by Deborah Lutz
Photography would gradually replace memorializing the dead with hair keepsakes. Along with this new technology, many historical changes led to the disappearance of hairwork. The spread of secularization starting around the end of the nineteenth century meant that doubts about the existence of an afterlife grew. Dying and the corpse began increasingly to represent meaningless loss rather than paradise and continuity. In medicine, revised theories about bacteria, germs, and disease led doctors to attribute death to specific physical causes rather than divine interference. God had not caused the death, rather the disease had, making it more difficult to believe that the body (and its hair) served as a window to heaven. Death began to feel more like failure than triumph, a defeat of the physician’s skill, a collapse of the patient’s will. Yet the true blow to the belief in the beautiful corpse came with World War I. The death of hundreds of thousands of young men (over four hundred thousand British soldiers died in the First Battle of the Somme alone) led to the widespread desire to distance the physicality of death. Mass graves came to replace personal ones as the war worsened and many had to be buried where they fell, or sometimes they couldn’t be buried at all because they lay in no-man’s-land or their bodies had been exploded into tiny fragments. About half of the bodies of British soldiers were never found. Alongside this growing distaste for the corpse and hair mementos came new technologies for creating keepsakes of the dead. Cameras and film became so cheap by 1900—when Kodak brought out the Brownie—that most of the population could own a camera and take snapshots regularly. Instead of crystallizing a moment by cutting a lock of hair, one could hold it in amber with a photo. Voice recordings, moving images, even typewriters were all means of holding onto the dead without the leavings of their actual bodies, or even of their writing as a remnant of their hand moving across a page. 35
But this shift in feeling happened decades after Charlotte died, on March 31, 1855, just before she turned thirty-nine. No photograph was taken of her corpse, another type of death souvenir Victorians favored. The servants Martha Brown and Hannah Dawson (the elderly Tabby Ackroyd had died just before Charlotte) laid out her body in the bedroom that her mother had died in many years before. They cut off a long tress of her dark brown hair to keep. She had promised it to them, they said, during her lifetime. Later, when Charlotte’s husband was despondent because he had forgotten to gather some hair on her deathbed, Martha and Hannah split the tress with him. 36
Ellen Nussey arrived soon after Charlotte’s death, to pay her last respects to her closest friend. She spread evergreen branches and flowers on Charlotte’s “lifeless form.” She, along with Charlotte’s husband, Patrick, and many townsfolk, saw Charlotte’s small coffin interred alongside her mother, aunt, and four of her siblings. Patrick still held onto his faith in heaven despite having lost all of his children. He wrote of his daughter’s demise: “our loss we trust is her gain.” 37
After the funeral, Ellen went home with a few curls: some she wore in jewelry, others she later gave away to favored friends and Brontë fans, such as John James Stead, who eventually donated his to the British Library. Arthur Nicholls had a gold ring made with his initials, a snippet of Charlotte’s hair tucked away behind a little door. 38
CHAPTER EIGHT
Memory Albums
The violet’s eye might shyly flash
And young leaves shoot among the fern
—EMILY BRONTË, UNTITLED POEM
Our hills only confess the coming of summer by
growing green with young fern and moss in secret
little hollows.
—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, IN A MAY 1851 LETTER
WHEN CHARLOTTE WAS working on her final novel, Villette, in 1851, she made a trip to London. Her real identity had begun to leak out into the larger world after the publication of Shirley, and she had started on a career of being “lionized,” as she put it. Trips to London meant meeting famous people eager to make the acquaintance of the author of Jane Eyre and, if less so, Shirley. The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace had just opened when she arrived in May. She visited the giant fair full of objects of all sorts—hair pictures, elaborate traveling desks, needlework boxes, machines for making gummed envelopes—again and again, finding that “its grandeur does not consist in one thing,” as she told her father.
But in the unique assemblage of all things—Whatever human industry has created—you find there—from the great compartments filled with Railway Engines and boilers, with Mill-machinery in full work—with splendid carriages of all kinds—with harnesses of every description—to the glass-covered and velvet spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith—and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls. . . . [I]t is such a Bazaar or Fair as eastern Genii might have created.
She admired a special alarm bed that pushed the sleeper awake and onto the floor at the set hour, which she thought the somewhat lazy author William Makepeace Thackeray should be made to use. By her fifth visit, though, she began to tire of the fair somewhat, finding it bewildering and feeling it left one “bleached and broken in bits.” She may have had this multifarious collection of things in mind, or the love the Victorians had for things in general, when she considered at first calling Villette “Choseville,” meaning “thingville” in French. 1
Charlotte probably also saw on one of those visits another invention, which rivaled the alarm bed: a glass container created by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a London doctor. A mostly self-sustaining environment for ferns, the Wardian case (generally about the size of an average aquarium) required only a small amount of upkeep to maintain an ideal habitat. At the Great Exhibition, Ward displayed two cases that he claimed had been closed for many years—miniature worlds thriving almost magically. Ward’s boxes with their living interiors must have been especially striking when set in the gorgeous glass and steel structure of the Crystal Palace, built in Hyde Park: little glass cases within one giant one. In fact, the designer of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton, had been producing glass houses for nurseries for much of his career, and he based the Crystal Palace on these smaller dwellings for plants. Wardian cases could soon be found in most fashionable women’s parlors, alongside needlework, taxidermy, and other decorations made or tended by hand. Bought at nurseries, conservatories, and glass manufactories beginning in the 1840s, fern houses spread in the 1850s into average middle-class homes. Often sitting on stands, or placed on tables, like today’s aquariums, Ward’s cases also projected out of windows. Some of these vibrant cells came in the shape of the Crystal Palace itself, as souvenirs of the origins of their popularity. Charlotte would surely have been drawn to these living cabinets, since ferns had already become, for her, markers of dreamy places and memories. She also had an affinity for the contemporary practice of boxing-up, as we have seen, taking something potentially wild, whether it be natural specimens, hair, or dead and stuffed animals, and putting it in a container, album, or book or under a glass dome.2
Wardian cases were part of a “fern craze” that reached its heyday in the 1850s and ’60s. “Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania,’ ” the writer Charles Kingsley commented in 1855, taking the Greek word for fern, pteris, derived from pteron, meaning feather or wing, to give the fad a title. Ferns began to replace flowers and other plants as the most desired greenery for gardeners and the most exciting specimens for amateur naturalists on hunts in the countryside. For craft-minded women, ferns became the most treasured plant to press and collect in albums and books, or to affix to white paper in order to be framed and hung on the wall. Pteridomaniacs sent birthday and greeting cards that not only had ferns depicted on them, but often included pieces of real ferns. A favored motif in decoration, fern shapes appeared on plates, glass, curtains, and wallpaper, as well as in needlework and lace. The Brontë household, for example, had a white ceramic water jug with a raised pattern of fern leaves winding around its exterior. The ghostly shadow of ferns eme
rged on objects when an actual fern frond set on a surface was sprayed with india ink or another dye or paint. Then the plant was carefully removed, creating a piece of “fern ware.” Also called “splash-work” or “spatter-work,” this fern pastime became popular with young girls, who would use a toothbrush wet with ink drawn along the teeth of a comb to do the spattering.3
Fern madness led to some types of ferns coming close to extinction from over-harvesting in parts of Britain and brought talk of passing “fern laws,” so they wouldn’t go the way of the wolves. In the second half of the nineteenth century, parents named their girls, and sometimes boys, Fern, and people called their houses “Fern Bank, Fern Cottage, Fern Hollow, Fern House, Fern Lodge, Fern Villa, Fernbank, Ferncliffe, Ferndale, The Fernery, Fernielee, Fernlea, Fernleigh, Fernmore, The Ferns, Fernside, or Fernwood,” as the historian Sarah Whittingham enumerates. On these houses, ferns were usually carved into the window frames, keystones, or stone capitals.4
The Brontës were early fern lovers, beating the fern cultists by more than a decade. For them and others with a literary turn, walking out to look at and gather ferns, or other forms of “botanizing,” brought to mind the Romantic poets, especially the close study and interest shown by Dorothy and William Wordsworth in hidden, tender plants that sprout in dark, damp places, like ferns. Dorothy collected ferns on her walks around their Dove Cottage and planted them in their garden, and her brother wrote of them in poems and prose, including of “Fair Ferns . . . Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.” One of Ward’s favorite fern cases was designed after a window in the ruin of Tintern Abbey. He may have had in mind William Wordsworth’s famous poem, written while looking at the abbey, when he designed it—both the poem and the fernerie grew out of a love of contemplating the decayed and ruined, the remains of the past that brought on a sweet sense of melancholy. Since ferns grew in shady places, they had an association in the popular imagination with old walls, hollow trees, ruined chapels, tombstones in churchyards, and other places lovely because desolate. Mourning jewelry occasionally had fern carvings, as did gravestones. Ferns were sometimes “skeletonized,” or had their fleshly parts removed, and then bleached to make mourning arrangements, called “phantom bouquets,” often preserved under glass domes with pictures or relics of the departed. Some Wardian cases took the shape of a gothic cathedral, while others had tiny ruins set up in them. Outdoor gardens and ferneries also mimicked castle and abbey remains, the ferns magnifying the atmosphere of ancient loneliness. One George Glenny took blood-stained moss gathered by a friend at one of the battlefields of the Crimean War of 1854 and trained it to grow on an “old ruin” in his Wardian case.5
The fern craze developed out of a larger gothic revival in art, architecture, and design, with the art critic and professor John Ruskin as its most celebrated spokesman. The medieval gothic style, Ruskin and his followers felt, developed from an organic creativity with form, as if it grew straight out of the busy soul of the craftsman, compared to the stiff, clean surfaces of styles like the neoclassical. Ferns were the plant version of the gothic, with their intricate detail and coiling stems. Ruskin believed that the hand of God could be found in the “spirals of springing ferns,” their representation in art a way of celebrating God in nature. Ruskin painted watercolors of ferns and advocated for fern designs on gothic-influenced architecture, most famously on the capitals of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, carved with recognizable fern species. Charlotte admired Ruskin’s books and was reading volumes of the Stones of Venice (published by her own firm of Smith, Elder and Co., which sent them to her) during the months before her marriage, including his famous chapter titled “The Nature of the Gothic.” 6
No Wardian case appears to have graced the parlor of the Haworth parsonage, but the Brontës found ferns growing just outside their windows, the poor moorland soil ideal for numerous species. In Emily’s poems the plants and their wild plots evoke seclusion, solitude, and the grave, usually desired places in her world—sites of comfort and concealment. In a Gondal poem, fern leaves “sighing wave” over a character’s grave, “like mourners.” A wildly rushing mountain spring in another poem has its source in “fern and ling.” “Ferny glens” in a third beckon the poet (or her alter ego) on her walks, being part of her “own nature,” as is the “wild wind.” Emily’s feelings for ferns mirrored those in the popular consciousness, with their gothic gloominess infused with a sense of consolation. Writers on ferns saw them as part of a linked chain, starting with the boggy landscapes in which they grew, the peat that ferns and other plants (moss especially) became, which was burned to warm the home and make the hearth glow. Peat under enough pressure became coal, and Victorian fossil hunters wrote excitedly about finding fern imprints on coal, evidence of plants growing eons ago.7
Yet somehow, in a curious paradox, ferns represented both this ancient decay and the fresh green grotto, the glimmering stream. Ward’s case originated out of a desire to create a rustic garden at his house in Whitechapel, London. He tried to build a rockery in his backyard, fed by trickling water and covered in ferns and mosses, but the smoke and fumes from surrounding factories killed the plants. One day he captured a moth in a glass bottle and happened to add some “moist mould.” Covering it with a lid, he found to his delight that a fern sprouted up in the perfect moistness, and he surmised that the delicate plants needed protection from the “noxious gases” of the factories in order to thrive. Even indoors, plants were difficult to grow because of fumes from open fires and gas lighting (increasing in use since the 1850s), so Ward embarked on many experiments that involved guarding plants from interior pollutants, assisted by a friend who owned a nearby nursery. His inventions were instrumental in the development of the “aqua vivarium,” or aquarium, and the terrarium, a term not coined until the 1890s. Sealed ferneries in Victorian parlors brought “some shadow of the green country lanes and lovely scenes, so refreshing even in the remembrance,” one writer enthused, “into the close atmosphere of a city.” 8
Charlotte had all of these associations in mind when Jane Eyre ends up in Ferndean—“fern valley”—Manor with Rochester, after she has passed through a succession of houses and institutions: Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield Hall, and Moor House (also called Marsh End). Gateshead, where Jane is a child living with the Reeds, needs entering then leaving behind, like one would any gate at the head of a path. Lowood, the charity school to which Mrs. Reed sends her, represents an unhealthy environment because it is “low,” a place of potential sickness according to the Victorian theory of “miasma”—a belief that fevers could emerge out of certain damp, vapory environments and be carried on the air. The “forest-dell” of Lowood, a “cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence,” brings the typhus that kills off so many girls, already weakened by bad food and insufficient clothing, results of the “low” or unethical culture of the poorly run school. Thornfield, where she is the governess to Rochester’s ward, pricks, fraught with romantic attraction and dangers. Moor House, where she stumbles upon her cousins, has much going for it with its bracing altitude and its boggy spots, which bring peat fires rather than pestilence. The pebbly bridle path that leads to it winds between fern banks. But Rochester isn’t there, and St. John, who has a certain perilous magnetism for Jane, is.
Jane finally reaches and then ends her days in the ferny valley, which has a soft give compared to the thorns of Rochester’s other house, a masculine place where women pace, fret, and descend into madness. Ferneries and fern hunts served in many Victorian novels as settings for romance and assignations. “Ferns, and picnics, and love tales, go so well together,” opined one fern expert, “that perhaps the fact may account for some of the ‘pteridomania’ now so common a complaint.” Part of the fern’s allure came from its association with a state of “fascination,” from the Latin verb fascinare, meaning “to enchant.” Victorians drew on an established tradition of giving flowers and other plants symbolic meaning, called the “language of flowers.” The daisy repre
sented innocence, for instance, while the common thistle meant misanthropy, and the poppy consolation. One greeting card from a “language of flowers” series had a maidenhair fern frond attached to it. The card was labeled “Fern—Fascination” and had printed on it:
This little spray of Maidenhair,
Will, better far than words, declare
That by the charms of your art;
Your modest mien; your loving heart;
“I’m fairly fascinated.”
This fern species was given its name by country folk because it reminded them of women’s pubic hair.9
When Ferndean is first introduced to the reader, it has miasmic potential, representing the rot and darkness of ferny places. It would have been safer if Rochester had concealed his mad wife Bertha at the old manor house at Ferndean, a place more secure from prying eyes than Thornfield because “even more retired and hidden.” But he had “a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood,” he tells Jane, because the “damp walls” would soon have killed her. After Bertha burns down Thornfield, a crippled, chastened Rochester moves to Ferndean, and Jane comes there to nurse the widower. “Deep buried” in a heavy wood, Ferndean begins at this juncture to pick up some of the more heartening emotions attached to ferns. Jane first arrives on foot at the start of evening, descending into further shadows, “so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood,” and almost losing her way in the “sylvan dusk,” like a girl in a fairy tale. The next day, when the two are together, they take a walk and find “cheerful fields” with a “sparkling blue” sky. Even in the woods they encounter “hidden and lovely” corners. After the two marry, they people the spot with their children. Still, some of the atmosphere of the ferny graveyard lingers. The novel ends with a letter from St. John, who is dying in India, which brings the idea of death back to Ferndean and lets it linger as the story concludes.