A Little History of Literature (19 page)

Haworth – the parsonage, church, and adjoining graveyard – forms the climate and the small world of the sisters' fiction. None of the three broke free and they all spent virtually their whole lives within the boundaries of their father's parish. The fact they saw so little of the larger world is evident enough in their novels. In Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights
(1847), for example, all the action takes place within a ten-mile radius of the ancient house that gives the novel its title. This tiny territorial reach leaves holes in the narrative. At the beginning of the story Mr Earnshaw has just walked to Liverpool and back (‘Sixty miles each way’) bringing with him a foundling – the infant Heathcliff, destined to overthrow the house he is fostered in. Other novelists would have dredged up some ‘back story’ for this strange child, or, at least, have given us the scene in which Earnshaw found the waif, as he claims (unconvincingly), in the Liverpool gutter. Is he an unacknowledged bastard, with some gipsy mother? Emily offers no explanatory scene. Why not?

The most plausible reason is that she did not know Liverpool, and did not want to take her story to a place she did not know. The largest such hole in the
Wuthering Heights
plot concerns Heathcliff's ‘missing years’. On overhearing Cathy tell Nelly (another of the novel's many narrators) that she intends to marry
Linton, Heathcliff runs away without so much as packing a bag, and with not a penny in his pocket. He comes back, three years later, rich, well-groomed and cultivated – a ‘gentleman’. How did that happen? Where has he been that this change could happen? The novel does not say.

These ‘holes in the plot’, as I've called them, can be seen as touches of art, deliberately there as features of the novel's design. But they also witness the fact that the author was a provincial, unworldly woman who simply had no experience of the places and situations in which an ignorant country boy, like the runaway Heathcliff, could return so strangely different.

Anne went to London, for a couple of days, only once in her life (to prove that she was the author of her first novel). Her two novels (which are traditionally underrated) frugally use her very limited life experience to the full. Drawing on the two years she spent as a governess with a family near York, in
Agnes Grey
(1847) she created the finest work of Victorian fiction to delineate the humiliations and frustrations of that ‘upper servant’ station in the middle-class household. The other thing she knew more than most women about was alcoholism. Because she was asthmatic, she spent more time at home and was more biddable than her sisters (as a child she won a medal for ‘good conduct’; it's hard to imagine Charlotte or Emily winning one). So it was Anne who had to look after Branwell in his wild bouts of drunkenness and dreadful withdrawals. It forms the plot of Anne's novel
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848), the most painfully accurate depiction of ‘dipsomania’, as alcoholism was then called, in Victorian literature.

A fact often forgotten is that the Brontës were a clergyman's daughters. It is woven into the fabric of their writing – sometimes invisibly. Most readers of
Jane Eyre
(1847) will remember the first line (‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’) and the horrors of the ‘red room’ and the odious Mrs Reed. But readers are often stumped to remember the last words of the novel: ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’

It is important to remember, when reading their novels, that the sisters had virtually no institutional education. Their brief
experience of Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School proved disastrous, and led to the eldest sisters' deaths. Charlotte immortalised the awful place, vengefully, as Lowood in
Jane Eyre
. After fifteen years, she still felt the physical pangs that sadistic school had inflicted on her and her sisters:

After typhoid swept through the school, closing it, their father took over his three surviving daughters' education and tutored them at home, exceptionally well. For these five years – probably the happiest years of their lives – the sisters were free to rummage at will throughout the well-stocked parsonage library. They were stimulated by the books they found – Scott's romances and Byron's poems, notably.

Around 1826, the three young sisters, together with Branwell, began secretively to write long serials, in tiny, almost illegible script, about imaginary worlds. This ‘web of childhood’ was initially inspired by games with Branwell's toy soldiers. The narratives ranged as far abroad as Africa, featuring Napoleonic and Wellingtonian heroes. The super-heroism of the characters in the imaginary Angria and Gondal filtered through in the later novels to such characters as Edward Rochester and, most glamorously, Heathcliff, that hero composed – as was his name (forename or surname?) – of the two hardest, least human elements in Emily's beloved moorland landscape.

Once grown up, what should unusually clever young women like the Brontë sisters do? Marry, of course. When their father died they would be penniless. The few portraits and a single photograph (of Charlotte) that survive confirm they were physically attractive. There were young, eligible clergyman in plenty for them to choose
from. But the sisters wanted more than marriage. Charlotte, for example, is known to have turned down early offers. They could, they resolved, pass on the home schooling their father had passed on to them. All three girls became governesses: Emily and Charlotte briefly and unhappily, Anne for longer and more long-sufferingly.

In 1842, Emily and Charlotte went off to Brussels, to work, as student teachers, in an exclusive boarding school for girls, with the aim of mastering French. It would help them, they believed, set up a school of their own one day. In Brussels, Emily was chronically unhappy away from Yorkshire and the moors. She, like Heathcliff and Cathy, loved ‘wilderness’. One of the fascinating moments in
Wuthering Heights
is when the young Cathy and Heathcliff compare their favourite summer days. For her it is when the clouds scud across the sky, driven by the wind, and the land is dappled. For him it is still, sultry, cloudless days. That is not an episode we would find in Charlotte's fiction.

Emily left Brussels to return to Haworth as soon as she decently could. The foreign place held nothing for her. Charlotte stayed another year. Disastrously for herself, but happily for literature, she fell madly in love with the principal of the school, Constantin Héger. He behaved well. She, consumed by passion, behaved, if not quite badly, then rather recklessly. Héger was the great love of her life. It was not to be, but nonetheless that wretched experience forms the stuff of the novels to come – Rochester's teasing, cat-and-mouse games with his governess, for example, in
Jane Eyre
. In
Villette
(1853), Héger appears, more realistically, as the man Lucy Snowe loves while working as a student teacher in a Brussels boarding school. The autobiographical element is heightened by both novels being written by the heroines in first-person narrative (‘I’ narrative) form. Rarely has an unhappy love affair produced greater fiction. And knowing what lay behind these novels helps us as readers to appreciate that greatness.

After Brussels the three women found themselves reunited at Haworth. They were now in their twenties. Neither governessing nor Belgium had worked. But apparently they were still unwilling
to put themselves on the marriage market and collectively resolved to earn their own income – never easy for women of the early Victorian period.

They decided that they would write. On the profit their books made they would, one day, set up a school. To break into the world of authorship, dominated as it was by men both as authors and publishers, they adopted male pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). They paid for a volume of their verse to be printed under their pen-names, loosed it on the world, and waited expectantly. It sold two copies. Posterity has made some amends by recognising Emily, particularly, as a major poet.

One wonderful year, 1847, saw the publication of all three of the great Brontë novels. But they were not all immediately successful.
Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes Grey
– Emily's and Anne's first novels (again published under their male pen-names) – were accepted by the most dishonest publisher in London. Under his mistreatment they sank without trace or payment. Long after the women's deaths, these novels would go on to be recognised as masterworks of Victorian fiction. Too late, though, for their authors.

Charlotte fared better. Her first novel was rejected by the publisher she sent it to, but with the comment that the firm would be very interested to see her next work. She duly dashed off
Jane Eyre
in a few weeks. It became a bestseller and ‘Currer Bell’ (she did not keep the pseudonym going for long) found herself the novelist of the day. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, like many others, stayed awake to read the story of the plain little governess who takes on the world and wins the man she loves, after he has conveniently disposed of the madwoman (his first wife) in the attic, and been ‘tamed’, Samson-like, by losing his sight and a hand.

Emily died a few months later, barely thirty, without finishing the second novel which she is thought to have been working on. Anne died, aged twenty-eight, five months after her sister. Her second novel,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
, was, like the first, shamefully mishandled by her publisher. Both sisters died of consumption.

Charlotte lived on for another six years. She was also the only
child of the family to marry, having accepted the proposal of her father's curate. Not long after the marriage, she died too, aged thirty-eight, from the complications of pregnancy. She was buried in the family vault at Haworth, one of three sisters who left behind them a body of fiction that will live forever.

CHAPTER
20

Under the Blankets

L
ITERATURE AND
C
HILDREN

Let's play some literary hide and seek. Where is the child hiding in
Hamlet
? Where are the little ones in
Beowulf
?
Pride and Prejudice
was, in 2012, voted the most influential novel in the English language. Where are the children in Austen's story about the Bennet family? Come out, come out, wherever you are! You'll seek in vain.

If, for the traditional parent, the ideal child was ‘seen and not heard’, in the long history of literature the child was, for centuries, neither seen nor heard. They are, of course,
there
, but they are invisible.

Children's literature – in the double sense of books
for
children, and books
about
children – emerged as a distinct category of fiction in the nineteenth century. The new interest in ‘the child’ as something worth writing about and for can be credited to two leading spirits of the Romantic movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth. In Rousseau's
Émile
(1762) – a manual for the ideal education of the child – and Wordsworth's long autobiographical poem
The Prelude
in the following century, childhood is the period of life which ‘makes’ us. As Wordsworth put it: ‘The
child is father of the man’. Not on the sidelines, but at the centre of the human condition.

Wordsworth's cult of the child had two sides to it. One was that childhood experience was ‘formative’ (it could also be traumatic – ‘deformative’). In
The Prelude
(and childhood is a prelude to adulthood) he argues that it is in childhood that our relationship with the world around us is established. In the poet's own case it was in childhood that his intimate relationship with nature was forged.

The other aspect was Wordsworth's religious belief that the child, having been most recently in the company of God, was a ‘purer’ being than the grown-up person. This belief is proclaimed in his poem, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. We come into the world, the poem asserts, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, which are gradually dispersed as the years pass. Conventionally the term ‘growing up’ suggests addition: we become stronger, more knowledgeable, more skilled. It is not (in Britain or America) until we reach a certain age, when we are ‘mature’ enough, that we can see some films, drink alcohol, drive a car, marry or vote in public elections. Wordsworth saw it differently. Growing up was not
gaining
something, but
losing
something much more important.

As we saw in Chapter 18, Wordsworth's heir in terms of a shared belief in childhood's primacy in human existence is – who else? – Charles Dickens. In his second novel,
Oliver Twist
(written in his mid-twenties, in 1837–38), he attacks new legislation, recently introduced, which made it more painful for the poor to rely on public aid – in order to motivate the ‘idle’ members of society to find useful employment and get off the municipal payroll. It's one of the recurrent swings in political thinking about the ‘welfare state’.