by Deborah Lutz
9 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 60; Morris Marples, Shanks’s Pony: A Study of Walking (London: Dent, 1959), 45; Hucks quoted in Holmes, Coleridge, 61.
10 For Dickens and walking, see Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), 230–31; Dickens’s compass is at the Berg, his stick at the Library of Congress; Darwin’s stick is at the Wellcome Collection, A 4962.
11 For pilgrims’ staffs, see Joseph Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 53; for sticks containing relics, see Max Von Boehn, Modes and Manners: Lace, Fans, Gloves, Walking-Sticks, Parasols, Jewelry, and Trinkets (London: Dent, 1929), 98; for souvenir sticks, see Van Den Broek, Return of the Cane, 104–11; a late-nineteenth-century staff, for instance, has Welsh place-names cut all over it, attesting to the walker’s indefatigability. In a private collection, but pictured and discussed in Boothroyd, Fascinating Walking Sticks, 169.
12 An odd souvenir walking stick of 1832 that fits this composite function had a shaft made of the floating batteries of Gibraltar and a handle mounted with brass from one of its guns. A similar stick, a souvenir of the Bristol Reform Act Riots of 1831, seems almost too fanciful to have existed. It was made out of wood from the prayer desk in the Bishop of Bristol’s palace, which was burned down during the riots. The handle came from the pistol that Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brereton, court-martialed because he withdrew his troops during the riots to save them from being injured, used to kill himself during his trial. The stick also had a “tricolor tassel” made from pieces of the ropes used to hang some of the rioters. This stick and the Gibraltar one are mentioned in “Curiosities Sent to the Naval and Military Museum,” Age, Feb. 12 (1832), 54; the Nelson stick is in a private collection, but see Boothroyd, Fascinating Walking Sticks, 167.
13 As Rebecca Solnit explains, in her eloquent Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001), 72, “Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there”; EB, “Every leaf speaks bliss to me,” 1838; AB and EB, diary paper, June 26, 1837, BPM, BS105; EB, “The Prisoner,” Oct. 9, 1845; EB drew a picture of herself writing on this stool in her bedroom, on her diary paper of July 1845. The Brontës’ servant Martha Brown was given the stool by PB, and she in turn gave it to her sister Tabitha Ratcliffe, who sold it to J. Roy Coventry of Liverpool. Eventually it made its way to the BPM, F11. Tabitha reported seeing EB regularly carry the stool outside to write. Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 104.
14 Robert Southey to CB, March 12, 1837, in LCB, vol. 1, 166.
15 The quotations about crossing the Alps are from Book 6 of The Prelude, lines 629, 635, 640–41, from the passage about crossing Simplon Pass. Initially disappointed because he didn’t notice they had gone over the pass, Wordsworth was able to experience this sense of eternity in his imagination, after the fact. Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1959), 209–10; Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 49, 97–98, in Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980), 113–15; see Wallace, Walking, and Solnit, Wanderlust, for more on Wordsworth and walking; Coryate is quoted in Marples, Shank’s Pony, 4.
16 Stephen is quoted in Marples, Shank’s Pony, 147; for “streetwalkers,” see Wallace, Walking, 221–22. See also Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
17 When EB was teaching at Law Hill in 1838–1839, she may have crossed paths with Anne Lister, whose house, Shibden Hall, was nearby. EB probably heard Lister’s story, as Lister was already thought a remarkable character by those who lived nearby. See Jill Liddingon, “Anne Lister and Emily Brontë, 1838–39: Landscape with Figures,” BST 26, no. 1 (2001); Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister 1791–1840 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 278; see Marples, Shank’s Pony, chap. 9, for a general biography of Weeton; Edward Hall, ed., Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), vol. 2, 24, 34, 45; Lister, I Know My Own Heart, 113–14.
18 CB to EN, Aug. 14, 1839, in LCB, vol. 1, 200; CB to Margaret Wooler, Sept. 27, 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 477.
19 See Solnit, Wanderlust, chap. 14, for more on women walking as a form of protest; Frances Wilson, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 54; Dorothy Wordsworth to Mrs. Christopher Crackenthorpe, Apr. 21, 1794, in Ernest de Selincourt, ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1967), vol. 1, 116–17.
20 Wuthering Heights has become a key text for feminist literary theory, and the ideas I put forth here are commonplace. The most important essay on EB’s contribution to feminism is, arguably, the chapter on Wuthering Heights in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). Their chapter on Jane Eyre in the same volume makes a convincing case for its importance for feminism as well.
21 There has been a good deal of writing about the maternal role of nature in EB’s work. For some of the best, see Margaret Homans, “Repression and Sublimation of Nature in Wuthering Heights,” PMLA 93, no. 1 (1978), and Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: Women’s Press, 1994).
22 For facts about EB’s walking, I draw on accounts by contemporaries, the most important being walks on the moors that EN took with the sisters during visits, the first in 1833. Only three letters written by EB survive, all of them brief and formal. As we have seen, her childhood writings have gone missing, along with the manuscript of Wuthering Heights and part of a new novel that she probably began just before her death. Besides her poetry and her one novel, only a few essays written at school, the diary papers, her drawings, a fragment of an account book, and a couple of text fragments survive. Almost all of what we know about EB—and this holds true for BB and AB as well—comes from CB’s comments in letters, general remarks to friends, a couple of short essays written after EB’s death, and Shirley, with the title character based in part on EB. As Lucasta Miller has shown, CB had her motives for depicting EB and her other siblings in specific, likely skewed, ways. See The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001). Many Brontë scholars have debated to what extent EB’s poems are autobiographical, especially given that many of them were written about Gondal events and characters, or from these imaginary people’s points of view. I read them as personal in this chapter, following the lead of Janet Gezari, in Last Things.
23 Quoted in E. M. Delafield, ed., The Brontës: Their Lives Recorded by Their Contemporaries (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 267; these descriptions of EB come from EN as given in her reminiscences in LCB, vol. 1, and in conversations with the early biographer of EB, Agnes Mary Francis Robinson, Emily Brontë (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1889); CB, “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights,” in LCB, vol. 2, 748.
24 CB, “Editor’s Preface,” in LCB, vol. 2, 749; EN quoted in Clement Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), 179; Gaskell, Life, 166.
25 EB, “It was night and on the mountains,” 1839?; EB, “The Philosopher,” Feb. 3, 1845, and “Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle,” Oct. 9, 1845; Wilson, Ballad, 54; EB, “I’m happiest when most away,” 1838?; Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 46–47, in Lyrical Ballads; scholarship on the importance of nature in EB’s writing is vast. One particularly fine work is Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Ideology: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
26 Gaskell to John Forster, 1853, in LCB, vol. 3, 198; quotes are from the Oxford English Dictionary. See Steven Vine, Emily Brontë (London: Twayne, 1998)
, chap. 4, for an eloquent exploration of the term “wuther.”
27 CB, “Editor’s Preface,” in LCB, vol. 2, 749.
28 EB, “Loud without the wind was roaring,” Nov. 11, 1838.
29 Gezari, Last Things, 17.
30 EB could read German, and it’s possible that she was familiar with the term Sehnsucht. Brontë scholars have argued that EB should be considered a philosopher in her own right. Janet Gezari, for instance, sees EB as a “self-taught philosopher whose audacity is related to her refusal to create or subscribe to a system” (Last Things, 4).
31 CB, “Prefatory Note to ‘Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell,’ ” in LCB, vol. 2, 748, 752; EB, “Why ask to know the date—the clime?” Sept. 14, 1846; EB, “All day I’ve toiled but not with pain,” undated; EB, “Honour’s Martyr,” Nov. 21, 1844; EB, “Loud without the wind was roaring” and “F. De Samara to A.G.A.,” Nov. 1, 1838; EB, “Tell me tell me smiling child,” 1836?; EB, “The inspiring music’s thrilling sound,” 1836?
32 EB, “Faith and Despondency,” Nov. 6, 1844.
33 Frances Wilson suggests, in Ballad, 54, in her exploration of Dorothy Wordsworth’s pedestrianism, that walking was “a physical expression of longing”; CB to W. S. Williams, May 22, 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 403.
34 For more about such studies, see Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2006), especially 9; T. P. Grinsted, The Last Homes of Departed Genius (London: Routledge, 1867), vi.
35 John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, July 18–22, 1818, in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. 1, 342; lines 1–2, in H. W. Garrod, ed., Keats: Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 385; see Simon Goldhill, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Watson, Literary Tourist, for more about pilgrimages to Abbotsford; the walking stick made from a tree growing out of Scott’s grave was given to Andrew Carnegie by Thomas Fox on May 9, 1901, and a photograph of it is at the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, CA-522.
36 Miller, Brontë Myth, 98; Virginia Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” Guardian, Dec. 21, 1904; Matthew Arnold, “Haworth Churchyard,” lines 154–55, in Humphrey Milford, ed., The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1804–1867 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1909), 280; Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 73; see Watson, Literary Tourist, 111–18, for more on the confusion about graves and Brontë pilgrimage more generally.
37 It is hard to reconstruct when Parkes went to Haworth. A letter that Gaskell reproduces, without saying who wrote it, in her biography of CB, Life, describes a visit to Haworth, and Charles Lemon, who reprints the letter in Early Visitors to Haworth: From Ellen Nussey to Virginia Woolf (Haworth, UK: Brontë Society, 1996), attributes it to Parkes and dates it October 3, 1850. Margaret Smith, however, attributes the letter to Jane Forster, and speculates that its date is late January 1851. For her arguments, see LCB, vol. 2, 569–70. Emma Lowndes, in Turning Victorian Women into Ladies: The Life of Bessie Raynor Parkes, 1829–1925 (Palo Alto, CA: Academica, 2012), reports that Parkes’s daughter thought she went with Gaskell to Haworth in July 1855. See also the biography of Parkes written by her daughter: Marie Belloc Lowndes, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia: A Record of Love and of Childhood (London: Macmillan, 1941); Gaskell to an unknown correspondent, quoted in Lemon, Early Visitors, 21–23.
38 W. H. Cooke, “A Winter’s Day at Haworth,” St. James Magazine 21 (Dec. 1867–Mar. 1868), 166. Others who walked from Keighley include Charles Hale, in 1861. See Lemon, Early Visitors, 73; walking from Bradford on footpaths and roads, then on to Bingley was one route; another went by way of Heaton, Wilsden, Old Allan, and Brae Moor. The anonymous walker who wrote for The Bradford Observer, April 30, 1857, took the Bradford route. William Scruton took this latter way, in 1858. See Lemon, Early Visitors, 33, 46; Walter White’s walking tour, for example, detailed in his 1858 Month in Yorkshire, had a stop in Haworth. See Lemon, Early Visitors, 42; E. P. Evans, “Two Days at the Home of the Brontës,” Treasury of Literature and the Ladies’ Treasury, Dec. 2 (1872), 302–4; Helen H. Arnold, “Reminiscences of Emma Huidekoper Cortazzo, 1866–1882,” BST 13 (1958), 221.
39 Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 588–89.
40 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Note on Charlotte Brontë (London: Chatto and Windus, 1877), 74; EB, “Gleneden’s Dream,” May 21, 1838; Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay,” lines 97–101, in Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), 4.
41 Many of these objects are held at the BPM. They include the pew fronts, urns, candlesticks, and the walking stick, Ch30, which has an ivory handle and a silver plate with the following inscription: “R.A. Hey, Sawwood OXENHOPE Oak from Haworth Church / erected in the year 670.” It was donated to the museum by Mrs. Foster Bannister, Mill Hey, Haworth, in 1947, according to BST 11, no. 2 (1947), 115. The escritoire might be the desk at the BPM, TA 230, which was purchased in 1970 and was used in the library, according to BST 15, no. 5 (1970), 333.
CHAPTER FOUR: KEEPER, GRASPER, AND OTHER FAMILY ANIMALS
1 EB, diary paper, July 30, 1841, manuscript missing, but a facsimile can be found in Clement Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970); CB gave this account to Elizabeth Gaskell. See Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Penguin, 1997), 200–201. Some Brontë scholars doubt its truth, or at the very least think it was embellished by Gaskell. This is perhaps true; we can never know, of course. However, there are many other accounts of EB’s relations with animals and evidence in her own writing that seem to support Gaskell’s tale, at least in its bare bones.
2 According to Gaskell, Life, 200, Keeper was a gift to EB. She doesn’t specify from whom—perhaps PB—nor do we know where Keeper came from nor how old he was when he arrived, although he wasn’t a puppy if he already had such a reputation; the quote is from John Stores Smith, who described Keeper’s breed after he visited Haworth and met PB and Keeper. He later published an account of his visit in Free Lance, Mar. 14, 1868; Gaskell, however, calls Keeper a “bull-dog” and in other sources he is called a “bull mastiff.” Jane Sellars, in The Art of the Brontës (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 122, speculates that he is a Labrador mix, which is unlikely given that the breed wasn’t introduced to England until the late eighteenth century and remained rare until many decades later, according to Carson I. A. Ritchie, The British Dog: Its History from Earliest Times (London: Robert Hale, 1981), 151–52. I am speculating on Keeper’s breed by studying the watercolor EB made of him in 1838 and comparing it to the many paintings of bull terriers around the time in William Secord’s wonderful and comprehensive Dog Painting 1840–1940 (Suffolk, UK: Antique Collector’s Club, 1992); on the history of dog breeding, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 91–98; for bull-baiting in Haworth, see Barbara Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell’: The Story of a Friendship (Otley, UK: Smith Settle, 1993), 113; for working dogs and the history of animal cruelty legislation, see Ritchie, British Dog, 180, 141–44, 183–84.
3 Ritchie, British Dog, 25.
4 See Walter Woodburn Hyde, “The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 64 (1915–1916), 730; William Ewald, “Comparative Jurisprudence (I): What Was It Like to Try a Rat?” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143 (1994-1995), 1889; and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 97–98; William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 4.1; see Ewald, “Comparative Jurisprudence (I),” 1915, for the basic rights of animals in the past.
5 These ancient beliefs all come from Thomas, Man
and the Natural World, 27, 75, 78, 98, 137; CB, “Like wolf—black bull or goblin hound,” from Victor Neufeldt, ed., The Poems of Charlotte Brontë: A New Text and Commentary (New York: Garland, 1985), 425.
6 For instance, see the 1803 engraving of a lurcher by Philip Reinagle, in The Sportsman’s Cabinet (London: Cundee, 1804), 102; see Lisa Surridge, “Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights,” BST 24, no. 2 (1999), 161–73, for a discussion about working animals in the novel, as opposed to pets.
7 From Queen Victoria’s diary, quoted in Katharine MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 133.
8 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Dover, 1968), vol. 2, 48–50; Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), 117–18.
9 Ritvo, Animal Estate, 86; The titles of illustrations come from Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 108; Secord, Dog Painting, 252, and Ritchie, British Dog, 20, discuss dogs put in human roles and stuffed pets; the poodle-shawl story comes from MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs, 135. Even PB fell into some of this sentimentalism, writing two letters from the point of view of dogs, one as Flossy; the Dickens letter opener is now at the Berg.
10 See Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: Women’s Press, 1994), for this view of EB’s feelings about dogs and human nature, especially 104–5. See also Ivan Kreilkamp, “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 1 (2005), 87–110, and Surridge, “Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights”; EB, “Le Chat,” in Sue Lonoff, ed. and trans., The Belgian Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 56–58.
11 EN’s observation comes from Shorter, Charlotte Brontë, 179–80; the quote from the acquaintance is from Gaskell, Life, 199.