Growing Up Brontë

Published Mar 7, 2012, 4:26 PM

The Brontë sisters are 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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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house stuff works dot com. Helloly, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deleted Chuck Reboarding and longtime listeners know that sad royal childhoods are a frequent theme of ours, But the truth is discussing the youth of a podcast subject is usually pretty interesting, whether their royalty or not. Whether it's eleot Chellaby showing off to the Sultan, or as we discussed recently, paleontologist Mary Anning getting struck by lightning as an infant, or even haunts Christian Anderson crashing dinner parties in his ill fitting communion suit. 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 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. And 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 footing before we go there. I mean, the first one would be that most of the family didn't live much beyond childhood, 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 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 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 and one brilliant wastrel 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 learn their origins were in Northern Ireland and that their family name wasn't even Bronte. Their father, Who's Patrick, was born in seventy seven on St Patrick's Day in Northern Ireland, and he was the son of Hugh Brunte, who was a ditch mender. And despite the poor beginnings, Patrick was the eldest of ten really you know, in a really poor family. Uh, they were very story oriented. Hugh Brunte 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 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 Frasier, and she said that this jump from being the ditch mender's son to attending Cambridge was really an almost unimaginable lee. Again, 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 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 Patrick, Mariah packed it 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, 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 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, Rome's Moors, after all, not some cute little village. So not long after Anne's birth in eighteen twenty, Mr Bronte accepted a position as the curate of Hawarth 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 house and um the water supply and where it came from, and it just very involved, definitely, but it's something that 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 you might be thinking, you know, a 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 Whitechapel, London, of course, one of the um worst most packed with people's slums in London. The average life expectancy with only twenty five years. The problems that this place had where that there weren't enough previews, 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. 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 were 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 one description of them learning lighthouse keeping, whatever that means, because it means I just imagine people walking around with a feather nut 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 a house for 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 time people thought was stomach cancer but now what historians believe was blood poisoning. 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 Brandwell, to 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. 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, new 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, of course precocious, a little Bronte's. They'd read newspapers and talk politics. They'd argue about who they thought was Beth 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 it seems like kind of a hopeless situation. But then a miracle seemed to happen. In eighteen twenty 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, 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 cachet, 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 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 provies 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 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 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 Brown day Um by Jane tripp It, she's actually called the Unknown Bronte because so little is really known about her. Mariah also died young, but she was sort of the inspiration for Helen Burns and you know, really idolized by her family. But 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. 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 Calvin Bridge was Lowwood from Jane Eyre Chrus Wilson 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 come 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 for having been a child at the time, she wouldn't have remembered things that they really were exactly. According to Fraser, 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 Rosie in the nine though someone 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 a sudden, but with the death of Mariah and Elizabeth in such a 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, remember that Howard's high mortality rate was really obvious to anybody who was stopping through, because the church bell would constantly toll 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's just lost so many people in such a short stand of time. So Miss Branwell became the household educator for the girls, while Mr Bronte would have given extra Greek and Latin lessons to Branwell. 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 Branwell's Ladies magazine. 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 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 for 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 she wrote, Branwell 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 the soldiers became 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, Brandwell even created a language and history and maps for this world. By January nine, they started to 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 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 the 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 were a nineteenth century person with bad eyesight. 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 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 would at various times try to ditch her imaginary world as she'd get older, but she'd come back, you know sometimes. Deplena 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 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 and 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 roe Head, twenty miles from Hollarth. It was different from colin Bridge and it was in 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 play because she was so nearsighted, so she was really loved 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 Brontes much loved cook Cabby, and two of her roe Head friends, Ellen Nussy and Mary Taylor, became lifelong correspondence of her. So she did manage to make those bonds. Yeah, and as the 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 all were 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 eighteen thirty three, wrote that quote, they were beginning to feel conscious of their powers. They were rich in each other's companionship. Their health was good, their spirits were good. There was often 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 the Bronte's. 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, 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 that you'd want as your legacy, 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 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 came over me, am, I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage forcibly suppressing my ray age at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fat headed oaths on a compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity, and to make matters worse, Brandwell partly the reason why the 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 eight thirty five, Brandwell had gone to London to apply to the Royal Academy of the Arts. You know, this was going to be this big start. He either never made it to London and was robbed on the way, 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 geara types, and he became addicted to opium eventually, which was on top of a developing drinking problem, and it wasn't long before he had to start making his living as a tutor, which you know, 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 their tutor strongs, which I don't know, it sounds kind of fun for them, but 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 in that charm, 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 eight and over the next few years the Bronte girls all took teaching jobs, even painfully shy Emily, who distinguished herself at law Hill by telling her students that she preferred the school dog to them. That wouldn't win you many most popular teacher points for it 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 her head and was very likely the model for John Reid, Jane Eyre's cruel cousin. Yeah, so Charlotte wasn't enjoying governor 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 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 John Rivers. I think the second proposal came from a clergyman who was just 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 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 beat 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. 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 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 um 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 your own thing. 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 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 Bronte start looking for a school, and with their connections and Brussels, you know, they had somebody on the on the other side of the channel. He could do the legwork for them, and they ultimately found a school that was high quality but pretty inexpensive, you know, within their budget, and in January forty two they settled on the Paulson A A j. So that's where we're going to leave off 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 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. Today we just think of them as great novelist, but during the Victorian period they were also scandalous women. So I think that's a good time for us to move on to listener mail and maybe discuss another recent literature related podcasts we covered. So we have two emails here that we want to read about our Elizabeth Barrett Browning slash Robert Browning podcast. We talked about their relationship and how that developed and blossomed over the years. We have one here from Anna Lisa. She says, I just finished listening to the Elizabeth Barrett Brownie and Robert Brownie podcast and I love it. But I can't believe you guys didn't talk more about Flush, Elizabeth's Dog. If you aren't aware of Virginia Wolfs remarkable little book, Flush of Biography, I highly recommend it as both an imaginative look at the world through the dog's eyes and a unique perspective on Elizabeth and Robert's romance and marriage. Incidentally, I would also love if you did a podcast on Wolf someday, so she throws up a little suggestion there, But yeah, we did. We mentioned that Elizabeth's dog was one of the few possessions that she took with her when they away. Yes, but we didn't go. We didn't have time to really explore flush. Now I feel like I should stave off any other listener emails by noting getting it out there that Emily Bronte is really a famous dog lover. To get a massive would do these pretty watercolors of it. So that's officially on the record now. We also got a letter about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning from Tasha, who is studying English and American literature in England, and she said she was researching Browning from my Last Duchess, which you mentioned in your podcast about Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Apparently the Duchess and the poem is based on one of the Medici family. Like Queen Victoria, they just get everywhere. Lacrazia di Cosomo de Medici was the daughter of Cosomo the first Medici and the sister of Francesco the first e Medici, who was the unfortunate quote father in the Medici Murders in a Basket Baby podcast. Aged fourteen, she married Alonso the second death Day, the fifth Duke of Ferrara, who went on to abandon her for two years before she died aged just seventeen, of suspected poisoning. That was the way a lot of people went back. Then. Ferrara went on to marry Barbara of Austria, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor of Fernand the First. I thought this was an interesting link between the two subjects that you guys might appreciate. I always like a Medici connection, so thank you Tasha for sharing that. And I like my last duchess to We talked about that that that episode didn't we um, so thank you guys. It's always neat to have some more literary insight or dog insight on subjects, and I that's kind of while we're talking about the I don't know insight and sources. It was cool to research the Brontes because there is so much information on them, which is honestly not something that usually happens for most of our podcast subject Usually we have to dig and dig and dig, so it is kind of nice. Once in a while when you have those topics where it's just all kind of laid out for you. Well, it's strange too, though, because there's so much information on them that you get biographies that are countering other biographies. I mean, I've mentioned the Rebecca Fraser biography, which I really like, but the kind of well it is the original Charlotte Bronte biography is the Mrs Gaskell one, and that's full of spin in addition to actual biographical information, something again we'll talk about in the second episode. There's even a whole scholarly journal devoted to the Bronte that was really kind of overwhelmed in this episode in a good way. Yeah, I mean that's true. That makes it harder in a way because you have to kind of find the commonality us and figure out what's sort of in their aerie and what's real. Yeah, vastly conflicting opinions about these women in their lives. So, um, I don't know, it's it's cool to talk about, and we definitely like to know your opinions. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com, and we're also on Twitter at mist in History, and we are on Facebook and if you'd like to find out a little bit more about some of the topics we discussed on this podcast. You can find them by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes.

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