Brontës (73 page)

After the excitement of the official openings, things quietened down in Sowerby Bridge, but not to the extent so often suggested by biographers. It is true that only three trains ran daily each way along the line at the beginning, but by 1 March 1841, when the Summit Tunnel was open and that part of the journey no longer had to be made by omnibus, this had increased to twelve trains each way, a total of twenty-four passing through Sowerby Bridge every day.
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The clerk and his assistant were therefore kept busy logging the trains and their cargoes, organizing and co-ordinating the loading and unloading of waggons and supervising the safety of passengers. As Sowerby Bridge was the nearest station to Halifax, this was a not inconsiderable task. The
Halifax Guardian
complained that

Since the opening of the Railway, Sowerby Bridge has been one continued scene of battle occasioned by the passing and re-passing of the Omnibuses etc. Opposition has already commenced, and the public may now have a cheap ride to or from that place.
⁹⁵

The dangers of horse-drawn omnibuses racing each other up and down the perilously steep hill between the competing inns of Halifax and Sowerby Bridge in an attempt to be the first and cheapest service to get their passengers to the station added to the bustle and excitement in Sowerby Bridge. The town was already a thriving industrial centre of about 5,000 inhabitants, which owed its wealth to its position at a crossing of the River Calder at the foot of the Pennines. The precipitous hills surrounding the town provided a plentiful supply of water to run a large number of cotton, woollen, worsted and corn mills in the valley bottom. The Rochdale canal, built in
the late eighteenth century, added to the town's prosperity and now extended along the length of the Aire and Calder Navigation to the heartlands of industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire ending, in the extreme east, at the flourishing port of Goole. Sowerby Bridge had therefore developed long and busy wharves to deal with the canal traffic and a gas works, chemical works and iron foundries had grown up along the banks of the canal.
⁹⁶

According to local tradition, Branwell lodged at the Pear Tree Inn in Sowerby Street, overlooking the railway. This seems inherently unlikely. In 1841, there was no Pear Tree Inn in Sowerby Bridge and the site was occupied by a beer house, the lowest form of drinking establishment.
⁹⁷
However great his supposed propensity for alcohol, Branwell was still a gentleman and a comparatively well paid one at that. No gentleman would have been seen lodging in a beer house: he might possibly have lodged at any one of the six inns in the town, but he is more likely to have rented a suite of rooms with a respectable family as he had already done in Bradford and Broughton and was to do at Luddenden.

For Branwell the chief merit of his new job was his proximity to the literary, artistic and musical circles of Halifax, a town long renowned for its culture. John Frobisher, the organist at Halifax Parish Church, was a prolific organizer of concerts for the Quarterly Choral Society; there were regular, if sometimes bizarre, lectures in the town and, in December, a newly refurbished and reorganized Halifax Theatre opened, offering two different plays every night of the week.
⁹⁸
In addition, Branwell had old friends in the town. Within a few weeks of his arrival he had already had at least one visit from Joseph Bentley Leyland, the sculptor, who had his studio and marble works at The Square in Halifax town centre. He brought with him his brother, Francis, an antiquarian who ran a bookshop and circulating library from his father's premises, Roberts Leyland & Son, at 15 Cornmarket, again in the centre of Halifax. Francis Leyland's first impressions of Branwell are instructive.

The young railway clerk was of gentleman-like appearance, and seemed to be qualified for a much better position than the one he had chosen. In stature he was a little below the middle height; not ‘almost insignificantly small,' as Mr Grundy states, nor had he ‘a downcast look;' neither was he ‘a plain specimen of humanity.' He was slim and agile in figure, yet of well-formed outline. His complexion was clear and ruddy, and the expression of his face, at the time, lightsome and cheerful. His voice had a ringing sweetness, and the utterance and use
of his English were perfect. Branwell appeared to be in excellent spirits, and showed none of those traces of intemperance with which some writers have unjustly credited him about this period of his life.

My brother had often spoken to me of Branwell's poetical abilities, his conversational powers, and the polish of his education; and, on a personal acquaintance, I found nothing to question in this estimate of his mental gifts, and of his literary attainments.
⁹⁹

In this hopeful mood, with the real possibility of literary success before him, Branwell ended the year 1840 in a new career on the railway at Sowerby Bridge.

Chapter Thirteen

A WISH FOR WINGS

The new year of 1841 opened with bad news from Gomersal. Joshua Taylor, father of Mary and Martha, had died at Christmas after a long illness. The consequence of his death, as Charlotte anticipated, was to be ‘a dissolution and dispersion of the family perhaps not immediately but in the course of a year, or two – '.
¹
The Taylor family problems did not interest Charlotte as much as Ellen's: her suitor, Mr Vincent, could not be persuaded to make a proposal in due form. He had written numerous ‘sentimental and lovesick' letters to Ellen's brother, Henry, but had not yet declared himself to the object of his attentions. Charlotte lost all patience.

In the name of St Chrysostom, St Simeon and St Jude, why does not that amiable young gentleman come forward like a man and say all that he has to say to yourself personally – instead of trifling with kinsmen and kinswomen?

At Ellen's request, she gave her friend further advice on what she should do, once more setting her a very different standard from herself.

From what I know of your character – and I think I know it pretty well – I should say you will never
love before marriage
– After that ceremony is over, and after you have had some months to settle down, and to get accustomed to the creature you have taken for your worse half – you will probably make a most affectionate and happy wife – … Such being the case Nell – I hope you will not have the romantic folly to wait for the awakening of what the French call
‘Une grande passion'
– My good girl ‘une grande passion' is
‘une grande folie'
. I have told you so before and I tell it you again – Mediocrity in all things is wisdom – mediocrity in the sensations is superlative wisdom … all I have to say may be comprised in a very brief sentence. On one hand don't accept if you are
certain
you cannot
tolerate
the man – on the other hand don't refuse because you cannot
adore
him.
²

Ellen seems to have taken Charlotte's advice in rather poor part, suspecting that she was in league with Henry and the rest of her family in trying to persuade her to accept Mr Vincent.
³
In fact, Charlotte was in touch with Henry, but attempting to convince him that he ought to rely on Ellen's own judgement in the matter. Rather curiously for a man who was engaged to another woman, Henry had been in fairly regular correspondence with Charlotte since she turned him down. On one occasion she was vastly amused when he asked her to write

in a regular literary way to you on some particular topic – I cannot do it at all – do you think I am a Blue-stocking? I feel half-inclined to laugh at you for the idea, but perhaps you would be angry what was the topic to be – Chemistry? or Astronomy? or Mechanics? or Chonchology or Entomology or what other ology? I know nothing at all about any of these –
⁴

Now he sent her a poem and asked her to return the gift in kind, provoking an equally satirical reply.

How do you know that I have it in my power to comply with that request? Once indeed I was very poetical, when I was sixteen, seventeen eighteen and nineteen years old – but I am now twenty-four approaching twenty-five – and the intermediate years are those which begin to rob life of some of its superfluous
colouring. At this age it is time that the imagination should be pruned and trimmed – that the judgement should be cultivated – and a few at least, of the countless illusions of early youth should be cleared away. I have not written poetry for a long while
⁵

This was indeed the case. It would seem that the golden dream of Angria had at long last begun to pall. She had written nothing, either poetry or prose, since the beginning of the story she had sent to Hartley Coleridge the previous winter. In telling Henry that ‘the judgement should be cultivated' she perhaps indicated that she now spent her leisure hours in reading, rather than writing. The old passion for self-improvement, stimulated by the gift of the bales of French novels from Gomersal, had sprung to life once more. The hot-house attractions of Angria were now beginning to be replaced by the less exotic but equally potent and foreign attractions of France.

Now, too, she had a new occupation for, after a break of more than eighteen months, she had at last found herself a job. Some time towards the end of February, she accepted the post of governess in the family of John White of Upperwood House at Rawdon, travelling there to take up residence on 2 March 1841. By a singular coincidence, she thus found herself situated within a stone's throw of Woodhouse Grove School, where her parents had met and courted so long ago. Upperwood House was Georgian, ‘not very large, but exceedingly comfortable and well regulated', set in its own grounds on the wooded hillside above the lovely Aire Valley. Rural in outlook, it was only a few miles from both Bradford and Leeds and, as Charlotte was swift to point out to Ellen, only nine miles from Brookroyd.

In taking the place I have made a large sacrifice in the way of salary, in the hope of securing comfort – by which word I do not mean to express good eating and drinking, or warm fire, or a soft bed, but the society of cheerful faces, and minds and hearts not dug out of a lead mine, or cut from a marble quarry.
⁶

Charlotte's salary was indeed low, a mere twenty pounds per annum, out of which approximately four pounds was to be deducted for her laundry. This was exactly half the sum Anne was earning at Thorp Green, despite the fact that she was younger and less experienced than her sister.
⁷

Charlotte's new employer, John White, was a Bradford merchant who, with his brother, had inherited Upperwood from a wealthy uncle in 1818. He and his wife, Jane, were a devoted couple, with three children, Sarah,
aged eight, and Jasper, aged six, who were Charlotte's pupils, and Arthur, the baby of the family who was only two and still in the nursery.
⁸

Though Charlotte set out determined to do her best, it was probably inevitable that she would encounter difficulties – as she herself was the first to recognize.

no one but myself can tell how hard a governess's work is to me – for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are to the employment. Do not think that I fail to blame myself for this, or that I leave any means unemployed to conquer this feeling. Some of my greatest difficulties lie in things that would appear to you comparatively trivial. I find it so hard to repel the rude familiarity of children. I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want, however much I want it. It is less pain to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to [go into the kitchen to] request its removal. I am a fool. Heaven knows I cannot help it!
⁹

A few years later, writing to advise a friend whose daughters were contemplating the prospect of becoming governesses, Charlotte further analysed her failure: ‘the
one
great qualification necessary to the task', she argued with a passion that spoke from experience, was

the faculty, not merely of
acquiring
but of
imparting
knowledge; the power of influencing young minds; that natural fondness for – that innate sympathy with children … He or She who possesses this faculty, this sympathy – though perhaps not otherwise highly accomplished – need never fear failure in the career of instruction. Children will be docile with them, will improve under them; parents will consequently repose in them confidence; their task will be comparatively light, their path comparatively smooth. If the faculty be absent, the life of a teacher will be a struggle from beginning to end … she may earn and doubly earn her scanty salary; as a daily governess, or a school-teacher she may succeed, but as a resident governess she will never – (except under peculiar and exceptional circumstances) be happy. Her deficiency will harass her not so much in school-time as in play-hours; the moments that would be rest and recreation to the governess who understood and could adapt herself to children, will be almost torture to her who has not that power; many a time, when her charge turns unruly on her hands, when the responsibility which she would wish to discharge faithfully and perfectly, becomes unmanageable to her, she will wish herself a housemaid or kitchen-girl, rather than a baited, trampled, desolate, distracted governess.