The Brontesaurus Read online

  The

  BRONTËSAURUS

  The

  BRONTËSAURUS

  An A-Z of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë

  (& Branwell)

  JOHN SUTHERLAND

  Published in the UK in 2016

  by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

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  by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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  ISBN 978-178578-143-8

  Text copyright © 2016 Icon Books Ltd

  Except ‘Jane Eyre abbreviated’: text copyright © 2016 John Crace

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro by Marie Doherty

  Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College London and an eminent scholar in the field of Victorian fiction. He is the author of several books, including The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longman, 2009) and the bestselling popular titles Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (OUP, 1995) and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? (OUP, 1996). His more recent works include Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (Profile, 2011) and A Little History of Literature (Yale, 2013).

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Anne’s last journey

  Attic matters

  Bigamy

  Bog people

  Branderham

  Branwell’s Robinsoniad

  Branwell’s Robinsoniad II

  Bumps on the head

  The confession box

  Creole

  Dates

  Elementary

  Extradiegesis

  Flossy

  Ghosts

  Grace

  Guadeloupe

  Hands

  The hound of Haworth

  Idiot child

  The idiot child and me

  Jane! Jane! Jane!

  Jane’s change of heart

  Letters

  Liverpool

  Masculinities

  Mononymity

  Mr Charlotte Brontë

  Mrs Arthur Bell Nicholls

  Murder?

  Myopia

  No Coward Soul

  Normality?

  Obstinate fasting

  Opium (1)

  Opium (2)

  Pillar

  Pistol-packing parson

  Plain Jane

  Privacy

  Publishers

  Rochester’s wealth

  Self-murder

  Spirit-written

  Steel

  Survivor’s privileges

  Tat

  Teething

  That name

  Three-decker

  Toothsome

  Transformation

  Vampirology (1)

  Vampirology (2)

  Vegetarianism

  Villainy

  Whither wuther?

  Windows

  Appendix: Jane Eyre abbreviated by John Crace

  PREFACE

  Like most, I suspect, who read Wuthering Heights early in life, the novel has smouldered in my mind ever since – rekindled by regular rereading. I remember taking the book out of the school library (an ‘Everyman’ edition) aged fifteen. I entered my name in the borrowing ledger.

  A day or two later, a senior boy came up to me. ‘How did you like it?’ he asked. It was conspiratorial. He, like me, was someone who had discovered the novel. It was something to keep private, lest the teachers, who claimed they knew everything, got their pedagogic paws on it. It was secret treasure. I went on to read, over the following years, the poignantly short Brontëan oeuvre.

  In my formative years, the reputation of the Brontës had to contend with the lofty anathema proclaimed by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition – a work of biblical authority in the postwar period. Leavis found no place for them in his selection of British novelists who really mattered. Charlotte’s three novels had only ‘interest of a minor kind’, he proclaimed. Wuthering Heights was granted to be ‘astonishing’, but a ‘sport’: a term used by geneticists to indicate life forms outside the main evolutionary line. A freak, or deviant phenomenon. It belonged not in the great tradition of English fiction but in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum of literature.

  The most perceptive critics of the Brontë oeuvre think differently, and more reverently, from Mrs Gaskell and Mrs Humphry Ward onward, to Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca Fraser, Sally Shuttleworth, Margaret Smith, Lucasta Miller, Juliet Barker, Claire Harmon, Winifred Gerin, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gerber, Gayatri Spivak, and (for me the most enlightening) Dorothy Van Ghent. Jean Rhys (with Wide Sargasso Sea) and Daphne Du Maurier (with Rebecca) went on to elaborate Brontëan designs into second-generation Brontëan fiction, as fine as Jane Eyre, the work they were paying homage to. This list could be enlarged.

  This fancifully entitled book is homage to the Brontës (and their most perceptive critics) in an anniversary year. It reflects, I hope, a pleasure I have had over many decades reading them, ever since that first, treasured, reading of Wuthering Heights.

  John Sutherland

  ANNE’S LAST JOURNEY

  The Haworth death toll – it came as regularly as Christmas – worked against the Brontës ever mustering as a complete family. They are, nonetheless, forever gathered in one place: under the pillar over their vault in the chapel of Haworth church.

  There is, however, an absentee. It’s surprising, given the fact that Anne was, ostensibly, the most obedient and homebound of the four children who made it into adulthood. Anne, the baby of the family, and asthmatic, was – on grounds of physical fragility – spared the ordeal of Cowan Bridge school, the institution where TB had claimed the lives of her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. ‘Gentle’ is one of the few defining epithets applied to Anne as a girl. In one of her brief spells of formal education, Anne won a ‘good conduct’ medal – an award which one strains to imagine decorating the juvenile breasts of Emily, Branwell or Charlotte.

  But there was, her biographers argue persuasively, steel in her mix. Anne’s first employment, aged eighteen, was with the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield. The Ingham children were spoilt and malicious and she was dismissed after a year for not indulging their nastiness. It’s nice to think that the Inghams lived to read themselves portrayed as the odious Bloomfields, in Agnes Grey.

  ‘Gentle’ and ‘dutiful’ as she may have been, Anne does not gild the governess’s life with Jane Eyreish romanticism. She is more of Jane Fairfax’s party (in Jane Austen’s Emma) that governe
ssing is the domestic English slave trade. Particularly stomach-turning is the depiction of young Tom Bloomfield torturing (‘fettling’) birds. When Agnes remonstrates, she is blandly informed that she is a servant and should mind her own business – ‘by gum!’ They are lesser creation: so is she. Governesses, despite the name, govern nothing.

  Anne went on to a more salubrious post with the Revd Edmund Robinson, and his wife Lydia (the destroyer of Branwell, see below, ‘Branwell’s Robinsoniad’, page 22) at Thorp Green Hall (immortalised as Horton Lodge in Agnes Grey), near York. Anne was with the Robinsons for five years. Her holidays at Haworth were short. The happy, late section of Agnes Grey draws on her time at Thorp Green, merging finally into the happy ever after of the heroine’s marriage to the ubiquitous curate in the Brontë world: something that would never, alas, happen to the author herself. (It was her sister, Charlotte, who married the ever-present curate – see below, ‘Mr Charlotte Brontë’, page 95.)

  Particularly wonderful for Anne were the Robinson family’s long summer holidays in Scarborough. The seaside resort figures in both her novels (it’s near Linden-Car in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). Her first publication, ‘Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day’, is about being at Thorp Green, and dreaming about Scarborough:

  I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing

  The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;

  I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,

  And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!

  What Scarborough meant to her is expressed, ecstatically, in the penultimate chapter of Agnes Grey, rhapsodising about ‘the sands’:

  And then, the unspeakable purity and freshness of the air! There was just enough heat to enhance the value of the breeze, and just enough wind to keep the whole sea in motion, to make the waves come bounding to the shore, foaming and sparkling, as if wild with glee. Nothing else was stirring – no living creature was visible besides myself. My footsteps were the first to press the firm, unbroken sands; – nothing before had trampled them since last night’s flowing tide had obliterated the deepest marks of yesterday, and left it fair and even, except where the subsiding water had left behind it the traces of dimpled pools and little running streams.

  Anne perhaps bathed from time to time using one of the ‘machines’ on the beach. But it was the air which most charmed her. Anne dreamed of setting up a school at Scarborough with her sisters, using the small inheritance their aunt Branwell left them. It happens, fictionally, in Agnes Grey.

  Disastrously, Anne got a position for Branwell with the Robinsons in 1843. The boy, Hugh, needed a male tutor, not a governess. Branwell had a messy affair with the mistress of the house, Lydia Robinson, ‘the vile seductress’, as Brontë patriarch Patrick called her. She too, apparently, needed a young male.

  In the last months of her life it was clear (not least to herself) that Anne was dying. The family was by now expert in the sad symptomatology of premature death. Extraordinarily, in what were her dying days – possibly hours – this most obedient of the sisters demanded, uncompromisingly, she be taken to Scarborough.

  She did not want her last breath to be the toxic air of Haworth. One can see her last journey as a kind of anabasis, a wilful break for freedom, into the light – away from the morbid lazaret on the moors with its killing miasmas. No doctor would have approved the trip. But, as Emily had shown, a dying woman could defy doctors.

  Anne, Charlotte and a servant left Haworth on 24 May 1849. They spent a night at York. Anne’s request was that she should visit, again, York Minster (one of a number of hints that her religious views had ascended higher than those of her father and Charlotte). She was by now immobile and required a wheelchair. It was clear she was knocking at death’s door. A doctor in York confirmed the sad fact. She died on 28 May, in rented lodgings, in a spot in Scarborough she particularly loved.

  It would have been quite feasible to bring Anne’s body back the 70 miles to Haworth (easier, in fact, to negotiate her frail body across railway changes in a coffin than it had been getting her to Scarborough in a wheelchair). But Charlotte religiously observed what were patently her sister’s dying wishes, and made arrangements for burial at St Mary’s Church, with a view of the bay and her beloved ‘sands’. Patrick did not attend the service. He may have been distressed by his daughter’s final act of separation from him.

  There was, other than Anne’s companions, just one (unnamed) mourner at the burial, in a temporary resting place (St Mary’s, undergoing restoration, was not yet ready for her – a poignant touch in an overwhelmingly poignant death).

  Charlotte returned to the grave only once, in flowering June, three years later, to visit the grave. Her reluctance is explained in the poem she wrote, bluntly entitled ‘On the Death of Anne Brontë’:

  There’s little joy in life for me,

  And little terror in the grave;

  I’ve lived the parting hour to see

  Of one I would have died to save.

  Mick Armitage, in the informative ‘Anne Brontë – The Scarborough Connection’ section of his website, records that there is no evidence that Patrick ever visited Anne’s grave, despite his name being inscribed with hers on the gravestone.

  One would like to think Anne’s spirit is freer, in clearer air, than those of her parents and five siblings, immured at mephitic Haworth.

  Postscript

  Charlotte arranged the installation of the headstone for her sister in St Mary’s graveyard, overlooking her beloved Scarborough Sands, with the inscription:

  Here

  lie the remains of

  Anne Brontë

  Daughter of the

  Revd P. Brontë

  Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire

  She died Aged 28

  May 28th 1849

  Charlotte’s eyes were not sharp enough, however, or were too bleared by tears, to pick up the fact that there were no less than five misprints inscribed on the stone (including Anne’s age, which was 29). When Charlotte revisited the grave, three years later, and could (unobserved) get close enough to the stone to read its errors she had it recarved and refaced (the age error she still missed, oddly). The Brontë Society laid a new stone on the grave in 2013.

  The original stone, now illegible, was left in place. Anne, its blunders reminds us, was always the neglected one – worth only a cursory glance by posterity.

  ATTIC MATTERS

  There are obvious objections to the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ reading of Jane Eyre and the critical theses which have given it currency. Very briefly, the ‘Madwoman’ theory implies that the ‘real’ heroine of the novel is the abused, irrepressibly feral woman, Bertha. Call her the ‘under-heroine’ or, more literally, ‘her upstairs’.

  The first objection is rather mundane – what one might call the Kirstie Allsopp objection. Bertha Mason is not locked up in an attic. There are indeed attics at Thornfield Hall under the ‘leads’ (i.e. lead-lined roof). But servants were accommodated in these wretched, cold and leaky dormers at the back of the main building. Bertha Mason is housed in a separate annex, with its own staircase, on the third floor, accessible only by master key, with a barred window.

  The second objection is accompanied by the background noise of Charlotte Brontë turning in her grave. The creator of the novel surely did not intend this, superficially perverse, reading – a reading which would take 150 years before anyone tumbled to the ‘correct’ interpretation of Jane Eyre.

  Brontë does not pull her punches in describing the first Mrs Rochester – a woman called ‘it’:

  What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

  It was atop the great feminist erklärung of the 1960s that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), ma
de the point that saw Bertha Mason (few honour her with her married name) become iconic, the quasi-heroine of the novel mis-named Jane Eyre.

  Using a Freudian ‘repression’ twist, Gilbert and Gubar argued that Bertha, symbolically, was, if not the ‘real’ Jane, then her ‘other half’. The feral Bertha incarnates the inner rebellion of Victorian womanhood confined within the age’s oppressive feminine ‘mystique’, and the ‘maiden’ and ‘angel in the house’ roles, a confinement closer than the corsets which split in half the liver of Charlotte Brontë’s disciple, Marie Corelli.

  The Madwoman in the Attic argues a powerfully ideological reading and one is grateful for it. But it manifestly violates what Charlotte Brontë, in her ignorance, believed she was doing. What was that? She believed she was writing a ‘moral’ tale for young women, not a manifesto. When asked what good his novels did, Trollope replied they instructed young women how to receive their suitors. Charlotte Brontë could have said the same. (Emily could not.)

  Everyone knows the opening line of Jane Eyre: ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’ and its most famous line: ‘Reader, I married him’. Do you, reader, know the last line? ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’

  The Madwoman in the Attic thesis is trotted out, nowadays, in thousands of school and university examination essays. I’ve read many, with increasing weariness, myself. It is revision critically exhausted by repetition, alongside the similarly worn-out readings of Caliban as the ‘real’ hero of The Tempest and Mr Hyde as the implicitly ‘real’ hero of Stevenson’s novel.

  But in a long career I can’t recall any essay arguing that Jane Eyre is a novel with an overt Christian motive written by a woman who attended church weekly (often daily) and subscribed faithfully to its doctrines; the daughter of a clergyman (whose parsonage she never left – even in death), eventually the wife of a clergyman, who superintended Dorcas meetings,1 undertook the routine task of ‘district [i.e. parish] visiting’ and awaited, with almost orgasmic excitement, the second coming.

  That, I venture, might be a truly revisionist reading.