The Brontë Cabinet Read online

  THE BRONTË CABINET

  Three Lives in Nine Objects

  DEBORAH LUTZ

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK – LONDON

  For Tony and Pamela

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Preface: The Private Lives of Objects

  CHAPTER 1 Tiny Books

  CHAPTER 2 Pillopatate

  CHAPTER 3 Out Walking

  CHAPTER 4 Keeper, Grasper, and Other Family Animals

  CHAPTER 5 Fugitive Letters

  CHAPTER 6 The Alchemy of Desks

  CHAPTER 7 Death Made Material

  CHAPTER 8 Memory Albums

  CHAPTER 9 Migrant Relics

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  Index

  Illustrations

  Ambrotype of Haworth Parsonage, ca. 1850, Brontë Parsonage Museum, © The Brontë Society

  Charlotte’s “Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine,” October 1829, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Lowell 1 (5)

  Anne’s sampler, January 1830, Brontë Parsonage Museum, S12, © The Brontë Society

  Branwell’s walking stick, Brontë Parsonage Museum, SB: 337, © The Brontë Society

  Keeper’s brass collar, Brontë Parsonage Museum, H110, © The Brontë Society

  Emily’s pencil sketch of Grasper, Brontë Parsonage Museum, E10, © The Brontë Society

  Letter from Charlotte to Constantin Heger, January 8, 1845, © British Library Board, ADD. 38732 D (front only)

  Wafers from Emily’s desk, Brontë Parsonage Museum, © The Brontë Society

  Charlotte’s portable desk, Brontë Parsonage Museum, H219, © The Brontë Society

  Emily’s self-portrait on her diary paper, July 30, 1845, from a facsimile in Clement Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896)

  Hair bracelet, Brontë Parsonage Museum, J14, © The Brontë Society

  Page of Charlotte’s fern album, Brontë Parsonage Museum, bb238, © The Brontë Society

  Page of Mary Pearson’s commonplace book, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, MS-0526

  Jet ovals, Brontë Parsonage Museum, J82, © The Brontë Society

  INSERT

  Branwell’s “Blackwood’s Magazine,” January 1829, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Lowell 1 (8)

  Charlotte’s needlework box and contents, Brontë Parsonage Museum, H87, © The Brontë Society

  Photograph of path on the moors, near Haworth, taken by the author

  Emily’s watercolor of Keeper, Brontë Parsonage Museum, E6, © The Brontë Society

  Lock of Mrs. Maria Brontë’s hair, Brontë Parsonage Museum, J81, © The Brontë Society

  PREFACE

  The Private Lives of Objects

  Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. As shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon . . . finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on.

  —MARILYNNE ROBINSON, Housekeeping

  The world is so full of a number of things

  I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

  —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, “HAPPY THOUGHT”

  THE STRANGE BED in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has always haunted me. We read about Catherine Earnshaw’s “large oak case” before we know anything about her. A wooden box entered via sliding panels, it has cutout squares near the top that resemble “coach windows,” as if one might crawl in to travel somewhere. The cabinet, its own little private room within a room, encloses a window and its ledge, where Catherine long ago stacked her small library and scratched her name into the paint. She once read there, scribbling her diary in the margins of her books.

  As one who favors reading in bed, I find this oak box charged with meaning, especially when encountered while settled in my own, the lamp a circle of warmth carved out of the late-night darkness. Just as the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is moved through by the children until the layers of fur coats become flakes of snow and tree branches, the bed opens into other worlds, the plenitude of the imagination. Heathcliff believes in this capability too; he gets into the dead Catherine’s box believing he can find her. He perishes there himself, and the novel hints that the bed provides a portal to another sphere, the one of ghosts.

  There are few books I’d rather carry me late into the night than Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Villette, few books whose worlds I’d rather crawl into and inhabit. I have even felt, somehow, known by their heroines, as if they might recognize me when I enter their spheres. I move around in those rooms with Jane or Lucy, sit in the antechamber of Bertha Mason’s prison, and also peer with wonder as the candlelight plays over “the doors of a great cabinet opposite—whose front, divided into twelve panels, bore in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each inclosed in its separate panel as in a frame.” My intimacy with these books has led me, like so many others, to want to come closer to their authors. So alive are these novels that I wish I could resurrect the Brontës themselves, their daily living and breathing, their material presence.

  Catherine’s box bed and the cabinet with the apostles’ heads glimmer with animation, seeming to lift off the page. I remember the uncanny sensation when I saw the real apostles cabinet, a seventeenth-century Dutch cupboard that Charlotte encountered when visiting a grand house with her friends, which she then transported to the top floor of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre. Did Emily, as well, base her oak sleeping closet on one she actually saw? If so, does it still exist somewhere?1

  Even ordinary objects can carry us to other times and places. Old things gain an extra patina of significance for this reason. Take, say, a striped dress from the 1940s, hemmed by hand, that I found in a thrift store. Holding it makes me wonder, What did it witness? What did the wearer feel and see with this very fabric against her skin? That body may well now be dead. Still, I feel the deep mystery of the lives of others in this palpable emissary of past moments, now impossible to recover. The texture of those lost days settles into possessions that outlive their owners, it seems to linger in a mended tear, a stretnotes.xhtml#ched elbow, a corner’s roundedness. Resurrecting this old matter by wearing or using it feels almost as if we respect the absent, whomever they might be, call them back for a brief moment before the door shuts for good. We, too, will leave behind things we have nicked with incident, warmed with wearing. Will they carry our history, abide in our place without us? Will our clothing still bear our gestures?

  The Victorians were more likely than we are to find remnants of selfhood in possessions that belonged to their dead. Their culture had less squeamishness about the dead body than ours usually does; sentimental thoughts about corpses were cultivated in many circles. Dying happened mostly at home, and then the living swept into the rooms and beds of the dead and kept on using them. The fashioning of death masks was still common, and the photographing of corpses had its day. A lock of hair taken from a corpse connected the living, many believed, to an afterlife where the dead resided. A nightshirt, a ring, a book, infused with the past, might reanimate it, when approached with all the senses.

  I was struck by a sense of bodies long gone when I held the artifacts I describe in the following chapters. Books especially bear the leavings of inky, soiled, or oily fingertips and palms. The Brontës scribbled, doodled, and inscribed in their books—stuck plants, drawings, visiting cards in them—making their presence manifest. Some of these well-used volumes transmitted even more than evidence of reading; they had a certain scent to them, which seemed,
to my nose, a fleshy smell. I was lucky to be able to touch (often without gloves), turn over, bring close, and even sniff the things I handled in libraries and museums. My great fortune reminded me of the attenuation of all the senses but sight in most museums today. We look—and only look—at things behind glass. It is hard to imagine how this could be different, since we want these works to be preserved, to last; yet it once was. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, museums still retained some aspects of the private collections from which they grew, and visitors were invited to touch artifacts on display. A woman in 1786 described a trip to the British Museum where she reached into an ancient Greek urn to caress the ashes. “I felt it gently; with great feeling . . . I pressed the grain of dust between my fingers tenderly, just as her best friend might once have grasped her hands.” When one Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1710, he complained that “even the women” were allowed in: “they run around here and there, grabbing at everything.” When the Victorian collector Captain Henry Lane Fox, who later took the name Pitt-Rivers, began gathering tools, art, and ceremonial items from all over the world so that the “lineaments of past ordinary lives” would be revealed, he wanted people to come to his collection (now the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) and “hold in their hand an idea expressed by the hands.”2

  Making use of objects to recover history has been a popular method for at least the last couple of decades. Borrowing from archaeology and anthropology, the field of “material culture” (also called “thing theory”) in literary studies flourishes: taking an object depicted in fiction and using it to explore the story and the culture in whinotes.xhtml#ch the tale is embedded. Elaine Freedgood, for instance, uses the mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre to discuss the violent histories of deforestation and slavery in Britain and its colonies, forms of mastery that appear also in Jane’s need to suppress herself and others. Even more radical approaches to the object realm have emerged lately. Metaphysicians of objects see them as autonomous from our perception, withdrawing from our direct access. As a philosophical or poetic meditation, as a way for us to loosen our human-centered hubris, the theory that the object has a secret existence seems worthy of exploration.3

  Yet, as much as I favor the idea of inanimate things having lives concealed from us, I still feel that an object’s meaning—its slumbering life—comes from our own desires and passions, the shadows we let play over it. All such theories have their roots, I believe, in ancient faiths. The body parts of saints, their clothing, and the objects they had touched exuded oils, perfumes, miracles, and healing. They could suddenly bleed, cry, levitate, or gain weight in a desire to not be moved. Matter, for Catholic believers in the Middle Ages, was fertile, “maternal, labile, percolating, forever tossing up grass, wood, horses, bees, sand, or metal,” as the historian Caroline Walker Bynum explains. Spontaneous generation and spontaneous combustion—ancient notions that animate bodies could emerge from nonliving substances or could suddenly disappear altogether—still had currency in the nineteenth century. So did “animal magnetism,” the belief in a fluid that permeated everything and that allowed objects (and people) to influence each other, even from afar. Certain gems could ward off the “evil eye,” and “touchpieces,” often of slate and worn around the neck as jewelry, carried the healing qualities thought to reside in the touch of the monarch. Objects had agency in British law. Belongings that had caused an individual’s death were accursed or had to be given up to God, which meant forfeiting them to the church or the Crown to be converted for pious uses, a practice called “deodand.” The custom in Scotland when a fisherman had fallen out of a boat and drowned, of beanotes.xhtml#ching it, cursing it, and leaving it to decay apart from its “innocent” mates, continued up until at least the early twentieth century.4

  Since things are mute, their interpretation leaves much latitude for conjecture. Writing about the belongings of authors one greatly admires, as I do in this book, can be fraught with the dangers of “over-reading.” Too much of oneself can be projected into the silence, making history personally nostalgic. All biography takes these risks, especially when little is known about a subject, as is the case with Emily Brontë. Lucasta Miller, in The Brontë Myth, explores how the Brontë sisters have been construed according to different agendas and the concerns of varied ages. With these myths born of Brontë love in mind, I sometimes had to laugh at my own zealousness. Poring over an artifact, I found myself wondering if some scratch in the wood of, say, Emily’s desk box, formed words or initials. Was this a message from the dead, or just the results of a bump into a table? I felt like a detective looking for clues, traces of evidence, even bodily fluids. But here no crime had been committed.

  Can we let objects speak on their own? Probably not even the metaphysicians of objects would think this possible. What I set out to do here is place each object in its cultural setting and in the moments of the everyday lives of the Brontës. I coax out what the thing might have “witnessed,” how it colored its human settings. This has meant covering some well-worn biographical ground—a whole library could be filled with books published on the Brontës, many of them so excellent that one feels there need be no more. I speculate at times, but I also take care not to overlay these objects with too much intensity of my own. Through the “eyes” of thread, paper, wood, jet, hair, bone, brass, fur, frond, leather, velvet, and ash, new corners and even rooms of these Victorian women’s lives light up for us. There has been little writing on most of these artifacts, on some not a jot. I find these things and their Victorian mates wholly beguiling. I wish with all my heart that they would step forth and speak, maybe even rise from the page. If they unlock themselves only a little—are brought to voice—then my task has been accomplished.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tiny Books

  I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. Heathcliff kicked his to the same place.

  —EMILY BRONTË, Wuthering Heights

  Reading is my favorite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

  —ANNE BRONTË, Agnes Grey

  IT WAS OCTOBER 1829, Charlotte Brontë was thirteen, and she was concocting a tiny text with whatever was at hand. She probably sat at the kitchen table, as she often did when writing as a child, the family’s beloved servant Tabby knocking about, cleaning and baking cakes. The Elland stone–flagged kitchen, just behind their father’s study, was regularly occupied by the Brontë girls, who might be writing there, but could just as well be kneading dough, cutting up hash, or feeding the dogs some of their oatmeal porridge. The weather for October had been steadily drenching, the raindrops tapping the windowpanes of their house in Haworth, West Yorkshire. A peat fire under the stove kept out the damp.1

  Charlotte’s early years bristled with dark incident. The family had moved into the gray, ashlar-stone parsonage, perched on an eminence overlooking an expanse of moorland hills, in April 1820. Her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, had been appointed the perpetual curate of Haworth. The two-storied eighteenth-century house teemed with people. In four bedrooms and a two-seated outdoor privy, ten bodies had to find space for dreaming and moving about: Charlotte, her parents, her five siblings, and two live-in servants. Her mother was Maria Branwell, a southerner from the mild-weathered port town of Penzance, with bluestocking tendencies. Maria had been attracted to Patrick, an Irish clergyman, not only for his dignified beauty and his rough warmth—she called him “saucy Pat” in their love letters—but because he used his Cambridge education to write thoughtful sermons accessible to the unlearned. He had literary ambitions too, publishing the occasional poem or story before his job and his family filled almost all of his time. Not many months after their arrival in Haworth, Maria took to bed. She passed seven-and-a-half agonizing months in her upstairs bedroom, dying of cancer. At times she slipped into a delirium. The certainty of leaving behind her children preyed most on her mind. The nurse heard her cry
out often, “Oh God my poor children—oh God my poor children!” She died on Saturday, September 15, 1821, with the children, Patrick, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, gathered around her bed. She was interred just next door, under a vault in the church. The mural tablet marking her burial chamber admonished the passerby to “be ye also ready.”2

  Charlotte’s father was left with a throng of children, the eldest—a second Maria—seven years old and Anne, the baby, not yet two. Aunt Elizabeth Branwell soon moved in to help. Further relief came when Patrick discovered a school set up for children of clergymen who were missing one or both parents. Subsidized by donations from the wealthy, the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge wasn’t expensive, an essential consideration for Patrick, whose curate’s salary was barely enough to support his large family. He tutored his son, Branwell, at home, and Anne was too young to go, so he sent the other four daughters there. Maria and Elizabeth, who as the eldest had become maternal figures for the younger children after their mother’s death, left for school in July 1824. Charlotte followed in August, Emily in November. The institution would become notorious for its grim, cruel conditions when Charlotte fictionalized it as Lowood school in her second novel, Jane Eyre, published in 1847. Both Maria and Elizabeth became ill of consumption. Eleven-year-old Maria was sent home sick in February 1825. When she died in May, her sisters were still at school. A few weeks after Maria died, ten-year-old Elizabeth was sent home, wasting away with the same illness. Charlotte and Emily were brought home in June and watched their sister die.

  In October 1829, when Charlotte was assembling her small manuscript, the house, still packed with inhabitants, had pockets of felt absence. In a short diary of the year, written a few months earlier, she mapped out the location of the remaining family members, as if to reassure herself they were still above ground. She first placed herself: “I am sitting by the table writing this in the kitchen.” Then she gave accounts of those in her immediate vicinity and included one of the dead in parentheses. “Tabby the servant is washing up after breakfast and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was the eldest), is kneeling on a chair looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us.” In the parlor down the hall Emily is “brushing it” (the room, presumably). Aunt Branwell is upstairs in her room, and her brother, Branwell, has gone with “Papa” to Keighley, a town a few miles away, to get a copy of the Leeds Intelligencer.3