Brontës (31 page)

Patrick probably had no forewarning that Elizabeth was returning home,
for he would undoubtedly have insisted on his younger daughters being sent home with her. One can only guess at his feelings when a second daughter was brought home to die. Seeing the signs of consumption on Elizabeth's face, his thoughts immediately flew to his remaining daughters still at the school. Perhaps they, too, were in danger. The very next day he went straight to Silverdale and carried away both Charlotte and Emily.
⁹⁶
They were never to go back. Their joy at escaping from the hardships of the Clergy Daughters' School and returning to their beloved home would be tempered by the knowledge that it was a home without Maria and soon to be without Elizabeth. All Wilson's dire predictions and stories of the deaths of small children must have sprung to mind as they watched Elizabeth die. Perhaps fortunately for them all, the process was not prolonged. She was already far gone in consumption and on Tuesday, 15 June 1825, at the age of ten, she followed her sister to an early grave. William Morgan returned yet again to Haworth on 18 June to perform the melancholy task of burying the third member of his friend's family.
⁹⁷

The deaths of Maria and Elizabeth had a traumatic effect on the remaining children. It was not simply that they lost two of their sisters, but that they lost their two
eldest
sisters. The younger children had naturally looked to them for the leadership and support which elder children provide. In their case this role had taken on even greater importance because Maria, and to a lesser extent Elizabeth, had helped to fill the void caused by their mother's death so early in their lives. Once again they had been deprived of the maternal figure in the family.

The profound nature of their loss was to be reflected in all their later work. Motherless children and orphans were a feature not only of their juvenile writings but also of their novels. All Charlotte's heroines, from Frances Henri in her first novel,
The Professor
, to the schoolgirl in
Emma
, her last, unfinished work, were orphans. The absence of maternal love is a major factor in determining not only their future prospects but also their sense of loneliness and deprivation. In
Shirley
, this was of particular significance as the discovery of her long-lost mother is the crucial factor in Caroline's recovery from an apparently hopeless illness. ‘My own mamma,' Caroline says, ‘who belongs to me, and to whom I belong! I am a rich girl now: I have something I can love well, and not be afraid of loving.'
⁹⁸

In
Wuthering Heights
, Emily too seems to have created an orphan world. Virtually every child, including Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley
in the first generation and Linton, the young Catherine and Hareton in the second, loses at least one parent, usually the mother. Though the effect is less crucial on the development of the personalities of her characters than in Charlotte's novels, the motherless state of so many of them must be significant. The relationship between the two cousins, Linton and Catherine, particularly, is essentially that of a mother surrogate and her child.
⁹⁹

By contrast, Anne, the youngest child, who was also closest to her aunt, creates the most normal families. Agnes Grey has a happy home with father, mother and sister and, unlike Jane Eyre, only goes to be a governess at her own insistence. Helen Graham, the heroine of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
, has an ordinary home life with her uncle and aunt even though her parents are apparently dead.
¹⁰⁰
Her suitor, Gilbert Markham, is fatherless, but not from childhood, and enjoys a robust and normal family life with his mother, brother and sister. Anne, who was only five when Maria and Elizabeth died, seems to have been the least affected, if only because she still had older sisters to look up to in Charlotte and Emily.

Though Branwell never published a novel, the loss of his sisters made a deep and abiding impression on him. For him there was no confusion between the loss of his mother and his two eldest sisters. It was the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth that made most impact. Ten years later, writing to the editor of
Blackwood's Magazine
, Branwell described the delight he had taken in the magazine as a child and quoted from memory the following lines:

‘Long Long long ago seems the time when we danced hand in hand with our golden haired Sister whom all that looked on loved long long long ago the day on which she died. That hour so far more dreadful than any hour that now can darken us on this earth – When She her coffin and that velvet pall descended – and descended – Slowly – slowly – into the horrid clay and we were born[e] deathlike and wishing to die out of the churchyard that from that moment we thought we could never enter more.' Passages like these Sir, (and when that last was written my Sister died) Passages like these, read then and remembered now afford feelings which I repeat I cannot describe.
¹⁰¹

In a long poem he wrote about the same time, he described the death of a beloved sister and her funeral solemnities. While it is dangerous to consider the poem autobiographical, as it owed more to
Blackwood's
than to the
deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, there are certain graphic and haunting lines which suggest that Branwell was drawing on actual experience. When lifted to see the dead child in her coffin, for instance,

And, to this moment, I can feel

The voiceless gasp – the sickening chill –

With which I hid my whitened face

The funeral, too, is described in terms redolent of personal experience:

All else seems blank – the mourning march,

The proud parade of woe,

The passage 'neath the churchyard arch,

The crowd that met the show.

My place or thoughts amid the train

I strive to recollect, in vain –

I could not think or see:

I cared not whither I was borne:

And only felt that death had torn

My Caroline from me …

Long years have never worn away

The unnatural strangeness of that day
¹⁰²

But it was Charlotte who was the most vulnerable and probably the most affected. She had witnessed her sisters' sufferings at the Clergy Daughters' School and she was closest to them in age. She must have felt a bewildering sense of divine injustice in the deaths of sisters she considered so eminently superior to herself. More importantly, having always been one of the ‘little ones', her sisters' deaths promoted her to the role of eldest child. It was a responsibility she was always to feel and her own sense of inadequacy as to the way she filled that role may help to explain her subsequent veneration for Maria. A later schoolfriend described how

She used to speak of her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died at Cowan Bridge. I used to believe them to have been wonders of talent and kindness. She told me, early one morning, that she had just been dreaming: she had been told that she was wanted in the drawing-room, and it was Maria and Elizabeth … she wished she had not dreamed, for it did not go on nicely; they
were changed; they had forgotten what they used to care for. They were very fashionably dressed, and began criticizing the room, etc.
¹⁰³

As late as 1849, Charlotte still refused to believe that a fellow pupil at Cowan Bridge might remember her, rather than her sisters:

none of them can possibly remember me. They might remember my eldest sister, Maria; her prematurely developed and remarkable intellect, as well as the mildness, wisdom, and fortitude of her character, might have left an indelible impression on some observant mind amongst her companions. My second sister, Elizabeth, too, may perhaps be remembered, but I cannot conceive that I left a trace behind me.
¹⁰⁴

It was not Charlotte but Elizabeth who left least impression on her contemporaries at the school. Obviously less brilliant than Maria, Charlotte or Emily, as Patrick had recognized when entering her for the lower level of education, she shared their outstanding moral fortitude. The only incident concerning her which anyone brought to mind was the way she suffered ‘with exemplary patience' a cut on the head so severe that she had to spend several days and nights in the superintendent's room.
¹⁰⁵

On 23 September 1825, Patrick received the final settlement of his account with the Clergy Daughters' School in a long letter of condolence from the superintendent, Miss Evans. She had been ill herself, she told him, and the school had still not recovered fully from the outbreak of typhus in the spring:

though cast down we have not been in despair but enabled to look beyond the dark valley of the shadow of death to that glorious life and immortality which are brought to light by the Gospel. May we but be enabled to hold on and to hold out to the end and the tears which now so often dim our eyes by reason of the sorrow which saddens our hearts, shall all be wiped away then when there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither shall there be any more pain seeing the former things are passed away.
¹⁰⁶

Miss Evans had no inkling of the resentment Charlotte harboured against the school, for there was no connection in her mind between Cowan Bridge and the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. She ended her letter, ‘Our
circle unite in kind respects to yourself with love to dear Charlotte and little petted Em.' Patrick was to be credited with £2 14s. 2d. One year of education at the Clergy Daughters' School had cost him £80 2s. 2d., nearly half his annual income.
¹⁰⁷
It had also cost him two beloved daughters.

Chapter Six

SCRIBBLEMANIA

For Charlotte and Emily the summer of 1825 was a welcome return to Haworth and the family. While all the household mourned Maria and Elizabeth, there was at least the consolation of grief shared and of certainty in believing that they had gone to a better world. These would be months of physical and mental recovery from the sufferings of Cowan Bridge, watched over by Patrick, Aunt Branwell, who now had to give up all hope of returning to Penzance, and Tabby Aykroyd. With good food, daily walks in the fresh air of the moors and the re-establishment of a routine of lessons with their father and aunt, the children would gradually return to something like normality.

No doubt Patrick kept his anxiety about their finances to himself but, despite the brave words to his friends, his position and future were not as secure as they might have seemed. On 25 August, some two months after bringing his daughters home from Cowan Bridge, he wrote once more to the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty. He had looked at the deeds for the
parsonage and found that the trustees were not bound in law to let the incumbent live there but could rent it out or otherwise do as they liked with it. Even his salary was uncertain as the trustees had ample excuses for withholding it, in part or as a whole, ‘however circumspectly he may walk'. Worst of all, Patrick was personally responsible for paying for any repairs or maintenance work carried out on the Church lands: this he had recently found out to his cost, when the trustees presented him with several bills ‘to a very large amount, rendering the salary inadequate to support my family, even with the most rigorous economy'.
¹
Despite being urged to pursue his case by Henry Heap, the vicar of Bradford, Patrick once again came up against an immovable block. Whatever the real merits of the case, the fact that his annual salary was valued by his archbishop at over £150 made it impossible for the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty to intervene. Patrick had to struggle on and economize wherever possible.
²

He had founded an Auxiliary Bible Society in Haworth in 1823 and on 19 September 1825 it held its second anniversary meeting in a packed church. Patrick, as President, took the chair and delivered a ‘very animated speech', followed by twelve others, including ones by the Reverends Henry Heap and William Morgan from Bradford and Moses Saunders, minister of the newly built Baptist chapel at Hall Green at the bottom of Main Street. The Haworth Auxiliary had raised the amazing sum of £350 and distributed eighty copies of the Bible during the previous year. One newspaper report stated:

We never saw speakers more in earnest, nor any Meeting of the kind more attentive. And we venture to predict, that Haworth which has been so long blessed with the light of the gospel, will increase its labours in diffusing that light among the benighted inhabitants of the universe.
³

A few weeks later, Patrick, supported by his two secretaries, James Greenwood, a manufacturer, and Thomas Andrew, the surgeon, wrote to the Parent Society to express deep concern about the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Bibles issued by the society. This practice was

pregnant with the seeds of Discord, and if not speedily, and forever abandoned, will counteract, whatever partial good it may do, by a
vast
preponderance of evil; and will
entirely
dissolve that spell, which can exist, only as long as the Inspired Books alone, shall be distributed.
⁴