by Deborah Lutz
22 CB, “History of the Year.” Like other personal effects of Maria and Elizabeth, this book is, inexplicably, lost.
23 New Testament, PML, Printed Books 17787.
24 Prayer book, PML, MA 2696.
25 John Frost, Bingley’s Practical Introduction to Botany, 2nd ed. (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1827), BPM, 2004/47.9; Susanna Harrison, Songs in the Night (London: Baynes, 1807), BPM, bb30. In addition to many pressed ferns and other plants, there is also a tipped-in calling card, from a Mrs. T. Lord, from the nearby Lower Laith, Todmorden. There is also, unsurprisingly, an inscription, as Patrick gave this book to one Hannah, with his “kind regards.”
26 Iliad, BPM, Bonnell 35; Bible, PML, 17769; CB, piece of paper, BPM, Bonnell 108.
27 BB, “History of the Young Men.”
28 John Greenwood, the local Haworth stationer, reported this to Gaskell, Life, 216.
29 For the history of paper, see Altick, English Common Reader, 262; and Schaffer, Novel Craft, 69; CB, “Third Volume of the Tales of the Islanders”; CB, untitled fragment, BPM, Bonnell 88; CB, “The Poetaster,” vol. 1, July 6, 1830, Houghton Library, Lowell I(2).
30 Written on the inside of the cover of BB’s November 1833 “The Politics of Verdopolis, A Tale by Captain John Flower” are directions for delivering a package: “Carriage Paid 110, by Red Rover, Lynn Coach, Thursday Night, March 6, 1834,” which seems to show that BB sewed his book together some months after he wrote it. BPM, Bonnell 141; BB, “Blackwood’s,” Jan. 1829, Houghton Library, MS Lowell 1(6); BB, “History of the Rebellion,” BPM, BS112; CB, “Albion and Marina,” Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, MA. It wasn’t just the children who handmade booklets. Their father, PB, also created a small notebook, BPM, BS 178, out of recycled paper, stitched together. He filled it with French phrases to be used on his trip to France and Belgium to escort CB and EB to their school.
31 Leah Price, “Getting the Reading out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew’s London,” in Bookish Histories; Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 154; CB to George Smith, Feb. 5, 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 573.
32 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 27–29; Geography for Youth, 14th ed., trans. Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy (Dublin: P. Wogan, 1795), BPM, SB 256. This volume, obviously very cheaply made with rag paper unevenly printed—a testament to the poverty of the Brontë clan—has doodles and jottings covering most of the blank pages, including “Hugh Bronte His book in the year 1803” and Walsh Bronte’s signature.
33 The Shelley diary is at the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library; Edward Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 145; Bodleian Library, Shelley adds. d.6.
34 The skull fragments are unlikely to be authentic. The helpful curators of the collection are themselves doubtful of their authenticity. When I looked at these fragments, I wondered what sort of material they might really be if they aren’t bone. What is the story behind that fraud? What are said to be parts of Shelley’s jaw are on display at the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome. The beautiful (if grisly) volume that supposedly contains his hair and ashes, British Library, Ashley MS 5022, was created in the 1890s by the bibliophile Thomas James Wise, who was also a known forger and thief (more about him in chap. 9). The manuscripts it contains are definitely authentic, but the Shelley remains probably aren’t. Someone’s hair is set in the front cover, however, but what is in the back cover is anyone’s guess. The fragments looked to me like small black and gray rocks. Wise also owned many Brontë manuscripts, and he had CB’s manuscript of The Professor bound by Joseph Zaehnsdorf, a London binder who occasionally used tanned human skin rather than leather. See “Books Bound in Human Skins,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 1886.
35 For an engrossing and impeccably researched account of body snatching, the Anatomy Act, and corpse recycling, see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); the pocket book is now at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh.
36 BB, “Young Soults Poems with Notes,” BPM, BS114; CB, “An Interesting Passage in the Lives of Some Eminent Men,” Houghton Library, Lowell 1(1).
37 Gaskell, Life, 14; for graveyard overcrowding, see Barker, Brontës, 98; C. Mabel Edgerley, “The Structure of Haworth Parsonage,” BST, 9, no. 1 (1936), 29; EN’s reminiscences, in LCB, vol. 1, 600; for the “arvills,” see Gaskell, Life, 26–27; BB to the editor of Blackwood’s, Dec. 7, 1835, in Wise and Symington, eds., Brontës, vol. 1, 133.
38 Many Brontë scholars argue that the handmade booklets are reactions to grief after the death of the two Brontë sisters. See especially Brown, “Beloved Objects,” Robert Keefe, Charlotte Brontë’s World of Death (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), and Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); CB, “An Interesting Passage in the Lives of Some Eminent Men of the Present Time,” June 17, 1830, Houghton Library, Lowell I(1).
39 EN’s reminiscences, in LCB, vol. 1, 597.
40 Gaskell felt the window seats gave the house an old-fashioned feel when she first visited CB there. Gaskell, Life, 39, 105. A visitor to the parsonage house today will not be able to see the moors out of most of the windows, but during the Brontës’ time, the trees that now block the view either did not exist or were very small. Also, some of the windows that had the best views of the moors no longer exist, such as one in the kitchen and another in an upstairs bedroom; CB’s friend Mary Taylor wrote about CB’s odd reading in a letter to Gaskell, in ibid., 78.
41 Barbara Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell’: The Story of a Friendship (Otley, UK: Smith Settle, 1993), 51.
42 CB, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” first printed in her edition of Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and a selection of her sisters’ poems, published by Smith, Elder and Co., 1850. Republished as appendix II, in LCB, vol. 2, 742.
CHAPTER TWO: PILLOPATATE
1 Abraham Shackleton calls it “a fine day.” Manuscript weather records, Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley.
2 AB and EB, diary paper, Nov. 24, 1834, BPM, Bonnell 131.
3 This box has gone missing, but Clement Shorter described it when Arthur Nicholls lent it to him in 1895. It isn’t the one now at the BPM that is said to have belonged to EB, H109, since that one is more than twice as large as the diary papers tin, which was “about two inches long.” Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), 146, originally published in 1896; for discussions of EB’s and AB’s reading of Moore’s Life of Byron, see Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), 83, and Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 44–45.
4 CB, “A Day at Parry’s Palace, by Lord Charles Wellesley,” BPM, B85.
5 EN’s account of her visit to the parsonage in 1833, reprinted in appendix II, in LCB, vol. 1, 596; for EB leading CB close to strange animals, see EN’s recollections, quoted in Shorter, Charlotte Brontë, 179; CB, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” in LCB, vol. 2, 745, 746.
6 Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, ed. Linda Peterson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007), 99, 112, 51.
7 From an interview with Martha Brown, first printed in Yorkshireman, and reprinted in BST 14, no. 3 (1963), 28–29; “Turning” could also mean putting damp clothes through a mangle, according to Jocelyn Kellett, Haworth Parsonage: The Home of the Brontës (Bradford, UK: Brontë Society, 1977), 65.
8 AB’s sampler, BPM, S12, was given by CB’s husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, to Clement Shorter, an early Brontë collector and biographer, who then donated it to the BPM.
9 AB’s first sampler, BPM, S11; Maria Brontë’s sampler, BPM, S5, with a verse from Proverbs, was finished May 18, 1822. Elizabeth’s, BPM, S6, was completed on July 22, 1822; Maria Branwell’s sampler, April 15, 1791, BPM, S1, a
nd Elizabeth Branwell’s, October 11, 1790, BPM, S2. Both were made in Penzance; EB’s first sampler, BPM, S9, was finished April 22, 1828, and her second, BPM, S10, on March 1, 1829. CB’s first, BPM, S7, was July 25, 1822, her second, BPM, S15, April 1, 1828.
10 Carol Humphrey, Samplers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5; a framed sampler hanging at the Brontë parsonage was made by one Nellie Cattral when she was thirteen years old, in 1781. It was sold at a Sotheby’s auction on July 2, 1898 (lot 41), by Robinson Brown, who inherited it from his father, William Brown, the Haworth church sexton. William probably obtained it from his niece Martha Brown, a servant at the parsonage. See the Sotheby’s Sales Catalog, BPM, Bon335; for samplers stitched with hair, see Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts (London: Ward Lock, 1969), 68–69; one of these Great Exhibition samplers is pictured in Nerylla Taunton, Antique Needlework Tools and Embroideries (Suffolk, UK: Antique Collector’s Club, 1997), 187; Elizabeth Parker’s sampler, Victoria and Albert Museum, T.6-1956.
11 Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 45; CB, “Julia,” in Winifred Gérin, ed., Five Novelettes (London: Folio Press, 1971), 92.
12 Martineau, Autobiography, 323–24.
13 Beaudry, Findings, 45. Especially poignant examples of needlework tools that speak of an absent woman are the wooden knitting-sheaths, BPM, H201.1 and H201.2, that belonged to Maria, the Brontës’ mother. They have “MB” scratched on them and were used by the daughters after their mother’s death; Mary Andere, Old Needlework Boxes and Tools (New York: Drake, 1971), 26.
14 Sally Hesketh, “Needlework in the Lives of the Brontë Sisters,” BST 22, no. 1 (1997), 73.
15 All of the workboxes discussed in this paragraph are featured in Taunton, Antique Needlework Tools, 57, 108–9, 113.
16 Hesketh, in “Needlework,” 74, describes Aunt Branwell’s boxes; CB’s leather work-case, BPM, H108; CB’s workbox, BPM, H180, was kept by her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and sold at auction in 1907 by his second wife after his death. The BPM bought it at this auction.
17 Andere, in Old Needlework Boxes, 24–25, discusses secret compartments.
18 For the contents of CB’s workbox, see Juliet Barker, Sixty Treasures: The Brontë Parsonage Museum (Haworth, UK: Brontë Society, 1988), n. 50; AB’s workbox was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 1916, lot 664, by the Brontë enthusiast J. H. Dixon, who had bought it from Tabitha Radcliffe, the sister of Martha Brown, a servant of the Brontës. The lot also contained an unfinished green purse and a handmade silk purse.
19 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1897), 106; while cloth and clothing began to be made in factories in the early nineteenth century, mass-produced and machine-made clothing didn’t begin to widely replace hand sewing until the 1850s and later. The sewing machine was invented in the 1850s, but it would take a few decades before it would be found in many homes. For “it-narratives” and their meaning, see Elaine Freedgood, “What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives,” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 1 (2010), 33–100.
20 Umbrella needle-case, Victoria and Albert Museum, T.238-1969; Maria’s gift, BPM, H129; CB’s needle booklet for Eliza, BPM, H175; for premade cards to turn into needle-cases, see Andere, Old Needlework Boxes, 76. Embroidering on paper was a common craft, as was creating “pin-pricked” designs and pictures on paper. See Toller, Regency and Victorian Crafts, 46–48; numerous drawings CB made were probably meant for needle-cases, as Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars explain, in The Art of the Brontës (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 188–89; CB to EN, April 22, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 53; CB’s “housewife,” BPM, H149.
21 Basket, BPM, H108.5; book pincushion, part of the contents of CB’s portable desk, Berg; CB’s pincushion with the inscription was sold at the Sotheby’s auction of July 2, 1898, lot 88, BPM, Bon335; the Wordsworth one is pictured in Taunton, Antique Needlework Tools, 140–41.
22 CB to EN, Dec. 1839, and Apr. 30, 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 207, 216; CB to EN, Jan. 1847, Apr. 1847, and Sept. 1847, in LCB, vol. 1, 515, 523, 543; CB to EN, Apr. 30, 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 216; CB to EN, Dec. 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 441; CB to EN, Apr. 1847, in LCB, vol. 1, 523.
23 CB’s recitation while sewing comes from EN’s reminiscences, in LCB, vol. 1, 609; the unfinished patchwork quilt, BPM, D145, might not have been made by the Brontës, though it was sold as such at a Sotheby’s auction, on July 2, 1898, lot 47, by Robinson Brown.
24 See Talia Schaffer, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), for her theories about the relationship between crafts and novel writing for Victorian women. She explores all of the crafts mentioned in this paragraph. For crafts and class status, see 29; “Catalogue of the Contents of Moor Lane House, Gomersal, to be Sold by Auction on Wednesday and Thursday, May 18 and 19, 1898,” BPM, P Sales Cat. 2; CB’s quilled tea caddy, BPM, H34, which, according to Barker, Sixty Treasures, was a gift for Ellen.
25 Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 207. See also Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984), 175–79 and Schaffer, Novel Craft, 34–35.
26 CB to EN, Dec. 1839, in LCB, vol. 1, 207; CB to EN, Jan. 20, 1842, in LCB, vol. 1, 278; CB’s stockings, BPM, D23; AB, diary paper, July 31, 1845, in private hands; CB to EB, June 8, 1893, in LCB, vol. 1, 191.
27 See Sally Hesketh’s excellent article, “Needlework,” on needlework and the Brontës for more on this. On p. 78 she writes, “Morally strong characters embrace domestic duty (represented by plain sewing), whilst those who are morally weak shirk their obligations in preference of frivolous ornamental work.”
28 Ellen Weeton’s diaries, partially published as Edward Hall, ed., Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), vol. 2, 396; quoted in Pam Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Feminist, Artist, and Rebel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), 54.
29 Geoffrey Warren, A Stitch in Time: Victorian and Edwardian Needlecraft (London: David and Charles, 1976), 123.
30 See Edward Chitham, A Life of Anne Brontë (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), especially chap. 9, for an extensive analysis of AB’s more rational character.
CHAPTER THREE: OUT WALKING
1 “High waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending,” Dec. 13, 1836. All of the quotations from EB’s poems come from Janet Gezari, ed., Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992). If EB didn’t title a poem, then I give its first line as a title. The dates provided come from Gezari’s scholarly footwork. When they are conjectural, I include a question mark.
2 EN’s reminiscences, in LCB, vol. 1, 601, 598; EB, “Song,” 1844.
3 See Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), for his discussion of the actual weather in EB’s poems. EB, “Often rebuked, yet always back returning,” undated. This poem may have been written by CB and attributed to EB, or if EB wrote it, it is probable that CB revised it, as she did with many of EB’s poems. Chitham, in Emily Brontë, 219, argues the latter. Gezari argues that the poem was wholly written by CB but cast in EB’s voice and deliberately attributed to EB by CB. See her Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially 141–50.
4 BB’s fragment, in Victor Neufeldt, ed., The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë (New York: Garland, 1999), vol. 2, 587.
5 The stick, BPM, SB: 337, was donated in 1917 to the museum by Mr. George Day. He was an annual subscriber to the Brontë Society starting in 1897 and then a lifetime member from 1906 to 1926. Along with the walking stick, he donated funeral cards for CB, BB, PB, and John Brown, as well as other items. Day bought the stick at a Sotheby’s auction as lot 668 in December 13–15, 1916, as part of the colle
ction of a well-known Brontë enthusiast and collector of Brontë artifacts, J. H. Dixon of Harrogate. It was accompanied by a silhouette portrait of BB and a framed authentication letter, stating that it was sold by J. Briggs to H. Edmundson, who sold it in turn to C. Stansfield, from whom it was purchased by Mr. Dixon. See “Catalogue of Valuable Illuminated and Other Manuscripts,” Sotheby’s, Dec. 13–15, 1916, BPM. For Dixon as a collector, see Ann Dinsdale, Sarah Laycock, and Julie Akhurst, Brontë Relics: A Collection History (Yorkshire, UK: Brontë Society, 2012), 43; the history and craft of blackthorn sticks comes from A. E. Boothroyd, Fascinating Walking Sticks (London: White Lion, 1973), 54–56; in addition to PB’s blackthorn stick, there is also a heavy oak one, perhaps used when he was an old man, at the BPM. John Lock and Canon W. T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, 1777–1861 (London: Ian Hodgkins, 1979), 52.
6 Gerard J. Van Den Broek, The Return of the Cane: A Natural History of the Walking Stick (Utrecht: International Books, 2007); Anthony Reál, The Story of the Stick in All Ages and Lands (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1876), 234; CB to Mary Taylor, Sept. 4, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 113; Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Penguin, 1997), 166; John Greenwood, the local stationer, told the story about EB’s shooting lessons. See Chitham, Emily Brontë, 159, for more information.
7 EN quoted in Wemyss Reid, Charlotte Brontë (London: Macmillan, 1877), 30; for BB’s walks to Bradford, see Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 305; for BB’s walk to Roe Head, see Barbara Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell’: The Story of a Friendship (Otley, UK: Smith Settle, 1993), 9; CB to EN, June 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 221.
8 Thomas quoted in Lucy Newlyn, “Hazlitt and Edward Thomas on Walking,” Essays in Criticism 56, no. 2 (2006), 164, a very fine meditation on the walking stick and on foot travel more generally; it would be rather hard to touch Saint Catherine’s stick now, however. A portion is displayed in her former house and shrine in Siena, Italy, but it is encased in a reliquary; the Saint John of God statue is now at the Wellcome Collection, London, A 61810.