The Life of Charlotte Bronte (74 page)

Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.

I
have always been much struck with a passage in Mr. Forster’s Life of Goldsmith.
^cp
Speaking of the scene after his death, the writer says:—

“The staircase of Brick Court is said to have been filled with mourners, the reverse of domestic; women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable.”

This came into my mind when I heard of some of the circumstances attendant on Charlotte’s funeral.

Few beyond that circle of hills knew that she, whom the nations praised far off, lay dead that Easter morning. Of kith and kin she had more in the grave to which she was soon to be borne, than among the living. The two mourners, stunned with their great grief, desired not the sympathy of strangers. One member out of most of the families in the parish was bidden to the funeral; and it became an act of self-denial in many a poor household to give up to another the privilege of paying their last homage to her; and those who were excluded from the formal train of mourners thronged the churchyard and church, to see carried forth, and laid beside her own people, her whom, not many months ago, they had looked at as a pale white bride, entering on a new life with trembling happy hope.

Among those humble friends who passionately grieved over the dead, was a village girl who had been seduced some little time before, but who had found a holy sister in Charlotte. She had sheltered her with her help, her counsel, her strengthening words; had ministered to her needs in her time of trial. Bitter, bitter was the grief of this poor young woman, when she heard that her friend was sick unto death, and deep is her mourning until this day. A blind girl, living some four miles from Haworth, loved Mrs. Nicholls so dearly that, with many cries and entreaties, she implored those about her to lead her along the roads, and over the moor-paths, that she might hear the last solemn words, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

 

Such were the mourners over Charlotte Brontë’s grave.

 

I have little more to say. If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debateable land. One who knew her long and well,—the “Mary” of this Life—writes thus of her dead friend:—

“She thought much of her duty, and had loftier and clearer notions of it than most people, and held fast to them with more success. It was done, it seems to me, with much more difficulty than people have of stronger nerves, and better fortunes. All her life was but labour and pain; and she never threw down the burden for the sake of present pleasure. I don’t know what use you can make of all I have said. I have written it with the strong desire to obtain appreciation for her. Yet, what does it matter? She herself appealed to the world’s judgment for her use of some of the faculties she had,—not the best,—but still the only ones she could turn to strangers’ benefit. They heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of her labours, and then found out she was much to be blamed for possessing such faculties. Why ask for a judgment on her from such a world?”

But I turn from the critical, unsympathetic public,—inclined to judge harshly because they have only seen superficially and not thought deeply. I appeal to that larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius, and how to reverence with warm, full hearts all noble virtue. To that Public I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë.

 

 

THE END.

1
(p. 14) A.D. sexcentissimo: This inscription suggests that a monastic community was established in Haworth in 600. Were this accurate, the community would have predated the arrival of Christianity in the region in the generally accepted year of 627, when the Roman missionary Paulinus, later archbishop of York, converted the Anglo-Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria.

2
(p. 15)
curate at Haworth:
Thomas Dunham Whitaker (1759-1821), vicar of Blackburn and local antiquarian, casts doubt on the antiquity of the Haworth chapel by suggesting that a stone mason mis-read the original inscription. This debate is important to Gaskell because it allows her to establish the independent character of the locals and to explain the grounds for their unusual right of refusal of curates.

1
(p. 20)
religious dictations of such men as
Laud: William Laud (1573-1645), archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, tried to impose a uniform standard of worship throughout England in an effort to deter religious dissent. Dissenters were members of sects that worshiped outside of the Church of England. These sects were historically well established in the northern manufacturing districts, Yorkshire among them. Gaskell, a Unitarian, was herself a dissenter.

2
(p. 20)
Commonwealth men:
Gaskell turns social historian and explains the religious and economic forces that induced Yorkshire to support the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell, which deposed and executed Charles I in 1649, and set about overturning the religious and trading restrictions the Stuarts had imposed.

3
(p. 21)
persecuting days of Charles
II: Upon his restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles II attempted to rein in religious dissent with the Act of Uniformity (1662), which required all clergy to take an oath that they would adhere to Anglican doctrine as established in The
Book of Common Prayer.

4
(p. 21) “Life of Oliver Heywood”: Joseph Hunter wrote
The Rise of the Old Dissent, Exemplified in the Life of Oliver Heywood, One of the Founders of the Presbyterian
Congregations in the County of York (1842).

5
(p. 26)
scene of the ministrations of the
Rev. William
Grimshaw:
The Reverend William Grimshaw (1708-1763), perpetual curate of Haworth from 1742 until his death and a major Evangelical figure, is credited with revitalizing the spiritual life of the town by introducing the Evangelical Revival. The Evangelical party comprised reform-minded clergy within the Church of England who believed in a religion based on personal revelation and social responsibility.

6
(p. 26)
Newton,
Cowper’s
friend:
John Newton (1725-1807), a slave-ship captain who underwent a conversion and became an Evangelical clergyman, wrote Memoirs of the Life of the
LateWilliam Grimshaw
(1825). Newton and the poet William Cowper (1731-1800) collaborated on the Olney Hymns (1779). Cowper, a proto-Romantic, is best known for the expressive style of his poetry and its theme of religious doubt.

7
(p. 27) fervour of a Wesley...
fanaticism of a Whitefield:
John Wesley (1703-1791) and George Whitefield (1714-1770) led Methodism, a religious movement that valued personal spiritualism over ritualistic devotion, from within the Anglican Church. Methodists adopted open-air preaching in order to reach marginalized members of the community. Doctrinal differences ultimately led to the severing of the relationship between Whitefield, a strict Calvinist who believed in predestination, and Wesley, a follower of Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, who maintained that individuals could effect their own salvation. Methodism’s formal break with the established church occurred in 1795.

8
(p. 30) Dr. Scoresby: William Scoresby (1789-1857) was an Arctic explorer before he entered the Anglican ministry and later became the vicar of Bradford (1839-1847); he was a source of local history and local color for Gaskell.

9
(p. 32)
circumstances which I have described:
Samuel Redhead’s son-in-law disputed Gaskell’s version of events. Gaskell responded in the third edition by appending testimony from two eyewitnesses supporting her account.

1
(p. 34) Patrick Brontë... County Down in Ireland: For Patrick Brontë’s biography, see John Lock and W T. Dixon,
A Man of Sorrow: The Life,
Letters
and Times of the Rev. Patrick
Brontë, 1777-1861 (London: Nelson, 1965), and Barker,
The
Brontës; see “For Further Reading.”

2
(p. 35)
military duties which they had to perform:
During the period 1803-1805 Napoleon was gathering forces at Boulogne with the intention of invading England, a threat that ended with Nelson’s victory off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. One of Patrick Brontë’s Cambridge classmates, Lord Palmerston (1784—1865), later became prime minister (1855-1858, 1859-1865).

3
(p. 39) of Mr. Brontë’s
composing:
Patrick Brontë was a published author at the time of his marriage. He had published two collections of moral poems,
Cottage Poems
(1811) and the
Rural Minstrel
(1813), as well as the didactic romances
Cottage in the Wood
(1815) and The
Maid of
Killarney (1818). He also weighed in on religious and social issues of the day by contributing to regional newspapers throughout his career.

4
(p. 39)
“Advice to
a Lady”: George, Baron Lyttelton’s
Advice to
a
Lady
(1733) was typical of eighteenth-century conduct literature for girls. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) summarized and lampooned it: “Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet; / In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.”

5
(p. 43)
“potatoes for their dinner”:
The false claim that Patrick Brontë enforced a vegetarian diet and the charge of wastefulness, to which servants Nancy and Sarah Garrs objected, were retracted in the third edition. Gaskell wanted only to show that “no
stingy
motive” induced Patrick to deny his children meat
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 368). This and much other disputed information about life at the parsonage came from the nurse who attended Mrs. Brontë in her final illness.

6
(p. 44)
the ideas of Rousseau and Mr. Day:
Political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was also an educational theorist. In Émile (1762) he advocated educating boys to exercise the independence accorded them by nature rather than making them conform to their social station; girls, however, were to be molded with the exclusive purpose of pleasing their future partners. Rousseau influenced Thomas Day (1748-1789), whose
History of Sandford and Merton
(1783-1789) was one of the first novels written for children.

7
(p. 45)
reduced to the condition of stools:
The catalogue of Patrick’s “volcanic wrath,” which included burning his children’s boots, shredding his wife’s silk dresses, burning a hearthrug, and sawing the backs off chairs was omitted, at Patrick’s request, in the third edition.

8
(p. 45)
days of the Luddites:
The Luddite riots (1811-1816) were staged by organized gangs of cloth workers who roamed the manufacturing districts destroying the machinery they felt was displacing them from their jobs. Brontë would set Shirley (1849) amid this uprising.

1
(p. 53)
William Carus Wilson:
The Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791-1859), a Calvinist Evangelical who was the model for
Jane
Eyre’s Reverend Brocklehurst, established the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Like his fictional counterpart, Carus Wilson wrote devotional tracts full of fire and brimstone for children. He was a polarizing figure. A vitriolic public debate erupted with the publication of the Life about the degree of culpability he had, if any, in his management of Cowan Bridge (see Wise and Symington, eds.,
The
Brontës: Their
Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence,
vol. 4, appendix 1).

2
(p. 53)
certain sum was raised annually in subscription:
Subscribers to the school included such prominent Evangelicals as moralist Hannah More and abolitionist William Wilberforce.

3
(p. 59)
Miss Temple, the superintendent:
Miss Ann Evans (1792-1856) was superintendent of the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Evans died before the publication of the Life, but her husband and a Miss Andrews, who was the model for Miss Scatcherd in
Jane Eyre
(1847), came to the defense of William Carus Wilson, who ran the school (see note 1, above).

4
(p. 59)
after
Maria’s
and Elizabeth’s deaths:
Charlotte and Emily in fact did not return to the school after their sisters’ deaths. According to school records, they withdrew on June 1, 1825.

1
(p. 64)
Tabby:
Tabitha Aykroyd (the name had various spellings) served the Brontës from her mid-fifties until her death in 1855. For Gaskell, and perhaps for Brontë as well, she embodied England’s folkloric past and Yorkshire superstition. Bessie in
Jane Eyre
and Martha in Shirley share some of Tabby’s qualities. Aykroyd was a Methodist and a class leader at her chapel.

2
(p. 69)
“We then chose who should be chief men in our islands”:
The Brontë children’s choice of heroes evidences their Toryism and the degree to which the periodicals their father received informed their worldview. Branwell selects the fictional John Bull, Englishness personified, and the poet Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). Emily chooses literary men: novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and John Gibson Lockhart (1794—1854), contributor to
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
and later editor of the
Quarterly Review.
Charlotte picks the Duke of Wellington (see note 3, below), and Christopher North, the fictional persona adopted by John Wilson, editor of
Blackwood’s.
Anne chooses Lord William Bentinck, the governor-general of Bengal who abolished suttee (self-cremation of a Hindu widow on the funeral pyre of her husband as a mark of her devotion to him). With the exception of Emily, they each choose an eminent physician as well.