a gallimaufry

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, part two

At the end of my previous post about the family, Patrick Brontë had failed to find a second wife for himself and stepmother for his six children. This meant falling back onto Plan B: school. On the recommendation of a couple of family friends, the two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, aged just nine and eight, were sent off to Crofton Hall. Unfortunately, it was expensive, and Patrick had other children to educate…  

(Undated etching of Cowan Bridge, found here)

A new ‘School for Clergymen’s Daughters’ was being opened at Cowan Bridge and seemed an answer to Patrick’s prayer: the fees were half those of comparable schools and its list of patrons included some of the most eminent people in the land. So Patrick escorted Maria and Elizabeth there on 21 July 1824; three weeks later, he brought Charlotte, and in November, Emily, who was only six. By December, poor little Maria was showing signs of consumption but the school did not inform her family; it wasn’t until the middle of February, when she was seriously ill, that the school wrote to Patrick. He came immediately and took her home, where she died in May. Even as the family was nursing Maria, Elizabeth was falling ill with consumption too. There was an outbreak of typhus at the school and on doctor’s advice the girls were sent to the seaside – except for Elizabeth. She was sent back to Haworth in the company of a servant.

Patrick travelled to Silverdale the very next day to bring Emily and Charlotte home, and they never went back to Cowan Bridge. Elizabeth died in June. The remaining children were of course deeply traumatised by what had happened. It was particularly hard, Juliet Barker writes, that Maria and Elizabeth were the eldest; they were the ones who had led, whom the others had looked up to. Motherless children and orphans became a fixture of the remaining sisters’ writing.

Juliet Barker argues that Cowan Bridge was no worse than most schools of its time and in fact better than many. Children and adults were susceptible to fatal diseases the causes of which were not always understood; pupils dying at school was therefore a depressingly common phenomenon and Cowan Bridge’s record was not too bad. Still, the argument that ‘other schools were worse’ in terms of health and punishment is hardly an exoneration of Cowan Bridge. There’s no question that the food was unpleasant, unhygienically prepared and inadequate. The dirty kitchen was responsible for the outbreak of typhus. The girls were cold in winter and, most damningly, expected to wear thin shoes and pattens on their walks. This frequently resulted in wet feet, an invitation to illness –especially consumption. While Charlotte’s depiction of Lowood in Jane Eyre was fictional and based on a small girl’s perspective, particularly alive to cruelty and injustice, it was accurate enough for many former pupils to recognise its original as Cowan Bridge and distressing enough for readers of the time to be horrified by it; its regime may have been the norm but that didn’t make it acceptable to everyone in the nineteenth century.

(One of the little books by Charlotte, from here, where there are lots of nice images of the little books)

Back at Haworth the years passed, the pain grew bearable. The children read voraciously; in addition to their books at home they had access to the circulating libraries in Keighley and copies of Blackwood’s Magazine which they borrowed from a neighbour. Blackwood’s, with its Tory politics, satire and reviews of new works of biography, history, travel and fiction, had a profound influence on the siblings’ writings. Sadly, Emily’s and Anne’s early writings have not survived, but many of Branwell’s and Charlotte’s tiny books still exist. Juliet Barker writes very interestingly about the Gothicky stories of Glasstown and Angria, and the way in which they often formed a sort of artistic conversation between Charlotte and Branwell, a game they enjoyed playing with each other. In the stories they mock their sisters and each other and attack each other’s favourite characters. Barker claims that previous biographers have used Charlotte and Branwell’s cheerfully prolific references to drunkenness to argue that Branwell was already boozing (at the age of thirteen!) – but they don’t argue the same of Charlotte, an interesting double standard.

But the spectre of school and of a governessy future never entirely receded and when Charlotte was fourteen she was sent off to Roe Head School (a considerable improvement on Cowan Bridge which I feel slightly undermines Barker’s earlier position that Cowan Bridge was sort of all right really). Although it was tough for Charlotte, especially at first, she made friends – two were lifelong – and entertained her fellows by telling them stories – a sort of creative lifeline for her, too, away from Branwell and the little books. She also excelled academically. Later she was to return to teach, a less happy experience. Emily and Anne were also sent to Roe Head in due course but Emily only lasted three months before falling ill and being sent home. Barker speculates that while all the sisters found school difficult, Anne and Charlotte had a much stronger sense of duty and obligation than Emily, who simply could not and would not abide the restrictions.

(Drawing of Roe Head school by Anne Brontë, c. 1835–37; found here)

It’s hard not to feel angry on Charlotte and Anne’s behalfs, and not just because there were so few avenues available to them as middle-class women who must earn their livings so they were forced into something that made them miserable. Patrick dissuaded Charlotte from considering a writing career as being too uncertain. This was no doubt true, yet while Charlotte was gritting her teeth teaching French etc. to mischievous girls at Roe Head, Branwell was faffing about at home – shall I become an artist or a writer? Artist? Writer? – and writing hilariously entitled letters to the editor of Blackwood’s insisting that he read Branwell’s work and hire him at once as the next James Hogg. Patrick’s indulgence of this seems doubly odd as everyone seems to have agreed that Branwell was a totally crap painter. And while I’m on the subject, Branwell doesn’t seem at any point to have been sent off to school. So at this stage of the biography, the Brontë men are rather taxing my patience despite Juliet Barker’s even-handedness.

all the birds going crazy

Being an unreconstituted wimp, I have never read Daphne du Maurier’s story ‘The Birds’ nor watched the Hitchcock film because they are renowned for being scary and I certainly don’t require any external help in frightening myself rigid in any remotely uncanny situation. However, I am aware of the premise, and at the moment I am feeling anxious because what if it is in fact starting, and starting here, in this unexceptional part of Belgium?

First, it was the blackbird. I believe I have mentioned the cheeky blackbird before. He and his wife now boldly help themselves to cat food from almost literally under the noses of Mister Puss and Clara. I worry about this. Will cat food turn them into monster birds, who will grow beyond what nature intended and start carrying off children? The local primary school is all too close by. At least they seem to eat the food themselves and not take it to their babies.

When not thieving, Mr Blackbird is as good as biting the paw that feeds him by picking on Clara. No sooner does she step outside than he starts shouting at her and dive-bombing her. Ostensibly, this is because Mr Blackbird is a father and is doing his duty to protect his darlings.

(The baby blackbirds in their nest in the yew hedge, taken last week. I had to climb a ladder to take this picture. K, who peered into the nest before me, says that the baby birds smiled and waved at him but as you see they had fallen asleep when me and my camera arrived.)

However, Clara is usually nowhere near the nest when he starts up. So I think that Mr Blackbird is enjoying himself. A Napoleon complex perhaps? At first poor Clara hid under chairs or bushes to escape him, but now she frequently joins in the spirit of the thing, creeping and leaping and trying to catch him. Mr Blackbird had better be careful because his antics have improved Clara’s stalking skills no end and she nearly had him yesterday.

(Clara and Mr Blackbird)

Oddly, Mr Blackbird completely ignores Mister Puss, who does actually pose a real threat to any baby bird being a dastardly slayer of all things furred and feathered.

(Who, me?)

Meanwhile, in the chicken run...

(Night Fluffy)

This morning, poor little Fluffy was limping, so I caught her to investigate. And Night Fluffy attacked me! Although I fended him off quite easily with my clog, using a technique developed when Mister Puss gets spring in his veins and pretends to be a tiger among the hostas – I don’t hit him! I just use the clog as a shield – this was alarming and I am not sure that it bodes well for the future.

Night Fluffy is also responsible for Flower’s decline in looks. Now that Night Fluffy has entered into man’s estate, as it were, he has a particular fondness for Flower and likes to lavish her with his love rather too enthusiastically. So enthusiastically that he's pulling the feathers out from her back. Apparently this is not unusual, and I am assured that a chicken saddle is the solution to this problem. I have purchased one, and it arrived this morning. With trepidation (and clogs), I entered the run to seize Flower and fit her with the saddle.

Fortunately, Flower is a trusting soul and rushed up to me, so I scooped her up and was out again before Night Fluffy had taken in what was happening. He was very cross though, and flew up onto the gate and crowed. It struck me, as I wrestled with the chicken saddle and the unlucky Flower, that cocks crowing are really not so very different from lions roaring. I managed to get the saddle on, and took Flower back. Here she is, saddled up and displeased. I think I need to adjust it a bit, it looks rather loose. I’m having lunch first though.

(Flower in her saddle with Fluffy and Night Fluffy, giving me the evils. Daisy was laying an egg)

In short, dear readers, the birds are revolting. Find a secure cellar, stock up with a few years’ worth of gin and books, and prepare to wait it out. In fact, let’s play a game. What reading matter would you take into a secure cellar in the event of birds going bad?

Note for chicken enthusiasts: the saddle I bought was from here. The lady in the video makes it look so easy...

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, part one

It was only when I started seeing reviews of Claire Harman’s new biography of her, that I realised that 2016 was a Significant Year: the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. Stefanie’s and Jenny’s brilliant reviews made me wild to read about this extremely talented and erm slightly unusual family, and I knew I had a copy of Margaret Lane’s biography… but who knows where that is? It may be at my parents’ house, but even though that poor book has lain unread for ten years on a shelf or perhaps even in a box, suddenly I could not wait even a couple of months until I next visited them. I needed Brontës right now! And although the Harman biography looked very good, I decided to succumb entirely to Brontëmania and ordered a copy of Juliet Barker’s biography of the whole family, described as ‘definitive’.

Definitive it may very well be, but it is also enormous. Huge! Bigger than my Collected Shakespeare! When the postman arrived, we had to remove the front door simply to get the book in the house! I can only read it if K kneels before me holding it up and open, as a human lectern! And it’s so heavy he weeps all the time he’s holding it! Progress through such a large book is thus necessarily slow and, the Parry brains being no longer what they could be, I feared that I might forget the beginning before I reached the end. Then I thought: I’ll write about it as I go along!

Before I started, I believed I knew a few things about the Bs:

1. Patrick Brontë, the papa, was a mean old tyrant.
2. Branwell, the brother, was a useless drunkard. And his paintings were crap!
3. The children lived an isolated and friendless life, with only the moors, their imaginations and assorted dogs called Gnasher and Psycho for companions.
4. Everyone (except Papa) died of consumption, either due to the horrible cruel school where the girls were sent by their mean old papa, or due to the poisonous fumes of the churchyard by their house, I don’t really know which but it was definitely grim and Victorian.

Already, it seems that I may not have been correct about all of these...

(Photograph of Patrick Brontë around 1860; found here)

The biography starts off with several chapters concerning Patrick’s life before becoming a father. I admit that I was impatient to get onto some wailing and moorland, but this section is both useful for understanding the children’s domestic environment and important because it gives us a more rounded figure of Patrick than the mean old git of popular legend. Born in Ireland of farming stock, Patrick managed to secure himself a place at St John’s, Cambridge: he was clearly very intellectually able but without an immense amount of hard work and determination he would never have succeeded. At university, surrounded by the sons of the richest families in Britain, he struggled to make ends meet yet was almost always top of his class. He also managed to make some useful friends who helped him to his first job as a curate in the Essex village of Wethersfield. Here he had a fairly easy life and contracted an engagement with Mary Burder. Precisely what happened next is unclear, but it seems that Mary’s uncle – her father was dead, but the family was reasonably well-off – took a dim view of Patrick’s future prospects and Irishness. He forbad the marriage and whisked Mary away from Wethersfield to his house. Embarrassed by this and convinced that God had acted through the uncle (Mary was a Nonconformist and marrying her was a bit problematic for Patrick’s conscience and career), Patrick gave her up, found another job and moved away; Mary continued to hope for some years after. Eventually, bitterly hurt, she realised that their engagement would never be renewed and believed she had been jilted.

Not so much is known about Patrick’s wife, Maria Branwell, whom he met when she was helping her aunt with the domestic side of running a school, Woodhouse Grove, and married in 1812. She had grown up in Penzance in middle-class comfort and a whirl of social activity until her father died when she was twenty-five (her mother died a year later). Her letters seem to suggest she was more playful and perhaps light-hearted than Patrick. What would life have been like for our future authors and their siblings had she survived? For after bearing six children in as many years, she contracted what was probably cancer of the uterus and died; her suffering lasted a harrowing seven and a half months.

(Maria Branwell, artist unknown, at around the age of 15 according to the internets; found here)

Maria’s great concern seems to have been for the future of her children, and it must have been heartbreaking for her to know she would never see them grow and that they would be marked by her loss. But her death brought another problem. She left five daughters and, despite all Patrick’s hard work, it was clear that none of them would be independently wealthy through him. If they failed to marry, they would have to earn their own livings. In the early nineteenth century, pretty much the only respectable form of employment for an unmarried middle-class woman was teaching, either as a governess or in a school. Without a mother, however, the Brontë girls would fail to acquire the education necessary for such employment – unless they went to school. And school cost money and Patrick did not have much money.

In the two years following Maria’s death, therefore, Patrick desperately sought a second wife. Did he realise that a man of limited means with six small children whose wife had only recently died was perhaps not the most attractive prospect as a husband? He seems to have proposed or tried to propose to three women and managed to do so in a way that left them no longer on speaking terms with him. One of these women was none other than poor Mary Burder. Patrick seems genuinely surprised that she might have been wounded by his behaviour a dozen or so years previously.

So far, Juliet Barker has been rather at pains to rehabilitate Patrick Brontë from the damning portrait painted by Elizabeth Gaskell and sometimes perhaps bends a bit too far the other way. That drive which served him so well in his career may have rendered him rather blinkered when it came to others’ sensitivities. He also had a lot of calls on his time which surely would have kept him from spending a lot of time with his children – although in Victorian England, that was not remotely unusual. Discharging the pistol which you slept with from the back of the house every morning was, on the other hand, definitely unusual however you try to gloss it.

Next time: horrible school and juvenilia.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton

My exposure to G.K. Chesterton, until now, has been limited to his lovely poem ‘The Donkey’. As a child, I learnt it off by heart and I still think it’s terrific:

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

On a recent visit to Ipswich I found a second-hand copy of three of his novels published as A G.K. Chesterton Omnibus and having always meant to read The Man Who Was Thursday, which it contains, I bought it. However, I decided to start with The Napoleon of Notting Hill for the exciting and original reason that it was first in the book.

Well, it is a very odd novel, not at all what I expected (which was something Wodehousey, actually) and I am unable to think of anything it resembles. Written in 1904, it is set in 1984: a 1984 which is very similar to 1904 largely as a result of apathy. Democracy requiring too much effort for the British, they have decided on despotism, so much less bother than democracy and arguing about everything in Parliament. The king – women don’t seem to be eligible – is chosen by lot on the death of his predecessor and everything chugs gently along as one king is very much like another. Until Auberon Quin is chosen to be the next king. Quin considers it all to be a huge joke and uses his privileges to poke fun at the bland, dull society around him. Under his pet project, Charter of the Cities, he decides to strengthen the boroughs of London, granting to each its own provost, walls and private army: the powers of mediaeval city states. No one else really likes this idea and no one likes observing Quin’s redundant ceremonials or strutting about in robes at all, but no one takes the trouble to oppose him. It all seems quite harmless, anyway.

And so ten years pass. A large new road is proposed linking Hammersmith with Westbourne Grove; people are bullied and land is purchased and properties demolished and coincidentally a number of the provosts stand to make a tidy profit from its construction. But then Notting Hill acquires a new provost: the romantic, passionate Adam Wayne, who refuses to relinquish Pump Street to the developers. The other boroughs send in their armies but are repelled; barricades are built and swords are drawn. Suddenly the joke of the Charter is being taken very seriously indeed.

(‘In the dark entrance there appeared a flaming figure’, illustration by W. Graham Robertson for The Napoleon of Notting Hill, London and New York: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1904; found here)

The world of the book is very strange, not least because it’s 1904 masquerading as the future but with the mediaeval past (or 1904’s idea of the mediaeval past), in the shape of the Charter and Adam Wayne, breaking in on it. Men are walking around dressed in top hats and frock coats but brandishing halberds or belting up swords. Then there are no women – not one, not even a woman walking past in the street or serving a man a cup of tea or darning a sock. This is actually quite peculiar, although I’m not sure that Chesterton consciously intended it to be. And then there’s the tone. Auberon Quin is a joker and a cynic, who despises the outlook of the businessmen around him. He longs for romance and his ministers don’t provide that. Adam Wayne, however, does. Like a Pre-Raphaelite knight made flesh, he speaks in a heightened, mediaevalish way, cherishes honour and courtesy, and takes the Charter seriously. He is able to inspire men who were not really bothered about whether Pump Street is knocked down or not, and inspire them to fight to the death. This is another oddness: there is fighting, the streets literally run with blood, but only one death is actually described. The violence is veiled and there is no pain or grief. Everyone seems like toy soldiers, to be knocked down as part of a game. And everything is described in a wry, comical tone.

Quin is at first amused that someone is taking his Charter seriously; later he grows to admire Wayne despite his ridiculousness since he believes deeply in something, and this elevates him above everyone else, with their practical and material outlook. Both Chesterton and Quin describe Wayne as a ‘fanatic’. His fanaticism is particularly disturbing because it isn’t for a moral, spiritual or social end but for the upholding of his own powers as provost under the Charter. From the outset, it’s made pretty clear that most of the inhabitants of Notting Hill are quite happy for the road to be built and Pump Street to be knocked down. It is Wayne who objects and for no other reason than that he is entitled to object: ‘That which is large enough for the rich to covet, is large enough for the poor to defend’ – it’s mine and you can’t have it. This struck me as a petty principle for which to expect men to die. The painlessness of the fighting seemed at times like Chesterton disguising this.

But I think there’s another reason too. At the very end, Quin and Wayne talk together. Where are they? The story suggests that it may be the afterlife. On the other hand, this novel began with a preface discussing the futility of predicting the future, it continually and jokily resists realism and it includes a long despatch from Quin who at one point masquerades as a journalist reporting on the fighting in Notting Hill. In other words, we’re constantly being reminded of the artificiality of the story. None of the characters in it is ‘real’: none is more than a toy soldier constructed of words. There’s no ‘real’ death. So, at the end, Quin and Wayne may be in the afterlife, or they may have stepped outside outside the story, and are now looking in. They talk about their different perceptions of the world. Quin confesses that the Charter was conceived as a joke. He says:

‘Suppose I am God [...] and suppose I made the world in idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as toad-stools. Suppose Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things, laugh at them.’

‘And suppose that I am man,’ answered the other. ‘And suppose that I give the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for the fools’ paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible a joy. If we have taken the child’s games, and given them the seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?’ [...]

‘But suppose, friend, [...] it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility, of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a joke.’

The tall figure answered: ‘He could not know it. For it was not all a joke.’

Wayne goes on to say that he, the fanatic, and Quin, the satirist, are essential to the world, ‘and they went away together into the unknown world’. All of which adds up to an interesting and terrifying theology. Are satire and fanaticism both essential (especially when the satire is in love with the fanaticism, as in this novel)? If God is in fact an idle joker then are humans actually greater than God? And must we spill blood to prove our seriousness? As I say, I found this a profoundly disquieting book.

(Also, what is a Dutch garden?)