The Brontë Cabinet Read online

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  The Brontës gave sewing an integral place in their fiction. So much so that when Jane Eyre became a sensation in London, with speculation rife about the gender of “Currer Bell” (Charlotte’s pseudonym), Harriet Martineau knew the author was a woman because a passage “about sewing on brass rings, could have been written only by a woman or an upholsterer.” Charlotte was especially adept at realizing needlework’s dramatic potential. In an early passage of Jane Eyre, young Jane finally gathers the courage to tell her Aunt Reed how cruelly abusive she has been. Her aunt feigns disinterest by focusing on her needlework. As her fingers pause in their nimble movement, a moment opens up for Jane to give voice to her feelings of injustice. Jane knows she has won this small battle when her aunt’s “work had slipped from her knee.” Dropping one’s sewing shows agitation in many a Victorian novel, as does stabbing one’s finger with a needle, which Caroline does when Robert Moore, in Shirley, confesses his romantic past in order to clear the way to propose to her. Lucy Snowe of Villette is prickly with other women, which is handily expressed when she puts pins in her girdle to ward off the physically affectionate Ginevra Fanshawe, who would otherwise be “gummed” to her. 12

  The motions of plying the needle, or pins and other implements, often expressed a female character’s hidden emotional life. Romance blossomed through needlework, just as it did through reading and book giving. Shirley and her lover, Louis Moore, sit so close he is “near enough to count the stitches of her work, and to discern the eye of her needle,” an elegant figure for bodily intimacy. When M. Paul Emanuel, in Villette, sees Lucy Snowe knitting a silk and bead watchguard (another term for a watch chain or fob, used to secure a man’s pocket watch to his clothing), he is jealous, thinking this intimate gift is being made for another man. But Lucy keeps secret the fact that it is a birthday present for him, making the final moment of giving all the more poignant for him.

  Shy women hide out with their needlework. Jane, forced by Rochester to join the brilliant company in the parlor at Thornfield, sneaks in early and slips into an unobtrusive window seat. She tries to avoid being noticed by the likes of the Ingrams, and especially to avoid showing her longing for Rochester, by concentrating her “attention on these netting-needles, on the meshes of the purse I am forming.” She tries to train her desire and vision to narrow to the “silver beads and silk threads that lie in my lap.” Agnes Grey, in Anne’s novel, often avoids situations that make her uncomfortable by stepping over to the window with her needlework, with the excuse that she needs more light, but secretly meaning that she needs fewer people.

  Even the tools of needlework had the power to speak out of a woman’s inner self. Handled on such a daily basis, often around others, sewing implements had a close association with the body of the woman who used them, the archaeologist Mary Beaudry explains, and with their personal gestures and motions. Especially ubiquitous during the Victorian era was the workbox. Needles, pins, and other instruments, still expensive in the early nineteenth century, especially to relatively poor girls like the Brontës, were carefully stored and guarded in workboxes (or work-cases, -bags, -baskets, or -tables). It is hard to imagine a Victorian home without at least one; even the spartan Moor House, where Jane Eyre meets her long-lost cousins, has a “brace of work-boxes.” When M. Paul, the man who falls for Lucy Snowe in Villette, sets up a small house and school for her out of his diminutive savings, it is only complete when he provides a workbox “on a gueridon with a marble top.” Sold in shops specializing in fancy goods, such as the renowned “Temple of Fancy” in London, workboxes were usually made of wood with metal fittings, although cheaper ones could be had in such materials as papier-mâché. They almost always came fitted with sets of matching tools. 13

  Much like clothing, workboxes reflected a woman’s disposition and status. Caroline Helstone carries her “gay little work-bag” to the Moores’ house, in Shirley. As a child, Paulina, in Villette, has a little “toy white workbox of white varnished wood.” When she becomes a young woman and a wealthy countess, “the white-wood workbox of old days was now replaced by one inlaid with precious mosaic, and furnished with implements of gold.” Workboxes or workbags could be signs of poverty and forced humility. Part of the Lowood uniform for the orphans, in Jane Eyre, are “little pockets of Holland (shaped something like a Highlander’s purse) tied in front of their frocks, and designed to serve the purpose of a work-bag.” The Brontë girls were expected to bring workbags with them to Cowan Bridge, the prototype for Lowood. 14

  Some of the most elaborate workboxes took pride of place in the Great Exhibition, many made as souvenirs to commemorate the event itself, picturing the Crystal Palace on their lids. The dearest workboxes were the French Palais Royal. One model called a “secret book,” popular in the court circle of Charles X, took the shape of a small volume, made of burr amboyna wood. An early-nineteenth-century French Empire workbox has what looks like books fitted into the case, with their spines visible when the box is opened. When one slides out the “books,” their function becomes clear: two are pincushions, one a needlebook, another a silk tape measure. Workboxes also had the booklike quality of carrying inscriptions, to commemorate friendships, scenes of giving, or community service. One box, made by Fisher, of 188 Strand Street, has an inscribed lid: “Presented to Miss Boundy / In grateful acknowledgement of her gratuitous services for several years as organist at Bethany and afterwards at Argyll Chapel Swansea, 15th July, 1875.” 15

  The Brontë women naturally had their workboxes. Aunt Branwell owned at least two: one had a “Chinese” design on the top and the other an “Indian” one. Like many a middle-class woman of some privilege, she bought finely crafted boxes made by artisans in the East, seen by the British as a form of exoticism with a suggestion of luxury. The girls each had a workbox. Charlotte seems to have had a couple and also a morocco leather work-case. Her rosewood workbox, an average type for the time and much simpler (and cheaper) than her aunt’s, was saved with most of its contents intact. With mother-of-pearl inlay on the top and sides and lined with blue paper, the box has a tray with ten compartments and a pincushion in the middle (see photograph). Removing the tray exposes a larger space for swatches of material and other whatnots. The usual tools that came with workboxes are found in Charlotte’s: pins, needles, spools, ivory bobbins, scraps of lace, ribbon, braiding, buttons, fasteners, an ivory measuring tape, another one made out of a cowrie shell, purple silk thread wrapped around a flat piece of bone, and an acorn-shaped thimble holder. 16

  Despite their semi-public nature, workboxes were treated like private spaces, and it is in this respect that they give voice so eloquently to the nature of the woman who carried them around. Like Charlotte’s, most of them were subdivided in multiple neat ways, with pouches let into the lids, cubbies, and nooks. A fad for secret compartments in workboxes had its day, usually a drawer held in place by a long bolt that would release a spring in the bottom of the box, pushing the drawer out. The inscribed workbox given to one Miss Boundy for her service as an organist, for instance, has a hidden spring that opens a secret drawer and another that releases a mirror. Most had locks, like Charlotte’s and like Lucy Snowe’s in Villette, but a lock doesn’t prevent Lucy’s employer, the crafty Madame Beck, from searching through the box in order to keep tabs on her. Obnoxious children ransacked their governesses’ workboxes and turned them inside out, depicted as a serious invasion of privacy. Agnes Grey’s workbag is rifled by an especially evil child, who then spits in it. Intimacy with another’s workbox and its contents could be welcome when a desirable hand is involved, as when M. Paul slips a romance into Lucy Snowe’s, a clandestine offering of affection. When Shirley first meets Caroline, she reaches into her own workbox for a section of silk, then uses it to tie a bouquet that she gives to Caroline. This marks the beginning of a devoted friendship, full of shared confidences. 17

  Victorian women stuffed all sorts of things in their workboxes, making them catchalls for the everyday detritus of living.
In Charlotte’s we find stray items that were more personal: paper patterns for cutting out clothes to be sewn, the snipped-off finger ends of kid gloves (possibly used as finger protectors), a piece of a whalebone stay, a pair of black silk cuffs, and some round, pink pillboxes with pills still intact. Martin Yorke, in Shirley, “extracted from his mother’s work-basket a bunch of keys” to a medicine cabinet. In Anne’s workbox she stored a hoard of rocks collected on the beaches of Scarborough, where she traveled as a governess with a family on vacation, some of the rocks later polished to intensify their colors. Charlotte’s box also had some pebbles, gathered on walks, and writing paper with doodles. Locks of hair ended up here; Charlotte stored two tresses (now anonymous) in hers, lending it a somatic character. Caroline, in Shirley, discovers a black curl belonging to Robert Moore in his sister’s workbox. The discovery provides her with an excuse to ask Robert for one for her workbox, giving the box an erotic charge—part of the body of her lover now mingling with her sewing things. 18

  The Victorians had a penchant for depicting inanimate objects as thinking, feeling, and speaking things, with the workbox and its contents especially expressive of vitality. Lewis Carroll has his Alice spend “a minute or so vainly pursuing a large bright thing that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a workbox.” In an 1858 tale called The Story of a Needle, by Charlotte Maria Tucker, in which said needle is a sentient being who speaks to the reader of his experiences, there is a chapter called “Conversation in a Workbox.” The scissors complains to the needle about how they are always blamed for human inadequacies, but then the thimble, who is a superior being, waxes eloquent about human ingenuity and the blessings of working for them. Other sewing implements stretch, chat, and explain how they were manufactured, like Mrs. Pin in The History of a Pin. Many a narrative of an object telling its life story appeared in the nineteenth century, a time when household goods were increasingly mass-produced: The Adventures of a Pincushion, The Silver Thimble, The Memoirs of an Umbrella, Adventures of a Black Coat. The popularity of these odd tales probably stemmed in part from discomfort with the way that the people who made these things, or even bought and used them, came to seem like objects and machines themselves. If needles and pins stirred to life, speaking of how nice it was to be employed, then maybe people, too, could maintain animation and agency. If the workbox, a dead, factory-made thing, was an extension of a woman’s body, might the woman herself become more mechanical and wooden, just an appliance completing domestic duties, a kind of sewing robot? 19

  Needle-cases also walked this line between being mass-produced—and near ubiquitous—and sometimes being distinctive and imbued with original character. They could be purchased in an astonishing array of shapes and sizes; one popular version took the form of a tiny, closed umbrella made of bone, with a miniature spyhole (called a Stanhope viewer, after the inventor, Lord Charles Stanhope) in the “handle,” showing tourist sights such as the Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition. Handmade or hand-adorned needle-cases were gifts for close female friends, and patterns for cutting and stitching them appeared in women’s magazines. Little Maria Brontë, just before she died, gave an embossed cardboard and ribbon needle-card to a friend, inscribing it like a book: “To my dear Margaret from her affectionate schoolfellow, Maria Bronte.” Charlotte stitched together a needle booklet, using white paper covers with ribbon edging, and, inside, pink tissue paper and two sheets of a flannel material for the needles to be stuck into, and gave it to one Eliza Brown. On the front and back covers are flowers and vines made out of pinpricks in the paper, which perhaps once held embroidery thread. Charlotte may have bought the parts premade and ready for her to piece together and embellish, as such sets of perforated cards, meant to be decorated with colored silks worked through the holes, could be bought in shops. She also personalized a needle-case for herself with pencil drawings—a sketch of a bird’s nest with eggs on one side and a running spaniel on the other. Charlotte’s best friend Ellen Nussey sent her a “housewife,” also called a “hussif”—a fancy needle-book that often included scissors and a pincushion. Ellen’s gift had the formal title of a “Housewife’s Traveling Companion,” and Charlotte thought it “a most commodious thing; just the sort of article which suits me to a t—and which yet I should never have the courage or industry to sit down and make for myself—I shall keep it for occasions of going from home—it will save me a world of trouble in collecting together little necessaries: it must have required some thought to arrange the various compartments and their contents so aptly.” Housewives, like workboxes, came in the form of books, bearing legends like “Essays” or “A Stitch in Time.” Charlotte had a leather, book-shaped housewife with “Souvenirs” printed on the spine, creating a neat symmetry between sewing, novel writing, and collecting. 20

  Needlework cemented intimacies between women. Pincushions, often homemade, also marked friendship or devotion by becoming gifts from one needleworker to another. The Brontës had many: one in the shape of a basket and another like a closed book, with the place for the pages being stuffed with cloth into which pins could be stuck. One of Charlotte’s was inscribed, “C. Brontë, from a sincere friend and well-wisher, A. M., October, 1835.” There were mourning pincushions—black with black pins—and “sticking pincushions,” with pins inserted so that the heads spelled a phrase, like “ever true to you” or “ever love the giver.” One had a memorial to the poet William Wordsworth painted on its glass top, picturing his tombstone along with his daughter’s in a graveyard; others commemorated the Great Exhibition. A pincushion made by Lucy Snowe and given to her godmother Mrs. Bretton, in Villette, plays a crucial role as a memory device. After being ill and collapsing in the street, Lucy wakes up in a strange room that has ghostly reminders of the past. Especially startling is a pincushion “made of crimson satin . . . and frilled with thread-lace” with the letters “L.L.B.” formed in gold beads, Mrs. Bretton’s initials. When she recognizes she made it, Lucy begins to form ties with a past of friendship and love that has been lost to her until now. 21

  The relationship between Charlotte and Ellen Nussey can be followed as it flowered and deepened by tracing the handmade needlework gifts they exchanged through the mail. Charlotte spent many months in 1839 and 1840 working a bag for Ellen and lamenting in letters that she hadn’t time to finish it. Ellen sent Charlotte some “pretty little cuffs” to keep her wrists warm, and then, later, “wrist frills,” and a collar for Emily. Materials to be “made up” into something went back and forth between the two. In 1840, Ellen posted to Charlotte “very pretty Turkish looking things,” but since she “can get no cord and tassels at Keighley,” it must “lie by a time longer.” In 1845, Charlotte scolded Ellen (a common means of showing gratitude between the two) for sending her some pretty slippers, which she will have “made up” to bring along when she goes to see her. Such gifts were used as occasions to compliment the friend’s skills and denigrate one’s own. “Will you condescend,” Charlotte writes to Ellen in 1847, “to accept a scrubby yard of lace . . . I thought I would not offer to spoil it by stitching it into any shape. Your creative fingers will turn it to better account than my destructive ones.” 22

  Sewing was a way for women to be together, to mark time in each other’s company, not so different from reading aloud. In fact, the two often went together, with women sewing while another read to them or told stories. Charlotte developed the habit of reciting poetry when busy with her needle, especially Thomas Moore, such as “O Thou Who Driest the Mourner’s Tear” and “The Bird, Let Loose in Eastern Skies.” In Agnes Grey, the sisters Agnes and Mary pass many happy hours “sitting at our [needle]work by the fire,” probably based on Anne’s experience sewing with her own sisters. The three girls also occasionally worked on the same article, such as a colorful patchwork quilt they all stitched but never finished. Like the micro books they handmade as children after creating shared imaginary worlds, the plan for the quilt was cooked up among the three, reusing ho
usehold scraps to give their ideas a physical, lasting shape. As we shall see, their first novels were also crafted with the help of each other, as domestic work among women that would become highly visible. 23

  The term “craft” links much of the Brontës’ aesthetic work, whether it refers to piecing together a poem, making a bead bag, or sketching a portrait of a family dog. The more mundane sorts of crafts, including “fancy” needlework, were strewn about the average middle-class woman’s parlor, signs to visitors of her investment in the housewifely sphere. Time for crafts meant excess leisure, so handcrafts were also tangible expressions of class status, proudly displayed in the most public rooms of the house, as badges of privilege. The parlor of Ellen Nussey, Charlotte’s friend, gives us a sense of the layers of craftwork filling a typical Victorian living space. There we would find a pair of embroidered pictures; an octagonal bamboo table with embroidered cover; an oak occasional chair, with embroidered back and seat; two sofa cushions in needlework; a walnut sideboard, with panels on the doors embroidered with Shakespearean subjects; a needlework footstool and circular wool cushion; an embroidered table cover; a needlework tray cloth; and ten crocheted mats. Ellen even had an embroidered toilet cover. There were, of course, other crafts that kept women’s hands busy, such as fashioning flowers from shells, wax, feathers, paper, or sand which were then placed behind or under glass. Homemade taxidermy was assiduously and skillfully developed by many a lady, learned through instructions in women’s magazines and craft books. Leaves were skeletonized by dissolving the fleshy parts and leaving only the delicate filaments; seaweed was made into collages; and fish scales left over from a meal were sewn upon silk or satin to form flowers, leaves, or ornamental borders. Leftover cherry pits decorated picture frames, tables, and workboxes. The early Victorians were inveterate recyclers, as we have seen with paper goods, so even flimsy luxury items made to show off one’s free time revealed a cleverness in reusing common household waste. One of these handicrafts that combined both thriftiness and hours of careful labor was paper filigree work, sometimes called “quilling.” This involved rolling tiny strips of paper into circles or other shapes and pasting them onto the outside of workboxes and other sorts of containers as a form of delicate ornamentation. Charlotte made a quilled tea caddy, probably as a gift for Ellen. Like the Brontës’ reuse of household wastepaper for their tiny books, quilling gave paper yet another life. 24