Brontës (166 page)

The matter might and should have ended there had not yet another officious ‘friend' intervened. Under the pretext of defending Mrs Gaskell from Patrick's supposed accusation that she was an enemy, Harriet Martineau declared that she had seen two of his letters praising the memoir in terms which made it impossible for him to have so completely changed his mind in the interval. The real reason for writing her letter, however, was to vent her spleen about Charlotte's remarks on herself and Mrs Gaskell's portrayal of their quarrel. ‘When I find that, in my own case, scarcely one of Miss Brontës statements about me is altogether true, I cannot be surprised at her biographer having been misled in other cases of more importance.'
¹⁰³

Two days after Harriet Martineau's statement in the
Daily News
was copied in the
Bradford Observer
, William Dearden returned to the parsonage in high dudgeon, anxious to take up the cudgels once more on Patrick's behalf. Patrick tried to dissuade him, but there was little he could do to restrain his self-appointed champion. A couple of days later he wrote an eloquent plea for peace which came little short of an express prohibition on further comment.

I trouble you with a few lines merely to state, that I wish nothing more should be written against Mrs Gaskell, in regard to the ‘Memoir.' She has already encountered very severe trials, which generally falls to the lot of celebrated authors. She has promised to omit, in the third Edition, the erroneous statements respecting me; which is all, I can now, reasonably expect or desire, as no more, I think can be safely, or prudently done. As for myself, I wish to live in unnoticed and quiet retirement; setting my mind on things above in heaven, and not on things on the earth beneath, and performing my duty to the utmost of my power; esteeming myself after all, but an unprofitable servant, and resting my hopes for salvation, on the all-prevailing merits of the Saviour of a lost world, and considering, that the passing affairs of this life – which too much occupy the attention of passing mortal man, are but dust and ashes, when compar'd with the concerns of Eternity.

Lest Dearden should be in any doubt, he added a postscript. ‘I never thought otherwise of Mrs Gaskell, than that she was a friend of my Daughter, and no enemy to me. In alluding to enemies, I meant false informants, and hostile Critics.'
¹⁰⁴
Aware that his pleas were likely to fall on deaf ears, Patrick wrote again to Mrs Gaskell to put the record straight. ‘My real, or pretended friends,' he wrote with unaccustomed bitterness, ‘seem in their gossiping skill, to have combined, to paint me not as a single but a double Janus, looking, and smiling or frowning, with my four faces, in opposite directions, as may best suit my own selfish convenience. They would please me better, by minding their own affairs, and letting mine alone.'
¹⁰⁵

Dearden, of course, could not let Harriet Martineau's statement pass without comment, and ill-advisedly rushed off a reply to the
Bradford Observer
which wrongly accused Harriet Martineau of not having seen the whole of Patrick's letters.
¹⁰⁶
The whole terrible cycle of ill-informed accusation and counter-accusation was about to begin again. Matters were made
worse by an article in the
Spectator
which the
Bradford Observer
obligingly reprinted for the edification of the Brontës' home circles. Pointing out how Mrs Gaskell's accounts of the Clergy Daughters' School, Branwell's affair and now Charlotte's father had all been denounced as untrue, it picked up Harriet Martineau's unpleasantly suggestive comment that ‘It is a perilous task to write the history of a singularly imaginative person, during the lifetime of contemporaries.' ‘Interpreting this passage in the ordinary way,' declared the
Bradford Observer
, ‘we might understand that Charlotte Brontë dealt less in fiction when she was writing “Jane Eyre” and other romances than when she professed to be stating plain facts.'
¹⁰⁷

It says much for Patrick's patience and restraint that he was able to resist the temptation to reply. What seems to have tipped the scale, however, was the continuing circulation of Harriet Martineau's charges against Charlotte combined with the publication in September of the long-awaited third edition of the
Life of Charlotte Brontë
. Mrs Gaskell had done her best to please everyone, despite feeling aggrieved that her version of events had been disputed. ‘I
did so try to tell the truth,'
she wrote miserably to Ellen Nussey, ‘& I believe
now
I hit as near the truth as any one
could do.'
To George Smith, she complained more robustly: ‘I hate the whole affair, & every thing connected with it.'
¹⁰⁸
Nevertheless, she had removed the offending passages about Patrick, Lady Scott and the ‘plenty and even waste' in the Brontë household under the Garrs sisters and had toned down references to an easily identifiable Haworth girl who had been seduced. She had even placed a denial from Harriet Martineau alongside Charlotte's statement that she had lost friends by writing the Atkinson letters and allowed her to give her own version of the quarrel between them. It was this that particularly irked Patrick and Arthur, though Patrick had been generous in his praise of the new edition. ‘With the work as it now stands, all reasonable persons must be satisfied; since in it, there is much to praise, and little or nothing to blame. It has, I think, arrived at a degree of perfection, which was scarcely attainable, in a first, and second Edition.' He expressed the somewhat forlorn hope that there would now be a period of calm and that there would be no faultfinders, adding, with unfortunately prophetic words:

unless some one like Miss Martineau should arise, determine! to be hostile, and to put the worst construction, on the best intentions, both in words and actions. Notwithstanding Miss Martineau's strange and unhappy illusions, which mystify, and bewilder, her Atheistical Brain, I had thought she was a Woman,
naturally kind, and just and generous, who would not knowingly, or willingly injure the memory of any one, especially that of the dead, who were
unable to defend themselves.
¹⁰⁹

He was soon to find out just how wrong he had been. As Harriet Martineau continued to complain loud and long in print that Charlotte's statements about her were not true, Patrick wrote to her privately to remonstrate, pointing out that ‘I have ever heard her speak of you, in terms of kindness, and veneration, and when any one spoke of you otherwise, she took your part.' Miss Martineau dashed off a dismissive reply, repeating her accusation with the added sting that Charlotte's remarks about her were ‘more like hallucinations than sober statement'. She referred Patrick to the third edition where, she claimed, Mrs Gaskell had ‘corrected' his daughter's mis-statements.
¹¹⁰

The letter was gratuitously offensive, prompting Arthur to look through the new edition to see exactly what concessions Mrs Gaskell had made to Charlotte's erstwhile friend. Amongst the new material she had supplied, he found the passage she quoted from Harriet Martineau's letter to Charlotte about the love in
Villette
. ‘Your letter is now in my possession', he told her, ‘this passage does not occur in it – I shall adopt the same means, that you have, to inform the public that the individual, who accuses my wife of
inaccuracies
, has herself been guilty of a much graver offence.'
¹¹¹

Clearly alarmed, Harriet Martineau wrote a self-justificatory letter, claiming to have supplied the quote from memory and that ‘in a spirit of kindness' she had leapt to the defence of Patrick against the unjust imputations of William Dearden; in a desperate bid for sympathy she also told him that she was herself ‘deep in my last illness' – as she had been for over two years and was to be until her death in 1876, nineteen years later. Nevertheless, she demanded to see the original of her letter or a certified copy. ‘This is the first step', she ominously declared. ‘We shall then see what next.'
¹¹²

Arthur sent off a copy of the letter with an understandable but provocative retort.

Your intention in writing to ‘the Daily News' may have been very kind: but will you pardon me for saying that your interference was wholly gratuitous? Mr Brontë being quite competent to take care of himself: he would moreover have willingly dispensed with a vindication which was made the occasion of bringing a charge of general untruthfulness against his daughter.
¹¹³

Unable to deny that her supposed quotation was substantially different from her original letter, Harriet Martineau changed tack, accusing him of deliberately deceiving Mrs Gaskell by telling her that he had destroyed all Charlotte's papers when he clearly had not. Aware now that he was dealing with a hysterical woman who might be on her deathbed, Arthur replied more patiently than he might otherwise have done, pointing out that he had claimed only to have destroyed Charlotte's letters to himself. Patrick, too, wrote again, confessing how sorely he still felt his bereavement. ‘This it is that makes, both Mr Nicholls and me, feel sensitive, in regard to any prejudices, or misrepresentations, bearing upon the character of my Dear Daughter Charlotte.' Reiterating the advice he had given Mrs Gaskell, he added, ‘Beware of the designs, of prejudiced, or reckless Informants.'
¹¹⁴
This was clearly a reference to John Greenwood, who had told Miss Martineau that Arthur had burnt all Charlotte's papers. She had wrongly believed that the statement had come directly from Arthur himself and had used it as further evidence of his duplicity in dealing with Mrs Gaskell. Forwarding a letter from Greenwood himself, in which he abjectly confessed that he only
‘believed
Mrs Nicholls made it a rule not to keep letters, except those of importance', Arthur could not restrain his anger at uncovering yet another example of unwarranted interference in his affairs. Greenwood's letter showed that he acted ‘solely on supposition' and ‘His position is not such as would have enabled him to know any thing of Miss Brontës private affairs further than what he [might] have learnt by gossiping with servants. His relation to Miss Brontë consisted in being the recipient of her bounty and advice, when in distress from the claims of a large family.'
¹¹⁵

Responding by return of post to Miss Martineau's demand for all her letters to Charlotte to be sent back to her, Arthur informed her that he had not read any of them, except the ones relevant to the quarrel, and requested her to send Smith, Elder & Co. a revised transcript of her letter on
Villette
for inclusion in a future edition. This she agreed to do.
¹¹⁶
The ‘warlike correspondence' which had been carried on at a fast and furious pace – there are twelve extant letters written in only ten days – now came to an end. Arthur evidently sought to extend a hand of friendship at the close but Miss Martineau, taking the somewhat warped view that she had been vindicated by the correspondence, crowed to her friends about her ‘victory': ‘I fancy these gentlemen (who are not gentlemen, however) have never before been opposed or called to account. In their own parish they reign by fears: and I hope it may be good for them to find they can get wrong.'
¹¹⁷

Whether it was good for them or not, this was the last occasion on which either Patrick or Arthur ventured personally into Brontë controversy. Clearly there was little to be gained and much to lose by sinking to the level of Charlotte's critics: a dignified silence was the most appropriate response. From now on they would put their faith in the third edition of the
Life of Charlotte Brontë
to defend Charlotte's reputation. As Patrick himself had declared:

my opinion, and the reading world's opinion of the ‘Memoir,' is, that it is every \way/ worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another, and that it ought to stand, and will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time.
¹¹⁸

Chapter Twenty-Eight

THE END OF ALL

In the general furore which greeted Mrs Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë
, the publication of Charlotte's first novel,
The Professor
, slipped by almost unnoticed. Printing began shortly after the biography had appeared but was so slow that Arthur, who meticulously proof-read every page, began to fear that he might lose the brief holiday he had planned to take in June. A plea to George Smith produced the desired effect and the book was ready for publication by the third week in May: it appeared as a two-volume set at the beginning of June. Characteristically self-effacing, Arthur only allowed his name to be appended to a brief foreword claiming that he had consented to the publication because ‘it has been represented to me that I ought not to withhold “The Professor” from the public'; he made no mention of his own conscientious work as editor and left his wife to speak for herself in the foreword she had written when proposing to revise it as her second publication.
¹