Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (560 page)

‘It must upset most people’s notions of beauty to be told that the portrait at the beginning is that of an ugly woman.
 
  I do not altogether like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness.  I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose.

‘I had the impression that Cartwright’s mill was burnt in 1820 not in 1812.  You give much too favourable an account of the black-coated and Tory savages that kept the people down, and provoked excesses in those days.  Old Robertson said he “would wade to the knees in blood rather than the then state of things should be altered,” — a state including Corn law, Test law, and a host of other oppressions.

‘Once more I thank you for the book — the first copy, I believe, that arrived in New Zealand. — Sincerely yours,

‘Mary Taylor.’

And in another letter, written a little later (28th January 1858), Miss Mary Taylor writes to Miss Ellen Nussey in similar strain: —

‘Your account of Mrs. Gaskell’s book was very interesting,’ she says.  ‘She seems a hasty, impulsive person, and the
 
needful drawing back after her warmth gives her an inconsistent look.  Yet I doubt not her book will be of great use.  You must be aware that many strange notions as to the kind of person Charlotte really was will be done away with by a knowledge of the true facts of her life.  I have heard imperfectly of farther printing on the subject.  As to the mutilated edition that is to come, I am sorry for it.  Libellous or not, the first edition was all true, and except the declamation all, in my opinion, useful to be published.  Of course I don’t know how far necessity may make Mrs. Gaskell give them up.  You know one dare not always say the world moves.’

We who do know the whole story in fullest detail will understand that it was desirable to ‘mutilate’ the book, and that, indeed, truth did in some measure require it.  But with these letters of Mary Taylor’s before us, let us not hear again that the story of Charlotte Brontë’s life was not, in its main features, accurately and adequately told by her gifted biographer.

Why then, I am naturally asked, add one further book to the Brontë biographical literature?  The reply is, I hope, sufficient.  Forty years have gone by, and they have been years of growing interest in the subject.  In the year 1895 ten thousand people visited the Brontë Museum at Haworth.  Interesting books have been written, notably Sir Wemyss Reid’s
Monograph
and Mr. Leyland’s
Brontë Family
, but they have gone out of print.  Many new facts have come to light, and many details, moreover, which were too trivial in 1857 are of sufficient importance to-day; and many facts which were rightly suppressed then may honestly and honourably be given to the public at an interval of nearly half a century.  Added to all this, fortune has been kind to me.

Some three or four years ago Miss Ellen Nussey placed in my hands a printed volume of some 400 pages, which bore no publisher’s name, but contained upon its title-page the statement that it was
The Story of Charlotte Brontë’s Life
,
 
as told through her Letters
.  These are the Letters — 370 in number — which Miss Nussey had lent to Mrs. Gaskell and to Sir Wemyss Reid.  Of these letters Mrs. Gaskell published about 100, and Sir Wemyss Reid added as many more as he considered circumstances justified twenty years back.

It was explained to me that the volume had been privately printed under a misconception, and that only some dozen copies were extant.  Miss Nussey asked me if I would write something around what might remain of the unpublished letters, and if I saw my way to do anything which would add to the public appreciation of the friend who from early childhood until now has been the most absorbing interest of her life.  A careful study of the volume made it perfectly clear that there were still some letters which might with advantage be added to the Brontë story.  At the same time arose the possibility of a veto being placed upon their publication.  An examination of Charlotte Brontë’s will, which was proved at York by her husband in 1855, suggested an easy way out of the difficulty.  I made up my mind to try and see Mr. Nicholls.  I had heard of his disinclination to be in any way associated with the controversy which had gathered round his wife for all these years; but I wrote to him nevertheless, and received a cordial invitation to visit him in his Irish home.

It was exactly forty years to a day after Charlotte died — March 31st, 1895 — when I alighted at the station in a quiet little town in the centre of Ireland, to receive the cordial handclasp of the man into whose keeping Charlotte Brontë had given her life.  It was one of many visits, and the beginning of an interesting correspondence.  Mr. Nicholls placed all the papers in his possession in my hands.  They were more varied and more abundant than I could possibly have anticipated.  They included MSS. of childhood, of which so much has been said, and stories of adult life, one fragment indeed being later than the
Emma
which
 
appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine
for 1856, with a note by Thackeray.  Here were the letters Charlotte Brontë had written to her brother and to her sisters during her second sojourn in Brussels — to ‘Dear Branwell’ and ‘Dear E. J.,’ as she calls Emily — letters even to handle will give a thrill to the Brontë enthusiast.  Here also were the love-letters of Maria Branwell to her lover Patrick Brontë, which are referred to in Mrs. Gaskell’s biography, but have never hitherto been printed.

‘The four small scraps of Emily and Anne’s manuscript,’ writes Mr. Nicholls, ‘I found in the small box I send you; the others I found in the bottom of a cupboard tied up in a newspaper, where they had lain for nearly thirty years, and where, had it not been for your visit, they must have remained during my lifetime, and most likely afterwards have been destroyed.’

Some slight extracts from Brontë letters in
Macmillan’s Magazine
, signed ‘E. Balmer Williams,’ brought me into communication with a gifted daughter of Mr. W. S. Williams.  Mrs. Williams and her husband generously placed the whole series of these letters of Charlotte Brontë to their father at my disposal.  It was of some of these letters that Mrs. Gaskell wrote in enthusiastic terms when she had read them, and she was only permitted to see a few.  Then I have to thank Mr. Joshua Taylor, the nephew of Miss Mary Taylor, for permission to publish his aunt’s letters.  Mr. James Taylor, again, who wanted to marry Charlotte Brontë, and who died twenty years afterwards in Bombay, left behind him a bundle of letters which I found in the possession of a relative in the north of London.
 
  I discovered through a letter addressed to Miss Nussey that the ‘Brussels friend’ referred to by Mrs. Gaskell was a Miss Lætitia Wheelwright, and I determined to write to all the
 
Wheelwrights in the London Directory.  My first effort succeeded, and
the
Miss Wheelwright kindly lent me all the letters that she had preserved.  It is scarcely possible that time will reveal many more unpublished letters from the author of
Jane Eyre
.  Several of those already in print are forgeries, and I have actually seen a letter addressed from Paris, a city which Miss Brontë never visited.  I have the assurance of Dr. Héger of Brussels that Miss Brontë’s correspondence with his father no longer exists.  In any case one may safely send forth this little book with the certainty that it is a fairly complete collection of Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence, and that it is altogether a valuable revelation of a singularly interesting personality.  Steps will be taken henceforth, it may be added, to vindicate Mr. Nicholls’s rights in whatever may still remain of his wife’s unpublished correspondence.

CHAPTER I: PATRICK BRONTË AND MARIA HIS WIFE

It would seem quite clear to any careful investigator that the Reverend Patrick Brontë, Incumbent of Haworth, and the father of three famous daughters, was a much maligned man.  We talk of the fierce light which beats upon a throne, but what is that compared to the fierce light which beats upon any man of some measure of individuality who is destined to live out his life in the quiet of a country village — in the very centre, as it were, of ‘personal talk’ and gossip not always kindly to the stranger within the gate?  The view of Mr. Brontë, presented by Mrs. Gaskell in the early editions of her biography of Charlotte Brontë, is that of a severe, ill-tempered, and distinctly disagreeable character.  It is the picture of a man who disliked the vanities of life so intensely, that the new shoes of his children and the silk dress of his wife were not spared by him in sudden gusts of passion.  A stern old ruffian, one is inclined to consider him.  His pistol-shooting rings picturesquely, but not agreeably, through Mrs. Gaskell’s memoirs.  It has been already explained in more than one quarter that this was not the real Patrick Brontë, and that much of the unfavourable gossip was due to the chatter of a dismissed servant, retailed to Mrs. Gaskell on one of her missions of inquiry in the neighbourhood.  The stories of the burnt shoes and the mutilated dress have been relegated to the realm of myth, and the pistol-shooting may now be acknowledged
 
as a harmless pastime not more iniquitous than the golfing or angling of a latter-day clergyman.  It is certain, were the matter of much interest to-day, that Mr. Brontë was fond of the use of firearms.  The present Incumbent of Haworth will point out to you, on the old tower of Haworth Church, the marks of pistol bullets, which he is assured were made by Mr. Brontë.  I have myself handled both the gun and the pistol — this latter a very ornamental weapon, by the way, manufactured at Bradford — which Mr. Brontë possessed during the later years of his life.  From both he had obtained much innocent amusement; but his son-in-law, Mr. Nicholls, who, at the distance of forty years still cherishes a reverent and enthusiastic affection for old Mr. Brontë, informs me that the bullet marks upon Haworth Church were the irresponsible frolic of a rather juvenile curate — Mr. Smith.  All this is trivial enough in any case, and one turns very readily to more important factors in the life of the father of the Brontës.  Patrick Brontë was born at Ahaderg, County Down, in Ireland, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1777.  He was one of the ten children of Hugh Brunty, farmer, and his nine brothers and sisters seem all of them to have spent their lives in their Irish home, to have married and been given in marriage, and to have gone to their graves in peace.  Patrick alone had ambition, and, one must add, the opportune friend, without whom ambition counts for little in the great struggle of life.  At sixteen he was a kind of village schoolmaster, or assistant schoolmaster, and at twenty-five, stirred thereto by the vicar of his parish, Mr. Tighe, he was on his way from Ireland to St. John’s College, Cambridge.  It was in 1802 that Patrick Brontë went to Cambridge, and entered his name in the college books.  There, indeed, we find the name, not of Patrick Brontë, but of Patrick Branty,
  
and this brings us to an
 
interesting point as to the origin of the name.  In the register of his birth his name is entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as ‘Brunty’ and ‘Bruntee’; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as Dr. Douglas Hyde has pointed out, the original name was O’Prunty.
 
  The Irish, at the beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as were the English of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see variations in the spelling of the Brontë name — it being in the case of his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt ‘Brontee.’  To me it is perfectly clear that for the change of name Lord Nelson was responsible, and that the dukedom of Brontë, which was conferred upon the great sailor in 1799, suggested the more ornamental surname.  There were no Irish Brontës in existence before Nelson became Duke of Brontë; but all Patrick’s brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more attractive surname.  For this theory there is, of course, not one scrap of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick’s native parish gives us Brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies is Brontë.

From Cambridge, after taking orders in 1806, Mr. Brontë moved to a curacy at Weatherfield in Essex; and Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us, with that singular literary charm of his, how the good-looking Irish curate made successful love to a young parishioner — Miss Mary Burder. 
 
Mary Burder would have married him, it seems, but for an obdurate uncle and guardian.  She was spirited away from the neighbourhood, and the lovers never met again.  There are doubtful points in Mr. Birrell’s story.  Mary Burder, as the wife of a Nonconformist minister, died in 1866, in her seventy-seventh year.  This lady, from whom doubtless either directly or indirectly the tradition was obtained, may have amplified and exaggerated a very innocent flirtation.  One would like further evidence for the statement that when Mr. Brontë lost his wife in 1821 he asked his old sweetheart, Mary Burder, to become the mother of his six children, and that she answered ‘no’.  In any case, Mr. Brontë left Weatherfield in 1809 for a curacy at Dewsbury, and Dewsbury gossip also had much to say concerning the flirtations of its Irish curate.  His next curacy, however, which was obtained in 1811, by a removal to Hartshead, near Huddersfield, brought flirtation for Mr. Brontë to a speedy end.  In 1812, when thirty-three years of age, he married Miss Maria Branwell, of Penzance.  Miss Branwell had only a few months before left her Cornish home for a visit to an uncle in Yorkshire.  This uncle was a Mr. John Fennell, a clergyman of the Church of England, who had been a Methodist minister.  To Methodism, indeed, the Cornish Branwells would seem to have been devoted at one time or another, for I have seen a copy of the
Imitation
inscribed ‘M. Branwell, July 1807,’ with the following title-page: —

an extract of the christian’s pattern: or, a treatise on the imitation of christ.  written in latin by thomas à kempis.  abridged and published in english by john wesley, m.a., london.  printed at the conference office, north green, finsbury square.  g. story, agent.  sold by g. whitfield, city road.  1803.  price bound 1s.

 
The book was evidently brought by Mrs. Brontë from Penzance, and given by her to her husband or left among her effects.  The poor little woman had been in her grave for five or six years when it came into the hands of one of her daughters, as we learn from Charlotte’s hand-writing on the fly-leaf: —

‘
C. Brontë’s book
. 
This book was given to me in July 1826
. 
It is not certainly known who is the author
,
but it is generally supposed that Thomas à Kempis is
. 
I saw a reward of
£10,000
offered in the Leeds Mercury to any one who could find out for a certainty who is the author
.’

The conjunction of the names of John Wesley, Maria Branwell, and Charlotte Brontë surely gives this little volume, ‘price bound 1s.,’ a singular interest!

But here I must refer to the letters which Maria Branwell wrote to her lover during the brief courtship.  Mrs. Gaskell, it will be remembered, makes but one extract from this correspondence, which was handed to her by Mr. Brontë as part of the material for her memoir.  Long years before, the little packet had been taken from Mr. Brontë’s desk, for we find Charlotte writing to a friend on February 16th, 1850: —

‘A few days since, a little incident happened which curiously touched me.  Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers, telling me that they were mamma’s, and that I might read them.  I did read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe.  The papers were yellow with time, all having been written before I was born.  It was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order.  They were written to papa before they were married.  There is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them indescribable.  I wish she had lived, and that I had known her.’

 
Yet another forty years or so and the little packet is in my possession.  Handling, with a full sense of their sacredness, these letters, written more than eighty years ago by a good woman to her lover, one is tempted to hope that there is no breach of the privacy which should, even in our day, guide certain sides of life, in publishing the correspondence in its completeness.  With the letters I find a little MS., which is also of pathetic interest.  It is entitled ‘The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns,’ and it is endorsed in the handwriting of Mr. Brontë, written, doubtless, many years afterwards: —

‘
The above was written by my dear wife
,
and is for insertion in one of the periodical publications
. 
Keep it as a memorial of her
.’

There is no reason to suppose that the MS. was ever published; there is no reason why any editor should have wished to publish it.  It abounds in the obvious.  At the same time, one notes that from both father and mother alike Charlotte Brontë and her sisters inherited some measure of the literary faculty.  It is nothing to say that not one line of the father’s or mother’s would have been preserved had it not been for their gifted children.  It is sufficient that the zest for writing was there, and that the intense passion for handling a pen, which seems to have been singularly strong in Charlotte Brontë, must have come to a great extent from a similar passion alike in father and mother.  Mr. Brontë, indeed, may be counted a prolific author.  He published, in all, four books, three pamphlets, and two sermons.  Of his books, two were in verse and two in prose. 
Cottage Poems
was published in 1811;
The Rural Minstrel
in 1812, the year of his marriage;
The Cottage in the Wood
in 1815; and
The Maid of Killarney
in 1818.  After his wife’s death he published no more books.  Reading over these old-fashioned volumes now, one admits that they possess but little distinction.  It has been pointed out, indeed, that
 
one of the strongest lines in
Jane Eyre
— ‘To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.’ — is culled from Mr. Brontë’s verse.  It is the one line of his that will live.  Like his daughter Charlotte, Mr. Brontë is more interesting in his prose than in his poetry. 
The Cottage in the Wood
;
or
,
the Art of Becoming Rich and Happy
, is a kind of religious novel — a spiritual
Pamela
, in which the reprobate pursuer of an innocent girl ultimately becomes converted and marries her. 
The Maid of Killarney
;
or
,
Albion and Flora
is more interesting.  Under the guise of a story it has something to say on many questions of importance.  We know now why Charlotte never learnt to dance until she went to Brussels, and why children’s games were unknown to her, for here are many mild diatribes against dancing and card-playing.  The British Constitution and the British and Foreign Bible Society receive a considerable amount of criticism.  But in spite of this didactic weakness there are one or two pieces of really picturesque writing, notably a description of an Irish wake, and a forcible account of the defence of a house against some Whiteboys.  It is true enough that the books are merely of interest to collectors and that they live only by virtue of Patrick Brontë’s remarkable children.  But many a prolific writer of the day passes muster as a genius among his contemporaries upon as small a talent; and Mr. Brontë does not seem to have given himself any airs as an author.  Thirty years were to elapse before there were to be any more books from this family of writers; but
Jane Eyre
owes something, we may be sure, to
The Maid of Killarney
.

Mr. Brontë, as I have said, married Maria Branwell in 1812.  She was in her twenty-ninth year, and was one of five children — one son and four daughters — the father of whom, Mr. Thomas Branwell, had died in 1809.  By a curious coincidence, another sister, Charlotte, was married in Penzance on the same day — the 18th of December 1812.
 
 
 
Before me are a bundle of samplers, worked by three of these Branwell sisters.  Maria Branwell ‘ended her sampler’ April the 15th, 1791, and it is inscribed with the text,
Flee from sin as from a serpent
,
for if thou comest too near to it
,
it will bite thee
. 
The teeth thereof are as the teeth of a lion to slay the souls of men
.  Another sampler is by Elizabeth Branwell; another by Margaret, and another by Anne.  These, some miniatures, and the book and papers to which I have referred, are all that remain to us as a memento of Mrs. Brontë, apart from the children that she bore to her husband.  The miniatures, which are in the possession of Miss Branwell, of Penzance, are of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Branwell — Charlotte Brontë’s maternal grandfather and grandmother — and of Mrs. Brontë and her sister Elizabeth Branwell as children.