Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle

by Clement King Shorter

our day other than that he prints certain letters from Branwell in his autobiography. Miss Mary F. Robinson, whatever distinction may pertain to her verse, should never have attempted a biography of Emily Brontë. Her book is mainly of significance because, appearing in a series of Eminent Women, it served to emphasise the growing opinion that Emily, as well as Charlotte, had a place among the great writers of her day. Miss Robinson added nothing to our knowledge of Emily Brontë, and her book devoted inordinate space to the shortcomings of Branwell, concerning which she had no new information.

Mr. Leyland’s book is professedly a biography of Branwell, and is, indeed, a valuable storehouse of facts. It might have had more success had it been written with greater brightness and verve. As it stands, it is a dull book, readable only by the Brontë enthusiast. Mr. Leyland has no literary perception, and in his eagerness to show that Branwell was a genius, prints numerous letters and poems which sufficiently demonstrate that he was not.

Charlotte never hesitated in the earlier years to praise her brother as the genius of the family. We all know how eagerly the girls in any home circle are ready to acknowledge and accept as signs of original power the most impudent witticisms of a fairly clever brother. The Brontë household was not exceptionally constituted in this respect. It is evident that the boy grew up with talent of a kind. He could certainly draw with more idea of perspective than his sisters, and one or two portraits by him are not wanting in merit. But there is no evidence of any special writing faculty, and the words ‘genius’ and ‘brilliant’ which have been freely applied to him are entirely misplaced. Branwell was thirty-one years of age when he died, and it was only during the last year or two of his life that opium and alcohol had made him intellectually hopeless. Yet, unless we accept the preposterous statement that he wrote Wuthering Heights,

he would seem to have composed nothing which gives him the slightest claim to the most inconsiderable niche in the temple of literature.

Branwell appears to have worked side by side with his sisters in the early years, and innumerable volumes of the ‘little writing’ bearing his signature have come into my hands. Verdopolis, the imaginary city of his sisters’ early stories, plays a considerable part in Branwell’s. Real Life in Verdopolis bears date 1833. The Battle of Washington is evidently a still more childish effusion. Caractacus is dated 1830, and the poems and tiny romances continue steadily on through the years until they finally stop short in 1837—when Branwell is twenty years old—with a story entitled Percy. By the light of subsequent events it is interesting to note that a manuscript of 1830 bears the title of The Liar Detected.

It would be unfair to take these crude productions of Branwell Brontë’s boyhood as implying that he had no possibilities in him of anything better, but judging from the fact that his letters, as a man of eight and twenty, are as undistinguished as his sister’s are noteworthy at a like age, we might well dismiss Branwell Brontë once and for all, were not some epitome of his life indispensable in an account of the Brontë circle.

Branwell was born at Thornton in 1817. When the family removed to Haworth he studied at the Grammar School, although, doubtless, he owed most of his earlier tuition to his father. When school days were over it was decided that he should be an artist. To a certain William Robinson, of Leeds, he was indebted for his first lessons. Mrs. Gaskell describes a life-size drawing of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne which Branwell painted about this period. The huge canvas stood for many years at the top of the staircase at the parsonage. [123] In 1835 Branwell went up to

London with a view to becoming a pupil at the Royal Academy Art Schools. The reason for his almost immediate reappearance at Haworth has never been explained. Probably he wasted his money and his father refused supplies. He had certainly been sufficiently in earnest at the start, judging from this letter, of which I find a draft among his papers.

TO THE SECRETARY, ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS

‘Sir,—Having an earnest desire to enter as probationary student in the Royal Academy, but not being possessed of information as to the means of obtaining my desire, I presume to request from you, as Secretary to the Institution, an answer to the questions—

‘Where am I to present my drawings?

‘At what time?

and especially,

‘Can I do it in August or September?

—Your obedient servant,

Branwell Brontë.’

In 1836 we find him as ‘brother’ of the ‘Lodge of the Three Graces’ at Haworth. In the following year he is practising as an artist in Bradford, and painting a number of portraits of the townsfolk. At this same period he wrote to Wordsworth, sending verses, which he was at the time producing with due regularity. In January 1840 Branwell became tutor in the family of Mr. Postlethwaite at Broughton-in-Furness. It was from that place that he wrote the incoherent and silly letter which has been more than once printed, and which merely serves to show that then, as always, he had an ill-regulated mind. It was from