Brontës (49 page)

While Charlotte and Emily packed their bags ready for their departure to Roe Head on 29 July 1835,
¹
Branwell sat down in some excitement to draft a letter to the Royal Academy in London.

Sir,

Having an earnest desire to enter as Probationary Student in the Royal Academy, but not being possessed of information as to the means of obtaining my desire I presume to request from you as Secretary to the Instiution an answer to the questions –

Where am I to present my drawing?

At what time—?

and especialy

Can I do it in August or September
²

The sorry tale of what happened next has entered Brontë mythology.
Branwell travelled to London, we are told, where he was so crushed by the realization of his own lack of talent when faced with the brilliant portraits on display in the metropolis that he abandoned the Royal Academy altogether and drowned his sorrows in drink and dissipation. Once he had spent all the money his father had given him he was forced to return home in disgrace, offering only the transparent lie that he had been robbed by a fellow traveller as an excuse for his penniless state.
³

Persuasively characteristic of Branwell's later behaviour though this may be, the entire episode is almost certainly complete fiction. In the summer of 1835 it was indeed the plan that Branwell should enter the Royal Academy but his letter was just a draft to which he attached so little importance that it was torn into several pieces and used as scrap paper for writing poetry. The Royal Academy has no record of any correspondence with, or about, him and his name does not appear as either a probationer or student in its files: Branwell, it would appear, never made a formal approach for entrance.
⁴

Though Charlotte and Patrick wrote letters on 2 July and 6 July referring to the proposed Royal Academy scheme there is no mention in any extant Brontë correspondence of Branwell's either taking up a place there or even having travelled to London to do so. This was not a family ‘conspiracy of silence' to obliterate all reference to Branwell's first step on the slippery downward slope (they were hardly reticent about his later failings) but simply reflects the fact that the plan came to nothing. Mrs Gaskell certainly believed this was the case and actually wrote to Ellen Nussey to ask why. Ellen's reply, though not flattering to Branwell, is definitive: ‘I do not know whether it was conduct or want of finances that
prevented
Branwell from going to the Royal Academy. Probably there were impediments of both kinds.'
⁵

In fact there was a far simpler and more creditable reason: on 11 September 1835 Branwell had taken what was supposed to be his last lesson with William Robinson in Leeds.
⁶
On 16 November he wrote to confess that ‘After repeated delays, for which I am ashamed to apologise I have at length nearly completed my picture, and shall be ready to appear with it before your bar of judgement on Monday next': he also asked for a further course of lessons, a request which Patrick endorsed in a telling letter of his own:

I am so much pleased with the progress he has made, under your tuition, and so fully impressed with the idea, that he should go to the Metropolis under the
most favourable circumstances
, that I have finally made up my mind, that by
your permission, he shall have at least another course of lessons from you, during the season of Winter, and shall improve himself, in Anatomy, which is the grammar of painting, & also make some farther progress in Classics, and consequently defer his journey, to London, till next Summer – When God willing – I intend he shall go—
⁷

Although this clearly demonstrates that Branwell had not made the infamous failed attempt to gain admittance to the Royal Academy it does not rule out the possibility that he made a brief trip to London, perhaps in the spring of 1836. All potential probationers at the Royal Academy were required to submit an extensive portfolio of drawings ‘from the skeleton' and ‘from the antique' as proof of draughtsmanship and London, with the resources of the British Museum and the recently founded National Gallery, was the obvious place to go.
⁸

The evidence that he did so is not contemporary – it was recorded between 1872 and 1886 – but it comes from friends Branwell made in the 1840s. Francis Grundy, a railway engineer, remembered him drawing the western façade of Westminster Abbey from memory ‘having been but once in London some years before'. Branwell always liked to show off in front of an admiring audience but this incident is not proof that he had actually seen the abbey for himself. From childhood he had been surrounded by books like
A Description of London
, which not only described such buildings in detail but also reproduced pictures of them.
⁹
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Branwell carelessly to have sketched a copy of one of these illustrations from memory for the amusement of his friends, perhaps deliberately leaving them with the impression that he was recalling it from personal observation. This is precisely what he did with the maps of London he obtained in preparation for his proposed entry at the Royal Academy, as another acquaintance, George Searle Phillips, later described.

So enthusiastic was he about London at this time, that he got hold of all the maps he could find, illustrating its highways and byways, its alleys, and back slums, and short cuts, and studied them so closely that he knew them all by heart, and often cheated the ‘commercial gents' who came to the Black Bull into the belief that he, though a young man, was an old Londoner, and knew more about the ins and outs of the mighty Babylon than many a man who had passed his life within its walls. Then Branwell would astonish them by saying that he was never in London in his life.
¹⁰

On the other hand, another railway friend, a Mr Woolven, actually claimed to have met Branwell in London:

I remember previous to my being engaged in the Railway Service I one night visited the Castle Tavern in Holborne London then kept by the Champion Prize fighter Tom Spring, the parlour was full of sporting characters Pugilists &c[.] One of the company I believe was Mr Bronte to whom was referred to decide many disputes about great battles that had been fought.

When Woolven took up his post at Hebden Bridge in 1840 he observed the clerks and porters bringing the stores for the different stations on the line by canal-boat from Littleborough: ‘Mr Bronte was among them to my great surprise I recognised him as the person I had seen at Tom Springs in London.' Woolven struck up a friendship with Branwell and remained at Hebden Bridge station until 1846 so he had ample opportunity to confirm that they had met in London several years earlier.
¹¹

Woolven might have been mistaken, or deceived, however, for Branwell was completely familiar with the setting and the
habitués
of the Castle tavern at Holborn from his reading of the works of Pierce Egan, the author who had possibly inspired his own love of boxing. Branwell had certainly read extracts from his five-volume work
Boxiana; or Sketches of Antient and Modern Pugilism
, in
Blackwood's Magazine
, if not the work itself. He also regularly read Egan's sporting journal,
Bell's Life in London
, for which he had to send to the Shake Hands public house between Keighley and Oakworth. In all probability Branwell would also have read Egan's
Book of Sports
, published only three years earlier in 1832, which gave a detailed description of the Castle tavern, its landlord, its clientele and a typical evening of jollities there.
¹²
With his facility for conversation and his remarkably retentive memory, Branwell would easily have been able to give an apparently personal impression of the Castle tavern and talk with its famous landlord, the retired pugilist, Tom Spring. Among his much more worldly and better travelled friends at the railway, Branwell was always anxious to foster a sophisticated image of himself, so it would not have been unnatural for him to pretend a genuine knowledge of the metropolis which was, in fact, simply derived from books.

If Branwell did indeed make a visit to London, however, it is likely to have taken place at the beginning of 1836 because, having written to the editor
of
Blackwood's Magazine
on 8 December 1835, he wrote for a second time on 8 April 1836 claiming ‘Absence from home has for a long time prevented my again addressing you'.
¹³
At the very least this was an exaggeration and any absence can only have been for a few days. Branwell was certainly in Haworth between 19 December and 14 January and on 10 February, 2 and 23 March when he dated manuscripts of his latest story ‘Angria and the Angrians'.
¹⁴
He was also there on 29 February when he was initiated as a mason into the Three Graces Lodge and on 28 March when he attended his first meeting as a full member.
¹⁵

Had Branwell really undergone the traumatic experience of rejection or personal failure in London this would undoubtedly have been reflected in his writing. Biographers have therefore assumed that two fragments of an Angrian story written in May 1836 are an autobiographical account of his experiences. They describe the first visit of a young Angrian, Charles Wentworth, to Verdopolis: overwhelmed by the sights and glories of the city, particularly the splendour of St Michael's Cathedral, Wentworth allows his letters of introduction to remain unused in his pocket, fortifies himself with regular ‘little squibs of rum' and spends all day walking about ‘objectless'.
¹⁶

It is always dangerous to argue autobiographical facts from fiction and there is nothing to suggest that Branwell identified himself with Wentworth, who is introduced as a new character in this story in which he plays only a relatively minor role.
¹⁷
Wentworth's background and reasons for his visit to the metropolis could hardly be more different from those of Branwell. Wentworth is a wealthy young man, soon to inherit a large fortune on his twenty-first birthday, who is troubled by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. He asks ‘shall I perish for ever for doing what I could not avoid' and then, following the ‘most mistaken advice' of the poet who advises ‘Pursue what fate or Chance proclaimeth the best', he decides to visit Verdopolis ‘to seek in its pleasures and dissipation and wild approaching turmoil the good which fate and Chance should hold out to him'.
¹⁸
This could hardly be further from the fixed purpose of the eighteen-year-old Branwell's journey.

As for Wentworth's ‘little squibs of rum, rum was the only drink Branwell disdained. Whisky was his own favourite tipple and when he could not afford that he drank gin.
¹⁹
In a story written the following year as part of his chronicles of Angria, Branwell has Wentworth, Hastings and his sister's creation, Townsend, drinking in an inn at Aynsham. There, brandy is declared ‘the highest Liquor the prince and sovereign of the lot'; the man who chooses to
drink it ‘exhibits Ambition a love of the grand in art and Nature – a poetical feeling'. Gin is ‘a witty but dissipated sort of Liquor' whose choice ‘exhibits a quick mind but a fondness for the foundations of society – the lowest'. Rum, on the other hand, which Wentworth is again drinking, is castigated sharply: ‘Catch me a harsher meaner clumsier fluid and I'm yours … A love of Rum declares a mind naturally grovelling. and fourpennorth betokens it stingy parsimonious and abominable'.
²⁰
Quite clearly Branwell did not intend Wentworth as a self-portrait.

Wentworth's dazed reaction to the glorious buildings and bustling streets of Verdopolis is typical of all newcomers to that great city but is not the beginning, crux or even end of his story. The news that finally moves him to action is the outbreak of war, at which point he decides to join the forces of Northangerland and seek glory in the ensuing military campaign to protect Angria from the Reformist Ministry in Verdopolis.
²¹
In fact, Wentworth owes his creation to Branwell's need to have an informant among Northangerland's troops, just as he already had Henry Hastings on the side of Zamorna and John Flower, now Baron Richton, with Fidena and the Constitutionalists.
²²
He fills a fictional void and assumes a minor and rather disreputable role in the continuation of the Angrian chronicles. In short, therefore, there is no reason to believe Wentworth and his experiences in Verdopolis are literal and autobiographical accounts of Branwell himself and his supposed adventures in London. The story cannot, and should not, be taken out of its context as a very minor incident in a long train of much more important events.

Branwell was in a buoyant mood throughout the autumn of 1835 and the following spring. He was not only constantly employed on his writing but also had several works on hand at once, including a massive undertaking writing the chronicles of Angria. On 3 October 1835 he began an important new chapter in the first volume of a chronicle which, over the summer, had followed the fortunes of Angria after Zamorna's victory over the Ashantee at Loanga and the excitement of the subsequent elections. The new chapter was almost exclusively concerned with the political consequences of the Marquis of Ardrah's Reform Ministry being elected to power and his introduction of a ‘Bill for the Reform of the Angrian Kingdom'. The Angrians were to be faced with the stark choice of complete independence from the Verdopolitan Union, with the subsequent loss of their estates and rights elsewhere in Africa, or the abolition of their own monarchy and legislature, which would be submerged in that of Verdopolis. These events, inspired by
the return of Viscount Melbourne's reforming Whig ministry in the April elections of 1835, set the scene for the forthcoming civil war which was to be the most climactic event in the whole history of the imaginary kingdoms of Africa.
²³