The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  The hairwork process—involving boiling the hair to clean it, then weaving it on specially designed round tables (which could be mail ordered) with a series of weights that were attached to the strands of hair—was described in instructional manuals, such as Mark Campbell’s popular 1865 Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work. The tight weave of the bracelet with Anne’s and Emily’s hair, pictured at the start of this chapter, was likely achieved this way, although in this case probably by a professional, who then attached the ends of the hair to the metal. A bracelet made of Anne’s hair, from locks given to Ellen Nussey by Charlotte after Anne’s death, has a slightly different weave, and Ellen may have made it herself. By the time Ellen died, she had at least three hair bracelets, four hair brooches, a hair ring, and a couple of loose locks, much of it hair from the Brontë family. 20

  A coil of hair stowed in the case at the back of a watch was an easy aide-mémoire. Sergeant Troy, in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, tucks away Fanny Robin’s golden plait, then marries Bathsheba Everdene. She witnesses, with much misgiving and jealousy, Troy steal a look at the forbidden cutting in his gold timepiece. Jewelers of this time added compartments to jewelry, in the front or back of a ring or brooch, for instance, to hide hair. The locket containing hair, a staple in the Brontës’ writing, also usually represented stormy love. A cross with gems, “the centre stone of which was a locket enclosing a ringlet of dark-brown hair,” is worn by a beautiful lady in an early story by Charlotte, to profess her love for a duke who, though married to someone else, gave her his hair. In a poem by Emily, someone’s dual loves are encased in a “locket fair / Where rival curls of silken hair / Sable and brown revealed to me / A tale of doubtful constancy.” Another locket tells the same tale, in Wuthering Heights, when the servant Nelly Dean finds Edgar Linton’s wisp of light hair on the floor where Catherine’s body is laid out. She opens the locket and entwines it with Heathcliff’s black curl. The Brontës themselves possessed a number of jewelry pieces with compartments that snapped open, such as a tiny locket with one glass side, making visible an anonymous circle of hair. Simple jewelry like this was increasingly mass-produced by the end of the 1850s, becoming affordable to most Victorians, who individualized the ornament by adding a curl. A brooch of Charlotte’s containing Anne’s hair has this inexpensive, standardized quality. 21

  Forming tendrils of endearment among the living, the hair in the lovers’ lockets and the tress Charlotte begged from Ellen had nothing to do with death. In truth, the amethyst bracelet pictured at the head of this chapter doesn’t have the hallmarks of a mourning piece. Mourning jewelry is usually enameled in black or fashioned of black material such as jet, and often has engravings like epitaphs, such as a gold brooch at the Victoria and Albert Museum that has two interleaved curls of different colors and textures and is inscribed, “Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, Died Decr 1849. Aged 80. Sophia Brunel, Died Jany 1855, Aged 79.” Symbols of death, like weeping willows or women in classical robes grieving over urns or tombstones, also appeared on mourning pieces, with parts of the scene—the willow branches or clouds in the sky—sometimes made of tiny cuttings of hair. The elderly ladies in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, for instance, prove the hold on them of their dead friends and relatives by their many brooches decorated “with mausoleums and weeping-willows mostly executed in hair.” Such jewels seemed themselves like little tombs, the hair standing in for the corpse. When discovered today at an antique shop, a piece of anonymous hair jewelry can feel like an unmarked, but still visible, grave. Whose bodily shred lies here? Who treasured it enough to encase it? 22

  In corners of the Brontë archives, hair marking all sorts of relationships can be found—close to fifty curls or hairwork associated with the family are deposited in various libraries and museums in Europe and the United States. One especially strange, poignant work created initially out of a sense of devotion to the living became, all too soon, a collection of fragments of the dead. Attached to a dark velvet–covered backdrop are seven snippets of hair, some taped and others sewn, each labeled by hand with the name of a member of the Brontë family and the date it was cut (see photograph). Reputedly gathered by Sarah Garrs, one of the Brontës’ nursemaids, when she left their employ, all the locks are dated 1824, except Patrick’s. Dated 1860, his hair was probably sent to Garrs when they were in touch toward the end of his life. The cuttings represent all of the family members—including their sister Maria and their mother—but one. The hair of their sister Elizabeth seems never to have been collected, for reasons unknown. 23

  The intimacy of hair worn, especially when exposed and brushing the skin of the wearer, is missing in this framed and glassed-in group on the wall. This desire for a physical connection with the dead has its roots in the wearing of saints’ hair in amulets—traveling reliquaries common during the Middle Ages. There was little need to visit relics in a sacred place when one could find the miracles, health, or good luck thought to emanate from them so readily at hand. The sapphire amulet Charlemagne gave his wife in the ninth century, one of the earliest and celebrated of such talismans, held, it was believed, the Virgin Mary’s hair and fragments of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Even long after the Reformation reached Britain in the 1530s and many of the saints’ relics were destroyed, the practice still could be found, in modified form. For instance, Royalists, believing Charles I had a divine right to rule and had been martyred, wore rings containing his hair after he was beheaded in 1649. Some of the snippets had been dipped in pools of his blood from the scaffold. For Protestant Victorians, the hair of a loved one, substituted for relics of the saints or royals, connected them to heaven, with its blessing of immortality. 24

  Yet a dash of paganism, persisting into the nineteenth century, also added magic to hair’s religious aura. Special materials or gems had protective qualities, according to ideas stretching back to antiquity, and wearing them guarded against hard luck such as illness, slander, and the “evil eye.” Rings with “toadstones” (believed to be from the head of a toad, but actually the fossilized tooth of a now extinct fish) warded off poison and kidney disease, for example, and rubies aided in holding onto land and status. Since a caul—the membrane still in place around an infant at birth—was believed to protect the possessor from drowning, it was sometimes worn in jewelry, as with an early nineteenth-century pendant at the British Museum containing both braided hair and a caul. 25

  Victorian hair jewelry radiated similar powers for many, carrying the foundational safeguard of love, often so strong it could outlast the grave. Some thought hair had an animal magnetism, an invisible fluid permeating the world and allowing bodies and objects to interact even when far apart. Hair could draw the absent donor’s “fluid” or presence toward the possessor of the curl, creating a link between the two beings. In an early story, Charlotte has “two locks of soft, curly hair, shining like burnished gold,” magically lead her character out of the “land of the grave” and back to where he most yearns to be: with the two young princes who gave him the hair. In another story, a coffin is opened, a lock of hair is cut from the corpse, and “with magic ceremonies,” which involve throwing it into a fire, it is formed into “a little locket or brooch in which a small portion of hair appeared under a very rich diamond.” This talisman protects the son of the dead man from all misfortune: the loving hand of the father hovers around his strands of hair. In Villette, Paulina calls the locket she wears containing the hair of her father and husband intertwined an “amulet,” which she believes will “ ‘keep you two always friends. You can never quarrel so long as I wear this.’ ” 26

  Strewn liberally across novel plots of the day, hairwork meant all sorts of things, like in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton when the dying prostitute Esther is redeemed after she kisses a locket containing her dead daughter’s hair just before she herself expires. Men’s (and sometimes women’s) watch fobs made of hair became so ubiquitous they marked middle-class respectability, such as the “hair guard�
�� Bradley Headstone in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend wears, a means for this working-­class man to establish his middle-class credibility. Helen, the heroine of Anne’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, has a small gold watch with a “hair chain,” a conventional touch establishing her steady character, leading the reader to trust her despite her status as a runaway wife. Contrarily and a little scandalously, Charlotte writes in “Caroline Vernon” of an illicit love affair made material by the man going to the theater wearing a “watchguard” composed of his lover’s “long streaming tress,” “the black braid across his chest,” prominently displayed for all to see. Romantic intrigue blossoms through other hair jewelry, like Edward Ferrars’s ring in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility “with a plait of hair in the center.” Edward claims it is the hair of his sister, Fanny, but Elinor Dashwood (in love with Edward) and her sister Marianne think it might be Elinor’s hair, a secret profession of Edward’s love for her. When they discover it belongs to the love of Edward’s youth, the vulgar and obnoxious Lucy Steele, all hope of romance seems to be ruined.27

  Deep drama in Victorian tales springs from coils of hair: they provide clues to identity, stand at the heart of mysteries. The first hint to the orphaned Oliver Twist’s parentage in Charles Dickens’s novel comes from a “little gold locket, in which were two locks of hair and a plain gold wedding ring” engraved with the name “Agnes,” with a blank space for the surname and the date of Oliver’s birth. In Charlotte’s story “The Secret,” a lady orders a ring from a jeweler “with a crystal stone” for “a little braided chestnut-coloured hair.” Central to a complicated blackmail plot, the ring is made in order to replace the authentic one, originally given by a wife to her husband when he left to fight in a war. The wife later marries a wealthy aristocrat after hearing of her husband’s death by shipwreck, but she keeps her first marriage secret. Imposters use the fraudulent ring to try to blackmail her by claiming her first husband is still among the living. 28

  Charlotte craftily preyed here on an anxiety that one’s mourning jewelry might not contain the hair of the loved one. Rumors and scandals about unscrupulous makers of mourning ornaments replacing hair mailed to them with someone else’s hair of the same color were discussed at length in women’s craft and fashion magazines of the day. Women sold their hair for such purposes—also for wigs and hairpieces—and hairworkers found this bought hair easier to work with because it was usually thicker, longer, and healthier. The “false” piece of jewelry took on the qualities of a disturbingly anonymous “grave” if the fraud was detected or even merely suspected. “Why should we confide to others the precious locks or tress we prize,” a writer for the magazine Family Friend asks, “risking its being lost, and the hair of some other person being substituted for it, when we may ourselves weave it into the ornament we desire?” 29

  Scraps of hair and other remnants of the dead showed up in ghost stories, a subgenre dear to Victorians. Following other writers of the time—especially Dickens, whose characters are often haunted by the past, like his Ebenezer Scrooge—Emily and Charlotte built plots around the haunting of houses. Read in a certain way, Wuthering Heights is a traditional ghost story, the entire narrative unfurling in response to the question, posed at the beginning of the novel: Who is the girl-waif who torments Lockwood in his nightmare in the strange box bed? Wuthering Heights, “swarming with ghosts and goblins,” influenced Thornfield Hall, in Jane Eyre, which also seems to be troubled by some demon or goblin that lights fires, rips wedding veils, and bites flesh in the dead of night. In Villette, Lucy believes she sees the specter of the long-dead nun, supposedly buried at the foot of the pear tree, glide past her numerous times. While these apparitions are explained away in both of Charlotte’s stories, others remain supernatural, such as in the passage when Jane at Moor House hears Rochester call out to her from hundreds of miles away, an instance of something akin to animal magnetism or romantic telepathy. Unlike her sisters with their gothic proclivities, Anne, the steady realist, didn’t write about ghosts; her houses are troubled only by human cads, flirts, and abusive husbands.

  Charlotte believed in supernatural occurrences and omens, as did many of her contemporaries. Besides her stories being riddled with them, she once told Mary Taylor that she sometimes heard ghostly voices, like when a disembodied voice said one night, “Come, thou high and holy feeling, / Shine o’er mountain, flit o’er wave, / Gleam like light o’er dome and shielding.” A contemporary with faith in the haunting of material objects like hair was Queen Victoria. Even before her husband’s sudden death in 1861, the queen was alive to the capability of things to soak up experiences and memories. She and her husband adored souvenirs, and few events were too insignificant for commemoration. A visit to their beloved Highlands in Scotland in 1844 led to the commissioning of an inkstand that included pebbles they had picked up on a stroll in Blair Atholl and teeth taken from deer Albert had shot there. Not only did the prince have necklaces, studs, pins, and waistcoat buttons made of stag teeth, engraved with the date and place he killed them, he and the queen had jewelry made of the baby teeth of their children, with inscriptions stating where and when they had been pulled or had fallen out. The queen also had her babies’ legs and hands carved in marble before their small roundedness disappeared as they aged. Albert gave her a charm bracelet with nine hearts, each holding the hair of one of her children. 30

  After her husband died, the queen had his bedroom left exactly as it was at the terrible moment of loss, and every day she had fresh clothes laid out for him and hot water put on his nightstand. The glass used for his last dose of medicine remained next to his bed, and his blotting book lay open on his writing desk, his pen resting on it—all frozen to lament his absence. She would hold one of his nightshirts as she slept, and she kept a cast of his hand nearby. Not only did she commission a death mask, but she also had a tomb effigy fashioned, the face modeled on the death mask. She sent a pile of his hair to Garrard, the royal jewelers, who made at least eight pieces incorporating his hair, such as a gold pin with an onyx cameo of the prince, his hair kept in a box at the back. The queen’s half sister, Princess Feodora, gave her a bracelet set with tresses from the heads of family members, mixed in with Albert’s. The queen’s eight-year-old son wore “a Locket with beloved Papa’s hair.” 31

  The queen believed that Albert still lingered in spirit form. “I feel now to be so acquainted with death,” she wrote to her daughter soon after he died, “and to be much nearer that unseen world.” She conducted séances in order to communicate with him, certain that her “adored Angel” hovered near, watching over and guiding her. Spiritualists like the queen believed that the dead usually chose everyday things through which to “speak” to the living: knocking or “rapping” on tables or walls, or moving heavy objects, such as levitating the séance circle’s table. Spirits played on musical instruments with invisible hands, believers reported, or guided the medium to write down messages, which was called passive or automatic writing. The most difficult task mediums performed involved “materializing” a spirit. The medium, usually tied to a chair behind a curtain, caused a form of the deceased person to emerge—a spirit, supposedly, but one solid enough for the audience to “prove” its existence by touching, grasping, or kissing it (it was often the medium herself, escaping her bonds and wearing a disguise). Believers theorized that the wispy forms consisted of a kind of “ectoplasm,” a type of mesmeric fluid or force. In the 1870s, the celebrated medium Florence Cook “materialized” a spirit called “Katie King,” who cut off locks of her hair and handed them to audience members as souvenirs from the afterlife. Harriet Beecher Stowe told George Eliot that she spoke with Charlotte Brontë’s spirit during a séance in the 1870s. 32

  Photographers claimed to capture images of ghosts with their cameras, in pictures that usually showed mourners with a white, wispy form floating nearby, like an emanation from their sorrowful thoughts. Some of these “spirit photographs” pictured ectoplasm or other types of fluid,
sometimes seeping out of the orifices of mediums. It hardly mattered that these photos and performances were hoaxes; a widespread faith in spirits, which peaked in the 1860s and ’70s, remained unshakable until the beginning of the twentieth century, feeding the collecting of relics and souvenirs. One Thomas Wilmot claimed in 1894 to catch an image of the “angel” Charlotte Brontë, called up by a medium, in a photograph that pictures a woman reaching toward the viewer. 33

  But all of this was after the Brontë children died. They didn’t take up spiritualism; it barely existed during all but Patrick’s lifetime. Neither did they take up photography, which was invented in the 1830s but not widely available until the 1850s, and even then it was quite expensive and usually required a visit to a photographer’s studio. Patrick was the only family member known to be photographed, although a glass negative that may be of Charlotte in 1854 surfaced in 1984 in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, but its authenticity remains controversial. 34