Charlotte Bronte Page 3
Charlotte’s grief at the deaths of her two sisters provided the source material for the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, who is based specifically on Charlotte’s eldest sister, Maria Brontë. For Charlotte, Maria represented something of a maternal influence, as Helen does for Jane, the loss being all the more painful for Charlotte in light of the death of her mother. Charlotte’s letters contain few references to her two elder sisters, but it is clear from Gaskell’s recollections of conversations with Charlotte, as well as from Charlotte’s own letters to her publishers, that she drew on the experience of her sister’s death in portraying the death of Helen Burns. The scene is full of pathos not only because of the glimpse it affords of the grief Charlotte experienced as a child on the death of her sisters, but also because it unwittingly seems to anticipate Anne Brontë’s death just a short time later:
I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual: my mind is at rest […] by dying young, I shall escape great sufferings […] I am going to God […] I can resign my immortal part to him without any misgiving[.]
Anne, like Helen Burns, was to die resigned to her fate and with complete faith in God. Writing of her youngest sister’s death to her publisher, William Smith Williams, Charlotte revealed how Anne ‘died without struggle – resigned – trusting in God -thankful for release from a suffering life – deeply assured that a better existence lay before her’.
Early Writing
Following the deaths of their two elder sisters, Charlotte and Emily were, unsurprisingly, permanently removed from the school at Cowan Bridge and, for the next few years, educated at home, with Patrick Brontë taking on much of the burden of educating his children himself, despite the demands on his time. The books belonging to the Brontë household during Charlotte’s childhood suggest her education at the parsonage included history, grammar, geography and literature, as well as an emphasis on religious and moral education. In addition to this, despite his limited income (barely sufficient to support his large family), Patrick also hired an art tutor and a music tutor for his children, in an attempt to ensure that Charlotte and her siblings were provided with every opportunity for their creative and intellectual development.
The formative education of the Brontë children was clearly crucial to their later development as writers. However, the structured education Charlotte received during her short time at Cowan Bridge and the formal lessons with her tutors were undoubtedly less important in terms of this development than the informal, liberal education she received at the parsonage. All of the Brontë children were avid readers, and their father refused to censor their reading; hence from a young age they were allowed access to works that might generally be perceived as unsuitable for young minds – particularly for the daughters of the family, at a time when women’s reading material was frequently heavily censored. The Brontë children eagerly consumed newspapers, magazines, and whatever books they could lay their hands on, and these exerted a powerful influence on their creative development. When Elizabeth Gaskell came to write her biography of Charlotte, Patrick provided some information relating to his children’s early development as writers:
When mere children, as soon as they could read and write, Charlotte and her brother and sisters, used to invent and act little plays of their own […] I discovered signs of rising talent, which I had seldom or never before seen, in any of their age.
In 1826, Patrick Brontë made a gift to his only son of a box of toy soldiers – a seemingly trivial event that was, in fact, to prove central to the artistic development of the Brontë children. The twelve-year-old Charlotte provides an account of the gift and its consequences in a diary paper entitled ‘The History of the Year’, dated 12th March 1829. It details the crucial development in the imaginative worlds of the four remaining Brontë children:
Papa bought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds. When Papa came home it was night we were in bed so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed and I snatched up one and exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! When I said this Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers. When Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole and perfect in every part. Emily’s was a grave looking fellow [and] we called him Gravey. Anne’s was a queer little thing very much like herself. He was called Waiting Boy. Branwell chose Bonaparte[.]
The gift of the soldiers led to some of the children’s earliest writings, for example the stories of the Young Men, recorded in minute, barely legible writing in tiny books, a number of which survive today. Charlotte’s childish description of this event provides some interesting insights into the relationship between the siblings, as well as into her development as a writer. The soldiers are presented to Branwell, the only boy, and of the three remaining sisters, it is Charlotte, now the eldest, who makes her selection first, followed by Emily, and lastly Anne -suggesting a distinct ‘pecking order’ in the family based on sex and age. Though this is merely a child’s account of a father’s gift, it does seem telling in terms of the future relationship between the siblings: Charlotte was shortly to form a creative alliance with Branwell, Emily with Anne. Though the sisters would later collaborate on their volume of poetry, and frequently discuss their work with one another, offering each other advice and support, it would seem naive to suppose that there existed no sibling rivalry between them – a rivalry that almost certainly came into play later in their lives as they attempted to publish their first novels, and which arguably continued to affect Charlotte even after her sisters’ deaths.
Charlotte’s alliance with her brother was perhaps, even at this young age, in part a strategic move: the eldest surviving child, Charlotte, allied with the only son, Branwell, for whom the family had high hopes of success. In a letter written many years later, shortly after her brother’s death, she revealed that her father ‘naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters’. Implicit in this is an awareness that her gender would not only affect her potential reception as a writer, but that it also had a profound effect on her personal life: as a daughter, even in her new position as the eldest child of the family, she could not expect to obtain the same high opinion from her father that he bestowed on his son. Evidence suggests that during her childhood Charlotte felt closer to her brother than to either of her surviving sisters, perhaps because they were closer in age, or perhaps because she recognised in her brother a similar sense of ambition to her own. In a letter to him written in 1832, she writes, As usual I address my weekly letter to you – because to you I find the most to say.’ Though various circumstances may have contributed to Charlotte’s early partnership with her brother, it would seem to anticipate her later desire to be considered alongside the male writers of the day: perhaps even at this young age, she recognised that the male sex was granted far more privileges and opportunities than women.
The literary alliance between Charlotte and Branwell was to continue for several years. Together they created the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’ and ‘Branwell’s Blackwoods Magazine’ (the title of the latter taken from their favourite publication of the day), in which they recorded the stories of the Young Men. Over the years that followed, Charlotte wrote almost incessantly: Margaret Smith, editor of Brontë’s letters, estimates that she wrote around 180 poems and 120 stories between 1829 and 1841, though, as an unknown number of her early literary productions have not survived, this may well be a conservative estimate. Many of these works were based around an imaginary colony in Africa, which the Brontë children named Glass Town. The Glass Town stories eventually led to the creation of two new imaginary worlds: Angria, created by Charlotte and Branwell, and Gondal, the creation of Emily and Anne. Again, Charlotte’s alliance with Branwell, rather than her two sisters, can be perceived as significant, and the creation of Angria and Gondal s
eems to indicate a distinct divide between the two sets of siblings. Emily and Anne’s Gondal saga has not survived, other than in passing references in diary papers and in some of Emily’s poetry, which has its roots in her Gondal writings, but from which she later removed references to this imaginary world. However, much of the Angrian writing of Charlotte and Branwell has survived.
Though Charlotte’s early fictional writings inevitably suggest the immaturity of the author, they are nevertheless significant in terms of their relationship to and anticipation of her later literary productions, as well as a useful indication of her key literary influences at this age. If the Angrian writings lack the maturity of Charlotte’s later novels, they are notable for their reflection of a youthful literary mind unrestrained by the conditions of the Victorian literary marketplace. Charlotte Brontë’s early literary productions have more in common with Romantic writing than Victorian realism. There is an emphasis on the gothic and the sensational, which she would later attempt to eschew, not entirely successfully, in favour of literary realism. The exotic locations, Byronic heroes and high passions of the juvenilia anticipate Jane Eyre to some extent, but these features are far more pronounced here. Adultery, illegitimacy and sexual desire are all unflinchingly portrayed: the young Charlotte, writing for pleasure rather than publication, had no need to concern herself with notions of public propriety. Such themes found their way into her novels later in life, but in diluted form – rendered more palatable for public taste, though even then she would be accused of ‘coarseness’. She would later criticise her sister Anne for writing a novel in which the heroine suffers various indignities through her marriage to her dissolute husband, but in her juvenilia she has no such qualms. In this respect, her early writing is suggestive of the mask she would later adopt as ‘Currer Bell’: not only concealing her true identity but arguably repressing certain tendencies in her writing as well – whether this was the result of a desire for literary success and public acknowledgment, or whether it marks a genuine shift in her writing style is debatable (though the first novel she wrote, The Professor, perhaps suggests the latter).
If the juvenilia are important for their thematic anticipation of the later novels, and in their reflection of a writer free from constraints, they are also significant in terms of gender – as we have seen, a key issue in Brontë’s novels, as well as in her choice of pseudonym. While Anne and Emily place a female character – Augusta Geraldine Almeda – at centre stage, it is the figure of the Byronic (anti)hero that dominates Charlotte’s Angrian world. This figure begins life as the Duke of Wellington – the identity selected for Charlotte’s toy soldier – and subsequently takes on the identity of the Duke of Wellington’s son, Arthur Wellesley, who goes on to become Marquis of Douro, the Duke of Zamorna, and finally King of Angria. Elsewhere in the juvenilia, it is Charles Wellesley, brother of Arthur, who narrates the story. The emphasis on the figure of the hero, rather than the heroine, anticipates Charlotte Brontë’s first novel, The Professor, with its first-person male narrator, William Crimsworth, and of course Charlotte’s later adoption of a gender-ambiguous pseudonym, although she would later deviate from the pattern apparent in her early writing through her emphasis on specifically female experience in her portrayals of her heroines – Jane Eyre, Shirley Keeldar, Caroline Helstone and Lucy Snowe. Her early interest in the figure of the hero can perhaps be attributed in part to the influence of Branwell.
The imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria were to dominate Charlotte’s formative years as a writer, and, along with her siblings, she became entirely absorbed in the fictional world she had created, to the extent that the boundaries between reality and imagination appear blurred at times. The diary papers that survive detail everyday life at the parsonage alongside events occurring in the imaginary worlds of their creation, and, particularly during the times she spent away from Haworth, the world of Angria provided a key source of comfort and consolation for Charlotte, enabling her to escape the harsh realities of her everyday life, and return to the world of her imagination in which she found so much solace and comfort. This blurring of the boundaries is further apparent in the fiction itself, in which the children flit in and out as narrators and sometimes participants in the stories. From a young age, then, though external circumstances may have forced her to take a different path, Charlotte was immersed in the world of her imagination.
In January 1831, at the age of fourteen, Charlotte again left the parsonage to continue her formal education – this time at Roe Head school in Mirfield (twenty miles from Haworth). The school was run by Margaret Wooler (the original for Miss Temple in Jane Eyre) and her four sisters, and Charlotte’s time here was in stark contrast to the miserable few months she had spent at Cowan Gate. Amongst those people she met at Roe Head were fellow pupils Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, both of whom would become lifelong friends (of whom Charlotte had relatively few outside of her immediate family) and regular correspondents (indeed, Charlotte’s letters to Ellen and Mary form the basis of much of what we know about her life and views). Assisting Elizabeth Gaskell with her research for her biography years later, Mary Taylor recalled the first impression Charlotte made on her upon her arrival at Roe Head: ‘I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes […] She looked a little old woman, so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something […] She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent.’ Despite having spent her entire life in Yorkshire, it seems Charlotte’s accent betrayed her father’s Irish roots.
Though her experiences at Roe Head were largely positive, Charlotte was afflicted by the homesickness that was subsequently to affect her whenever she left her family and home in Haworth. She no doubt lacked a sense of belonging upon her arrival at the school, and her sense of dislocation at being removed from her family rendered her experience at Roe Head somewhat painful at first. She delighted, however, in the formation of her friendships with Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey; indeed, her letters from this period suggest an element of surprise that they should take a continuing interest in her – indicative, perhaps, of her own impression of herself as something of an outsider. Though she was widely read, her education had been somewhat sporadic, and this gave her fellow pupils the impression of ignorance. Despite Patrick’s efforts to educate his children, upon Charlotte’s arrival at Roe Head, her limited knowledge in matters such as geography and grammar was noted by her fellow pupils. Nevertheless, she went on to excel as a pupil there, and was awarded the school prize for achievement three times during the short period she spent at the school.
In June 1832, Charlotte left Roe Head and returned to Haworth, where she made use of the formal education she had received over the last eighteen months by assisting in her sisters’ learning. She remained in touch with both Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, and a few months after her departure from Roe Head, visited Ellen at her family home in Birstall, West Yorkshire, for the first time. This was followed by a visit from Ellen to Haworth the following year, and Charlotte’s letters from this period attest to a deepening friendship between the two. Though Charlotte had extended her field of friends and acquaintances, her intense attachment to her siblings, and to Branwell in particular, continued. Following her return to Haworth, she once again turned to the imaginary worlds she had inhabited since childhood.
In July 1835, Charlotte returned to Roe Head school – this time as a teacher (anticipating Jane’s progression from pupil to teacher at Lowood in Jane Eyre and further highlighting the autobiographical links between heroine and author). Charlotte was nineteen when she took up her post as teacher, and found her first position difficult at times. Once again, she was severely affected by the removal from home and family: shortly before she left to take up her post, she wrote to Ellen, informing her that, ‘We are all about to divide, break up, separate.’ She was somewhat comforted, however, by the presence of Emily, who accompanied her sister to Roe Head as a pupil, though the younger sister was to
suffer even more acutely from a sense of overwhelming homesickness. Indeed, such was Emily’s anguish at her removal from Haworth and her beloved moors that she only remained at Roe Head a few months, and was replaced by Anne in October of that year. Charlotte was to remain as a teacher at Miss Wooler’s school until December 1838. During this time, she continued to nurse literary ambitions, and felt acutely the contrast between these hopes and dreams and her life as a teacher. This conflict is revealed in a number of personal papers from this period. The papers stand in stark contrast to Charlotte’s letters, and are indicative of the fact that, even with those she felt closest to, she tended to conceal her true feelings in her correspondence. Few such papers survive (indeed, it is unclear whether or not Charlotte regularly recorded her feelings in this way): those that do are crucial in providing further evidence of the various masks that Charlotte Brontë adopted, and allow us a brief and tantalising glimpse of the woman behind the masks.
Though separated from her brother, in her free moments Charlotte continued to focus on their imaginary world of Angria, and it was a subject of discussion between the two in their correspondence. Writing one of the diary papers shortly after receiving a letter from Branwell, in which he included an imagined letter from Northangerland to his daughter, she states, ‘I lived on its contents for days’ – again indicating the significance of their early creative projects to her later development as a writer, but also suggesting the extent to which she obsessed over her imaginary world, which provided a crucial source of escapism during her time at Roe Head. These fragmentary diary papers drift between the world of Roe Head and that of Angria, as Charlotte’s musings on her imaginary world are frequently interrupted by the realities of life as a teacher. She had little time to focus on the Angrian world of her imagination, and felt her teaching duties to be a frustrating burden at times, giving vent to her feelings in another of the diary papers from this period: