Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (451 page)

Mr. Wilson felt, most probably, that the responsibility of the whole plan rested upon him.  The payment made by the parents was barely enough for food and lodging; the subscriptions did not flow very freely into an untried scheme; and great economy was necessary in all the domestic arrangements.  He determined to enforce this by frequent personal inspection; carried perhaps to an unnecessary extent, and leading occasionally to a meddling with little matters, which had sometimes the effect of producing irritation of feeling.  Yet, although there was economy in providing for the household, there does not appear to have been any parsimony.  The meat, flour, milk, &c., were contracted for, but were of very fair quality; and the dietary, which has been shown to me in manuscript, was neither bad nor unwholesome; nor, on the whole, was it wanting in variety.  Oatmeal porridge for breakfast; a piece of oat-cake for those who required luncheon; baked and boiled beef, and mutton, potato-pie, and plain homely puddings of different kinds for dinner.  At five o’clock, bread and milk for the younger ones; and one piece of bread (this was the only time at which the food was limited) for the elder pupils, who sat up till a later meal of the same description.

Mr. Wilson himself ordered in the food, and was anxious that it should be of good quality.  But the cook, who had much of his confidence, and against whom for a long time no one durst utter a complaint, was careless, dirty, and wasteful.  To some children oatmeal porridge is distasteful, and consequently unwholesome, even when properly made; at Cowan Bridge School it was too often sent up, not merely burnt, but with offensive fragments of other substances discoverable in it.  The beef, that should have been carefully salted before it was dressed, had often become tainted from neglect; and girls, who were school-fellows with the Brontës, during the reign of the cook of whom I am speaking, tell me that the house seemed to be pervaded, morning, noon, and night, by the odour of rancid fat that steamed out of the oven in which much of their food was prepared.  There was the same carelessness in making the puddings; one of those ordered was rice boiled in water, and eaten with a sauce of treacle and sugar; but it was often uneatable, because the water had been taken out of the rain tub, and was strongly impregnated with the dust lodging on the roof, whence it had trickled down into the old wooden cask, which also added its own flavour to that of the original rain water.  The milk, too, was often “bingy,” to use a country expression for a kind of taint that is far worse than sourness, and suggests the idea that it is caused by want of cleanliness about the milk pans, rather than by the heat of the weather.  On Saturdays, a kind of pie, or mixture of potatoes and meat, was served up, which was made of all the fragments accumulated during the week.  Scraps of meat from a dirty and disorderly larder, could never be very appetizing; and, I believe, that this dinner was more loathed than any in the early days of Cowan Bridge School.  One may fancy how repulsive such fare would be to children whose appetites were small, and who had been accustomed to food, far simpler perhaps, but prepared with a delicate cleanliness that made it both tempting and wholesome.  At many a meal the little Brontës went without food, although craving with hunger.  They were not strong when they came, having only just recovered from a complication of measles and hooping-cough: indeed, I suspect they had scarcely recovered; for there was some consultation on the part of the school authorities whether Maria and Elizabeth should be received or not, in July 1824.  Mr. Brontë came again, in the September of that year, bringing with him Charlotte and Emily to be admitted as pupils.

It appears strange that Mr. Wilson should not have been informed by the teachers of the way in which the food was served up; but we must remember that the cook had been known for some time to the Wilson family, while the teachers were brought together for an entirely different work — that of education.  They were expressly given to understand that such was their department; the buying in and management of the provisions rested with Mr. Wilson and the cook.  The teachers would, of course, be unwilling to lay any complaints on the subject before him.

There was another trial of health common to all the girls.  The path from Cowan Bridge to Tunstall Church, where Mr. Wilson preached, and where they all attended on the Sunday, is more than two miles in length, and goes sweeping along the rise and fall of the unsheltered country, in a way to make it a fresh and exhilarating walk in summer, but a bitter cold one in winter, especially to children like the delicate little Brontës, whose thin blood flowed languidly in consequence of their feeble appetites rejecting the food prepared for them, and thus inducing a half-starved condition.  The church was not warmed, there being no means for this purpose.  It stands in the midst of fields, and the damp mist must have gathered round the walls, and crept in at the windows.  The girls took their cold dinner with them, and ate it between the services, in a chamber over the entrance, opening out of the former galleries.  The arrangements for this day were peculiarly trying to delicate children, particularly to those who were spiritless and longing for home, as poor Maria Brontë must have been; for her ill health was increasing, and the old cough, the remains of the hooping-cough, lingered about her.

She was far superior in mind to any of her play-fellows and companions, and was lonely amongst them from that very cause; and yet she had faults so annoying that she was in constant disgrace with her teachers, and an object of merciless dislike to one of them, who is depicted as “Miss Scatcherd” in “Jane Eyre,” and whose real name I will be merciful enough not to disclose.  I need hardly say, that Helen Burns is as exact a transcript of Maria Brontë as Charlotte’s wonderful power of reproducing character could give.  Her heart, to the latest day on which we met, still beat with unavailing indignation at the worrying and the cruelty to which her gentle, patient, dying sister had been subjected by this woman.  Not a word of that part of “Jane Eyre” but is a literal repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher.  Those who had been pupils at the same time knew who must have written the book from the force with which Helen Burns’ sufferings are described.  They had, before that, recognised the description of the sweet dignity and benevolence of Miss Temple as only a just tribute to the merits of one whom all that knew her appear to hold in honour; but when Miss Scatcherd was held up to opprobrium they also recognised in the writer of “Jane Eyre” an unconsciously avenging sister of the sufferer.

One of their fellow-pupils, among other statements even worse, gives me the following: — The dormitory in which Maria slept was a long room, holding a row of narrow little beds on each side, occupied by the pupils; and at the end of this dormitory there was a small bed-chamber opening out of it, appropriated to the use of Miss Scatcherd.  Maria’s bed stood nearest to the door of this room.  One morning, after she had become so seriously unwell as to have had a blister applied to her side (the sore from which was not perfectly healed), when the getting-up bell was heard, poor Maria moaned out that she was so ill, so very ill, she wished she might stop in bed; and some of the girls urged her to do so, and said they would explain it all to Miss Temple, the superintendent.  But Miss Scatcherd was close at hand, and her anger would have to be faced before Miss Temple’s kind thoughtfulness could interfere; so the sick child began to dress, shivering with cold, as, without leaving her bed, she slowly put on her black worsted stockings over her thin white legs (my informant spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flushed out undying indignation).  Just then Miss Scatcherd issued from her room, and, without asking for a word of explanation from the sick and frightened girl, she took her by the arm, on the side to which the blister had been applied, and by one vigorous movement whirled her out into the middle of the floor, abusing her all the time for dirty and untidy habits.  There she left her.  My informant says, Maria hardly spoke, except to beg some of the more indignant girls to be calm; but, in slow, trembling movements, with many a pause, she went down-stairs at last, — and was punished for being late.

Any one may fancy how such an event as this would rankle in Charlotte’s mind.  I only wonder that she did not remonstrate against her father’s decision to send her and Emily back to Cowan Bridge, after Maria’s and Elizabeth’s deaths.  But frequently children are unconscious of the effect which some of their simple revelations would have in altering the opinions entertained by their friends of the persons placed around them.  Besides, Charlotte’s earnest vigorous mind saw, at an unusually early age, the immense importance of education, as furnishing her with tools which she had the strength and the will to wield, and she would be aware that the Cowan Bridge education was, in many points, the best that her father could provide for her.

Before Maria Brontë’s death, that low fever broke out, in the spring of 1825, which is spoken of in “Jane Eyre.”  Mr. Wilson was extremely alarmed at the first symptoms of this.  He went to a kind motherly woman, who had had some connection with the school — as laundress, I believe — and asked her to come and tell him what was the matter with them.  She made herself ready, and drove with him in his gig.  When she entered the schoolroom, she saw from twelve to fifteen girls lying about; some resting their aching heads on the table, others on the ground; all heavy-eyed, flushed, indifferent, and weary, with pains in every limb.  Some peculiar odour, she says, made her recognise that they were sickening for “the fever;” and she told Mr. Wilson so, and that she could not stay there for fear of conveying the infection to her own children; but he half commanded, and half entreated her to remain and nurse them; and finally mounted his gig and drove away, while she was still urging that she must return to her own house, and to her domestic duties, for which she had provided no substitute.  However, when she was left in this unceremonious manner, she determined to make the best of it; and a most efficient nurse she proved: although, as she says, it was a dreary time.

Mr. Wilson supplied everything ordered by the doctors, of the best quality and in the most liberal manner; the invalids were attended by Dr. Batty, a very clever surgeon in Kirby, who had had the medical superintendence of the establishment from the beginning, and who afterwards became Mr. Wilson’s brother-in-law.  I have heard from two witnesses besides Charlotte Brontë, that Dr. Batty condemned the preparation of the food by the expressive action of spitting out a portion of it.  He himself, it is but fair to say, does not remember this circumstance, nor does he speak of the fever itself as either alarming or dangerous.  About forty of the girls suffered from this, but none of them died at Cowan Bridge; though one died at her own home, sinking under the state of health which followed it.  None of the Brontës had the fever.  But the same causes, which affected the health of the other pupils through typhus, told more slowly, but not less surely, upon their constitutions.  The principal of these causes was the food.

The bad management of the cook was chiefly to be blamed for this; she was dismissed, and the woman who had been forced against her will to serve as head nurse, took the place of housekeeper; and henceforward the food was so well prepared that no one could ever reasonably complain of it.  Of course it cannot be expected that a new institution, comprising domestic and educational arrangements for nearly a hundred persons, should work quite smoothly at the beginning.

All this occurred during the first two years of the establishment, and in estimating its effect upon the character of Charlotte Brontë, we must remember that she was a sensitive thoughtful child, capable of reflecting deeply, if not of analyzing truly; and peculiarly susceptible, as are all delicate and sickly children, to painful impressions.  What the healthy suffer from but momentarily and then forget, those who are ailing brood over involuntarily and remember long, — perhaps with no resentment, but simply as a piece of suffering that has been stamped into their very life.  The pictures, ideas, and conceptions of character received into the mind of the child of eight years old, were destined to be reproduced in fiery words a quarter of a century afterwards.  She saw but one side of Mr. Wilson’s character; and many of those who knew him at that time assure me of the fidelity with which this is represented, while at the same time they regret that the delineation should have obliterated, as it were, nearly all that was noble or conscientious.  And that there were grand and fine qualities in Mr. Wilson, I have received abundant evidence.  Indeed for several weeks past I have received letters almost daily, bearing on the subject of this chapter; some vague, some definite; many full of love and admiration for Mr. Wilson, some as full of dislike and indignation; few containing positive facts.  After giving careful consideration to this mass of conflicting evidence, I have made such alterations and omissions in this chapter as seem to me to be required.  It is but just to state that the major part of the testimony with which I have been favoured from old pupils is in high praise of Mr. Wilson.  Among the letters that I have read, there is one whose evidence ought to be highly respected.  It is from the husband of “Miss Temple.”  She died in 1856, but he, a clergyman, thus wrote in reply to a letter addressed to him on the subject by one of Mr. Wilson’s friends: — “Often have I heard my late dear wife speak of her sojourn at Cowan Bridge; always in terms of admiration of Mr. Carus Wilson, his parental love to his pupils, and their love for him; of the food and general treatment, in terms of approval.  I have heard her allude to an unfortunate cook, who used at times to spoil the porridge, but who, she said, was soon dismissed.”