Then follow pictures of the life at Haworth Parsonage, which tell us how Charlotte Brontë adored her sisters; and with the modesty of true genius she places herself at their feet, as it were. We have a sketch of Tabitha Aykroyd ironing Aunt Branwell's lace frills and crimping her nightcap borders in Jane Eyre, Chapter I., wherein both figure as Bessie and Aunt Reed. Years ago it came to be thought the original of Jane Eyre's Aunt Reed was Miss Branwell, the aunt of the Brontë children, though one writer identified her with a certain Mrs. Sidgwick whose son threw a book at Miss Brontë in her governess days, because "the son of Mrs. Reed" threw a Bible at Jane Eyre. The fact the rainy-day narrations in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre establish, that Charlotte Brontë associated a "volume-hurling" incident with her childhood and Branwell Brontë's "tyranny," disposed finally of the Sidgwick identifications. John Reed we have now seen was, like Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, drawn by Charlotte Brontë from her brother Branwell Brontë. Always she wrote of him vindictively, and with a retributive justice, her strong characteristic. At about the period when Currer Bell was penning Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Branwell was a source of considerable distress to her. He was disgraced; his habits were the reverse of temperate, and it was daily feared that in a fit of delirium he might make an attempt upon his own life. Indeed Charlotte Brontë palpably writes of Branwell Brontë and those miserable associations which brought trouble upon Mrs. Gaskell's first edition of the Brontë Life, in The Professor, Chapter XX., where she says:—
Limited as had yet been my experience of life, I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of ... domestic treachery.... I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded ... by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle.
Charlotte's letters also show she was ashamed of and losing patience with him. John Reed is spoken of as "a dissipated young man; they will never make much of him, I think.... Some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he has such thick lips." For obfuscation's sake he is "tall," and Mrs. Gaskell in speaking of Branwell's profile says:—"There are coarse lines about the mouth, and the lips, though handsome in shape, are loose and thick, indicating self-indulgence." Aunt Reed exclaims at the last of her favourite:—"John is sunken and degraded, his look is frightful—I feel ashamed for him when I see him." It was near the time that Aunt Branwell died at Haworth there was this decided degradation of her favourite nephew Branwell. For story purposes Charlotte Brontë makes her aunt a married woman in Jane Eyre, and places her nephew Branwell and her niece Eliza Branwell in the relation of children to her as John and Eliza Reed—Georgiana is no doubt a Brontë relative of whom we have not heard, and Charlotte thought vain. The fact that in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXI., her name is mentioned in connection with "a title," would show Currer Bell early apportioned her a place in the book by reason of Montagu's reference to a Lady Georgiana.
A child, sympathetic and intensely emotional, Charlotte Brontë, evidently, felt injustices with an acuteness not easy to understand without reading her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre by aid of The Key to the Brontë Works. It would be like Maria Brontë to protest with her younger sister on her holding resentment against Aunt Branwell; and with the inference that she herself had endured her harshness, she says as Helen Burns:—"What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would it not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited?"
Of Eliza Reed (Cousin Eliza Branwell), as seen by Jane at the death of Aunt Reed, we are told: "she was now very thin, and there was something ascetic in her look." She wore "a nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and colourless visage." In 1840 Charlotte Brontë wrote of her "Cousin Eliza Branwell" that she spoke of nothing but botany, her own conversion, Low Church, Evangelical clergy, and the Millennium.[43] And thus in Jane Eyre we read of Cousin Eliza Reed, by way of emphasis on this side of her character:—
Eliza ... had no time to talk, ... yet it was difficult to say what she did.... Three times a day she studied a little book which I found ... was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said 'the Rubric.' Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth; ... she informed me it was ... for the altar of a new church.... Two hours she devoted to ... working by herself in the kitchen garden. [Cousin Eliza's parterre is also referred to in Chapter IV. of Jane Eyre.] Eliza [attended] a saint's-day service at ... church—for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist: no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers. And by way of climax, Jane Eyre tells us that Cousin Eliza says:—"I shall devote myself ... to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their system; if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil."
The river Reed, I may remark, has its rise close to the Cheviot Hills, within about five miles of the source of the Keeldar Burn, which name Charlotte Brontë used later in Shirley for the surname of Shirley Keeldar who, the world knows, is really Emily Brontë. To quote a ballad of Leyden,
"The heath-bell blows where Keeldar flows,
By Tyne the primrose pale."
The Reed has a Rochester near, which doubtless provided a name for Charlotte's hero.