Brontës (170 page)

Ultimately, however, the trustees' choice of John Wade in preference to Arthur Nicholls seems attributable chiefly to that bloody-mindedness which is characteristic of Yorkshiremen and more especially of the people of Haworth. They seem to have wished to assert their own authority in the face of a general expectation that they would prefer the curate. Even Arthur seems to have laboured under this same delusion: from the day he resumed his duties after Patrick's funeral he signed the parish registers as ‘Officiating Minister', rather than ‘Curate'. This may have been technically correct, but it implied a presumption guaranteed to infuriate the trustees, who were just as sensitive about their right to appoint the incumbent as their forebears. Nor was Arthur's case helped by newspaper reports that his appointment was expected and that the vicar of Bradford had promised him the place on his marriage.
⁶⁸

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the trustees' choice, their deliberations were held in secret and their decision was not made public until
18 September, three months after Patrick's funeral. Arthur had reverted to signing himself'Curate' as early as 4 August, suggesting that he had already been informed by then that his candidacy was unacceptable to the trustees.
⁶⁹
Having lost his wife, his father-in-law and his closest friend, Arthur was now to be deprived of his home and his employment. Clearly he could not remain as curate when the trustees had so publicly displayed their lack of confidence in him: he handed in his resignation immediately and prepared to vacate the parsonage, which would now have to be handed over to the new incumbent.

Despite the bitterness he must have felt, Arthur maintained a dignified silence and made no public comment. It was left to the editor of the
Bradford Observer
, himself a Dissenter, to denounce the ‘shabbiness and heartlessness' of the decision:

the trustees will be asked by the country not whether their choice is a better man, but whether Mr Nicholls is unfit for the incumbency of Haworth? They are responsible, first to the parishioners, and next to all England for an answer. Have they interpreted the feelings of the parishioners correctly? Is it possible that the people of Haworth wished to turn adrift in a thankless manner a gentleman, no longer young, who had been for so many years their teacher in divine things?

The
Bradford Observer's
advocacy was a two-edged sword, however, its reasons for supporting Arthur being, in all probability, precisely those which had caused his rejection.

It is not many months ago since Patrick Brontë went down to the grave in ripe old age; he was the last of his race, but he wanted not in his latter helpless years the watchful kindness of a son. Mr Nicholls, his curate, and the widowed husband of Charlotte, smoothed the old man's dying bed, and saw his head laid in the grave. He had for many years laboured in every sense as the Pastor of Haworth. His character is above reproach, and his faithful discharge of the duties of his office well known. What was more natural than that the people of Haworth would wish the incumbency to be conferred on the man that had gone out and in before them for such a long time, and who stood in the relation of husband to her that first made their district known to fame. Outsiders never doubted for a moment but that the congregation would do all in their power to perpetuate by the only remaining link the connection that fortune had formed
between them and a child of genius. It is therefore with a feeling different from surprise that we now learn the unexpected issue.
⁷⁰

Though well-meant, such expressions of support could only rub salt in Arthur's wounds: if the trustees did not see fit to appoint him on his own merits why should they do so solely because he had been briefly married to Charlotte Brontë?

The new incumbent made his presence felt with unseemly haste. Only four days after the announcement of his appointment, he officiated in the church on Sunday and baptized his first Haworth infants.
⁷¹
Arthur literally had only days to pack up his belongings and leave the parsonage. Apart from the vault containing the mortal remains of the woman he loved, there was nothing to keep him in Haworth or its neighbourhood. Still raw with grief at his recent bereavements and devastated by his humiliating rejection by the church trustees, he had no one to turn to and nowhere to go. Only his old home in Ireland offered sanctuary. It was impossible for him to take all the contents of the parsonage with him, but he was determined to keep everything of personal or sentimental value: all the family manuscripts, most of the Brontës' signed books, their writing desks, even items of his wife's clothing, he packed up and took with him to Ireland. The larger items of household furniture, the contents of the kitchen, some of the pictures and books had to be left behind. Mr Cragg, the local auctioneer, was called in and over the course of two days, on 1 and 2 October, he sold off 485 lots and raised £11513s. ud.
⁷²
To an intensely private man like Arthur Nicholls, the sight of souvenir and bargain hunters going through the Brontës' possessions and the dispersal of the contents of their home, must have been a traumatic experience.

There was no point in linGéring. Less than a month after John Wade's appointment, Arthur quietly and without ceremony departed from Haworth.
⁷³
This time there was no public testimonial, no parting gift from a grateful Sunday school and congregation. His departure was not even noticed in the local papers. He was accompanied only by Patrick's dogs, Plato and Cato, and more surprisingly, by Martha Brown. From initial hostility towards the man who had presumed to love her mistress, she had been won to such a pitch of loyalty and devotion that, when Arthur offered her the chance to continue in his employment, she left her home and her family for the unknown and life among strangers in Ireland. She returned to Haworth two years later, but remained in Arthur's service and thereafter
divided her time between Yorkshire and Ireland. She died on 19 January 1880, aged fifty-one, and was buried in Haworth churchyard only a stone's throw from the parsonage.
⁷⁴

Arthur returned to Banagher to live with his aunt, Mrs Bell, and her daughter, who had moved from Cuba House, where he had brought Charlotte as a bride, to a somewhat smaller residence on the top of the hill above the town and overlooking the Shannon.
⁷⁵
Whether he intended his flight to Ireland to be temporary or permanent is not known, but in this quiet rural backwater, far from Haworth and everything to do with the Brontës, Arthur soon settled into the peaceful obscurity which he had always craved. Martha Brown, with her Yorkshire accent and her famous sponge cakes, was more of a celebrity than her master. Well liked and respected by all his neighbours, particularly the children, Arthur became a stalwart of the local community. The only manifestation of his bitterness at his treatment by the Haworth church trustees was that he never again sought or obtained a clerical appointment: in his new life he would be a farmer. The money he had inherited from the Brontës was not enough for him to live on – despite Ellen Nussey's hysterical accusations that he had enriched himself at their expense – and he gradually subsided into genteel poverty.

On 25 August 1864, at the age of forty-five and nearly nine and a half years after the death of Charlotte, he married again. His second wife was Mary Bell, his cousin, the ‘pretty lady-like girl with gentle English manners' whom Charlotte had met on honeymoon. The marriage was affectionate and companionable but childless, and the second Mrs Nicholls seems to have been under no illusions about her husband's undying devotion to the first. Their house was a shrine to the Brontë family: the parsonage grandfather clock stood on the stairs near Leyland's medallion of Branwell; Patrick's gun and a photograph of Haworth Parsonage hung in the dining room; the drawing room was given over to Richmond's portrait of Charlotte, the engraving of Thackeray and a large number of framed drawings by the Brontës.
⁷⁶
When he died, on 2 December 1906, a few weeks before his eighty-eighth birthday, Mary had his coffin placed beneath the portrait of Charlotte until it was carried from the house. He was buried in the churchyard at Banagher, surrounded by his Bell relations: over his grave Mary erected a simple marble cross carved with the inscription ‘Until the day break and the Shadows flee away' and the legend ‘In Loving Memory of The Revd Arthur Bell Nicholls, formerly Curate of Haworth Yorkshire'.
⁷⁷

Desperately short of money, Mary Nicholls reluctantly had to sell the bulk of what remained of the collection of Brontëana which her husband had so lovingly preserved for nearly half a century, selling the manuscripts and books in two large sales at Sotheby's in 1907 and 1914 to a world eager to preserve anything connected with the remarkable Brontë family. She herself died on 27 February 1915 and was buried next to her husband in Banagher churchyard.
⁷⁸

By retiring to Ireland, where he was largely forgotten, Arthur effectively protected himself against much of the unpleasantness which was to arise from the pursuit of Brontë fanatics. On the whole, he was able to maintain his dignity to the end and achieve a peace of mind that would not have been possible had he stayed in Haworth or its neighbourhood.
⁷⁹

Apart from Mrs Gaskell, who never attempted another biography and died suddenly in 1865,
⁸⁰
most of Charlotte's friends rivalled her father and husband in their longevity. Of her publishers, James Taylor survived the climate of India till 1874, dying in Bombay, William Smith Williams died the following year and George Smith, who went on to found the
Dictionary of National Biography
and become the grand old man of English publishing, died in 1901.
⁸¹
Constantin Heger, unlike his fictional counterpart, Paul Emanuel, enjoyed a long career of outstanding academic success, becoming one of the most eminent professors of the Athénée Royal in Brussels and dying, six years after his wife, in 1896.
⁸²

Of Charlotte's friends from school, Miss Wooler lived to a ripe old age, dying in her nineties, in 1885. Though spared the worst excesses of Brontë fanatics, to the end of her life she was harassed by Americans who came to interview her about her most famous pupil. ‘I cannot refuse to see them', she told her great-nephew. ‘It is very trying, but I will do my best.'
⁸³

Mary Taylor, on the other hand, remained serenely indifferent to the lure of fame as Charlotte Brontës friend. She returned from New Zealand in i860, having earned enough money through her shopkeeping in Wellington to build a house for herself, High Royd, at Gomersal, where she lived in sturdy independence till her death in 1893. Unconventional to the end, she published a number of what would now be called feminist articles, defending the right of women to think, work and employ themselves in purposeful activity. These ideas were expanded in her novel,
Miss Miles
, which she was working on while Charlotte was writing
Shirley
. Though their themes were similar, the fact that Mary did not finish and publish her book till 1890, forty years after her friend, meant that the originality of its message was lost.
It sank without trace. Nevertheless, Mary continued to live by her own creed, even organizing a ladies' walking tour in Switzerland which culminated in an ascent of Mont Blanc when she was nearly sixty years of age.
⁸⁴
She and Ellen discovered that age and experience had only widened the gulf between them; they had little in common and their friendship foundered soon after Mary's return from New Zealand. Like Ellen, she never married, but unlike her former friend, lived a practical, useful and happy life, unburdened by regrets. She was, as Ellen bitterly complained,
‘dead
to any approach on the Brontë subject', wisely refusing to be drawn into the inexhaustible demand for further information, and therefore earning the reputation of being ‘peculiar'.
⁸⁵

It was Ellen Nussey, however, who was universally recognized as the fount of all knowledge where the Brontës were concerned. Though thinly disguised as ‘E' throughout the
Life of Charlotte Brontë
, her role as Mrs Gaskell's informant was immediately and widely known. One can hardly avoid the impression that she had preened herself because Mrs Gaskell turned constantly to her for information, rather than to the hated husband and father; it was her version of events which would be made immortal by Mrs Gaskell's pen. Ellen had expected nothing but praise and gratification for this role and was genuinely shocked and appalled when she incurred considerable censure for supplying Mrs Gaskell with information which, it was suggested, should never have been published. Ironically, the very people whose good opinion she most cared for, the clergymen and her Anglican friends in Birstall and Gomersal, proved to be the most critical.

Alarmed at this unexpected turn of events, Ellen wildly tried to justify herself, mainly by blaming Charlotte's husband and father: she had told them they ought to have oversight of the book, she had only lent her letters because they had insisted, she had supplied information on the sisters ‘only'. As early as 1860 she was already uttering the complaint she was to reiterate for the rest of her life: ‘What I have reaped has not been pay of gold or of praise – It has been neglect from the father whose dying child I bore in my arms down two flights of stairs (when at Scarboro') – Of blame from the husband whose feelings I strove to spare …'
⁸⁶

It was Charlotte's husband who bore the brunt of her increasingly hysterical accusations. He had been in ‘a savage humour' with her ever since the publication of the
Life of Charlotte Brontë
, though ‘he never had any just reason to be so': she had not had a line from him since Mr Brontë died, and then she had only received ‘a most ungracious reply'.
⁸⁷
Judging Arthur's
behaviour by her own, she was unable to believe that he had not kept her own letters to Charlotte and frequently denounced him to anyone prepared to listen. Believing that she had been betrayed by Mrs Gaskell, Ellen made several attempts to ‘set the record straight', as she saw it, by writing her own biography of Charlotte. Like Mrs Gaskell, however, she discovered to her horror and indignation that she could not quote from Charlotte's letters without her husband's approval, but this she could not bring herself to ask.