The Brontë Cabinet Page 2
Despite one grim incident after another befalling her, Charlotte crammed these early years with inventing hilarious tales. She then created booklets to hold them, as she was doing this October. She began by snipping out eight sheets into squares of about two by one and a half inches, then folding each down the middle. The jagged edges of the white rag paper show some clumsy scissor wielding. Charlotte had small hands—her friend and first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell described the shake of one as “like the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm.” In later years her fingers could work expertly on delicate paintings and embroidery, but at thirteen their childishness made her cuts dip and sway as if she were on a boat while at her craft. Taking a used piece of parcel wrapping paper, brownish gray and fibrous, she cut out a square slightly larger than the white ones. This too she folded once down the middle. Stacking the leaves together, with the brown sheet on the outside forming a front and a back cover, Charlotte sewed them along the seam with needle and white thread. Now she had—empty and waiting—a rudimentary booklet of sixteen pages, about the size of a matchbook.4
Dipping her quill pen into an inkpot, Charlotte copied into the volume from a text she had already drafted in the weeks before she arrived at this stage of “publication.” She used a print, modeled after the type of real books, so minuscule it is difficult to make out without a magnifying glass. The illustration at the beginning of this chapter is more than twice the actual size, but the following is what she wrote on the first page, close to its real tininess:
In the year 1829, lived Captain Henry Dunally, a man whose possessions in this world bring him £200,000 a year. He was the owner of a beautiful country seat, about 10 miles from Glass Town and lived in a style which, though comfortable and happy, was some thousands below his yearly income. His wife, a comely lady in the 30th year of her age, was a person of great management and discretion, and given to use her tongue upon occasion. They had 3 children, the eldest of whom was 12, the second 10 and the youngest 2 years of age. They went by the separate names of Augusta Cecilia, Henry Fearnothing (the name of a maternal uncle of no great character among the more sober part of mankind and to this class both Dunally and his wife belonged) and Cina Rosalind. These children had, as may be supposed, each a different character. Augusta was given to
What Charlotte was after was an imitation, in miniature, of her favorite journal of the day: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. “The most able publication there is,” Charlotte enthused. All four siblings—Charlotte, Branwell (twelve years old), Emily (eleven), and Anne (just nine)—read and adored the monthly Scottish periodical, lent to them by their friend Mr. Driver. Published by William Blackwood from 1817, the magazine was a “miscellany” of a common type in England at the time. Short stories or poems, mostly gothic-tinged and busy with ghosts and murders, were mixed with Tory-leaning political articles about current affairs, sheet music, reviews of paintings and books, imaginary conversations in a tavern among tipsy characters, and other odds and ends. Articles were signed with pseudonyms, such as the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg’s sometimes alias. It was Charlotte’s brother, Branwell, who first had the idea to make imitations of the magazine. He started his dwarf-sized “Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine” in January 1829, with himself as editor and primary author, writing under various names, such as PBB, Sergeant or Captain Bud, and Young Soult. Charlotte occasionally “contributed,” under her own name or as one Captain Tree. After about six issues in as many months, Charlotte took over the “serial,” now calling it “Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine,” with Branwell sometimes appearing in her pages. Her first issue of August 1829 was “edited by the genius CB.” To Elizabeth Gaskell, who read these little magazines many years later, they seemed “the wildest and most incoherent things.” They gave her the “idea of creative power carried to the verge of insanity.” 5
The volume pictured at the opening of this chapter is the October issue of Charlotte’s “Blackwood’s.” As with other miscellanies, she included fiction, poetry, a section called “Military Conversations” modeled on the tavern talk of Blackwood’s, and a table of contents at the end. Advertisements appear on the last page, for objects and books such as How to Curl One’s Hair, by Monsieur Whats-the-reason. The most pungent piece in the magazine is the first story, “The Silver Cup: A Tale,” which opens on a scene pulled from her own experience: a family listening as one member reads a novel aloud. The story is interrupted by a peddler at the door, who sells the father an embossed silver cup. The cup carries with it a curse, as the father eventually realizes in a dream, and misfortunes begin to befall the family. Many of these involve children wildly misbehaving, such as the youngest girl, Cina, smashing into bits a miniature ship composed of glass, kept in a rosewood box. These little ruffians are threatened with having their brains knocked out against the wall or are given “hearty beatings,” a kind of dark slapstick that the Brontës reveled in as children and which continued in the adult writings of Emily and Branwell. All is made right when the cup is drained of its evil magic by an anti-genie potion. The influence of the Arabian Nights—the children were reading and copying obsessively from it—is obvious here in the trouble-making genie. A more subtle idea Charlotte poached is that seemingly innocent objects might radiate with animation and meaning. “Open sesame” moved the stone door that locked up mounds of treasure; a rub of an ancient lantern thrown up by the sea fulfilled mad desires. The delicate crystal ship in Charlotte’s tale was “mended by invisible hands” as if a vital spark burned low at its center, ready to be stoked. The inverse could also happen: people might transform into objects. Charlotte’s Captain Bud gets so depressed sometimes that he supposes himself turned into a stone, an oyster, or a heather-bell shrub “apt to be blown away at every blast of the wind.” 6
Children especially can hold in their minds two contradictory ideas: that a toy is made of just wood and paint and that it is a quivering thing, breathing and rushing into adventures. The many stories and books the young Brontës created in tandem emerged from fantasylands and people cooked up in their own heads, like the Glasstown Confederacy where their early characters roamed and played out their dramas. Yet most of their tales were also tethered to the real and tactile. The “Young Men” plays that Charlotte drew on for her “Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine” began life as a set of twelve wooden soldiers (the “Twelves”) given to Branwell by Patrick. Charlotte recounts how, on the night of June 4, 1826, their father came home from Leeds carrying presents for them. Branwell’s present of a box of soldiers became the most evocative when he burst in on his sisters the next morning. Emily and Charlotte “jumped out of Bed,” and Charlotte, snatching up “the prettiest of the whole,” named it after one of her heroes, the Duke of Wellington, and proclaimed, “It shall be mine!” Emily’s wooden man was grave and thus took the name Gravey. Anne’s was “a queer little thing like herself” and took the odd name of Waiting Boy; Branwell’s was Bonaparte, after Napoleon.7
In Branwell’s account of that morning, he imagines himself as an immense and terrible monster seizing the twelve brave soldiers as they are exploring the interior of Africa (and waging a war against the Ashantees, represented by Charlotte’s set of ninepins, brought by their father on the same night as the soldiers). He takes them to “a hall of inconceivable extent and splendor,” that is, the girls’ bedroom, which was in reality small and shabby. Here, three other giants become involved. All of them become the genies—Brannii, Tallii (Charlotte), Emmii, and Annii—that sometimes protect the soldiers and sometimes do evil things in the towns the soldiers establish.8
These weren’t the first toys to be pressed into service. In “The History of the Young Men,” thirteen-year-old Branwell lists his key acquisitions. In the summer of 1824, “papa” bought him his first box of soldiers from Bradford. A second set came from Keighley but didn’t last the year because they were “either maimed lost burnt or destroyed by various casualties they ‘departed and left not a wreck behind!’ �
�� Then came two bands of Turkish soldiers and the “Twelves,” mentioned already. In 1828 he purchased a “band of Indians.” 9
The mythologizing of these figures included a made-up language the little “men” spoke in, called “the old young men tongue,” which seems to have been a Yorkshire dialect spoken while pinching the nose. The siblings also appeared in the stories in their own persons, such as in Charlotte’s first volume of the “Tales of the Islanders,” where schoolchildren were punished in a secret dungeon by Colonel Naughty and his gang. “Unjust torturing” would go on “if it was not that I keep the key of the dungeon and Emily keeps the key of the cells.” The children in this way stepped into the stories they created, inhabiting different identities, speaking in multiple voices. They also imbued their toys with narrative and with their own selves, in the way most children do, as if their bodies could meld with the tiny wooden frames, their skin becoming paint. 10
While some of the tales had their origins in toys, others unfurled on specific furniture or in particular rooms. The raw cellar where beer was kept, reached by descending stone steps into the dark, served as a model for countless dungeons and prisons. The bed that Charlotte and Emily shared as girls—a common practice at the time and a necessity in the overcrowded parsonage—worked as a nighttime space of free invention. Charlotte called the tales spun here “bed plays,” the repertory of which began to form on the night of December 1, 1827. “Bed plays mean secret plays,” Charlotte explained two years later. “They are very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones.” 11
Fancies arose when sitting around the kitchen fire. Charlotte describes how their play of the Islanders evolved one evening, also in December 1827. “One night, about the time when the cold sleet and dreary fogs of November are succeeded by the snow storms and high, piercing night winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced.” After a long pause, Branwell remarks in a lazy manner, “I don’t know what to do.” Emily and Anne echo his boredom.
“Wha ya may go t’bed,” Tabby points out, in her broad Yorkshire.
“I’d rather do anything than that,” says Branwell.
“You’re so glum tonight, Tabby. Well suppose we had each had an island,” Charlotte chimes in.
“If we had, I would choose the Island of Man,” says Branwell.
Everyone picks an island and their “chief man,” but their inspiration is interrupted by the “dismal sound of the clock striking seven,” and they are called to bed.12
The cherry tree growing beside the house was another object brought into their games, transmuting inevitably into fiction. Acting out scenes from the Restoration, Emily, around eleven years old, played King Charles II. She escaped from her siblings, in character as Roundheads, by stepping out of a second-floor bedroom into the branches of the tree, which had become the Royal Oak, where Charles is said to have hid from his enemies. In the one novel she completed in her lifetime—Wuthering Heights—Emily places a fir tree just outside Catherine Earnshaw’s second-floor bedroom window at the Heights. Years after Catherine’s death, her daughter—also called Catherine—uses the fir as an escape ladder when she is imprisoned in the house by her father-in-law Heathcliff, on a rampage against all of Catherine’s relatives. She climbs out the lattice onto the limbs, then slides to the ground.13
A few months later, in a dream, the fir becomes infused with the first Catherine’s spirit. When the stranger Lockwood comes to visit the Heights, a sudden snowstorm blows in, and he is forced to spend the night in the long-dead Catherine’s bed. The driving snow and wailing wind knock the fir branch against the casement. Annoyed by the sound, he attempts to unhasp the window. Finding the hook soldered shut, he pushes his knuckles through the glass and grasps the branch. Instead of the slim bough, his fingers close on “a little, ice-cold hand!” Clinging to him, the sobbing girl calls herself Catherine. She begs to be let in, crying that she has been a waif for twenty years. Lockwood starts awake and tells Heathcliff about his dream. Believing Catherine really is out there, Heathcliff wrenches open the lattice and bursts into “an uncontrollable passion of tears. ‘Come in! Come in!’ he sobbed. ‘Cathy, do come! Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!’ ” An exit strategy and then a ghost girl, the tree is like the laurel into which the mythological Daphne is transformed, as her only means to escape Apollo’s pursuit. Catherine speaks, like Daphne, when the wind rustles through her leaves.
As with Wuthering Heights, the Brontë children’s tales unfolded from real-life matter—toy, bed, kitchen fire, tree—and came full circle as concrete things when recorded in their little books. Starting in 1826, the Brontë siblings probably produced around a hundred of their micro tomes (so many have gone missing, an exact count is impossible). The earliest surviving one is Charlotte’s 1826 book about and for Anne, which opens, “There was once a little girl and her name was Ane,” and contains six watercolor illustrations. They probably first began making their books small because paper was dear and scarce (more about this later). Yet their penmanship became so minute the adults couldn’t read it. These books were tangible secrets, private domains made more private by their miniaturization. Dispatches from their hidden fantasy world, their works were curated for an audience of four only. Tiny books generated others, in a long chain that appeared for a time never ending, stretching through their teenage years and into their twenties. They found miniaturization to be funny, suggestive. Their minuscule books initially fit well with their child bodies, as if the books were emanations of those undersized fingertips and palms. Or little worlds for small bodies to climb into, open sesame. Another way to think about the size of the books in relation to their bodies: the tiny pages and print made their fingers and frames seem gigantic. They liked to imagine themselves as giants, carrying around contrastingly diminutive objects. Charlotte writes about an island inhabited by their “Chief Men” who are ten miles high. Branwell relishes the notion of himself as a huge monster, carting around elfin soldiers. Yet they also appear in their stories as pigmy queens and a king. In the guise of a “famous Little Queen,” Charlotte appears in her “Tales of the Islanders” as a “little shrunk old woman.” Extreme sizes of bodies and books on both ends of the scale sparked endless invention. They could fit seemingly infinite spheres into cramped, contracted spaces. Yet they also packed these expansive stories with action and movement, filling out any gaps.14
While all of the books we have left were made by Charlotte and Branwell, some were surely crafted by Emily and Anne and are now missing, probably destroyed. Other lost artifacts that can be sensed by their lack are those made by or belonging to Maria and Elizabeth. Did they also create miniature books? Maria was apparently a precocious intellectual—fictionalized by Charlotte as the girl Helen at Lowood school in Jane Eyre—and it is hard to imagine that she didn’t also throw herself into writing and handicraft, perhaps even teaching it to her younger siblings.
By 1829, all the surviving Brontë children were seized by what Branwell, using his newly learned Latin, called furor scribendi. They named their ability to come up with imaginary people and lands “making out.” To egg each other on, they would urge, “But go on! Make it out! I know you can.” This mania for scribbling wasn’t an unusual activity for literary middle- or upper-class children in nineteenth-century England (many poorer kids were working at a young age, including Charles Dickens, who pasted labels onto jars at Warren’s Shoeblacking factory and warehouse when he was twelve years old and his father was in debtor’s prison). In the late eighteenth century, young Jane Austen filled the beautiful notebooks her father had bought her with sparkling imitations and parodies of fashionable society novels, calling them “Volume the First,” “Second,” and “Third.” John Ruskin made a forty-five-page book with red covers, ruled with blue lines, wh
en he was just seven. Using a “book print” like the Brontës, he included illustrations and called it “Harry and Lucy.” Mary Ann Evans (who later took the pen name George Eliot) wrote a fragment of a historical novel in a school notebook when she was fourteen. Charles Dodgson scribbled family magazines, sewn into cardboard covers, with his ten siblings, such as one called “Mischmasch.” His adult writing continued in this same vein of delightful ramblings, published under the name Lewis Carroll. The young Stephens had their family magazine, produced weekly, in the 1890s, with Thoby and Virginia (later Woolf) as the main authors and editors and Vanessa and Adrian as contributors. It was an early practice run for the Bloomsbury Group.15
Not just writers inking up paper, these children wanted to be bookmakers. Books, in those days, were precious and rare, things to be treasured and copied (which didn’t necessarily exempt them from being used as missiles, as Heathcliff and Catherine do with their prayer books in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter). Published books were expensive possessions, much less disposable than they would become in the twentieth century. Their high cost was partially due to the book trade being technologically behind other industries during the first half of the nineteenth century. Steam didn’t widely replace hand labor until the 1840s. Premade cases into which sheets were glued were invented around the same time, quickly replacing the time-consuming and hence costly operation of sewing the binding around the leaves. The Brontës knew, even as children, all about rare and gorgeous books. Sumptuous works like “the French classics, bound in watered silk, gilt and lettered” are pictured as family heirlooms in their early writing.16