Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle. Clement King Shorter
that she had preserved. It is scarcely possible that time will reveal many more unpublished letters from the author of Jane Eyre. Several of those already in print are forgeries, and I have actually seen a letter addressed from Paris, a city which Miss Brontë never visited. I have the assurance of Dr. Héger of Brussels that Miss Brontë’s correspondence with his father no longer exists. In any case one may safely send forth this little book with the certainty that it is a fairly complete collection of Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence, and that it is altogether a valuable revelation of a singularly interesting personality. Steps will be taken henceforth, it may be added, to vindicate Mr. Nicholls’s rights in whatever may still remain of his wife’s unpublished correspondence.
CHAPTER I: PATRICK BRONTË AND MARIA HIS WIFE
It would seem quite clear to any careful investigator that the Reverend Patrick Brontë, Incumbent of Haworth, and the father of three famous daughters, was a much maligned man. We talk of the fierce light which beats upon a throne, but what is that compared to the fierce light which beats upon any man of some measure of individuality who is destined to live out his life in the quiet of a country village—in the very centre, as it were, of ‘personal talk’ and gossip not always kindly to the stranger within the gate? The view of Mr. Brontë, presented by Mrs. Gaskell in the early editions of her biography of Charlotte Brontë, is that of a severe, ill-tempered, and distinctly disagreeable character. It is the picture of a man who disliked the vanities of life so intensely, that the new shoes of his children and the silk dress of his wife were not spared by him in sudden gusts of passion. A stern old ruffian, one is inclined to consider him. His pistol-shooting rings picturesquely, but not agreeably, through Mrs. Gaskell’s memoirs. It has been already explained in more than one quarter that this was not the real Patrick Brontë, and that much of the unfavourable gossip was due to the chatter of a dismissed servant, retailed to Mrs. Gaskell on one of her missions of inquiry in the neighbourhood. The stories of the burnt shoes and the mutilated dress have been relegated to the realm of myth, and the pistol-shooting may now be acknowledged as a harmless pastime not more iniquitous than the golfing or angling of a latter-day clergyman. It is certain, were the matter of much interest to-day, that Mr. Brontë was fond of the use of firearms. The present Incumbent of Haworth will point out to you, on the old tower of Haworth Church, the marks of pistol bullets, which he is assured were made by Mr. Brontë. I have myself handled both the gun and the pistol—this latter a very ornamental weapon, by the way, manufactured at Bradford—which Mr. Brontë possessed during the later years of his life. From both he had obtained much innocent amusement; but his son-in-law, Mr. Nicholls, who, at the distance of forty years still cherishes a reverent and enthusiastic affection for old Mr. Brontë, informs me that the bullet marks upon Haworth Church were the irresponsible frolic of a rather juvenile curate—Mr. Smith. All this is trivial enough in any case, and one turns very readily to more important factors in the life of the father of the Brontës. Patrick Brontë was born at Ahaderg, County Down, in Ireland, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1777. He was one of the ten children of Hugh Brunty, farmer, and his nine brothers and sisters seem all of them to have spent their lives in their Irish home, to have married and been given in marriage, and to have gone to their graves in peace. Patrick alone had ambition, and, one must add, the opportune friend, without whom ambition counts for little in the great struggle of life. At sixteen he was a kind of village schoolmaster, or assistant schoolmaster, and at twenty-five, stirred thereto by the vicar of his parish, Mr. Tighe, he was on his way from Ireland to St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was in 1802 that Patrick Brontë went to Cambridge, and entered his name in the college books. There, indeed, we find the name, not of Patrick Brontë, but of Patrick Branty, [28] and this brings us to an interesting point as to the origin of the name. In the register of his birth his name is entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as ‘Brunty’ and ‘Bruntee’; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as Dr. Douglas Hyde has pointed out, the original name was O’Prunty. [29] The Irish, at the beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as were the English of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see variations in the spelling of the Brontë name—it being in the case of his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt ‘Brontee.’ To me it is perfectly clear that for the change of name Lord Nelson was responsible, and that the dukedom of Brontë, which was conferred upon the great sailor in 1799, suggested the more ornamental surname. There were no Irish Brontës in existence before Nelson became Duke of Brontë; but all Patrick’s brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more attractive surname. For this theory there is, of course, not one scrap of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick’s native parish gives us Brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies is Brontë.
From Cambridge, after taking orders in 1806, Mr. Brontë moved to a curacy at Weatherfield in Essex; and Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us, with that singular literary charm of his, how the good-looking Irish curate made successful love to a young parishioner—Miss Mary Burder. Mary Burder would have married him, it seems, but for an obdurate uncle and guardian. She was spirited away from the neighbourhood, and the lovers never met again. There are doubtful points in Mr. Birrell’s story. Mary Burder, as the wife of a Nonconformist minister, died in 1866, in her seventy-seventh year. This lady, from whom doubtless either directly or indirectly the tradition was obtained, may have amplified and exaggerated a very innocent flirtation. One would like further evidence for the statement that when Mr. Brontë lost his wife in 1821 he asked his old sweetheart, Mary Burder, to become the mother of his six children, and that she answered ‘no’. In any case, Mr. Brontë left Weatherfield in 1809 for a curacy at Dewsbury, and Dewsbury gossip also had much to say concerning the flirtations of its Irish curate. His next curacy, however, which was obtained in 1811, by a removal to Hartshead, near Huddersfield, brought flirtation for Mr. Brontë to a speedy end. In 1812, when thirty-three years of age, he married Miss Maria Branwell, of Penzance. Miss Branwell had only a few months before left her Cornish home for a visit to an uncle in Yorkshire. This uncle was a Mr. John Fennell, a clergyman of the Church of England, who had been a Methodist minister. To Methodism, indeed, the Cornish Branwells would seem to have been devoted at one time or another, for I have seen a copy of the Imitation inscribed ‘M. Branwell, July 1807,’ with the following title-page:—
an extract of the christian’s pattern: or, a treatise on the imitation of christ. written in latin by thomas à kempis. abridged and published in english by john wesley, m.a., london. printed at the conference office, north green, finsbury square. g. story, agent. sold by g. whitfield, city road. 1803. price bound 1s.
The book was evidently brought by Mrs. Brontë from Penzance, and given by her to her husband or left among her effects. The poor little woman had been in her grave for five or six years when it came into the hands of one of her daughters, as we learn from Charlotte’s hand-writing on the fly-leaf:—
‘C. Brontë’s book. This book was given to me in July 1826. It is not certainly known who is the author, but it is generally supposed that Thomas à Kempis is. I saw a reward of £10,000 offered in the Leeds Mercury to any one who could find out for a certainty who is the author.’
The conjunction of the names of John Wesley, Maria Branwell, and Charlotte Brontë surely gives this little volume, ‘price bound 1s.,’ a singular interest!
But here I must refer to the letters which Maria Branwell wrote to her lover during the brief courtship. Mrs. Gaskell, it will be remembered, makes but one extract from this correspondence, which was handed to her by Mr. Brontë as part of the material for her memoir. Long years before, the little packet had been taken from Mr. Brontë’s desk, for we find Charlotte writing to a friend on February 16th, 1850:—
‘A few days since, a little incident happened which curiously touched me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers, telling me that they were mamma’s, and that I might read them. I did read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were yellow with time, all