May 12, 2018 • 28 mins
This classic revisits the Brontë sisters. They're considered some of the best writers of the 19th century but their past may surprise you. Join Sarah and Deblina as they discuss the sisters' childhood tragedies, unconventional educations and their imaginary worlds.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We recently got a request from listener
Erica to re release our past episodes on the Brontes
as a Saturday classic. Now. These are the work of
past hosts Sarah and Deblina from back in We hear
so often that longtime listeners think that is one of
the absolute best episodes that Sarah and Deblina ever did.
(00:22):
They are definitely a top listener favorite, so we are
very happy to oblige with Erica's request. Today's installment is
called Growing Up Bronte, and as the name suggests, it
is about the unconventional childhoods of the Bronte siblings. Welcome
to Steph you missed in history class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:50):
Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck reporting and longtime listeners
know that sad royal childhoods are a frequent theme of ours,
But the truth is discussing the youth of a podcast
object is usually pretty interesting, whether their royalty or not.
Whether it's Elliot Chellaby showing off to the Sultan, or,
as we discussed recently, paleontologist Mary Anning getting struck by
(01:11):
lightning as an infant, or even Hans Christian Anderson crashing
dinner parties in his ill fitting communions. I really think
that taking a closer look at the early years often
shows a different side of a subject, or sometimes even
most intriguingly, a sign of what's to come, you know,
some spark of genius in the early years. But it's
(01:32):
rare that we devote an entire episode to those early
pre fame years, as we're going to do today with
the talented Bronte family. While we we will follow up
with an episode on their remarkable breakthroughs and their successes,
which we all probably know a little bit more about.
There are a few good reasons for establishing a solid
(01:52):
footing before we go there. I mean, the first one
would be that most of the family didn't live much
beyond childhood. That's kind of the sad reason why the
youngest Bronte child to die was only at ten and
the oldest was thirty eight, so not very long lives
at all. Secondly, the Bronte children grew up under very
(02:12):
strange circumstances. They grew up in extreme isolation coupled with
endless intellectual stimulation. Yeah, there's a New Yorker article by
Mary Hawthorne on their fantastic drawings and watercolors. Something you
might not be aware of that the Brontes were actually,
in some cases really talented artists too. But this article
suggested that the peculiarities of their upbringing produced quote an
(02:36):
extraordinary collective creative mania, which I think is a great
way to think about what they were doing as kids.
And there's one third reason that we want to go
into their childhood a little bit first, and that's the
Bronte mystique. It almost hinges on those earlier years. So
how did one remote family produce three world class writers
(02:58):
and one brilliant way stroll brother. How did the isolated
and experienced Bronte girls author books filled with so much
passion and terror? And what was in the water at
how worth besides death and disease? And what made them
also brilliant? So the Brontes are such a staple of
British literature classes that it probably surprises some people to
(03:20):
learn their origins were in Northern Ireland and that their
family name wasn't even Bronte. Their father, who's Patrick, was
born in sevent seventy seven on St. Patrick's day in
Northern Ireland, and he was the son of Hugh Bruntie,
who was a ditch mender. And despite the poor beginnings,
Patrick was the eldest of ten really you know, in
(03:42):
a really poor family. Uh. They were very story oriented.
Hugh Brunty was known in his area as being an
incredible storyteller. Young Patrick grew up reading as much as
he possibly could. He even memorized Paradise Lost as a kid.
And that intellectual spark caught the attention of a local
Presbyterian minister and from there Patrick made one good connection
(04:05):
after another with wealthy members of the Methodist movement and
ultimately earned himself a spot at Cambridge. And I read
a really great biography on Charlotte Bronte by Rebecca Fraser,
and she said that this jomp from being the ditchmender's
son to attending Cambridge was really an almost unimaginable leap. Again,
(04:26):
it did remind me a little bit of Hans Christian
Anderson actually, who had just talked about. In eighteen o six, Patrick,
who had changed his name to Bronte at school, decided
to take orders as a clergyman. In eighteen twelve, he
met Mariah Branwell, who was from a well off Cornish
merchant family with rumors of pirate ancestry. She lived in
Penzance after all, and Mariah was in a pretty great
(04:49):
place for an unmarried thirty year old in the nineteenth century.
She had some money, she had some independence, and she
was much loved and valued by her family. But only
months after meeting Trick, Mariah packted in, married him and
moved north and started having just baby after baby. They
had six kids and six years Mariah, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell,
(05:13):
Emily and Anne. So most of the younger Bronte children
were born in Thornton, West Yorkshire, where the Brontes could socialize.
It was near enough to a town that they could
go visit with friends, They had a They had a
busy life there, and that was especially important considering Mr
and Mrs Bronte were already pretty isolated from their extended
(05:33):
families in Ireland and Cornwall. But of course Bronte buffs
know that the kids didn't grow up in this busy,
sociable town of Thornton Heathcliff, Romes Moor's after all, not
some cute little village, so not long after Anne's birth.
In eighteen twenty, Mr Bronte accepted a position as the
(05:55):
curate of Haworth and it wasn't really too far off
from Thornton, but the hills and the moor surrounding it
made the place inaccessible, plus cold and windy and boggy.
And today we know that Howard was also very, very unhealthy.
And I can actually remember this from my eleventh grade
literature class, my teacher drawing a picture of the Bronte
(06:17):
house and um the water supply and where it came from,
and it just takes very involved, definitely, but it's something.
The unhealthy nous of the town was something that Mr
Bronte noticed right away and tried to fix in his
role as parson. I mean, just to give you a
few examples of how unhealthy this place really was, because
(06:39):
he might be thinking, you know, small village, how bad
could it be? But the Babbage Report on Sanitation from
about thirty years after the Bronte's arrival compared Howard's death
rate to that of White Chapel, London, of course, one
of the um worst most packed with people's slums in London.
The average life expectancy was only twenty five years. The
(07:02):
problems that this place had where that there weren't enough privies,
no sewers, water was rarely clean, and there were too
many dead filling up the poorly drained churchyard. And guess
where the family lived, right by the churchyard with a
view of the cemetery on two sides. Since the local
families were mostly quite poor, they were laborers and factory workers.
(07:25):
There were only a few other, quote, you know, respectable
people that the Brontes could socialize with, so they stuck
to themselves mainly. There was a class thing here. The
Brontes were poor also, but they were middle class because
of Mr Bronte's position. The girls grew up learning to
do things like put up linen, but they had servants
to do the cleaning and the cooking. Yeah, I read
(07:46):
one description of them learning lighthousekeeping whatever that means, because
it means I just imagine people walking around with a
feather nut when I hear being I don't know, like
making lace or something. But still, you know, you're probably
wondering at this point, why would you take this position
if this town was so unhealthy. But the job meant
a major raise for Mr Bronte. Plus the house for
(08:08):
his family of eight and a job for life, which
is a pretty serious thing. But the tragedies started not
too long after they moved. Only nine months later, Mrs Bronte,
who hadn't really ever recovered after Anne's birth, started to
get very sick, and Mr Bronte nursed her himself for
seven months while she slowly died of what at the
(08:30):
time people thought was stomach cancer but now what historians
believe was blood poisoning. M Mariah, the oldest daughter, you know,
still just a little kid, took care of her younger
sisters and her brother until all six of them also
got sick. They came down with scarlet fever, and at
that point Mr Bronte was just at his breaking point
and wrote to his sister in law, Elizabeth Branwell, to
(08:53):
come up to Yorkshire and please help the family. So
she attended her sister's death and stayed to care for
the kids, but she really wanted to go home to
warmer Cornwall. Mr Bronte meanwhile tried to find a new
wife to help educate his kids and also to study
his temper and allow his sister in law to go home,
(09:13):
but he found no takers. I mean, he just wasn't
in that attractive a position at the time. He had
six kids and a really low salary, so it just
didn't help his cause. Yeah, no takers. So with six kids, though,
and five of them girls, how was he supposed to
educate them on a poor Parsons income. And the kids were,
(09:34):
of course precocious, their little Brontes. They'd read newspapers and
talk politics. They'd argue about who they thought was best,
the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon or Hannibal or Caesar.
But they didn't have a formal education, which was especially
important for girls who might need to actually go work
later in life, you know, become teachers, become governesses. So
(09:56):
it seems like kind of a hopeless situation, But then
mere goal seemed to happen. In eighteen four, a new
school for the daughters of the poor evangelical clergy opened
at cowan Bridge, only about fifty miles from Haworth. For
only fourteen pounds a year, a girl could study history, geography, globes, grammar, writing, arithmetic,
(10:18):
needlework and fine housekeeping. And you could even choose a
vocation of sorts. You could choose to learn to be
a wife, a governess, or your own housekeeper. And for
added cache, the school's director was a wealthy clergyman named
Carus Wilson, which was a really big name to someone
like Mr Bronte. Okay, though, if you've read Jane Eyre,
(10:48):
you know where this story is going. The school was cold,
it was damp, the building was overcrowded, too many girls
in two cramped rooms with too few privies, and poor food.
And another problem was that Wilson thought deprivation was a
really good thing. He believed little children were particularly sinful,
so he probably wasn't the best person to be running
(11:10):
a school full of little children in an unhealthy spot.
But by November, the four eldest Bronte girls were at
Cowan Bridge, and Mariah went home first in February. She
was dead by May of tuberculosis. Elizabeth went home May
thirty one, prompting Mr Bronte to leave the very next
(11:33):
day and rescue Charlotte and Emily. So I mean that
gives you a pretty good picture of what kind of
state Elizabeth must have been in for him to go
rushing back. She died just two weeks later, and according
to an article on Elizabeth Bronte um by Jean Trippet.
She's actually called the Unknown Bronte because so little is
really known about her. Mariah also died young, but she
(11:55):
was sort of the inspiration for Helen Burns and you know,
really idolized by her family. But a Elizabeth more of
a blank slate. So anyway, this article by Jeane Trippett
and the journal Bronte Studies. Elizabeth supposedly also met with
some unknown quote alarming accident while she was at school,
her head being quote severely cut according to the school's headmistress.
(12:17):
So it seems like there were, you know, potentially more
serious things going on, not that the accident was necessarily
something um, somebody had caused her harm, but just that
it wasn't covered in any more detail than that. Yeah,
it sounds sketchy, you know, it makes you feel like
maybe cowen Bridge was Lowwood from Jane Eyre, Charus Wilson
(12:37):
could have been the evil Mr Brocklehurst. And I mean,
we'll talk more about Charlotte's legacy in the next episode.
But since she was the only sister to become really
famous during her lifetime, a lot of people took an
interest in that connection. Charlotte herself said that Lowood was true.
The Wilson camp claimed that Charlotte couldn't be relied on
(12:58):
for having been a child at the time wouldn't have
remembered things as they really were exactly. According to Frasier,
their biggest piece of evidence came from a letter signed
a h which was believed to be the former headmistress
and inspiration for the kind Miss Temple. In Charlotte's book,
she claimed everything had been rosy in n though someone
(13:19):
finally bothered too to the math and realized that the
real Miss Temple had actually been dead when she wrote
the vindicating letter, and the letter's author was probably actually
the inspiration for the evil Mrs Scatchard, which doesn't sound
so good for cowen Bridge all of a sudden, but
with the death of Mariah and Elizabeth in such a
(13:40):
short span of time, and of course also so soon
after the death of their mother, uh, the kids were
really devastated. And remember their house looks out on a
cemetery too, so there was really no escaping this feeling
of death. A later guest remembered that Howard's high mortality
rate was really obvious to anybody who was stopping through,
(14:01):
because the church bell would constantly told for the dead,
and then the tombstone chiseler would always be at work,
you know, chipping away at the granite blocks, which sounds
really horrifying in this context of a family who has
just lost so many people in such a short span
of time. So Miss Branwell became the household educator for
(14:22):
the girls, while Mr Bronte would have given extra Greek
and Latin lessons to Branwell. And they also had an
inexhaustible supply of reading materials day old newspapers, magazines, borrowed books,
methodist tracks, and literature. Of course, Charlotte and Branwell read
almost all of Byron at age thirteen and twelve. The
only thing that Patrick Bronte seemed to censor was Miss
(14:45):
Branwell's Ladies magazine because he thought it had silly little
stories in it. He didn't want his kids to read them. Um.
So it's probably no surprise that with the kids reading
so much romantic literature and then geography too and current events,
that they made up their own world eventually, you know,
as a way to kind of get away from all
that was going on in their real life and filled
(15:07):
it with byronic heroes and their most famous creation, the
Empire of Angria, with its capital of glass Town, started
when Mr Bronte brought home a set of wooden soldiers
from Brandwell, and Charlotte later described it in a way
that sounds so genuine. You know, you can imagine kids
just picking up toys and starting this imaginary world. But
(15:28):
she wrote, Brandwell came to our door with a box
of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and
I snatched one up and exclaimed, this is the Duke
of Wellington. This shall be the Duke. Emily's became Gravy,
and Anne's waiting boy, and brand Well's Bonaparte. So with
all their soldiers named, I think the names went through
a few variations in some cases. Uh, the soldiers became
(15:52):
what they called the young men, and um they lived
in Glasstown. The kids became these all powerful genies. And
then the Glasstown saga morphed into something that wasn't just
like playing with the soldiers on rainy days and making
up stories. It really became a world for them. Yeah.
Brand Will even created a language in history and maps
for this world. By January eighty nine, they started to
(16:15):
produce miniature Glasstown magazines with science articles, poems, and jokes. Actually,
all the Glasstown writings were done on a miniature scale.
So the first magazine was two and a quarter inch
by one in a quarter inch, done on scraps of
sugar paper or wallpaper in Angria and the Angrians brand
Well crammed two thousand, five hundred words onto a five
(16:37):
by seven inch page and they called it Scribblemania, which
I think is my new band name. And you know,
they had a reason, though, behind all of this tiny writing,
which they also did to sort of imitate print almost.
It was a way to keep the adults out of
their business, you know, because it was so impossible to read,
probably especially if you're a nineteenth century person with bad eyesight.
(16:59):
So Emily and Anne participated in the world of Angria,
but they also created their own world called Gondol. And
we don't know quite as much about Gondol as we
do about Glasstown, because Charlotte destroyed much of her sister's
early writings after their deaths. But there is one pretty
intriguing fact, especially if you've read any of those younger
(17:20):
Bront's works. Gondol was ruled by women, which certainly set
it apart from from the world of Angria, which had
these really strong male protagonists. But all the kids continued
writing poems and plays and romances about their worlds and
these characters well into adulthood, and Charlotte Wood at various
times try to ditch her imaginary world as she'd get older,
(17:42):
but she'd come back, you know sometimes. Deklena and I
were discussing before the podcast actually that while so charming
in their youth, it does start to take on a
disturbing tone when they are still so obsessed with it
as they get older. But her indirect interest in it
ultimately ended up coming out partly in some of her
more famous work. Charlotte's alter ego, The Morna is very
(18:06):
much like her later anti hero Mr Rochester, So I mean,
there you go. But of course they couldn't play at
home forever. In eighteen thirty, Mr Bronte got sick and
nearly died. When he recovered, he realized his kids had
no safety net, so he decided to keep branwell at home,
but he sent Charlotte to school again to learn to
be a governess, this time at Mrs Wooler School at
(18:29):
roe Head, twenty miles from Hollworth. It was different from
colin Bridge and it wasn't a charity school. Other students
there were rich manufacturing daughters, and Charlotte stood out with
her Irish accent and her funny clothes. To make things worse,
she was placed at the bottom of the class since
her entire education had been so haphazard, and she couldn't
(18:49):
play because she was so nearsighted, so she was really
left out right instead of you know, joining in with
ball games. Eventually, though, according to the BBC documentary In
Search of the Brontes, she made friends through storytelling, which
was really her strength. As we know, she would rehash
the ghost tales that she learned from the Bronte's much
loved cook Tabby, and two of her roe Head friends,
(19:12):
Ellen Nucy and Mary Taylor, became lifelong correspondence of her.
So she did manage to make those bonds. Yeah, and
as a side note to the correspondence with Ellen really
is the source of a lot of biographical information about
not just Charlotte, but the Bronte family as a whole.
Mary Taylor burned her correspondence, so we don't know what
(19:32):
all we're missing there. So Charlotte also worked her way
to the top of the class, and after two years
she came home. This is maybe one of the happier
times in the Brontes lives. All the kids were back
at the parsonage. Charlotte's friend Ellen, who visited in eighty three,
(19:55):
wrote that quote. They were beginning to feel conscious of
their powers. They were in each other's companionship. Their health
was good, their spirits were good. There was awten joyousness
and mirth. The perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened
the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly.
So we can kind of get a picture two of
(20:16):
the Brontes during this period. They would take long walks
over the moors, and in the evening, the four girls,
or if Ellen was visiting, would stroll around the sitting
room arm in arm. There were a lot of pets
in the house. Later on they had geese named Victoria
and Adelaide, which I just love. Um brand Will also
still seemed like the great hope of the family, and
that's something that's always interesting when you learn about the Brontes.
(20:39):
These three very famous sisters yet the family expected the
Sun to be the great one. But at this point,
you know, it seemed likely. He was charming, He was smart,
he was good at everything he did. He had a
well respected art teacher at this point, and while his
most famous work of his sisters is unfortunately pretty crude,
not the best representation and that you'd want as your legacy,
(21:02):
he was considered an accomplished draftsman, so maybe he was
a little better at drawing than at oil painting. So
Charlotte turned down a few governessing jobs to stay at home,
but in eighteen thirty five she eventually got an offer
that she couldn't refuse. It was a teaching position at
roe Head with free education offered for one sister. But
going back to roe Head turned out to be a
(21:24):
really serious mistake. Emily could barely make it three months
before she had to go home. She couldn't stand being
away from home. The more's her imaginary life, so fifteen
year old and came up instead. Charlotte was also seriously
depressed and was going through kind of a religious crisis.
In August eighteen thirty six, she wrote, quote, the thought
(21:45):
came over me, am I to spend all the best
part of my life in this wretched bondage forcibly suppressing
my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical
and most asinine stupidity of those fat headed oaths on compulsion,
assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity, and to
make matters worse, brand Well partly the reason why the
(22:07):
girls were working in the first place was failing miserably. Yeah,
they had of course taken jobs to help their father out,
you know, help him support brand Well. And in the
fall of eighty five, Brandwell had gone to London to
apply to the Royal Academy of the Arts. You know,
this was going to be his big start. He either
never made it to London and was robbed on the way,
(22:31):
or he got to London that didn't end up applying
to school, or he applied but was turned down. It's
unclear of what exactly happened, but Brandwell later tried to
still make his living as an artist, specifically as a
portrait painter, but he couldn't really compete with a better
artists and the nude gara types, and he became addicted
to opium eventually, which was on top of a developing
(22:54):
drinking problem, and it wasn't long before he had to
start making his living as a tutor, which sounds like
a good job for a lot of people, but it
was not something that Brandwell was suited for at all.
When he was eventually fired from his first position, his
employers complained that their sons had basically done nothing more
than make sketches and think up stories to go with
(23:15):
their tutor strongs, which I don't know, it sounds kind
of fun for them, but telling their parents weren't too
happy they were spending money on that, and there was
a rumor too, right, there was also a rumor that
Brandwell might have had an illegitimate child who died with
a servant um. So, you know, just kind of sketchy
things starting to pick up around his name, and that charm,
(23:37):
that intense energy he had was starting to seem more manic,
a little more disturbing. After two years at school, Anne
got sick and had to go home. Charlotte, who was
depressed to the point of illness, also followed in eighty eight,
and over the next few years, the Bronte girls all
took teaching jobs, even painfully shy Emily, who distinguished herself
(23:58):
at law Hill by telling her stwodents that she preferred
the school dog to them. That wouldn't win you many
most popular teacher points at all, and bad experience with
the Ingham family influenced her later novel Agnes Gray, while
Charlotte's experience with the Sedgewick family provided inspiration for Jane Eyre,
and one of Charlotte's charges even threw a Bible at
(24:20):
her head and was very likely the model for John Reid,
Giant Eyre's cruel cousin. Yeah. So Charlotte wasn't enjoying governess thing,
to say the least, but she also wasn't willing to
trade it in for a hasty marriage. She turned on
two proposals in just six months, the first of which
came from Ellen's brother, who was a Calvinist preacher who
(24:40):
really just needed a wife for his big move to Sussex.
You know it was proper that he was married. Reminds
you a little bit of Sint Jhon Rivers. I think.
The second proposal came from a clergyman who was just
out of Dublin University. They met in a large group.
Charlotte mistook his name as Price instead of Bryce, and
really the next thing, you know, she was getting a
(25:01):
letter of proposal from him, and that wasn't her style.
So it seems like all the brilliant Brontes were just
stuck in a rut, you know, that they were going
to have to the girls were gonna have to just
tutor forever or be governess is rather um something that
they did not care for. Brandwell was now working as
a railway booking clerk and not taking that work very seriously.
(25:23):
He was doodling in the ledgers, and so out of
all this kind of um, I don't know, stall dead
end sort of life, it seems a new idea emerged.
Ms Brandwell proposed offering up some of her savings. She
had been squirreling away money over the year from her
father's inheritance to her um, even though she was paying
(25:45):
Mr Bronte rent the whole time she insisted on it. Um.
She had managed to save a bit, though, and so
she offered a pretty good sum for the three girls
to open their own school, you know, which would be
a lot different than being a governess, where you're not
really a servant, but you're not really a member of
the family either. So Consequently, you're just completely isolated. If
you had your own school, you'd be able to do
(26:07):
your own things. So Charlotte really liked this idea. Emily
and Anne were into it too, but Charlotte cooked up
an additional perk. She thought that for their school to succeed,
the Bronte girls would really need to distinguish themselves in
some way, have something that made them different. So she
proposed that she and Emily would go off to Brussels
for a few months. Mary Taylor was studying there and
(26:29):
so she had a connection, and they had hone their
French and their Italian. Maybe they'd pick up some German um,
you know, pick up these accomplishments that would make their
school one that people in the area would actually want
to attend. And Aunt Brandwell and Mr Bronte were game,
you know, a little skeptical, but they were. They were
fine with it. Sounded like an okay idea. So the
(26:51):
Bronte started looking for a school, and with their connections
and Brussels, you know, they had somebody on the on
the other side of the channel who could do the
legwork for them, and they utimately found a school that
was high quality but pretty inexpensive, you know, within their budget,
and in January ET two they settled on the Palsiona
a j So that's where we're going to leave off
(27:13):
for this episode. I can say at this point, you know,
the Brontes are all grown up. We have exited the
growing up Bronte phase. And next time we're going to
be talking about their time in Belgium, their education, and
then the three breakout novels of course that are published
in just one year, and then as we know, all
of the family tragedy that starts um piling up towards
(27:35):
the to the end of the Bronte saga. Plus we're
gonna talk a little bit about the reputation of the Brontes,
which is something that I'm very interested in discussing in
more detail. Yeah, it's interesting how that reputation evolves and
um the part that some of the Brontes themselves playing that.
(27:58):
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
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be obsolete. Now, so here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot
com and then we're at missed in the history all
(28:18):
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and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Happy Saturday, everybody. We recently got a request from listener
Erica to re release our past episodes on the Brontes
as a Saturday classic. Now. These are the work of
past hosts Sarah and Deblina from back in We hear
so often that longtime listeners think that is one of
the absolute best episodes that Sarah and Deblina ever did.
(00:22):
They are definitely a top listener favorite, so we are
very happy to oblige with Erica's request. Today's installment is
called Growing Up Bronte, and as the name suggests, it
is about the unconventional childhoods of the Bronte siblings. Welcome
to Steph you missed in history class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:50):
Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck reporting and longtime listeners
know that sad royal childhoods are a frequent theme of ours,
But the truth is discussing the youth of a podcast
object is usually pretty interesting, whether their royalty or not.
Whether it's Elliot Chellaby showing off to the Sultan, or,
as we discussed recently, paleontologist Mary Anning getting struck by
(01:11):
lightning as an infant, or even Hans Christian Anderson crashing
dinner parties in his ill fitting communions. I really think
that taking a closer look at the early years often
shows a different side of a subject, or sometimes even
most intriguingly, a sign of what's to come, you know,
some spark of genius in the early years. But it's
(01:32):
rare that we devote an entire episode to those early
pre fame years, as we're going to do today with
the talented Bronte family. While we we will follow up
with an episode on their remarkable breakthroughs and their successes,
which we all probably know a little bit more about.
There are a few good reasons for establishing a solid
(01:52):
footing before we go there. I mean, the first one
would be that most of the family didn't live much
beyond childhood. That's kind of the sad reason why the
youngest Bronte child to die was only at ten and
the oldest was thirty eight, so not very long lives
at all. Secondly, the Bronte children grew up under very
(02:12):
strange circumstances. They grew up in extreme isolation coupled with
endless intellectual stimulation. Yeah, there's a New Yorker article by
Mary Hawthorne on their fantastic drawings and watercolors. Something you
might not be aware of that the Brontes were actually,
in some cases really talented artists too. But this article
suggested that the peculiarities of their upbringing produced quote an
(02:36):
extraordinary collective creative mania, which I think is a great
way to think about what they were doing as kids.
And there's one third reason that we want to go
into their childhood a little bit first, and that's the
Bronte mystique. It almost hinges on those earlier years. So
how did one remote family produce three world class writers
(02:58):
and one brilliant way stroll brother. How did the isolated
and experienced Bronte girls author books filled with so much
passion and terror? And what was in the water at
how worth besides death and disease? And what made them
also brilliant? So the Brontes are such a staple of
British literature classes that it probably surprises some people to
(03:20):
learn their origins were in Northern Ireland and that their
family name wasn't even Bronte. Their father, who's Patrick, was
born in sevent seventy seven on St. Patrick's day in
Northern Ireland, and he was the son of Hugh Bruntie,
who was a ditch mender. And despite the poor beginnings,
Patrick was the eldest of ten really you know, in
(03:42):
a really poor family. Uh. They were very story oriented.
Hugh Brunty was known in his area as being an
incredible storyteller. Young Patrick grew up reading as much as
he possibly could. He even memorized Paradise Lost as a kid.
And that intellectual spark caught the attention of a local
Presbyterian minister and from there Patrick made one good connection
(04:05):
after another with wealthy members of the Methodist movement and
ultimately earned himself a spot at Cambridge. And I read
a really great biography on Charlotte Bronte by Rebecca Fraser,
and she said that this jomp from being the ditchmender's
son to attending Cambridge was really an almost unimaginable leap. Again,
(04:26):
it did remind me a little bit of Hans Christian
Anderson actually, who had just talked about. In eighteen o six, Patrick,
who had changed his name to Bronte at school, decided
to take orders as a clergyman. In eighteen twelve, he
met Mariah Branwell, who was from a well off Cornish
merchant family with rumors of pirate ancestry. She lived in
Penzance after all, and Mariah was in a pretty great
(04:49):
place for an unmarried thirty year old in the nineteenth century.
She had some money, she had some independence, and she
was much loved and valued by her family. But only
months after meeting Trick, Mariah packted in, married him and
moved north and started having just baby after baby. They
had six kids and six years Mariah, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell,
(05:13):
Emily and Anne. So most of the younger Bronte children
were born in Thornton, West Yorkshire, where the Brontes could socialize.
It was near enough to a town that they could
go visit with friends, They had a They had a
busy life there, and that was especially important considering Mr
and Mrs Bronte were already pretty isolated from their extended
(05:33):
families in Ireland and Cornwall. But of course Bronte buffs
know that the kids didn't grow up in this busy,
sociable town of Thornton Heathcliff, Romes Moor's after all, not
some cute little village, so not long after Anne's birth.
In eighteen twenty, Mr Bronte accepted a position as the
(05:55):
curate of Haworth and it wasn't really too far off
from Thornton, but the hills and the moor surrounding it
made the place inaccessible, plus cold and windy and boggy.
And today we know that Howard was also very, very unhealthy.
And I can actually remember this from my eleventh grade
literature class, my teacher drawing a picture of the Bronte
(06:17):
house and um the water supply and where it came from,
and it just takes very involved, definitely, but it's something.
The unhealthy nous of the town was something that Mr
Bronte noticed right away and tried to fix in his
role as parson. I mean, just to give you a
few examples of how unhealthy this place really was, because
(06:39):
he might be thinking, you know, small village, how bad
could it be? But the Babbage Report on Sanitation from
about thirty years after the Bronte's arrival compared Howard's death
rate to that of White Chapel, London, of course, one
of the um worst most packed with people's slums in London.
The average life expectancy was only twenty five years. The
(07:02):
problems that this place had where that there weren't enough privies,
no sewers, water was rarely clean, and there were too
many dead filling up the poorly drained churchyard. And guess
where the family lived, right by the churchyard with a
view of the cemetery on two sides. Since the local
families were mostly quite poor, they were laborers and factory workers.
(07:25):
There were only a few other, quote, you know, respectable
people that the Brontes could socialize with, so they stuck
to themselves mainly. There was a class thing here. The
Brontes were poor also, but they were middle class because
of Mr Bronte's position. The girls grew up learning to
do things like put up linen, but they had servants
to do the cleaning and the cooking. Yeah, I read
(07:46):
one description of them learning lighthousekeeping whatever that means, because
it means I just imagine people walking around with a
feather nut when I hear being I don't know, like
making lace or something. But still, you know, you're probably
wondering at this point, why would you take this position
if this town was so unhealthy. But the job meant
a major raise for Mr Bronte. Plus the house for
(08:08):
his family of eight and a job for life, which
is a pretty serious thing. But the tragedies started not
too long after they moved. Only nine months later, Mrs Bronte,
who hadn't really ever recovered after Anne's birth, started to
get very sick, and Mr Bronte nursed her himself for
seven months while she slowly died of what at the
(08:30):
time people thought was stomach cancer but now what historians
believe was blood poisoning. M Mariah, the oldest daughter, you know,
still just a little kid, took care of her younger
sisters and her brother until all six of them also
got sick. They came down with scarlet fever, and at
that point Mr Bronte was just at his breaking point
and wrote to his sister in law, Elizabeth Branwell, to
(08:53):
come up to Yorkshire and please help the family. So
she attended her sister's death and stayed to care for
the kids, but she really wanted to go home to
warmer Cornwall. Mr Bronte meanwhile tried to find a new
wife to help educate his kids and also to study
his temper and allow his sister in law to go home,
(09:13):
but he found no takers. I mean, he just wasn't
in that attractive a position at the time. He had
six kids and a really low salary, so it just
didn't help his cause. Yeah, no takers. So with six kids, though,
and five of them girls, how was he supposed to
educate them on a poor Parsons income. And the kids were,
(09:34):
of course precocious, their little Brontes. They'd read newspapers and
talk politics. They'd argue about who they thought was best,
the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon or Hannibal or Caesar.
But they didn't have a formal education, which was especially
important for girls who might need to actually go work
later in life, you know, become teachers, become governesses. So
(09:56):
it seems like kind of a hopeless situation, But then
mere goal seemed to happen. In eighteen four, a new
school for the daughters of the poor evangelical clergy opened
at cowan Bridge, only about fifty miles from Haworth. For
only fourteen pounds a year, a girl could study history, geography, globes, grammar, writing, arithmetic,
(10:18):
needlework and fine housekeeping. And you could even choose a
vocation of sorts. You could choose to learn to be
a wife, a governess, or your own housekeeper. And for
added cache, the school's director was a wealthy clergyman named
Carus Wilson, which was a really big name to someone
like Mr Bronte. Okay, though, if you've read Jane Eyre,
(10:48):
you know where this story is going. The school was cold,
it was damp, the building was overcrowded, too many girls
in two cramped rooms with too few privies, and poor food.
And another problem was that Wilson thought deprivation was a
really good thing. He believed little children were particularly sinful,
so he probably wasn't the best person to be running
(11:10):
a school full of little children in an unhealthy spot.
But by November, the four eldest Bronte girls were at
Cowan Bridge, and Mariah went home first in February. She
was dead by May of tuberculosis. Elizabeth went home May
thirty one, prompting Mr Bronte to leave the very next
(11:33):
day and rescue Charlotte and Emily. So I mean that
gives you a pretty good picture of what kind of
state Elizabeth must have been in for him to go
rushing back. She died just two weeks later, and according
to an article on Elizabeth Bronte um by Jean Trippet.
She's actually called the Unknown Bronte because so little is
really known about her. Mariah also died young, but she
(11:55):
was sort of the inspiration for Helen Burns and you know,
really idolized by her family. But a Elizabeth more of
a blank slate. So anyway, this article by Jeane Trippett
and the journal Bronte Studies. Elizabeth supposedly also met with
some unknown quote alarming accident while she was at school,
her head being quote severely cut according to the school's headmistress.
(12:17):
So it seems like there were, you know, potentially more
serious things going on, not that the accident was necessarily
something um, somebody had caused her harm, but just that
it wasn't covered in any more detail than that. Yeah,
it sounds sketchy, you know, it makes you feel like
maybe cowen Bridge was Lowwood from Jane Eyre, Charus Wilson
(12:37):
could have been the evil Mr Brocklehurst. And I mean,
we'll talk more about Charlotte's legacy in the next episode.
But since she was the only sister to become really
famous during her lifetime, a lot of people took an
interest in that connection. Charlotte herself said that Lowood was true.
The Wilson camp claimed that Charlotte couldn't be relied on
(12:58):
for having been a child at the time wouldn't have
remembered things as they really were exactly. According to Frasier,
their biggest piece of evidence came from a letter signed
a h which was believed to be the former headmistress
and inspiration for the kind Miss Temple. In Charlotte's book,
she claimed everything had been rosy in n though someone
(13:19):
finally bothered too to the math and realized that the
real Miss Temple had actually been dead when she wrote
the vindicating letter, and the letter's author was probably actually
the inspiration for the evil Mrs Scatchard, which doesn't sound
so good for cowen Bridge all of a sudden, but
with the death of Mariah and Elizabeth in such a
(13:40):
short span of time, and of course also so soon
after the death of their mother, uh, the kids were
really devastated. And remember their house looks out on a
cemetery too, so there was really no escaping this feeling
of death. A later guest remembered that Howard's high mortality
rate was really obvious to anybody who was stopping through,
(14:01):
because the church bell would constantly told for the dead,
and then the tombstone chiseler would always be at work,
you know, chipping away at the granite blocks, which sounds
really horrifying in this context of a family who has
just lost so many people in such a short span
of time. So Miss Branwell became the household educator for
(14:22):
the girls, while Mr Bronte would have given extra Greek
and Latin lessons to Branwell. And they also had an
inexhaustible supply of reading materials day old newspapers, magazines, borrowed books,
methodist tracks, and literature. Of course, Charlotte and Branwell read
almost all of Byron at age thirteen and twelve. The
only thing that Patrick Bronte seemed to censor was Miss
(14:45):
Branwell's Ladies magazine because he thought it had silly little
stories in it. He didn't want his kids to read them. Um.
So it's probably no surprise that with the kids reading
so much romantic literature and then geography too and current events,
that they made up their own world eventually, you know,
as a way to kind of get away from all
that was going on in their real life and filled
(15:07):
it with byronic heroes and their most famous creation, the
Empire of Angria, with its capital of glass Town, started
when Mr Bronte brought home a set of wooden soldiers
from Brandwell, and Charlotte later described it in a way
that sounds so genuine. You know, you can imagine kids
just picking up toys and starting this imaginary world. But
(15:28):
she wrote, Brandwell came to our door with a box
of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and
I snatched one up and exclaimed, this is the Duke
of Wellington. This shall be the Duke. Emily's became Gravy,
and Anne's waiting boy, and brand Well's Bonaparte. So with
all their soldiers named, I think the names went through
a few variations in some cases. Uh, the soldiers became
(15:52):
what they called the young men, and um they lived
in Glasstown. The kids became these all powerful genies. And
then the Glasstown saga morphed into something that wasn't just
like playing with the soldiers on rainy days and making
up stories. It really became a world for them. Yeah.
Brand Will even created a language in history and maps
for this world. By January eighty nine, they started to
(16:15):
produce miniature Glasstown magazines with science articles, poems, and jokes. Actually,
all the Glasstown writings were done on a miniature scale.
So the first magazine was two and a quarter inch
by one in a quarter inch, done on scraps of
sugar paper or wallpaper in Angria and the Angrians brand
Well crammed two thousand, five hundred words onto a five
(16:37):
by seven inch page and they called it Scribblemania, which
I think is my new band name. And you know,
they had a reason, though, behind all of this tiny writing,
which they also did to sort of imitate print almost.
It was a way to keep the adults out of
their business, you know, because it was so impossible to read,
probably especially if you're a nineteenth century person with bad eyesight.
(16:59):
So Emily and Anne participated in the world of Angria,
but they also created their own world called Gondol. And
we don't know quite as much about Gondol as we
do about Glasstown, because Charlotte destroyed much of her sister's
early writings after their deaths. But there is one pretty
intriguing fact, especially if you've read any of those younger
(17:20):
Bront's works. Gondol was ruled by women, which certainly set
it apart from from the world of Angria, which had
these really strong male protagonists. But all the kids continued
writing poems and plays and romances about their worlds and
these characters well into adulthood, and Charlotte Wood at various
times try to ditch her imaginary world as she'd get older,
(17:42):
but she'd come back, you know sometimes. Deklena and I
were discussing before the podcast actually that while so charming
in their youth, it does start to take on a
disturbing tone when they are still so obsessed with it
as they get older. But her indirect interest in it
ultimately ended up coming out partly in some of her
more famous work. Charlotte's alter ego, The Morna is very
(18:06):
much like her later anti hero Mr Rochester, So I mean,
there you go. But of course they couldn't play at
home forever. In eighteen thirty, Mr Bronte got sick and
nearly died. When he recovered, he realized his kids had
no safety net, so he decided to keep branwell at home,
but he sent Charlotte to school again to learn to
be a governess, this time at Mrs Wooler School at
(18:29):
roe Head, twenty miles from Hollworth. It was different from
colin Bridge and it wasn't a charity school. Other students
there were rich manufacturing daughters, and Charlotte stood out with
her Irish accent and her funny clothes. To make things worse,
she was placed at the bottom of the class since
her entire education had been so haphazard, and she couldn't
(18:49):
play because she was so nearsighted, so she was really
left out right instead of you know, joining in with
ball games. Eventually, though, according to the BBC documentary In
Search of the Brontes, she made friends through storytelling, which
was really her strength. As we know, she would rehash
the ghost tales that she learned from the Bronte's much
loved cook Tabby, and two of her roe Head friends,
(19:12):
Ellen Nucy and Mary Taylor, became lifelong correspondence of her.
So she did manage to make those bonds. Yeah, and
as a side note to the correspondence with Ellen really
is the source of a lot of biographical information about
not just Charlotte, but the Bronte family as a whole.
Mary Taylor burned her correspondence, so we don't know what
(19:32):
all we're missing there. So Charlotte also worked her way
to the top of the class, and after two years
she came home. This is maybe one of the happier
times in the Brontes lives. All the kids were back
at the parsonage. Charlotte's friend Ellen, who visited in eighty three,
(19:55):
wrote that quote. They were beginning to feel conscious of
their powers. They were in each other's companionship. Their health
was good, their spirits were good. There was awten joyousness
and mirth. The perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened
the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly.
So we can kind of get a picture two of
(20:16):
the Brontes during this period. They would take long walks
over the moors, and in the evening, the four girls,
or if Ellen was visiting, would stroll around the sitting
room arm in arm. There were a lot of pets
in the house. Later on they had geese named Victoria
and Adelaide, which I just love. Um brand Will also
still seemed like the great hope of the family, and
that's something that's always interesting when you learn about the Brontes.
(20:39):
These three very famous sisters yet the family expected the
Sun to be the great one. But at this point,
you know, it seemed likely. He was charming, He was smart,
he was good at everything he did. He had a
well respected art teacher at this point, and while his
most famous work of his sisters is unfortunately pretty crude,
not the best representation and that you'd want as your legacy,
(21:02):
he was considered an accomplished draftsman, so maybe he was
a little better at drawing than at oil painting. So
Charlotte turned down a few governessing jobs to stay at home,
but in eighteen thirty five she eventually got an offer
that she couldn't refuse. It was a teaching position at
roe Head with free education offered for one sister. But
going back to roe Head turned out to be a
(21:24):
really serious mistake. Emily could barely make it three months
before she had to go home. She couldn't stand being
away from home. The more's her imaginary life, so fifteen
year old and came up instead. Charlotte was also seriously
depressed and was going through kind of a religious crisis.
In August eighteen thirty six, she wrote, quote, the thought
(21:45):
came over me, am I to spend all the best
part of my life in this wretched bondage forcibly suppressing
my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical
and most asinine stupidity of those fat headed oaths on compulsion,
assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity, and to
make matters worse, brand Well partly the reason why the
(22:07):
girls were working in the first place was failing miserably. Yeah,
they had of course taken jobs to help their father out,
you know, help him support brand Well. And in the
fall of eighty five, Brandwell had gone to London to
apply to the Royal Academy of the Arts. You know,
this was going to be his big start. He either
never made it to London and was robbed on the way,
(22:31):
or he got to London that didn't end up applying
to school, or he applied but was turned down. It's
unclear of what exactly happened, but Brandwell later tried to
still make his living as an artist, specifically as a
portrait painter, but he couldn't really compete with a better
artists and the nude gara types, and he became addicted
to opium eventually, which was on top of a developing
(22:54):
drinking problem, and it wasn't long before he had to
start making his living as a tutor, which sounds like
a good job for a lot of people, but it
was not something that Brandwell was suited for at all.
When he was eventually fired from his first position, his
employers complained that their sons had basically done nothing more
than make sketches and think up stories to go with
(23:15):
their tutor strongs, which I don't know, it sounds kind
of fun for them, but telling their parents weren't too
happy they were spending money on that, and there was
a rumor too, right, there was also a rumor that
Brandwell might have had an illegitimate child who died with
a servant um. So, you know, just kind of sketchy
things starting to pick up around his name, and that charm,
(23:37):
that intense energy he had was starting to seem more manic,
a little more disturbing. After two years at school, Anne
got sick and had to go home. Charlotte, who was
depressed to the point of illness, also followed in eighty eight,
and over the next few years, the Bronte girls all
took teaching jobs, even painfully shy Emily, who distinguished herself
(23:58):
at law Hill by telling her stwodents that she preferred
the school dog to them. That wouldn't win you many
most popular teacher points at all, and bad experience with
the Ingham family influenced her later novel Agnes Gray, while
Charlotte's experience with the Sedgewick family provided inspiration for Jane Eyre,
and one of Charlotte's charges even threw a Bible at
(24:20):
her head and was very likely the model for John Reid,
Giant Eyre's cruel cousin. Yeah. So Charlotte wasn't enjoying governess thing,
to say the least, but she also wasn't willing to
trade it in for a hasty marriage. She turned on
two proposals in just six months, the first of which
came from Ellen's brother, who was a Calvinist preacher who
(24:40):
really just needed a wife for his big move to Sussex.
You know it was proper that he was married. Reminds
you a little bit of Sint Jhon Rivers. I think.
The second proposal came from a clergyman who was just
out of Dublin University. They met in a large group.
Charlotte mistook his name as Price instead of Bryce, and
really the next thing, you know, she was getting a
(25:01):
letter of proposal from him, and that wasn't her style.
So it seems like all the brilliant Brontes were just
stuck in a rut, you know, that they were going
to have to the girls were gonna have to just
tutor forever or be governess is rather um something that
they did not care for. Brandwell was now working as
a railway booking clerk and not taking that work very seriously.
(25:23):
He was doodling in the ledgers, and so out of
all this kind of um, I don't know, stall dead
end sort of life, it seems a new idea emerged.
Ms Brandwell proposed offering up some of her savings. She
had been squirreling away money over the year from her
father's inheritance to her um, even though she was paying
(25:45):
Mr Bronte rent the whole time she insisted on it. Um.
She had managed to save a bit, though, and so
she offered a pretty good sum for the three girls
to open their own school, you know, which would be
a lot different than being a governess, where you're not
really a servant, but you're not really a member of
the family either. So Consequently, you're just completely isolated. If
you had your own school, you'd be able to do
(26:07):
your own things. So Charlotte really liked this idea. Emily
and Anne were into it too, but Charlotte cooked up
an additional perk. She thought that for their school to succeed,
the Bronte girls would really need to distinguish themselves in
some way, have something that made them different. So she
proposed that she and Emily would go off to Brussels
for a few months. Mary Taylor was studying there and
(26:29):
so she had a connection, and they had hone their
French and their Italian. Maybe they'd pick up some German um,
you know, pick up these accomplishments that would make their
school one that people in the area would actually want
to attend. And Aunt Brandwell and Mr Bronte were game,
you know, a little skeptical, but they were. They were
fine with it. Sounded like an okay idea. So the
(26:51):
Bronte started looking for a school, and with their connections
and Brussels, you know, they had somebody on the on
the other side of the channel who could do the
legwork for them, and they utimately found a school that
was high quality but pretty inexpensive, you know, within their budget,
and in January ET two they settled on the Palsiona
a j So that's where we're going to leave off
(27:13):
for this episode. I can say at this point, you know,
the Brontes are all grown up. We have exited the
growing up Bronte phase. And next time we're going to
be talking about their time in Belgium, their education, and
then the three breakout novels of course that are published
in just one year, and then as we know, all
of the family tragedy that starts um piling up towards
(27:35):
the to the end of the Bronte saga. Plus we're
gonna talk a little bit about the reputation of the Brontes,
which is something that I'm very interested in discussing in
more detail. Yeah, it's interesting how that reputation evolves and
um the part that some of the Brontes themselves playing that.
(27:58):
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
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something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now, so here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot
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(28:18):
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