Brontës (39 page)

Charlotte's visits to the Red House and her friendship with Mary Taylor, in particular, were to be stimulating, exciting and constantly surprising

Much less enjoyable were the duty visits Charlotte had to pay to her father's friends. With the best of intentions, she was occasionally invited over to spend the day with the Franks at the vicarage in Huddersfield or with the Atkinsons at Green House. For Charlotte, these visits were an ordeal. Even the servant sent to fetch her to the Atkinsons' found her
exceedingly shy, timid and shrinking, ‘spare of speech and nice in manners, though somewhat awkward, and evidently observant'.
²⁷
On her best behaviour in company and terrified of committing a
faux pas
among people whom she did not know well, Charlotte found most pleasure in retreating into the garden. One visit to an unnamed family who had known Patrick when he was curate in their parish was particularly mortifying. Charlotte's shyness and smallness were taken as indications of extreme youth: ‘They took me for a child, and treated me just like one … one tall lady would nurse me.'
²⁸
Always hypersensitive to anything that smacked of patronage, Charlotte resented the intended, if misplaced, kindness. Similarly, she clearly felt her own poverty, especially when contrasted with the wealth of her own and her father's friends. A note to Mrs Franks, written during Charlotte's first half year to thank her for the present of a frock and muslin and Miss Outhwaite for a shawl, is polite in the extreme but hardly breathes a spirit of genuine appreciation.
²⁹
No doubt Mary Taylor and the other girls had mocked her old-fashioned and second-hand clothing as they had her lack of personal good looks. The gifts, meant in kindness, were perceived as charity and served only as a reminder to Charlotte of her inferior status.

Patrick, on the other hand, was grateful for his old friends' attentions to his daughter and wrote to thank them on her behalf. He also took the opportunity to set the record straight on his own position, which had become increasingly isolated over the last few months. His liberal stance on Roman Catholic Emancipation and, more particularly his campaign to revise the criminal code, had angered many of his former friends, including William Morgan, the Franks and the Outhwaites. His campaign over the winter of 1830 and spring of 1831 for the restoration to the magistracy of Michael Stocks was only marginally less controversial. Stocks, who was a Whig, had been humiliatingly removed from office when charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice; eventually he was to be triumphantly vindicated when his accuser turned out to be a proven liar who was simply seeking revenge on a magistrate who had sentenced him in the past. Patrick, with all the other clergymen of the parish of Bradford, had signed a memorial to the Lord High Chancellor seeking Stocks' reinstatement as early as December 1830, though the affair dragged on as a party political issue throughout the following year.
³⁰

It was Patrick's support for the Whigs' Reform Bill of 1831 which most annoyed his High Tory friends. The bill would disenfranchise the rotten
boroughs, enfranchise some of the new towns which had grown up since the Industrial Revolution and halve the property qualification for registering as a voter. Once more Patrick had to defend himself against charges of having become an enemy to the establishment.

A warmer, or truer friend – to Church, and state, does not breathe the vital air. But, after many years, mature deliberation, I am fully convinced, that, unless, the real friends of our Excellent Institutions, come forward, and advocate the cause of Temperate reform – the inveterate enemies – will avail themselves of the opportunity, which this circumstance would give them, and will work on the popular feeling – already but too much excited – so as to cause, in all probability, general insurrectionary movements, and bring about a revolution – … Both, then, because, I think moderate, or temperate reform, is wanted – and that this would satisfy all wise & reasonable people, and weaken the hands of our real enemies, & preserve the Church and State from ruin – I am an advocate for the Bill, which has been just thrown out of Parli[a]ment – It is with me, merely an affair of conscience and judgement, and sooner than violate the dictates of either of these, I would run the hazard of poverty, imprisonment, and death.
³¹

It is a measure of the independence of thought Patrick inspired in his children that both Branwell and Charlotte took completely the opposite view on the question of the Reform Bill. A year later, on 17 May 1832, Charlotte addressed her weekly letter home to Branwell, ‘As usual … because to you I find the most to say'.

Lately I had begun to think that I had lost all the interest which I used formerly to take in politics but the extreme pleasure I felt at the news of the Reform-bill's being thrown out \by/ by the House of Lords and of the expulsion or resignation of Earl Grey, &c. &c. convinced me that I have not as yet lost
all
my penchant for politics.
³²

This particular letter had been preceded by a totally unexpected visit from Branwell, who had arrived at Roe Head, having walked the twenty-odd miles from Haworth, to visit his sister. He brought news that Aunt Branwell had decided to subscribe to
Fraser's Magazine
, which, though less interesting to the children than
Blackwood's
, was nevertheless better than nothing. They discussed politics and, almost certainly, Branwell's progress with the Glasstown saga. His stay, of necessity short, threw Charlotte into such a
confusion of excitement that it was only after he had left that she remembered all the questions she had wanted to ask him.
³³

In Charlotte's absence, Branwell had been preoccupied with a major retrospective of the establishment and growth of Glasstown, which he entitled ‘The History of the Young Men'. The biggest enterprise yet undertaken in terms of both physical size and imaginative scale, it was finally completed on 7 May 1831, about six weeks before Charlotte came home for the summer holidays.
³⁴
The real threat of revolution in England, as the Reform Bill looked likely to be rejected by Parliament, prompted Branwell to tackle two more volumes of his occasional series, ‘Letters from an Englishman', in June 1831. The first carried James Bellingham away from the Great Glasstown to Wellington's Glasstown in the African interior, in the company of the Marquis of Douro (Arthur Wellesley), his brother Charles and the poet Young Soult. During their journey they encounter cattle rustlers led by Pigtail, ‘the greatest vender of white bread and Prussian Butter', stay overnight with a gang of poachers and ‘rare lads' and are then summoned dramatically back to the Great Glasstown by news that it is on the point of revolution.
³⁵
This little book was sabotaged by one of his sisters, possibly Emily, who wrote on the back of the title page in her best schoolgirl French: ‘ma cher frère vous l'avez ecris tres bien je croyais non vraiment vous n'avez pas. Ma foi que vous étes un mauvais garçon et vous serez un choquant homme.'
³⁶

The second volume, drawing heavily on newspaper accounts of the 1830 revolutions in Paris, Belgium, Poland, Germany and Italy, gives an account of the transformation of Alexander Rogue into a demagogue, including a verbatim report of his speech to Parliament, which results in his expulsion. It also vividly describes, from Bellingham's point of view, the resulting revolution and destruction of the Great Glasstown. Peace is only brought about by the intervention of the venerable patriarch, Crashey, one of the original Twelves.
³⁷
Though his future importance was not yet apparent, in Alexander Rogue, whom he consistently calls ‘Rougue', Branwell had created one of the greatest figures in all the juvenilia and one who was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

By contrast, Charlotte seems to have used the summer holiday as a period of relaxation from her self-imposed burden of education. The fact that she did not seize the opportunity to rush straight back into the affairs of Glasstown suggests that she had found her first term both intellectually demanding and fulfilling. There is only one extant piece of writing from her
holiday in 1831 and that is a fragment. Far from referring to Branwell's destruction of Glasstown or advancing the fates of her own preferred characters, the fragment is a desultory and half-hearted descriptive piece, an excuse for a long poem by Marian Hume lamenting her abandonment by her lover, the Marquis of Douro, who has fallen in love with another woman. The love affair and the marquis's subsequent attraction to Lady Zenobia Ellrington had already been the subject of Charlotte's short story ‘Albion and Marina', written in the October before she went to school, so this was little more than a reworking of an old story.
³⁸

Similarly, in the Christmas vacation, Charlotte produced only two poems. ‘The trumpet hath sounded' is generally portrayed as the death knell for Glasstown, representing the fulfilment of the children's decision to destroy their whole imaginary world. This is to give the poem an arbitrary and isolated importance, however, which is not justified by subsequent events in the juvenilia. It would seem that Charlotte was simply toying with an idea suggested by Branwell's devastation of the city of Great Glasstown by Rogue and his revolutionaries. Charlotte, who had always preferred the magic and supernatural element in their stories, simply reinterpreted his story, attributing the destruction to a biblical-style visitation from the Angel of Death. The Genii, too, who had disappeared from Branwell's most recent work, reappear in Charlotte's poem, even if it is only so that they can be swept away with all the living souls of the Glasstown. The poem reflects Charlotte's passion for Isaiah, which Ellen Nussey had noted at school, and her growing love for Byron, upon whose poem, ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib', it is based. It did not, however, mark the end of the kingdoms or characters of Glasstown, which were to continue to flourish long after the creation of Angria.
³⁹
Within two weeks Charlotte was writing a second poem extolling the beauties of her imaginary Africa as if nothing had happened.
⁴⁰
Again, however, she had neither the time nor the inclination to pursue her fictional writings in the month between her second and third terms at Roe Head.

In June 1832, at the end of her third term, Charlotte had to announce that she would not be returning after the summer holidays. She had had eighteen months' schooling but, through her own determination and self-discipline, had achieved far more than the syllabus would normally have allowed. She left the school covered with glory. She had won the silver medal for achievement three terms in succession and it was now presented to her to keep as a permanent memorial of her success. She had never had
to wear the black sash for breach of rules, unladylike manners or incorrect grammar, and she had only once been awarded a black mark for failing to learn what Miss Wooler finally admitted, on protest from her other pupils, was an excessively long portion of Blair's
Belles-Lettres.
⁴¹
After preparation by the Reverend Edward Carter, who was curate of Mirfield and engaged to Susan Wooler, Charlotte had been confirmed, probably during September 1831 when the Archbishop of York had visited the locality.
⁴²
In every aspect of her life she had made dramatic improvements during those eighteen months.

Not the least important of these was in her social life. Alone among the Brontë girls, Charlotte made friends with several girls of her own age and class which were to last a lifetime. (Emily would apparently briefly befriend a fellow pupil in Brussels; Anne's sole recorded friend, Ann Cook, died only a year or so after she left Roe Head.)
⁴³
Charlotte's two closest friends were Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. The quiet, ladylike and kind Ellen, who had comforted her when she had been in the throes of homesickness in her first weeks at school, became her bed-fellow in the dormitory and a spur to further achievement in the classroom. Even while they were both still at school, Charlotte and Ellen were already exchanging letters, probably, it must be admitted, as part of a school exercise. Ellen's older sister, Mercy, had invited them both to hear Mr Murray's lectures on Galvanism but, as it would have meant asking for an extra half-holiday, Charlotte observed that they would have to refuse, ‘compelled “to bend our inclinations to our duty” (as Miss Wooler observed the other day)'; ‘besides', she added, ‘we should perhaps have got behind-hand with our lessons.'
⁴⁴

In the Christmas holidays, ‘knowing that when School girls once get home they willingly abandon every recollection which tends to remind them of school', Charlotte was surprised and gratified to receive letters from both Ellen and Mary. It is a measure of the comparative importance of each friendship that Charlotte's reply to Ellen was taken up with messages to Mary: she was glad Mr Taylor had liked Mary's drawings but was somewhat alarmed to hear that she was reading the ‘lucubrations' of the Radical, William Cobbett.

I beg she will on no account burden her Memory with passages to be repeated for my edification lest I should not justly appreciate either her kindness or their merit since that worthy personage & his principles whether private or political are no great favourites of mine [.]
⁴⁵

Ellen was not unintelligent but neither was she mentally adventurous. Mary, on the other hand, could follow Charlotte intellectually where Ellen could not and, though differing wildly in their views and thoughts, the two had much in common. Charlotte's two friends represented the two halves of her life. Ellen, with her quiet domesticity, unquestioning conformity to social and moral codes of behaviour and complete conventionality, was a model which Charlotte strove to emulate in order to achieve a peaceful acceptance of her fate as a clergyman's daughter and middle-class spinster. In her friendship Charlotte found a certain restfulness and the ease of companionship. Throughout the many years of correspondence between them, Ellen was Charlotte's confidante for family problems and an emotional prop.