The Books: The Brontës, by Juliet Barker

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on this shelf is The Brontës, by Juliet Barker

The story of the tragic Brontë family is familiar to everyone: we all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken, drug-addicted wastrel of a brother, wild romantic Emily, unrequited Anne and ‘poor Charlotte’. Or do we? These stereotypes of the popular imagination are precisely that – imaginary – created by amateur biographers from Mrs Gaskell onwards who were primarily novelists, and were attracted by the tale of an apparently doomed family of genius. Juliet Barker’s landmark book was the first definitive history of the Brontës. It demolishes myths, yet provides startling new information that is just as compelling – but true. Based on first-hand research among all the Brontë manuscripts, many so tiny they can only be read by magnifying glass, and among contemporary historical documents never before used by Brontë biographers, this book is both scholarly and compulsively readable. The Brontës is a revolutionary picture of the world’s favourite literary family.
— The Independent, review of Juliet Barker’s The Brontës

Haworth Parsonage

The three pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë

Manuscript page of Jane Eyre

“Landmark” is the word most commonly used to describe Juliet Barker’s giant biography of the Brontës. The myth, perpetuated by Mrs. Gaskell’s 1857 biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë was hard to shake. Perhaps because it was so attractive. Mrs. Gaskell wrote evocatively of the moors and the loneliness of Haworth Parsonage, creating the impression of a family huddled in the middle of nowhere, with four brilliant children growing up in isolation and intermittent misery, comforting themselves by creating fictional worlds. Mrs. Gaskell played up the misery, and downplayed (if not left out) many of the more controversial details. Patrick Brontë, the father of these four brilliant children, was still alive when her book was published, as was Charlotte Brontë’s husband, and Mrs. Gaskell didn’t want to hurt them. So the problems with Mrs. Gaskell’s albeit wonderful book are twofold. She fictionalized certain aspects, imagining their lives at Haworth in one particular way, and she also left giant portions out entirely. You’re not getting the whole story. In many ways, one of the most surprising things I learned when I read Juliet Barker’s book was that Haworth was not this stone house huddled miles from civilization. It was part of a busy little community, and the Brontë sisters and brother had much interaction with their fellow man. They were not feral wild children, untouched by society and living entirely in their fantasies (an impression given by Mrs. Gaskell’s book, and a myth that has persisted to this day when one thinks of the Brontës).

Juliet Barker was curator and librarian at the Haworth Parsonage, and had access to the voluminous paperwork that described the life that had been lived there (land deeds, employment reports, salaries, grocery bills – everything is in her book). The footnotes are daunting. The book is enormous. It is a commitment to read it. You have to gear yourself up for it (or at least I did). Barker knows the task at hand. She knows what she is up against. Or who. And her name is Elizabeth Gaskell. The words “Mrs. Gaskell” probably appear in this book more than any other. The myth must be dismantled. Barker takes her time. She paints the picture as she sees it. Nothing is uninteresting to her. The history of the area, the property leases, the layout, the economic information. She knows that the Mrs. Gaskell myth has lasted so long due to its power, and also to Mrs. Gaskell’s gift as a writer and novelist. It is hard to deny its beauty and seduction. But “it wasn’t the way she said it was” insists Juliet Barker, in page after page of detailed excavation.

I read the book when it first came out, so it’s been years since I read it, but I remember being in awe of her research, and also her ease with bringing that research to the public. At least it seems easy in the book. But as I kept flipping back and forth to read each footnote (the book is unwieldy in that way), all I kept thinking was: “Good lord, how long did it take for her to gather all of this information?” It took patience, time, and a willingness to stay away from Drama. The story of the Brontës is inherently dramatic, you can’t get away from that. In a family of four (well, six, but the elder two children died), three of them – all women – published multiple novels, all under assumed names, and some of these novels would then go on to be considered classics, taught in English classes in the modern-day? And they lived in the middle of nowhere? And they all died at young ages, and, in some cases, within one year of each other? You also have to take into account the books themselves, and in this case, I am really talking about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The fact that these two extraordinary (and strange) books came out of the same family is nothing less than breathtaking. I want to say: “Are you serious??”

It’s not that the books are “good”. Their “goodness” is irrelevant. What is shocking is how original and unique they both are. It is as though they have landed from outer space. Yes, there are Gothic elements in both, you can feel those influences, but the books so far surpass their influences that they then become their own damn thing. And you can’t loop Wuthering Heights in with Jane Eyre. They aren’t companion pieces at all. But read together, you think, my GOD, what was going on in that family.

This, of course, is ridiculous. Because there is such a thing as writing talent, and use of one’s imagination (something that the Brontë family had no problem accessing). Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë were master inventors, and they obviously utilized what they knew about the world and human nature in creating their memorable characters and stories. Charlotte Brontë’s experience as a governess came in handy for Jane Eyre, as did her sisters’ experiences with a horrid boarding school. Emily Brontë is an interesting case. The little we really know about her comes from Mrs. Gaskell’s books, Charlotte’s letters, and Emily’s own writing (poetry and novels). She suffered from intense homesickness whenever she left Haworth. Being away from it actually made her ill. She would strike out into the moors and go for long solitary walks. She cared more for animals than for people. These are the details. But out of such details, one writes Wuthering Heights? It makes no sense, and that is the most attractive and exciting thing about it. Jane Eyre has its own supernatural aspect, with Mr. Rochester screaming for her across the space-time continuum, etc., but Wuthering Heights takes it to a whole other level. In Jane Eyre, you still can imagine that civilized society does exist, and that it must be given its due (even with all its cruelty). But in Wuthering Heights we get a Godless world, where Love equals Selfishness, and the two lead characters, impetuous and rather awful, MUST be together. Even after death, they stalk the earth, howling for one another. Love in Jane Eyre is wrenching and awful, and great compromises must be struck, and you must accept the flaws, the deep flaws, in your beloved. But the happiness and solace (mainly solace) provided by love is a buffer against the darkness and the cold world out there. None of that is present in Wuthering Heights. Cathy and Heathcliff are almost outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde, come hell or high water. It is hard to “like” either one of them, although as you read the book that becomes an irrelevant point as well. Wuthering Heights gives a vision of love that is destructive, and as all-consuming as a giant fire. Your best bet would be to get out of the way.

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, despite their reputation as classics, which puts them in somewhat hoity-toity company, are weird dark books, violent and disturbing, in different ways, and the question remains: What the hell was going on at Haworth Parsonage to bring two such different geniuses into the world at the same time?

Juliet Barker breaks it all down, piece by minute piece, and since she is not inhibited by the same things Mrs. Gaskell was (protecting the remaining members of the Brontë family, for example), we get a much clearer picture of many elements left out of Mrs. Gaskell’s book. Branwell Brontë, the dissipated brother whom everyone seemed to think was the greatest genius of them all – if only he hadn’t drank so much and gambled, etc. He was the ringleader of many of their literary pursuits as children.

Barker is methodical, and for that reason the book is sometimes tedious. The ins and outs of the employment history at Haworth is pretty dry reading. But I stuck to it, and over the course of the giant book, a picture started to emerge. Or, many pictures. Of these people who had lived there once upon a time. The same letters from Charlotte Brontë utilized by Mrs. Gaskell are here (Barker went on to edit a collection of the Brontë family correspondence), but when surrounded by the giant mountain of additional facts, you start to see her in a different light. My experience, reading the book, was that these so-called mythical people actually started seeming real. It was quite odd, and I’m not sure how the transference occurred – it’s been a long time since I read it – but God is in the details, and getting an idea of how life was lived in that town, in the parsonage and elsewhere … starts to actually bring these extraordinary individuals into the foreground in a way that Mrs. Gaskell’s book, with its ulterior motives, did not. I felt like I could actually see those three sisters, sitting in the parlor, each writing in their own corner, and then coming together intermittently to read what they were working on. How exciting that must have been.

I have to admit I like the mystery. But Juliet Barker’s impressive biography does much to bring this family into reality. Because they were, in fact, real, and that is perhaps the biggest mystery of them all. Nothing can EXPLAIN Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Genius is genius.

For Brontë fans, this is a must-read. It’s daunting. It’s huge. But worth it.

Here’s an excerpt about the group literary projects Emily, Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne involved themselves in when they were kids. They created an entire fantasy world called Gondal, and wrote mini-novels about the wars, peaces, treaties, and battles in Gondal.

Excerpt from The Brontës

Only one story is extant from Our Fellows, Branwell’s ‘History of the Rebellion in My Fellows,’ which he wrote in 1828, when he was eleven. Written on music paper, it begins, ‘Good man was A Rascal and did want to Raise a Rebellion’ and tells the story of events in the autumn of 1827. The play was set in Lorraine, which was ruled by Branwell’s character, Boaster, and follows the rebellion, besieging at Loos and defeat in battle of Good Man, Charlotte’s character. After sending embassies to ‘Charlotte’s Country’ and negotiating a peace, Boaster ‘began to fortify my country I build c[h]urches castles and other publick Buildings in abundance’. The fact that the children enacted the parts of their characters is quite clear; the story even includes a letter addressed to ‘little Branwell’ by Charlotte as Good Man, declaring war on him.

All the elements of the Brontës’ juvenile writings are already present in this story: battles, rebellions and politics were to be their staple diet, reflecting not only their origins in the toy soldiers but also Branwell’s dominant role in the plays. The story also presaged future efforts in form as well as subject, for it was written in a hand-made little book, less than thirteen centimetres square. At first it was probably the fact that paper was expensive and in short supply that persuaded the young Brontës to write their stories in such tiny books, which they made themselves from scraps of paper, sewn into covers from odd bits of sugar bags, parcel wrappings and wallpaper. The handwriting was proportionately tiny, and, as the children grew older and more skilful, they developed a miniscule hand, designed to look like bookprint, which allowed them to write many more words to the page. The writing cannot be read easily without a magnifying glass, but as all the young Brontës were shortsighted, this would not have been so much of a problem to them. The tiny hand also had the advantage of being illegible to their father and aunt, so the children enjoyed the delicious thrill of knowing that the contents of the little books were a secret shared only among themselves.

Looking at the apparently painstakingly written pages and the hundreds of thousands of words they contain, it is easy to fall into the same trap as Mrs Gaskell and assume that the Brontë children’s interests were ‘of a sedentary and intellectual nature’. The popular image is of young children with a compulsion to write, pouring out precocious and mature literary works at an age when most children can barely form their letters. This is only a very small part of the story and, indeed, in some ways a major distortion of the truth.

The invention of fantasy kingdoms and the chronicling of imaginary adventures in little books was not unique to the Brontës. At the age of seven, their exact contemporary, John Ruskin, wrote over fifty pages of a little book, measuring only fifteen by ten centimetres, in a minuscule print similarly modelled on book print. Like the Brontës, his own reading, in his case the Scientific Dialogues of Joyce and the dramatic poem Manfred by Byron, provided the inspiration for his stories and poems. Equally literate, though less eminent than Ruskin, were the four Winkworth children, who were growing up in Manchester at about the same time as the Brontës. They, too, were highly imaginative and, because they were allowed very few works of fiction to read, they drew their inspiration from reading travelogues and histories. Every game they played had an associated story behind it. They took to dividing up the realms of Nature among themselves and developing stories round their own special possessions. ‘Thus each of the children had a Continent and a kingdom of Natural History, each choosing their representative beast as “king” of the animals.’ The young Catherine Winkworth, who was later to become a friend of Charlotte Brontë, also kept a personal journal which was written in minute printed characters. For whatever reason, bright children at this period were drawn to writing little books and inventing fictitious kingdoms.

It is easy also to over-emphasize the maturity of the young Brontës by drawing attention to the complexity of their childhood writings, the elaborate and exotic descriptive passages, the wide range of references and the rich vocabulary used. Less often mentioned is the highly imitative nature of much of the writing, in both style and subject matter. Their slap-dash writing, appalling spelling and non-existent punctuation well into their late teenage years is usually glossed over, as is the frequent immaturity of thought and characterization. These elements in the juvenilia do not detract from the Brontë’s achievement in producing such a volume of literature at so early an age, but they do extensively undermine the view that they were born novelists.

The Brontës were unique in their total absorption in the fantasy worlds they had created – an involvement that was at times to bring them into conflict with the real world. Equally unique is the fact that the play element continued to be an important part of the creative process even into adulthood. As late as 1845, when they were in their middle twenties, Emily and Anne whiled away a train journey by pretending to be Royalist prisoners escaping from Gondal.

The play origin of the books and the mixing of fact and fiction is perhaps best illustrated by the story of the Young Men, also known as the Twelves, which gradually came to dominate the children’s imaginations. Both Charlotte and Branwell recorded their origin. On 5 June 1826,

papa bought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds when papa came home it was night and we where in Bed so next morning Branwell came to our Door with a Box of soldiers Emily and I jumped out of Bed and I snat[c]hed up one and exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! \Auther/ when I said this \Athur/ Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole and perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave Looking ferllow we called him Gravey Anne’s was a queer little thing very much like herself. he was called waiting Boy Branwell chose Bonaparte

The children invented a previous history for their soldiers, which was recorded by Branwell in his ‘History of the Young Men’. The Twelves were a brave band of Englishmen who had sailed from England, fought against and slaughtered the Dutch on Ascension Island and then landed in the kingdom of Ashantee on the coast of Africa. While exploring the interior they were seized by

an Immense and terrible monster his head touched the clouds was encircled with a red and fiery Halo his nostrils flashed forth flames and smoke and he was enveloped in dim misty and indefinable robe

The monster, as Branwell explained in a footnote, turned out to be the redheaded and nightgown-clad Branwell himself, bringing the soldiers to show his sisters on that morning of 5 June.

the tallest of the 3 new monsters seized Arthur Wellesly the next seized EW Parry and the least seized J Ross For a long time they continued looking at them insilence which however was broken by The monster who brought them there he saying ‘Know you then that I give into your protection but not for your own these mortals whom you hold in your hands’ … ‘I am the chief Genius Brannii with me there are 3 others she wellesly who protects you is named Tallii she who protects Parry is named Emmii she who protects Ross is called Annii

Branwell’s own soldier, Bonaparte, was also called Sneaky; later he developed into Rogue and ultimately into Branwell’s alter ego, Northangerland. Emily’s Gravey swiftly became Sir William Edward Parry, the Arctic explorer who had just returned from his third expedition to find the North-West Passage. Anne’s oddly named Waiting Boy similarly turned into the more charismatic Sir James Clarke Ross, who had accompanied Parry on the expeditions. Both explorers had featured prominently in Blackwood’s Magazine. Charlotte, already obsessive about her hero, the Duke of Wellington, named her soldier after him. He was to feature as ‘her man’ in most of the plays, regardless of their origin, and her fixation on him as a fictional character did not really end until he was superseded by his more malleable sons, the fictional Arthur and Charles Wellesley.

Blackwood’s Magazine provided not only the characters of many of the Young Men but also the setting for the plays. In 1819 it had printed an eighteen-page review of T. Edward Bowditch’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle in Ashantee; with a statistical account of that kingdom, and geographical notices of the other parts of the interior of Africa. The Brontës placed their Young Men on the west coast of Africa in the kingdom of Ashantee and they adopted not only its capital, Coomassie, but also at least two of its Ashantee kings, Sai Too Too and Sai Quamina, as their enemies. The rivers Gambia and Niger flowed through their imaginary land, which was divided up into a confederacy of states, each belonging to one of the soldiers of each child: Wellingtonsland, Sneakysland, Parrysland and Rossesland. A number of islands just off the coast belonged to other soldiers, Monkeysland and Stumpsland playing the most prominent role. The lands, their populations and their characteristics were faithfully recorded not only in stories but also in maps and censuses.

Each state had its own capital, called a Glasstown, and at the mouth of the Gambia was the Great Glasstown itself. Under Branwell’s classical influence it was translated into Verdopolis and under Charlotte’s French influence it became a hybrid, Verreopolis. Whatever its name, the city was a heady mixture of London, Paris, and Babylon. Dominated by the Tower of All Nations, which was inspired by the biblical Tower of Babel, the Great Glasstown had all the excitement and bustle of a great metropolis. Public buildings on the scale of John Martin’s biblical paintings vied with mills drawn from the Brontës’ own experience. The city had its fashionable aristocratic society, like the London of which they read in the newspapers, and its low life haunting the inns in the manner of pre-revolutionary France. All life was here depicted, arts, learning, politics, fashionable and unfashionable scandal, thrown together in a potent brew that could never be matched in reality.

Branwell’s fictional interpretation of real events in ‘The History of the Young Men’ is indicative of the Brontës’ whole approach to the plays. The battles were played out for real in the garden or on the moors, where the toy soldiers could shoot down their enemies with cannon and wash them away by damming the streams. The parsonage cellars, with their peeling walls and atmospheric darkness, could be turned into dungeons for political prisoners or cells for punishing naughty schoolchildren. The enthusiasm, amounting to violence, with which the children played with the Twelves is reflected in the fate of the toy soldiers themselves. During the year his sisters were away at Cowan Bridge, Branwell ‘Maimed Lost burnt or destroyed’ two dozen soldiers. Of the Twelves themselves, bought in June 1826, only two or three lsted until 1830, when Branwell wrote their history, and the ‘Ashantees’, a set of ninepins, fared even worse. The children even invented an ancient language for their heroes, ‘the old young men tongue’, which they reproduced phonetically in their stories. It appears to have been Yorkshire dialect spoken out loud while holding the nose.

Real events impinged on the fictional world. The king of the Young Men, Frederick Guelph, Duke of York, was allowed to be killed in battle because ‘at the time we let this battle take place (ie in the beggining of AD 1827) The real Duke of York died of a mortification’. The arrival of a party of Peninsular War veterans in Ashantee, under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington, was caused by Branwell’s purchase of a new set of Turkish Musicians in Halifax in 1827 who had to be given a role in the plays. Even more dramatically, the children themselves sometimes appeared in the stories, either as Genii intervening to save their Young Men from a nasty fate or even to restore them to life, or in their own persons. We have already seen how ‘little Branwell’ and Charlotte appeared alongside Boaster and Good Man in ‘The History of the Rebellion in My Fellows’. In Charlotte’s first volume of ‘Tales of the Islanders’, the fictional aristocratic pupils of the Islanders’ school are kept in order by Branwell who has a ‘large black club with which he thumps the children upon ocasion and that most unmercifully’; the children would be tortured without detection in the school’s dungeons ‘if it was not that I keep the key of the dungeon & Emily keeps the key of the cell’s’.

So real were their imaginary characters and worlds to the young Brontës that the two frequently became confused. Emily, writing one of her occasional diary papers in November 1834, places equal emphasis on both; she moves from describing the practicalities of daily life to her imaginary world of Gondal as if there is no discernible difference between the two: ‘papa opened the parlour Door and gave Branwell a Letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte – The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally mosley is washing in the back Kitchin.’

An even more graphic demonstration of this is given in Charlotte’s second volume of ‘Tales of the Islanders’. Having described how a school had been established by the Islanders, Charlotte suddenly breaks off – just as the young Brontës clearly broke off from their play – distracted by the burning issue of Roman Catholic Emancipation.

O those 3 months from the time of the Kings speech to the end! nobody could think speak or write on anything but the catholic question and the Duke of Wellington or Mr Peel I remember the day when the INtelligence extraordinary came with Mr Peels speech in it containing the terms on which the catholics were to be let in with what eagerness papa tore off the cover & how we all gathered round him & with what breathless anxiety we listend as one by one they were disclosed & explained & argued upon so ably & so well & then when it was all out how aunt said she thought it was excellent & that the catholics [could] do no harm with such good security. I remember also the doubts as to wether it would pass into the house of Lord & the prophecys that it would not & when the paper came which was to decide the question the anxiety was almost dreadful with which we litsened to the whole affair the opening of the doors the hush the Royal Dukes in theire robes & the Great Duke in green sash & waistcoat the rising of all the peeresses when he rose the reading of his speech papa saying that his words were like precious gold & lastly the majority one to 4 in favour of the bill. but this is a digression . . .