The Brontes Interviews and Recollections by the Same Author

The Brontes Interviews and Recollections By the same author

BRITISH POETRY 1880-1920: Edwardian Voices (editor, with Paul Wiley) CRITICAL ESSAYS ON RUDYARD KIPLING (editor) CRITICAL ESSAYS ON SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (editor) CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THOMAS HARDY'S POETRY (editor) THE DEVELOPMENT OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, 1885-1900 *THE DYNASTS, by Thomas Hardy, New Wessex Edition (editor) ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT: Nine Essays on a Literary Relationship *THE FINAL YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY, 1912-1928 *GILBERT AND SULLIVAN: Interviews and Recollections (editor) *THE HISTORICAL NOVEL FROM SCOTT TO SABATINI: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920 IRISH HISTORY AND CULTURE: Aspects of a People's Heritage (editor) "A KIPLING CHRONOLOGY *THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF REBECCA WEST THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITER AND HIS AUDIENCE (editor, with George ]. Worth) POPULAR FICTION IN ENGLAND, 1914-1918 RUDYARD KIPLING: Interviews and Recollections (editor) THE SCOTTISH WORLD (editor, with Marilyn Stokstad and Henn; Snyder) *SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: Interviews and Recollections (editor) SIX STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT (editor, with George J. Worth) THOMAS HARDY'S EPIC-DRAMA: A Study of 'The Dynasts' *THOMAS HARDY'S PERSONAL WRITINGS: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences (editor) THE UNKNOWN THOMAS HARDY: Lesser-known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career *VICTORIAN LITERARY CRITICS: George Henry Lewes, Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton, Leslie Stephen, Andrew Lang, George Saintsbury, Edmund Gosse VICTORIAN SHORT STORIES: An Anthology (editor) VICTORIAN SHORT STORIES 2: The Trials of Love (editor) THE VICTORIAN SHORT STORY THE WORLD OF VICTORIAN HUMOR (editor)

*Also published by Palgrave Macmillan THE BRONTES Interviews and Recollections

Edited by

HAROLD OREL University Professor of English University of Kansas

Palgrave macmillan Selection and editorial matter © Harold Orel 1997

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or * transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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First published 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 978-0-333-66314-1 ISBN 978-1-349-25199-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25199-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. To Bill, Marjorie, and Mary Bryden, with love Contents

(The year or range of years within parentheses identifies the period covered in the selections.)

Introduction xi

INTERVIEWS AND RECOLLECTIONS

T. Wemyss Reid, ['liThe Little Family" of the Brontes'] (1829-1849), in Charlotte Bronte: A Monograph 1 Charlotte Bronte, 'A Strange Occurrence at the Parsonage' (1830), in Mrs Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte 8 Sir Humphry Davy Rolleston, ['Charlotte, Emily, and Miss Wooler'] (1831-1838), in The Right Honourable Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt K.C.B.: A Memoir 10 'E' [Ellen Nussey], 'Reminiscences of Charlotte Bronte' (1831-1855), in Scribner's Monthly 13 Emily and Anne Bronte, [,A Diary Note' - No. 11 (1834) 31 Patrick Branwell Bronte, ['A Letter to the Editor of Blackwood's Magazine'] (1835) 33 Patrick Bl'anwell Bronte, ['A Letter to William Wordsworth'] (1837) 35 Emily and Anne Bronte, ['A Diary Note' - No. 21 (1837), in Bronte Society Transactions 37 Arthur Christopher Benson, ['Charlotte Bronte as a Governess'] (1839), in The Life of Edward White Benson, Sometime Archbishop of Canterbury 38 Francis A. Leyland, ['The Changing Moods of Branwell Bronte'] (1840-1841), in The Bronte Family, with Special Reference to Patrick Branwell Bronte 39 Emily Bronte, ['A Diary Note' - No.3] (1841) 42 Mrs Strickland, ['Charlotte and the White Family of Rawdon'] (1841), in The Westminster Gazette 43 Anne Bronte, ['A Diary Note' - No.4] (1841) 44 Francis H. Grundy, ['The Decline and Fall of Branwell Bronte'] (1841-1848), in Pictures of the Past: Memories of Men I Have Met and Places I Have Seen 46 Dorothy Melling, 'An Early Acquaintance' (1842), in The Brontes, edited by E. M. Delafield 59

vii viii CONTENTS

Charlotte Bronte, ['A Boarding School for Young Ladies'] (1844) 61 Charlotte Bronte, ['Four Letters to M. Heger'] (1844-1845), in The Shakespeare Head Bronte 62 Emily Bronte, ['A Diary Note' - No.5] (1845) 71 Anne Bronte, ['A Diary Note' - No.6] (1845) 73 Patrick Branwell Bronte, ['The Thorp Green Affair'] (1845) 75 Harriet Martineau, ['A Personal Impression of Charlotte Bronte'] (1847-1849), in Biographical Sketches 83 George M. Smith, 'Charlotte Bronte' (1847-1855), in Cornhill Magazine 85 William Makepeace Thackeray, ['Impressions of Charlotte Bronte'] (1847-1853), in The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray 105 William Makepeace Thackeray, 'The Last Sketch' [Introduction to Emma, by Charlotte Bronte] (1847-1855), in Cornhill Magazine 108 Mary Taylor, ['Letters from New Zealand to Charlotte Bronte'] (1848-1855), in Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Bronte: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere, edited by Joan Stevens 110 Anne Bronte, ['Letter to the Reverend David Thorn'] (1848) 120 Harriet Martineau, ['Charlotte Bronte's Reaction to Criticism'] (1849), in Autobiography 122 Catherine Winkworth et al., ['Letters about Charlotte and Her Marriage'] (1849-1854), in Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth 127 Charlotte Bronte, 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' (1850) 133 Mrs E. [Elizabeth] C. [Cleghorn] Gaskell, ['Letters about Charlotte Bronte'] (1850-1855), in The Letters of Mrs Gaskell 141 Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ['Charlotte Bronte's Appearance'] (1850), in Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie 160 [John Stores Smith], 'Personal Reminiscences: A Day with Charlotte Bronte' (1850), in The Free Lance: A Journal of Humour and Criticism 161 Charles and Frances Brookfield, ['A Party for Charlotte Bronte'] (1850-1851), in Mrs Brookfield and her Circle 170 CONTENTS ix

William Scruton, 'A "Stroller's" Interview with Charlotte Bronte' (1851) and 'Martha Brown' (1898), in Thornton and the Brontes 172 Frank Smith, ['An Offer of a Living to Mr Nicholls'] (1854), in The Life and Work of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth 179 Patrick Bronte, ['Two Autobiographical Letters Sent to Mrs Gaskell'] (1855), in A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Bronte, by John Lock and Canon W. T. Dixon 181 H. K. Bell, 'Charlotte Bronte's Husband. His Later Life and Surroundings' (1855-1906), in Cornhill Magazine 185 [Anonymous], 'A Winter-Day at Haworth' (1867), in Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art 191 William Cory, ['What Charlotte Bronte Meant to an Eton Schoolboy'] (1867), in Extracts from the Letters and Journals of William Cory 203 C. [Cautley] Holmes Cautley, 'Old Haworth Folk Who Knew the Brontes' (1910), in Cornhill Magazine 205

Index 215 Introduction

The selections in this anthology constitute a family portrait, painted by those who knew personally one or more of the Brontes. Because all the Brontes were fascinating personalities, this kind of testi• mony will go far to satisfy readers interested in the question of how a family living in so small and remote a community as Haworth were able to produce some of the most heart-felt, original, and strik• ing literature of the nineteenth century. Allow me to begin with the arguable proposition that there is no ann us mirabilis in the history of the Bronte family, though the activities of all the children, for better or worse, reached an aston• ishing climax in the late 1840s. The case may be made, first, with the Reverend Patrick Bronte, who lived longer than all his children, and on till the age of 85; but no single year claimed precedence, either for successes or sorrows, over all the others. An edition of Patrick's Collected Works, compiled by J. Horsfall Turner, was pub• lished in 1898. Patrick's publications - including foul' volumes of didactic fiction and poems, essays and sermons, religious medita• tions, and letters to various periodicals, all marked by lucidity, vigour of expression, and a strong sense of the value of the written word - ranged in time from 1810 to 1844; yet none of these broke through to a larger audience. The writings of his children began early, in 1826, but a full two decades were to elapse before a series of published novels would attract the attention of readers outside Haworth. The juvenilia filled more than 100 manuscripts, many of them 2t x It inches in size. All were written in an excruciatingly tiny script. (Charlotte, who was capable of writing more than a hundred words on each scrap of paper, was notoriously near-sighted.) The total wordage, by the time they broke off, exceeded that of all the novels and poems that they would subsequently write. The brother and his three sisters were devising long, complicated stories of Glass Town, an imaginary African kingdom, and of Angria and Gondal. Charlotte and Branwell contributed both prose and poetry to the Glass Town cycle. What we know about the juvenilia is, regrettably, less than we would like to know. Some of the hand• made volumes have been lost; others survive only in fragments. The prose contributed by Emily and Anne to the Gondal cycle has disappeared. Some of the readings of Charlotte's handwriting must

xi xii INTRODUCTION

remain problematic: the paper she used was not of high quality, some words blotted into illegible smears, and the Lilliputian script is, even for the dedicated scholar, hard to decipher. The creative energies of the Bronte children were almost com• pletely absorbed by these sagas from the mid-1820s until the late 1830s. But Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne discovered, ultim• ately, that they could not rest satisfied with these extended ima• ginings of different kingdoms. Reacting to Charlotte's prodding, they agreed to the issuance of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (May 1846), which printed the Gondal poems of Emily and Anne, wrenched from their prose context. This small production was fol• lowed by a number of novels that ended only with the long-delayed (and posthumous) publication of Charlotte's The Professor in 1857, with an introduction written by her husband. Though Charlotte developed the longest bibliography - primarily because she lived the longest of the Bronte siblings - her talents as a creative artist were seriously rivalled (and thought by some critics to have been exceeded) by those of her younger sister Emily. But Emily published only one novel, and, so far as we know, never began a second one. The total achievements of three of the Bronte children, coming before the attention of the reading-public over an eight-year period, richly document a collective imaginative life that may have no peer in the annals of English literature. Allow, still one more time, a calling of the roll: Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1847), Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847), Anne's Agnes Grey (1847), Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte's Shirley (1849), and Charlotte's Villette (1853). (The Professor, already mentioned, was completed in 1847, but lan• guished unpublished for a full decade.) Charlotte died on 31 March 1855, from tuberculosis exacerbated by pregnancy, exhaustion, and dehydration. She left behind four unfinished manuscripts; she obviously intended to continue writ• ing novels. One of these fragments, entitled Emma, was introduced by William Makepeace Thackeray to the readers of Cornhill Maga• zine in 1860. As Frank Pinion wrote, 'The sureness and economy of style in this fragment make one wonder how much more Charlotte would have matured as a writer had she lived, and had her unima• ginative husband encouraged her to write.'t Some writers on the Bronte family, unfortunately, have in• dulged in wilder flights of fancy. Maria and Elizabeth, the two oldest children, might have lived much longer if their father had made a determined effort to continue bearing the expenses of Crofton Hall INTRODUCTION xiii

School at Wakefield. Instead, he decided to send them to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where they fell prey to the con• sumption that would kill them at the ages of 11 and 10 respectively. Some biographers have wondered whether, if they had grown to womanhood, they could have written novels of some distinction. Another speculation: Branwell, with his multiple unfocused talents, might have become a successful artist or poet on a larger stage than Yorkshire provided if recklessly-taken drugs (alcohol and opium) had not ruined his body and clouded his mind. Some writers on the Bronte 'legend' have gone so far as to assess the quality of the novels that 'Currer', 'Ellis', and'Acton' Bell (i.e., Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) might have written if they had lived another decade or two. Such theorising is futile. Less than three months after Branwell's death at the age of 31 (24 September 1848), Emily died at the age of 30 (19 December 1848); five months later Anne, at the age of 29, followed her to the grave (28 May 1849). All visitors to the rebuilt Haworth Church - which stands on the site of the Old Haworth Church, demolished in 1879 - realise, as they stare at the Brontes' grave, how poignantly abbreviated the lives of all the Bronte chil• dren were. Though Haworth in the early years of the nineteenth century was an isolated, grim community of approximately 5,000 people - who were exposed to the inevitable consequences of bad or totally inad• equate sewerage - too much can be made of the unpleasant aspects of the environment in which the Bronte children grew up. The Reverend Patrick Bronte's interest in literature certainly enriched lives of his children. Charlotte, in a memorandum entitled 'The History of the Year 1829', listed matter-of-factly some of the pub• lications regularly available to the Bronte children; these included five newspapers and Blackwood's Magazine. In her father's home books were taken seriously. Patrick always encouraged his children to write, even to dramatise their fantasies; on one notable occasion he provided them with a mask behind which each might speak freely. Shortly after the death of his wife, Maria Branwell (15 Sep• tember 1821), he came to appreciate that he was discovering 'signs of talent' which he had 'seldom, or never before, seen in any of their age'. It is well past time to scotch the canard that he did not care about Charlotte's aspirations to become a successful novelist, and knew nothing about them, until she appeared before him in his study one day, offering to read him some early reviews of Jane Eyre. xiv INTRODUCTION

(Mrs Gaskell, told about this moment by Charlotte, heightened it for dramatic effect when she recounted it in The Life of Charlotte Bronte.) Several such stories, underlining the Reverend Patrick Bronte's reclusive habits and unpredictable flashes of temper, were first re• corded in the Life, which was published in March 1857, shortly after Charlotte's death. As later investigators showed, Patrick's grow• ing alarm over the wide circulation of such anecdotes, particularly those exhibiting in a harsh light his relations to his children and his parishioners, was fully justified. Some of the stories were based on the hearsay of a garrulous (and untruthful) day-nurse hired during Charlotte's last illness. Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, an equivocal friend of the Bronte family, also contributed to the miasma of rumours. Though Mrs Gaskell sought to establish the truth by interviewing as many Haworth residents as she could, her time spent in doing so was necessarily limited, and many anecdotes that she recounted were susceptible to a more innocent interpretation than the Life provided. Matters were not helped by the sentimentalising, in hundreds of subsequent articles and dozens of books, of the supposed romantic relationships of Branwell and the sisters to various women and men (named and nameless). Any reader of a Bronte bibliography quickly discovers that it is heavily weighted toward what Robert Bernard Martin once called 'the Purple Heather School of Criticism and Biography'.2 Nevertheless, matters have improved greatly since Mildred G. Christian scornfully wrote, some thirty years ago, 'Objec• tive writing about the Brontes is scanty, and scholarly examination of them rare.'3 Within the Bronte household matters did not look the same as from the outside. Patrick did not forbid meat at the table; in fact, the children were well fed. They were not continually depressed, but played happily and enjoyed each other's company. Their friend• ships, though few, proved to be intense and long-lasting. Emily and Anne chose not to expand their circle of acquaintances, but not because they were ostracised in any way, or to the slightest degree, by the citizens of Haworth. Charlotte may well have been an awk• ward presence in London society; but she met more intellectuals than is generally appreciated. One way to redress the awkward balance struck by the prolif• eration of partially fictionalised versions of life at the Parsonage is to re-examine the testimony provided by those who knew the Brontes. INTRODUCTION xv

The most heroic of all such efforts to record that testimony has been conducted, over the period of a full century, by the Bronte SOciety, which began its meetings in 1894 with Lord Houghton as President; the annual publication of the Transactions, which was first known as Publications, began in 1895, and, despite an inevitable clutter of trivia, the Transactions have become essential to all researchers. Unfortu• nately, by the time the Society was organised, some forty years had elapsed since the death of Charlotte, and very few witnesses were alive to respond to the inquiries of those who loved the liter• ary heritage left by the Bronte sisters. No scholar is satisfied with the Shakespeare Head Bronte, edited by T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (4 volumes, 1932). Inaccuracies in transcription abound, and many of the dates are conjectural. Nev• ertheless, for want of a trustworthy text, it has served as the most complete edition of the Bronte correspondence till now. (The first volume of a three-volume edition, The Letters of Charlotte Bronte / With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, prepared by Margaret Smith, was published by Oxford: Clarendon Press late in 1995, and promises to be definitive despite the fact that many letters written by Charlotte no longer exist.) William Scruton, in Thornton and the Brontes (Bradford: John Dale & Co., 1898), added an appendix of interviews with a few individuals who had known the Bronte fam• ily, but these were tantaliSingly brief, and most of the relationships not particularly significant. E. M. Delafield, in The Brontes (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), surveyed the field more thoroughly, includ• ing (for example) excerpts from Ellen Nussey's important article in Scribner's Magazine (May 1871). Regrettably, however, all the selec• tions were briefer than necessary, some texts were cut at peculiar places, no background information was provided, and the bibliograph• ical information provided was often incomplete or misleading. This volume in the Interviews and Recollections series is not prim• arily an edition of letters, and it has seemed undesirable to quote at length, still one more time, from the readily available text of Mrs Gaskell's Life. Several allusions to what may be found therein are inevitable, but they are intended, for the most part, to serve as guides to directed reading in that indispensable biography. I have included a singularly important quartet of letters from Charlotte to M. Heger in Brussels (not known to the general public until 1913); a number of letters written by Mrs Gaskell that provided vivid im• pressions of the Bronte household (several years later she re-ordered and rendered details selectively, adopting a more literary tone, in the xvi INTRODUCTION

Life); and a number of missives sent back from New Zealand to England, written by Mary Taylor, Charlotte's lifelong friend. A few additional letters are reprinted for the essential information that they provide. Because the Bronte correspondence - with the major portion written by Charlotte - is so bulky, however, an interested reader should consult the Shakespeare Head Bronte. A warning should be sounded, however, about the sparseness of the materials left behind by the Brontes, even when we count the letters. The 'biographical heresy' - a phrase used to condemn the practice by some biographers and critics of using the creative work as a directory to biographical fact, and of suggesting closer corres• pondences between the life and the literary product than may actually exist - is particularly troublesome in the case of writers like the Brontes, who have left relatively few letters, diaries, and per• sonal essays. The most significant personal documents of Emily Bronte are, by any objective standard, minor: three letters, two birthday-notes and two diary-notes, and a number of practice essays written in schoolgirl-French. The juvenilia (much of which was deliberately destroyed) and the poems are not candidates for inclusion here. The manuscript of Wuthering Heights was lost long ago. Anne's literary remains are two novels, fifty-nine poems, and - of the hundreds of letters that we know she wrote - only three let• ters to Ellen Nussey, one to William Smith Williams (the sympathetic and knowledgeable reader at Smith, Elder & Co., Charlotte's pub• lisher), and one to the Reverend David Thorn. There also exist a few diary-papers; Anne co-signed them with Emily at foy-r-year inter• vals, and of these, only two are in Anne's handwriting. (These diary• papers are reprinted here.) Most of her juvenilia, like that of Emily, has disappeared. It is possible to be more specific: Charlotte, anxious to guard the posthumous reputation of her sisters, was responsible for the destruction of all the unfinished works of both Emily and Anne. We cannot even guess as to the quality of what was lost. Nevertheless, without Charlotte's determination to secure a wider audience for the writings of her sisters, none of their poems and novels would have come into print. The case of Branwell differs from that of Emily or Anne. As Winifred Gerin noted in her biography (1961), a great many of Branwell's unpublished writings - the juvenilia that he wrote in col• laboration with Charlotte, and a number of adult compositions (most INTRODUCTION xvii of them of limited literary value) - survive in various collections in both England and the United States. In the summer of 1842 he pub• lished some poems in the Halifax Guardian and the Leeds Intelligencer, but they attracted little or no attention. His unpublished poems were printed in 1927. All his poems were collected, along with those of Charlotte, by T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, in a one-volume edition (1934). Separated from Charlotte's poems, they were again edited, by higher standards, in more recent years: once by Tom Winnifrith in 1983, and again by Victor A. Neufeldt in 1990. C. W. Hatfield, com• piler of an indispensable catalogue of the holdings of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, edited in 1925 Branwell's letters to Joseph B. Leyland, an artist whose life spiralled downward in a way that eerily paralleled Branwell's own disintegration. Even so, Branwell, who wrote about himself incessantly, was more concerned with his emotions than with objective reality, and prac• tically everything he had to say about his own life must be checked against the testimony of other witnesses. Charlotte was the great letter-writer and historian of the family, much more so than her father. Unfortunately, as already hinted, some of Mrs Gaskell's misinterpretations of the Reverend Patrick Bronte's behaviour are traceable directly to Charlotte's casual com• ments. Charlotte probably trusted too uncritically Branwell's account of the Robinson affair, which led to his dismissal from Thorp Green Hall; she certainly detested Mrs Robinson; but her letters speak more frequently of Branwell's intemperate habits than of his repeated failures to distinguish between fact and fancy. Her attitude toward Emily and Anne, though fond and protective, underestimated their talents, and seems condescending to readers of this century. Despite these reservations (which an editor or biographer must record), she always wrote honestly, and she often packed her letters with rich detail. The Reverend Arthur B. Nicholls, who married Charlotte on 29 June 1854, was her husband for only nine months before she died, during which time he apparently held little sympathy with her desire to write more novels. He may have been the primary person responsible for her not moving ahead more vigorously on various fragments of fictional narratives that she began, but after her life• time and until 1906 (when he himself died) he acted as a vigorous, if occasionally blindly partisan, defender of her reputation. What this means, in effect, is that a great deal of what we know about the Brontes - indeed, some of the most interesting information xviii INTRODUCTION that we have been able to gather over the last 150 years - has come not from the Brontes themselves but from local tradition, the places associated with the Brontes (not all of them in Yorkshire), friends and acquaintances, journalists, fellow-novelists and various men and women involved in the publishing trade, and sometimes even the most casual of visitors to the Haworth Parsonage. Because the Brontes, an extraordinary family, have left behind such sketchy docu• mentation of their doings, the record can be usefully supplemented. This composite biography, drawing on the written records of those who knew the Brontes, has been constructed to satisfy that need.

NOTES

1. Frank B. Pinion, A Bronte Companion: Literary Assessment, Background, and Reference (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 156. 2. Quoted by Herbert J. Rosengarten in his critical bibliography, 'The Brontes', in Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, edited by George H. Ford (New York: Modern Language Association, 1978), p. 170. 3. Mildred G. Christian, 'The Brontes', in Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), p.215.