Brontës (36 page)

The sheer sense of fun which leaps off every page makes it clear that the imaginary worlds were not simply a retreat from reality but a hugely enjoyable frolic. Charlotte frequently used her characters to poke fun at her brother and sisters – and they responded in kind. In a review of the
Causes of the Late War
, a book which purported to be written by the Duke of Wellington himself, Charlotte detected the hand of Branwell in his character of Sergeant Bud:

Firstly, because the margins are uncommonly narrow; secondly because the style is like that of a rule to show cause why a prosecution for libel should not be tried against some unhappy individual; thirdly, because Bud, at the time when it was writing, was often out of the way when we wanted him … fourthly and lastly, because we are sure His Grace never would have the patience to write such a long dry thing.
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Emily and Anne were targeted in ‘A Day at Parry's Palace', Parry being Emily's chief character. Clearly, Emily and Anne had already broken away from Glasstown even at this early period, to the extent of forming their own distinct and separate country. The sardonic Charles Wellesley

was imediately struck with the changed aspect of every thing. instead of tall strong muscular men going about seeking whom they may devour, with \guns/ on their shoulders or in their hands – I saw none but little shiftless milk-and-water-beings, in clean blue linen jackets & white aprons all the houses were ranged in formal rows, they contained four rooms each with a little garden in front. No proud Castle or splendid palace toweres insultingly over the cottages around.
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Their neat, ordered and ordinary world was apparently inhabited by dolls rather than soldiers and even the meals (roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mashed potatoes, apple pies and preserved cucumbers) are unexciting compared to the feasts at Glasstown. Charlotte, in her Wellesley character, is very patronizing of her younger sisters. They speak a ‘scarcely intelligible jargon' which is a mix of baby talk and Yorkshire dialect, the conversation is all of the new clothes they have made for their dolls and Parry offers Wellesley a napkin at dinner to pin to his clothes saying ‘that he supposed they were my best as I had come on a visit & that perhaps my mama would be angry if they got stained'.
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On 18 June 1830, Charlotte wrote a piece by Charles Wellesley about the resurrectionists disturbed in their digging up corpses for anatomical dissection by a group of Glasstown worthies bent on recovering the public library books they have stolen and hidden in coffins in the churchyard. Branwell was so incensed at this scurrilous attack on so many of the chief characters that the next day he wrote an answer to it, ‘The Liar Detected'.

Homer had his Zoilus Virgil his Meavius – and CAPTAIN TREE his Wellesly
all these were & are alike contemptible in character and Influence and like vipers can do no more than bite the heels of their Enimies
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After effectively demolishing the lies of ‘the little shop boy', he also attacks Wellesley's conceit:

O how I fancy I can see the yong Author brimfull of himself after having finished this passage rise up take the Manuscript in his greasy hand rubb his head stick out his shirt frill give a few hems pop into Popes homer to see if their was a passage their equal to it then sit down \his self esteem/ no way abated and fag away like one on a wager
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Only a few weeks later, Charlotte responded with a similar but much more prolonged attack on one of Branwell's favourite characters, Young Soult, a poet with grandiose aspirations. Insultingly caricaturing him as ‘Henry Rhymer', she dedicated two whole volumes to the ‘Poetaster', as she called him, mocking his pomposity and his exalted sense of his own calling. Rhymer, sitting alone in his garret, starts at a sudden noise:

what's that? O! 'twas but the wind mournfully serenading me on its passage through the sky – methinks I will apostrophise it – yea the thoughts are crowding into my mind – dost thou O wind look from thy ever resounding halls with pity on me – The Forsaken? – dost thou send forth thy blasts to moan thy compassion in my disconsolate ears – I will beleive that thou dost though not articulate response comes on the winged breeze. Let me see that's good poetry I'll versify it –

Thinks
. No it'll not do the thoughts should come spontaneously as I write or there not the inspirations of Genius But I'll try again

seizes a bit of paper
–
pen & ink
. How my hand trembled – I'm certainly in a Consumption – brought on by excessive drinki – study – I mean – Or was it only the effect of those fervid flashes from one of the Muses lamps that just the[n] passed through my mind.
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Though this long play owed much, including its title, to Ben Jonson, Charlotte was also taking the opportunity to get her own back. With sarcasm bordering on savagery, she depicts the hapless Rhymer on the gallows offering his writings as his legacy. A voice from the crowd cries ‘thank you lad they'll do to light our pipes.' The final insult is that Rhymer is only
saved from execution on condition that he becomes Charles Wellesley's secretary, reducing Glasstown's greatest poet to the mere amanuensis of his rival.
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There were two serious points behind the heavy irony of 'The Poetaster'. One is that the Brontës were widening their scope in their writings, drawing on new forms and styles for imitation and inspiration; the other is that they had become interested in investigating and analysing the whole nature of the arts and literature.

It was Branwell again who led the way. After handing over ‘Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine' to Charlotte, he had turned to newspaper writing. Although there is only one extant, later example of this, his ‘Monthly Intelligencer' of March to April 1833,
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it is clear that the newspaper format gave Branwell greater opportunity to explore the political scene in Glasstown, reporting debates and the progress of events as they unfolded with an immediacy to which the monthly magazines could not aspire. As early as June 1829, Bravey's Inn took ‘the Young Mans Intelligencer', ‘the Opposition', ‘the Greybottle', ‘the Glasstown Intelligencer', the ‘Courier du francais' and the ‘Quatre Deinne' any one of these could have been taken up and developed by Branwell as a vehicle for his political interests.
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His literary ambitions were developing too. On 30 September 1829 he ‘published' two volumes of poems by Young Soult which were extensively annotated by Monsieur de la Chateaubriand, a fictitious version of the real French writer and statesman whose work had been featured in
Blackwood's Magazine
. The flippant style of some of the notes – ‘this Poem is an exeedingly rambling and irregular meter and contains a great many things for which he ought to be punished Yong Soult – wrote it while drunk'
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– masks an extensive knowledge of France under Napoleon. A similar venture was his edition, supposedly in twenty-eight volumes, of the poems of Ossian, edited by Sergeant Bud. In a splendidly satirical send-up of learned commentaries, which he was no doubt obliged to use in his classical studies with his father, Branwell added dull and obvious notes to virtually every line. A note to the word ‘thistle', for example, reads ‘the thistle latin carduus Greek
a prickley weed abounding in Scotland & chiefly growing in cornfields'. He ends his review ‘this is one of the most long winded Books that have ever been printed we must now conclude for we are dreadfuly tired'.
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Between 18 and 23 December 1829, Branwell produced his first verse play, ‘Laussane: a Dramatic Poem' by Young Soult, set in France in 1423 and
charting the restoration to power of the exiled Count Laussane. Once again the subject, style and language seem to have been inspired by
Blackwood's Magazine
, in this case by the ‘Horae Germanicae' series of translated extracts from German tragedies.
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More poems were to follow in the same mould. Six months later, as Young Soult, he wrote another dramatic poem, ‘Caractacus', telling the story of the ancient Briton's betrayal to the Romans. Six months after ‘Caractacus' he produced ‘The Revenge', another medieval ‘tradgedy in 3 Acts', similar to but much more sophisticated than ‘Laussane'.
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On the title page of ‘Caractacus' and ‘The Revenge', he quoted himself, as Captain John Bud:

In dramatic poetry the cheif thing to be attained Is an excellence in describing the passions and in proportion as this excelence is attained so are we To judge of the merits of the peice. J BUDS synop[s]is of The Drama Vol I p130
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In all three dramas but especially in the last two, the thirteen-year-old Branwell achieved some moments of genuine poetry, despite using archaic language and borrowing heavily from Byron, Milton and Shakespeare. While Charlotte may have mocked his pretension to heroic verse and his choice of grandiose subjects in ‘The Poetaster' (significantly her only large scale verse drama), there is no escaping the fact that Branwell's work was both more mature and more adventurous than her own at this time.

Glasstown was not forgotten, but Branwell did find a new way of approaching it. On 6 September 1830 he began the first in a series of six ‘Letters from an Englishman', which described the travels and adventures of James Bellingham in Africa.
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The letter format allowed Branwell to write in character but, because his author was an outsider, they were also a convenient vehicle for describing what amounted to first impressions of the scenery and characters he encountered.

Throughout their little books in the fertile period of 1829 to 1830, Charlotte and Branwell were continually exploring the idea of creative art and the role of the artist. It is, for instance, no accident that the juvenilia is full of references to drunkenness. Biographers have taken this to mean that Branwell was a habitual drunkard from his teenage years,
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but in fact the references date back as early as 1829 when the boy was only twelve years old and it defies the imagination to believe that he was already a hardened drinker. In addition, there are just as many allusions to drinking in Charlotte's poetry and prose of this period, though no one has yet suggested
she, too, was an alcoholic. The apparent obsession with drunkenness can be traced to two sources,
Blackwood's Magazine
and the classics. In both cases, alcohol is the source or at least the backdrop to creativity. The
Noctes Ambrosianae
were set in Ambrose's public house and the convivial poets, writers and artists meeting there take plenty of Madeira, whisky, punch and brandy during their gatherings. The mood is set by the motto which appears at the beginning of each session, quoting from the Greek of Phocylides:

… 'Tis right for good winebibbing people,

Not to let the jug pace round the board like a cripple;

But gaily to chat while discussing their tipple.
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The main protagonists kept up their heavy drinking image in other contributions to the magazine, including, most famously, Morgan O'Doherty's 142 ‘Maxims', which are almost exclusively on drinking.
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In classical poetry, too, the ancient Greeks and Romans found inspiration in the wine cup; drinking was supposed to induce the poetic muse and drunkenness betokened possession by poetic frenzy. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Charlotte who was most drawn to this type of poetry, producing several poems extolling the virtues of wine and brandy, including one, ‘Haste bring us the wine cup', which is an imitation of the classical format.
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The children's education at this time permeated their juvenile writings. Branwell flaunted his knowledge of Latin and Greek in his pseudo-scholarly notes to the works of Young Soult and Sergeant Bud,
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but Charlotte was equally at home with the classics. Her stories and poems, too, are peppered with casual references to Scipio Africanus, Socrates, Ovid, Virgil's
Eclogues
and Herodotus and it is clear from their context that she knew more about them than simply their brief entries in her father's Lemprière's
Bibliotheca Classica
.
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‘The Violet', for instance, a long poem written on 14 November 1830, is full of allusions to not only the greatest literary men but also the landscape of ancient Greece and Rome. In the poem Charlotte seeks the gift of poetic inspiration and is given a violet, rather than the customary laurel, as a symbol that she will have that gift but only to a lesser degree than the ancients.
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The children were also beginning to study French. France and all things connected with Napoleon had long held a fascination for them. Their eldest sister, Maria, could read French by the time she went to the Clergy
Daughters' School, but Charlotte was fourteen before she began to make a serious study of the language. It is interesting to speculate who taught the children French. Patrick's knowledge of the language would seem to have been fairly basic: in 1842, when he had to escort his daughters to Belgium, he drew up a book of simple phrases of the most elementary kind to assist him.
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Aunt Branwell, however, was well read and had had the conventional education of her day. It seems very likely that she shared the predilection for French novels of her sex, generation and class and so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was responsible for instructing her nieces in the language. Charlotte was sufficiently interested to spend three shillings of her precious money on a copy of Voltaire's epic poem
La Henriade
, which she bought in May 1830. On 11 August she translated the first book, transcribing it into one of her own miniature books.
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The exercise inspired her to include more French in her writings, as two days later she began a new series in her ‘Young Men's Magazine' entitled ‘Journal of a Frenchman', in which her characters converse in French – except when the vocabulary was beyond her.
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