by Deborah Lutz
23 The autograph album had a long history before the Victorian period, however, and dates back at least to the seventeenth century. See Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), 23; the snippet of Docwra’s, BPM, E.2006.2. At least seven letters from PB still exist that say something very similar to this one: “Dear Madam, The annexed scrap, is all I can spare, of the autograph, of my dear daughter Charlotte Brontë, I have had so many applications, that my store is nearly exhausted. Yours very respectfully, P. Brontë.” PB to Miss Jenkins, July 9, 1857, in Dudley Green, ed., Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë (Stroud, UK: Nonsuch, 2005), 256. A page removed from an anonymous, nineteenth-century album, to give another example, has a letter from PB pledging support for a parliamentary candidate mounted on it, and pasted above it is a piece cut from a letter that says, “Believe me / Yours sincerely / C Brontë,” MSS 001, box 21, folder 16b, Fales Collection, New York University Bobst Library; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, ed. Linda Peterson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007), 219; The Enoch signatures are reproduced in Thomas Wise and John Alexander Symington, The Shakespeare Head Brontë (Oxford, UK: Shakespeare Head, 1938), vol. 2, 104.
24 See CB to EN, July 31, 1845, in LCB, vol. 1, 413 and n. 14, 414. See also EN’s reminiscences, in LCB, vol. 1, 609; Mary Pearson’s commonplace book is at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. See Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 355, and Barker, Brontës, 512.
25 Roe Head Album, BPM, C109; Christine Alexander discusses this album and speculates that some or all of the pages may have been sold loose, then drawn or written on by the girls, and then finally bound together later. See “Charlotte Brontë, Her School Friends, and the Roe Head Album,” Brontë Studies 29 (2004), 1–16.
26 Wagner album, Pforz BND-MSS (Wagner, A.), Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library; for the Stovin albums for Walker, see S. P. Rowlands, “An Old Fern Collection,” British Fern Gazette 6, no. 10 (1934), 260–62; the Stovin album given to Nightingale, Florence Nightingale Museum, FNM: 1072.
27 The album with birds comes from Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts (London: Ward Lock, 1969), 58; for albums with cards and stamps, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 267, 350–52; the war album, Florence Nightingale Museum, FNM: 0600. There is another Crimean War album with pressed plants from battlefields, made by Arthur Walber, here: FM 0601.1-2; Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (New York: Penguin, 1999), 82.
28 For the queen’s seaweed album, see Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124; for more of her albums, see Jonathan Marsden, ed., Victoria and Albert: Art and Love (London: Royal Collection, 2010), 185, 355.
29 It is possible that CB didn’t bring this album back with her to Haworth. She may have left it with the Bells in Ireland, or left the pressed ferns there, and one of the Bells put them into the album; CB to EN, Aug. 9, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 283–84.
30 CB to EN, July 1850, and CB to Margaret Wooler, Nov. 15, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 282, 301; CB to EN, Dec. 26, 1854, in LCB, vol. 3, 312; CB to Amelia Taylor, Feb. 1855, in LCB, vol. 3, 327.
31 Souvenir album of Haworth, BPM, E 2013.2; collection of photographs titled “Views taken during 1903,” Berg, box PB7. This box contains an assortment of random Brontë-related items, like two locks of hair, loose photos of the Haworth environs, and disassembled album pages that contain other area pictures, some snipped from print sources.
32 Here are a few scrap albums, of many more, devoted strictly to the Brontës: BPM, TA.125, two albums, one brown, the other blue, of newspaper clippings, postcards, and a few letters, made by Mabel Edgerley. BPM, TA.138, newspaper cuttings in a brown album with blue spine, possibly compiled by Miles Hartley. BPM, SB:1258A, album with postcards, clippings, and photos, donated by Mrs. Chadwick. BPM, SB:764, scrap album with a blue spine, dated 1855; Brown album, BPM, SB:2352; Scruton album, BPM, TA.198. A red hardback edition of The Temple Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Rev. W. Ewing (London: Dent, 1909); Turner album, BPM, SB:2288.
CHAPTER NINE: MIGRANT RELICS
1 Charles Hale to Sarah Hale, Nov. 8, 1861, reprinted in Charles Lemon, ed., Early Visitors to Haworth: From Ellen Nussey to Virginia Woolf (Haworth, UK: Brontë Society, 1996), 73-85.
2 Martine Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson, eds., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 10–11. The British Museum has some of these Holy Land tokens made from earth from various sites. Stones, earth, and other materials from places like Cavalry and the Holy Sepulchre were set into reliquaries, such as one held at the Katholisches Münsterpfarramt, Zwiefalten, Germany, with stones from these sites behind gems, along with fragments of the True Cross.
3 For Hardy and Keats, see Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (New York: Penguin, 2006), 235. For more information about the taking of souvenirs from Keats’s burial place, see Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12 and chap. 4. For Shakespeare’s tree and Burns souvenirs, see Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 69; the writer didn’t even have to be dead to be transportable, in the minds of some fans, to be possessable through the matter she had touched. Harriet Martineau told of slight acquaintances visiting her, with strangers who would filch her pen “from the inkstand, still wet” in order to “be framed or laid up in lavender.” Martineau, Autobiography, ed. Linda Peterson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007), 309.
4 Mrs. M. H. Spilmann, of Kent, was sent heather from the moors near the parsonage in 1935, from Mrs. de l’Hopital, BPM, BSC 2.6.4. Sydney Biddell brought his copy of Gaskell’s biography (now at the BPM) when he traveled to Haworth in 1879 and made annotations about what he saw. He pressed between its pages a leaf from a black currant bush and a sprig of heather; burial in Burns land started in the 1840s. See Watson, Literary Tourist, 74.
5 Virginia Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” Guardian, Dec. 21, 1904; Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 589.
6 CB, “The Death of Napoleon,” in Sue Lonoff, ed. and trans., The Belgian Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 272; it appears that Napoleon’s coffin that was broken up had been buried for around twenty years, making it an even eerier relic. A contemporary described the original set of coffins thus: “composed first of tin, lined with white satin, which having been soldered down, was enclosed in another of mahogany, a third of lead, and the whole in a fourth of mahogany, secured with iron screws.” Quoted in Mark R. D. Seaward, “Charlotte Brontë’s Napoleonic Relic,” BST 17, no. 3 (1978), 186–87; fragment of coffin, BPM, BS20a. See also Juliet Barker, Sixty Treasures: The Brontë Parsonage Museum (Haworth, UK: Brontë Society, 1988), item 16.
7 The ball in a locket is discussed in the London Times, June 17, 1844, p. 6, col. G. It is now part of the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle; Nelson’s coat (UN 10024), the other items mentioned, and much more of the same are now at the National Maritime Museum, London. Much jewelry was made with Lord Nelson’s hair, such as a brooch belonging to a Lady Neville, inscribed with such details as “Lost to his country Oct. 21, 1805”; For example, the British Library holds a wooden box, add. MSS 56226, made from a fragment of the HMS Victory shot off during the Battle of Trafalgar. It contains a sample of Nelson’s hair, taken at the same battle. The box has a small brass plate on the lid, inscribed with “Victory Trafalgar. Octr 21 1805.” A snuffbox at the Victoria and Albert Museum, partly made of the oak from one of Nelson’s ships, the HMS Bellerophon, reproduces his death mask in miniature.
8 Even though the attending physician wrote, “Phthisis,” or general wasting
disease, on CB’s death certificate, Brontë biographers have made a solid argument for extreme morning sickness. See Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 772; H. W. Gallagher, “Charlotte Brontë: A Surgeon’s Assessment,” BST 18 (1995), 363–69; and LCB, vol. 3, 320–21, n. 3; CB to EN, Jan. 19, 1855, in LCB, vol. 3, 319.
9 Elizabeth Gaskell to John Greenwood, Apr. 12, 1855, in J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), 337; for more about Gaskell’s reference to abortion, see Barker, Brontës, 774–75; for references to abortions in medical journals, see J. A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1964), 86; Mayhew quoted in Patricia Knight, “Women and Abortion in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop 4 (1977), 57. The history of herbs, mixtures, and advertisements comes from ibid., 60–62, and John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 202–3. Knight explains that the men behind the “Madame Frain” mixture spent time in prison for “conspiring to incite women to abortion” (62). See also R. Sauer, “Infanticide and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Population Studies 32 (1978), 88.
10 James Whitehead, a physician at the Manchester Lying-in Hospital, wrote a report in 1847 about his clinical experience. Out of 2,000 women he questioned, 747 said they had aborted at least once. Whitehead performed a few abortions himself, he admitted, when the woman’s life was in danger, by administering ergot of rye. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs, 238.
11 PB to Mrs. Sarah Newsome (formerly Garrs), June 12, 1855, in Dudley Green, ed., The Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë (Stroud, UK: Nonsuch, 2005), 231; PB to Elizabeth Gaskell, June 20, 1855, in ibid., 235; the sexton William Brown told the story of the buried memorial tablet to Charles Hale. Charles Hale to Sarah Hale, Nov. 8, 1861, in Lemon, Early Visitors to Haworth, 79–80.
12 See Barker, Brontës, 822–25, who covers the different theories and possibilities as to why Nicholls wasn’t able to take PB’s place; PB’s notebook, BPM, BS 178. See Barker, Sixty Treasures, item 15; the detail about the destruction of the bed comes from Alan H. Adamson, Mr. Charlotte Brontë: The Life of Arthur Bell Nicholls (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 125.
13 The manuscript auction catalog for this sale, BPM, SB:349, is extremely vague as to what was sold. Most of the books, for instance, were just listed as “books,” without any other information, except for in rare cases such as listings for “Brontë poems,” “3 vols. Jane Eyre,” and “History of Rome”; the “Greenwood” listed as a buyer at the auction may have been a local landowner rather than the stationer, who was unrelated to these other Greenwoods. The “Smith” who walked away with a few artifacts may have been George Smith, Charlotte’s publisher. The Brontë piano was also sold at this auction, to John Booth of Oxenhope, now BPM, F13. Barker, Sixty Treasures, items 8 and 23.
14 The Berg has one of these postcards, part of box PB7; the information about the saltboxes and candleholders comes from the catalog of the 1916 Sotheby’s sale: “Catalogue of Valuable Illuminated and Other Manuscripts,” Dec. 13–15, 1916, 97.
15 The veil and dress are now at the BPM, D97 and D74. EB’s wooden stool and CB’s corset also passed from Martha to the sisters, then eventually to the BPM; Barker, Sixty Treasures, item 51, discusses the altering and reusing of CB’s dresses; the apron was eventually donated to the BPM, by Miss Omerod, Beach House, Hawarden Road, Colwyn Bay. See BST 11, no. 2 (1947), 115; a “pot” doll, BPM, H153, wears bits of what CB wore, once owned by Mrs. Grayson, Keighley. See also BST 11, no. 1 (1946), 49.
16 Ann Dinsdale, Sarah Laycock, and Julie Akhurst, Brontë Relics: A Collection History (Yorkshire, UK: Brontë Society, 2012), 25; “Catalogue of Brown Collection of Brontë Relics,” Sotheby’s sale, July 1898, BPM, P.S. Cat. 1, and “Museum of Brontë Relics, a Descriptive Catalogue of Brontë Relics Now in the Possession of R. and F. Brown,” BPM, P. Bib. 1.
17 Adamson, Mr. Charlotte Brontë, 136.
18 Ibid., 147–155; quoted in ibid., 156.
19 See John Collins, The Two Forgers: A Biography of Harry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise (Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1992), and Wilfred Partington, Forging Ahead: The True Story of the Upward Progress of Thomas James Wise (New York: Putnam, 1939).
20 For Wise, the Brontë manuscripts, and his bibliography, see Dinsdale et al., Brontë Relics, 41; “Forgeries and Uncertain Attribution,” in LCB, vol. 3, 375–78; there are also a couple of letters to Thackeray to whom CB did write, but her letters to him didn’t survive.
21 Donald Hopewell, “The President on ‘Follies of Brontë Obsession,’ ” BST 12, no. 4 (1954), 308, and “New Treasures at Haworth,” BST 12, no. 1 (1951), 21.
22 The Brontë Parsonage Museum bought the ovals, BPM, J82, at a Sotheby’s auction held on February 24, 2000. They were listed in the sales catalog for £600 to £800 and probably had been inherited by a relative of Gérin, who died in 1989. See BST 26, no. 1 (2001), 106; fragments of jet bracelet: BPM J75.2; sewing box: BPM, H171.
23 Stella Gibbons to Winifred Gérin, Nov. 5, 1971, BPM, BS IX Gib.1971-11-05. In the letter, Gibbons mentions that she had offered the ovals to someone at the Brontë Society in the 1950s, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. She also writes, “The reason why I haven’t sent on the clasps before is Procrastination, the Thief of Time.”
24 Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (New York: Penguin, 1994), 36, 123, 126.
25 Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), 206–7, 216, tells the history of the theories of BB’s authorship of EB’s novel; Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 102; Miller, Brontë Myth, 339; Gibbons’s nephew, Reggie Oliver, went on to write a biography of Gibbons. See Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 238; Gibbons would have been close to seventy when she sent the ovals to Gérin, so she may have aged out of her satirical period, although maybe she became ever more witty as she grew older.
26 See Miller, Brontë Myth, 106–8, for more about what she calls the “Brontë brand.”
27 Virginia Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” Guardian, Dec. 21, 1904; the tall trees in the churchyard were not there during the Brontës’ time; they were planted in the 1860s in order to break up the overcrowded corpses in the graveyard. Barker, Brontës, 98.
Further Reading
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil: Essays. London: Boyars, 1997.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion, 1996.
Bradley, Ian. The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians. New York: Macmillan, 1976.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992.
Brown, Bill, ed. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Brown, Peter. The Cult of Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Cottom, Daniel. Unhuman Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Curl, James. The Victorian Celebration of Death. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2000.
Davey, Richard. A History of Mourning. London: Jay’s, 1889.
Dávidházi, Péter. The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare. New York: Pal
grave, 1998.
Davies, Stevie. Emily Brontë: The Artist as a Free Woman. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1983.
Di Bello, Patrizia. Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Du Maurier, Daphne. The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë. New York: Doubleday, 1961.
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1975.
Elfenbein, Andrew. Byron and the Victorians. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Fraser, Rebecca. Charlotte Brontë: A Writer’s Life. New York: Pegasus, 2008.
Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Gallagher, Catherine, The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Gere, Charlotte, and Judy Rudoe. Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World. London: British Museum Press, 2010.
Gérin, Winifred. Branwell Brontë. London: Hutchinson, 1972.
Glen, Heather. Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.