Life of Charlotte Brontë, condensed...

Chapter I

The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveler journeys upward to the gray round hills that seem to bound his journey of four miles.

For a short distance the road appears to turn away from Haworth, as it winds round the base of the shoulder of a hill ; but then it crosses a bridge over the ^^ beck," and the ascent through the village begins. The flagstones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, in order to give a better hold to the horses' feet ; and, even with this help, they seem to be in constant danger of slipping backward. The old stone houses are high compared to the width of the street, which makes an abrupt turn before reaching the more level ground at the head of the village, so that the steep aspect of the place, in one part, is almost like that of a wall. But this surmounted, the church lies a little off the main road on the left, a hundred yards or so, and the driver relaxes his care, and the horses breathe more easily, as they pass into the quiet little by-street that leads to Haworth Parsonage. The churchyard is on one side of this lane, the schoolhouse and the sexton's dwelling (where the curates formerly lodged) on the other.

The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon the church ; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried schoolhouse, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond.

The little church lies above most of the houses in the village ; and the graveyard rises above the church, and is terribly full of upright tombstones. The chapel or church claims greater antiquity than any other in that part of the kingdom ; but there is no appearance of this in the external aspect of the present edifice, unless it be in the two eastern windows, which remain unmodernized, and in the lower

4 tlFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

part of the steeple. Inside, the character of the pillars shows that they were constructed before the reign of Henry VII.

The interior of the church is commonplace ; it is neither old enough nor modern enough to compel notice. The pews are of black oak, with high divisions ; and the names of those to whom they belong are painted in white letters on the doors. There are neither brasses, nor altar-tombs, nor monuments, but there is a mural tablet on the right-hand side of the communion-table, bearing the following inscription :

HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF

MARIA BRONTE, WIFE

OF THE

REV. P. BRONTE, A. B., MINISTER OF HAWORTH.

HER SOUL

DEPARTED TO THE SAVIOUR, SEPT. I5TH, 182I,

IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE.

** Be ye also ready : for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh." — Matthew xxiv. 44.

ALSO HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF

MARIA BRONTE, DAUGHTER OF THE AFORESAID;

SHE DIED ON THE

6tH of may, 1825, IN THE I2TH YEAR OF HER AGE ;

AND OF

ELIZABETH BRONTE, HER SISTER;

WHO DIED JUNE I5TH, 1825, IN THE IITH YEAR OF HER AGE.

*' Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." — Matthew xviii. 3.

HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF

PATRICK BRANWELL BRONTE,

WHO DIED SEPT. 24TH, 1 848, AGED 30 YEARS ; AND OF

EMILY JANE BRONTE,

WHO DIED DEC. I9TH, 1848, AGED 29 YEARS,

SON AND DAUGHTER OF THE

REV. P. BRONTE, INCUMBENT.

THIS STONE IS ALSO DEDICATED TO THE

MEMORY OF ANNE BRONTJE,*

YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A. B.

SHE DIED, AGED 27 YEARS, MAY 28tH, 1849,

AND WAS BURIED AT THE OLD CHURCH, SCARBORO*.

* A reviewer pointed out the discrepancy between the age (twenty-seven years) assigned, on the mural tablet, to Anne Bronte at the time of her death

LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. J

At the upper part of this tablet ample space is allowed between the lines of the inscription ; when the first memorials were written down, the survivors, in their fond affection, thought little of the margin and verge they were leaving for those who were still living. But as one dead member of the household follows another fast to the grave, the lines are pressed together, and the letters become small and cramped. After the record of Anne's death, there is room for no other.

But one more of that generation — the last of that nursery of six little motherless children — was yet to follow, before the survivor, the childless and widowed father, found his rest. On another tablet, below the first, the following record has been added to that mournful list :

ADJOINING LIE THE REMAINS OF

CHARLOTTE, WIFE

OF THE

REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS, A. B.

AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A. B., INCUMBENT.

SHE DIED MARCH 3 1 ST, 1 85 5, IN THE 39TH

YEAR OF HER AGE.

The Rev. Patrick Bronte was a native of the County Down in Ireland. His father, Hugh Bronte, was left an orphan at an early age. He came from the south to the north of the island, and settled in the parish of Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. There was some family tradition that, humble as Hugh Bronte's circumstances were, he was the descendant of an ancient family. But about this neither he nor his descendants have cared to inquire. He made an early marriage, and reared and educated ten children on the proceeds of the few acres of land which he farmed. This large family were remarkable for great physical strength, and much personal beauty. Even in

in 1849, and the alleged fact that she was born at Thornton, from which place Mr. Bronte removed on February 25, 1820. I was aware of the discrepancy, but I did not think it of sufficient consequence to be rectified by an examination of the reg-ister of births. Mr. Bronte's own words, on which I grounded my statement as to the time of Anne Bronte's birth, are as follows :

" In Thornton, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, and Anne were born." And such of the inhabitants of Haworth as have spoken on the subject say that all the children of Mr. and Mrs. Bronte were born before they removed to Haworth. There is probably some mistake in the inscription on the tablet.

his old age, Mr. Bronte was a striking-looking man, above the common height, with a nobly shaped head and erect carriage. In his youth he must have been unusually handsome.

He was born on Patrickmas day (March 17), 1777, and early gave tokens of extraordinary quickness and intelligence. He had also his full share of ambition ; and of his strong sense and forethought there is a proof in the fact, that, knowing that his father could afford him no pecuniary aid, and that he must depend upon his own exertions, he opened a public school at the early age of sixteen ; and this mode of living he continued to follow for five or six years. He then became a tutor in the family of the Rev. Mr. Tighe, rector of Drumgooland parish. Thence he proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was entered in July, 1802, being at the time five-and-twenty years of age. After nearly four years' residence, he obtained his B. A. degree, and was ordained to a curacy in Essex, whence he removed into Yorkshire. The course of life, of which this is the outline, shows a powerful and remarkable character, originating and pursuing a purpose in a resolute and independent manner. Here is a youth — a boy of sixteen — separating himself from his family, and determining to maintain himself ; and that not in the hereditary manner, by agricultural pursuits, but by the labor of his brain.

I suppose, from what I have heard, that Mr. Tighe became strongly interested in his children's tutor, and may have aided him, not only in the direction of his studies, but in the suggestion of an English university education, and in advice as to the mode in which he should obtain entrance there. Mr. Bronte has now no trace of his Irish origin remaining in his speech ; he never could have shown his Celtic descent in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his face ; but at five-andtwenty, fresh from the only life he had ever known, to present himself at the gates of St. John's proved no little determination of will and scorn of ridicule.

While at Cambridge, he became one of a corps of volunteers, who were then being called out all over the country to resist the apprehended invasion by the French. I have heard him allude, in later years, to Lord Palmerston as one who had often been associated with him then in the mimic military duties which they had to perform.

We take him up now, settled as a curate at Hartshead, in Yorkshire — far removed from his birthplace and all his Irish connections ; with whom, indeed, he cared little to keep up any intercourse, and whom he never, I believe, revisited after becoming a student at Cambridge.

Hartshead is a very small village, lying to the east of Huddersfield and Halifax ; and, from its high situation — on a mound, as it were, surrounded by a circular basin — commanding a magnificent view. Mr. Bronte resided here for five years ; and, while the incumbent of Hartshead, he wooed and married Maria Branwell.

She was the third daughter of Mr. Thomas Branwell, merchant, of Penzance. Her mother's maiden name was Carne ; and, both on father's and mother's side, the Branwell family were sufficiently well descended to enable them to mix in the best society that Penzance then afforded. Mr. and Mrs. Branwell would be living — their family of four daughters and one son, still children — during the existence of that primitive state of society which is well described by Dr. Davy in the life of his brother.

Mr. Branwell, the father, according to his descendants' account, was a man of musical talent. He and his wife lived to see all their children grown up, and died within a year of each other, — he in 1808, she in 1809, — when their daughter Maria w^as twenty-five or twenty-six years of age. I have been permitted to look over a series of nine letters, which were addressed by her to Mr. Bronte during the brief term of their engagement in 1812. They are full of tender grace of expression- and feminine modesty ; pervaded by the deep piety to which I have alluded as a family characteristic. I shall make one or two extracts from them to show what sort of a person was the mother of Charlotte Bronte ; but first, I must state the circumstances under which this Cornish lady met the scholar from Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. In the early summer of 181 2, when she would be twenty-nine, she came to visit her uncle, the Reverend John Fennel, who was at that time a clergyman of the Church of England, living near Leeds, but who had previously been a Methodist minister. Mr. Bronte was the incumbent of Hartshead, and had the reputation in the neighborhood of being a very handsome fellow, full of Irish enthusiasm, and with something of an Irishman's capability of falling easily in love. Miss Branwell was extremely small in person, not pretty, but very elegant ; and always dressed with a quiet simplicity of taste, which accorded well with her general character, and of which some of the details call to mind the style of dress preferred by her daughter for her favorite heroines. - Mr. Bronte was soon captivated by the little, gentle creature, and this time declared that it was for life. In her first letter to him, dated August 26, she seems almost surprised to find herself engaged, and alludes to the short time which she has known him. In the rest there are touches reminding one of Juliet's

But trust me, grentleman, I'll prove more true Than those that have more cunning to be strange.

There are plans for happy picnic parties to Kirkstall Abbey, in the glowing September days. *^ Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin Jane " — the last engaged to a Mr. Morgan, another clergyman — were of the party ; all since dead, except Mr. Bronte. There was no opposition on the part of any of her friends to her engagement. Mr. and Mrs. Fennel sanctioned it, and her brother and sisters in far-away Penzance appear fully to have approved of it. In a letter dated September i8, she says :

" For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever ; so far from it, that my sisters, Avho are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother, used to consult me on every occasion of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my opinions and actions ; perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that I do not boast of it. I have many times felt it a disadvantage, and although, I thank God, it has never led me into error, yet, in circumstances of uncertainty and doubt, I have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor." In the same letter she tells Mr. Bronte that she has informed her sisters of her engagement, and that she should not see them again so soon as she had intended. Mr. Fennel, her uncle, also writes to them, by the same post, in praise of Mr. Bronte.

The journey from Penzance to Leeds in those days was both very long and very expensive ; the lovers had not much money to spend in unnecessary traveling, and, as Miss Bran well had neither father nor mother living, it appeared both a discreet and seemly arrangement that the marriage should take place from her uncle's house. There was no reason either why the engagement shouTd be prolonged. They were past their first youth ; they had means sufficient for their unambitious wants ; the living of Hartshead is rated in the Clergy List at ^202 per annum, and she was in the receipt of a small annuity (^50 I have been told) by the will of her father. So, at the end of September, the lovers began to talk about taking a house, for I suppose that Mr. Bronte up to that time had been in lodgings ; and all went smoothly and successfully with a view to their marriage in the ensuing winter, until November, when a misfortune happened, which she thus patiently and prettily describes :

^* I suppose you never expected to be much the richer for me, but I am sorry to inform you that I am still poorer than I thought myself. I mentioned having sent for my books, clothes, etc. On Saturday evening, about the time when you were writing the description of your imaginary shipwreck, I was reading and feeling the effects of a real one, having then received a letter from my sister giving me an account of the vessel in which she had sent my box being stranded on the coast of Devonshire, in consequence of which the box was dashed to pieces with the violence of the sea, all my little property, with the exception of a very few articles, being swallowed up in the mighty deep. If this should not prove the prelude to something worse, I shall think little of it, as it is the first disastrous circumstance which has occurred since I left my home.'*

The last of these letters is dated December the 5th. Miss Branwell and her cousin intended to set about making the wedding-cake in the following week, so the marriage could not be far off. She had been learning by heart a " pretty little hymiU " of Mr. Bronte's composing ; and reading Lord Lyttelton's "Advice to a Lady," on which she makes some pertinent and just remarks, showing that she thought as well as read. And so Maria Branwell fades out of sight ; we have no more direct intercourse with her; we hear of her as Mrs. Bronte, but it is as an invalid, not far from death ; still patient, cheerful, and pious. The writing of these letters is elegant and neat ; while there are allusions to household occupations — such as making the wedding-cake — there are also allusions to the books she has read, or is reading, showing a well-cultivated mind. Without having anything of her daughter's rare talents, Mrs. Bronte must have been, I imagine, that unusual character, a well-balanced and consistent woman. The style of the letters is easy and good ; as is also that of a paper from the same hand, entitled '* The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns," which was written rather later, with a view to publication in some periodical.

She was married, from her uncle's house, in Yorkshire, on the 29th of December, 181 2 ; the same day was also the wedding-day of her younger sister, Charlotte Branwell, in distant Penzance. I do not think that Mrs. Bronte ever revisited Cornwall, but she has left a very pleasant impression on the minds of those relations who yet survive : they speak of her as *' their favorite aunt, and one to whom they, as well as all the family, looked up, as a person of talent and great amiability of disposition ; " and again, as " meek and retiring, while poslO LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

sessing more than ordinary talents, which she inherited from her father, and her piety was genuine and unobtrusive."

Mr. Bronte remained for five years at Hartshead, in the parish of Dewsbury. There he was married, and his two children, Maria and Elizabeth, were born. At the expiration of that period, he had the living of Thornton, in Bradford parish.

Here, at Thornton, Charlotte Bronte was born, on the 21st of April, 1816. Fast on her heels followed Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, and Anne. After the birth of this last daughter, Mrs. Bronte's health began to decline. It is hard work to provide for the little tender wants of many young children where the means are but limited. The necessaries of food and clothing are much more easily supplied than the almost equal necessaries of attendance, care, soothing, amusement, and sympathy. Maria Bronte, the eldest of six, could only have been a few months more than six years old, when Mr. Bronte removed to Haworth, on February 25, 1820. Those who knew her then describe her as grave, thoughtful, and quiet to a degree far beyond her years. Her childhood was no childhood ; the cases are rare in which the possessors of great gifts have known the blessings of that careless, happy time ; their unusual powers stir within them, and, instead of the natural life of perception — the objective, as the Germans call it — they begin the deeper life of reflection — the subjective.

Little Maria Bronte was delicate and small, in appearance, which seemed to give greater effect to her wonderful precocity of intellect. She must have been her mother's companion and helpmate in many a household and nursery experience, for Mr. Bronte was, of course, much engaged in his study ; and, besides, he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent appearance on the scene both as a drag on his wife's strength and as an interruption to the comfort of the household.

Haworth Parsonage is an oblong stone house, facing down the hill on which the village stands, and with the front door right opposite to the western door of the church, distant about a hundred yards. Of this space, twenty yards or so in depth are occupied by the grassy garden, which is scarcely wider than the house. The graveyard lies on two sides of the house and garden. The house consists of four rooms on each floor, and is two stories high. When the Brontes took possession, they made the larger parlor, to the left of the entrance, the family sitting-room, while that on the right w^as appropriated to Mr. Bronte as a study. Behind this was the kitchen ; behind the former, a

LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. II

sort of flagged store-room. Upstairs were four bedchambers of similar size, with the addition of a small apartment over the passage, or " lobby," as we call it in the north. This was to the front, the staircase going up right opposite to the entrance. There is the pleasant old fashion of window-seats all through the house ; and one can see that the parsonage was built in the days when wood was plentiful, as the massive stairbanisters and the wainscots and the heavy window-frames testify.

This little extra upstairs room was appropriated to the children. Small as it was, it was not called a nursery ; indeed, it had not the comfort of a fireplace in it ; the servants — two affectionate, warm-hearted sisters, who cannot now speak of the family without tears — called the room the ^^ children's study." The age of the eldest student was perhaps by this time seven.

The people in Haworth were none of them very poor. Many of them were employed in the neighboring worsted mills ; a few were millowners and manufacturers in a small way ; there were also some shopkeepers for the humbler and every-day wants ; but for medical advice, for stationery, books, law, dress, or dainties, the inhabitants had to go to Keighley.

'' They kept themselves very close,'' is the account given by those who remembered Mr. and Mrs. Bronte's coming among them. I believe many of the Yorkshiremen would object to the system of parochial visiting ; their surly inde^ pendence would revolt from the idea of anyone having a right, from his office, to inquire into their condition, to counsel, or to admonish them. The old hill spirit lingers in them, which coined the rhyme, inscribed on the under part of one of the seats in the Sedilia of Whalley Abbey, not many miles from Haworth :

Who mells wi* what another does Had best go home and shoe his goose.

I asked an inhabitant of a district close to Haworth, what sort of a clergyman they had at the church which he attended.

** A rare good one," said he ; ^' he minds his own business, and ne'er troubles himself with ours."

Mr. Bronte was faithful in visiting the sick, and all those who sent for him, and diligent in attendance at the schools ; and so was his daughter Charlotte, too ; but, cherishing and valuing privacy themselves, they were, perhaps, over-delicate in not intruding upon the privacy of others.

From their first going to Haworth, their walks were directed rather out toward the heathery moors, sloping upward behind the parsonage, than toward the long, descending village street. A good old woman, who came to nurse Mrs. Bronte in the illness — an internal cancer — which grew and gathered upon her, not many months after her arrival at Haworth, tells me that at that time the six little creatures used to walk out, hand in hand, toward the glorious wild moors, which in after days they loved so passionately ; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things.

They were grave and silent beyond their years ; subdued, probably, by the presence of serious illness in the house ; for, at the time which my informant speaks of, Mrs. Bronte was confined to the bedroom from which she never came forth alive. ^* You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. Maria would shut herself up " (Maria, but seven !) " in the children's study with a newspaper, and be able to tell one everything when she came out ; debates in parliament, and I don't know what all. She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. But there never were such good children. I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen. They were good little creatures. Emily was the prettiest."

Mrs. Bronte was the same patient, cheerful person as w^e have seen her formerly ; very ill, suffering great pain, but seldom if ever complaining ; at her better times begging her nurse to raise her in bed to let her see her clean the grate, " because she did it as it was done in Cornwall " ; devotedly fond of her husband, who warmly repaid her affection and suffered no one else to take the night nursing ; but, according to my informant, the mother was not very anxious to see much of her children, probably because the sight of them, knowing how soon they were to be left motherless, would have agitated her too much. So the little things clung quietly together, for their father was busy in his study and in his parish, or with their mother, and they took their meals alone ; sat reading, or whispering low, in the "children's study," or wandered out on the hillside, hand in hand.

Mr. Bronte wished to make his children hardy, and indifferent to the pleasures of eating and dress. In the latter he succeeded, as far as regarded his daughters.

His strong, passionate Irish nature was, in general, compressed down with resolute stoicism ; but it was there notwithstanding all his philosophic calm and dignity of demeanor; though he did not speak when he was annoyed or displeased.

Mrs. Bronte, whose sweet nature thought invariably of the bright side, would say, '' Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word ? "

Mrs. Bronte died in September, 182 1, and the lives of those quiet children must have become quieter and lonelier still. Charlotte tried hard, in after years, to recall the remembrance of her mother, and could bring back two or three pictures of her. One was when, sometime in the evening light, she had been playing with her little boy, Patrick Branwell, in the parlor of Havvorth Parsonage. But the recollections of four or live years old are of a very fragmentary character.

Owing to some illness of the digestive organs, Mr. Bronte was obliged to be very careful about his diet : and, in order to avoid temptation, and possibly to have the quiet necessary for digestion, he had begun, before his wife's death, to take his dinner alone, — a habit which he always retained. He did not require companionship, therefore he did not seek it, either in his walks, or in his daily life. The quiet regularity of his domestic hours w^as only broken in upon by churchwardens, and visitors on parochial business ; and sometimes by a neighboring clergyman, who came down the hills, across the moors, to mount up again to Haworth Parsonage, and spend an evening there. But, owing to Mrs. Bronte's death so soon after her husband had removed into the district, and also to the distances and the bleak country to be traversed, the wives of these clerical friends did not accompany their husbands ; and the daughters grew up out of childhood into girlhood bereft, in a singular manner, of all such society as would have been natural to their age, sex, and station.

Chapter II

About a year after Mrs. Bronte's death, an elder sister came from Penzance to superintend her brother-in-law's household, and look after his children.

I do not know whether Miss Branwell taught her nieces anything besides sewing and the household arts in which Charlotte afterward was such an adept. Their regular lessons were said to their father ; and they were always in the habit of picking up an immense amount of miscellaneous information for themselves. But a year or so before this time, a school had been begun in the north of England for the daughters of clergymen. The place was Cowan Bridge, a small hamlet on the coach road between Leeds and Kendal, and thus easy of access from Haworth, as the coach ran daily, and one of its stages was at Keighley^ The yearly expense for each pupil (according to the entrance-rules given in the Report for 1842, and I believe they had not been increased since the establishment of the schools in 1823) was ^18 a year.

Mr. Bronte formed the determination to send his daughters to Cowan Bridge School ; and he accordingly took Maria and Elizabeth thither in July, 1824.

I now come to a part of my subject which I find great difficulty in treating, because the evidence relating to it on each side is so conflicting that it seems almost impossible to arrive at the truth. Miss Bronte more than once said to me, that she should not have written what she did of Lowood in ''Jane Eyre," if she had thought the place would have been so immediately identified with Cowan Bridge, although there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it ; she also said that she had not considered it necessary, in a work of fiction, to state every particular with the impartiality that might be required in a court of justice, nor to seek out motives, and make allowances for human failings, as she might have done, if dispassionately analyzing the conduct of those who had the superintendence of the institution. I believe she herself would have been glad of an opportunity to correct the over-strong impression which was made upon the public mind by her vivid picture ; though even she, suffering her whole life long, both in heart and body, from the consequences of what happened there, might have been apt, to the last, to take her deep belief in facts for the facts themselves — her conception of truth for the absolute truth.