Brontës (40 page)

Mary, on the other hand, with her intellectual curiosity, utter disregard for appearances or the opinions of others and fearless pursuit of self-improvement, was a stimulus to Charlotte's longing to do and be something in the world. Mary was a born fighter and her example was both a frequent reproach to Charlotte and a constant reminder that she should use her abilities and talents to the full. Nothing gives a better indication of the characters of the three friends than their reactions to the fate which overcame each of them in turn: the necessity of facing a future without the security of family wealth or marriage. Ellen Nussey retreated into genteel poverty, keeping up appearances but entirely (and often querulously) dependent on the charity of her brothers. Mary Taylor, or Polly as she was affectionately known to her friends, packed her bags and emigrated to set up shop in New Zealand where she made enough money to return home and live in comfortable independence. Charlotte, torn between duty and inclination, lacking the courage to stand on her own two feet but afraid of the consequences of not doing so, submitted to second best, taking a series of hated governessing posts before giving in to literary ambition. It is more than unfortunate that virtually all Charlotte's letters to Mary Taylor have been destroyed. Their different emphasis would have given us more insight into Charlotte's development, particularly as a writer, than the commonplaces of her correspondence with Ellen.
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In early June 1832, Charlotte returned home to Haworth, parting with some reluctance from her friends. On her last day at Roe Head, she flung off her studious character, telling Ellen:

I should for once like to feel
out and out
a school-girl; I wish something would happen! Let us run round the fruit garden (running was what she never did); perhaps we shall meet some one, or we may have a fine for trespass.
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Nothing did happen, however, and Charlotte left school in the same quiet manner she had spent her time there. Her homecoming was no doubt boisterous enough. She was now sixteen and old enough not only to take charge of her own studies but also to direct those of her fourteen- and twelve-year-old sisters.

It must have been a relief to Patrick to relinquish the supervision of his daughters' education to Charlotte. The demands on his time were so great that he can have had little or no time to indulge in private reading and his health had never fully recovered from the attack on his lungs in 1830. Despite this, he was relentless in his campaigns. Like his old friend and vicar, John Buckworth, he tried to encourage pious men in his parish to go for ordination. He wrote several times on behalf of one, Anthony Metcalfe, who was the brother of a Keighley schoolmaster, but the archbishop refused to bend his rules to ordain a non-graduate who was already over thirty years of age.
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Another campaign, of much wider significance to his district, was more successful.

In the summer of 1831 he had obtained a grant of eighty pounds from the National School Society towards the building of a Sunday school in Haworth. The church trustees had given some land adjacent to the parsonage for the site of the school and the remainder of the money was to be raised by a public subscription. Foreseeing future problems with his belligerent trustees, Patrick requested that the National School Society should
‘peremptorily
demand' that the incumbent should always have a considerable share in the management of the school. To add to the funds, Patrick invited local preachers of distinction to address his congregation and donate the collections to the subscription: among those who came were Edwin Smith of Keighley, who was soon to go as a missionary to India, and Thomas Crowther of Cragg Vale, the champion of factory children, who was to become a regular preacher at Haworth. The new building was erected and opened in the summer of 1832 with a plaque, surely devised by Patrick, which noted that ‘this National Church Sunday School is under the management of trustees of whom the Incumbent for the time being is one'.
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All the Brontës were to take their turn as teachers in the Sunday school, a duty they could hardly escape as children of the minister. Anne ‘looked the nicest and most serious like' and Branwell was notorious for his impatience:

He was very rapid and impulsive in his manner: he could not bear slowness of reading from the scholars; he could hardly wait till they got through their verses;
he wanted to be getting on. Well, there was one scholar in the class who was extremely slow, and who spelled his way through almost every word. On one occasion Branwell got quite out of patience with him, and sharply remarked, ‘Get on, or I'll turn you out of the class.' The boy's answer was characteristic of the rough and outspoken character of the Haworth people of the period. In angry tones he replied, ‘Tha' willn't, tha' old Irish –.' And having had his say, he took his cap and walked out of the school … After school hours we were taken to the church, and placed in a large square pew under the north gallery. Branwell accompanied us. He used to retire to one corner close to the window, where he read with avidity during the service some book which was not the Prayer-book. If any of us disturbed him he was very cross. He would come to the interrupter, and, twining a lock of the lad's hair round his finger, he would lift the offender from the floor and finish by giving him a sharp rap with his knuckles.
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Given the amount of time the Brontës would have to spend in the Sunday school, it is not surprising that one of Charlotte's first duties on returning from Roe Head was to entertain the female teachers to tea.
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It was over a month after leaving school before Charlotte got a letter from Ellen Nussey. How much she had missed her friend and longed to hear from her is an indication of how happy she had been at Roe Head.

My dearest Ellen

Your kind and interesting letter gave me the sincerest pleasure – I have been expecting to hear from you almost every day since my arrival at home and I \at/ length began to despair of receiving the wished-for letter … I do hope my dearest – that you will return to School again for your own sake though for mine I had rather you would remain at home as we shall then have more frequent opportunities of correspondence with each other … accept all the fondest expressions of genuine attachment, from Your real friend

Charlotte Brontë

P.S. Remember the mutual promise we made of a regular correspondence with each other … Farewell my
dear dear dear
Ellen.

Ellen's letter had been full of chat about their school-friends and their circle, almost all of whom Ellen saw on a regular basis, in the holidays as well as at school to which she did return for the next term. Charlotte felt the contrast with her own life very deeply.

You ask me to give you a description of the manner in which I have passed every day since I left School: this is soon done as an account of one day is an account of all. In the Morning from nine o'clock till half-past twelve – I instruct my Sisters & draw, then we walk till dinner after dinner I sew till tea-time, and after tea I either read, write, do a little fancy-work or draw, as I please. Thus in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course my life is passed.
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It may have pleased Charlotte to give her friend a dull account of her life which would inspire sympathy, but this was scarcely the whole truth. In the same letter she admits to having been out to tea twice in the last month, expecting company at the parsonage that afternoon and the following Tuesday and to having had a letter from Leah Brooke, a former pupil at Roe Head.
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Charlotte was fortunate in receiving letters from her school-friends, however intermittent, as this was an extravagance the family could ill afford; in these days before the introduction of the Penny Post system, it was the recipient, not the sender, who had to pay the postage, which was often quite arbitrarily and extravagantly high.

Part of Charlotte's sense of dullness may be attributable to her inability to work up any enthusiasm for the fictional world of Glasstown at this time. Far from allowing her to plunge back into the imaginary worlds with all the renewed vigour of someone who had been deprived of them for the last eighteen months, her release from school routine seems to have left her feeling only regret and lack of purpose. It was a month after her return before she tried her hand at any writing and even then her verse play, ‘The Bridal', was only a half-hearted reworking of her ‘Albion and Marina' of nearly two years before. Telling of Lady Zenobia Ellrington's efforts to win the Marquis of Douro from his fiancée, Marian Hume, by invoking magical and demonical arts, the story shows little advance in subject or style on Charlotte's previous efforts. It lacks even the interest of being seen through the eyes of the malicious and amusing Charles Wellesley.
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Though it is always dangerous to argue from absence of evidence, since manuscripts may well have been lost or destroyed, the six months following Charlotte's return from Roe Head appear to have been remarkably barren. Apart from ‘The Bridal', which she had completed by 20 August, Charlotte seems to have written only two poems during the rest of 1832 – neither of them on Glasstown subjects. ‘St John in the Island of Patmos', written on 30 August, is a competent but conventional poem of fifty-six lines based on the Revelation of St John. ‘Lines on the Celebrated Bewick',
completed three months later, is a longer and more evocative poem conjuring up the much loved woodcuts by Thomas Bewick which the young Brontës had copied so often.
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Both poems are a departure from Charlotte's earlier efforts, not only in subject matter, but also in showing signs of being carefully thought out and worked upon. It seems likely that they were written for ‘public' consumption rather than for inclusion in the juvenilia like her earlier poetry. These were poems she could show openly to her father and aunt as tangible proof of the benefit her education at Roe Head had bestowed on her.

Charlotte's lack of interest in the fictional worlds is in sharp contrast to Branwell's undimmed enthusiasm. Typically, he had found a new way of describing events in Glasstown, inspired by his reading of the classics and of John Milton. In ‘The Fate of Regina', a poem of over 400 lines divided into two books, Branwell imitated the heroic verse of Homer's
Iliad
and Milton's
Paradise Lost
to describe the bloody battle for the city of Regina between the four kings and Rogue's revolutionary followers. He followed this with two odes, in the classical tradition, both written on his fifteenth birthday. ‘IIId Ode on the Celebration of the Great African Games' is interesting as one of the most direct comparisons between the world of the ancients and that of the Glasstown confederacy.
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Not only are there parallels in landscape but, more importantly, the role of the Genii is seen as directly comparable to that of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome.

Awful Branii gloomy giant

Shaking oer earth his blazing spear

Brooding on blood with drear and vengeful soul

He sits enthroned in clouds to hear his thunder roll

\Dread/ Tallii next like a dire Eagle flies

And on our mortal miseries feasts her bloody eyes.

Emmii and Annii last with boding cry

Famine and war fortell and mortal misery
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The role of the Twelves, too, is seen as similar to that of the heroes of the ancient world, fighting against the vengeful whims of the gods, voyaging far and wide and leading their people to found a new civilization.

‘Ode to the Polar Star' is probably the finest Branwell had yet produced. It sings the praises of the travellers' ‘guardian in the sky' which guides sailors through the stormy seas.

Blesser of Mortals! Glorious guide

Nor turning ever from thy course aside

Eternal Pilot while time passes by

While Earthly Guides decay and die

Thou holdst thy throne

Fixed and alone

In the vast concave of the nightly sky
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In August Branwell also completed the final three volumes of his ‘Letters from an Englishman‘. After the rebellion, James Bellingham continued his sightseeing trip to Sneaky's Glasstown in the company of the Marquis of Douro, his brother Charles Wellesley and Young Soult. For a second time, the party was caught up in Rogue's machinations: they heard one of his rabble-rousing speeches fomenting revolt against the aristocrats, were captured by his newly raised army and forced to witness his taking and burning of the city of Fidena. Branwell's juvenilia is usually (and unfairly) characterized as an endless description of campaign and battle but even at this early date, when he was more interested in warfare for its own sake, all the elements of his later work are present. Rogue is not simply a general but a demagogue whose political ambition is far more important than any military manoeuvring. The crux of the fifth volume is not the burning of Fidena but the desertion of his commander, O'Connor, which imperils the success of the siege. The theme of the sixth volume is the rivalry between Highlanders and Lowlanders in Rogue's army which leads to in-fighting and ultimately causes the defeat of the rebels and Rogue's own execution by the kings of the Glasstown states. Defiant to the end, dressed in black and with a countenance pale as death, Rogue faces the firing squad and orders them to fire in ‘a firm clear but sepulchral tone'.
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The death of what was fast becoming his favourite character seems to have put rather a damper on Branwell's writing for the time being and, like his sister, he appears to have temporarily lost his enthusiasm for Glasstown. Charlotte had other excitements to distract her. At the end of September, only three months after leaving school, she was invited to stay for a fortnight at The Rydings with Ellen Nussey, her older sister Mercy, and their mother. Escorted by Branwell, Charlotte travelled the twenty-odd miles to Birstall in a two-wheeled gig – a rather more refined mode of transport than the covered cart which had taken her to Roe Head. The battlemented old house and its beautiful grounds sent Branwell into ecstasies and he returned
reluctantly to Haworth, telling his sister that he ‘was leaving her in Paradise and if she were not intensely happy she never would be!' Charlotte's extreme shyness, which manifested itself most of all on formal occasions, made her a difficult guest. On one occasion, she trembled and nearly burst into tears when led into dinner by a stranger but, on the whole, the visit was a great success. The two girls were allowed to retreat to the garden away from the daily round of visitors and the time passed pleasantly enough.
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