by Deborah Lutz
Ferns brought to mind fairy tales for many Victorians, openings into supernatural realms. Fairies were often pictured dancing in ferny settings, and they left behind rare ferns as tokens of their presence. To make oneself invisible, one need only gather fern seeds, according to an old proverb, revived in Victorian fern lore. Some still believed in a folk tradition that the moonwort fern provided a cure for “lunacy” (so called because mental illness was once thought to be related to the moon) when picked in the light of a full moon. Charlotte clusters these images around a young Jane in the famous passage in the potentially haunted red room at Gateshead. Jane looks into a mirror, but, with a hint of Catherine-like madness, she sees staring back at her a tiny phantom, “half fairy, half imp,” who comes out of “lone, ferny dells in moors,” appearing before the “eyes of belated travellers.” The fairy side of Jane, which retreats for many chapters, peeks out again when she first meets Rochester, riding out of the darkness with the gytrash bounding before him. He teases her after his fall by calling her a fairy who bewitched his horse. When the two finally withdraw to Ferndean, they find comfort, like in a peaty fire, but also the thrill of the gothic, with its murk and magic. This is the eroticism of ferns.10
Charlotte gathered and pressed the ferns for the album pictured at the start of this chapter during her honeymoon in Ireland. She had known the man she married for many years. The twenty-six-year-old Arthur Bell Nicholls, three years Charlotte’s junior, became Patrick Brontë’s curate in May 1845, after he had completed his ordination as a deacon. An Irishman like Patrick, Nicholls had received his bachelor of arts from Trinity College, Dublin. Charlotte found him a “respectable young man,” but she was pining for Heger, her unavailable “master.” Rumors floated about that Nicholls courted Charlotte, but she quickly quashed them, telling Ellen that a “cold, far-away sort of civility are the only terms” on which they had ever been. The curates of the area saw her, she claimed, as “an old maid,” and she regarded them as “highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the ‘coarser sex.’” She paid these curates in kind by portraying them in Shirley as a pack of dunderheads, Nicholls as Mr. Macarthy, an Irishman somewhat unhinged by the local Dissenters and Quakers. After word spread about the true identity of the author of Shirley, local Haworth people began to read it and Jane Eyre, then told the author herself what they thought of the books. Nicholls read them both, and he found the passages about the curates in Shirley so hilarious that he gave “vent to roars of laughter,” as Charlotte described it, “clapping his hands and stamping on the floor.” He read them aloud to Patrick and “triumphed in his own character.” 11
At some point Nicholls began falling in love with Charlotte. The situation was fraught: she had grown famous, he continued as a lowly curate with a tiny salary. But he had also been there as a witness to Branwell’s fall, and he had officiated at Emily’s funeral. By 1851, Charlotte reported to Ellen that Nicholls, before leaving for a vacation in Ireland, had invited himself to tea at the parsonage and “comported himself somewhat peculiarly for him—being extremely good—mild and uncontentious.” In the letter to her father where she describes her visit to the Great Exhibition in London, she includes Mr. Nicholls in her hope that all at home are well. Starting in 1852, Nicholls visibly pined for Charlotte, staring at her, holding her gaze, and treating her with a feverish restraint.12
He finally steeled himself to propose. After tea one day, Charlotte had withdrawn into the parlor while her father and his curate talked in the study. Charlotte heard Nicholls get up as if to go, but instead he tapped on the parlor door. He entered and stood before her, “shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty.” Charlotte felt a strange shock at seeing the usually cool man overcome by passion. He told her that he had suffered for many months, that he could no longer endure it, and that he craved for some hope. She promised she would give him a response the next day, and led him out of the room. Then she went and told her father, who was so furious at Nicholls’s presumption that he seemed on the edge of a fit or stroke, with the veins starting out on his forehead and his eyes suddenly bloodshot. Charlotte considered her father unjust—he applied to Nicholls various strong “epithets”—yet she also didn’t feel in love. She sent him a note of rejection.13
Patrick refused to speak to Nicholls, seeing the match as a degradation for Charlotte. Nicholls, for his part, hardly ate, he became restless, ill, and so deeply unhappy that he believed he must leave his situation. He applied to become a missionary in Australia. Charlotte pondered all this, reckoning Nicholls to be one “whose sensations are close and deep—like an underground stream, running strong but in a narrow channel.” Needing a break from the impossible turbulence at home, she slipped away to London, ostensibly to see Villette through the last stages of printing. Returning a few weeks later, she found Nicholls still lingering about, not able to tear himself away. She regarded his dogging her up the lane after the evening service—and all his dark, gloomy looks—as pitiful. As spring came, Nicholls remained inconsolable and so alone in his heartbreak that Charlotte fancied “he might almost be dying” for love of her. Touches of tenderness for the outcast and unhappy man became unavoidable for Charlotte. Nicholls found another curacy, and as he officiated at his last church service in Haworth, he gazed on Charlotte in the audience and lost command of himself, becoming pale and beginning to shake. Only with difficulty could he “whisper and falter through the service,” and women in the audience who understood what was going on began to weep. “I could not quite check my own tears,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen. Patrick didn’t attend, but when he heard about it he called Nicholls an “unmanly driveller.” Yet, up until the last, Nicholls let Anne’s spaniel Flossy come to his rooms, and he and the dog went out for long walks.14
On the night before Nicholls left, he came to deliver some papers to Patrick and to say good-bye. Charlotte heard them from another room, listening as Nicholls left the house and then paused in the garden. She felt compelled to go out and say a few words of farewell. She found Nicholls, believing he would never see her again, “leaning against the garden-door in a paroxysm of anguish—sobbing as women never sob.” She tried to comfort him, but took care not to give any hope. Still, Charlotte’s attitude toward him had begun to shift. His well of passion for her must have reminded her of the heroes she wrote about. Nicholls was something of a Rochester figure, with his masculine physique—not conventionally handsome—and his devotion to one, plain woman. Nicholls had no ancient fortune or name though, no great gloomy mansion, no mad wife in his attic. He was a real-life lover. In short: Would this be enough for Charlotte?15
This was not Charlotte’s first marriage proposal, nor even her second. There was the one from Ellen Nussey’s brother, mentioned already; a proposal from an Irish clergyman she had met briefly when he was visiting Haworth in 1839; and another from James Taylor, the managing clerk at her publishing house. This latter proposal came in 1851, not long before Nicholls began mooning over her. Taylor’s offer was flattering to Charlotte, but she had a kind of physical distaste toward him.
After Nicholls moved away, he began secretly corresponding with Charlotte. Matters progressed, and he made some sly visits to Haworth, without Patrick’s knowledge. After six months of this courtship, Charlotte told her father all, insisting that he agree to Nicholls’s courting her more formally. Patrick finally submitted, but only with great bitterness. Nicholls began openly visiting the parsonage. Charlotte accepted Nicholls’s renewed proposal, and he returned as Patrick’s curate. Charlotte told her friends she wasn’t really in love, though she had “esteem” and affection for the steadfast, devoted man. She wished he had more brilliance and finer talents; she worried that he wasn’t her intellectual equal. She mainly felt gratitude, perhaps not the best foundation for a marriage. Elizabeth Gaskell made an astute comment about the impending nuptials and Charlotte’s intended: “I am sure Miss Brontë could never have borne not to be well-
ruled and ordered well!” she remarked. “She would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, law-giving, passionate man.” 16
Charlotte had much to do before the wedding: she was “very busy stitching” green and white curtains for Nicholls’s study, which used to be the “peat room” that Emily sometimes kept animals in. She had to buy a border for the tablecloth and sew it on and purchase her wedding dress—a white, book muslin “with a tuck or two.” She refused the pricier silk tulle that friends favored, although she wore a lace mantle over it, embroidered by Ellen. Her white bonnet trimmed with green leaves brought to mind a “snow drop,” according to townsfolk. Like Jane Eyre, she took care that her veil was neat and inexpensive, not wanting to “make a fool of herself.” Wedding cards with both “card” envelopes and “postage envelopes,” all to be sealed with white wax, had to be bought and then sent out.17
At eight o’clock on the morning of June 29, 1854, Charlotte and Nicholls married in the Haworth church. Only a handful of people were invited. Patrick declared at the last minute he wouldn’t attend, claiming illness, but one wonders if it was resentment that kept him in his bedroom. Charlotte’s teacher at Roe Head, Margaret Wooler (one of the models for Miss Temple in Jane Eyre), gave her away instead, rather fittingly. Ellen played the role of bridesmaid, and a few of Nicholls’s friends attended, one of them officiating. After a brief wedding breakfast, Charlotte changed to a gray-and-lavender silk dress, with velvet trim at the neck, and they left immediately on their honeymoon in a carriage and pair to the Keighley train station, then on to Wales and Nicholls’s Ireland.18
They passed through busy cities and towns, like Dublin and Banagher, where they stayed with Nicholls’s family, but they generally sought, in Charlotte’s words, “wild and remote spots.” It was at Killarney, in the south of Ireland close to the coast, where Charlotte collected the ferns that made up her album. She wasn’t the only one to hunt ferns there: it was a thriving tourist spot for Victorian “fernists”; even Queen Victoria visited with Albert in 1861 and gathered a few ferns for her garden. Killarney was known for its more than fifty species, especially the tall royal fern and the Killarney fern. A “filmy fern” with transparent leaves originally found in Yorkshire in 1724, the Killarney sprouted on the edges of waterfalls and streams and could also be found in caves (now rare because of Victorian over-harvesting). Ward planted a Killarney fern in one of the cases he displayed at the Great Exhibition, and one appears to be represented in Charlotte’s album (although it’s not easy to tell since the ferns weren’t labeled). The intrepid Mary Taylor sent Charlotte some exotic fern fronds from New Zealand, which may have ended up on these pages. Charlotte didn’t leave behind an account of her “botanizing,” so we don’t know if she carried a vasculum—a rounded tin case with a handle for preserving specimens—or a collecting press, which held sheets of absorbent paper.19
The adventures of zealous fern seekers appeared in magazines, including an account in Punch of a Miss Netley on a search in Devon, “seldom out without an Alpine-stick and a basket, as if she were going to market.” “Splendid ferns everywhere,” she exclaimed. Ferns often took enthusiasts to edges of cliffs or fast-flowing rivers, and accidents were numerous, as in 1867 when a Miss Jane Myers fell 170 feet after bending down to gather a fern on the edge of a cliff at Craighall in Perthshire, Scotland, and died. Charlotte may have been ferning when she had a potentially perilous accident near Killarney. As she crossed the Gap of Dunloe—a pass between high cliffs—on horseback, having ignored the recommendation of their guide that she dismount because of the boulder-strewn path, her horse slipped, trembled, and, suddenly going “mad,” reared and threw her onto the stones under its hooves. Nicholls, not noticing for a moment that Charlotte had fallen, grasped the horse’s bridle while it plunged and stamped around her. Convinced she would die, she worried about leaving behind her husband and father. But then Nicholls saw her on the ground and let go of the horse, which immediately sprang over her. Helped up, Charlotte was miraculously unhurt. When recounting the story to a friend, she mentioned “a sudden glimpse of a grim phantom,” probably a reference to death, but also to local folk tales and legends about the gap and its environs. A “Phantom of the Lake” supposedly haunted the area: the specter of O’Donoghue Ross, a chieftain who had been thrown from his horse and, taking this as a sign of impending death, began practicing the “black arts” in order to assume strange shapes. He appeared to travelers every seven years, the legend went, riding on his horse. This was an aptly ferny adventure for a honeymoon, with its gothic, fairy tale overtones and hints of romance. A superstitious person might take Charlotte’s accident in the way O’Donoghue did his, since not only would Charlotte die within the year, but what would have saved her was deemed by many a “black art” (more about this later).20
Having gathered the ferns, a collector such as Charlotte would then dry the fronds for herbariums, which included not only albums, but also portfolios or individual leaves kept in cabinets or boxes. For albums, the ferns would be attached to the pages by, for example, sewing the stalk to the thick paper, or threading ties through small holes to affix parts of the fern stem. Charlotte’s “fern book,” as these albums were sometimes called, has black leather binding and gold trim. A band was cut out of each of the heavy pages that make up the album, and the stem of the fern was stuck into it. Some sort of clear paste—flour paste, gum arabic, isinglass, mucilage, and starch were all recommended by manuals on how to make fern albums—was then used to affix the tops and edges of the fronds. A sense of sinuous movement, of wind feathering the intricate frond, now all stilled, lingers in the ferns’ positioning on the pages. Albums specially made for receiving fern specimens, such as “The Fern Collector’s Album,” had preprinted descriptions of common ferns on one side. The other side had a frame in which the plant could be added. Those unwilling to do any work themselves could purchase printed books already containing pressed ferns—like William Gardiner’s 1850 Selection of British Ferns and Their Allies, with each plant surrounded by decoration and botanical information—at shops catering to tourists in spots haunted by fern lovers.21
Victorians were prolific album compilers, creators of all manner of curated collections arranged in the little museum of the volume. Albums, along with Wardian cases, were part of the Victorian enthusiasm for collecting, containing, classifying, and organizing, especially when it came to saving the past by placing it into some sort of permanent system. An ancient ancestor of the Victorian album was the commonplace book, typically a place to copy favorite quotations, to record one’s reading and intellectual activity. These compilations of notes survived throughout the Victorian period and continue in various forms up to today (with notebooks and journals). Arthur Nicholls kept a commonplace book, where he stored poetry and prose extracts and drew a family tree of the Bells, his maternal relatives. Many functioned as private aide-mémoire, while others were receptacles for basic information, holding hand-copied recipes, patterns for embroidery, or sketches. Usually private, occasionally they were made as gifts, especially as educational tools for children, or treated as heirlooms, like the poet Felicia Hemans’s commonplace book, which ended up in the hands of, rather appropriately, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, when newsprint became cheaper, commonplace-book makers began to include clippings from printed sources, often alongside their own handwritten recordings, beginning the compiling of books of “scraps,” later in the century called “scrapbooks.” 22
Albums functioned also as social spaces for gathering traces of friends, families, or the famous. The autograph album, a relative of the commonplace book, had a semi-public character, often displayed in the drawing room to be paged through with visitors. The lucky hostess could prove her stellar social position by the illustrious guests who had contributed a poem, sketch, or signature. Those not able to muster famous friends bought or begged for autographs to paste into their albums. The strips of handwriting that Patrick m
ailed to Charlotte’s fans, created by cutting up her letters to him, often went into autograph albums, as did the signatures Ellen cut off of letters from Charlotte. Mary Jesup Docwra, from Kelvedon, in Essex, sent a letter to Patrick in 1858 pleading for some of Charlotte’s handwriting. She put the note he sent in reply—“Dear Madam, The enclosed is all I can spare of my dear Daughter Charlotte’s handwriting. Yours, very respectfully, P. Brontë.”—in her album with marbled covers, along with the snipped sample, so small that it holds only the words “my book—no one” and then, on the line below, “ious than I am to.” When Harriet Martineau became a famous writer, she complained about the “importunity about albums” and being “despoiled of the privacy of correspondence” with her friends “by the rage for autographs.” Surely the most exciting Brontë autograph is a small letter containing all three of the sisters’ signatures, signing as “Currer Bell,” “Ellis Bell,” and “Acton Bell.” It was requested by a Frederick Enoch—probably one of the two people who bought their volume of poetry—through their publishers in 1846, a year before any of their novels appeared in print. Enoch and his contemporaries found an emotional charge in a signature; it captured and relayed selfhood for them, something like what the photograph would do.23
One needn’t be someone of note to be asked to contribute to an album. Many women (and occasionally men) appealed to people in their circle to contribute to their friendship album or “souvenir.” In 1845, Charlotte, not yet famous, copied a poem in German from memory into a Miss Rooker’s album and one in French—“Le Jeune Malade,” by Charles Hubert Millevoye—into Ellen Nussey’s, glossing it with the fact that the poet himself died young and that she considered the poem the most poetical of all French verse. When Branwell was on his drunken path of self-destruction in 1846, he stayed in Halifax where his friend J. B. Leyland lived. Mary Pearson, the daughter of a local innkeeper, asked Branwell to contribute to her album on more than one occasion, and his verse and sketches mirrored his troubled state of mind. He copied out some of his own poems and lines from Byron’s verse and did some sketching, including of a man with a desolate face, captioned “The results of Sorrow.” A churchyard with a tombstone inscribed “I IMPLORE FOR REST” makes up another entry. He also penciled a portrait of himself and, on the same page (pictured here), drew a man kneeling and weeping, with a sinking ship in the background.24