Brontës (70 page)

My strength more broken, and my feelings colder,

That spring was hastning into autumn sere –

And leafless trees make loveliest prospects drear –

That sixteen years the same ground travel oer

Till each wears out the mark which each has left before.
⁴⁴

Branwell sent the fair copy of this poem and five of his translations from Book I of Horace's
Odes
to Thomas De Quincey, one of the early contributors to
Blackwood's Magazine
, who now resided at Wordsworth's old home, Dove Cottage at Grasmere. A note to the text of the translations reveals not only Branwell's love for, but also his knowledge of, the
Odes:
‘There are doubtless many mistakes of sense and language – except the first – I had not when I translated them, a Horace at hand, so was forced to rely on memory. P B Brontë.'
⁴⁵
Unfortunately for Branwell, he had chosen a bad time to write to De Quincey, who was then prostrate with illness. In all probability he never replied to Branwell's letter; if he did, the correspondence, including Branwell's original letter, is lost. Nevertheless, the fact that De Quincey saw fit to preserve the manuscripts of the poems suggests that he saw at least some merit in them.
⁴⁶

Five days after writing to De Quincey, Branwell addressed another Lake Poet, Hartley Coleridge, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived at Nab Cottage on Rydal Water. Branwell's letter reveals how much he had matured since the days of his intemperate demands on the editor of
Blackwood's Magazine
and Wordsworth.

Sir,

It is with much reluctance that I venture to request, for the perusal of the following lines, a portion of the time of one upon whom I can have no claim, and should not dare to intrude; but… I could not resist my longing to ask a man from whose judgement there would be little hope of appeal.

Since my childhood I have been wont to devote the hours I could spare from other and very different employments to efforts at literary composition, always keeping the results to myself, nor have they in more than two or three instances been seen by any other. But I am about to enter active life, and prudence tells me not to waste the time which must make my independence; yet, sir, I love writing too well to fling aside the practice of it without an effort to ascertain whether I could turn it to account, not in
wholly
maintaining myself, but in
aiding
my maintenance, for I do not sigh after fame and am not ignorant of the folly or the fate of those who, without ability, would depend for their lives upon their pens; but I seek to know, and venture, though with shame, to ask from one whose word I must respect: whether, by periodical or other writing, I could please myself with writing, and make it subservient to living.
⁴⁷

With this letter, Branwell enclosed a poem of over 300 lines, ‘At dead of midnight – drearily –'. Like ‘Sir Henry Tunstall', this was a poem he had written some time ago: the first version was drafted in July 1837, the second on 14 May 1838 and this, his third revision, on 20 April 1840.
⁴⁸
Branwell was thus setting the pattern he was to continue with most of the poems he later sent for publication, taking a piece he had written in the 1830s and reworking it in the 1840s. He described it to Hartley Coleridge as ‘the sequel of one striving to depict the fall from unguided passion into neglect, despair, and death. It ought to show an hour too near those of pleasure, for repentance, and too near death for hope'. With the poem Branwell enclosed two of the translations he had sent to De Quincey. They were given, Branwell said, ‘to assist an answer to the question – would it be possible to obtain remuneration for translations for such as these from that or any other classic author?'
⁴⁹

Having sent out so many letters of this nature over the past few years, without eliciting a response, one can only imagine Branwell's wild delight when he received a reply from Coleridge. Though the letter has not survived, it must have expressed some approbation, for it also contained an invitation to visit Nab Cottage.

The moment he received Coleridge's letter, Branwell must have dropped
everything and hurried over to Rydal Water, on the outskirts of Ambleside. He spent the whole of May Day there with Coleridge and, though no account of the visit survives, the two certainly discussed and read to each other their own translations. Branwell was sufficiently encouraged to embark on a complete translation of the first book of Horace's
Odes
, which Coleridge promised to read upon its completion.
⁵⁰

Less than two months after the excitement of his meeting with Coleridge, which had seemed to demonstrate that a poetic career was at last within his grasp, Branwell was suddenly brought sharply down to earth again. Mr Postlethwaite dismissed him from his post as tutor to his sons. The reasons for his dismissal are obscure. According to one tradition, Branwell followed Coleridge's advice to pursue his literary efforts to the extent that he neglected his pupils. Another has it that when he did not return to Broughton House as expected one day, William Postlethwaite was sent off to find him and brought him back ‘visibly the worse for drink'.
⁵¹
These explanations seem odd, given that Branwell was well aware of his need to keep his job at least until he had established his poetic reputation.

A recently discovered source offers another, totally new explanation which puts the dismissal in a very different light. In October 1859, a friend of Mrs Gaskell's, Richard Monckton Milnes, then Lord Houghton, visited William Brown, the sexton of Haworth, and was shown a number of letters written by Branwell to William's brother John. Among them was the letter addressed to ‘Old Knave of Trumps' from Broughton, which Brown had clearly not censored as Branwell had requested and which Houghton was therefore able partially to transcribe. Beneath his transcript, Houghton noted that Branwell ‘left Mr Postlethwaites with a natural child by one of the daughters or servants – which died'.
⁵²

This revelation, which Houghton gleaned either from other letters or verbally from William Brown, is almost impossible to verify but is not unlikely. On 3 April 1846, Branwell wrote a poem entitled ‘Epistle from a Father on Earth to his Child in her Grave'. All the evidence points to this being an autobiographical poem rather than an imaginative or Angrian one.
⁵³

Branwell was nearly twenty-three years old and possessed considerable charms: though he wore glasses, he was good-looking, with a shock of red hair brushed forward over his high forehead, long side-burns and a straight and prominent nose. Vivacious and witty, he excelled at conversation and was impressively erudite. A writer and a poet, too, he was quite capable of
sweeping a young girl off her feet. It is only surprising, perhaps, given the moral climate of the day which allowed young men considerable licence, that this would appear to have been his first sexual experience.
⁵⁴

There are a number of possible candidates for the mother of Branwell's child. The most obvious is Margaret Fish, the eighteen-year-old daughter of his landlord at High Syke House, whose beauty Branwell had already admired in his letter to Brown. However, unless she had a child which died, unbaptized, at birth, or it was taken away from her and fostered, this is most unlikely. She was still living, unmarried and childless, with her family at High Syke House in June 1841 when the population census was taken.
⁵⁵
The Postlethwaites had no daughter, so we are left with only servants as a possibility. Three women in the parish of Broughton-in-Furness gave birth to illegitimate children in the relevant period, any of whom could have been fathered by Branwell. Robert Pearson, assistant curate, baptized all three: James, son of Eleanor Nelson, ‘single woman', on 2 August 1840, Frances, daughter of Frances Atkinson, ‘single woman', on 9 December 1840 and Mary, daughter of Agnes Riley, ‘spinster', on 21 March 1841.
⁵⁶

The census returns for June 1841, almost a year after Branwell left, give us some further clues. Eleanor Nelson was then nineteen and lived at Sykehouse, the cottages between Broughton House and High Syke House. She is likely to have been a Postlethwaite servant as the census reveals that her brother, John, was a sixteen-year-old male servant at Broughton House, a post he retained ten years later. As an unmarried mother, she would, of course, have been automatically expelled from her employment when her condition became obvious, which may explain why she was living at home with her parents and her son. However, for James Nelson to have been Branwell's child he would have had to be conceived almost immediately upon Branwell's arrival and even then, presuming he was baptized immediately which was not usual practice, he would have been a seven-month baby. Eleanor married Thomas Armer, a farmer from Cartmel, on 2 October 1841 and though she had more children, her first-born, James, was apparently dead when the next census was taken in 1851.
⁵⁷

Frances Atkinson is more promising. In June 1841 she was seventeen, with a six-month-old daughter, living with her family on the road running between Broughton House and High Syke House. Tantalizingly, her occupation is given as female servant, though she clearly did not live in the house of her employers, who are not named. Again, given her address, she is likely to have been a servant of the Postlethwaites or the Fishes. Her daughter,
Frances, however, was still living with her grandparents in 1851, though she died at the age of thirteen and was buried on 2 April 1854.
⁵⁸
This would seem to be too late a date for Branwell's child, as Houghton's statement implies that the child died not long after its birth and certainly before Branwell himself.

The final possibility is Agnes Riley, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of an agricultural labourer who lived at Sunny Bank, which was also in Broughton West. In 1841 her employment was not listed but she lived with her parents and her daughter was said to be four months old. According to her birth certificate, Mary Riley was born on 20 February 1841, so she must have been conceived in May of the previous year while Branwell was living at Broughton. If the pair were not caught
in flagrante
, this would still have given time for the pregnancy to be confirmed, if not obvious, before Branwell was dismissed towards the end of June. The baby was named Mary, and although she may simply have been named after her grandmother, it is significant that this was one of Branwell's favourite names, which he used repeatedly in his juvenilia. It is also significant that Mary immediately disappears from the records, suggesting that she died young. Her mother, however, married Thomas Mingins on 17 January 1846 and went to live with him at Bootle, on the coast not far from Broughton. In 1852 they emigrated to Australia with their three children and it was there that Agnes herself died in 1908, leaving her family unaware that she had borne a daughter before her marriage.
⁵⁹

The mother of Branwell's child would have had a claim on him for its maintenance and, if he refused to pay, could have taken bastardy proceedings against him to compel him to do so. Though the maintenance can have been little enough, it would nevertheless have been an additional drain on Branwell's already slight resources. He does not appear to have ever returned to Broughton to visit his child and there is no evidence of any contact with her mother.

Branwell was dismissed at midsummer 1840,
⁶⁰
having kept his post as a tutor for only six months. He returned to Haworth but whether he told his family the reason for his dismissal can only be conjectured. For him, the fact that he had lost his job paled into insignificance beside the fact that a professional literary career was now opening out before him. Within a few days of his return, he had polished up his translations of the first two books of Horace's
Odes
and sent the first on to Hartley Coleridge for approval. His letter was an odd mixture of self-deprecation and egotism.
‘You will, perhaps, have forgotten me,' he told Coleridge, ‘but it will be long before I forget my first conversation with a man of real intellect, in my first visit to the classic lakes of Westmoreland.' He went on to request Coleridge's opinion of his translation:

you might tell me whether it was worth further notice or better fit for the fire … and will you, sir, stretch your past kindness by telling me whether I should amend and pursue the work or let it rest in peace? … I dared not have attempted Horace but that I saw the utter worthlessness of all former translations, and thought that a better one, by whomsoever executed, might meet with some little encouragement. I long to clear up my doubts by the judgement of one whose opinion I should revere, and – but I suppose I am dreaming – one to whom I should be proud indeed to inscribe anything of mine which any publisher would look at, unless, as is likely enough, the work would disgrace the name as much as the name would honour the work.

Amount of remuneration I should not look to – as anything would be everything – and whatever it might be, let me say that my bones would have no rest unless by written agreement a division should be made of the profits (little or much) between myself and him through whom alone I could hope to obtain a hearing with that formidable personage, a London bookseller.

Branwell evidently had second thoughts about his naive proposal to share the profits of his translation with Coleridge, for he rather touchingly added a footnote: ‘If anything in this note should displease you, lay it, sir, to the account of inexperience and
not
impudence.'
⁶¹

The translations, substantially revised over the last three months, were among the best work Branwell had ever produced and would probably have had a ready market at the time.
⁶²
It is perhaps the most tragic irony of Branwell's life that Coleridge never seems to have got round to sending him a reply, though towards the end of the year, on 30 November or 1 December, Coleridge set out his opinions in a draft letter. It is worth quoting this draft, if only to answer those who believe Branwell to have been a worthless individual and an even more worthless poet.