March 14, 2012 • 31 mins
The Brontë sisters quickly rose from obscurity to notoriety after their three novels were published under the Bell pseudonym. Join Sarah and Deblina as they discuss the sisters' rise to fame and the scandalous suggestions about their lives and morals.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm de Blaye and chuco boarding
and we are going back to the Brontes today. We
talked about them recently, and when we left off the
(00:21):
last episode, we had just finished discussing their early live Charlotte, Brandwell,
Emily and Bronte's early lives the four children of the
Reverend Patrick Bronte of how Earth, and by their early twenties,
these four brilliant Bronte children were in a bit of
a rut. Really, Brandwell, who was expected to be a
(00:42):
great artist or writer, the really the pride of the
family is the only son, was working as a railway
clerk and becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol and opium. The
three girls, meanwhile, had at various points taken unpleasant teaching
jobs to governessing jobs that they really weren't that well
suited for. Yeah, so it seems like a blessing one.
(01:02):
In forty one, there living aunt Elizabeth Brandwell proposed using
her savings to set the girls up with their own school.
Charlotte quickly sweetened the deal by convincing her aunt father.
To make the school work, they need some accomplishments like
flawless French and a good grasp of Italian and German,
so they hatched this plan. Charlotte and Emily would study
(01:23):
for six months at the Poncionale j and Brussels before
coming back, reuniting with Anne and opening up their own school.
So it really sounds like a pretty good plan. But
for nature loving home body Emily, leaving Howard was really painful.
She loved being out in the moors. For Charlotte, though
it was thrilling, it was so exciting to finally get
(01:43):
out into the world in experience some of all that
she'd been reading about for years and years. The two shy,
kind of country Bronte girls must have really stood out
among their fancier and their Catholic Belgian peers at Madame
J's school for girls, but they did pretty well all
with their lessons. They took private French lessons from Monsieur
(02:03):
a J, who was a respected professor, and they were
really doing so well, in fact, that at the end
of their six months of study, Madame is J suggested
that they stay on for a while longer Charlotte would
teach English, Emily would instruct music, and that would be
kind of a trade for their lessons, so they wouldn't
have to keep on funding their own schooling. But in
(02:26):
October two where it came that Aunt Brandwell was dead,
so they headed home, finding that Brandwell was also there,
having been fired from his railroad job after a discrepancy
was found in the account. So brand Well was at
it again. It's no wonder that Charlotte was soon eager
to accept the A J's invitation to return to Belgium
(02:46):
and continue her studies and would keep Governess sane and
Emily would tend to their father, who was increasingly suffering
from cataracts. Again. In one year they had reunite and
finally start their school together. This guy around. How Over,
Charlotte didn't exactly concentrate fully on her studies. Things were
okay at first, but without her sister Emily there, she
(03:08):
became very lonely, and she started to fixate more and
more on her master, her professor Muilsieur j. And if
you'd like to see another side of Charlotte, one that
almost helps reconcile her as the author of the passionate book.
Jane Ere, I'd recommend checking out these letters to Monsieur J.
They're kind of like love letters but not. And consequently,
(03:31):
Charlotte's friends, the a J's and their children and countless
Bronte historians have tried to figure out what exactly was
going on between these two, Whether Charlotte loved Monsieur J
in a romantic way, whether he was innocent and encouraging
that admiration, you know, or whether he was just interested
in her as a student, somebody who wanted to help
(03:53):
learn French better and appreciate literature more. And then whether
Charlotte even realized that her tonic obsession could be mistaken
by some people as adulterous love for this guy who
was married and had a large and constantly growing family.
So she might have just been a little bit naive
in that respect. But even if Charlotte was unaware of
(04:13):
the way her feelings could be taken, Madam a J
was not. As Charlotte's second year in Belgium war on,
Madam Aja ended the pairs one on one English lessons,
she started acting really coolly towards Charlotte as well, and
Charlotte even came to believe that Madame a Jay had
another teacher spy on her. By the end of the year,
Charlotte was packing her bags to head back to Haworth,
(04:35):
where she started correspondence. Those first letters must have been
appropriate enough. We don't know what they contained because they
don't survive. But after a few months, Monsieur a J
stopped writing back, and Charlotte got even more desperate. Fortunately, though,
these letters do survive because even though Monsieur a J
ripped them up, his wife stitched them back together as
(04:58):
quote a safeguard for the future. According to Charlotte Bronte's
biographer Rebecca Frasier, just to give you an example of
the kind of writing we're talking about, I mean, it
does sound very much like a love letter. Here's an
example from a January letter, Charlotte wrote, quote, all I
know is that I cannot that I will not resign
(05:18):
myself to lose wholly the friendship of my master. I
would rather suffer the greatest physical pain and then always
have my heart lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master
withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall be altogether
without hope. If he gives me a little, just a little.
I shall be satisfied, happy, I shall have reason for living,
(05:40):
on for working. So like a love letter, but again
not quite like a love letter, something kind of in between,
but also clearly kind of inappropriate. It's ambiguous, but there's
definitely some sort of very strong attachment there. Meanwhile, though,
the Bronte ladies were making arrangements for their long planned
school because Mr Bronte's cataracts had nearly blinded him. Emily
(06:03):
and Charlotte decided the school should be at the parsonage,
which is kind of a bad idea since, as you'll remember,
it was pretty out of the way, so it was
impossible for students to find. And that was really unfortunate too,
because by the summer of eighty five all of the
Bronte children were at home again and unemployed, and had
resigned her four year position as the governess for the
(06:26):
Robinson family in June, mysteriously writing in her secret diary.
By the way, I quote, I was then at Thorpe Green,
and now I am only just escaped from it. During
my stay, I've had some very unpleasant and undreamt of
experiences of human nature, kind of a strange thing to
write a month after you leave a job. And then
(06:48):
in July Brandwell had his own sort of strange exit
from employment. He had been working for the Robinson's as
a tutor also, and he got a note from his
boss Ball on vacation. The gist of it was, I
know what you did. It's despicable. Don't ever contact me
or my family again, quote on pain of exposure. So
(07:09):
that's a pretty serious way to be dismissed. And it
seems that while Charlotte was wrestling with her possibly adulterous
feelings for Monsieur j but likely no more than feelings,
brand Will was having an actual affair with the mother
of his pupil, appropriately enough named Mrs Robinson um Or
at least that was Brandwell's version of the story, the
(07:31):
one that he told to his drinking buddies that he
had had a long term affair with the promises of
eventually running away together, eventually marrying. Brandwell of course, dreaming
of being supported by this wealthier woman and being able
to indulge his talents, you know, write poetry, right, novels,
paint that sort of thing. So again it's unclear exactly
(07:52):
what happened between the two of them, But there are
some facts. At the time of Brandwell's dismissal, Mr Robinson
was dying, and this is Robinson did marry again, but
she married again to a very well connected, wealthy man,
not an improverished tutor. Mrs Robinson's doctor also later sent
Brandwell large amounts of money, and her coachman eventually paid
(08:14):
a secret visit to Brandwell. So something fishy going on there.
We're just not sure what. The only problem with the
whole brand Well and Mrs Robinson romance scenario is that
Mr Robinson clearly thought only brand Well was at fault,
you know, hence the on pain of exposure. Yeah, that
doesn't sound like he's going to expose his wife to
(08:35):
public scrutiny. It sounds like everybody will blame brand Well
if what happened comes out. Plus, let's just be honest,
who could really trust brand Well? At this point, he
was getting into a pattern of raving all night long
and passing out during the day. Over the next year,
he set his bed on fire. He was actually rescued
by Emily and he had to start sleeping in Mr
(08:56):
Bronte's room, which was kind of a scary thought, since
Mr Ande famously slept with a loaded pistol, and because
Branwell was kind of threatening his own life by this point.
So during all of this drama, the three Bronte women
were ironically creating their own drama. Charlotte had started writing
The Professor, Anne was writing Agnes Gray, and Emily was
(09:18):
working on Wuthering Heights. But they still might have destroyed
away on their novels like another piece of Angrin or
Gondol fiction if Charlotte hadn't discovered a manuscript of Emily's
poems in the fall of eighty five. I mean you
can imagine she was completely excited, completely thrilled to make
this discovery, and she wrote about that a lot later,
(09:39):
sometimes publicly, but in a later letter she wrote, they
stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when
I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement
I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery
I had made. I was sternly rated at first for
having taken an unwarrantable liberty. So you can imagine Emily
was not pleased with her sister reading her secret poems
(10:02):
she'd been working on, but After some strong convincing, Charlotte
did talk Emily into publishing a group volume, so if
all the sisters published it would be okay, and they
would also publish under gender ambiguous pseudonyms Kerr Ellis and
Acton Bell. A lot of speculation about where that name
(10:24):
Bell came from, though, yeah, Bell was possibly chosen as
a joke on Mr Bronte's curate, Mr Arthur Bell Nichols,
who apparently really amused these women by bragging about his
Bell relations. He'll come up again, So that's a good
name to remember, even aside from the pseudonym relation. Indeed,
(10:44):
so financed by their aunt's savings and with Charlotte acting
as the mysterious Bell's literary agent, they published poems by
Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell on the best paper they
could afford, and the book got some great reviews. The
critic called it a quote ray of sunshine. But it's
still only sold two copies. But still they were published writers,
(11:04):
which was something. I mean, it probably gave them the
confidence to keep on writing and do what they were
about to do, because by the summer of eighteen forty six,
the Brontes were really shopping around their novels, this time
unwilling to front the entire cost of publishing themselves. They
weren't willing to go vanity all the way, but they
were finding no takers for their three novels. The same
(11:26):
day that Charlotte attended her father's cataract surgery in Manchester,
she found that they had been rejected. So she was
in kind of a bad place. She was in Manchester.
Her father was recovering from his eye surgery. You know,
nineteenth century eye surgery, you can imagine kind of unpleasant.
(11:46):
It was a long recovery. It required total silence. Her
novel wasn't getting anywhere, and so she started to write
a new book called Jane Eyre. She wrote for three
weeks straight and by the time her father had the
okay to go home and September, she had written all
the way through Jane and Mr Rochester's canceled wedding in
Jane's White which when you read Jane here, I think
(12:09):
it'll be neat next time. I next time I read
it to know that breaking point in her writing, because
just looking back on it, you can see there's a
definitive shift in the tone of the novel, and I
can definitely imagine that first part being written in this frenzy.
That's true, But three weeks that's amazing to me. Anne
hadn't let rejection stop her either. She had started writing
(12:31):
The Tenant of Wildfill Hall, and with Charlotte home again,
she Emily and Anne would take turns reading new chapters
of their books around the fire, and I would just
love to be a fly on the wall in that room.
But by the following summer they had an offer from
Newby Publishers in London for Anne and Emily's books, and
Charlotte continued to shop the professor around, setting it to Smith,
(12:52):
Elder and Company, where it was read by A William Smith.
Williams and Williams read the book and he rejected it,
but not without also encouraging the author to submit something
with a bit more action, maybe a bit like Jane
Eyre perhaps, so Charlotte sent off her exciting new second
manuscript to Williams in August. He read the manuscript, he
(13:14):
handed it over to his boss, George Smith, who read
it in one day, and the firm published the new
novel by October to almost a media and overwhelming acclaim.
I mean, just this remarkable that you had finished this novel,
you know, polish it up in August, send it off,
and it would be published and a hit by October.
(13:34):
It's hard to imagine today, I think a new book
being as much of a cultural phenomenon as Jane Eyre was. Ellen.
Charlotte's dear friend wrote a visiting London during the first
height of Belle Fever, and she said, when I reached London,
I found there was quite a furor about the authorship
of the new novel. The work was quickly obtained, and
(13:56):
as soon as it arrived, it was seized upon. In
the first half paid read aloud, it was as though
Charlotte Bronte herself was present in every word, her voice
and spirit thrilling through and through everybody was talking about it. Gradually, though,
the tone of the reviews began to change from ecstatic
to critical. Reviewers found the novel course your religious more salacious.
(14:19):
Gossip started when Charlotte decided to dedicate the second addition
to her literary hero William Thackeray. That was kind of
a mistake because it turned out that Thackeray himself had
a mad wife, and folks started guessing that Kerr Bell
was actually Thackeray's mistress. Yeah, you can imagine all parties
were pretty embarrassed by this discovery. Despite the gossip, though
(14:39):
in the hurtful interpretations of Charlotte's work, at least her
book was very popular. It was selling well. Weathering Heights, meanwhile,
was getting terrible reviews. The Atlas called it quote strange
and inartistic story. Many readers figured that it must have
come from this particularly wicked mind. I mean today, it's
it's so strange to imagine people dissing on Weathering Heights
(15:04):
so much. It's a classic something you breathe in every
high school English class. But um, people were experiously disturbed
by it at the time. Agnes Spray, a book novelist
George Moore later called quote as simple and beautiful as
a muslin dress. Hardly earned any buzz at all at
the Thomas, where some also started accusing the Bells of
(15:25):
being one writer, a theory which was encouraged by Emily
and Anne's own publisher, who was hoping to cash in
on the success of Curve Bell. The confusion finally got
bad enough for Charlotte and to practically run to the
nearest town in order to get to London meet Mr
Smith and prove that there were at least two bells.
So then there's a big change in this story. It's
(15:45):
this rapid ascent of fame. But in the fall of
eighty eight, less than a year after the appearance of
Jane Eyre, the Brontes world really began to transform. It
started with Branwell dying in September, and he may have
seemed like he was in constant danger of drinking himself
to death or committing suice that are, having some unfortunate
(16:06):
accident while sleeping in the room with the loaded pistols,
but no one in the family had really realized that
he was seriously ill with tuberculosis as well. His alcoholism
had effectively covered it up until almost the very end,
and one of the details about all the Bronte's lives
would There are so many sad details we could choose from,
but one of the saddest me is that Charlotte, Emily
(16:28):
and Anne never told their brother that they had become
famous authors. They finally did tell their father, but they
just didn't feel up to letting Brandwell know, and, as
Charlotte later wrote, fear of causing him too deep, a
pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents misapplied.
And that was their reason for holding it back for them,
(16:48):
you know, the their fellow writer in childhood. Something about
that so tragic. Another weird thing. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,
some of Branwell's friends later thought he co authored Weathering
Heights because it was so masculine. And I mean that
makes the whole thing that they never told him at
all even more strange, that it almost would fit with him.
(17:11):
And after Brandwell's death, the bad news just kind of
kept coming for the Brontes. Emily got a cold at
Brandwell's funeral. By December, she was also dead from tuberculosis.
Her dog keeper walked in the funeral procession with the
Brontes and their servants. He sat in their pew at
the church, and he lay outside of her empty room
for a week and how old. And just a few
(17:31):
weeks after that and was also diagnosed with tuberculosis. And
unlike Emily, who had really resisted any kind of medicine,
any kind of doctor's interference until the literal end um,
Anne took every possible remedy, including a trip to the
sea in May, but she died May away from home.
(17:52):
So just one year brings three published novels, and the
next year brings three family death. It's kind of the
remarkable tragedy of the Brontes lives. And home was obviously
so sad and so lonely for Charlotte, now the only
surviving child of six. She wrote about how happy the
(18:12):
dogs were when she came home because they thought that
maybe the other two weren't too far behind, and she
just felt really lonely. Her father was um a kind
of distant during this time too, as you can imagine.
So the next period of Charlotte's life bounced between this
loneliness and depression at home and then brief getaways filled
with festivals and treats that were worthy of a famous novelist,
(18:35):
because of course, her fame hadn't gone away in the meantime,
she had just kind of left it for a while.
She finished her second which was really her third work
entitled Shirley, and made a second visit to London, clad
and Sable, picked out by her friend Ellen, and on
her third trip to London, she was showered with attention
from a publisher, George Smith, they even visited the zoo together,
(18:57):
and they kind of stalked the Duke of Wellington together,
which really fun for her. Charlotte's hero, her childhood hero.
I think they sort of waited for him like on
his church root and caught a few glimpsees of him.
During this period, Charlotte also met the novelist Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell,
who turned out to be her future biographer, and who
was really quickly impressed by Charlotte's hard life story and
(19:19):
her talent and wanted to help her rehabilitate her image
a little bit. So gradually word was starting to slowly
creep out that Kerr Bell was actually Charlotte Bronte, even
back home in Yorkshire, and one funny account, Charlotte wrote
to Ellen that her family's made Martha came to her saying, quote,
I've heard such news, please, ma'am. You've been and written
(19:40):
two books, the grandest books that ever was seen. And
I thought it was really funny to learn that. While
Charlotte started to handle her fame in London, you know,
she got to meet her famous author friends and do
all of that, do fun things. She was a little
bit terrified with being known as this famous author back home,
because it meant that her actual her actual neighbors would
(20:03):
go and try to figure out who were the characters
in her books, which does sound pretty terrifying, and she
had to be around them all she did she could
go go back to her tiny home and forget about
it all. So amid all of this growing fame, though,
Charlotte attracted a third suitor. We talked about her first
two in the first part of this little series, but
(20:25):
this guy was James Taylor, who was an agent at
her publisher, and they've been writing to each other for
some time, but really their correspondence was kind of third
rung with her literary correspondence at her publishing how she
had always sort of preferred writing to Mr Williams, the
guy who had discovered her. They talked about books and
all sorts of things, and then she was obviously starting
(20:47):
to get a bit of a crush on the publisher himself,
Mr George Smith, he of the zoo trips and the
lavish attentions. Mr Taylor, though, had kind of a thing
for Charlotte, and he ended up being spurred on by
his impending move to India to go ahead declare his
love for her and propose. Charlotte of course refused, but
(21:09):
it certainly got her thinking about that growing crush on
George Smith. But her next trip to London must have
really squashed this idea. She wasn't the only one thinking
about it too. It seems that even her father, Patrick Bronte,
seemed to have some hopes or ideas that she might
end up with George Smith. It turned out, though, on
that next trip that Smith was clearly just going to
(21:31):
be a friend, just going to be her publisher, and
she made that quite obvious in a somewhat awkward way
in her final complete novel, The Let, by having the
Charlotte like heroine not end up with the George Smith
like Dr John Graham bretton which, of course I mean
that's awkward because Mr Smith was of course reading these
(21:53):
manuscripts and figuring out, oh, that would be awkward. So
that sort of chance that love didn't work out for Charlotte,
But she had other things to keep her busy when
she wasn't so bothered by her own characterization in the
press as an immoral course writer. She disliked her sister's
memories being disrespected. According to an article in Women's Writing
(22:15):
by Susan R. Bauman, it's largely Charlotte who's responsible for
Emily's later reputation as the wild more Poetus and Anne's
as the devotional Christian writer. And she did this by
shaming reviewers with biographical details of her sister's lives and
sad deaths, editing and publishing more of their poems, and
more strangely, sometimes even agreeing with critics negative assessments of
(22:38):
their work. So consequently, some Bronze biographers considered Charlotte the
snafari's curator of her sister's writing. Bauman mentioned theories ranging
from Charlotte tricking Emily into revealing her poetry so not
just like I can't believe you read my poetry, but
let's get over it in a bit, something more furious
than that um and then theories even as extreme as
(23:01):
Charlotte purposefully destroying Emily's second novel after her death out
of jealousy. Interesting to note here since Charlotte is so
very much responsible for the way people ultimately saw Emily Bronte,
and Bronte her own life was shaped largely by Mrs
Gaskell's biography that came out after Charlotte's death, which really
(23:25):
turned her from this sketchy writer of naughty books to
a heartbroken, admirable churchgoing woman who had never neglected her more.
I don't know quote womanly duties at home. She was
the parson's daughter. She was the parson's wife, um not
the scandalous writer that she was depicted as. Charlotte's posthumous
(23:47):
reputation was also shaped by her widower. Remember that Mr Nichols,
the curate that we talked about earlier. This is why
we asked you to remember him. While Charlotte had gone
from making fun of him with her sisters to at
least thinking of him as a nice guy, he had
fallen head over heels without her even noticing. And on
December eighteen fifty three she received the fourth out of
(24:09):
nowhere proposal of her life. And this time Charlotte's father
was furious that his poor Irish curate, um kind of
a lot like himself, would court his daughter. You know,
he really thought that Charlotte deserved somebody with more money,
somebody with more prestige. But instead of calling under some
rock and disappearing, Nichols escalated this courtship to really an
(24:31):
all out war with Mr Bronte. It was so awkward
he handed in his notice, but he was stuck in
the town for several months, having to see each other
all the time. Charlotte once um once. Mr Nichols did
eventually leave. How Charlotte eventually got permission from her father
to start communicating with him and eventually start visiting him.
(24:53):
She's thirty seven at this point, to just consider that,
and then ultimately they married in June eighteen d four.
Her father was supposedly too sick to attend the ceremony,
so she was given away by her old friend, Miss Willer,
whose school she had attended so many years before, and
wore a white embroidered dress, a bonnet and a veil,
(25:14):
and was said to look like a little snow drop
there in the middle of the in the middle of
the summer. By December, Charlotte was writing to Ellen hinting
of a pregnancy, but from that point on she only
got sicker and sicker. She died March thirty one, and
it's kind of unclear exactly what she died of. I
think it's generally accepted that it may have been tuberculosis,
(25:36):
with the official cause it could have been also dehydration
from really extreme morning sickness. That's another theory that's out there. Yeah,
there are several berries, or just that Charlotte's health was
not so great anyway. She had suffered from ill health
for a long time, and that maybe her pregnancy um
kind of escalated latent tuberculosis. But a month before her death,
(26:00):
she had interestingly changed her will to benefit Mr Nichols.
So his attentions to her during her sickness and before
must have really impressed her. Because when they had first
got married, she had set it up so he'd have
zero control over her estate even if she died childless,
which was kind of an unusual arrangement for a married
(26:22):
couple at the time. And um, he wouldn't even be
able to access her money for debt that sort of thing.
Mr Nichols cared for Mr Bronte for six more years
until his death. Mr Bronte is sometimes considered a too stern,
too self interested figure, but one has to feel for him.
I mean, he lost all six of his children of
(26:42):
his own famous temper, he supposedly said quote, had I
been numbered amongst the calms sedate, concentric men of the world,
I should, in all probability never have had such children
as mine, And I think that's an interesting point to
start to wrap this up. On Mrs Gaskell's biography sort
of wonders what would Charlotte Bronte have been like if
(27:03):
she had been brought up in a healthy and happy situation.
But Mr Bronte's own words how much his personality likely
shaped his children, shows that it almost did seem to
be a requirement that they had this isolated upbringing, this
unhealthy atmosphere they lived in, and the development of their
(27:23):
intense imaginations almost came from that. It's also I need
to I think that we rarely talk about our subjects
in such a broad view as this, But I read
a New Yorker article on the Bronte myth and noted
that the sisters have really been quote remolded in successive
generations to fit with different agendas, Freudian feminist agendas, and
(27:46):
that's so strange to me. It has been interesting to
learn about a biography and how that's connected to the
writer's works, but also how much these lives are into interpretation. Yeah,
it's so true, but I kind of like that aspect
of it. But it's still up to get interpretation, because
then you can't definitively say, Okay, this happened to them,
(28:08):
and this is why this is in the book. You
still have room for interpretations when you read the novels
as well, which is fun. Yeah, and to look at
how they shaped their own identities and how much the
press influenced it. I don't know, it's all very cool
to me. So I think that's probably a good time
to move on though, and go to listener mail. So
(28:30):
we received an email from listener Alan. He said, I
really enjoyed the podcast on Robert Shaw in the fifty
four regiment, although I was a little disappointed that you
have quickly passed over Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who preceded Shaw
in leading a regiment of free plays and in many
ways outstripped him in the cause of emancipation and equality
for African Americans. But makes Higginson particularly interesting and deserving
(28:53):
of his own podcast is that, in addition to his
dedication to the abolitionist movement, he was one of the
night teenth centuries great ricontours, as well as the editor
and friend of Emily Dickinson. Now you can see why
I picked this email for this episode. In fact, it
is largely because of his efforts and influence that Dickinson's
brilliance was brought to a national audience. Dickinson herself died
(29:16):
of mysterious circumstances, although her death certificate lists Bright's disease
as a cause, There's been recent speculation that she may
have been an epileptic um. And then he also suggest
some other interesting scandals about Dickinson. But I thought this
was such a neat coincidence because one of the articles
I used or consulted for this episode compared Emily Dickinson
(29:39):
and Emily Bronte. Emily Dickinson was apparently a huge Emily
Bronte fan, and a lot of circumstances in their life
kind of line up in a strange way. Interesting. Well,
we always love when our listeners give us a different
perspective like that. If you have any stories related to
the Bronte's or anything else that you want to share
with us, you can write us or a history podcast
(30:02):
at Discovery dot com, or you can look us up
on Facebook and write to us there, or we're on
Twitter at miss and History. And to share one more
unusual medical fact, I didn't realize tuberculosis was still a
worldwide problem, did you. I did, only because when I've
traveled internationally, I have to get the You have to
get the vaccination. Yeah, okay, I hadn't thought of that,
(30:25):
or make sure that your vaccination is up to date.
I should say. I just always think of it in
association with romantic poets and novelists and not as a
global problem. But I received my alumni magazine the other day.
Here I am reading about all these tuberculosis stuff, and
I learned that a third of the world's population is
actually infected with tuberculosis. So, um, I don't know. It's
(30:48):
those You can combine a little bit of medical history
with literary history too, and we have both types of
articles on our website at how stuff works dot com.
You can find them by going to our homepage www
dot howta works dot com. Be sure to check out
(31:09):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
st Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The houst Works iPhone app has
a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm de Blaye and chuco boarding
and we are going back to the Brontes today. We
talked about them recently, and when we left off the
(00:21):
last episode, we had just finished discussing their early live Charlotte, Brandwell,
Emily and Bronte's early lives the four children of the
Reverend Patrick Bronte of how Earth, and by their early twenties,
these four brilliant Bronte children were in a bit of
a rut. Really, Brandwell, who was expected to be a
(00:42):
great artist or writer, the really the pride of the
family is the only son, was working as a railway
clerk and becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol and opium. The
three girls, meanwhile, had at various points taken unpleasant teaching
jobs to governessing jobs that they really weren't that well
suited for. Yeah, so it seems like a blessing one.
(01:02):
In forty one, there living aunt Elizabeth Brandwell proposed using
her savings to set the girls up with their own school.
Charlotte quickly sweetened the deal by convincing her aunt father.
To make the school work, they need some accomplishments like
flawless French and a good grasp of Italian and German,
so they hatched this plan. Charlotte and Emily would study
(01:23):
for six months at the Poncionale j and Brussels before
coming back, reuniting with Anne and opening up their own school.
So it really sounds like a pretty good plan. But
for nature loving home body Emily, leaving Howard was really painful.
She loved being out in the moors. For Charlotte, though
it was thrilling, it was so exciting to finally get
(01:43):
out into the world in experience some of all that
she'd been reading about for years and years. The two shy,
kind of country Bronte girls must have really stood out
among their fancier and their Catholic Belgian peers at Madame
J's school for girls, but they did pretty well all
with their lessons. They took private French lessons from Monsieur
(02:03):
a J, who was a respected professor, and they were
really doing so well, in fact, that at the end
of their six months of study, Madame is J suggested
that they stay on for a while longer Charlotte would
teach English, Emily would instruct music, and that would be
kind of a trade for their lessons, so they wouldn't
have to keep on funding their own schooling. But in
(02:26):
October two where it came that Aunt Brandwell was dead,
so they headed home, finding that Brandwell was also there,
having been fired from his railroad job after a discrepancy
was found in the account. So brand Well was at
it again. It's no wonder that Charlotte was soon eager
to accept the A J's invitation to return to Belgium
(02:46):
and continue her studies and would keep Governess sane and
Emily would tend to their father, who was increasingly suffering
from cataracts. Again. In one year they had reunite and
finally start their school together. This guy around. How Over,
Charlotte didn't exactly concentrate fully on her studies. Things were
okay at first, but without her sister Emily there, she
(03:08):
became very lonely, and she started to fixate more and
more on her master, her professor Muilsieur j. And if
you'd like to see another side of Charlotte, one that
almost helps reconcile her as the author of the passionate book.
Jane Ere, I'd recommend checking out these letters to Monsieur J.
They're kind of like love letters but not. And consequently,
(03:31):
Charlotte's friends, the a J's and their children and countless
Bronte historians have tried to figure out what exactly was
going on between these two, Whether Charlotte loved Monsieur J
in a romantic way, whether he was innocent and encouraging
that admiration, you know, or whether he was just interested
in her as a student, somebody who wanted to help
(03:53):
learn French better and appreciate literature more. And then whether
Charlotte even realized that her tonic obsession could be mistaken
by some people as adulterous love for this guy who
was married and had a large and constantly growing family.
So she might have just been a little bit naive
in that respect. But even if Charlotte was unaware of
(04:13):
the way her feelings could be taken, Madam a J
was not. As Charlotte's second year in Belgium war on,
Madam Aja ended the pairs one on one English lessons,
she started acting really coolly towards Charlotte as well, and
Charlotte even came to believe that Madame a Jay had
another teacher spy on her. By the end of the year,
Charlotte was packing her bags to head back to Haworth,
(04:35):
where she started correspondence. Those first letters must have been
appropriate enough. We don't know what they contained because they
don't survive. But after a few months, Monsieur a J
stopped writing back, and Charlotte got even more desperate. Fortunately, though,
these letters do survive because even though Monsieur a J
ripped them up, his wife stitched them back together as
(04:58):
quote a safeguard for the future. According to Charlotte Bronte's
biographer Rebecca Frasier, just to give you an example of
the kind of writing we're talking about, I mean, it
does sound very much like a love letter. Here's an
example from a January letter, Charlotte wrote, quote, all I
know is that I cannot that I will not resign
(05:18):
myself to lose wholly the friendship of my master. I
would rather suffer the greatest physical pain and then always
have my heart lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master
withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall be altogether
without hope. If he gives me a little, just a little.
I shall be satisfied, happy, I shall have reason for living,
(05:40):
on for working. So like a love letter, but again
not quite like a love letter, something kind of in between,
but also clearly kind of inappropriate. It's ambiguous, but there's
definitely some sort of very strong attachment there. Meanwhile, though,
the Bronte ladies were making arrangements for their long planned
school because Mr Bronte's cataracts had nearly blinded him. Emily
(06:03):
and Charlotte decided the school should be at the parsonage,
which is kind of a bad idea since, as you'll remember,
it was pretty out of the way, so it was
impossible for students to find. And that was really unfortunate too,
because by the summer of eighty five all of the
Bronte children were at home again and unemployed, and had
resigned her four year position as the governess for the
(06:26):
Robinson family in June, mysteriously writing in her secret diary.
By the way, I quote, I was then at Thorpe Green,
and now I am only just escaped from it. During
my stay, I've had some very unpleasant and undreamt of
experiences of human nature, kind of a strange thing to
write a month after you leave a job. And then
(06:48):
in July Brandwell had his own sort of strange exit
from employment. He had been working for the Robinson's as
a tutor also, and he got a note from his
boss Ball on vacation. The gist of it was, I
know what you did. It's despicable. Don't ever contact me
or my family again, quote on pain of exposure. So
(07:09):
that's a pretty serious way to be dismissed. And it
seems that while Charlotte was wrestling with her possibly adulterous
feelings for Monsieur j but likely no more than feelings,
brand Will was having an actual affair with the mother
of his pupil, appropriately enough named Mrs Robinson um Or
at least that was Brandwell's version of the story, the
(07:31):
one that he told to his drinking buddies that he
had had a long term affair with the promises of
eventually running away together, eventually marrying. Brandwell of course, dreaming
of being supported by this wealthier woman and being able
to indulge his talents, you know, write poetry, right, novels,
paint that sort of thing. So again it's unclear exactly
(07:52):
what happened between the two of them, But there are
some facts. At the time of Brandwell's dismissal, Mr Robinson
was dying, and this is Robinson did marry again, but
she married again to a very well connected, wealthy man,
not an improverished tutor. Mrs Robinson's doctor also later sent
Brandwell large amounts of money, and her coachman eventually paid
(08:14):
a secret visit to Brandwell. So something fishy going on there.
We're just not sure what. The only problem with the
whole brand Well and Mrs Robinson romance scenario is that
Mr Robinson clearly thought only brand Well was at fault,
you know, hence the on pain of exposure. Yeah, that
doesn't sound like he's going to expose his wife to
(08:35):
public scrutiny. It sounds like everybody will blame brand Well
if what happened comes out. Plus, let's just be honest,
who could really trust brand Well? At this point, he
was getting into a pattern of raving all night long
and passing out during the day. Over the next year,
he set his bed on fire. He was actually rescued
by Emily and he had to start sleeping in Mr
(08:56):
Bronte's room, which was kind of a scary thought, since
Mr Ande famously slept with a loaded pistol, and because
Branwell was kind of threatening his own life by this point.
So during all of this drama, the three Bronte women
were ironically creating their own drama. Charlotte had started writing
The Professor, Anne was writing Agnes Gray, and Emily was
(09:18):
working on Wuthering Heights. But they still might have destroyed
away on their novels like another piece of Angrin or
Gondol fiction if Charlotte hadn't discovered a manuscript of Emily's
poems in the fall of eighty five. I mean you
can imagine she was completely excited, completely thrilled to make
this discovery, and she wrote about that a lot later,
(09:39):
sometimes publicly, but in a later letter she wrote, they
stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when
I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement
I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery
I had made. I was sternly rated at first for
having taken an unwarrantable liberty. So you can imagine Emily
was not pleased with her sister reading her secret poems
(10:02):
she'd been working on, but After some strong convincing, Charlotte
did talk Emily into publishing a group volume, so if
all the sisters published it would be okay, and they
would also publish under gender ambiguous pseudonyms Kerr Ellis and
Acton Bell. A lot of speculation about where that name
(10:24):
Bell came from, though, yeah, Bell was possibly chosen as
a joke on Mr Bronte's curate, Mr Arthur Bell Nichols,
who apparently really amused these women by bragging about his
Bell relations. He'll come up again, So that's a good
name to remember, even aside from the pseudonym relation. Indeed,
(10:44):
so financed by their aunt's savings and with Charlotte acting
as the mysterious Bell's literary agent, they published poems by
Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell on the best paper they
could afford, and the book got some great reviews. The
critic called it a quote ray of sunshine. But it's
still only sold two copies. But still they were published writers,
(11:04):
which was something. I mean, it probably gave them the
confidence to keep on writing and do what they were
about to do, because by the summer of eighteen forty six,
the Brontes were really shopping around their novels, this time
unwilling to front the entire cost of publishing themselves. They
weren't willing to go vanity all the way, but they
were finding no takers for their three novels. The same
(11:26):
day that Charlotte attended her father's cataract surgery in Manchester,
she found that they had been rejected. So she was
in kind of a bad place. She was in Manchester.
Her father was recovering from his eye surgery. You know,
nineteenth century eye surgery, you can imagine kind of unpleasant.
(11:46):
It was a long recovery. It required total silence. Her
novel wasn't getting anywhere, and so she started to write
a new book called Jane Eyre. She wrote for three
weeks straight and by the time her father had the
okay to go home and September, she had written all
the way through Jane and Mr Rochester's canceled wedding in
Jane's White which when you read Jane here, I think
(12:09):
it'll be neat next time. I next time I read
it to know that breaking point in her writing, because
just looking back on it, you can see there's a
definitive shift in the tone of the novel, and I
can definitely imagine that first part being written in this frenzy.
That's true, But three weeks that's amazing to me. Anne
hadn't let rejection stop her either. She had started writing
(12:31):
The Tenant of Wildfill Hall, and with Charlotte home again,
she Emily and Anne would take turns reading new chapters
of their books around the fire, and I would just
love to be a fly on the wall in that room.
But by the following summer they had an offer from
Newby Publishers in London for Anne and Emily's books, and
Charlotte continued to shop the professor around, setting it to Smith,
(12:52):
Elder and Company, where it was read by A William Smith.
Williams and Williams read the book and he rejected it,
but not without also encouraging the author to submit something
with a bit more action, maybe a bit like Jane
Eyre perhaps, so Charlotte sent off her exciting new second
manuscript to Williams in August. He read the manuscript, he
(13:14):
handed it over to his boss, George Smith, who read
it in one day, and the firm published the new
novel by October to almost a media and overwhelming acclaim.
I mean, just this remarkable that you had finished this novel,
you know, polish it up in August, send it off,
and it would be published and a hit by October.
(13:34):
It's hard to imagine today, I think a new book
being as much of a cultural phenomenon as Jane Eyre was. Ellen.
Charlotte's dear friend wrote a visiting London during the first
height of Belle Fever, and she said, when I reached London,
I found there was quite a furor about the authorship
of the new novel. The work was quickly obtained, and
(13:56):
as soon as it arrived, it was seized upon. In
the first half paid read aloud, it was as though
Charlotte Bronte herself was present in every word, her voice
and spirit thrilling through and through everybody was talking about it. Gradually, though,
the tone of the reviews began to change from ecstatic
to critical. Reviewers found the novel course your religious more salacious.
(14:19):
Gossip started when Charlotte decided to dedicate the second addition
to her literary hero William Thackeray. That was kind of
a mistake because it turned out that Thackeray himself had
a mad wife, and folks started guessing that Kerr Bell
was actually Thackeray's mistress. Yeah, you can imagine all parties
were pretty embarrassed by this discovery. Despite the gossip, though
(14:39):
in the hurtful interpretations of Charlotte's work, at least her
book was very popular. It was selling well. Weathering Heights, meanwhile,
was getting terrible reviews. The Atlas called it quote strange
and inartistic story. Many readers figured that it must have
come from this particularly wicked mind. I mean today, it's
it's so strange to imagine people dissing on Weathering Heights
(15:04):
so much. It's a classic something you breathe in every
high school English class. But um, people were experiously disturbed
by it at the time. Agnes Spray, a book novelist
George Moore later called quote as simple and beautiful as
a muslin dress. Hardly earned any buzz at all at
the Thomas, where some also started accusing the Bells of
(15:25):
being one writer, a theory which was encouraged by Emily
and Anne's own publisher, who was hoping to cash in
on the success of Curve Bell. The confusion finally got
bad enough for Charlotte and to practically run to the
nearest town in order to get to London meet Mr
Smith and prove that there were at least two bells.
So then there's a big change in this story. It's
(15:45):
this rapid ascent of fame. But in the fall of
eighty eight, less than a year after the appearance of
Jane Eyre, the Brontes world really began to transform. It
started with Branwell dying in September, and he may have
seemed like he was in constant danger of drinking himself
to death or committing suice that are, having some unfortunate
(16:06):
accident while sleeping in the room with the loaded pistols,
but no one in the family had really realized that
he was seriously ill with tuberculosis as well. His alcoholism
had effectively covered it up until almost the very end,
and one of the details about all the Bronte's lives
would There are so many sad details we could choose from,
but one of the saddest me is that Charlotte, Emily
(16:28):
and Anne never told their brother that they had become
famous authors. They finally did tell their father, but they
just didn't feel up to letting Brandwell know, and, as
Charlotte later wrote, fear of causing him too deep, a
pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents misapplied.
And that was their reason for holding it back for them,
(16:48):
you know, the their fellow writer in childhood. Something about
that so tragic. Another weird thing. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,
some of Branwell's friends later thought he co authored Weathering
Heights because it was so masculine. And I mean that
makes the whole thing that they never told him at
all even more strange, that it almost would fit with him.
(17:11):
And after Brandwell's death, the bad news just kind of
kept coming for the Brontes. Emily got a cold at
Brandwell's funeral. By December, she was also dead from tuberculosis.
Her dog keeper walked in the funeral procession with the
Brontes and their servants. He sat in their pew at
the church, and he lay outside of her empty room
for a week and how old. And just a few
(17:31):
weeks after that and was also diagnosed with tuberculosis. And
unlike Emily, who had really resisted any kind of medicine,
any kind of doctor's interference until the literal end um,
Anne took every possible remedy, including a trip to the
sea in May, but she died May away from home.
(17:52):
So just one year brings three published novels, and the
next year brings three family death. It's kind of the
remarkable tragedy of the Brontes lives. And home was obviously
so sad and so lonely for Charlotte, now the only
surviving child of six. She wrote about how happy the
(18:12):
dogs were when she came home because they thought that
maybe the other two weren't too far behind, and she
just felt really lonely. Her father was um a kind
of distant during this time too, as you can imagine.
So the next period of Charlotte's life bounced between this
loneliness and depression at home and then brief getaways filled
with festivals and treats that were worthy of a famous novelist,
(18:35):
because of course, her fame hadn't gone away in the meantime,
she had just kind of left it for a while.
She finished her second which was really her third work
entitled Shirley, and made a second visit to London, clad
and Sable, picked out by her friend Ellen, and on
her third trip to London, she was showered with attention
from a publisher, George Smith, they even visited the zoo together,
(18:57):
and they kind of stalked the Duke of Wellington together,
which really fun for her. Charlotte's hero, her childhood hero.
I think they sort of waited for him like on
his church root and caught a few glimpsees of him.
During this period, Charlotte also met the novelist Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell,
who turned out to be her future biographer, and who
was really quickly impressed by Charlotte's hard life story and
(19:19):
her talent and wanted to help her rehabilitate her image
a little bit. So gradually word was starting to slowly
creep out that Kerr Bell was actually Charlotte Bronte, even
back home in Yorkshire, and one funny account, Charlotte wrote
to Ellen that her family's made Martha came to her saying, quote,
I've heard such news, please, ma'am. You've been and written
(19:40):
two books, the grandest books that ever was seen. And
I thought it was really funny to learn that. While
Charlotte started to handle her fame in London, you know,
she got to meet her famous author friends and do
all of that, do fun things. She was a little
bit terrified with being known as this famous author back home,
because it meant that her actual her actual neighbors would
(20:03):
go and try to figure out who were the characters
in her books, which does sound pretty terrifying, and she
had to be around them all she did she could
go go back to her tiny home and forget about
it all. So amid all of this growing fame, though,
Charlotte attracted a third suitor. We talked about her first
two in the first part of this little series, but
(20:25):
this guy was James Taylor, who was an agent at
her publisher, and they've been writing to each other for
some time, but really their correspondence was kind of third
rung with her literary correspondence at her publishing how she
had always sort of preferred writing to Mr Williams, the
guy who had discovered her. They talked about books and
all sorts of things, and then she was obviously starting
(20:47):
to get a bit of a crush on the publisher himself,
Mr George Smith, he of the zoo trips and the
lavish attentions. Mr Taylor, though, had kind of a thing
for Charlotte, and he ended up being spurred on by
his impending move to India to go ahead declare his
love for her and propose. Charlotte of course refused, but
(21:09):
it certainly got her thinking about that growing crush on
George Smith. But her next trip to London must have
really squashed this idea. She wasn't the only one thinking
about it too. It seems that even her father, Patrick Bronte,
seemed to have some hopes or ideas that she might
end up with George Smith. It turned out, though, on
that next trip that Smith was clearly just going to
(21:31):
be a friend, just going to be her publisher, and
she made that quite obvious in a somewhat awkward way
in her final complete novel, The Let, by having the
Charlotte like heroine not end up with the George Smith
like Dr John Graham bretton which, of course I mean
that's awkward because Mr Smith was of course reading these
(21:53):
manuscripts and figuring out, oh, that would be awkward. So
that sort of chance that love didn't work out for Charlotte,
But she had other things to keep her busy when
she wasn't so bothered by her own characterization in the
press as an immoral course writer. She disliked her sister's
memories being disrespected. According to an article in Women's Writing
(22:15):
by Susan R. Bauman, it's largely Charlotte who's responsible for
Emily's later reputation as the wild more Poetus and Anne's
as the devotional Christian writer. And she did this by
shaming reviewers with biographical details of her sister's lives and
sad deaths, editing and publishing more of their poems, and
more strangely, sometimes even agreeing with critics negative assessments of
(22:38):
their work. So consequently, some Bronze biographers considered Charlotte the
snafari's curator of her sister's writing. Bauman mentioned theories ranging
from Charlotte tricking Emily into revealing her poetry so not
just like I can't believe you read my poetry, but
let's get over it in a bit, something more furious
than that um and then theories even as extreme as
(23:01):
Charlotte purposefully destroying Emily's second novel after her death out
of jealousy. Interesting to note here since Charlotte is so
very much responsible for the way people ultimately saw Emily Bronte,
and Bronte her own life was shaped largely by Mrs
Gaskell's biography that came out after Charlotte's death, which really
(23:25):
turned her from this sketchy writer of naughty books to
a heartbroken, admirable churchgoing woman who had never neglected her more.
I don't know quote womanly duties at home. She was
the parson's daughter. She was the parson's wife, um not
the scandalous writer that she was depicted as. Charlotte's posthumous
(23:47):
reputation was also shaped by her widower. Remember that Mr Nichols,
the curate that we talked about earlier. This is why
we asked you to remember him. While Charlotte had gone
from making fun of him with her sisters to at
least thinking of him as a nice guy, he had
fallen head over heels without her even noticing. And on
December eighteen fifty three she received the fourth out of
(24:09):
nowhere proposal of her life. And this time Charlotte's father
was furious that his poor Irish curate, um kind of
a lot like himself, would court his daughter. You know,
he really thought that Charlotte deserved somebody with more money,
somebody with more prestige. But instead of calling under some
rock and disappearing, Nichols escalated this courtship to really an
(24:31):
all out war with Mr Bronte. It was so awkward
he handed in his notice, but he was stuck in
the town for several months, having to see each other
all the time. Charlotte once um once. Mr Nichols did
eventually leave. How Charlotte eventually got permission from her father
to start communicating with him and eventually start visiting him.
(24:53):
She's thirty seven at this point, to just consider that,
and then ultimately they married in June eighteen d four.
Her father was supposedly too sick to attend the ceremony,
so she was given away by her old friend, Miss Willer,
whose school she had attended so many years before, and
wore a white embroidered dress, a bonnet and a veil,
(25:14):
and was said to look like a little snow drop
there in the middle of the in the middle of
the summer. By December, Charlotte was writing to Ellen hinting
of a pregnancy, but from that point on she only
got sicker and sicker. She died March thirty one, and
it's kind of unclear exactly what she died of. I
think it's generally accepted that it may have been tuberculosis,
(25:36):
with the official cause it could have been also dehydration
from really extreme morning sickness. That's another theory that's out there. Yeah,
there are several berries, or just that Charlotte's health was
not so great anyway. She had suffered from ill health
for a long time, and that maybe her pregnancy um
kind of escalated latent tuberculosis. But a month before her death,
(26:00):
she had interestingly changed her will to benefit Mr Nichols.
So his attentions to her during her sickness and before
must have really impressed her. Because when they had first
got married, she had set it up so he'd have
zero control over her estate even if she died childless,
which was kind of an unusual arrangement for a married
(26:22):
couple at the time. And um, he wouldn't even be
able to access her money for debt that sort of thing.
Mr Nichols cared for Mr Bronte for six more years
until his death. Mr Bronte is sometimes considered a too stern,
too self interested figure, but one has to feel for him.
I mean, he lost all six of his children of
(26:42):
his own famous temper, he supposedly said quote, had I
been numbered amongst the calms sedate, concentric men of the world,
I should, in all probability never have had such children
as mine, And I think that's an interesting point to
start to wrap this up. On Mrs Gaskell's biography sort
of wonders what would Charlotte Bronte have been like if
(27:03):
she had been brought up in a healthy and happy situation.
But Mr Bronte's own words how much his personality likely
shaped his children, shows that it almost did seem to
be a requirement that they had this isolated upbringing, this
unhealthy atmosphere they lived in, and the development of their
(27:23):
intense imaginations almost came from that. It's also I need
to I think that we rarely talk about our subjects
in such a broad view as this, But I read
a New Yorker article on the Bronte myth and noted
that the sisters have really been quote remolded in successive
generations to fit with different agendas, Freudian feminist agendas, and
(27:46):
that's so strange to me. It has been interesting to
learn about a biography and how that's connected to the
writer's works, but also how much these lives are into interpretation. Yeah,
it's so true, but I kind of like that aspect
of it. But it's still up to get interpretation, because
then you can't definitively say, Okay, this happened to them,
(28:08):
and this is why this is in the book. You
still have room for interpretations when you read the novels
as well, which is fun. Yeah, and to look at
how they shaped their own identities and how much the
press influenced it. I don't know, it's all very cool
to me. So I think that's probably a good time
to move on though, and go to listener mail. So
(28:30):
we received an email from listener Alan. He said, I
really enjoyed the podcast on Robert Shaw in the fifty
four regiment, although I was a little disappointed that you
have quickly passed over Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who preceded Shaw
in leading a regiment of free plays and in many
ways outstripped him in the cause of emancipation and equality
for African Americans. But makes Higginson particularly interesting and deserving
(28:53):
of his own podcast is that, in addition to his
dedication to the abolitionist movement, he was one of the
night teenth centuries great ricontours, as well as the editor
and friend of Emily Dickinson. Now you can see why
I picked this email for this episode. In fact, it
is largely because of his efforts and influence that Dickinson's
brilliance was brought to a national audience. Dickinson herself died
(29:16):
of mysterious circumstances, although her death certificate lists Bright's disease
as a cause, There's been recent speculation that she may
have been an epileptic um. And then he also suggest
some other interesting scandals about Dickinson. But I thought this
was such a neat coincidence because one of the articles
I used or consulted for this episode compared Emily Dickinson
(29:39):
and Emily Bronte. Emily Dickinson was apparently a huge Emily
Bronte fan, and a lot of circumstances in their life
kind of line up in a strange way. Interesting. Well,
we always love when our listeners give us a different
perspective like that. If you have any stories related to
the Bronte's or anything else that you want to share
with us, you can write us or a history podcast
(30:02):
at Discovery dot com, or you can look us up
on Facebook and write to us there, or we're on
Twitter at miss and History. And to share one more
unusual medical fact, I didn't realize tuberculosis was still a
worldwide problem, did you. I did, only because when I've
traveled internationally, I have to get the You have to
get the vaccination. Yeah, okay, I hadn't thought of that,
(30:25):
or make sure that your vaccination is up to date.
I should say. I just always think of it in
association with romantic poets and novelists and not as a
global problem. But I received my alumni magazine the other day.
Here I am reading about all these tuberculosis stuff, and
I learned that a third of the world's population is
actually infected with tuberculosis. So, um, I don't know. It's
(30:48):
those You can combine a little bit of medical history
with literary history too, and we have both types of
articles on our website at how stuff works dot com.
You can find them by going to our homepage www
dot howta works dot com. Be sure to check out
(31:09):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
st Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The houst Works iPhone app has
a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
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