by Deborah Lutz
18 Many of these superstitions were practiced without a clear sense as to why, their origins having been forgotten. Ruth Richardson, in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, 7, 27, describes what she calls a popular “folk theology” during this time, a mixture of “orthodox, obsolete, and ersatz Christianity and what can only be called quasi-pagan beliefs.” Mirrors were covered for other reasons as well, such as in Jewish tradition where covering mirrors and not bathing during a wake are means to honor the dead by putting aside all considerations of personal appearance.
19 For Antoni Forrer, see Irene Guggenheim Navarro, “Hairwork of the 19th Century,” Magazine Antiques 159 (2001), 484–93. Shirley Bury also discusses Forrer in Jewellery, 1789–1910: The International Era (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collector’s Club, 1991); the details from the Great Exhibition come from Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), 1137, 683, and 1149. For a French example of a hair portrait, see Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (New York: Penguin, 2002), 36. Emma has a memorial card for her mother made out of the dead woman’s hair; the growth of the Victorian hair jewelry industry is explored in Christian Holm, “Sentimental Cuts: 18th-Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (2004), 139–43; Pamela Miller, “Hair Jewelry as Fetish,” in Ray B. Browne, ed., Objects of Special Devotion: Fetishes and Fetishism in Popular Culture (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, n.d.); Diana Cooper and Norman Battershill, Victorian Sentimental Jewellery (London: Newton Abbot, 1972); and Bury, Jewellery; the journals that discussed hairwork include New belle assemblee and The Cornhill Magazine. For more on Victorian hair jewelry, see Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New York: Yale University Press, 2010). For the Rembrandt in cross-stitch, see Nerylla Taunton, Antique Needlework Tools and Embroideries (Suffolk, UK: Antique Collector’s Club, 1997), 63; CB, “Passing Events,” PML, Brontë 02, 1836, and “Captain Henry Hastings,” 1839, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
20 Helen Sheumaker’s history of hairwork in America describes different types of hairwork and how these pieces were made (and by whom). See Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Although American hairwork was quite different from British hairwork in terms of use and history, its patterns and manufacture were similar; The bracelet made from AB’s hair, BPM, J8, was sold at the 1898 auction of EN’s things after she died (as lot 212, “plaited chain of hair in two strips, fastened with gold barrel-shaped fasteners”) and was acquired by the BPM from Mrs. Worthing Needham in 1932 (see BST 8, no. 1 [1932], 43–46). It almost matches a hair necklace, made from EB’s and AB’s hair, that was bought by the BPM in 1927 at an auction (lot 27), now J12. A very thin, long tress of tightly woven hair made into a necklace, BPM, J51, looks like it was also made with a table. It is said to be EB’s hair, passed down through the servant Martha Brown; “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.
21 CB, “Passing Events”; EB, “Why ask to know the date—the clime?” Sept. 14, 1846, in Janet Gezari, ed., Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992). Locket, BPM, J42, SB: 636; the brooch, BPM, J15, was also bought at the Nussey auction, by a Mr. James Miles, and there seems to be some uncertainty about whose hair it contains, either AB’s or CB’s.
22 Gold brooch, Victoria and Albert Museum, M.21-1972, 1855; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (New York: Longmans, 1905), 104.
23 Snippets of hair on velvet backdrop, BPM, J81. Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 134, identifies Sarah Garrs as the one who cut and took the hair. Garrs later married and emigrated to the United States. She wrote to PB from Iowa when she heard that CB had died. Aunt Branwell’s hair is not represented in the grouping, but Garrs would not have known her very well, since Aunt Branwell didn’t move into the parsonage permanently until after Garrs had left. The whole collection was donated to the BPM in 1989 by Dr. John D. Stull, BST 21 (1994), 3.
24 According to Joan Evans, the sapphire amulet was buried with Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle in 814 and rediscovered when the tomb was opened by Otto III in 1000. Preserved in the treasury of the cathedral, it was given by the canons to Empress Josephine in 1804, who wore it at her coronation, set into her crown. It is now in the treasury of the Palace of Tau, in Reims, France. See Evans, A History of Jewellery, 1100–1870 (Boston, MA: Boston Book and Art, 1970), 42; for Charles I relics, see Diana Scarisbrick, Ancestral Jewels (London: Deutsch, 1989), 67–68. Some of the Charles I hair jewels are at the Victoria and Albert Museum, including a brooch, M. 103-1962, ca. 1650, with his cypher in gold wire mounted over his hair, and this inscription on the back: “CR REX MARTYR.”
25 Numerous examples of talismanic jewelry can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, including at least four toadstone rings. The museum also has a number of amulets containing the teeth or horns of various animals—such as wolf or deer teeth—also thought to be protective or nurturing; jewel with caul, British Museum, Cat. 229-30, 577.
26 CB, “The Search after Happiness,” Aug. 17, 1829, British Library, Ashley 156; CB, “The Foundling,” 1833, British Library, Ashley 159.
27 CB, “Caroline Vernon,” in Winifred Gérin, ed., Five Novelettes (London: Folio Press, 1971), 301; Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 84.
28 Dickens, Oliver Twist, 313; CB, “The Secret,” Nov. 7, 1833, Elmer Ellis Library, University of Missouri-Columbia.
29 Bury, in Jewellery, 681, discusses the scandal of replacing the beloved’s hair with anonymous hair. For a similar occurrence in the hairwork industry in America, see Sheumaker, Love Entwined. Both Bury and Sheumaker discuss the busy traffic in human hair during the nineteenth century. The most popular hairwork instructional manual of the day, Alexanna Speight’s Lock of Hair (London: Goubaud, 1872), has an extensive discussion on the shearing of women’s hair for sale; The Family Friend 5 (1853), 55. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine makes a similar point: “When we think of the imperishable nature of human hair, we can easily understand the anxiety with which a tress or lock cut from the forehead of a friend who is perhaps long among the dead . . . is preserved.” Cassell’s Home Journal also played on these fears, as do all of the hairwork instructional manuals.
30 Mary Taylor is quoted in Gaskell, Life, 103; inkstand, Royal Collection, 15955. See also Jonathan Marsden, ed., Victoria and Albert: Art and Love (London: Royal Collection, 2010), 206; Examples of teeth jewelry are held in the archives at Frogmore House, Windsor Castle. They are matching earrings and a pendant made of gold-mounted enamel, RCIN, nos. 52540, 52541.1, and 52541.2, in the shape of fuchsia flowers, which symbolized humble love, and their stamens are represented by the baby teeth of Princess Beatrice. The pendant has written on it, in gold, “Our baby’s first tooth.” It also has a case built for a plait of hair, but no hair is in it. Another example is a gold and enamel brooch representing a thistle that holds, as its flower, a milk tooth of Princess Victoria. An inscription on the back states that it was pulled by her father, Prince Albert, on September 13, 1847. Balmoral Castle, RNIN 13517; charm bracelet: Royal Collection, 65293. See also Marsden, Victoria and Albert, 337.
31 Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 286–87; quoted in Bury, Jewellery, 666. Navarro, “Hairwork of the 19th Century,” discusses the many hair jewels given by Queen Victoria as well as those she received.
32 Quoted in Hibbert, Queen Victoria, 293; quoted in Wolffe, Great Deaths, 204–5; for discussions of the materiality of spiritualism and its general history, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), and Marlene Trom
p, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006); for Katie King, see Owen, Darkened Room, 55; the detail about CB’s ghost comes from Miller, Brontë Myth, 89.
33 Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, et al., eds., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Thomas Wilmot included the picture of CB in his Twenty Photographs of the Risen Dead (Birmingham, UK: Midland Educational Company, 1894). See also Miller, Brontë Myth, 89.
34 According to Susan R. Foister, in “The Brontë Portraits,” BST 18 (1984), 352, the negative was one of thousands at the National Portrait Gallery that came from the studio of the photographer Sir Emery Walker. The studio card index states that it is “from a carte-de-visite of Charlotte Brontë, taken within a year of her death.” As Foister points out, the carte de visite wasn’t introduced into Britain until 1857 at the earliest, so she theorizes that the carte was taken of the 1854 photograph (by re-photographing). See also Juliet Barker, “Charlotte Brontë’s Photograph,” BST 19, nos. 1–2 (1986), 27–28, who makes an even stronger case for the photo being authentic, based on the discovery of a print of the negative in a different collection. Barker later cast some doubt on her own conclusion, however, suspecting along with others that the photograph might actually be of EN. Audrey Hall speculates about other photos, in “Two Possible Photographs of Charlotte Brontë,” BST 21, no. 7 (1996), 293–302.
35 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 6, 373, 374. See also Audrey Linkman, Photography and Death (London: Reaktion, 2011), 69; Jay Winter remarks that “those who tried to reunite the living and the dead, to retrieve their bodies and to give them a secure and identifiable resting place, faced staggering problems.” See Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Place of the Great War in European Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28.
36 Ian and Catherine Emberson, “A Necktie and a Lock of Hair: The Memories of George Feather the Younger,” Brontë Studies 31 (2006), 161.
37 EN to George Smith, Mar. 28, 1860, quoted in Barker, Brontës, 773; PB to Elizabeth Gaskell, Apr. 5, 1855, in Green, Letters of Reverend Patrick Brontë, 227.
38 British Library, Egerton MS 3268B. Other locks EN gave away, BPM, J26 and E.2007.9, both curls in envelopes; Nicholls’s ring, BPM, J29.
CHAPTER EIGHT: MEMORY ALBUMS
1 CB to PB, June 7, 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 630–31; CB to Amelia Taylor, June 7, 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 633; “Thingville” comes from Kathryn Crowther, “Charlotte Brontë’s Textual Relics: Memorializing the Material in Vilette,” Brontë Studies 35, no. 2 (2010), 129.
2 The detail of the small box inside a big one comes from Yoshiaki Shirai, “Ferndean: Charlotte Brontë in the Age of Pteridomania,” Brontë Studies 28 (2003), 124; the information about Paxton and fern houses comes from Sarah Whittingham, Fern Fever: The History of Pteridomania (London: Frances Lincoln, 2012), 108, 113; for the cases shaped like the Crystal Palace, see Nicolette Scourse, The Victorians and Their Ferns (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 89.
3 Kingsley promoted the “mania,” feeling that it brought women outdoors and in contact with nature. As a fervent evangelical, Kingsley saw nature as expressing the glory of God, and he hoped “botanizing” would replace women’s desire for “novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool” work, a popular type of embroidery. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; Or, the Wonders of the Shore (Cambridge, UK: Macmillan, 1855), 4; for ferns as a design motif, see David Elliston Allen, Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 16; water jug, BPM, H28; for fern ware, see Nerylla Taunton, Antique Needlework, Tools, and Embroideries (Suffolk, UK: Antique Collector’s Club, 1997), 160.
4 For fern laws, see Allen, Naturalists and Society, 17; Whittingham, Fern Fever, 173.
5 For the Wordsworths as fern lovers, see Whittingham, Fern Fever, 13; Ward’s Tintern Abbey case is pictured in Allen, Naturalists and Society, 401; the popular association of ferns with graveyards and ruins comes from Charlotte Yonge’s 1853 Herb of the Field (London: Macmillan, 1887), 69–70; Whittingham, Fern Fever, 225, includes a picture of a “phantom bouquet”; For ruins inside Wardian cases, see Allen, Naturalists and Society, 404; the Glenny anecdote comes from Whittingham, Fern Fever, 119.
6 John Ruskin, “Remarks Addressed to the Mansfield Art Night Class, 14 October 1873,” in A Joy for Ever (London: George Allen, 1904), 238.
7 EB, “There shines the moon, at noon of night,” Mar. 6, 1837, “Weaned from life and torn away,” Feb. 1838, and “Often rebuked, yet always back returning,” date unknown, in Janet Gezari, ed., Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992); Yonge, Herb of the Field, 74; and Scourse, Victorians and Their Ferns, 169.
8 David Elliston Allen, The Victorian Fern Craze: A History of Pteridomania (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 11–12; quoted in Whittingham, Fern Fever, 26–27.
9 Quoted in Whittingham, Fern Fever, 216.
10 An example of fairies dancing in ferny settings can be found in Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, ed. Brian Alderson and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). See Whittingham, Fern Fever, 40–41, for more about the linkage between fairies and ferns and for some Victorian-era illustrations of them; for ferns and invisibility, see Yonge’s chapter on ferns, in Herbs of the Field, 69, and “How to Become Invisible,” Punch, Aug. 11 (1866), 65. For lunacy and ferns, see Whittingham, Fern Fever, 223.
11 CB to Mrs. Rand, May 26, 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 393; CB to EN, July 10, 1846, in LCB, vol. 1, 483; CB to EN, Jan. 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 337.
12 CB to EN, July 1851, in LCB, vol. 2, 671.
13 CB to EN, Dec. 15, 1852, in LCB, vol. 3, 93.
14 CB to EN, Jan. 2, 1853, in LCB, vol. 3, 101; CB to EN, Apr. 6, 1853, in LCB, vol. 3, 149; CB to EN, May 16, 1853, in LCB, vol. 3, 165–66.
15 CB to EN, May 27, 1853, in LCB, vol. 3, 168.
16 Elizabeth Gaskell to John Forster, Apr. 23, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 248.
17 CB to EN, May 21, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 263; the wedding dress was bequeathed by Nicholls to his niece, named, strangely, Charlotte Brontë Nicholls, with the promise that she burn it before she died so that it couldn’t be sold. In 1954 she did burn it, although a copy was made using the memory of it retained by her niece, according to Juliet Barker, Sixty Treasures: The Brontë Parsonage Museum (Haworth: Brontë Society, 1988), item 53. The bonnet and veil do still exist, however: BPM, D97; CB to an unknown recipient, June 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 266; CB to EN, June 11, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 268–69.
18 This travel dress is at the BPM, D74.
19 Some rare ferns had been found in Yorkshire, such as this “filmy fern” with transparent leaves, called the dwarf creeping fern when first found near Bingley in 1724, later renamed the Killarney fern when it was rediscovered in Ireland; Mary Taylor to CB, Apr. 1850, in LCB, vol. 2, 393; the vasculum often hung with a leather strap across the body. A collecting press was a wooden case, which could be strapped and buckled in order to flatten the ferns, such as the “Botanist’s Portable Collecting Press,” available at such shops as Mr. Bogue of 3 St. Martin’s Place, London, in three sizes. Whittingham, Fern Fever, 67.
20 “A Devonian Period,” Punch, Sept. 14, 1889; The Miss Myers story comes from Whittingham, Fern Fever, 66; CB to Catherine Winkworth, July 27, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 280; the “Phantom” tale comes from Eanne Oram, “Charlotte Brontë’s Honeymoon,” BST 25 (1975), 343–44, and LCB, vol. 3, 280–81.
21 CB’s fern album, BPM, bb238, has this inscription on the flyleaf: “F.E. Bell / Jan. 25th 1914 / From Mrs. Nicholls Hill House Banagher / Ferns collected and pressed by Charlotte Brontë at Killarney / On her honeymoon.” Since some of the pages of the album have a watermark of 1869, they were not all made by CB. It’s possible CB arranged the ferns on some of the pages, and members of the Bell family arranged others, and then the leaves were bound into
an album later, a common practice at the time. It’s also possible that CB only collected and pressed the ferns, and the Bell family later made them into an album. The album came from Frances Bell, whose aunt was Arthur Nicholls’s second wife, the Mrs. Nicholls referred to here. She gave it to Frances, who then handed it down to her niece, Mrs. Marjorie Gallop. It was donated to the BPM by her descendants, Christopher and Nigel Gallop. See BST 21 (1994), 4; lithographs of fern fronds, sometimes called “mixed fern” sheets, were cut up and pasted into albums, often alongside real pressed ferns. See Whittingham, Fern Fever, 184; Allen, Victorian Fern Craze, 52–53. These “albums” are reminiscent of the purpose-built photo albums that were soon to be made, with slots for plants rather than photographs. The same sorts of printed books containing dried specimens of seaweed or moss, with decorative frames and information, could also be bought. One was Mary Wyatt’s Algae Damnonienses, or Dried Specimens of Marine Plants, which came out in several volumes from 1834 to 1840. Another was Mary Howard’s Ocean Flowers and Their Teachings (Bath, UK: Binns and Goodwin, 1847). See Carol Armstrong, ed., Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), for reproductions of some of the pages of these gorgeous books.
22 Nicholls’s commonplace book, BPM, BS 244; the Victoria and Albert Museum has a marvelous pattern book, by a Sarah Bland, made c. 1836–1854, E.372:343-1967. Also, the Fales Collection, at New York University’s Bobst Library, has numerous British and American albums with handwritten recipes, some from the 1800s and others that are older. Felicia Hemans’s son gave the commonplace book to Browning; the term “commonplace book” is flexible and is often used for many sorts of albums, including what I call friendship or souvenir albums. David Allen, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29–34; even though it is about America, Ellen Gruber Garvey’s wonderful Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) has much to say about album culture in nineteenth-century Europe. She posits that scrapbooks didn’t become common in America until around the 1850s.