Charlotte Bronte Read online

  From Dewsbury, Patrick moved a few miles away to the village of Hartshead in 1811. Like much of Yorkshire at this time, it was a manufacturing area, but when Patrick moved there, the industry was struggling because of the ongoing wars with France and the resulting economic climate. Tensions were high among workers and mill owners, and were exacerbated by the introduction of new machinery, which workers felt further threatened their livelihoods. Consequently, the years 1811 and 1812 saw a series of disturbances by disillusioned workers calling themselves ‘Luddites’, who carried out a number of attacks on manufacturers and their property. Patrick witnessed some of these disturbances first-hand during his curacy at Hartshead, and his memories – particularly of the attacks on Rawfolds Mill and its owner William Cartwright – were later fictionalised by his daughter Charlotte in her novel, Shirley.

  It was in 1812, while curate of Hartshead, that Patrick met Maria Branwell, the woman he was to marry. Maria Branwell, Charlotte’s mother, hailed from Penzance in Cornwall, where she was born in 1783. Like her husband, she came from a large family: she was the eighth of the eleven children of Thomas and Anne Branwell. Her father was a merchant, but died in 1808. Her mother died the following year, and when Patrick met Maria, she was staying with an aunt at Woodhouse Grove school near Bradford. Their marriage took place on 29th December 1812 at the church of St Oswald’s in Guiseley, near Leeds. Marrying at the relatively late age of thirty-five, Patrick can hardly have expected to outlive his wife and all their children, but such was to be the case. Their first child, Maria, was born during Patrick’s time as curate at Hartshead. Shortly after the birth of their second daughter, Elizabeth, the family moved to Thornton in Bradford. Following the birth of their youngest child, Anne, in 1820, Patrick removed his young family to the village of Haworth, where he took up the position of curate at St Michael and All Angels Parish Church. Charlotte Brontë was four years old when she moved to the parsonage in Haworth – the home where she was to spend the rest of her life.

  Shortly after the family’s removal to Haworth, Maria Brontë fell ill with what is now generally assumed to have been ovarian cancer. She died on 15th September 1821, at the age of thirty-eight (the same age as Charlotte at the time of her death thirty-four years later), leaving her husband a widower with six young children to support – the youngest of whom was just twenty months old. The impact of Maria Brontë’s death on her children is evident in their writing: though the motherless heroine is a standard literary trope in nineteenth-century fiction, the writing of the three Brontë sisters is replete with absent mothers. Charlotte Brontë’s most famous heroine, Jane Eyre, is an orphan; Jane’s charge at Thornfield, Adèle, has also lost her mother; in Shirley, Caroline Helstone is brought up by her uncle after she is abandoned by her mother, while the eponymous heroine’s mother is dead. William Crimsworth, the protagonist in The Professor, the first novel Charlotte wrote, is, like Jane Eyre, an orphan; while in her final novel, Villette, both Lucy Snowe and the young Polly are motherless. Mother figures are also notable for their absence in the work of Charlotte’s sisters: Catherine Earnshaw’s mother in Emily Brontë’s WutheringHeights dies when Catherine is seven, and Catherine herself dies shortly after the birth of her daughter. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the heroine is raised by her aunt and uncle. It is only Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, that stands apart from the rest of the Brontë novels in terms of the absent-mother theme. Most of the Brontë novels, with the notable exception of Charlotte Brontë’s final completed novel, Villette, end with the marriage of the hero/heroine and with the birth of a new generation, or at least with the promise of children. Again, this is typical of nineteenth-century fiction, but given the authors’ own maternal loss, such scenes take on a greater poignancy, seeming perhaps to further signify a yearning for the lost mother. Given Charlotte’s young age at the time her mother died, her memories of her were undoubtedly few. In a poignant letter to Ellen Nussey, written almost thirty years after her mother’s death, Charlotte, having been presented with a number of letters written by her mother to her father during their courtship, describes the experience of reading them:

  I […] read them in a frame of mind I cannot describe – the papers were yellow with time all having been written before I was born – it was strange to peruse now for the first time the records of a mind whence my own sprang – and most strange – and at once sad and sweet to find that mind of a truly fine, pure and elevated order. They were written to papa before they were married – there is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense – a gentleness about them indescribable. I wished She had lived and that I had known her.

  This desire to have known the lost mother infiltrates Charlotte’s novels (as well as those of her sisters) – evident in her portrayals of motherless heroines whose quest for selfhood and identity can be seen to be linked in part to their motherless state.

  Following the death of Maria Brontë, her sister, Elizabeth (after whom the second of the Brontë children was named), came to live at the parsonage in Haworth, initially on a temporary basis, but in fact remaining there until her own death in 1842. She was referred to by the children as Aunt Branwell, and her removal to Haworth was surely an attempt by Patrick Brontë to provide a maternal figure for his motherless children, something he was clearly concerned about. Following his wife’s death, Patrick seems to have been determined to remarry and made a proposal of marriage, only three months after Maria Brontë’s demise, to Elizabeth Firth, a friend of the family. He was refused, and subsequent attempts to find a wife also appear to have come to nought – no doubt at least partly because of the prospective wives’ unwillingness to take on the burden of six young children. The law prevented Patrick from marrying his dead wife’s sister, but her removal to Haworth meant she could at least offer some form of replacement for the lost mother. In a letter written shortly after his wife’s death, Patrick referred to his sister-in-law as ‘behaving as an affectionate mother to my children’. The arrangements at the parsonage after the death of Maria Brontë exerted a similar powerful influence on the later writings of the Brontë sisters. As with the lost mother, substitute maternal figures are a staple feature in the Brontës’ fiction: aunts play a key role in the lives of both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s Helen Graham, while in Villette we are introduced to Lucy Snowe at her godmother’s house.

  Certainly in many respects Elizabeth Branwell sought to fill the place left by her sister, ensuring that her nieces acquired what she perceived as the necessary domestic skills. As well as supplying in part the maternal influence that the Brontë children lacked following the death of their mother, Aunt Branwell provided financial support to her nieces. She had an independent income of fifty pounds a year and was supportive of her nieces’ endeavours to earn a living – offering one hundred pounds to help them set up a school in Haworth (a plan that never came to fruition). She was conservative in some respects, concerning herself with ensuring that the Brontë sisters were adept at those skills necessary for running a household. Although their own household employed various servants, including Tabitha Ackroyd, who worked for the family for thirty years, and to whom the Brontë children were devoted, the young Brontë sisters nevertheless assisted with domestic duties throughout their lives, often combining their avid interest in books with such work: in her biography of Brontë, Gaskell includes an anecdote describing Emily baking bread in the kitchen while learning German from a book opened in front of her. Indeed, Gaskell claims that the Brontë sisters were taught ‘by their aunt […] that to take an active part in all household work was, in their position, woman’s simple duty’. Hence, Charlotte, Emily and Anne were encouraged to fulfil the duties traditionally prescribed to women of their class. Nevertheless, Aunt Branwell was liberal enough to support her nieces’ ambitions to earn an independent living. Charlotte, Emily and Anne inherited several hundred pounds from their aunt after her death, which was used to help finance the publication of their po
ems, as well as Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.

  Aunt Branwell could be difficult at times – objecting to visitors, for example – and occasionally ill-tempered, but it is clear that she cared deeply for her sister’s children, and that they in turn loved and respected her. Certainly there is little evidence to support the image of Elizabeth Branwell as a tyrannical figure in the Brontë household, as some biographers and scholars have suggested.4 Branwell in particular was close to his aunt: writing to a friend during her final illness, he declared that she ‘has been for twenty years as my mother’. After her death he wrote, ‘I have now lost the [guide] and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood.’

  Despite the assistance of his sister-in-law, Patrick Brontë must have struggled to raise his six children. Elizabeth Gaskell paints Patrick as something of a tyrannical father to his young children (thus further contributing to the various myths surrounding the Brontë family). She suggests that ‘he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent appearance on the scene as a drag both on his wife’s strength and as an interruption to the comfort of the household.’ In the first edition of her biography she includes an account from a woman who had nursed Charlotte’s mother in her final illness, stating that Patrick Brontë ’thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily: so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner’, though, at Patrick Brontë’s request, she deleted this passage from subsequent editions, along with an account of Patrick Brontë’s destroying a pair of boots because he believed them to be too gay and luxurious for his children’. Anecdotes of Charlotte’s father eating alone in his study, firing his gun from the back door and apparently mindlessly destroying household property when angered reinforce the image of the neglectful, tyrannical father figure. However, there is much to suggest that this was far from being the case. Some of the earliest surviving letters from Charlotte to her father are affectionate and playful and she remained a devoted daughter for the rest of her life. In a letter to her brother, Branwell, she refers to ‘our dear papa’, and there is nothing to indicate that she wished to escape her father’s presence – indeed, to the contrary, she rejected several proposals of marriage that would have enabled her to leave the parsonage and her father had she chosen.

  Evidence from Patrick himself suggests he was keenly concerned with and involved in his children’s development and education. One particular recollection, detailed in Gaskell’s biography, provides a fascinating insight not only into Patrick’s relationship with his children, but into the minds of the young Brontë children as well. In an attempt to encourage his children to overcome their timidity and speak their minds, Patrick provided them with a mask. Instructing them to ‘speak boldly from under cover of the mask’, he asked them each questions in turn, and describes Charlotte’s responses. She was then around eight years old: ‘I […] asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, “The Bible”. And what was the next best; she answered, “The Book of Nature”.’ In response to the questions put to his other children, he learned that Anne desired Age and experience’; Emily advised her father to reason with her naughty brother, and failing that to whip him; Branwell felt that the difference in the intellects of men and women could be ascertained ‘by considering the difference between them as to their bodies’; Elizabeth believed the ‘best mode of education for a woman was “That which would make her rule her house well”‘; and Maria believed her time was best spent in preparing for ‘a happy eternity’. Taken together, the children’s answers suggest a religious devotion and an acceptance of conventional gender roles, yet the older Charlotte was, at various points in her life, to question both these assumptions. While the anecdote is indicative of the interest Patrick took in his children, the mask behind which the Brontë children hid themselves while answering their father’s questions anticipates the mask behind which Charlotte, Emily and Anne would later conceal their true identities and their gender – writing and publishing as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell respectively. Like her younger self, the older Charlotte Brontë was to ‘speak boldly from under cover of the mask’, concealing her true identity and her gender behind the name of Currer Bell.

  When Charlotte was eight years old, she left Haworth for the first time since her arrival four years previously. Anxious that his daughters should be able to make their own way in the world, in 1824, Patrick Brontë sent his four eldest daughters to the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters’ school – some forty miles from Haworth – to continue their education. Charlotte arrived in August, and, though she was only to remain there for a matter of a few months, the experience was to haunt her for the rest of her life, finding its way into her fiction in the form of the Lowood scenes in Jane Eyre. The school was founded by the Reverend William Carus Wilson, the original for Mr Brock-lehurst in Jane Eyre, and its stated aim was the pupils’ ‘intellectual and religious improvement’, which would enable them ‘to maintain themselves in the different stations of life to which Providence may call them’.5 As well as receiving instruction in various subjects, pupils were also expected to perform those duties associated with domestic servants, in preparation for future employment. A broader educational programme was available at an extra charge for those pupils likely to embark on careers as governesses or teachers, and Charlotte, along with Maria and Emily, was enrolled on this basis: a clear indication of the path Patrick foresaw his daughters following. The admissions register detailing Charlotte’s abilities on her arrival at the school informs us that she ‘reads tolerably – Writes indifferently – Ciphers a little and works neatly. Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments’6 – a rather critical assessment, and certainly not indicative of her later achievements.

  The regime at the school was strict, and conditions harsh. A few months after the arrival of Charlotte and her sisters, Maria Brontë fell ill. In spite of the fact that she was clearly suffering, she was nevertheless forced to attend her lessons, and her family at Haworth remained unaware of her declining health for some time. Eventually, in February 1825, Patrick Brontë was contacted by the school and informed of his eldest daughter’s illness. He travelled to Cowan Bridge and removed Maria from the school: it was the last time Charlotte would see her eldest sibling. Maria was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis (then commonly known as consumption). Following her departure from Cowan Bridge, she survived for several weeks, but eventually succumbed to the illness and died on 6th May 1825, at the age of just eleven. Just over three weeks later, Elizabeth Brontë was also returned home to the parsonage; like her elder sister, she was suffering from consumption. The return from the school of a second seriously ill daughter led Patrick to remove his remaining children from Cowan Bridge, and Charlotte and Emily arrived home on 1st June. Elizabeth died just two weeks after her removal from Cowan Bridge, on 15th June. Within the space of a little over a month, Patrick Brontë had buried his two eldest children, who were laid to rest next to their dead mother. The family of six children was now reduced to four, and Charlotte found herself suddenly in the position of the eldest child of the family, and, whether expected to or not, took on her shoulders some of the responsibility that she perceived this to entail – a role previously fulfilled by her eldest sister, Maria: giving an account of the children to Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the Brontës’ servants recalled that Maria ‘was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother’ Following the death of the two eldest Brontë children, this responsibility now fell to Charlotte

  As with the death of her mother, the profound impact of the deaths of her two elder sisters is reflected in Charlotte’s fiction. Jane’s experiences at Lowood school in Jane Eyre are clearly based on the short time Charlotte spent at Cowan Bridge, and early readers of the novel were able to identify the original of Lowood as Cowan Bridge from her descriptions. Charlotte, rightly or wrongly, blamed Carus Wilson and the conditions at the school for the deaths of her sisters and her bitterness is suggested by her portrayal of Lowood. Cert
ainly, conditions at Cowan Bridge were harsh and the school appears to have failed to recognise the severity of Maria and Elizabeth’s conditions. However, tuberculosis was common throughout the nineteenth century and would later claim the lives of Charlotte’s remaining siblings. Conditions at the school may have contributed in as far as the proximity of a large number of pupils meant that infectious diseases were likely to spread, while a poor diet and generally unsanitary conditions may have served to weaken immune systems, but the extent to which Carus Wilson can be held directly responsible is questionable. Gaskell seems to have sympathised with Charlotte’s understandable bitterness towards the school, and was extremely critical of the conditions at Cowan Bridge in her biography. The association of Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre and Carus Wilson has further increased the popular notion of the founder of the school as culpable in the deaths of the two eldest Brontë children, though Carus Wilson himself strongly refuted a number of the accusations levelled at him: Gaskell was threatened with legal action over her comments about Cowan Bridge and its founder, and consequently tempered at least some of her accusations in the third edition of her biography