by Deborah Lutz
Charlotte’s death was heroic in an entirely different way, one barely recognized by her contemporaries; illnesses that befell only women were not openly discussed, nor were they viewed as valiant in the way men’s often were. It is now generally agreed that Charlotte died of hyperemesis gravidarum, or violent vomiting as a result of pregnancy. She became sick about six months after her marriage, when her “stomach seemed quite suddenly to lose its tone,” causing “continual faint sickness,” as she explained to Ellen in a letter, hinting also that she might be pregnant. The nausea and vomiting grew worse, until she was so weak and skeletal she couldn’t leave her bed. Perhaps suspecting that the end was near, Charlotte wrote her will, leaving her estate to her husband, trusting that he would take care of her elderly father. She died, along with her unborn child, nine months after her wedding. 8
It is a shame that Charlotte’s powerful female friends weren’t with her during her final illness. “How I wish I had known!” Elizabeth Gaskell exclaimed when she heard about it. “I do fancy that if I had come, I could have induced her,—even though they had all felt angry with me at first,—to do what was so absolutely necessary, for her very life.” Could she have convinced them to terminate the pregnancy, and did Nicholls or Patrick consider it, or Charlotte herself? While abortion was illegal in Britain in 1855, it was widespread, if underground and often dangerous. Much hand-wringing among doctors (all male at this time) against the “elimination of pregnancy” can be found in medical journals of the 1850s and ’60s. The journalist Henry Mayhew wrote in 1862 about the “immense number of embryo children who are made away with by drugs and other devices.” Most women who wanted to abort took the advice of female friends or midwives and used herbs or mixtures, bought at local herbalists and chemists, such as pennyroyal, oil of savin, and gin and gunpowder. Many of these drugs, described in terms like “menstrual stimulators” and “remedies in obstructed menstruation,” produced muscular contractions and vomiting, which sometimes caused abortion, although more often they failed to work. Abortifacients were also advertised in the press under euphemisms such as “female pills” and remedies for “ailments of the female system.” One firm that called itself “Madame Frain” sold a “magic Mixture” with this label: “on no account to be taken by persons desirous of becoming mothers.” Local women often acted as abortionists, their profession spread by word of mouth, and they went under such names as “granny” and used crochet or knitting needles to induce termination (sometimes resulting in death from infection). Established abortionists advertised offices for “temporary retirement” for ladies. 9
While Gaskell was deeply religious, she also knew firsthand the problems women faced when they didn’t have access to birth control or other methods of preventing childbirth. She worked alongside her husband, a Unitarian clergyman, among the poor in Manchester and wrote with sympathy in her novels of unwed mothers and the difficulties of prostitutes when pregnant. With a wide circle of female friends and associates of all classes, Gaskell must have had some knowledge about abortion, or at the very least, she would have known the right woman to give her advice. Some doctors would perform discreet abortions on their patients, especially if the woman’s life was in danger, so perhaps Gaskell would have tried a doctor. Or did she have herbs or mixtures in mind? It is hard not to wish, looking back from a modern perspective, that Gaskell had been given the chance to at least try. What books might Charlotte have written if she had made it past her thirty-ninth birthday? 10
Patrick had now lost the last member of his large family. He wrote of his astonishment with the situation to his children’s nurse, who had emigrated to America when the Brontë children were still small: “When You, and Your sister Nancy, first came to us at Thornton, My Dear Wife, and all my Dear Children were living—six, in number—They are all, now dead—and, I, bordering, on the age of eighty years, am left Alone.” No wonder he found himself “laboring under, so great a weight of sorrow,” as he wrote to another correspondent. But he had a recently minted son to look after him as his health slowly declined. When Gaskell’s wildly popular biography of Charlotte came out two years after her death, Patrick and Nicholls had to field pilgrims and souvenir hunters, who, having trickled in earlier, began to stream in steadily. When Patrick decided to have a new memorial tablet made for the family, he had them in mind when he took down the current one. Hung on an interior wall of the church, near where the family was interred, the old tablet had become so full from the family deaths that the later names had to be crowded in a tiny font at the bottom, leaving no room for his own name. He had the sexton break it up and bury it in the garden, not wanting it to be grabbed by the likes of Charles Hale, who had written about slabs removed from the parsonage walls: “Mr. Nicholls having neglected to bury these stones I might have brought one to America had they not been too heavy.” 11
Patrick finally succumbed to various illnesses on June 12, 1861, at the age of eighty-four. Hundreds of local people attended his funeral, and the shops in the town closed for the day as a mark of respect. The family vault received its last body; the new memorial tablet was completed with its final name. The natural promotion of Arthur Nicholls from curate to incumbent didn’t happen, to the surprise of many townsfolk and to Nicholls himself. The trustees voted him out by a narrow margin, for reasons that have remained cloudy. Forced to move out of the parsonage so that Wade, the vicar of Bradford and the choice of the majority of trustees, could move in, Nicholls was given only days to pack. Bewildered about where to go, he returned to live with his aunt in Banagher, taking with him the Brontë manuscripts, including the miniature booklets and Anne’s and Emily’s diary papers. He also packed up many of the inscribed volumes from the family’s library. Some of the girls’ samplers went to Ireland with him, as did the desk boxes and workboxes with their contents. He took a dog and maybe dog collars, some of Charlotte’s clothing, and locks of family hair. He carried a few mementos of Patrick, who had left him almost everything in his will, a mark of how close the two had finally become. Patrick’s notebook of French phrases, which he had made for his trip to Brussels when he escorted his daughters to school, was kept by Nicholls, as was his rifle. In an act of possessiveness and perhaps jealous mourning, Nicholls had Charlotte’s bed destroyed to prevent its reuse, or its treasuring as a relic. 12
Nicholls didn’t have room for most of the contents of the parsonage, so a sale by the local auctioneer, Mr. Cragg, dispersed what remained. Not widely advertised, the sale on October 1 and 2, 1861, went unnoticed by Brontë lovers, who then looked back on it with wistfulness, including Hale, who arrived just three weeks after its completion. Neighbors bought household goods for their own use, such as toilet covers, bed hangings, blankets, mattresses, pots, and baskets. Many books were sold, mostly unnamed in the auction catalog, listed only as “small books,” “old books,” or “sundry books.” Some odds and ends went because of their sentimental associations, others probably for a mix of both handiness and sentiment. John Greenwood, the stationer who had sold reams of paper to the Brontë girls, purchased some bric-a-brac, as did relations of the servant Martha Brown, including her brother John, the sexton who had been friends with Branwell. The black horsehair sofa associated with Emily’s last hours was bid for by William Hudson, a Haworth man, presumably for seating in his parlor. 13
Locals found that extra money could be made on the Brontë tourist trade. Greenwood had his Brontë stationery printed, on which Hale wrote his letter to his mother in 1861. Edwin Feather, a postmaster who had handled many of the Brontë manuscripts when sent back and forth to publishers, became a souvenir purveyor. He had a shop close to the church, and he sold postcards with reproductions of Patrick’s photo, a drawing of Charlotte by George Richmond, Nicholls’s photo, and depictions of the church, both exterior and interior, and the parsonage. One postcard sold by him in the 1860s contains all of these pictures crowded on its front. When the old church was pulled down, Feather and others collected oak from the interior t
o make souvenirs, such as saltboxes and candleholders. These were the first glimmerings of a tourist trade that would pick up speed in the twentieth century and continues to flourish today. 14
Brontë “relics” began to bring in cash. Martha Brown had been given some keepsakes by Patrick and Nicholls, including letters, some of the children’s miniature books, Charlotte’s wedding veil, and the silk dress she wore when she set off for her honeymoon. When Martha died, she willed them to her five sisters, who, being poor, either used them or sold them, or in some cases did one and then the other. Some of Charlotte’s dresses that still survive were adjusted to be worn by other bodies. One sister, Ann Binns née Brown, used some gray alpaca material that had belonged to the Brontës to sew a tea apron with a lace border. She wore the apron, then later sold it as a Brontë artifact, a gesture combining thrift with memory of the fabric’s previous owners. Relic culture melded with the world of women’s domestic handicraft; the memento was worked by hand into something useful for the house, and then later it became a keepsake once again. Or something decorative: scraps of Charlotte’s dresses became doll clothing. This apron and these dolls remind us of the wallpaper covers of the Brontë children’s stories and of the little snippets of rolled paper stuck to the tea caddy Charlotte made for Ellen. It’s hard to imagine this sort of household recycling with relics of Napoleon, say, or those of Dickens or Shelley. Take Dickens’s chamber pot, now at the Dickens museum in London: Did someone else fill it, before it became museum worthy and thus retired forever? 15
Rather astonishingly, the first attempt at a Brontë museum didn’t attract enough funds to stay in business. It was a small, slightly tawdry affair, put together by Martha’s cousins Francis and Robinson Brown, into whose hands many of the local keepsakes had fallen over the years. “Brown’s Temperance Hotel and Museum of Brontë Relics” opened on Main Street in 1889. They eventually moved it to Blackpool and then on to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, setting up not far from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Finally most of the Brown collection went up for sale at an 1898 auction, including the lock of hair cut from Charlotte’s corpse by Martha and numerous pincushions and pen-wipers. 16
Meanwhile, in Ireland, Nicholls went on to marry his cousin Mary Bell in 1864, but still felt, those who knew him attested, that Charlotte had been his only true love. One wonders how Mary felt about Charlotte’s wedding dress, gloves, and shoes preserved in a drawer upstairs, not to mention the Richmond portrait of Charlotte that hung over their sofa. A story, perhaps apocryphal, of this painting falling on Mary as she napped on the sofa, knocking her on the head and stunning her temporarily, has a poetic truth. When her husband died, she sold off the goods in two Sotheby’s auctions, in 1907 and 1916, taking in a tidy bundle of cash. Who can blame her? 17
Well before his death, Nicholls himself had sold off or lent some of the manuscripts. As his first wife’s fame swelled, enthusiasts came up to Ireland to see him. Clement Shorter, a journalist and Brontë devotee who went on to write the 1896 Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle and other Brontë biographies, was able to carry off letters, Emily’s and Anne’s diary papers, many of the miniature books, and a handful of Branwell’s manuscripts, simply by befriending Nicholls. Nicholls lent some of the papers to Shorter for his research; others Nicholls sold to him with the promise that they would ultimately be donated to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert). Shorter also visited Ellen Nussey, convincing her to sell him her letters from Charlotte, with the same promise that they would eventually end up in a public institution. Shorter was working with the bibliophile Thomas J. Wise, who fronted much of the money to acquire the manuscripts. Both Nicholls and Nussey began to have suspicions about the shadiness of Shorter and Wise, especially the latter. Nicholls once misplaced a lock of Charlotte’s hair, which ended up somehow in Shorter’s hands. When it was returned to Nicholls, it was “sadly reduced in size since I had it—a few hairs in stead of a long thick tress.” 18
Wise, born into a working-class family, came to devote his life to manuscripts, rare editions, and literary memorabilia, amassing a collection he called the “Ashley Library”—after his house in north London at 52 Ashley Road, Hornsey Rise—which was eventually sold to the British Museum. Wise combined being a serious bibliographer—he put together, with Alexander Symington, an important early edition of the Brontë letters, even serving as the Brontë Society president for a time—with being a forger and garden-variety fraudster. His main trick involved printing a copy of a rare first edition and then claiming it as genuine, or even a “pre-first” edition privately printed by the author. He forged a series of pamphlets of this sort, of poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and others. He eventually began stealing from the British Museum, where he had special privileges, ripping out pages of rare works and having them bound into editions he owned. Somehow Wise’s love of books bled into faking them, akin to a painter who begins making copies of the old masters out of reverence and then, eventually, for cash. Most of the money he made went into buying authentic manuscripts and rare books for his collection, his dishonesty serving his bibliophilia. 19
Wise never intended to donate the Brontë manuscripts; some he kept for his collection, others he sold off to make money. He did “increase” the number of items he could sell by unbinding a few of Charlotte’s handmade miniature booklets. He split up Emily’s 1839 poetry notebook, mounting each page separately. He sold Branwell’s manuscripts as Charlotte’s or Emily’s, since their work fetched much higher prices. When he produced his Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of the Members of the Brontë Family, it was a significant piece of Brontë scholarship except that he included his own fakery, thus institutionalizing it. As far as is known, he didn’t make any forgeries of Brontë material, but since a number of fake letters and inscribed books made by anonymous hands exist, we have to wonder. For instance, an inscription on the flyleaf of an edition of Les Psaumes de David, Mis en Vers Français, supposedly from Charlotte in Paris to Emily, saying that Emily could use it to “polish up your French,” is not in Charlotte’s handwriting. Fake letters purporting to be from Charlotte and other family members crop up on occasion, such as one supposedly from Charlotte written in Rome, where she never went. Perhaps some of the Brontë material believed to be genuine might be fakes more clever than these. 20
Worries about the authenticity of many of the Brontës’ possessions plagued museums and scholars from the start. The Brontë Society formed in 1893 and two years later opened a museum at the peak of the hill on Main Street, above the Yorkshire Penny Bank (which moved to the Brontës’ old home in 1928). By the 1950s, we find the society’s president worrying about the “idolatry” in “Brontëism” and the problem “a generation ago” of zealous hunters of Brontë relics: “The West Riding tinkled with the faint notes of ancient pianos which were alleged, on more or less specious grounds, to have been used by the Brontës at Haworth. So many of these instruments obligingly came to light that, if all were genuine, a piano must have stood in every room at the Parsonage, including the kitchen and the peathouse.” He complained about hoards of “Brontë Cradles” and heaps of supposed paintings and photographs of Emily. But he also claimed that the society had weeded out whatever was of “doubtful genuineness.” The researcher today who sifts the Brontë archives naturally finds herself wondering about the thoroughness of this culling. 21
Take, say, the linked jet ovals with Charlotte’s and Emily’s names scratched on them, pictured at the start of this chapter. What Brontë enthusiast wouldn’t want to believe in their authenticity? They thrill as “autographs,” like holograph manuscripts, with the vestige of the hand and its character. They seem to embody sisterly collaboration, reminiscent of the joint signatures on the diary paper of 1834, with Emily’s and Anne’s inked names touching. A household object has a second life, another Brontë hallmark: two panels of a mourning bracelet, which likely consisted of four or five of these o
vals, connected by string. Raised flowers and leaves—black foliage carved out of a black backdrop—decorate the reverse side of each link. The Brontë family had other pieces of jet jewelry, including another bracelet fallen into fragments. Jet, made from fossilized driftwood, was mined near the town of Whitby, along the North Yorkshire coast. An inky, coal-like substance, jet was one of the cheaper materials for jewelry making and had a softness ideal for amateur carvers. It would become popular for mourning jewelry during Queen Victoria’s reign, but by the start of the nineteenth century it was already associated with sentimentality and sympathy. The bracelet could have belonged to their aunt or mother, since the Branwell family in Penzance could afford such trinkets, unlike Patrick’s humble Irish clan. The sisters kept similar raw materials in their workboxes and desk boxes, as we have seen, bits and bobs salvaged from old clothing and jewelry. One small sewing box of painted wood, with a sliding top, has six compartments, holding ribbon, parts of broken jewelry, and metal clothing fasteners. Perhaps a young Charlotte first picked up the pieces of the old bracelet, took a scissors’ tip, and scratched this graffiti. Then Emily added her own statement of identity, a kind of “here I am,” becoming “here we are.” When Lucy, in Villette, crafts a watchguard for Paul Emanuel, she puts it in a shell box, and inside its lid she “graved with my scissors’ point certain initials.” Maybe Charlotte based this incident on her own “graving” in jet. Catherine Earnshaw’s scratching of variations on her name into the paint of the window ledge inside her bed also springs to mind. 22