The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (4 page)

Helen’s life is centred in her child, the second Arthur Huntingdon – bidding fair to become a second edition of the first as the father and his peers ‘“make a man of him” ‘ by teaching him ‘to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr Hattersley, and to have his own way like a man’ (p. 350). Cursing his mother as Heathcliff teaches Hareton to curse his family, ‘the infant profligate’ (p. 351) terrifies Helen with the success of the experiment to alienate him from her loving, principled education, reconstituting him in the image of the patriarchy which has in turn reproduced and authorized its damaged pattern in father and son from generation to generation. Shocking as this perversion is, Anne Brontë presents it as an extreme version of a norm familiar to all of us, current
in phrases such as ‘like a man’, ‘make a man of him’, ‘manly’, which by this stage in the narrative have a chilling effect on the reader. Meanwhile, Helen recognizes her own unfitness to mother Arthur under this pressure: ‘I am too grave to minister to his amusements’ (p. 325) and play with him as he needs, for she is neurotically given to detecting the father’s pernicious influence in the son’s innocent high spirits. Ironically, Helen is reproducing the repressive demeanour of the aunt against whom she had rebelled. Faced with the choice between a depressed mother and ‘joyous, amusing, ever-indulgent papa’, the child naturally gravitates toward the fun and games. Any normal child would do the same. The cycle begins again.

If marriage to Gilbert Markham is not felt by the reader to be the ideal union of souls to which a young woman might aspire, Gilbert is presented as honourable in intention, ordinary, solid, open to reason. Helen will keep him in order. Transposed from farming into landed opulence, he will certainly do more good than harm, and the book seems disposed to settle for common decency as a rather rare commodity in the marriage-market of the time. In such competition, Gilbert’s price is above rubies. It seems significant that Helen has to come down a class to find him. Contemporary reviewers tended to point out that such rakes as populate the central story were not a feature of contemporary Victorian life. The raunchy bucks of the Regency have not ‘been tolerated for many years, within the pale of civilized society’.
²⁵
But the author of this historical novel insists in her Preface that this is ‘the truth’: ‘I know that such characters do exist’ (p. 4). She had lived in books but, at Thorp Green, she had seen at first hand the behaviour of the gentry and aristocracy (Branwell liked to boast that the Robinson family was collateral to a Marquis and a Member of Parliament); Anne’s employer would remarry to become Lady Scott. She could say ‘I know’ because she had lived through a momentous equivalent of the events transcribed in
Wildfell Hall
and had tasted the disgrace of a beloved brother, sharing his disintegration as if she were (as indeed a sister is, in a literal sense) ‘one flesh’.

She dated her Preface 22 July 1848. Branwell was at home, in advanced stages of addiction. Six days later, Charlotte wrote that his
‘constitution is shattered’; ‘he sleeps all day’ and is ‘awake all night’. Two months later, on 24 September, he was dead. Eight months later, the twenty-nine-year-old author of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
followed him, making a self-commanding Christian death of awesome control and determination: ‘Take courage, Charlotte; take courage.’
²⁶

(Abbreviations are explained on p. 491.)

1
. See Edward Chitham,
The Poems of Anne Brontë
(Macmillan, 1979), Appendix III.

2
. No manuscript is available. The diary paper’s first transcribed publication is in Clement Shorter’s
Charlotte Brontë and her Circle
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1891), pp. 152–3.

3
. See the reviews assembled by Miriam Allott in
CH
, pp. 254-73.

4
. Charles Kingsley, ‘Recent Novels’,
Fraser’s Magazine
39 (April 1849), p. 273. Kingsley, in a conspicuously intelligent review, which however is tense with self-contradiction, defines
Wuthering Heights
as a disharmonious defiance of musical key, which he regrets on Christian humanist grounds which serve to point up both Anne Brontë’s technical protomodernism and her post-humanist analysis of human nature.

5
. Characters’ names in
Wuthering Heights
and
Wildfell Hall
tend to cluster under identical initials, especially ‘H’ and ‘L’: the latter novel consciously echoes
Wuthering Heights
in its system of ‘H’ characters, designating (chiefly but not exclusively) the libertine males. In
Wuthering Heights
the ‘H’ characters are Hindley, Heathcliff and Hareton; in
Wildfell Hall
, Huntingdon, Hattersley, Halford, Hargrave, Helen. This coding sets up a kind of indeterminacy and identity-loss amongst the fraternal ‘club’ which turns Helen’s life into hell (a recurrent word). Characters also group under other letters, a tendency which is also seen in the lists of fragments which have survived from the Gondal saga. I also posit a vestigial influence from the ‘H’ and ‘L’ names in Richardson’s
Clarissa
, which incorporates a similarly cryptic patterning of namings and shares several names in common with
Wildfell Hall
, attached to the theme of pathological libertinism.

6
. Charlotte Brontë, letter of 15 September 1850, to W. S. Williams.

7
. ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, as reprinted from the second edition (1850) in the edition of
Wuthering Heights
by Ian Jack (OUP, 1981), pp. 362–3.

8
. Emily Brontë’s diary paper of 1845,
SHLL
, Vol. II, pp. 49–51.

9
. Thomas Moore,
The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his Life
(Chatto & Windus, 1830), p. 136.

10
. For this theme, see Jan B. Gordon, ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’,
English Literary History
, 51, 4 (Winter 1984), pp. 719–45; Elizabeth Langland,
Anne Brontë: The Other One
(Macmillan, 1989), pp. 120–23.

11
. Charlotte Brontë, letter to James Taylor,
SHLL
, Vol. Ill, p. 138.

12
. E. P. Whipple, ‘Novels of the Season’,
North American Review
, 141 (October 1848), in
CH
, p. 262.

13
. On Emily Bronte’s narrative mode in
Wuthering Heights
, see J. Hillis Miller,
Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels
(Harvard University Press, 1982).

14
. Charlotte Brontë, letter of 30 January 1846, to Miss Wooler, in
The Brontës, Life and Letters
, ed. Clement Shorter (Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), Vol. I, p. 315.

15
. Branwell Brontë,
History of Angria
(1836). See Winifred Gérin,
Branwell Bronte
(Nelson, 1961), p. 99. Huntingdon is in no sense a ‘portrait’ of Branwell: rather, Branwell’s decline gave Anne Brontë insight into the processes she describes in
Wildfell Hall
.

16
. Unsigned review in
Sharpe’s London Magazine
7 (August 1848), in
CH
, p. 265.

17
. Unsigned review in the
Literary World {12
. August 1848), in
CH
, p. 259.

18
. Thomas Moore,
Byron
, p. 277.

19
. See ‘The Non-existence of Women’,
North British Review
(August 1855); Caroline Cornwallis, ‘The Property of Married Women’,
Westminster Review
10 (October 1856). The first Married Women’s Property Act was not passed until 1882.

20
. 1834 diary paper, Brontë Parsonage Museum.

21
. In
Agnes Grey
, Ch. 17: ‘pillars of witness set up, in travelling through the vale of life, to mark particular occurrences’.

22
. See Inga-Stina Ewbank,
‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
and
Women Beware Women’, Notes and Queries
10 (1963), pp. 449–50.

23
. In
And The Weary Are At Rest
, quoted with comments by Winifred Gérin,
Branwell Brontë
, pp. 257.

24
. F. H. Grundy,
Pictures of the Past
(1879): see Gérin’s moving remarks on this in
Branwell Brontë
, p. 301.

25
. Unsigned review,
Examiner
(29 July 1848), p. 256.

26
. Ellen Nussey’s account to Mrs Gaskell,
SHLL
, Vol. II, p. 336.

No manuscript of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
has survived. It seems likely that the first draft of the novel was composed during the period of the Brontë sisters’ ‘workshops’ in the second half of 1846, when
fane Eyre
was being projected and (in Edward Chitham’s view:
Life
, pp. 139–40)
Wuthering Heights
may have been undergoing revision. It is safe to hypothesize that the first draft of
Wildfell Hall
was completed on 10 June 1847, the date which is given at the conclusion of the narrator Markham’s correspondence with Halford. After November 1847 (when Anne had finished correcting the proofs of
Agnes Grey
), she may have redrafted and fair-copied the new novel, which she offered to her original publisher, T. C. Newby, who had bound her to an option on a second novel.

Newby published
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
at the end of June 1848, in a three-volume edition by ‘Acton Bell’ costing £1. 11s. 6d. In July it was published by Harper Brothers in New York, in a one-volume edition (and additionally in two paperback parts). However, Newby had sold
Wildfell Hall
to the American publisher under false pretences as the work of ‘Currer Bell’, Charlotte’s pseudonym, in order to cash in on the sensational success of
Jane Eyre
. As Charlotte Brontë wrote, ‘Acton Bell’s publisher is a shuffling scamp’ (Letter to Mary Taylor, 4 September 1848,
SHLL
, p. 251). She complained that the proof-corrections of
Wutbering Heights
and
Agnes Grey
were ignored by his printer, and lamented Newby’s technical negligence as well as his lack of probity. Newby published what he called, and the ‘Bells’ accepted (CB Letter to W. S. Williams, September 1848,
SHLL
, Vol. II, p. 255), a ‘second edition’ in London, in August 1848, but this is better described
as a second issue, consisting of unsold sheets of the first London edition, together with a Preface by the author dated 22 July 1848, which Charlotte (who deplored Anne’s second novel) described as ‘sensible’ (ibid., p. 255). Textual variations between these two issues are minor but have been considered by the present editor in making editorial judgements.

A cheap edition was issued in 1854 by Thomas Hodgson in the
Parlour Library
series, priced one shilling and sixpence. This corrupt text, which is highly expurgated, would become the basis for most subsequent British editions. It is worthless to the modern editor.

The text reproduced here, which is based on the Newby ‘first edition’ in the Bodleian Library, incorporates the Bodleian copy of the ‘second edition’ Preface. Hargreaves’s belief that the New York edition ‘if set from Newby proofs, may preserve a few authorial features that differ from the final Newby version’ (p. 19) admits of some doubt. The ‘Author’s Own Copy’ of the first edition, held by Princeton University Library, contains thirty-four pencilled revisions in Volume II, which may be Anne Brontë’s own, and which are worth taking into account. However, not only is the volume’s provenance problematic but these corrections are puzzling in their mingling of sensible revisions with the introduction of fresh errors together with the retention of old errors.

Anne Brontë’s handwriting was habitually neat and legible. The errors and inconsistencies in the first edition in spelling, punctuation and use of capitals may therefore be the result of compositorial interference whether conscious or unconscious; the practice of an apprentice reading aloud to the compositor, together with the possible eccentricity of Anne Brontë’s own usage. Careless reading seems to have turned ‘earnest supplication’ into ‘earnest application’ (p. 303); ‘exclamation’ into ‘explanation’ (p. 305), ‘gambolling’ into ‘gambling’ (p. 51), ‘might’ into ‘mite’ (p. 381). The present edition draws attention to such errors, and judicious amendment has been made in the text.

The vexed question of Anne Brontë’s eccentric punctuation, involving inconsistent use of the comma, both in excess and defect; heavy informal use of the dash; and heavy formal use of the semicolon is
addressed in the present text as a complex issue. It is possible, as Hargreaves believes, that some of the variation reflects the influence of different compositors in typesetting. My assessment, however, is that the curious mingling of informalizing punctuation with what we would see as overly formal punctuation (even acknowledging the more formal standard practice of the times) represents a conflict germane to the author herself. The free use of dashes, as rhythmic devices to indicate impromptu speech or thought, was a device favoured by all three Brontë sisters, especially in dialogue and expressive narrative, as giving a breathing immediacy to language. It would be natural to expect such voice-prints in the informal discourse of fictionalized letters and diary, as representing written language at its most intimate and spontaneous – and of course
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
is an epistolary novel with inset diary. It should also be recalled that Anne and Emily Brontë had improvised orally in composing their Gondal narratives, thus generating the facility for bravura speech and the feeling for exponential development of narrative. This narrowing of the gap between spoken (or thought) and printed words is, however, contradicted in Anne Brontë by the classicizing influence of her ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism, which strives towards the greatest precision and control.

These two influences produce a schismatic struggle on the page which may be viewed through the contradictory notations of a punctuation striving at once toward expressiveness and toward balance and reason. Hence I have taken care not to over-correct passages where, for instance, dashes are accompanied by commas or semicolons, and where commas are absent, e.g., before a name or title in the vocative (””You are mistaken there ma’am””, ‘“you must see her Gilbert’” (p. 16), or in impetuous utterances (‘“I won’t I tell you” ‘ (p. 61) or slangy emphasis (‘no not a sketch’), even where this is followed by what we would see as over-punctuation (‘no not a sketch, – a full and faithful account’). Epistolary discourse is in itself quite enough to justify usage fluctuating between formality and informality. Hence a degree of inconsistency should be tolerated rather than eliminated. In, for instance, Chapter 35, when Helen exclaims ‘God, only, knows how often I shall need it [self-command]
in this rough, dark road that lies before me’ (p. 316), the commas around ‘only’ are allowed to remain as minute breathing-pauses, substituting for italics, to indicate that God
only
can penetrate the nil visibility in Helen’s world. Nor have I deleted commas before vocatives, where these are supplied, since the formality they imply may be intended, in a rhetorical rhythm that moves freely (if sometimes confusingly) between high and low styles.

Commas have however been deleted between a complex subject and its verb and inserted where only half of a pair of commas occurs around an adverb in the first edition; and I have removed supernumerary commas attendant on a parenthesis, or resituated the second of the two – for the reason that, in these cases,
Wildfell Hall’s
anomalous punctuation is either redundant or obscuring. I have on occasion allowed an intrusive comma after ‘perhaps’ to stand, as this is an observable feature of northern usage even today, and may have represented Anne Brontë’s own idiolect, placing emphasis on the doubt conveyed in the ‘perhaps’; likewise, commas after ‘because’ are not invariably eliminated (see Chapter 15, n. 1). The principle of minimal interference allows the editor to represent a genuine tension within Anne Brontë’s mind and expression. This tension is often in the form of the struggle of hypotaxis against parataxis. It is frequently found in long, formless sentences (see Chapter 25, n. 5), whose complex grammar of hypotaxis is strung paratactically upon dashes representing the mind in ferment, rhapsody or wandering (the Romantic impulse), bearing the broken chains of heavier and more securely formal punctuation (the ‘Enlightenment’ impulse). Notes draw attention to the more notable of such stylistic features.

Spelling has generally been regularized and normalized in accordance with Penguin house style, except where Anne Brontë’s characteristic inconsistencies cause no problem in comprehension. Single quotation marks are used for the first edition’s double quotation marks; full stops after ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ are omitted; italicization has been retained. The latter is essential to the emotional forcefulness and immediacy of Anne Brontë’s style, and is another form held in common with the authors
of Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
, working with the dashes to suggest the rhythms of minds freely and intensely
expressing themselves. The following spellings are now obsolete or obsolescent and have been amended accordingly in the text: blythe (blithe), canvass (canvas), chesnut (chestnut), controul (control), dyed (died), exstatic (ecstatic), illude (elude), irradicate (eradicate), expence (expense), phrensy (frenzy), gulph (gulf), gingling (jingling), P jacket (pea-jacket), pretensious (pretentious), recompence (recompense), referrible (referable), skreen (screen), secresy (secrecy), shew (show), snoose (snooze), teaze (tease), tremour (tremor), vengibly (vengeably (see Chapter 13, n. 2)), villan (villain), visiter (visitor), wo (woe). Words with prefix ‘in–’ or ‘im–’ (e.g., incased, ingaged, imbowered) have been amended where appropriate to ‘en–’ or ‘em–’ in accordance with modern usage.

Facsimile title page of the first edition of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

While I acknowledge the success of the present work
¹
to have been greater than I anticipated, and the praises it has elicited from a few kind critics to have been greater than it deserved, I must also admit that from some other quarters it has been censured
²
with an asperity which I was as little prepared to expect, and which my judgment, as well as my feelings, assures me is more bitter than just. It is scarcely the province of an author to refute the arguments of his censors and vindicate his own productions, but I may be allowed to make here a few observations with which I would have prefaced the first edition had I foreseen the necessity of such precautions against the misapprehensions of those who would read it with a prejudiced mind or be content to judge it by a hasty glance.

My object in writing the following pages, was not simply to amuse the Reader, neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it, especially as he that does so will be likely to incur more scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge, than thanks for the jewel he procures; as, in like manner, she who undertakes the cleansing of a careless bachelor’s apartment will be liable to more abuse for the dust she raises, than commendation for the clearance she effects.
³
Let it not be imagined, however, that I consider myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim, and
if I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense.

As the story of ‘Agnes Grey’ was accused of extravagant overcolouring
⁴
in those very parts that were carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration, so, in the present work, I find myself censured for depicting
con amore
, with ‘a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal,’
⁵
those scenes which, I will venture to say, have not been more painful for the most fastidious of my critics to read, than they were for me to describe. I may have gone too far, in which case I shall be careful not to trouble myself or my readers in the same way again; but when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts – this whispering ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace
⁶
– there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.

I would not be understood to suppose that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace with his few profligate companions I have here introduced are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I know that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain: But, at the same time, if any honest reader shall have derived more pain than pleasure from its perusal, and have closed the last volume with a disagreeable impression on his mind, I humbly crave his pardon, for such was far from my intention; and I will endeavour to do better another time, for I love to give innocent pleasure. Yet, be it understood, I shall not limit my ambition to this, – or even to producing ‘a perfect work of art:’ time
and talents so spent, I should consider wasted and misapplied. Such humble talents
⁷
as God has given me I will endeavour to put to their greatest use; if I am able to amuse I will try to benefit too; and when I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I
will
speak it, though it be to the prejudice of my name and to the detriment of my reader’s immediate pleasure as well as my own.