by Deborah Lutz
A school album at Roe Head, begun in 1831, bristles with the talents and whimsy of the young pupils. Bound in dark leather, heavily embossed with the image of a reclining woman in classical robes surrounded by flowers and pink watered silk on the inside covers and endpapers, the album was purpose-built by De La Rue and Co., London, as a friendship album. Most of the schoolgirls wrote or painted on the leaves, which had paper “frames,” either printed directly onto the page or constructed so that drawings could be inserted into them. Some pages carried blank music staves to be filled by the purchaser. A handwritten “Prologue” begins with “Whoever with curious eye this book explores / Must add some contribution to its stores,” and states some rules, such as no “profane” wit. On the first leaf is a “ruined church” sketched in pencil by Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor, who also contributed a very accomplished watercolor of a castle on another page. Charlotte drew a picture of St. Martin’s Parsonage, Birmingham (copied from a David Cox drawing), on leaf 7, in pencil, and other girls rendered landscapes, flowers, and religious scenes. Original poems cover some pages, including one clever verse called “On being desired to write in an album,” signed “H.H.”; quotations from the Bible and Milton decorate other pages. One unsigned watercolor depicts an open album similar to the one in which it is contained, a witty commentary on the potential endlessness of album culture.25
Mementos of shared communities (school, parlor, neighborhood), such albums functioned something like photograph albums would later in the century. An especially gorgeous friendship album, bound in green morocco with a label on the spine that says, “Souvenir D’Amitié,” was compiled between 1795 and 1805 by Anne Wagner, whose niece was Felicia Dorothea Browne (later Hemans). Inscriptions and quotations written by friends and family were embellished with watercolors, braids of hair, collages, paper cutouts, and portrait silhouettes, often by Wagner herself. On one page a brown braid is attached to the paper with pink ribbon, with this verse next to it: “Close as this lock of hair the ribband binds / May friendship’s sacred bonds unite our minds / Yrs. Sincerely, Eliza Brooks, Liverpool, June 15th -95.” Charlotte brings a similar album into Shirley with Caroline Helstone’s enamel-covered souvenir book. Caroline cares so deeply for her friends, she wants to memorialize moments of affection. She takes a few flowers from a bouquet as she gives it to her dear friend Cyril Hall. Pressing them into her small album, closed with a silver clasp, she pencils in the date and these words: “To be kept for the sake of the Rev. Cyril Hall, my friend.” Cyril slips a sprig into his “pocket Testament,” penning her name next to it. Affinity was also expressed by creating an album as a gift. Margaret Stovin, an important botanist and early expert in ferns, gave two fern albums in 1833 to her friend Miss Walker that evoke her local walks searching for rare breeds. Stovin also created an album of pressed flowers and plants, collected in Derbyshire, for her young friend Florence Nightingale.26
Meant to be touched, albums functioned not just as visual feasts, especially when they held matter once alive or things that appear to emerge from the pages, as if they might spring out or walk off. Seaweed, skeletonized leaves, and pressed flowers thicken one early Victorian album. The anonymous compiler also cut out pictures of colored birds from cards and decorated them with real feathers. The “fever” for stamp albums was followed closely by a popularity for collecting valentines, Christmas cards, and postcards—personal ephemera crying out, many felt, to be arranged in a narrative form in an album. Travel or tourists’ albums filled with souvenirs mapped adventures. Lady Emilia Hornby, for example, visited the battlefields of the Crimean War, gathered wildflowers, and pressed them into an album, creating a portable battleground memento. Novelists used obsessive album keeping in their plots to show characteristics like melancholy sentimentalism, as in Wilkie Collins’s 1875 Law and the Lady with Major Fitz-David, who treasures an album of ornamented, vellum pages, bound in blue velvet with a silver clasp. Locks of hair, “let neatly into the center of each page,” carry inscriptions. Each page represents a “love-token” from a female lover, each inscription a reminder of the end of the affair. The first page “exhibited a lock of the lightest flaxen hair, with these lines beneath: ‘My adored Madeline. Eternal constancy. Alas, July 22, 1839!’ ” Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield, satirizes this saving of the minutiae of memory by having fashionable girls put the finger and toenail parings of a Russian prince in their keepsake albums.27
Moments of experience, friendship, and love could, through albums, be celebrated and controlled. Unlike with a box, case, or cabinet, the album provided a means to order objects not only on a page but also within the chronology of the volume. The keeper of the album sat down with a visitor to leaf through it together, often accompanying the turned pages with narration. A story emerged, told in part by the sequence of the leaves, a kind of autobiography in objects. Queen Victoria had the resources to affix the story of her life—or attempt to—onto the pages of a series of themed albums. She started as a young girl by making a seaweed album. Later she had many series of keepsake albums assembled, mostly collections of mounted watercolors she commissioned. Numerous “animal albums” pictured her pets, for instance, and in the “Souvenir Albums” she kept a chronological record of places she visited, ceremonies she attended, and other events needing memorialization. The question arose, did it really happen if it wasn’t put into an album? 28
Yet Charlotte made a collection of ferns only. Her album reminds us of Ferndean and the complicated eroticism between Rochester and Jane in that place of ferns, leading us, perhaps, to some inkling about why she married Nicholls. One wonders, in considering the oral performance that often accompanied the sharing of albums, if she ever showed her ferns, and, if so, what sort of chronicle she gave. Perhaps it prompted a travel narrative—the parts of Ireland they covered and what they saw there. Or was it too personal to show outside of the family? The gathering and pressing of these ferns coincided with what was probably Charlotte’s first sexual experience with a man. What she made of it can never be known: she left no record of her feelings. She did write some enigmatic lines to Ellen just after returning from her honeymoon, maybe referring to her sexual life with her husband. She begins by explaining that the six weeks of her married life have changed “the colour of my thoughts.” She believes that married women who “indiscriminately urge their acquaintances to marry” are “much to blame.” She now knows what a “solemn and strange and perilous thing” it is “for a woman to become a wife.” 29
Even so, from the evidence of Charlotte’s letters, she grew to have a deep fondness for her husband. His “kind and ceaseless protection” especially appealed to her, and she remarked that his attachment made her “own attachment to him stronger.” Part of this may have had to do with his physical self, his touch, caress, and kiss. They went on long walks together on the moors most days. After they had been married many months, Charlotte called him “my dear boy,” feeling that he became ever “dearer.” When she began to succumb to her final illness, she found him “so tender, so good, helpful, patient.” She adds, “My heart is knit to him.” 30
Even before her death, but especially after it, Charlotte was herself “collected” in albums, as we have seen with her autograph. Because the parsonage, moors, and Haworth became so associated with the three Brontë sisters, the place was often represented in scrapbooks. A souvenir album created around 1859 has a section devoted to the anonymous compiler’s visit to Haworth. On one page, two glued-on ivy leaves from the area decorate a carefully arranged collage that includes a snippet of paper with Patrick’s shaky signature on it and a drawing, clipped from stationery or a magazine, of the parsonage and surrounding cemetery, which includes the caption “The Home of Charlotte Brontë.” Some collectors filled albums with postcards of the Haworth area; others, when photography became cheaper and more portable, with photos they took themselves, such as those in a now unbound album titled “Views taken during 1903,” which feature many famous Brontë sites.
31
Piles of “Brontëana” scrapbooks from the later nineteenth century sit in archives, largely forgotten today. Album makers cut out reproductions of the painting George Richmond made of Charlotte, which often appeared in articles and books, as a kind of replacement for her absent photograph, and glued them to their pages. One Matilda Pollard filled a pink album in 1894, which she entitled “Scraps,” with newspaper cuttings related to the Brontë family, going back to 1888. A Miss Brown of Haworth, probably related to the Brontës’ servant Martha Brown, took a dark-green volume with “Album” embossed on the front and a picture of a dog sitting near a man’s hat and walking stick, and filled it with newspaper cuttings, many Brontë related. Thrifty scrap-album assemblers would reuse printed books they no longer wanted, pasting cuttings on top of print. William Scruton and J. Hambley Rowe, for instance, clipped images of places important to the Brontë story and pasted them into The Temple Dictionary of the Bible, removing some of the original pages so the thickened ones would fit between the boards. Horsfall Turner took The Stock Exchange Year-Book 1898 and pasted in Brontë cuttings from newspapers and magazines. Given Charlotte’s attraction to remnants, paper, texts—remember those tiny handmade volumes she and her siblings created as children, often with recycled scraps as covers—she probably would have found this attempt to represent her in a paper museum apt. Could a rustle of life be found again by turning over the leaves? Or does such an album present merely the dead shadow of what was once there? 32
CHAPTER NINE
Migrant Relics
Arranging long-locked drawers and shelves
Of cabinets, shut up for years,
What a strange task we’ve set ourselves!
How still the lonely room appears!
How strange this mass of ancient treasures,
Mementos of past pains and pleasures;
These volumes, clasped with costly stone,
With print all faded, gilding gone;
These fans of leaves, from Indian trees—
These crimson shells, from Indian seas—
These tiny portraits, set in rings—
Once, doubtless, deemed such precious things;
Keepsakes bestowed by Love on Faith,
And worn till the receiver’s death,
Now stored with cameos, china, shells,
In this old closet’s dusty cells.
—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, “MEMENTOS”
I PURCHASED OF THE proper person the whole lower sash of the window of the bedroom of Charlotte Brontë,” wrote Charles Hale, a Boston journalist and politician traveling in Europe while recovering from ill health, in a November 8, 1861, letter to his mother, penned mostly while at Haworth and finished at the house of his friend Elizabeth Gaskell. After Patrick’s death in June 1861, renovations on the parsonage were started by the new incumbent, a John Wade. Pilgrims like Hale could carry off fragments of the actual parsonage house itself. “This is the window at which she was most fond of sitting,” Hale boasted. He also brought away woodwork from the interior, which he combined with window glass to make picture frames, so he could look at photos through the “same medium” as Charlotte when she gazed out at the “dreary landscape.” His photos, Hale went on, “will be surrounded with wood that was about her as she sat there.” He met the local carpenter, William Wood, who told him of Emily’s bravery in breaking up a dogfight; the sexton’s wife showed him the “little wicker-work doll’s cradle mentioned in one of the books”; the sexton pointed out where the family dogs were buried in the garden; and he sat in Charlotte’s pew in the church where Patrick served. Hale also got his hands on the “wire and crank of Mr. Brontë’s bell-pull,” which Patrick had “used daily for forty-one years.” Finally walking back to Keighley to catch the train to London, he was so laden with loot that William Wood went along to help carry it. 1
Coveting parings or slivers of literary “shrines,” Victorian tourists who thronged such sites were not so different from religious pilgrims of the past. At the Lord’s tomb, Christ’s legendary place of burial and resurrection, believers tapped oil from lamps burning outside. Dirt and little pebbles gathered from the ground were set into reliquaries. Such substances, called eulogiae, stored within themselves the blessings of the holy place and could even be ingested: tokens from the Holy Land made of compact soil were crumbled along the edges into water, then swallowed as a kind of sacred medicine. 2
Similarly, Victorians wanted to imbibe the authors who had blessed them with their words. The writer Thomas Hardy plucked violets from John Keats’s grave in Rome, as did scores of others. The mulberry tree said to have been planted by Shakespeare in Stratford was stripped for souvenir trinkets, as was the thorn tree that Robert Burns stood under as he parted from Margaret Campbell, the inspiration for many of his poems and songs whom he called “Highland Mary.” Visitors to Burns’s birthplace bought needle-cases, trays, cups, “fancy boxes,” and other souvenirs guaranteed to be made of wood that grew nearby. A residue of grace permeated the surroundings of genius and might be a portable substance, lambent with ghostly presence.3
Even land associated with fictional works, rather than the authors of those works—like Wuthering Heights and its moors—glowed richly, as if fiction and real geography were somehow contiguous. When visiting the moors—doubly meaningful with fictional and authorial associations—tourists picked sprigs of heather to add to letters, or to press into books, especially Wuthering Heights or Gaskell’s biography, which many brought along as a kind of guidebook. Some literature lovers wanted to be buried close to or in such sites, like Alloway Kirk, immortalized in Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter,” where fans arranged for interment. It was almost as if one could be buried inside a favorite story or poem, to be resurrected there and to live there always. 4
Those later women writers who came to Haworth, like Virginia Woolf on her moor-wandering trip in 1904, also felt the pull of personal objects. What she found “most touching,” even more so than the manuscripts and letters displayed in the museum, were the “little personal relics of the dead woman.” It struck her forcefully that Charlotte’s shoes and thin muslin dress had outlived her, even though the “natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them.” Because these material remnants, “trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life.” Sylvia Plath made a short list in her journal of what she found in the “rooms of memorabilia,” which included “Charlotte’s bridal crown of heirloom lace & honeysuckle” and “Emily’s death couch.” She goes on, “They touched this, wore that, wrote here in a house redolent with ghosts.” 5
Charlotte had herself felt this almost-religious reverence for her heroes, this desire to touch what they had touched, to peer through the same medium. There were all those stories she wrote as a girl about the Duke of Wellington and his kindred. As an adult she idolized the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, even dedicating the second edition of Jane Eyre to him, which caused many to speculate that the novel was in part based on his own life—his wife had gone insane and, like Bertha Mason, had to be confined and restrained from self-harm—and that “Currer Bell” had been Thackeray’s own governess. Her admiration for Napoleon led her to write a school essay in Brussels about his solitary death on Saint Helena, “exiled and captive—bound to an arid rock.” Professor Heger, noting her deep respect, gave her a mahogany chip of Napoleon’s outer coffin, which had been broken up after being replaced by an ebony sarcophagus following his exhumation and re-interment in Paris, some twenty years after his first burial on Saint Helena. Charlotte recorded the scene of giving, perhaps with an attention to provenance, or in some slightly mystical gesture similar to her inscriptions in books, and then wrapped the descriptive page around the nugget. On August 4, 1843, at 1:00 p.m., Heger walked into her classroom, she wrote, and gave her the “relic,” which he brought to her from his friend Mr. Lebel. She went on to explain that Lebel was the secretary of Prince Achille Murat (Napoleon’s n
ephew) and that the Prince de Joinville traveled with Napoleon’s remains from Saint Helena. Lebel wrote directly on the wood in French, attesting to its authenticity. This stray oddment needed these announcements on and around it; otherwise it could easily have been cast off as detritus. It is in the stories surrounding and encasing it—as with those specks called thorns from Christ’s crown cradled in crystal, gold, and gems—that the object comes alive with meaning. 6
Unlike Napoleon’s demise and the afterlife of his body, Charlotte’s death was so quiet that most of her friends didn’t even know she had been dying until well after she was interred in the church vaults. Only her husband, father, and a few servants witnessed her illness and final breaths. None of the obsequies at Napoleon’s end—multiple ends—were practiced at Charlotte’s (despite the cult that developed around her possessions): no piece of coffin was sawed off, no death mask molded, no fragment of the pall detached. No body part was reputedly snipped off and eventually sold—as was rumored to have happened to Napoleon’s penis—just those simple locks of hair. Or, to illustrate how thorough such gatherings could be, take Lord Nelson’s death, a few hours after a musket ball entered his shoulder during the Battle of Trafalgar. The ball, with a part of the braid from his epaulette adhering to it, was removed by the surgeon William Beatty, who placed it in a locket. Queen Victoria accepted it as a gift in 1844. Nelson’s coat with the hole in the left shoulder, his bloody stockings, his pigtail cut off whole from his corpse, and the pocket watch worn when he died—all entered museums. Souvenir boxes fashioned from the HMS Victory, his ship during the fatal battle, held snuff, his hair, and other keepsakes. Nelson’s compatriots buried him in a coffin made partially from a piece of the mainmast of L’Orient, the French ship he and his crew blew up during the Battle of the Nile. Given Nelson’s and Napoleon’s outsized roles in shaping Western history, it isn’t surprising that their deaths were treated so differently from Charlotte’s. But when considered in light of the hagiography surrounding Dickens’s last moments (not to mention Shelley’s, with those saved bits of bone, ash, and heart) just fifteen years after Charlotte’s, which matched Napoleon’s closely, except for the penis snipping, the comparison is striking. 7