Brontës (93 page)

I promised her a better destiny than to go begging any one to marry her, or to lose her natural feelings as a sister of charity. She said, ‘My youth is leaving me; I can never do better than I have done, and I have done nothing yet.' At such times she seemed to think that most human beings were destined by the pressure of worldly interests to lose one faculty and feeling after another ‘till they went dead altogether. I hope I shall be put in my grave as soon as I'm dead; I don't want to walk about so.' Here we always differed! I thought the degradation of nature she feared was a consequence of poverty, and that she should give her attention to earning money. Sometimes she admitted this, but could find no means of earning money. At others she seemed afraid of letting her thoughts dwell on the subject, saying it brought on the worst palsy of all. Indeed, in her position, nothing less than entire constant absorption in petty money matters could have scraped together a provision … She used very inconsistently to rail at money and money-getting, and then wish she was able to visit all the large towns in Europe, see all the sights, and know all the celebrities.
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The whole concept of the Brontës' poverty has been greatly exaggerated, as much by Mary Taylor and Mrs Gaskell as by Charlotte herself. Her education and inclination both led her to want a life of leisured luxury in which she could pursue her reading and writing at will. The necessity of earning her own living thus produced a gnawing resentment which had poisoned her relations with her employers in the past and embittered her future prospects. She seems to have been unable to appreciate the advantages she had, including that of a comfortable home. By comparison with most of her father's parishioners, the Brontës enjoyed enormous wealth; in contrast to their homes, where large families of six, seven or more lived cramped in one or two rooms, the parsonage must have seemed a palace. Patrick's income, too, though not large in the general scale of clergy earnings, was at least three or four times that of the majority of his parishioners and, unlike theirs, it was secure and not dependent on the vagaries of trade.

The sort of wealth which Charlotte wanted would have given her the
leisure and financial freedom to indulge her artistic preferences and travel widely: unless she married a man with a fortune, it was out of the question. Her prospects of marriage were also fast receding with each passing year. An actuaries' table, published in the local press some five years earlier, had pointed out that two-thirds of women who did marry had done so before the age of twenty-five. By the age of thirty, this figure had risen to eighty-five per cent so that the chances of marrying later in life were extraordinarily slim.
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By these calculations, even Anne, the youngest Brontë, had passed the age at which she was likeliest to marry, and all three sisters were faced with almost certain spinsterhood.

Charlotte's preoccupation with money and future financial security was not therefore entirely unjustified, even if her inclinations were at odds with her earning capabilities. On 23 April, just two days after her twenty-ninth birthday, she wrote to Miss Wooler to thank her for her advice on purchasing an annuity. She and Emily had written to Miss Wooler's contact but he could only offer them a four and a half per cent return on their capital invested at the age of twenty-five, rising to five per cent if invested at the age of thirty. As none of the sisters had yet reached thirty, they decided to defer the decision on transferring their small capital for a year. Then they could decide whether to go for a five per cent annuity or purchase one which would give them an annual return of ten per cent if the paying out of the annuity was deferred for a further twelve years. Despite the greater reward, as Charlotte appreciated, this would be to take a huge risk, tying up their finances without return until each of them was forty-two years old. With favourable circumstances and moderate economy, they would be able to save the difference out of the interest.
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For the moment, then, the sisters' money remained where it was, in the original investments Aunt Branwell had made in the York and North Midland Railway and the Reeth Consolidated Mining Company.

Probably by default, in the absence of her sisters in Brussels and at Thorp Green, Emily had assumed responsibility for managing their small inheritance. Charlotte told Miss Wooler:

Emily has made herself mistress of the necessary degree of knowledge for conducting the matter, by dint of carefully reading every paragraph & every advertisement in the news-papers that related to rail-roads and as we have abstained from all gambling, all \mere/ speculative buying-in & selling-out – we have got on very decently.
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This praise for Emily's handling of the investment is often taken as evidence of her financial acumen, particularly as she was able to boast of a ‘degree of success' in the unstable and uncertain boom-and-bust market of railway shares. However, Emily's management seems to have consisted solely in leaving the money where it was; she made no attempt to spread the investment or put money into new ventures or different companies. By the time she and Anne died, their capital was still invested exactly as it had been when Aunt Branwell first left it to them.
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Charlotte was increasingly discontented with her present lot. Mary Taylor had sailed for her great adventure in New Zealand in March; even Ellen was away in Bridlington and shortly to go to Hathersage. Only Charlotte remained stranded at home, feeling herself imprisoned in Haworth. Despite all that the locality had to offer in the way of music and lectures, it could not compete with the imagined glories and glamour of travel. Charlotte was left to contrast her friends' experiences with her own increasingly miserable existence.

I can hardly tell you how time gets on here at Haworth – There is no event whatever to mark its progress – one day resembles another – and all have heavy lifeless physiognomies – Sunday – baking day & Saturday are the only ones that bear the slightest distinctive mark – meantime life wears away – I shall soon be 30 – and I have done nothing yet – Sometimes I get melancholy – at the prospect before and behind me – yet it is wrong and foolish to repine – and undoubtedly my Duty directs me to stay at home for the present – There was a time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me, it is not so now – I feel as if we were all buried here – I long to travel – to work to live a life of action –
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She was even contemplating the possibility of going to Paris as a governess, the glamour of the situation outweighing the drudgery of the employmeant.
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The opportunity to get out of Haworth, at least temporarily, soon presented itself. Ellen invited Charlotte to join her at Hathersage, a small village in the Derbyshire Peak District, not far from Sheffield, where she was supervising alterations to the vicarage in preparation for her brother Henry's forthcoming marriage to Emily Prescott. Henry had at last found a bride who fitted his criteria, including that of possessing a small fortune. Once the marriage had taken place at the end of May 1845, Ellen felt free to ask Charlotte to join her. At first Charlotte refused, thinking it would be wrong
to leave her father for any length of time when his eyesight was so poor and his spirits so low. In the middle of June, however, circumstances changed. Branwell and Anne came home for their annual summer holiday and Anne dropped her bombshell. She had handed in her resignation and did not intend to return to Thorp Green. Her reasons for doing so would only become clear later. Branwell was only home for a week and then had to return before taking the rest of his holiday while the Robinsons were at Scarborough. Anne's presence at home freed Charlotte to accept Ellen's invitation.
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The visit to Hathersage proved difficult to arrange, partly because of the problems of travelling in unfamiliar country and partly because Emily and Anne had plans for their own amusement. They had decided to celebrate Anne's release from the bondage of teaching by taking a short holiday together. Their first idea was to go to Scarborough, a place which Anne loved but Emily had never visited. They would take advantage of the opening of a new railway from York to Scarborough which would make the trip much easier. When the opening of the railway was delayed until 7 July, however, they were obliged to change their plans. A two-day visit to Ilkley, some fifteen miles from Haworth, was contemplated, but in the end they settled on the more exciting prospect of a trip to York.
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Emily and Anne left home on 30 June, travelling on the newly opened Keighley line to Bradford, where they changed trains for Leeds then York. Emily's description of the holiday, which she included in her diary paper written a month later on her twenty-seventh birthday, is a fascinating revelation of her priorities.

Anne and I went our first long Journey by ourselves \together/ – leaving Home on the 30th of June – monday – sleeping at York – returning to Keighley Tuesday evening sleeping there and walking home on wedensday morning – though the weather was broken, we enjoyed ourselves very much except during a few hours at Bradford and during our excursion we were Ronald Macelgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Augusteena, Rosobelle Esraldan, Ella and Julian Egramont Catherine Navarre and Cordelia Firzaphnold escaping from the Palaces of Instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans –
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While Anne had been so moved by her first glimpse of York Minster that she had recorded it in her diary paper four years earlier, Emily mentions
none of the sights she had seen for the first time. Clearly, the opportunity to indulge in a Gondal ‘play' with Anne meant more to her than anything else she had seen or done on their brief trip. Though it was at least thirteen years since the creation of their imaginary world, Emily, at almost twenty-seven, had lost none of her enthusiasm for Gondal, acting out the roles of its heroes and heroines with as much gusto as when a child.

The day after her sisters returned from their jaunt, Charlotte set off for Hathersage. The Reverend Henry Nussey had been appointed curate there in April 1844 and four months later the Duke of Devonshire, in whose gift the living lay, preferred him to the vicarage.
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The village was much like Haworth: a cluster of stone cottages lining either side of a steeply climbing road, with the church and vicarage on an eminence at the top end and a number of needle factories, which gave the village its principal industry, in the valley bottoms. From its vantage point on the hillside, Hathersage looks out over a magnificent prospect of undulating hills, covered with pasture and woodland, rising to the greater heights of the surrounding moors. The landscape is on a larger scale than that of Haworth: the valleys are wider, the hills are higher and the skylines, where menacing ridges of exposed and weather-beaten rock thrust stark against the clouds, are more dramatic.

Though Charlotte was to stay only a brief three weeks at Hathersage, the visit was to be a major influence in shaping
Jane Eyre
. It is possible that she was already turning over in her mind the various elements of the later part of the story when she arrived in Hathersage. In ‘The Missionary', an undated poem which probably belongs to this time, she describes the agonies suffered by a man who gives up the woman he loves in order to become a missionary overseas. This scenario was to be developed more fully in
jane Eyre
, where St John Rivers loves Rosamund Oliver but refuses to ask her to share his own destiny as a missionary in India because he knows she will not be able to adapt to its hardships. It is unlikely to be coincidental that the poem and the St John Rivers episode seem to have been conceived while Charlotte was staying in the home of Henry Nussey. Not only had he once proposed to Charlotte in the same business-like and unemotional way as St John Rivers did to Jane Eyre, but since then he had himself toyed with the idea of becoming a missionary.
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It was not unnatural that Charlotte should recall these things while living in the house which she and his sister were preparing to receive his bride.

Whether or not Charlotte was consciously seeking material for the story that, a year later, was to become
Jane Eyre
, the village of Hathersage and its
setting were to feature prominently in her novel. Even the name of its heroine seems to have been adopted from the four splendid medieval brasses of the Eyre family in the church.
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The fifteenth-century Eyre home, North Lees Hall, which lay two miles from Hathersage, may also have provided Charlotte with material for her description of Rochester's Thornfield Hall. Charlotte's own journey across the flat moorlands between Sheffield and Hathersage, where the desolation is broken only by scattered outcrops of rock, was to provide an appropriate setting for Jane's flight from Rochester, and Hathersage itself became the fictional village of Morton.
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Charlotte's arrival was much less traumatic than Jane Eyre's: Ellen met her off the omnibus in Sheffield and brought her safely back to her brother's new home.
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The vicarage was a pleasant eighteenth-century house, built of local stone, and not dissimilar in appearance to Charlotte's own home. Like Haworth Parsonage, it too was bounded on at least one side by the churchyard, but took full advantage of its elevated situation to drink in the magnificent views across the surrounding valleys toward the moors. In preparation for his marriage, Henry Nussey had undertaken a major extension to the house, adding a bay-windowed sitting room and two new bedrooms.
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Ellen had been left to supervise the completion of the work and the refurnishing of the house. Charlotte's visit therefore provided her with some welcome moral support in a task made more difficult by the fact that Henry's bride, Emily Prescott, was a virtual stranger whose tastes were, as yet, unknown.