Brontës (35 page)

Like the opponents of emancipation, Patrick believed that no Catholic oath of loyalty to the state could be trusted because the Pope had the power to release his subjects from their obligations. He also took it for granted that a Catholic state was an evil to be avoided at all costs. Where he differed from his friends was in believing that Catholics, like Dissenters, should have civil rights, providing that the Protestant establishment was secured by allowing the Protestant monarch or legislature to remove Catholics from ‘all places of trust or influence' if danger threatened. Speaking with the authority of one who had witnessed the last bloody Irish rebellion of 1798, Patrick declared:

we cannot continue as we now are, even for a few years longer, without the manifest danger of a general convulsion, that might shock the whole empire to its centre, and dissever for ever Ireland from Great Britain.
⁶⁹

In his second letter, he reiterated his views and defended his own attachment to the establishment.

I am in no way changed in reference to this mighty subject. A warm and true, but liberal friend to Church and State, I still am, and, I trust, ever will be. – But I would not suffer prejudice to mislead me, nor error to warp my judgement, or turn it aside from the path of justice and truth.
⁷⁰

In his last letter, he emphasized the pragmatism of offering Catholics some measure of emancipation as an antidote to the sort of extremism, embodied in the Roman Catholic Association, which could only lead to popular violence. Again, however, he pointed out that, ‘without the safest securities, it would be rash, it would be hazardous in the extreme, to permit Roman Catholics to have any share in our Legislation'.
⁷¹
Given Patrick's unpopular but publicly stated views, it is easy to see why his children took such a
fervent interest in the subject and to understand their relief in seeing emancipation pass through Parliament with the safeguards their father deemed necessary.

At almost the same time, Patrick was also writing to the newspapers on another favourite subject of his: the severity of the criminal code. In a letter to the
Leeds Mercury
, written on 22 December 1828 but not published till 10 January 1829, he offered support to the paper's attempt to start a campaign for liberalization. Patrick now took one stage further the views he had expressed in
The Maid of Killarney
. It was not only morally wrong to make no differentiation between stealing a sheep and murdering a fellow human, by hanging a man for either crime:

Shame and guilt rest on the heads of those who enacted such laws, and of those who connive at them, or willingly endure their continuance. Nor can they be innocent who execute them. The counsel who argues against the criminal is not innocent – the jury that convict, and the judge who delivers the fatal sentence, are not innocent – the reckless wretch that ties the fatal noose is not innocent. On the bench, on the jury-box, on the snowy ermine, on the fatal platform, there is a bloody stain, which no fancied duty of submission to the higher powers, can ever wash away.
⁷²

Patrick's sudden outburst into print at the beginning of 1829 was reflected in an explosion of literary activity in his children. There are only three extant little books for the preceding years,
⁷³
but there are at least eighteen for 1829 alone. While, to some extent, this may be because the Brontës kept only the pieces they considered worth preserving, it also demonstrates the more conscious creation of literary works rather than simple records of what had happened in their plays. Though the extant works are all by Branwell and Charlotte, the dominant pair in the plays, it is inconceivable that Emily and Anne, already nearly eleven and nine, did not have their own plays and books. These, like all their later prose books in the Gondal sagas, appear to have been lost or destroyed.

In January 1829, Branwell launched the first issue of ‘Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine'. It was, as its name declared, an outright imitation of
Blackwood's Magazine
and, although Branwell staked his claim to having founded it in its very title, Charlotte was almost certainly a contributor right from the start. The first issue, its cover made from an advertisement for
The Life of John Wesley
and Thomas à Kempis'
Imitation
of Christ
, began with a short account of gigantic mythical fish. It is headed ‘Natural History O Dear', which suggests that it originated in the play of the ‘O Dears', giant men based on characters from Aesop's
Fables
inhabiting islands.
⁷⁴
It is followed by a poetry section which contains a seven-line adaptation for the Americans of the National Anthem, urging them to abolish slavery and end their disputes with Britain. Beneath it, Branwell has copied out a comment from Charlotte in her Young Men character of Captain Tree: ‘this was sung at the our oratiorio and was much approved CT'.
⁷⁵
Charlotte, too, seems to be responsible for the next short piece, a letter addressed to Branwell in the old tongue of the Young Men, signed by ‘Good', Good Man being her character in Our Fellows. ‘Bany do ought not to – Punit de Doung moan for having rebelled agains[t] do – for dhey did deir Duty – Good –'. Finally, the little magazine ends with ‘Travels No 1', an unfinished account of a voyage across the South Atlantic.
⁷⁶

This tiny magazine, only five and a half by three and a half centimetres, written in the special book print with – it has to be remembered – a quill pen, set the pattern for the forthcoming monthly issues which were to appear regularly for the next two years. Most of them took only a couple of days to write, so they were often written several months before the supposed date of issue, and they followed closely the genuine
Blackwood's Magazine
format of prose tales, reviews of books and pictures and poetry. Branwell wrote the magazines for the first six months, contributing most of the material himself under a variety of pseudonyms, including Captain John Bud, the historian of Glasstown and later Angria, and Young Soult, the poet based on the real Marshal Soult, one of Napoleon's commanders. Sometimes, like a real editor, he reproduced works by ‘other authors', that is, Charlotte. The June issue of 1829, for example, contains Branwell's transcript of her short story ‘The Enfant'.
⁷⁷
Another innovation was Branwell's own version of
Noctes Ambrosianae
, the series first published in
Blackwood's Magazine
in March 1822 and still appearing in 1829. Branwell's ‘Nights' were set in Bravey's Inn in Glasstown and the participants included some of the characters associated with each child, suggesting that the conversations may have been ‘played out' first by the children and then recorded. After six months of ‘editing' his ‘Blackwood's Magazine', Branwell decided enough was enough and it was time to go on to pastures new. In a concluding address to his July 1829 issue, Branwell announced:

We have hitherto conducted this Magazine & we hope to the satisfaction of most. (No one can please all) but as we are conducting a Newspaper which requires all the time and attention we can spare from ot[h]er employiments we hav[e] fouund it expedient to relenquish the editorship of this Magazine but we recomend our readers t[o] be to the new Editor as they were to me the new one is the Chief Genius Charlotte she wil[l] conduct it in future tho I shall write now and then for it –
ΔΘH
^ι
July 1829 P B Brontë
⁷⁸

This was a typical pattern of events. Branwell initiated a new idea, dominated its early development and then, getting bored, would go off to do something else. Charlotte was to keep the general outline of Branwell's magazine, which she renamed the ‘Young Men's Magazine', adding more of her own short stories and giving greater weight to her characters, Arthur Wellesley and his younger brother, Charles.

Charlotte's editions of the ‘Young Men's Magazine' reflected her own preoccupations. The Duke of Wellington becomes a distinct character in his own right, one more firmly based on the real duke. Arthur becomes the duke's eldest son, the Marquis of Douro, a romantic and idealized hero, while his younger brother, Charles, more interestingly, becomes an increasingly waspish and sarcastic observer of events. Hero-worship of the duke emerges time and again, even in seemingly irrelevant passages. His tomb is described, set in the middle of a desolate plain:

Over his tomb you see no monument of human erection but there the light of his glory stands fixed in the heavens & \it/ shall eternally illuminate the small spot of earth where lie the bones of that mighty one
⁷⁹

A little later, she compiled a series of laudatory anecdotes about the life of the duke, culled from a variety of sources, including Walter Scott's
Life of Napoleon
.
⁸⁰

Charlotte's editions of the ‘Young Men's Magazine', written in the second half of 1829 and throughout 1830, are full of tales of magic, mystery and the supernatural. They included large-scale adaptations from the
Arabian Nights
, such as her story of Houssain, an old man from Isphahan in Persia, who sought an heir to his fortune by considering the candidates' reactions to a revelation of Paradise through a magic silver tube.
⁸¹
Other, less exotic stories, which feature spectral apparitions, premonitory dreams and fairy transformations, owe more to
Blackwood's Magazine
which, since 1818, had been
running irregular serials on superstitions, legends and traditions from Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
⁸²
In one particularly macabre story, inspired by an article on ‘The Buried Alive', Charles Wellesley dreams he loses all powers of speech and motion and is taken for dead and buried alive by his family.

Now I dreaded that they would suppose I was dead & tried in vain to give some sign of life, the emotions of horror which filled my mind are unutterable indescribable as I heard my father say he is gone & both he & Arthur burst into tears … mortal lips must not attempt the relation of my sufferings as the idea of being buried with dead bodies amid stench & putrefaction, while my soul yet held & animated its tenement, took possession of my mind.
⁸³

In this case, as in all the children's stories, the ‘corpse' is revived and all is well again.
⁸⁴
The power of restoring to life may reflect the Brontë children's deep-seated need to be able to give life back to their creations after the irreversible deaths of their sisters, but it also owes a great deal to their reluctance to part permanently with their favourite characters.

Much of Charlotte's writing at this time is given up simply to descriptive passages – something which had inevitably been missing from the plays but which in the magazines she could indulge in to her heart's content. Again, the
Arabian Nights
was a fertile source for exotic settings and, in imitation, Charlotte set her stories in the deserts and lush vegetation of the East. The Duke of Wellington, for example, lives in a white marble palace, surrounded by olive trees, myrtles, palms, almonds, vines, jasmine, lilies and roses, in an oasis three days' journey into the Sahara desert.
⁸⁵
Interiors are just as fabulous: the Genii sit

upon thrones of pure and massive gold in the midst of an immense hall surrounded by pillars of fine & brilliant diamond the pavement sparkles with ameythst jasper & saphire a large & cloudlike canopy hangs over the heads of the geni all studded with bright rubies from which a red clear light streams irradiating all around with its burning glow & forming a fine contrast to the mild flood of glory which pours from the magnificent emerald dome & invests every thing with a solemn shadowy grandeur \which/ reminds you that you are gazing on the production of a mighty imagination
⁸⁶

The tongue-in-cheek remark at the end of the passage is a reminder that Charlotte was usually aware when her hyperbole threatened to get the better
of her. The joy of the imaginary kingdoms was that different elements, no matter how incompatible or incongruous in real life, could be brought together to form the backdrop for the stories. Descriptions of rural Britain provided a salutary check on the more fantastic elements of African and Eastern scenery though, in their own way, they are just as exuberant and florid. Charlotte describes a summer morning walk in Ireland:

snails & worms luxuriate in dampness – under the heat[h] & hawthorn hedges glittring \With dew/ or white with blossoms & star-eyed robin-flowers and stately fairy-caps are seen gleaming from trailing underwood by the roadside; or crowning with crimson bells the sloping green banks. music at that happy hour is above below & around: larks warble in the sky – thrushe[s] sing in the hedge & grasshoppers chirp in the feilds.
⁸⁷

The descriptive passages were not always a simple indulgence. In ‘Conversations' in Bravey's Inn the characters of the two Wellesley brothers are deftly illuminated by their different perceptions of winter:

Marquis of Duro

O I like such weather when the snow is drifted up into great curling wreaths like a garland of lilies woven for the coffin of a giant or to crown his head with when he is wrapped in his shroud when the crystal icicles are hanging from the eaves of the houses & the bushy evergreens are all spangled with snow flakes as if twas spring & they were flourishing in full blossom –

Lord Charles Wellesley

when all the old women traverse the streets in great woollen cloaks & clacking iron pattons. When apothecarys are seen rushing about with gargles & tinctures & washes for sprained ancles chilblains & frost bitten noses. When you can hardly feel your hands & feet for the cold & forced to stand shuddering over the fire on pain of being petrified by the frost how pleasant that is Arthur?
⁸⁸