The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (78 page)

6
.
But death mill come – it is coming now – fast, fast!
: cf.
Dr Faustus
again in the accelerating panic of his final soliloquy: ‘The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d’ (sc. xix, 144).

7
.
I can’t repent; I only fear
: cf.
Dr Faustus
again: ‘My heart is harden’d, I cannot repent”, sc. vi, 18.

8
.
God is infinite Wisdom… and Love:
Psalms
147:5 1
‘John 4:8, 4:16.

9
.
in whom the fulness of the godhead shines
: Colossians 2:9. Helen tries to settle Huntingdon’s panic-stricken mind upon the human and intercessive person of the Trinity, the atoning Son, who has already taken Huntingdon’s sins upon himself.

10
.
as if I had never been; while I–
: compare Catherine’s speech beginning, “I wish I could hold you… till we were both dead”’ (
wuthering Heights
, Ch. 15).

11
.
No man… agreement unto God for him
: Psalms 49:7–8.

12
.
God, who hateth nothing that he hath made
: see Ezekiel 33:11, and the Book of Common Prayer (collect for Ash Wednesday). See Ch. 20, notes 10–18 above for Anne Brontë’s belief in universal redemption.

1
.
rank and circumstances
: as ‘Mrs Huntingdon of Grassdale Manor’, Helen is a person of ‘rank’, i.e., of inherited property, unearned income and gentry status. As ‘Mrs Graham the artist’, a working person living in a tenancy, she was merely middle class and therefore might be considered eligible by a farmer. Anne Brontë makes much of this perhaps in order to extend the novel to the required three-volume length.

2
.
my philosophy
: i.e., ‘my philosophic state of mind’.

3
.
come out from among them
:2 Corinthians 6:17. The quotation goes on: ‘and be separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.’ The novel here circles back to Ch. 20, and regretfully concurs with Aunt Maxwell’s opinion, which she had attached to the same chapter of 2 Corinthians, that the unbeliever and the believer must live in separation. See Ch. 20, n. 7.

1
.
appeal to the laws for protection
: Mr Millward, the voice of ecclesiastical authority in the area, speaks for the forces of reaction which decreed that
there were literally
no
circumstances under which a married woman could take autonomous action, apart from appeal to law. However, the law offered women no redress from abuse. Charlotte Brontë records this in the case of Caroline’s mother, Mrs Helstone, in
Shirley
: ‘The world’s laws never came near us – never! They were powerless as a rotten bulrush to protect me – impotent as idiot babblings to restrain him!’ (ch. 24).

2
.
tell the tale as ‘twas told to me
: cf. Sir Walter Scott, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1805), II. xxii.

3
.
balled the horses’ feet
: packed the hoofs with snow, thus hampering progress.

4
.
post-chaise
: enclosed coach carrying four persons, hired from stage to stage.

5
.
A gig then – a fly – car
: a ‘gig’ was a light two-wheeled vehicle; a ‘fly’ a small hired carriage (drawn by one horse); a ‘car’ a two-wheeled cart of various description.

6
.
clod-hoppers
: dismissive term for rustic labourers.

7
.
sotto voce
: low-voiced, on an undertone.

1
.
pea-jacket
: a short woollen overcoat.

2
.
platitude
: level condition.

1
.
and respectively returned
: Hargreaves emends ‘respectively’ to ‘respectfully’, on the grounds that the former is ‘at best extremely weak’: I have retained it, on the grounds that it makes adequate sense and that Anne Brontë’s writing
could
on occasion be ‘extremely weak’.

2
.
dared not believe in so much joy
: Hargreaves prints ‘believe in such felicity’, since the 1848 New York edition has ‘hope for such felicity’, a discrepancy which he hypothesizes may represent ‘different stages of the transmission of the text through proofs and a change of mind by the author’. However, since the New York version may erroneously have picked up the phrase ‘believe in such felicity’ from the manuscript for the page succeeding, I have retained the original, stronger version.

3
.
Linden-Car
: the first edition has, erroneously, ‘Linden Grange’.

4
.
I bequeathed the farm to Fergus
: marriage to Helen has emancipated Markham from the need to work for a living and translated him into a
landed gentleman who needs to do nothing but supervise his wife’s estates. No regret is shown at this emancipation, and we are given no idea as to how he and Helen spend their lives.

5
.
June 10th, 1847
: possibly the date on which Anne Brontë completed the draft of
The Tenant af Wildfell Hall
(see Chitham,
Life
, p. 152
).

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