Childhood of the Brontës.
The parson’s children were not allowed to associate with their little neighbors in the hamlet; their aunt, who came to the parsonage after their mother’s death, had scarcely more sympathy with them than their father himself; their only friend was the rough but kindly servant Tabby, who pitied the bairns without understanding them.... So they grew up strange, lonely, old-fashioned children, with absolutely no knowledge of the world outside; so quiet and demure in their habits, that years afterward, when they had invited some of their Sunday scholars up to the parsonage, and wished to amuse them, they found that they had to ask the scholars to teach them how to play—they had never learned. Carefully secluded from the rest of the world, the little Brontë children found out fashions of their own in the way of amusement, and curious fashions they were. While they were still in the nursery, when the oldest of the family, Maria, was barely nine years old, and Charlotte, the third, was just six, they had begun to take a quaint interest in literature and politics. Heaven knows who it was who first told these wonderful pigmies of the great deeds of a Wellington or the crimes of a Bonaparte; but at an age when other children are generally busy with their bricks or their dolls, and when all life’s interests are confined for them within the walls of a nursery, these marvellous Brontës were discussing the life of the Great Duke, and maintaining the Tory cause as ardently as the oldest and sturdiest of the village politicians in the neighboring inn.
Effect on Charlotte’s work in later life.
It may be well to bear in mind the frequency with which the critics have charged Charlotte Brontë with exaggerating the precocity of children. What we know of the early days of the Brontës proves that what would have been exaggeration in any other person was in the case of Charlotte nothing but a truthful reproduction of her own experiences.
T. Wemyss Reid: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’ New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1877.
Early reading.
On their father’s shelves were few novels, and few books of poetry. The clergyman’s study necessarily boasted its works of divinity and reference; for the children there were only the wild romances of Southey, the poems of Sir Walter Scott, left by their Cornish mother, and “some mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism; and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe ‘from the Dead to the Living’,” familiar to readers of ‘Shirley.’ To counterbalance all this romance and terror, the children had their interest in politics and Blackwood’s Magazine, “the most able periodical there is,” says thirteen-year-old Charlotte. They also saw John Bull, “a high Tory, very violent, the Leeds Mercury, Leeds Intelligencer, a most excellent Tory newspaper,” and thus became accomplished fanatics in all the burning questions of the day.
Their aunt’s training.
Miss Branwell took care that the girls should not lack more homely knowledge. Each took her share in the day’s work, and learned all details of it as accurately as any German maiden at her cooking school. Emily took very kindly to even the hardest housework; there she felt able and necessary.