by Deborah Lutz
Are these artifacts the real thing? They could be—the signatures are similar to theirs—but their provenance is so opaque that their authenticity is impossible, as far as I can tell, to confirm. The novelist Stella Gibbons said she found them in a “small, dirty junk shop, with no pretentions, in Kentish Town Road,” during World War II. “I asked the man, a dreary creature and plainly poor, if he knew where they came from and I think he said ‘from a big ’ouse’ but I also remember his saying he knew nothing about them.” She paid five pounds for them, and they knocked about in her jewelry box for years before she sent them to the biographer Winifred Gérin in 1971, whom she had met at the Royal Society of Literature. Gérin was about to bring out her book on Emily Brontë, and she had already made a name for herself with her award-winning biography of Charlotte. Gibbons herself professed her doubt as to their genuineness, wondering if they were “a child’s joke,” or if the man at the shop scratched them himself, but if so, she wondered why he didn’t ask for more money. “Do whatever you like with them,” Gibbons ends her letter to Gérin. 23
They could have been a Gibbons lark. A great wit, in 1932 she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, a parody of fiction about earthy connections to nature and people with a “slow, deep, primitive, silent down-dragging link” to beasts. “They lay close to the earth, and something of earth’s old fierce simplicities had seeped into their beings.” She was making gentle fun of D. H. Lawrence’s work and “ruralist” novels of the 1910s and ’20s, but her satire also touched the melodrama of Wuthering Heights. Her urbane heroine, Flora Poste, takes a trip to her country relations, farmers with names like Starkadder and Lambsbreath living in a house called Howling. Flora’s cousin, a tall girl named Elfine, is something of an Emily Brontë stereotype, a poetry lover and “shy dryad” who dances “in the woods with the wind-flowers and birds.” Flora civilizes them, teaching the women about birth control, dressing Elfine in current fashions, and marrying her off to the rich local landowner, Dick Hawk-Monitor. 24
While in the countryside, Flora encounters a young intellectual working on a study about Branwell which argues that he wrote all of the Brontë novels and let his sisters, who were drunkards (especially Anne with a love of gin), take the credit. Gibbons was ridiculing the theory, first made in the 1860s, that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights. “You see, it’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff,” says Gibbons’s intellectual. Lucasta Miller makes the astute point that Gibbons caricatures Brontë biographers, who had become a “source of mystification” by the 1930s, filling out the gaps in Emily’s life story with wild speculations. In fact, according to Gibbons’s nephew, who attended many of these Royal Society of Literature lectures with her in the 1970s, she didn’t like Gérin and tried to avoid her. Was Gibbons parodying the treatment of any stray stuff that might be connected to the Brontë story as meaningful by sending the jet ovals to Gérin? 25
Whether or not they are authentic, they represent the deep attention the Brontë story still elicits, a yearning that falls so often on place and matter. To many, the Brontës remain secular saints; the things they may have touched bring their personal magic closer. Without these strong emotions, these objects go the way of all matter, obscurity lapping at their edges. They speak of our need to believe that a life can be recalled through its material remnants, that not everything of that loved body’s movement through time has been lost for good. The Brontë story can bring a peculiar immortality to the things it brushes, even when not originally associated with it. The lack of clear provenance can gradually disappear out of historical memory, and the body of Brontë objects can expand instead of contract as time passes. Our desire makes finitude fall away.
Such unruly longings can be found in Haworth still. Since the early twentieth century, the town has crawled with tourists. On a recent fall trip, I stayed at the Brontë Cottage Bed and Breakfast and slept in the Anne Brontë room located in the basement; the Emily and Charlotte rooms were on the second floor. Busloads of tourists arrived to trawl along the main street, filling guided tours to the “Brontë waterfalls” and the “Brontë chair.” I passed people in Victorian dress in the churchyard, and a film crew, shooting a segment about Brontëland, crowded one day into the library at the museum where I was studying Brontë artifacts. Dishes, hand towels, and tee-shirts with pictures of the Brontë sisters could be bought in the shops, and tea could be had at the Villette coffeehouse. 26
Despite all of this, the town, the parsonage, the churchyard, and—especially—the moors have an atmosphere that really does, as Virginia Woolf put it, “express” the Brontës and fit them “like a snail its shell.” It’s hard to deny the stirring gloominess of the moorland scenery, with its sky usually darkly lowering. The barren Pennines ring with the calls of the grouse, as they suddenly start out of the brush and heather when a walker nears. Boggy spots dot the land, and stands of ferns grow at the edges of streams and rocky cliffs. Many a dog lover lives in Haworth and can be found out on the moors even well after darkness, their canine companions running ahead. The steep, cobbled street that Gaskell described in her biography remains, as do many of the soot-darkened eighteenth-century buildings. The townsfolk still burn coal (and sometimes peat) fires, which permeate the air with a heaviness and an oily smell. Some afternoons and early evenings a thick fog descends, making it impossible to see more than five feet ahead. It rained almost incessantly when I visited, and the penetrating chill increased when darkness fell by 4:30. Bright-green moss grew on the gray slate rooftops. Rooks cawed eerily among the trees in the churchyard. 27
One afternoon when I was starting up the steep incline of Main Street, I passed a young woman in black leather pants, her long hair dyed black. She stood still. Her face showed such fervor that I found myself looking away. The raw strength of her passion felt too private for a stranger to gaze on. It is easy to ridicule such intense feeling, easy to feel contempt at such naïve sentimentality. But then again, why not admire it? Is there a better place to look to find heroines on which to model one’s life?
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES
AB Anne Brontë
BB Branwell Brontë
CB Charlotte Brontë
EB Emily Brontë
EN Ellen Nussey
PB Patrick Brontë
Berg Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library
BPM Brontë Parsonage Museum
BST Brontë Society Transactions
LCB The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, vols. 1–3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
PML Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum
PREFACE: THE PRIVATE LIVES OF OBJECTS
1 The apostles cabinet is now at the BPM, F32.
2 Constance Classen, “Touch in the Museum,” in Constance Classen, ed., The Book of Touch (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2005), 275–77; quoted in ibid., 277; Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, Oxford in 1710, ed. W. H. Quarrell and W. J. C. Quarrell (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1928), 31; quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29.
3 See Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), chap. 1. Other important works on material culture include Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Philosophers have thought about materiality, of course: Immanuel Kant separated human consciousness from objects, arguing that we can never know the “thing-in-itself” since as soon as we encounter it, we color it with our own concepts of space and time. Martin Heidegger extended Kant’s ideas by seeing the object, such as a jug, as a sort of meeting place of the central elements of earth, sky, mortals (us), and divinities. But this was only when we could encounter the thing authentically, whi
ch Heidegger felt was becoming ever more impossible in a world full of trivial noise and hurry. Expanding on Heidegger, Graham Harman and others in the field of object-oriented ontology (and the related one of speculative realism) have removed the human from the center of everything and instead privileged the thing and its relationship to other things. “All human and non-human entities have equal status” in this philosophy, and the “real object lies deeper than any relations with people or other objects,” explains Harman in The Quadruple Object (Hants, UK: Zero, 2011), 21, 29, 46, 123. See also Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
4 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011), 233; touchpieces were used by royals who didn’t like direct contact with commoners but knew that their subjects would want the benefits of their touch. The Wellcome Collection has a few of these, such as a lodestone, made of slate and silver, A641031 (ca. 1702–1714), thought to have belonged to Queen Anne; Walter Woodburn Hyde, “The Prosecution and Punishments of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 64 (1915–1916), 726.
CHAPTER ONE: TINY BOOKS
1 For a floor plan of the house (and grounds) before CB had it renovated after the deaths of all her siblings, see F. Mitchell’s map in BST 9, no. 1 (1936), 27. See also Elizabeth Gaskell’s description in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Penguin, 1997), 39. Gaskell was friends with CB, and she visited her at the parsonage. The first edition of Gaskell’s biography was published in 1857, two years after CB’s death. All references to the weather come from the daily recordings of the local meteorologist Abraham Shackleton, a contemporary of the Brontës who lived in nearby Keighley. His manuscript weather records are in Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley. See Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), 17, for his argument that the fires in the house were of peat.
2 Juliet Barker argues that Maria was something of a bluestocking and that the children were there at their mother’s death. See The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 48, 104; for the nurse’s account, see Elizabeth Gaskell to Catherine Winkworth, Aug. 25, 1850, LCB, vol. 2, 447.
3 CB’s manuscript “The History of the Year,” Mar. 1829, BPM, Bonnell 80 (11).
4 I am tempted to imagine that the scissors she used are the rusty steel ones, one handle partly bound in kid, that still exist at the BPM, H128. Her process of making the book can be seen when one holds the book itself—no record of her making it survives. It is at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Lowell 1(5). The poet Amy Lowell was given the manuscript by the bibliophile and forger Thomas James Wise on September 11, 1905, in London. Wise had purchased it from CB’s husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1895, using the Brontë biographer Clement Shorter as intermediary (more about this in chap. 9). Amy Lowell donated the book to Harvard in 1925. For helpful transcriptions of CB’s juvenilia, see Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 3 vols. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987); Gaskell, Life, 74.
5 The tiny text reads, “In the year 1829, lived Captain Henry Dunally, a man whose possessions in this world bring him £200,000 a year. He was the owner of a beautiful country seat, about 10 miles from Glass Town and lived in a style which, though comfortable and happy, was some thousands below his yearly income. His wife, a comely lady in the 30th year of her age, was a person of great management and discretion, and given to use her tongue upon occasion. They had 3 children, the eldest of whom was 12, the second 10 and the youngest 2 years of age. They went by the separate names of Augusta Cecilia, Henry Fearnothing (the name of a maternal uncle of no great character among the more sober part of mankind and to this class both Dunally and his wife belonged) and Cina Rosalind. These children had, as may be supposed, each a different character. Augusta was given to . . .”; CB, “History of the Year”; see Margaret Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House, William Blackwood and His Sons, Their Magazine and Friends (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897); BB’s first “Blackwood’s” is at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Lowell 1(8). For excellent photos of BB’s first issue of the miniature magazines, owned by Harvard, go to http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.HOUGH:1077557. Indeed, all nine of the Brontë miniature books at Harvard can be viewed through the library catalog; CB’s first issue of “Blackwood’s” is also at the Houghton, MS Lowell 1(6); Elizabeth Gaskell to George Smith, July 1856, in J. A. V. Chapple and John Geoffrey Sharps, eds., Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1980), 149.
6 CB, “Characters of the Celebrated Men of the Present Time,” original manuscript lost. Alexander, Early Writings, vol. 1, 127.
7 For much more about the Brontë juvenilia, see Fannie Ratchford, The Brontës’ Web of Childhood (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964); see Barker, Brontës, chap. 6, for a list of the children’s toys. Some of these toys still exist in the BPM, such as a carved wooden lion, H163.3; a child’s tea set picturing three women around a table and the bit of verse “Ladies all I pray make free / And tell me how you like your tea,” H167.1-4; and a brass toy clothes iron, H165; CB, “History of the Year.”
8 BB, “History of the Young Men,” British Library, Ashley 2468. For transcriptions of BB’s miniature books, see Victor Neufeldt, ed., The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1999).
9 BB, “History of the Young Men.”
10 Ratchford, Brontës’ Web, 19, describes the made-up language; the miniature books that make up the volumes of the “Tales of the Islanders” have been, sadly, disassembled and mounted in a large, leather-bound volume made for the purpose. All, dated March 12, 1829–July 30, 1830, are at the Berg.
11 CB, “History of the Year.”
12 Ibid.
13 At least two versions of the story of the cherry tree, which happened sometime between 1828 and 1830, exist, told by locals about the family. This version comes from J. A. Erskine Stuart, The Brontë Country (London: Longmans, 1888), 189–90. Another version has their servant, Sarah Garrs, as the one stepping out onto the tree, playing an escaping prince. For this second version, see Marion Harland, Charlotte Brontë at Home (London: Putnam’s, 1899), 32.
14 Unlike most other writings by the children, the earliest surviving one, BPM, Bonnell78, isn’t dated, so 1826 is a careful guess based on the dates of the other manuscripts and the evidence of maturity of handwriting and skill. Christine Alexander, in Early Writings, vol. 1, 3, calls this CB’s first extant manuscript. While they are all small, the size of these books vary, as does the print. Some of the text is impossible to read without magnification, despite it also being neat and clearly written out. Probably the smallest book, with the tiniest print, is CB’s “The Poetaster,” vol. 2, June 8–July 12, 1830, PML, MA 2696.10; for the size of the books as related to the size of the children’s bodies, see Kate E. Brown, “Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality, and Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Never-Ending Story,’ ” English Literary History 65, no. 2 (1998), 395–421; CB, “Third Volume of the Tales of the Islanders,” Berg.
15 Gaskell, Life, 81; Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, eds., The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For Ruskin’s juvenilia, see his autobiography Praeterita (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 43–45.
16 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 262–78; CB, “Last Will and Testament of Florence Marian Wellesley . . . ,” Jan. 5, 1834, PML, Bonnell Collection.
17 There has been much debate among Brontë biographers about where the family got their books—borrowed from the nearby landowners, the Heatons of Ponden Hall, or from the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute. Barker makes a convincing case that they subscribed to a Keighley (the closest town to Haworth) circulating library
. See Barker, Brontës, 147–49; CB to Hartley Coleridge, Dec. 10, 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 240; Maria Branwell to Patrick Brontë, Nov. 18, 1812, in Thomas James Wise and John Alexander Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendship and Correspondence (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1932), vol. 1, 21.
18 The Brontës’ edition of Poems of Ossian is now at the BPM, bb203; BB, “Blackwood’s,” June 1829, Houghton Library, Lowell 1(7); CB to W. S. Williams, July 21, 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 667.
19 Russell’s General Atlas of Modern Geography, PML, 129886; BB, “The Liar Detected,” BPM, Bon 139; CB, “Leaf from an Unopened Volume,” Jan. 1834, BPM, 13.2.
20 Gaskell, Life, 93, describes the Brontës’ books; BB, “Liar Detected.”
21 For rebinding as a handicraft, usually practiced by women, see Talia Schaffer, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16; Harvard’s Houghton Library has some of these dress-bound volumes, in the Lowell Collection; Sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth, BPM, bb57. Inscription transcribed by Barker, Brontës, 30.