The Brontë Cabinet Read online

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pillopatate

  She by no means thought it waste of time to devote

  unnumbered hours to fine embroidery, sight-destroying

  lace-work, marvelous netting and knitting, and, above

  all, to most elaborate stocking-mending. She would give

  a day to the mending of two holes in a stocking any time,

  and think her “mission” nobly fulfilled when she had

  accomplished it.

  —CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Shirley

  November 24, 1834, was a clear day. It was just past noon, and the kitchen was in an untidy state. Anne and Emily paused in the middle of their chores to write a short account of what they, and the rest of the household, were up to. It was close to five years after Charlotte crafted her miniature book, and the three girls were helping out with preparations for dinner, which would be boiled beef, turnips, potatoes, and apple pudding.1

  Emily had just fed their pheasants, named Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake, and Jasper. Anne and Emily “want to go out to play,” but they have together made a muddle of their duties. “Anne and I have not tid[i]ed ourselves, done our bed work or our lessons,” Emily reports, nor have they finished their piano exercise, which “consists of b major.” Branwell came in earlier from a walk to Mr. Driver’s with news that, as Emily writes, “Sir Robert peel was going to be invited to stand for Leeds.” While the lack of capitalization of “peel” could merely be the result of Emily’s indifference to such rules, it might be a deliberate poetic play, turning an illustrious name into a common verb: from “Peel” to “to peel.” Without a period ending the sentence about Sir Robert, she launches into the next one: “Anne and I have been peeling Apples [for] Charlotte to make an apple pudding.” Emily connects the country’s politics to what average English girls do to prepare dinner. Needless to say, the wealthy Sir Robert Peel, who was to become prime minister in a few weeks, never did any peeling in the kitchen. 2

  Different versions of “peel” run throughout the diary, at times reflecting Tabby’s broad Yorkshire accent. Emily goes on: “Charlotte said she made puddings perfectly and she was of a quick but limted intellect Taby said just now come Anne pillopatate (ie pill a potato Aunt has come into the Kitchen just now and said where are you feet Anne Anne answered on the floor Aunt.” While it is not exactly clear if Charlotte is making a joke at her own expense or if Emily is teasing her, nor what their Aunt Branwell means with her question to Anne (perhaps she is checking to see that Anne doesn’t have her feet on the fire fender, an unladylike habit of hers), Emily’s report has a comic, even slapstick, quality. It is also the work of a budding poet who is reveling in the sounds of words as they come from different mouths: from “peel” to “pillopatate” to “pill.”

  Emily exchanges her quill pen for a peeling knife, both implements for work done in the home. When Tabby insists that Emily stop writing the diary to peel, Emily saucily puts her pen in Tabby’s face. Tabby grumbles, “Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate.” Emily answers, “O Dear, O Dear, O Dear I will derictly.” Just before she puts down the pen, though, she dips into the girls’ shared imaginary world. Not even a period separates the realistic domestic scene with their made-up adventures set in the land of Gondal: “Papa opened the parlour Door and gave Branwell a Letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte—The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally mosley is washing in the back Kichin.” On the page, Anne has drawn a long tress of a Gondal character’s hair—one Lady Julet—as if she is sitting next to them at the kitchen table, her locks sweeping the paper. Layering high and low activities, Emily accentuates with her lack of punctuation and experimental style (a kind of stream-of-consciousness, a term not yet invented) a certain equality: the country’s political activities, the workaday life at the parsonage on a Monday washday, and their writing, both of the actual and of the fantastical, are all crucial and “happening” just then. To the two sisters, these events all carry weight; being Sir Robert Peel and being a peeler of potatoes and apples, with a rich fantasy life, are equally worthy objects of slapdash lyricism.

  This was the first in a series of “diary papers,” as Anne and Emily called them, that give rare glimpses of the daily running of the house, especially Anne’s and Emily’s roles, and the intertwining of this labor with that of writing. Every three to four years over the next eleven years, they filled a scrap of paper (usually they each wrote their own), front and back, with the minutiae of a parsonage day in micro script. Then they folded the papers to make them even smaller and put them into a two-inch-long tin box. The rules for the diary papers multiplied by the 1840s. They were to be written on Emily’s birthday—July 30—and on the same day they would open and read the previous ones, written four years earlier. Lord Byron’s diary, which Emily and Anne were reading just then, via the pages of Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron, provided a model for this kind of writing. Byron’s chronicle, with its gambling, tippling, ennui, violent passions, and visits to mistresses, made for racy reading for the sixteen- and thirteen-year-old girls. Rather than the sex and drugs (laudanum, in particular) of Byron, in the diary papers we have the relative quality of pudding making among the girls of the house. 3

  These diaries were Anne and Emily’s private scheme. Charlotte and Branwell probably knew nothing about them. By 1834, allegiances among the siblings had shifted. Emily and Charlotte’s “bed plays” of 1827 had speedily dissolved, and Charlotte and Branwell continued to build their intertwined tales of the Glasstown Confederacy, which they moved into the newly made-up land of Angria in 1834. While the lost manuscripts of Emily and Anne’s collaboration remain forever a mystery, their stories at the time apparently ran along different lines from those of the older siblings. Charlotte and Branwell wrote of wars and sweeping dramas, but Emily’s and Anne’s work was more domestic and “female” in character. Charlotte complained about the dullness of Emily’s “Parry’s Land” in her August 1830 “Blackwood’s.” Writing from the point of view of her hero Charles Wellesley, Charlotte has him wander into the strange place. He is immediately struck with “the changed aspect of everything. Instead of tall, strong muscular men going about seeking whom they may devour, with guns on their shoulders or in their hands, I saw none but little shiftless milk-and-water-beings, in clean, blue linen jackets and white aprons.” They wear bibs when dining, and “Lady Emily” has a child named Eater “habited in a most dirty and greasy pinafore.” 4

  While Anne and Emily had been collaborating for at least a year, their writing partnership was cemented in 1831, when Charlotte left home to attend school at Roe Head, on the outskirts of Mirfield. Emily and Anne became “like twins, inseparable companions, and in the closest sympathy which never had any interruption,” a friend observed. This is probably when the two began inventing their world of Gondal, out of which so many of Emily’s great poems would flower. While these two grew closer, Charlotte began to form alliances outside the family. Nothing like the Cowan Bridge school, Roe Head would be a great benefit for her, not least because she would meet girls who would become lifelong friends, especially Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. Charlotte returned to Haworth during the summer of 1832, lording her new education over her sisters. She took on the task of teaching them, and she never really gave up this drive to guide, critique, and even control their actions and sometimes their writing. Emily bridled at Charlotte’s domineering nature, sometimes treating Charlotte with a touch of devilishness. Out on the moors, Emily liked to lead shortsighted Charlotte into situations that seemed dangerous to the more timid sister—the edges of drop-offs, high spots, and the like. Emily amused herself by bringing the unwitting Charlotte, afraid of unknown animals, in close proximity to bulls and unfriendly dogs, and then laughing at her horror. Yet Anne was passive with her stronger-willed sisters, willing to be led and taught, to be considered the baby well into adulthood. It was Anne’s custom “to bear whatever was unpleasant, with mild, s
teady patience,” Charlotte recalled. Unlike her sisters, who were complainers and noisy rebels, Anne was “milder and more subdued” and “long-suffering, self-denying,” with a quietude that covered her mind and feelings with a “nun-like veil.” This was probably due to the influence of her conventionally feminine Aunt Branwell, who, since Anne was the youngest, shaped her mind more than the other children. In some ways, Anne followed the gender rules laid down by the society of her time. In the 1840s, while Emily created the strange and stormy Wuthering Heights, Anne penned a comparatively straightforward, realistic narrative of the trials of the life of a governess, based closely on her own teaching jobs. As she made clear in Agnes Grey, she wanted the novel to be instructive to others. In writing a novel of moral guidance, Anne moved smoothly along the grooves set down for women, as self-effacing teachers of others. 5

  All three girls took up the usual women’s household labors on a regular basis. Domestic work and the writing life went hand in hand for them, a twinning somewhat unusual for the time. “It was not thought proper for young ladies to study very conspicuously,” Harriet Martineau, a writer and leading intellectual who grew up around the same time as the Brontës, explained in her autobiography, “especially with pen in hand.” When visitors called, women needed to be careful not to show “any signs of bluestockingism,” Martineau recalled, by taking care to “sit down in the parlour to sew.” Martineau did her writing and intellectual work early in the morning and late at night, since the daytime had to be spent “making my own clothes, or the shirts of the household.” When she published her first essay in a magazine, her beloved elder brother said gravely, “Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this.” Yet, after all, Martineau prided herself in not embodying the dreaded stereotype of the time: “a literary lady who could not sew.” Glad to be a contradiction, she could not only write but also “make shirts and puddings, and iron and mend, and get my bread by my needle, if necessary.” 6

  Emily, who was to do more and more of the chores as Charlotte and Anne went to work as governesses, became especially adept at developing lines of verse or passages of Wuthering Heights while doing housework. One of their servants described Emily’s practice of carrying out creative work while ironing clothes: Setting down the “tally iron,” she would scribble something on a piece of paper. “Whatever she was doing ironing or baking, she had her pencil by her.” At the end of Emily’s 1845 diary paper, she announces that she must hurry off to her “turning”—a thrifty practice of picking out the seams of collars, cuffs, and even entire dresses, turning them inside out and resewing them in order to conceal the worn or dirtied side. She also has “plenty of work on hands,” the “work” a shortened version of “needlework.” In this list of things she must rush off to get done, she includes writing, probably an early drafting of Wuthering Heights, finished about a year later. Putting down the pen and picking up needle and thread, or the knife to “pillopatate,” became a part of the rhythm of her writing process. 7

  It is no accident that the character who “tells” most of the story of Wuthering Heights is the servant Nelly Dean, who sews as she spins out the tale. The structure of Emily’s novel is famously convoluted, and some of this confusion comes from the fact that the story is told by Nelly, the observant housekeeper of Wuthering Heights, to Lockwood, a stranger to the family and the area. When the novel begins, most of the story has already happened—Catherine Earnshaw has been dead many years, Heathcliff has worked his revenge on the two families he feels slighted him. Lockwood gives the reader his impression of these strange creatures when he decides to rent Heathcliff’s house, Thrushcross Grange, and then goes up to Wuthering Heights and meets the family that is left. The story of their past is recounted to Lockwood and to us, the readers, when he falls ill and asks Nelly to give him an account of his landlord’s life. She settles next to him with her “basket of [needle]work,” commencing stitching and narrating. Emily has storytelling and needlework develop in tandem, the rhythms of one informing the cadence of the other. The female servant at her domestic work is given the agency to frame, reshape, and knit together the life plots of those around her, something like the novelist herself.

  The type of needlework that had the most potential to be story-like was the sampler. Creating a sampler, like Anne’s pictured at this chapter’s start, meant, in most cases, “writing” a text, where thread stitched into cloth replaced ink on paper. The Brontë girls learned at a young age how to do all sorts of needlework, from the “fancy” to the most tiresome mending of stockings. They sat with their Aunt Branwell in her room upstairs as she taught them, and some of their earliest works—to perfect and prove their skills—were samplers. Anne completed this one just after she turned ten, in January 1830. Its text is in brown thread, which may have faded from black, in a cross-stitch, on a background of light brown, roughly woven cloth. Moths have opened numerous holes in it, including one that has caused about an inch of the border to disappear. The sampler stands as a testament to the hours Anne spent in close toil, an emblem of her work ethic and sense of duty, on the one hand, and her pleasure in aesthetic creation, on the other. 8

  All the girls of the family made samplers, often more than one. Anne had already worked one in 1828, its simpler pattern—with bands of abstract designs, the alphabet, numbers, and two short biblical quotations—­a standard boilerplate for nineteenth-century girls. It ends with the line “Anne Bronte: Finished this Sampler Nov: 28: 1828.” The two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, each made one in 1822, rare testimonials to the activities of their brief lives. The years, and perhaps sunlight, have drained the color of the lettering to the same drab beige as the back cloth, giving the samplers the quality of epitaphs on old tombstones, requiring pencil rubbed on paper to be deciphered. Their mother, Maria Branwell, stitched one in 1791, and her sister, Elizabeth, worked hers one year earlier. Charlotte and Emily completed two each, their first primarily composed of alphabets, like Anne’s first. Charlotte’s second sampler, finished April 1, 1828, has a series of verses also from Proverbs, but full of fear and trouble, such as “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and “Better is a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifices, and strife.” As befits the sister who would eventually handle the domestic duties, Emily clearly had more skill, her second sampler of March 1, 1829, being the longest and neatest of all. Both Charlotte and Anne found themselves often having to split words between lines—as can be seen here with Anne’s—or to squeeze in a letter or word wherever it might awkwardly be stuck. Emily spaces out the letters of her quotation from Proverbs neatly, only having to split one word. Hers soothes, with the lyricism of God’s creations expressed in nature’s beauty: “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” And, “Who hath bound the waters in a garment?” Branwell never made a sampler, of course, nor was he ever required to help with the housework or cooking. Not for him was the reminder to “despise not the chastening of the LORD,” and to “not be wearied of his correction,” as Anne laboriously worked into her sampler, a text that fits with her dutiful and self-disciplined nature, although it’s possible that all of these biblical quotations were chosen by their Methodist aunt rather than by the girls themselves. Whatever the texts, the samplers were early attempts to think through how words and letters interact on a “page,” to understand the material nature of composition. 9

  Samplers were used to teach young girls embroidery and elementary literacy. Originally examples (“samples”) of patterns and techniques that a professional needleworker created in order to have a kind of notebook of work that could be referred to later or shown to potential clients, samplers increasingly came, by the late seventeenth century, to be stitched by children. Girls of all classes churned out these alphabets and religious quotations or moral sayings throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike the earlier tools of a trade, girls’ samplers were usually framed and saved as mementos. Thes
e squares of cloth and thread provide the historian with a chronicle of what a particular youth was up to during a specific set of days. For many girls, especially those who grew up in poverty or in orphanages and workhouses, very few, if any, records of their lives remain. Samplers are often the only documentary evidence of their existence and activities, and signatures and dates give them an added immediacy. Since most samplers followed a standard pattern, they didn’t provide much opportunity for individual expression, but more unusual ones still exist that give us a better window into these now obscure lives. Map and solar system samplers helped the producer learn geography and the night skies. Mourning samplers remembered the dead; family trees traced in thread on cotton kept alive the names of distant ancestors. Some girls depicted their homes, or towns (one Ann Woler made a sampler of the Haworth church), with family members and pets standing stiffly in front of buildings. Occasionally human hair was used instead of thread, like one sampler stitched entirely with black hair, ending, “Eliza Yates aged 9 / years, done at / Sileby School 1809.” Many samplers celebrating the Great Exhibition of 1851, a sort of world’s fair set up in London’s Hyde Park in a temporary glass structure called the Crystal Palace, were stitched by girls. Probably the must unusual and poignant sampler made in nineteenth-century Britain came from the needle of Elizabeth Parker, a nursery maid living in Ashburnham. Her 1830s sampler is a biography, “written” in red cross-stitch on a white background, of loneliness and despair. She admits to thoughts of suicide, breaking off mid-sentence with, “what will become of my soul . . .” 10

  Victorian women often represented their experience through needlework. Sewing was a type of women’s labor that had visibility, unlike peeling, kneading, and most everything else, which disappeared soon after completion. Some hand-sewn articles, as we have seen with samplers, not only lasted longer than the lifetime of their makers but also are still around today to make legible their workaday industry. The act of sewing itself had something of a public character, since women were expected to keep their hands busy, even among company. Advice manuals taught how best to show off skills and elegant hands while at needlecraft, even as a way to potentially attract a mate. Charlotte has a character always “trifling over some elegant piece of needle-work” when a man she loves comes to visit, so she can “set off her white hands.” As a social activity, needlework happened along with all sorts of other things, in the parlor or any part of the home. The rhythms of sewing punctuated events such as confessions of passion and secrets, a confluence nineteenth-century novelists were fond of utilizing as plot devices. 11