by Deborah Lutz
3 In this first notebook, British Library, Ashley MS 175: 1839, EB recorded the dates of composition and transcription. It was made in 1839 and contained the best of her poems going back to 1837. She wrote in a cursive hand, which was very unusual for her. The Gondal notebook is also at the British Library, add. MS. 43483. It retains its original binding, but the 1839 one was disassembled and the leaves remounted by the collector Thomas Wise. The non-Gondal one, now known as the Honresfeld MS, went missing in the twentieth century, but a facsimile copy was made in 1934, in volume 17 of the Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës’ writing: Thomas Wise and John Alexander Symington, eds., The Poems of Emily Jane Brontë and Anne Brontë (Oxford, UK: Shakespeare Head, 1934). EB started both notebooks in February 1844.
4 Both EB’s and CB’s desks, along with their contents, were kept by CB’s husband, Arthur Nicholls, after CB’s death. After his death, they were sold by his second wife at a Sotheby’s auction in 1907. See “Catalogue of Valuable Books and Manuscripts,” July 26–27, BPM, P.S. Cat. 3. CB’s desk was bought by Alexander Murray Smith, the son of her publisher George Smith, who later donated it to the BPM. EB’s desk was bought by Henry Houston Bonnell, the bibliophile and Brontëana collector from Philadelphia, who later donated it to the BPM; a non-portable standing desk at the BPM is also believed to have belonged to CB, probably bought by her in the 1850s, when her writing was bringing in fairly steady royalties; AB, diary paper, July 1841, manuscript missing.
5 The drawing of EB’s that makes it clear that she is representing the page she is currently writing is the diary paper of June 26, 1837, BPM, BS105, which pictures AB and EB sitting at a table, the diaries they are working on in front of them and labeled “the papers.”
6 The velvet’s border on CB’s desk repeats the star pattern, in brass set into the wood, on the outside of the box. The slope of AB’s desk has an especially feminine appearance, with a cerise-pink-velvet lining. AB’s desk has the most obscure provenance and was donated to the BPM empty. The Haworth stationer John Greenwood owned it, and his great-granddaughter Mary Preston donated it to the museum in 1961; the hair, BPM, BS 171, is accompanied by a note in PB’s hand that says, “Anne Brontë / May 22 1833 / Aged 13 / years,” and was in CB’s desk at the Sotheby’s sale in 1907. It is unclear when the hair was put there and by whom: CB, or her father or husband after her death; see Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for more information about the sewing patterns, especially 265; coin purse pattern, BPM, C36.
7 Nicholls’s pulling of the tin box out of a desk comes from Clement Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), 146; it’s possible that CB sent some sections of The Professor in the mail for friends or others to read, before she began sending it around to publishers—thus, these sections may have been folded to fit into envelopes. See, for instance, the introduction by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten to The Professor (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1987), where they explore this possibility; the information about the second tin comes from EB’s account book. Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), 195.
8 EB and CB each had paint boxes, and EB had a leather box that was specially made to hold her geometry set (which included a folding bone ruler and a retractable pen with a steel nib); George Eliot’s lace box is at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, X/R0723.
9 CB, “Last Will and Testament of Florence Marian Wellesley,” PML, Bonnell Collection; George Eliot’s desk was stolen in 2012 from a museum in Nuneaton, Warwickshire; Nightingale’s desk is at the Florence Nightingale Museum, London, FNM: 0371.
10 For the Lund warehouse, see Michael Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Cumbria, UK: Plain Books, 1990), 127; for Michi, see David Harris, Portable Writing Desks (Buckinghamshire, UK: Shire, 2001), 20; the Byam quote is from Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 2009), 132; the features of the elaborate desks come from Mark Bridge, An Encyclopedia of Desks (London: Apple Press, 1988), 84; Gaskell desk, BPM, LI.2005.7.1; Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896), 7.
11 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (New York: Penguin, 2003), 565, 168.
12 CB to EB, June 8, 1839, in LCB, vol. 1, 191; CB’s Roe Head Journal, BPM, Bonnell 98; CB to EN, June 30, 1839, and May 1842, in LCB, vol. 1, 191, 193, 253.
13 Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Oct. 24, 1798, Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15; J. F. Haywood, English Desks and Bureaux (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1968), 2, and John R. Bernasconi, The English Desk and Bookcase (Reading, UK: College of Estate Management, 1981), 28; CB, “The Secret,” Nov. 7, 1833, Elmer Ellis Library, University of Missouri-Columbia.
14 I have not been able to trace the provenance of the second desk box of CB’s, although it belonged to Dr. Albert A. Berg, who probably bought it from William Thomas Hildrup Howe, a major collector and president of the American Book Co. His collection, which included Dickens and Brontë artifacts, went on sale when he died in 1939. I have been unable to find a list of Howe’s collection. Berg donated CB’s desk to the New York Public Library with the following items stored inside: what is said to be a lock of CB’s hair (collected by Martha Brown from the corpse); another, anonymous lock of hair; the visiting cards of CB and her husband, in an envelope addressed to EN; a hand-painted cardboard box; a velvet bracelet that belonged to CB, according to an accompanying letter from EN; funeral cards for EB, CB, BB, and PB; and a few other odds and ends.
15 Anthony Trollope, North America (New York: Harper, 1862), 263–64; Anthony Trollope, Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1912), 89, 299; Anthony Trollope to Rose Trollope, Mar. 17, 1875, in N. John Hall, ed., The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), vol. 2, 654.
16 CB to EN, July 31, 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 412; BB to J. B. Leyland, Sept. 10, 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 424; Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 476.
17 CB to EN, Nov. 14, 1844, in LCB, vol. 1, 374.
18 EB, “The Prisoner,” Oct. 9, 1845, in Janet Gezari, ed., Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992); some, such as Gezari, believe that the notebook CB found was the Gondal one, but others, such as Barker, in Brontës, 481, think it was the non-Gondal notebook; CB described finding EB’s poetry a few years later to her publisher and eventual friend W. S. Williams, in a letter of September 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 119; she gives another version of the finding in CB, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” in LCB, vol. 2, 742.
19 For a sustained analysis of the distance that sprang up between CB and EB during this time, see Chitham, Emily Brontë, chap. 6.
20 CB to W. S. Williams, Sept. 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 119; see Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 309, for her argument that the pseudonyms were upon EB’s insistence; CB to W. S. Williams, July 31, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 94.
21 The large, gate-legged table they paced around, which EB pictured on her 1837 diary paper, is in a private collection; the fact about pacing at Roe Head comes from Barbara Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell’: The Story of a Friendship (Otley, UK: Smith Settle, 1993), 3; we don’t know exactly when they each began their novels, but estimates by most Brontë scholars put their completion within a year. See especially the introductions to the Clarendon editions of Wuthering Heights, ed. Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), of Agnes Grey, Hilda Marsden and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1988), and of The Professor, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten.
22 CB, “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights,” in LCB, vol. 2, 749.
23 CB to W. S. Williams, Sept. 17, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 255; CB to George Smith, Oct. 30, 1852, in LCB, vol. 3,
74. CB had been writing passionate, gothic stories like Jane Eyre since she was a girl, but she needed the influence of Wuthering Heights to show her how this type of writing could be incorporated into a novel.
24 CB to EN, Oct. 7, 1847, in LCB, 547.
25 From a letter Mary Taylor wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell, see Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Penguin, 1997), 81.
26 For EB’s struggles with pens, see Edward Chitham, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë at Work (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 10; CB’s pen-wiper, BPM, H223. It is also listed in “Museum of Brontë Relics: A Descriptive Catalogue of Brontë Relics Now in the possession of R. and F. Brown, 123, Main St., Haworth, 1898,” BPM, P. Bib. 1; CB to EN, Feb. 16, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 183.
27 This history of pens draws on Leonée Ormond, Writing: The Arts and Living (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981), 57.
28 J. Hunt, The Miscellany (Buckingham, UK: J. Seeley, 1795), 47.
29 Gaskell, Life, 234.
30 CB, “Biographical Notice,” in LCB, vol. 2, 743.
31 CB wrote the quoted words in 1836 on a snippet of diary that shares the page with her poem “Diving,” about plunging into the mind, into “depths so black and profound.” This snippet, Bonnell 98(7), BPM, makes up part of the journal notes called “The Roe Head Journal”; Harriet Martineau, “Obituary,” Daily News, Apr. 6, 1855; Gaskell, Life, 233.
32 CB was eventually able to pry some money out of Newby, four years after the novels were published. See Barker, Brontës, 747.
33 Ileana Martin speculates that CB used heron-shaped scissors (the legs comprising the blades), part of the collection at the BPM, for her cutting and pasting of Shirley. See “Charlotte Brontë’s Heron Scissors: Cancellations and Excisions in the Manuscript of Shirley,” Brontë Studies 38, no. 1 (2013), 19–29.
34 It is not known when AB began her second novel. Barker, in Brontës, 530, believes she probably started it in April 1847, while others give the start date as early as September 1846 (Chitham, Emily Brontë, 197), and still others estimate she began it six months later.
35 Barker, for instance, makes a strong case that EB had started a second novel. See Brontës, 532–33.
36 The information about the siblings possibly playing the game High Water comes from Whitehead, Charlotte Brontë and Her ‘Dearest Nell,’ 110.
37 For CB’s things in EB’s desk, see Juliet Barker, Sixty Treasures: The Brontë Parsonage Museum (Haworth, UK: Brontë Society, 1988), 43; CB to EN, Feb. 1852, in LCB, vol. 3, 17.
38 CB to W. S. Williams, Apr. 16, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 203.
CHAPTER SEVEN: DEATH MADE MATERIAL
1 The amethyst bracelet, BPM, J14, belonged to CB and was kept by her husband, Arthur Nicholls, after her death. After his death, it was sold with another bracelet (probably BPM, J43) made of AB’s and EB’s hair, by Nicholls’s second wife, at the 1907 Sotheby’s auction. Both were part of lot 34 and came in CB’s small satinwood box with a blue bead necklace and eyeglasses. The lot was purchased by the BPM. See “Catalogue of Valuable Books and Manuscripts,” July 26 and 27, 1907, 4, BPM, P.S. Cat. 3.
2 BB to J. B. Leyland, June 1846, in LCB, vol. 1, 475; BB to John Brown, Aug. 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 110.
3 CB to W. S. Williams, Oct. 6, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 124; CB to W. S. Williams, Oct. 2, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 122.
4 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (New York: Penguin, 2002), 297, The Old Curiosity Shop (New York: Penguin, 2001), 522, and Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2002), 192; information about the “good death” comes from Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially 19–38; quote from ibid., 22.
5 A page from Branwell’s sketchbook that has the drawing of his aunt is reproduced in Brian Wilks, The Brontës (London: Hamlyn, 1975), 79; Dickens’s daughter is quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), xii; the Millais pencil sketch and a plaster cast of the marble bust by Woolner can be viewed today at the Dickens Museum, London, along with many other relics, such as his “commode,” the china monkey that sat on his desk, and a clock from Gad’s Hill. There is also a table with a brass plaque nailed to it that reads, “Table (from the Chalet) upon which Charles Dickens penned his last words”; for the display of death masks around the house, see Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 290, and Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 128; Elizabeth Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow (New York: Harper, 1858), 17.
6 CB to W. S. Williams, Oct. 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 138; CB to EN, Oct. 29, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 130; CB to EN, Dec. 10, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 152; Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Penguin, 1997), 277; CB to W. S. Williams, Nov. 22, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 142; CB to W. S. Williams, Dec. 7, 1848, and CB to Dr. Epps, Dec. 9, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 148, 151.
7 CB, “Biographical Notice,” in LCB, vol. 2, 746; the detail about EB feeding the dogs comes from A. Mary F. Robinson, Emily Brontë (London: W. H. Allen, 1883), 228.
8 The details about EB in her room come from the servant Martha Brown’s account, given in an interview to Gaskell, who then wrote about it in a letter to John Forster, in September 1853, in J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), 246; Martha Brown passed the bone comb (BPM, H121)—probably given to her by Patrick—on to her sister, who gave it to her own daughter. The daughter’s husband, a Mr. Alderson of Shipley, sold it to J. H. Dixon, who put it up for sale at the Sotheby’s 1916 auction. See “Catalogue of Valuable Illuminated and Other Manuscripts,” Dec. 13–15, 1916, BPM. Lucasta Miller casts doubt on the authenticity of this comb, citing Godfrey Fox Bradby, The Brontës and Other Essays (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1932), 37, who remarks that “rumour has it that five other combs with charred teeth were aspirants for the honor of admission to the glass case.” Yet he gives no source for this “rumor,” so it’s hard to credit Miller’s conviction that “five combs with charred teeth would eventually battle it out for the honour of a place under glass in the Brontë Parsonage Museum,” based wholly on an unsourced rumor. See Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), 213; CB to EN, Dec. 19, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 154; EB’s words quoted in Gaskell, Life, 68. The black sofa now sits where it did when Emily died, in the parlor at the BPM. There has been much debate among Brontë biographers about whether she died in the parlor or in her bed upstairs; CB to EN, Apr. 12, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 200.
9 The coffin size comes from extracts from William Wood’s account book, BPM; one set of mourning gloves is at the BPM, D60. It is of white knitted silk and was given to a Mrs. Uttley; CB to EN, Dec. 23, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 157; the mourning cards are at the Berg. It’s not clear who had these made.
10 This letter, CB to EN, Dec. 23, 1848, is at the Berg. Also in LCB, vol. 2, 157; CB to W. S. Williams, Dec. 25, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 159; CB to W. S. Williams, Jan. 2, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 165.
11 The notion of a suburb in the sky comes from Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121; John Wolffe, in his survey of nineteenth-century British sermons preached on the deaths of the famous and his study of thousands of consolation letters, found a heavy emphasis on the dead as active in heaven. See Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63, 179; CB to EN, Aug. 6, 1843, in LCB, vol. 1, 328; W. S. Williams to CB, Dec. 21, 1848, in LCB, vol. 2, 156; PB to Eliza Brown, June 10, 1859, in Dudley Green, ed., The Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë (Stroud, UK: Nonsuch, 2005), 279; PB to the Reverend John Buckworth, Nov. 27, 1821. in ibid., 43.
12 CB to W. S. Williams, June 4, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 216; CB to W. S. Williams, June 13, 1849, in LCB, vol. 2, 220; from EN’s diary, quoted in LCB, vol. 2, 215n.
13 Mary Taylor told Gaskell about this incident in a letter. See Gaskell, Life, 104.
14 Jalland, in Death in the Victorian Family, recounts the Horsley story and discusses the practice generally. See especially 214. According to Bertram Puckle, Funeral Customs: Their Origins and Development (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1926), the ancient Greeks would cut the hair of a child whose parent had died, as a token of grief. A lock of the child’s hair would then be buried with the parent. See especially 269.
15 For Horsley, see Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 214; for Keats, see Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 564; Ruth Richardson tells the anecdote of the postman. See Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 4.
16 Numerous such artifacts were found among the archaeologist Margaret Cox’s excavations of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century burial vaults underneath Christ Church, Spitalfields, London, including a small wooden barrel containing two molars. See Cox, Life and Death in Spitalfields 1700–1850 (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1996). She also discusses the popular belief in resurrection, which “demanded complete mortal remains” (101). She explains that the lead coffins, found among her excavations, were a means to keep remains together, free from rot; as Richardson puts it, in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, 29: “Dissection represented . . . the deliberate mutilation or destruction of identity, perhaps for eternity.” See also Puckle, Funeral Customs, 206.
17 “The Relic,” lines 6, 11. In Donne’s “The Funeral,” the speaker hopes that when he dies, the one who shrouds him will not harm or “question much” that “subtle wreath of hair which crowns my arm” (lines 1–2). Donne, The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), vol. 1, 58, 62–63; “Locksley Hall,” lines 56–58, in Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman, 1987), vol. 2, 123; “Triumph of Time,” lines 114–115, 120, in Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon (London: Penguin, 2000), 32.