by Deborah Lutz
12 EN’s account of Keeper on EB’s lap, a common occurrence, quoted in Shorter, Charlotte Brontë, 179–80; see Davies, Emily Brontë, chap. 3, for her remark that EB found animals to be “blood relatives.”
13 CB, “Eamala is a gurt bellaring bull,” June 1833, in Neufeldt, ed. Poems of Charlotte Brontë, 109; John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer, from his diary of village events, quoted in Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 147.
14 CB told the rabies story to Gaskell. See Life, 200; the surgeon Gordon Stables, for instance, wrote in the 1870s that the best remedy involved immediate cauterization of the bite. See Dogs in Their Relation to the Public (London: Cassell, 1877), 28.
15 CB, “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights,” in LCB, vol. 2, 749; Cornhill Magazine, July 28, 1873, 66.
16 Kreilkamp, “Petted Things,” 87–110; CB, “Editor’s Preface,” in appendix II, in LCB, vol. 2, 751.
17 Davies, Emily Brontë, 118.
18 EB, “Le Papillon,” in Lunoff, ed. and trans., Belgian Essays, 176; see Davies, Emily Brontë, chap. 3, for an eloquent meditation on animals, especially the lapwing; EB, “Redbreast early in the morning,” 1837, and “And like myself lone wholly lone,” Feb. 27, 1841, from Janet Gezari, ed., Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992).
19 Our society today also abuses dogs and animals of all sorts, and it’s not always possible to argue that we are more humane than people of earlier eras. Much like the work dogs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, huskies are used to pull sleds and are then abandoned, and the use of greyhounds for racing can cause painful damage to their legs. We have our puppy mills, our drugged race horses, our industrial farms where chickens and livestock are kept in horrific conditions, and much more. Keeper’s collar, BPM, H110, belonged to a Miss Lucy Lund, from Ilkley, who lent it to the museum in 1898 and then donated it in 1902. It is possible that she bought it at the 1861 sale of the contents of the parsonage, after PB died, or from relatives of the Brontë servants, who were given such personal items by PB; quoted in MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs, 132; for the history of the dog tax, see P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671–1831 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 82–83; George Clark murdered a tax collector, on May 18, 1862. “Accidents and Offences,” Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, Mar. 5, 1862, 3; for the dog tax as a means to exert class control, see Ritvo, Animal Estate, 188.
20 Prince Albert’s walking stick is now in the Royal Collection, 31205.
21 For where collars were sold, see Elizabeth Wilson, “Foreword,” in Four Centuries of Dog Collars at Leeds Castle (London: Leeds Castle Foundation, 1979), 2; for a collar with an inside lining, see the gilt copper one, lined with red morocco leather and blue velvet, inscribed with “This dog belongs to his Royal Highness George Augustus, Prince of Wales, 1715,” now at the Armoury at Windsor Castle. See MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs, 131; “Advertisements and Notices,” Belfast News-Letter, June 28, 1866; for pictures of early metal collars, see Secord, Dog Painting, especially 37; for working dogs on ships, see Ritchie, British Dog, 149–50; Ipswich Journal, Oct. 16, 1841; Nicolás C. Ciarlo, Horacio De Rosa, Dolores Elkin, and Phil Dunning, “Evidence of Use and Reuse of a Dog Collar from the Sloop of War HMS Swift (1770), Puerto Deseado (Argentina),” Technical Briefs in Historical Archeology 6 (2011), 20–27.
22 The Dog Collar Museum in Leeds Castle has lots of these engraved collars, such as one inscribed with “Tabinet / The Property of Earl Talbot. The winner of the Great Champion all aged stakes for all England. 32 dogs at 20 guin’s each at Ashdown Park, Dec. 14th 1838”; the Wellesley collar and the Wimbledon Jack charity collar are at the Dog Collar Museum. See also Four Centuries of Dog Collars, no. 38 and no. 48.
23 The Bicknell collar is British, from the eighteenth century, and in the Dog Collar Museum; two collars have these inscriptions: “I’m the Marquis of Granby’s Dog Putton, Whose Dog are you?” and “I am Mr. Pratt’s Dog, King St. Nr. Wakingham, Berks. Whose Dog are You?” Both are pictured in Four Centuries of Dog Collars, no. 52 and no. 22; the Nelson collar is at the National Maritime Museum, London, PLT0138; the Dickens collar is in private hands; For the Burns collar, see George R. Jesse, Researches into the History of the British Dog (London: Hardwicke, 1866), vol. 1, 67; CB, “The Poetaster,” vol. 1, July 6, 1830, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Lowell I(2).
24 For EB’s account book, see Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), 195; Flossy’s collar, BPM, H111, is also missing its padlock and has a “JW” hallmark; the error about Flossy’s breed seems to have originated with EN, who wrote in pencil on one of CB’s letters that “Mr. B” had given her “a King Charles Dog,” Flossy’s offspring. This note was written many years after the dog, and CB herself, had died, so it may have been a failure on the part of EN’s memory (see LCB, vol. 1, notes, 362). Flossy’s breed is never described by any of the Brontës in letters or diaries, nor does Gaskell describe it. A contemporary engraving of one of these springing spaniels chasing after birds, in the anonymous Sportsman’s Cabinet, 181, looks remarkably like EB’s drawing of Flossy running, chasing a butterfly; for spaniel breeds, see Ritchie, British Dog, 163–64.
25 CB to EN, July 1, 1841, in LCB, vol. 1, 258–59. In her diary paper of July 1845 (in private hands), AB points out that CB is “now sitting sewing in the Dining-Room Emily is ironing upstairs . . . Keeper and Flossy are I do not know where.” A few lines later, she announces that CB has “let Flossy in by the bye and he is now lying on the sopha.”
26 See Alexander and Sellers, Art of the Brontës, 22, for more about the importance of Bewick’s History of British Birds to the Brontës’ art; BB, “Thomas Bewick,” first published in the Halifax Guardian, Oct. 1, 1842, reprinted in Viktor Neufeldt, ed., Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë (New York: Garland, 1999), vol. 3, 397–400.
27 BB’s oil painting, now known as the “Gun Group,” went missing after it was photographed around 1860, except for a cut-out segment that pictures EB, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. For the history of this painting and reproductions of it, see Alexander and Sellars, Art of the Brontës, 307–10; Juliet Barker discusses the theories as to why BB was dismissed at length. See The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 334–35; BB, “The Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” in Neufeldt, ed., Works, vol. 3, 337. He revised this poem numerous times, and it was published in the Yorkshire Gazette on May 10, 1845.
28 AB, diary paper, July 30, 1841, manuscript missing; Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick, In the Footsteps of the Brontës (London: Pitman, 1914), 124.
29 EB, diary paper, July 30, 1845, in private hands.
30 CB to EB, Sept. 2, 1843, in LCB, vol. 1, 329; CB to EB, Dec. 1, 1843, in LCB, vol. 1, 331.
31 EN’s account, quoted in Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell,’ 150; CB to PB, June 2, 1852, in LCB, vol. 3, 50.
32 EN to Mary Gorham, July 22, 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 405; CB to EN, Aug. 1844 and Nov. 14, 1844, in LCB, vol. 1, 363, 374; AB to EN, Jan. 26, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 19.
33 CB to W. S. Williams, June 25, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 224; CB to EN, June 23, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 222.
34 Elizabeth Gaskell to an unidentified person, 1853, in LCB, vol. 3, 198; CB to EN, Dec. 8, 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 726; CB to EN, Dec. 7, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 306.
35 The information about Plato and Cato comes from PB’s notebook, BPM, BS 173. See also 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), 482–83; the third brass collar, BPM, 2000.2, is shinier and in much better shape than Keeper’s (although its padlock is missing). It is also engraved in a more skilled manner, with decorative flourishes, and would have been more expensive than Keeper’s. For these reasons, I speculate that this collar did belong to one of the later dogs, since PB would have been more comf
ortably off at this point because of royalties from CB’s books (even though CB left most of her estate to her husband in her will, PB benefited from it since the two men lived together and shared in it). It is possible that the collar is not authentic. Although the provenance of the collars cannot be traced back to Arthur Nicholls, it seems likely that he took them with him when he moved back to Ireland. He was also a dog lover and took Flossy for walks after AB died. After PB’s death, Arthur took Plato with him, who died in 1866, and maybe Cato, although he is never mentioned in any letters by Nicholls. Nicholls wrote to Martha Brown, one of the former parsonage servants, “Poor Plato died about a fortnight ago; he had become very helpless, wasted away like Keeper.” This third collar was on loan to the BPM until May 2013, when it was donated. See BST 26, no. 1 (2001), 108.
CHAPTER FIVE: FUGITIVE LETTERS
1 CB to EN, Mar. 1855, in LCB, vol. 3, 328; CB to EN, May 11, 1831, and July 21, 1832, in LCB, vol. 1, 109, 114.
2 CB to EN, Oct. 18, 1832, and Nov. 10, 1834, in LCB, vol. 1, 119, 133; CB to EN, Dec. 5 and 6, 1836, in LCB, vol. 1, 156.
3 CB to EN, Sept. 5 and July 21, 1832, and May 1836, in LCB, vol. 1, 117, 115, 145; CB to EN, July 2, 1835, in LCB, vol. 1, 140; CB to EN, Aug. 20, 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 226; CB to EN, Mar. 6, 1843, in LCB, vol. 1, 312.
4 CB to EN, Dec. 5 and 6, 1836, in LCB, vol. 1, 156; CB to EN, Sept. 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 227–28.
5 See Kathryn Crowther, “Charlotte Brontë’s Textual Relics: Memorializing the Material in Villette,” Brontë Studies 35, no. 2 (2010), 131–32.
6 Paulina in Villette plaits together the “spoils” from her fiancé’s head, a “grey lock” from her father’s, and a thread of her own, and “prisoned it in a locket, and laid it on her heart.” When Catherine Earnshaw dies in Wuthering Heights, the locket around her neck contains a wisp of blond hair from her husband.
7 The details of Branwell’s affair come from Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 456–70; this letter from BB to John Brown is now missing, but Richard Monckton Milnes copied extracts of it into his commonplace book. Quoted in ibid., 459–61.
8 CB to EN, July 21, 1832, in LCB, vol. 1, 115.
9 Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, ed. Linda Peterson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007), 370–71, 136.
10 CB to EN, Feb. 11, 1834, in LCB, vol. 1, 125; CB to EN, July 4, 1834, in LCB, vol. 1, 129.
11 AB cross-wrote a letter to EN on October 4, 1847. She probably did it not to save on postage but rather because she had only small sheets of paper, since the national penny post had already been instituted. LCB, vol. 1, 544–45; John Pearce, A Descant on the Penny Postage (London: J. Born, 1841), 6.
12 James Wilson Hyde, The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance (London: Blackwell, 1885), 259, 181.
13 CB to EN, Aug. 24, 1838, in LCB, vol. 1, 180; CB to EN, early 1837, in LCB, vol. 1, 163.
14 CB to EN, May 8, 1835, in LCB, vol. 1, 137.
15 William Lewins, Her Majesty’s Mails: An Historical and Descriptive Account of the British Post Office (London: Sampson Low, 1864), 100.
16 CB to EN, Jan. 12, 1840, in LCB, vol. 1, 208.
17 For the history of valentines, Christmas cards, and so on, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 364.
18 Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2009), 27, 122; CB to EN, Dec. 1852, in LCB, vol. 3, 91; CB to George Smith, Feb. 17, 1852, in LCB, vol. 3, 21.
19 The letter with the wallpaper snippet is now at the Berg, with Gaskell’s handwritten note on the back of the wallpaper: “Slip of the paper with which Charlotte Brontë papered her future husband’s study, before they were married. —ECG”; CB to Amelia Ringrose, Mar. 31, 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 373; CB to Elizabeth Smith, May 25, 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 407. The socks and the letter are at the BPM; CB to EN, Apr. 1847, in LCB, vol. 1, 523. The piece of lace was reputedly given by EN to a Mrs. Cameron and was passed down as a family heirloom. See Barbara Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell’: The Story of a Friendship (Otley, UK: Smith Settle, 1993), 137, n. 1; CB to EN, Jan. 1847, in LCB, vol. 1, 515.
20 Michael Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Cumbria, UK: Plain Books, 1990), 59; CB to EN, June 19, 1834, in LCB, vol. 1, 128.
21 Michael Champness and David Trapnell, Adhesive Wafer Seals: A Transient Victorian Phenomenon (Kent, UK: Chancery House, 1996), 4–5, 13. For envelopes and their gumming, see Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 59.
22 These examples of wafers are all discussed and pictured in Champness and Trapnell, Adhesive Wafer Seals, 13–146.
23 Many of the envelopes for CB’s letters no longer exist, and it’s also likely that CB sent letters that disappeared without a trace, so we can’t know if she used wafers with other correspondents; CB to EN, Aug. 9, 1846, in LCB, vol. 1, 491–92.
24 CB to EN, Sept. 1847, PML, MA 7315.
25 Some Brontë biographers have argued that EB had a lover. See, for instance, Sara Fermi, “Emily Brontë: A Theory,” Brontë Studies 30, no. 1 (2005), 71–74. Also, after EB died, CB had possession of EB’s desk, so it is possible the seals were actually CB’s.
26 Champness and Trapnell, Adhesive Wafer Seals, 4.
27 For issues of privacy in the Victorian post, see Kate Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 2012); Champness and Trapnell, Adhesive Wafer Seals, 99, 107–111.
28 CB to BB, May 1, 1843, and CB to EN, May 1842, in LCB, vol. 1, 317, 184; CB to Constantin Heger, July 24, 1844, British Library, add. MS 38, 732A. See also LCB, vol. 1, 357–59; the account of the fate of the letters comes from Louise Heger, the daughter of the Hegers, who heard it from her mother. She then told it to M. H. Spielmann. See Spielmann’s “The Inner History of the Brontë-Heger Letters,” Fortnightly Review, Apr. (1919), 345–50.
29 CB to Constantin Heger, Oct. 24, 1844, British Library, add. MS 38, 732B. See also LCB, vol. 1, 370; Spielmann, “Inner History,” 346.
30 CB to Constantin Heger, Jan. 8, 1845, British Library, add. MS 38, 732D. See also LCB, vol. 1, 379–80; Spielmann, “Inner History,” 346.
31 Spielmann, “Inner History,” 346. See also Margaret Smith, “The History of the Letters,” in LCB, vol. 1, 64; CB to Constantin Heger, Nov. 18, 1845, British Library, add. MS 38, 732C. See also LCB, vol. 1, 435–37.
32 Spielmann, “Inner History,” 346.
33 Ibid., 348.
34 CB to Constantin Heger, July 24, 1844, in LCB, vol. 1, 357; CB to Constantin Heger, Oct. 24, 1844, in LCB, vol. 1, 370; CB to Constantin Heger, Jan. 8, 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 379.
35 The detail about Madame Heger reading Villette comes from Barker, Brontës, 787.
36 A special packet of letters given to CB by her father must have been profoundly moving to her. One day, he handed her a small collection of love letters written to himself by her mother before they were married. “Yellow with time,” the letters she read now for the first time held “a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy.” CB found it strange to peruse what she called “the record of a mind whence my own sprang.” The experience was at once sad and sweet for her, especially the “gentleness about them indescribable.” They made her wish that “she had lived and that I had known her.” CB to EN, Feb. 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 347; CB to EN, early 1837 and Dec. 5 and 6, 1836, in LCB, vol. 1, 162, 156; CB to EN, Sept. 26, 1836, in LCB, vol. 1, 152; CB to EN, Oct./Nov. 1836, in LCB, vol. 1, 154–55; Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (New York: Knopf, 1983), 168.
37 CB to EN, Oct. 1852, in LCB, vol. 3, 73; CB to EN, Oct. 13, 1843, in LCB, vol. 1, 334; CB to Margaret Wooler, July 14, 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 666; EN’s account, given in a letter to Lady Morrison, quoted in Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell,’ 156.
38 Elaine Miller makes a convincing argument about the importance of CB and EN’s passionate love, and that it has b
een mostly ignored by biographers who look at it with a heterosexist bias. See “Through All Changes and through all Chances: The Relationship of Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë,” in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840–1985 (London: Women’s Press, 1989).
39 See Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). CB’s ardent language in her letters to EN was also not unusual for the time. Marcus discusses many letters between women with similar language.
40 Anne Longmuir argues that the character Shirley was possibly based, in part, on the lesbian Anne Lister, in her “Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley,” Brontë Studies 31 (2006), 145–55; CB explained to Gaskell that Shirley was based on EB. See Gaskell, Life, 299.
41 CB to EN, Mar. 12, 1839, in LCB, vol. 1, 187; See Marcus, Between Women, for an exploration of the way Victorian heterosexual relationships were often secondary to female friendships and love.
42 CB’s favoring the name Charles for herself comes from Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell,” 45.
43 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).
44 CB to EN, Oct. 31, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 296; EN to Arthur Nicholls, Nov. 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 297.
45 CB to PB, June 9, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 218.
46 Abraham Shackleton, manuscript weather records, Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley.
CHAPTER SIX: THE ALCHEMY OF DESKS
1 AB diary paper, July 1845, in private hands.
2 An example of EB’s paper recycling can be seen on a version of the “chained bird” poem at the Berg, dated February 27, 1841, written on the back of a handwritten text in Latin; the sheet with eight poems is at the Berg, beginning “When days of Beauty deck the vale,” with poems dated from September to November 1836; Derek Roper discusses these manuscripts in great detail, in his introduction to The Poems of Emily Brontë (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1995), especially 13–21.