Brontës (62 page)

The actual date is not known. He was certainly at home when the Taylors came to stay in the first week of June. On 22 July 1838, Morgan paid a rare visit to Haworth to give the afternoon sermon in aid of the church Sunday school and it seems logical that Branwell should have taken advantage of his visit to return to Bradford with him. In any event, he was established in Bradford by 31 July, and living in lodgings only a stone's throw from Morgan's Christ Church.
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The house was a modest one, in the middle of a stone-built terrace which lay at right angles to the top of Darley Street, a busy thoroughfare leading to the heart of the town. It was well placed for businessmen seeking their own or their families' portraits, though it was in a residential area rather than in a commercial centre. Branwell's ‘Genteel & Comfortable lodgings … suitable for a Single Gentleman, or a Lady & Gentleman without incumbrance', were at No. 2, Fountain Street where the owner, Isaac Kirby, lived with his wife and two children. Kirby advertised himself as a ‘dealer in London & Dublin, Double XX Stout, Porter etc', which he sold from his commercial premises opposite the Rawson Arms in Market Street.
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It is surely evidence of the fact that Branwell was not yet a confirmed drinker that his father and William Morgan
allowed him to lodge with a dealer in beer in his first foray away from home.

The Kirbys and their niece, Margaret Hartley, were among those who sat to their lodger, but Branwell was also able to cultivate the much wealthier clerical circle surrounding his extremely influential patron. He is known to have painted Morgan himself and even the vicar of Bradford, Henry Heap.
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Though his portrait of Mrs Kirby is unflattering in the extreme, with its sharply angled face and Pinocchio-esque nose, other portraits of the period show that Branwell was a perfectly competent, though not a great artist. As he settled into his new lodgings, he had every prospect of making at least a modest success of his chosen career.

Though the fact that Branwell was now in a way to earn his own living eased the financial pressures on the rest of his family, it was still an absolute necessity that his sisters should be able to support themselves. Patrick was sixty-one and still working as hard as ever, since he had been without a curate for over a year. His continued good health, let alone his continued existence, could not be relied upon. Charlotte had little option, therefore, but to revoke her decision not to return to Dewsbury Moor after her extended summer holiday ended. On 24 August 1838, she wrote to Ellen Nussey, who had moved on from one brother in London to stay with another, Joshua, in Bath.

I am again at Dewsbury-Moor engaged in the old business teach – teach – teach …
When will you come home?
Make haste you have been at Bath long enough for all purposes – by this time you have acquired polish enough I am sure – if the varnish is laid on much thicker I am afraid the good wood underneath will be quite concealed and your old Yorkshire friends won't stand that –
Come
–
Come
I am getting really tired of your absence Saturday after Saturday comes round and I can have no hope of hearing your knock at the door and then being told that ‘Miss Ellen Nussey is come.' O dear in this monotonous life of mine that was a pleasant event
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Charlotte, as usual, exaggerated her plight. She was still in touch with Mary and Martha Taylor, who were about to take a tour in Wales, and she had ‘seen a great deal' of one of her former pupils, Ann Cook. It is a measure of Charlotte's changing mood that a girl whom she had once described as one of the ‘fat-headed oafs' at Roe Head was now transformed into someone who was ‘still the same warm-hearted – affectionate – prejudiced –
handsome girl as ever' whom Charlotte did not think at all altered ‘except that her carriage &c. is improved'. Of events or gossip in the neighbourhood, Charlotte could only say, ‘I have nothing at all to tell you' – this despite the fact that in the previous two weeks Dewsbury had been torn apart by some of the worst riots in its history. The new Poor Law guardians had recently held their first meetings in the town, causing the Radicals to hold a protest rally: the mob went on the rampage, physically attacking the guardians, who had to call out the troops to protect themselves. Only four days before Charlotte wrote her letter, there had been a second anti-Poor Law riot in Dewsbury even though troops were now stationed in the town to keep the populace in order.
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Of these dramatic events, despite her once-vaunted interest in politics, Charlotte remained oblivious, wrapped up in her own little world at Heald's House.

Charlotte was not alone in returning to the teaching profession. In September, Emily, who was now twenty years old, sought paid employment for the first time. Miss Wooler could not afford to employ another teacher at Dewsbury Moor, so Emily had to look elsewhere and found herself a post at Law Hill, a girls' school at Southowram on the outskirts of Halifax.

Law Hill is little changed today. It stands in glorious isolation high on a hillside with panoramic views across miles of open moor and farmland. To the north lie Queensbury and Shelf, to the southeast, across the wooded grounds of Kirklees Hall, are the familiar landmarks of the tower of Patrick's old church at Hartshead and the site of Roe Head. On a clear day, the view extends far into the heart of the East Riding. Below the house, the hillside falls away steeply into the beautiful wooded Shibden Valley; the village of Southowram is a good half mile further down the hill and its church, which the ladies of Law Hill attended, is another half mile beyond the village.

The house itself had once belonged to a gentleman farmer and it reflects that comparative wealth and solidity. Built of blackened sandstone, the house is square and austere, three storeys high with large sash windows, one on each side of the door and three on each of the upper floors. At the front is a small garden and to the side, across a large cobbled yard with a stone mounting block, was a big stone barn which had been converted into the schoolroom. Out of sight, behind the hill, lay the wealthy and highly cultured town of Halifax. Besides giving the girls an enviable proximity to exhibitions and museums, Halifax attracted eminent musicians from all over Europe. During Emily's residence, there was a concert by Johann Strauss and his waltz band, who performed to great applause in the Halifax
theatre. In terms of location, therefore, Law Hill had much to offer Emily.
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The school was well established and had been run for many years by Elizabeth and Maria Patchett, sisters of a Halifax banker. The younger sister, who was described as ‘very gentle', had got married and gone to live in Dewsbury almost exactly a year before Emily's appointment. It was possibly through her that Emily found out about the situation, for her husband was Titus Senior Brooke. Patrick knew the Brookes from his days as a curate in Dewsbury and Leah and Maria Brooke had both been at school with Charlotte. Though the post may have come to Emily's notice by word of mouth from the Dewsbury district, it is just as likely that she responded to an advertisement in the local press.
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Opinion was divided about Elizabeth Patchett, the forty-two-year-old spinster who remained in charge of the school. According to her former pupils, she was a very beautiful woman, who wore her hair in long curls and was a skilful rider. She was fond of teaching, a kind schoolmistress and the daily walks in her company were much prized. On the other hand, a contemporary who lived near the school in the winter of 1836–7 described her as ‘stately and austere. We always understood she knew how to keep things in order'.
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This seems to have been the Brontë view of the school. Even Charlotte was forced to admit that Emily's lot was harder than her own.

My sister Emily is gone into a Situation as teacher in a large school of near forty pupils near Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure it gives an appalling account of her duties – Hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night,. with only one half-hour of exercise between – this is slavery I fear she will never stand it.
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Of the forty-odd pupils at the school, all aged between eleven and fifteen, approximately half were boarders, hence the lateness of the hours Emily had to work. Despite its size, Miss Patchett ran her school with just two other teachers, so Emily's workload would inevitably have been greater than Charlotte's.
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Emily did not stand the ‘slavery' of Law Hill for long. As had happened before at Roe Head, her health broke down under the strain of living in the disciplined and demanding atmosphere of a boarding school. This was a fairly gradual process; Emily's first term does not appear to have been particularly unhappy. According to several old pupils who remembered her, she
was not unpopular ‘though she could not easily associate with others, and her work was hard because she had not the faculty of doing it quickly'. The only recorded incident concerning her which survives from this time is typical: one schoolgirl remembered that Emily was devoted to the house dog and once told her class that it was dearer to her than any of them were.
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Like Charlotte, Emily took refuge from the harsh realities and fatigue of the daily grind in poetry. The large number of poems she wrote in the three months of her first term suggests that, despite the length of the hours she had to work, she still found leisure for her own writing. As some of the poems are dramatic incidents in the Gondal saga, such as the suicide of Ferdinand de Samara, who has been deceived and abandoned by his former lover, Augusta Almeda,
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it is even possible that Emily was able to spend time on her prose tales while at Law Hill. Gondal was certainly not forgotten, nor put to one side. In this autumn of 1838 she also wrote three outstanding poems which expressed her personal misery and homesickness. The most clearly autobiographical of these, written on 4 December 1838, is worth quoting in full because it so exquisitely encapsulates Emily's dilemma: would a snatched hour of leisure be better spent in dreams of her beloved home, graphically described even to the path overgrown with weeds, or of Gondal, that ‘other clime'?

A little while, a little while

The noisy crowd are barred away;

And I can sing and I can smile –

A little while I've holyday!

Where wilt thou go my harassed heart?

Full many a land invites thee now;

And places near, and far apart

Have rest for thee, my weary brow –

There is a spot mid barren hills

Where winter howls and driving rain

But if the dreary tempest chills

There is a light that warms again

The house is old, the trees are bare

And moonless bends the misty dome

But what on earth is half so dear –

So longed for as the hearth of home?

The mute bird sitting on the stone,

The dank moss dripping from the wall,

The garden-walk with weeds o'e'r-grown

I love them – how I love them all!

Shall I go there? or shall I seek

Another clime, another sky –

Where tongues familiar music speak

In accents dear to memory?

Yes, as I mused, the naked room,

The flickering firelight died away

And from the midst of cheerless gloom

I passed to bright, unclouded day –

A little and a lone green lane

That opened on a common wide

A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain

Of mountains circling every side –

A heaven so clear, an earth so calm,

So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air

And, deepening still the dreamlike charm,

Wild moor sheep feeding everywhere –

That was the scene – I knew it well

I knew the pathways far and near

That winding o'er each billowy swell –

Marked out the tracks of wandering deer

Could I have lingered but an hour

It well had paid a week of toil

But truth has banished fancys power

I hear my dungeon bars recoil –

Even as I stood with raptured eye

Absorbed in bliss so deep and dear

My hour of rest had fleeted by

And given me back to weary care—
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Both the other poems, written in the gloom and snow of November and December at Law Hill, yearned for the transformation that spring and summer would bring to the moors.

For the moors, for the moors where the short grass

Like velvet beneath us should lie!

For the moors, for the moors where each high pass

Rose sunny against the clear sky!

For the moors, where the linnet was trilling

Its song on the old granite stone –

Where the lark – the wild sky-lark was filling

Every breast with delight like its own –
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The third poem, written just before Emily's return home for the Christmas holidays, was an elegy for the harebell, whose delicate flower breathes ‘a calm and softening spell', soothing as well as stirring up her longing for the return of summer.
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Even if being away from home did little for Emily's spirits, it was clearly a stimulus to poetic impulse, as the poems she produced this autumn included some of the best she ever wrote.

The family reunited for the Christmas holidays at the end of 1838, but joy at being home was mixed with concern at Patrick's evidently deteriorating state of health. He had been under considerable stress all year. The annual battle over church rates had been fought and lost but this time the confrontation had been taken a stage further. James Greenwood, the most prominent and well-respected of the Haworth Dissenters, had been prosecuted for refusing to pay his Bradford church rate. As he was also Chief Constable of Haworth, responsible for much of the parish administration, relations between him and Patrick must have been strained. When Greenwood pleaded that the rate had been levied illegally, the magistrates declared they had no jurisdiction in the matter and ‘wished the parties joy of the ecclesiastical courts'. A number of other people in the chapelry were later successfully prosecuted for failure to pay
their tithes, a move which can only have further alienated the Dissenters.
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