. Dated February 15, 1848, the message refers to a second novel by Ellis then in progress. While it has been suggested that this referred to Anne’s Tenant, and that Newby was confusing Acton with Ellis, something he was known to do, it could also have been accurately addressed to Emily.35

  If Emily had been drafting a new work, its pages of minuscule script would probably have been kept in her writing desk. There is something ghostly about this absence, a haunting that lingers around this box, a little like the strange bed in Wuthering Heights mentioned already. In that “large oak case,” the dead Catherine’s presence imbues her books, with their scribbled marginalia and musty smell. Her name carved in the wood itself is like an autograph on a manuscript, carrying a fragment of selfhood. Emily can also be felt in her desk box: in the hand-ruled pages found there, probably to guide the fair copies of her manuscripts; the blotting paper with ink stains; pieces of chalk browned with age; fragments of lace; an ivory seal; and an empty cardboard box that Emily marked with her initials: EJB, once containing pen nibs made by Caldwell, Lloyd, and Co., an Edinburgh publisher and stationer.

  For a Brontë enthusiast, each leftover in these desks, no matter how enigmatic and insignificant, seems to shine out with meaning. Another wisp of paper in Emily’s desk illustrates the charmed life of these remnants, the sense that they hold stories. A comic adhesive wafer stuck to a fragment of envelope pictures a man drowning, with the caption “High-water at the Isle of Man and Bury-Head.” Emily added another caption in ink: “Likewise at Bolton Bridge on Thursday June 20th 1844.” All four siblings were home on this Thursday, and they may have been playing a word game called High Water at Bolton Bridge, which was about thirteen miles from Haworth. Or perhaps someone fell into the River Wharfe and “buried” her or his head briefly, which struck Emily as humorous and worth preserving? It is tempting to imagine that this scrap could somehow be related to the lost manuscript of a second novel, a temptation that takes one onto the path of wild speculation, a trail many Brontë lovers (including me) feel compelled, at some point, to trod.36

  “Reading” the contents of Emily’s desk as evidence of any sort is complicated by the fact that Charlotte had it for years after Emily’s death, and that it passed through numerous hands after Charlotte’s death. Who knows what sort of fussing Charlotte did with the contents of the box, especially given her controlling nature? Some of the items stored there actually belonged to Charlotte herself: a letter to her from a Belgian friend; an empty envelope, on which she inscribed, “Diploma g
iven to me by Monsieur Heger, Dec 29—1843.” Yet, after all, this mingling of objects somehow suited the situation of these women, whose novels partook of a similar type of mingling of ideas and experience. Stashing someone else’s personal effects in one’s desk pulled them closer to one’s body and self. “I find I have stolen a pencil-case of yours,” Charlotte once wrote Ellen, after a visit. “I put it away with my pen in my little box.” Going through someone else’s desk could be irritating to the desk’s owner, but it could also be seen as an act of love, as Charlotte depicts in Villette when the professor regularly rifles the contents of Lucy Snowe’s desk, leaving behind the scent of his cigar smoke as evidence, a gesture of nosy affection.37

  One of the most eloquent testaments to the effect on Charlotte of her three siblings’ deaths, which happened within eight months, is the chaos of her manuscript for Shirley. Charlotte began it around the start of 1848 and probably discussed it with her sisters in the evenings along with Tenant and, perhaps, Emily’s second novel. She finished the fair copy of the first volume at the start of September 1848, and it has a moderately tidy appearance. She started the second volume and had mostly finished it when Branwell and then Emily died. “I try to write now and then,” Charlotte wrote her publishers about four months after Emily’s death. “The effort was a hard one at first. It renewed the terrible loss of last December strangely—worse than useless did it seem to attempt to write what there no longer lived an ‘Ellis Bell’ to read.” A couple of months after Anne’s death, she picked up the manuscript again, beginning with the chapter called “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” The parts of the “clean copy” written after Anne died show her usually neat handwriting uneven and confused. Alterations and deletions multiply, with cut-away and pasted-in passages breaking up many leaves. A text of grief, it makes material a sorrowful mind.38

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Death Made Material

  Long neglect has worn away

  Half the sweet enchanting smile

  Time has turned the bloom to grey

  Mould and damp the face defile

  But that lock of silky hair

  Still beneath the picture twined

  Tells what once those features were

  Paints their image on the mind.

  —EMILY BRONTË, UNTITLED POEM

  IF THE BRONTËS’ things feel haunted in some way, like Emily’s desk and its contents, then the amethyst bracelet on the previous page made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne is positively ghost-ridden. Over time the colors have faded, the strands grown stiff and brittle. Charlotte may have asked Emily and Anne for the locks as a gesture of sisterly affection. Or, the tresses were cut from one or both of their corpses, an ordinary step in preparing the dead for burial in an era when mourning jewelry with hair became part of the grieving process. Charlotte must have either mailed the hair to a jeweler or “hairworker” (a title for makers of hair jewelry) or brought it to her in person. Then she probably wore it, carrying on her body a physical link to her sisters, continuing to touch them wherever they were. 1

  Illness had started in the parsonage earlier in the year of 1848. Branwell rallied for a time after his forced exile from the woman he loved had led him to drink heavily, applying for jobs on newly opened rail lines and returning to writing poetry, even starting a novel. Then Mr. Robinson died in May 1846. At first Branwell was elated: now he could be with his beloved, who would be free to marry him after a period of mourning. But Mrs. Robinson had higher ambitions than the former tutor of her children, now unemployed, penniless, and steadily becoming a drunk. She devised various stratagems to keep him away but at the same time to pacify him so he wouldn’t cause a scandal. She sent her servants to him with excuses and often even with money. Branwell became emotionally overwrought. He stopped eating and sleeping for days, “too wretched to live,” he exclaimed. When the fact that he would never be with her sunk in—she soon married a wealthy relative—he turned drinking-himself-to-ruin into a full-time job. He only slowed when he ran out of money. While his sisters busied themselves with bringing out their poems and completing their novels, he was killing himself. As he undermined his health and his sanity, suffered fainting fits, delirium tremens, and hallucinations, he caused dangerous accidents, such as one night when he set his bed on fire. Anne, passing his room at the right moment and seeing the fire, rushed in and tried to put it out. Not succeeding, she fetched Emily, who hauled him out of bed and into a corner, dragged the bedclothes into the middle of the room, and doused them with water from the kitchen (a mishap possibly reworked for Jane Eyre, with Emily becoming Jane, and Branwell, Rochester). In his last surviving letter, Branwell begged his friend John Brown to oblige him by contriving “to get me Five pence worth of Gin in proper measure.” 2

  At some point in 1848, Branwell contracted tuberculosis, which made quick work of his weakened constitution. His death caught everyone by surprise. At the very end, he seemed to repent of his “godless” ways, Charlotte felt, “praying softly in his dying moment.” After the terrible death struggle, in which he flinched and jerked so violently he was almost on his feet, he fell back into his father’s arms, and his face took on a “marble calm.” He died on Sunday morning, September 24, 1848, just thirty-one years old. “I felt as I had never felt before that there was peace of forgiveness for him in Heaven,” Charlotte found, looking upon his countenance. Charlotte hardly regretted his death, since he was now “at rest,” but Patrick was inconsolable, calling out, “My son! My son!” 3

  Rather surprisingly, given that he didn’t die in a particularly holy way, Charlotte interpreted Branwell’s demise as a “good death,” an idea that Protestant evangelicals like the Brontës had borrowed from Catholic tradition, and one that had become widespread since evangelical revivals in the late eighteenth century. If God called away the chosen one to a more peaceful place—a paradise full of rewards—then death should be seen as a happy event. Emily put such ideas into the head of the servant Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, an average Victorian evangelical and believer in the “goodness” of death. Catherine Earnshaw died “as quietly as a lamb!” Nelly exclaims. “She drew a sigh, and stretched herself, like a child reviving, and sinking again to sleep.”

  The heavenly realm could even be seen on the countenance of one going there, or having recently arrived there, many believed. Nelly finds in Catherine’s corpse “perfect peace,” an “untroubled image of divine rest . . . a repose that neither earth nor hell can break.” Gazing on the dead body leads her to “feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter.” A radiance or holy light emanated from the faces of the dying and came directly, many were convinced, from the place of light where the dead had gone. Deathbed scenes with such signs became favorite devices of Victorian novelists, especially Dickens, whose little Paul Dombey, in Dombey and Son, dies illuminated by a “golden light,” which seems at first to come streaming through the window, but then shines on his head from the face of his mother, who is already in heaven. The remains of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop appear “fresh from the hand of god,” and when children die in Oliver Twist the cares of a cruel world pass off the face and “leave heaven’s surface clear.” To catch such evidence of grace, families watched at the side of their dying, kept diaries that detailed final days and moments, and listened for last words of wisdom. Some of these accounts were published, such as the celebrated Clear Shining Light, a diary of Sophia Leakey’s death from tuberculosis in 1858, written by her sisters. “Surprise and rapture” suffused her face just before death, and she exclaimed, “Yes, it is heaven . . . it is lovely, glorious!” 4

  Postmortem art thrived. In the corpse, the faithful found consolation that a vitality still flickered somewhere, evidence that needed fixing, copying. The ancient practice of recording the deceased’s appearance in drawings, paintings, or death masks went through a renaissance in the nineteenth century. Branwell sketched his aunt’s head just after her death, with her cap neat and her face at
rest. The Brontës had no death (or life) masks made of themselves, but other authors of the time had their features documented after their deaths, to be fashioned into masks or busts. When Dickens died on June 9, 1870, his daughter Katey watched his face smooth and then radiate a “beauty and pathos.” The artists John Everett Millais and Thomas Woolner traveled out to Dickens’s estate together the next morning. Millais made a pencil sketch of the still features; Woolner spread an oily mixture over the face, then covered it in a thin layer of soft plaster, which conformed to all the crevices and grooves that a worried life had written there. When the cast had dried, he lifted it off and used it to shape a bust. Ordinary Victorians had masks made of their loved ones too, then hung them on the wall of a bedroom or parlor, or displayed them in boxes with glass tops. Locks of hair had a special status as souvenirs, since they were “the very things themselves,” as Elizabeth Gaskell puts it in a story about a woman who looks through miniatures of the dead but finds touching their hair more poignant because it is “a part of some beloved body which she might never touch and caress again, but which lay beneath the turf, all faded and disfigured, except, perhaps, the very hair, from which the lock she held had been dissevered.” 5