Brontës (69 page)

Charlotte's sudden interest in church rates seems to have owed rather more to their current champion than to the actual importance of an issue which had now plagued her father for over six years.

It is undoubtedly significant that Charlotte chose to refer to William Weightman by the nickname ‘Miss Celia Amelia',
²⁹
as pseudonyms had always played an important part in her writing. From being a very young
girl she herself had almost invariably adopted a masculine persona which freed her from the constraints of female society and conventions. Now, she perversely chose to give Weightman – who was as ardent an example of male heterosexuality as an infatuated spinster could wish – a girlish name which, at the very least, suggested he was effeminate. This would seem to be a deliberate emasculation, a symbolic removal of the danger which this charming, unmarried young man posed to a susceptible and romantic single woman. Treated as if he were a girl, the curate could be admitted into the presence and confidence of herself and her sisters without impropriety; it became possible to enjoy a flirtation with him without having to admit to herself that she had fallen victim to his soon-to-be legendary charm.

That such was indeed the case was frequently suggested by Ellen Nussey, who persisted in dropping hints not only in her letters but also, to Charlotte's infinite annoyance, to Mary and Martha Taylor. Martha, as she was well aware, would not rest until she had found out all there was to know and disseminated the gossip amongst all her acquaintance. Charlotte responded to Ellen's hints by returning them in kind. She asked Weightman his opinion of Ellen, ‘a fine-looking girl and a very good girl into the bargain', and reported it back portentously to her friend; she called her ‘Mrs Menelaus', suggesting she was the beautiful Helen for whom the Trojan wars were fought, and warned her not to set her heart on him. She even nicknamed Emily ‘the Major' for her supposed tenacity in defending Ellen from Weightman's attentions.
³⁰

Though there can be little doubt that Weightman treated all the ladies with an unusual degree of familiarity and good-humoured courtesy, there is nothing to suggest that Ellen was particularly susceptible to his charms. She was, in fact, at this very time being courted by a Mr Vincent and, with the support of her family, was seriously considering marriage to him.
³¹
When she wrote to ask Charlotte's opinion on the subject, her friend responded with unusually pragmatic advice which was totally at odds with the view she had so forcibly expressed when Ellen's brother had sought her own hand in marriage.

Do not be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect – I do not say
love
because, I think, if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense
passion
, I am convinced that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and, in the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last the
honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse, perhaps, than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man's part; and on the woman's – God help her, if she is left to love passionately and alone.

Rather wistfully, Charlotte added, ‘I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all. Reason tells me so, and I am not so utterly the slave of feeling but that I can
occasionally hear
her voice.'
³²
Despite her partiality for William Weightman, she entertained – or wanted to convince herself that she entertained – no hopes or expectations in that direction.

Though the air was full of talk of love and marriage, at least for Charlotte and Ellen who had the time to indulge in such pleasantries, Patrick and Weightman were hard at work. Contrary to the impression of idleness given by Charlotte, they were deeply involved in trying to relieve the increasing distress in the township. Throughout the winter trade had been greatly depressed, leading to falling wages and rising unemployment. The weather had also been particularly harsh and the hardship had been compounded by the almost total failure of the peat crop, due to the unusually wet summer the previous year, which meant that the poor were deprived of their main source of fuel. They were unable to afford to keep themselves and their children either warm or well fed. The growing discontent manifested itself in a petition from Haworth to Parliament seeking the repeal of the Corn Laws, which kept the price of grain artificially high. The suffering could only be alleviated by charity, administered by Patrick and the Dissenting ministers of the chapelry. The bulk of the work fell on Patrick and his curate – and there was a great deal to do. The sum of £260 was raised by subscription and gifts, including £150 from the London Committee for the Relief of the Distressed Manufacturers. This money was used to purchase 1800 yards of cotton shirting, 180 pairs of blankets, thirty to forty loads of oatmeal and sixty or seventy loads of potatoes, which then had to be distributed according to need.
³³
Despite the additional duties which the depression in trade forced upon him, including an inevitable increase in sick-visiting, and the now customary row over the imposition of church rates, Patrick still found time for other activities. In April he gave both a lecture to the Keighley Mechanics' Institute and the afternoon sermon in aid of the Sunday schools at William Morgan's Christ Church in Bradford.
³⁴

Anne, too, had gone back to work after allowing herself only the briefest of holidays after her dismissal from Blake Hall. This was in stark contrast
to Charlotte, who had been unemployed since July 1839 and still showed a marked reluctance to find a new post. She had dithered over an offer to be governess to relatives of her father's old friends, the Halliley family, but, despite Mrs Halliley's best endeavours, had ultimately decided against it.
³⁵
The new-found attractions of Haworth, with an attentive and amusing curate in residence, overpowered any sense of duty which demanded that she ought to return to work. As if to prove that lack of will alone stood in the way of Charlotte obtaining a new post, Anne, though less well qualified, had found herself a new place without any difficulty. Had she really been in love with Weightman, she would no doubt have been as reluctant to leave Haworth as Charlotte.

Anne was now to be governess to four of the five children of the Reverend Edmund Robinson, a wealthy clergyman of independent means, who lived at Thorp Green, near York. This was the furthest away from home that any of the girls had gone as governess. It was also the most prestigious appointment that any of them had ever held. The Robinsons lived in grand style. Their house lay in the centre of a great estate in the rich agricultural triangle of the Vale of York between York, Ripon and Harrogate. Set in acres of parkland, half a mile from the banks of the River Ouse, the house must have been a mansion of some size as the Robinsons employed three male and seven female servants, as well as a governess, all of whom lived in. This was the second-largest establishment in the area, more than double the size of Blake Hall where Anne had previously been a governess. Edmund Robinson was lord of the manor of the nearest village, Little Ouseburn, and owned most of the land round Thorpe Underwoods; twenty-five years later the whole estate would be sold for the enormous sum of £116,750.
³⁶
Apart from the Thompsons at nearby Kirkby Hall and the craftsmen in Little Ouseburn and the hamlet of Thorpe Underwoods, virtually all their neighbours were wealthy farmers.
³⁷
The nearest settlement of any size – and that smaller than Haworth – was the ancient and busy market town of Boroughbridge, which lay six miles to the northwest of Thorp Green on the Great North Road.

Anne went to take up her post in this quiet rural retreat in May 1840.
³⁸
Her own first impressions of the place and her new employers have not survived and Charlotte was too wrapped up in William Weightman even to mention her youngest sister in her correspondence. We know, however, that the Reverend Edmund Robinson was about forty-four years old and a chronic invalid who rarely officiated as a clergyman. His wife, Lydia, the
daughter of the Reverend Thomas Gisborne, was four years younger, a dark-haired, vivacious woman whose portrait does not suggest she possessed any extraordinary good looks.
³⁹
The Robinsons had five children: Lydia, aged fourteen, Elizabeth, aged thirteen, Mary, aged twelve, Edmund, the only son, aged eight, and the baby, Georgina Jane, aged eighteen months, who was to die within the year.
⁴⁰
Like the Inghams, Anne's new charges were pampered and demanding, but at least they were old enough for her to escape the nursery duties of dressing and feeding them and keeping them clean.

While Anne set to work with a will, determined to overcome her undoubted homesickness and make a success of her new post, Branwell found himself rather too comfortable in his position at Broughton-in-Furness. Unlike Anne, who had to live in the house at Thorp Green and was therefore with her charges day and night, Branwell had only to put in a certain number of hours a day teaching the two Postlethwaite boys and then he was free to do as he wished. Lodging at High Syke House, his comings and goings were not as noticeable as they would have been had he had to live with his employers. Branwell took full advantage of his freedom.

Always a keen walker, he embarked on many excursions in and around the southern lakes. On one such expedition, he unexpectedly fell in with an acquaintance from his days in William Robinson's studio who was driving round the area. In order to prolong their conversation, Branwell drove some ten miles further on the road with him, regardless of the long walk he would have back to Broughton-in-Furness.
⁴¹
More productively, he explored the length of the River Duddon, his copy of Wordsworth's sonnets in his hand. At least four years later, he looked back with such affection on this journey, or series of journeys, that he purchased a copy of James Thorne's
Rambles by Rivers
, which he annotated with his own observations. From these we learn that Branwell enjoyed ‘a happy day' at the public house at Ulpha – not because he was able to indulge his propensity for drink but because ‘the late Landlord was a character – he knew Greek very respectably and was a proficient in Latin.' He evidently attended divine service at Seathwaite Chapel, adding to Thorne's comments on Robert Walker, the incumbent for sixty-seven years who had died in 1802, that the present incumbent ‘Priest Tyson' had had the cure for forty years, ‘so that
two
men have held it for the unexampled time of 105 years!' Thorne's remark that there were now several Methodists and two or three Baptists at Seathwaite roused Branwell's wrath. ‘This is since I left –', he wrote in the margin, ‘I am sorry for it – the pests!' He also corrected the author's remarks on the
tameness of the Duddon between Ulpha and the sands: ‘He evidently never passed that part of the valley, where the Scenery is most delightful and it does there possess what he says it does not – A Gentlemans house – Duddon Grove the seat of Miss Miller – now very likely Mrs Sawrey of Broughton Tower.'
⁴²

If Wordsworth's sonnets inspired Branwell to explore the Duddon, they also encouraged him to put pen to paper. In what is possibly his only original composition while at Broughton, he wrote a sonnet to Black Combe, the mountain across the Duddon estuary which dominated the surrounding country.

Far off, and half revealed, 'mid shade and light,

Blackcomb half smiles, half frowns; his mighty form

Scarce bending in to peace – more formed to fight

A thousand years of struggles with a storm

Than bask one hour, subdued by sunshine warm,

To bright and breezeless rest; yet even his height

Towers not o'er this world's sympathies – he smiles –

While many a human heart to pleasure's wiles

Can bear to bend, and still forget to rise –

As though he, huge and heath clad, on our sight,

Again rejoices in his stormy skies.

Man loses vigour in unstable joys.

Thus tempests find Black Comb invincible,

While we are lost, who should know life so well!
⁴³

His proximity to the Lake Poets clearly inspired him to further poetic effort and, despite the failure of his previous efforts to obtain critical comments on his work, he determined to try again. On 15 April he re-edited and made a neat transcription of the long poem he had written two summers ago in Bradford, calling it ‘Sir Henry Tunstall'. The name, which he used for the first time, may have been suggested by his journey to Broughton when he had passed the old Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge and seen the signs to Tunstall where the Reverend William Carus Wilson was still the vicar. The poem, though over-long at 540 lines, was decidedly the best of the narrative genre which Branwell had so frequently adopted over the last few years. It depicted, in typical Angrian terms, the longed-for return to his ancestral home of Henry Tunstall, after sixteen years spent as a soldier in
India. The family joy turns rapidly to disillusionment as Tunstall finds himself unable to pick up the threads of his old life:

They fancied, when they saw me home returning,

That all my soul to meet with them was yearning,

That every wave I'de bless which bore me hither;

They thought my spring of life could never wither,

That in the dry the green leaf I could keep

As pliable as youth to laugh or weep;

They did not think how oft my eyesight turned

Toward the skies where Indian Sunshine burned,

That I had perhaps left an associate band,

That I had farewells even for that wild Land;

They did not think my head and heart were older,