Brontës (65 page)

It must have been a matter of considerable concern to Patrick that within three months all three of his children who had ventured out into the world had given up their employment, two of them having succumbed to ill health. Nevertheless, he showed a quite remarkable leniency and did not push them into seeking new posts: rather the reverse. By the second week in March, Charlotte had two options before her. Henry Nussey had informed her of a school in his parish at Donnington in Sussex which she could take over but, as she regretfully told him, she had not the necessary capital to make a success of it.
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More realistically, she had the prospect of going as a private governess into the family of Thomas Brooke at Huddersfield, and though she felt it was time she should take up employment again, it was Patrick who urged her to stay at home a little longer.
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The offer from Mrs Brooke never materialized and in the meantime it was Anne who, in her customary quiet, efficient way, set about making her contribution to the family coffers. At the beginning of March she found herself her first post as a governess with the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield. She left home on 8 April and, at her own request, went alone by coach to Mirfield ‘as she thought she could manage better and summon more courage if thrown entirely upon her own resources'.
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If her picture of the young Agnes Grey also leaving home for the first time to be a governess is a true portrait of her own feelings at the time, she did not go unwillingly.

How delightful it would be to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister, besides exonerating them from the provision of my food and clothing; to show papa what his little Agnes could do; to convince mamma and Mary that I was not quite the helpless, thoughtless being they supposed.
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Charlotte, too, needed some convincing that her nineteen-year-old sister was capable of holding a post as governess.

Blake Hall was a splendid mansion, far more aristocratic than anything the Brontës had ever had contact with before. Three storeys high, it had an imposing eighteenth-century frontage.
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Though only a few miles from Roe Head, it did not enjoy such an elevated position, lying in the Calder Valley just beyond Mirfield. A small wooded park separated it from the busy main road between Dewsbury and Huddersfield, giving it an air of rural seclusion. Anne may even have seen the house before when, as a pupil at Roe Head, she attended services at Mirfield Church, which lay only a quarter of a mile away on an elevation overlooking Blake Hall park.

The Inghams of Blake Hall were an old and wealthy family, well known in the Mirfield area. Joshua Ingham, a Justice of the Peace, was thirty-seven and had connections with the Nussey family, his second cousin, Mary, having married Ellen's brother John, the court physician. Mary Nussey was on close terms with her relations at Blake Hall and had stayed with them there. It was possibly through this connection that Anne first heard of the post, though the Inghams were also well known to the Woolers and the rest of the Dewsbury circle. Interestingly, Mrs Ingham was the daughter of Ellis Cunliffe Lister, the reforming Member of Parliament for the relatively new borough of Bradford, and her sister Harriet was the ‘clever but refractory' Miss Lister who had so plagued Charlotte at Roe Head.
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The family at Blake Hall were all young. Mrs Ingham, ‘an amiable conventional woman', was ten years younger than her husband and had already produced five of her eventual thirteen children. The eldest, a six-year-old boy, Cunliffe, and his five-year-old sister, Mary, were the only ones in Anne's care: the younger girls, Martha, Emily and Harriet, were still in the nursery and not her responsibility.
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Within a few days of her arrival, Anne had correctly assessed the situation and its problems in a letter home to her sisters. Charlotte, as usual finding it difficult to see her youngest sister in any other
terms than as a ‘poor child', was ‘astonished to see what a sensible, clever letter she writes'. She even suggested that Anne's intense reserve might be misinterpreted, adding ‘it is only the talking part, that I fear – but I do seriously apprehend that Mrs Ingham will \sometimes/ conclude that she has a natural impediment of speech'. Charlotte relayed Anne's news back to Ellen.

We have had one letter from her since she went – she expressed herself very well satisfied – and says that Mrs Ingham is extremely kind … both her pupils are desperate little dunces – neither of them can read and sometimes they even profess a profound ignorance of their alphabet – the worst of it is the little monkies are excessively indulged and she is not empowered to inflict any punishment. she is requested when they misbehave themselves to inform their Mamma – which she says is utterly out of the question as in that case she might be making complaints from morning till night – ‘So she alternately scolds, coaxes and threatens – sticks always to her first word and gets on as well as she can'.
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The problem of discipline was one which was to haunt Anne at Blake Hall. The monstrous Bloomfield children she depicted in
Agnes Grey
may well have been drawn from life. If so, the little Inghams were spoilt, wild and virtually uncontrollable, tormenting their governess by refusing to do as she bid them, defying her authority and continually running to their parents to complain if she made any attempt to discipline them. How far the picture was an accurate portrayal of Anne's experiences and how much a fictional improvement is difficult to assess, but there are strong parallels. The three Bloomfield children were roughly the same age as the Inghams and it is possible that the next child, Martha, was also assigned to Anne's care during her time there. The incident in the book when the three children, having raided and spat in Agnes' workbag and thrown her writing desk out of the window, then go on the rampage in the snow without their hats, coats or gloves, incurring Mr Bloomfield's fury, is strongly reminiscent of a genuine episode told by a descendant of the Inghams. A parcel of scarlet native cloaks arrived at Blake Hall from South America. The young Inghams immediately seized upon them and ran out into the park screaming that they were devils and would not return to their lessons. Anne, reduced to tears, was obliged to go to Mrs Ingham and confess that the children were beyond her control. On another occasion, Mrs Ingham walked into the schoolroom to find that Anne had tied the two children to a table leg in a desperate attempt to keep them at their lessons.
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While Anne settled in to her difficult post at Blake Hall, Charlotte jokingly wrote to Ellen on 15 April:

I am as yet ‘wanting a situation – like a housemaid out of place' – by the bye Ellen I've lately discovered that I've quite a talent for cleaning – sweeping up hearths dusting rooms – making beds &c. so if everything else fails – I can turn my hand to that – if anybody will give me good wages, for little labour I won't be a cook – I hate cooking – I won't be a nursery-maid – nor a lady's maid far less a lady's companion – or a mantua-maker – or a straw-bonnet maker or a taker-in of plainwork – I will be nothing ‘but a house-maid'[.]
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Anne's departure for Blake Hall, however, had goaded Charlotte into making an effort to find a place for herself as a governess. It was hardly right that only the youngest of the Brontë children should be out earning her own living. Within a month Charlotte had found herself an acceptable place only ten or twelve miles away from Haworth as the crow flies, between Colne and Skipton. The Sidgwick family, who lived during the winter months at the gatehouse of Skipton Castle and in the summer at Stonegappe at Lothersdale, needed a temporary governess.
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The post had many advantages. It was not far from home, it was only temporary and, most important of all, she knew the wife of her new employer by report, if not personally. Mrs Sidgwick was the daughter of John Greenwood, a wealthy manufacturer who lived at the Knowle, one of the grandest houses in Keighley. She had married John Benson Sidgwick in 1827, the ceremony being performed by Patrick's old friend, Hammond Roberson.
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Her sister, Anne, was married to another old friend of Patrick's, the Reverend Theodore Dury, rector of Keighley. It was probably through Dury and his curate, John Collins, whose wife was on friendly, visiting terms with the Brontës, that Charlotte first heard of the post.
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Some time in May, Charlotte set off for Lothersdale, where the Sidgwicks were in residence, to her first posting as a private governess. Stonegappe is a huge imposing house, three storeys high with a central, square-built bay running the whole height of its frontage. The house is set high on a hillside, surrounded by its own woodland and looking out over a panorama of lower hills and valleys towards the wide flood valley of the River Aire in the distance. The countryside is marked by scattered farmhouses set in lush green pasture, with wooded riverbanks and moorland crowning the higher, uncultivated reaches of the hills. Charlotte herself
described the country, the house and the grounds as ‘divine'.
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About a mile away, down a steep and winding hill, was the pretty new church and, beyond that, in the valley bottom, the village of Lothersdale. Just across the fields was Lower Leys Farm where the Reverend Edward Carter lived with his wife, the former Susan Wooler, and their three children, while a parsonage house was built for them. The church day and Sunday schools were also temporarily housed in the gardener's cottage at Stonegappe.
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In such surroundings, Charlotte had every chance of being happy. However, from the very start she did not get on with Mrs Sidgwick. The fact that Charlotte was already known to her did not mean that she treated her governess with the familiarity and respect Charlotte evidently anticipated. Always swift to see a slight, whether intended or not, Charlotte remarked bitterly to Emily, ‘I said in my last letter that Mrs Sidgwick did not know me. I now begin to find that she does not intend to know me.'
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Like Anne at Blake Hall, Charlotte found her two charges, the youngest children, Mathilda, aged seven, and John Benson, aged four, beyond her control.

The children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. As for correcting them, I soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like. A complaint to Mrs Sidgwick brings only black looks upon oneself, and unjust, partial excuses to screen the children.

Like Anne, too, Charlotte was expected not simply to teach her charges but, to her infinite disgust, ‘to wipe the children's smutty noses or tie their shoes or fetch their pinafores or set them a chair'. What Charlotte found most galling of all, however, was the amount of sewing she had to do, a menial task which she felt beneath her. Mrs Sidgwick, she told Emily,

cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress.

Any illusions about the difference between being a schoolteacher and a private governess rapidly evaporated.

I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil. While she is teaching the children, working for them, amusing them, it is all right. If she steals a moment for herself she is a nuisance.

It was a measure of her discontent that Charlotte discovered she was ‘getting quite to have a regard for the Carter family. At home I should not care for them, but here they are friends'. Aware that it would appear at home that nothing suited her and that she was always complaining, she warned Emily not to show her letter to either their father or aunt, only to Branwell, who was likely to be more sympathetic.
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In June, the Sidgwicks left Stonegappe to stay at Swarcliffe, a summer residence belonging to Mrs Sidgwick's father, John Greenwood, at Birstwith, six miles from Harrogate. Swarcliffe was a large, stately and rambling house on the hill top overlooking the pretty hamlet of Birstwith, which is built round a bridge over the River Nidd. Like Stonegappe, it enjoyed long views over lovely rolling countryside, the flat river valley below, heavily wooded hills and rich agricultural land all around. The move did not lessen Charlotte's trials, though they were now of a different kind. On 30 June she wrote to Ellen Nussey – using a pencil because she could not get ink without going among the company in the drawing-room. She was tempted to pour out ‘the long history of a Private Governesse's trials and crosses in her first Situation' to her old friend.

imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me – thrown at once into the midst of a large Family – proud as peacocks & wealthy as Jews – at a time when they were particularly gay – when the house was filled with Company – all Strangers people whose faces I had never seen before – in this state of things having the charge given me of a set of pampered spoilt & turbulent children – whom I was expected constantly to amuse as well as instruct – I soon found that the constant demand on my stock of animal spirits reduced them to the lowest state of exhaustion – at times I felt and I suppose seemed depressed – to my astonishment I was taken to task on the subject by Mrs Sidgwick with a sterness of manner & a harshness of language scarcely credible – like a fool I cried most bitterly – I could not help it – my spirits quite failed me at first I thought I had done my best – strained every nerve to please her – and to be treated in that way merely because I was shy – and sometimes melancholy' was too bad. at first I was
for giving all up and going home – But after a little reflection I determined – to summon what energy I had and to weather the Storm –
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