Charlotte Brontë from the Beginnings

New Essays from the Juvenilia to the Major Works

Judith E. Pike, Lucy Morrison, Judith E. Pike, Lucy Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472453686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317168157
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Donne nella storia

Composed of serialized works, poems, short tales, and novellas, Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia merit serious scholarly attention as revelatory works in and of themselves as well as for what they tell us about the development of Brontë as a writer. This timely collection attends to both critical strands, positioning Brontë as an author whose career encompassed the Romantic and Victorian eras and delving into the developing nineteenth century's literary concerns as well as the growth of the writer's mind. As the contributors show, Brontë's authorship took shape among the pages of her juvenilia, as figures from Brontë's childhood experience of the world such as Wellington and Napoleon transmuted to her fictional pages, while her siblings' works and worlds both overlapped with and extended beyond her own.

1 Redefining the Brontë canon

A tribute to Christine Alexander

Judith E. Pike

This volume not only celebrates the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and her early literary works, but it also pays tribute to Brontë scholar Christine Alexander, whose seminal multi-volume collection, An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1987, 1991), offers readers the opportunity to study the epic scope of Charlotte Brontë’s early literary life before she made her public début as Currer Bell in 1846.¹ Scholars who preceded Alexander provided the public only small glimpses into the remarkable range of material that Charlotte Brontë produced from the eve of her thirteenth birthday to a month shy of her twenty-fifth birthday.² Alexander’s first volume of An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1987), along with her earlier companion study The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1983), established the foundation for the most comprehensive literary study of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia. At the time, scholarship on Charlotte Brontë’s early works was still an emerging field of Brontë studies that came into its own in the 1990s due largely to Alexander.³ Her prize-winning 1983 study was the first reliable critical survey of the complex nature of Brontë juvenilia.⁴ Her Bibliography of the Manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë (1982) listed Charlotte Brontë’s entire work for the first time, including over a hundred previously unknown and unpublished manuscripts. Then with her second volume of An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1991) and her co-authored volume The Art of the Brontës (1995) and co-edited The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005), Alexander has not only ushered in a new era of Brontë studies, but she has also rewritten the Brontë canon.

Nineteenth-century biographers and later scholars drew attention to Charlotte Brontë’s letters as an essential part of her literary legacy. At the same time, they largely ignored or discounted the literary value of her juvenilia, treating the manuscripts primarily as Brontëana. Alexander demonstrates that Charlotte Brontë’s early manuscripts are equally of critical importance to the Brontë canon, which for over a century had been too narrowly defined as novels, poetry and letters. By providing comprehensive access to Charlotte Brontë’s early works, Alexander invites readers and scholars alike to rethink Charlotte Brontë’s legacy from a broader and more nuanced perspective. Charlotte Brontë has long been recognized as a Victorian writer. However, by editing and publishing the body of work Charlotte Brontë wrote well before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, Alexander has repositioned the Brontë canon beyond the confines of such a limited periodization. The literary world of the juvenilia is not the world of Jane Eyre (1847). It offers readers, accustomed to Charlotte Brontë’s later novels, an unfamiliar but spectacularly colorful landscape populated by equally colorful figures. The world of the juvenilia is not bound by the domestic realism of her later novels. Alexander’s scholarly work on the Brontës and literary juvenilia, spanning more than thirty years, provides us with an invaluable and necessary map or, more fittingly, an atlas to help us navigate through the fascinating but circuitous paths of the literary kingdom of Glass Town and Angria along with Charlotte Brontë’s other early writings. Just as the Genii acted as guides for the Little Brontë King and Queens, Alexander, as one reviewer noted, acts as our “geni-editor,” for her work “provides the liveliest and most detailed record that exists of a major Victorian novelist’s youthful delighting in, and occasional trembling at, her extraordinary creative gifts” (Stone 365).

The description of Alexander as a “geni-editor” is an apt allusion, for, as with the Arabian Nights and its never-ending cycle of stories and characters, Charlotte Brontë’s early manuscripts present a complex saga of interwoven tales, sketches, plays, poems, magazines, speeches and novellas, most of which would not be in print today if it were not for Alexander’s editorial research on these early manuscripts. Moreover, given the ever-changing personae of Charlotte Brontë’s early narrators and characters, along with the expanding empire from Glass Town to Angria, these interwoven tales form a literary maze. Charlotte Brontë introduces over a hundred different characters, some appearing only once and others reoccurring in her juvenilia, though she concentrates on some twenty-five key figures. The characters’ lives are continually embroiled in military and amorous conquests, multi-generational familial intrigues, mistaken identities, personal and political betrayals and even murder. The names of characters change due to shifting political positions, marriages, familial ties, or even the discovery of a character’s true lineage, which can be quite puzzling at times.

The events unfold over several generations, principally taking place between 1793 and 1858, encompassing a time well before Charlotte Brontë’s birth in 1816 and several years after her death in 1855. In one of her earliest pieces, “A Romantic Tale” (1829), Charlotte Brontë describes how in 1793, her hero Arthur Wellesley, years before he became the Duke of Wellington, set sail from England with eleven other adventurers on the Invincible, landing three months later in Africa (EEW I: 8–10). Branwell sets the departure of the Invincible much earlier on 7 January 1770 and records Arthur Wellesley’s age then as “only 12 years old,” which is implausible, for the real Wellesley was born on May 1, 1769 (Works PBB I: 141, 142). Later, Charlotte Brontë foretells the future of the Angrian Empire not in one of her later novellas, or even as part of her Farewell to Angria (1839), but rather five years earlier in “A Leaf from an Unopened Volume” (1834), which marks only the midpoint in her early writings. Charlotte Brontë sets this piece in the future in 1858 after Zamorna has assumed his new title as Emperor Adrian (EEW II.1: 326). The events in the saga are obviously not always presented in chronological order. Fortunately, Alexander has not only made all of these early works available to today’s readers, but she acts as our literary guide, and so helps us to navigate through this fascinating labyrinth of Charlotte Brontë’s early writings with her detailed introductions and annotations in her An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë and comprehensive study The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. The large emphasis on early reading, writing and source material among myriad other topics in the co-authored The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (2003) has become an equally invaluable reference for any reader venturing into the world of the Brontës’ juvenilia. Due to what Terry Eagleton referred to as her “erudite, meticulous” research and editing, we can appreciate more fully this delightfully un-Victorian side of Charlotte Brontë’s literary legacy (30).

Earlier editions of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia

Previous edited collections of Charlotte Brontë’s early works, such as Fannie Ratchford and William DeVane’s Legends of Angria (1933) and Winifred Gérin’s Five Novelettes (1971), focused narrowly on Charlotte Brontë’s later manuscripts and thus offered an incomplete picture of the epic scale of her saga. Gérin describes Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia as “apprentice work” but, without proper access to the earlier manuscripts, readers had to rely on her and Ratchford’s limited excerpts along with their summaries and commentaries as the only avenue to study Charlotte Brontë’s literary apprenticeship (Five Novelettes 21). A number of more recent editions of selected tales, plays or novellas from Charlotte Brontë’s early work appeared in the 1970s and 1980s: William Holtz’s The Secret & Lily Hart (1979), Alexander’s Something about Arthur (1981) and Melody Monahan’s The Poetaster (1981) and Ashworth: An Unfinished Novel (1983). These are very fine editions and provide excellent scholarly commentaries, but they represent only a fraction of Charlotte Brontë’s early work. Such limited access stymied scholarly inquiry and the advancement of research in this emerging field of Brontë studies. Any attempt to read Charlotte Brontë’s early works in the chronological order in which she wrote them was not a simple task. Researchers encountered many challenges from having to locate the limited or privately printed editions to having to travel to university and rare book collections and even private homes on both sides of the Atlantic. As Alexander explains, research into Charlotte Brontë’s early writings was “hampered by inadequate knowledge of the original material, by reliance on inaccurate and fragmented publication, and a tendency to study individual stories in isolation” (EW 5). Alexander’s editorial work and research radically reconfigured the work of previous editors.

In her 1928 essay, Ratchford notes that “it is doubtful if as many as a dozen persons, including the author, have known the juvenilia as a whole; and it is only as a whole that they assume biographical and critical importance” (“Angrian Cycle” 494). The public would have to wait almost sixty years for Alexander to bring to light the early years of “the juvenilia as a whole” and its “critical importance.” Still, the idea of the “whole” of the juvenilia in regard to Alexander’s work needs further clarification, since she reconceives the notion of the “whole” in several interesting ways. First, her initial volumes along with the forthcoming third volume of An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë more than fulfill Ratchford’s vision of the juvenilia as a “whole.” Alexander clarifies that, as valuable as it is, “Ratchford’s work is based on only a small fraction of the manuscripts we now know to exist” (EW 4). Moreover, Alexander explains that many of the previously published manuscripts, in particular those produced by Thomas James Wise, Clement K. Shorter and C. W. Hatfield, were riddled with errors, deletions or emendations in such a fashion that corrupted the original manuscripts:

So inaccurate are some editions, such as The Adventures of Ernest Alembert: A Fairy Tale, edited by Thomas James Wise (London: printed for private circulation, 1896), where many phrases and even sentences have been inserted, that one can only conclude that either the editor was working from another manuscript (which is unlikely) or that he chose to ‘improve’ the original.

(EEW I: xxiii)

Because of problems like this, as well as the machinations of forgers like Wise and the enormous mass of manuscripts, some scholars warned that it would be “daunting” and unprofitable to try to produce “a satisfactory edition of the juvenilia.”⁵

Alexander’s aim, however, was to give readers access to the “whole” of Charlotte Brontë’s early creative life and to present her early manuscripts “with a minimum of editorial intervention” (EEW I: xxiii). Alexander also demonstrates that the “whole” of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia has no definable limit, as new manuscripts have surfaced and may continue to surface. In 2007, Alexander describes how, almost a decade earlier, she discovered in a private collection in Canada another unpublished manuscript, which she subsequently identified as “the final entries in ‘Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington’” (“Charlotte Brontë and the Duke of Wellington” 142, 144). As recently as 2011, she was involved in identifying for Sotheby’s yet another miniature Brontë magazine that is listed in her original Bibliography but that had been “lost” in an unknown private collection.⁶

Uncovering the historical, literary and religious influences on young Charlotte

Gaining a sense of the “whole” of Charlotte Brontë’s early writings also requires understanding the key historical, literary, and religious influences on the young writer. Obviously the military and political figure of the Duke of Wellington was central, but Alexander reveals that Charlotte Brontë’s representation of Wellington is not as one-dimensional as earlier biographers and editors describe. In The Brontës: Life and Letters (1908), Shorter states that, from age thirteen to eighteen, Charlotte Brontë had “one absorbing hero – the Duke of Wellington” (72). Alexander presents a more complex reading of the young author’s rendering of Wellington in her essay “Charlotte Brontë, Autobiography, and the Image of the Hero” (2011). Alexander points out that Charlotte Brontë’s portrait of Wellington was not a static figure. Her fictional shaping of him allows us to see how her narrative voice evolved and how her literary experimentation became an integral “part of a complex self-fashioning” for this young writer (2). Initially, her fictional Wellington mirrors more closely his historical identity:

In the earliest writings Wellington retains a clear historical identity. His many titles (including Marquis of Douro) and the names of towns and fortresses captured in Spain (such as Almeida and Zamorna) become names of characters in the juvenilia. His opponents in life become his enemies in the saga, and his colleagues its heroes. His estate at Strathfieldsay appears by name in the saga. And Wellington’s adoption of the four-year-old Salabut Khan, whom he rescued from Deccan battlefield during the Mahratta Wars in India, is transformed into the fictitious Duke’s adoption of the African Quashia. Charlotte stored every scrap of information on the Duke for the purpose of appropriation.

(10)

Alexander stresses, though, that “Charlotte’s fictional Wellington is a construct” (10). As Charlotte Brontë developed as an author, especially as “she fell under the spell of Scott and Byron,” her portrayal of Wellington would subsequently change “to accommodate the accretion of Gothic and Byronic elements” (10, 12). Later in her life Charlotte Brontë admired “Wellington’s political conservatism” and even used him as the model “for the active, ambitious male in Shirley” (16).⁷ However, as a teenager, Alexander observes, she became less interested in Wellington as a real military hero and more intrigued by his being a flawed “flesh-and-blood man” (16, 12). In turn, she develops the saga of his sons to explore this less noble side of Wellington: “The conservative Tory personality of Wellington became too restrictive for the young writer, keen to experiment with deviance and ambiguity in character” (12). In the process, Charlotte Brontë could retain her admiration for Wellington by displacing his “illicit liaisons of his real-life biography” onto his sons (12).

The historical figures and allusions in the juvenilia that Alexander beautifully documents in her annotations are too numerous to discuss here, but they continually enhance our appreciation of the complexity of Charlotte Brontë’s early pieces. Alexander continues the work of previous editors, but her work far exceeds that of any of her predecessors. Earlier editors and scholars have identified a range of cultural and literary influences on Charlotte Brontë’s early writings: the Arabian Nights, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Rev. J. Goldsmith’s A Grammar of General Geography, Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, James Macpherson’s Ossian, and the Annuals along with the works of Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson, Robert Southey, and Ben Jonson, among others. However, for any given author being alluded to in a particular passage, Alexander not only pinpoints the specific source, but she also gives us a more precise sense of what works were capturing Charlotte Brontë’s imagination at different points in the juvenilia. Alexander shows how allusions to Scott’s The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream appear in earlier pieces from 1829–1830 (EEW I: 28, 90, 109, 165), but references to Byron emerge later. While earlier critics offered a more general account of the influence of Byron, Alexander details the innumerable direct references and allusions to Byron in Charlotte Brontë’s later writings of the 1830s: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, A Tale, Hebrew Melodies, The Parisina, The Dream, Don Juan, Cain, and Sardanapalus, along with some of his other poems.

In her British Library edition of Charlotte Brontë’s High Life in Verdopolis: A Story from the Glass Town Saga (1995), for example, Alexander’s introduction and notes alert us to the way Wellington’s eldest son the Duke of Zamorna has become a fully-fledged Byronic hero, replete with details of Byron’s ancestry, lovers whose characters mimic those of the poet, and even Newfoundland dogs that imitate Byron’s favorite breed. Patsy Stoneman observes, though, that the Byronic hero also poses a dilemma for Charlotte as a young female writer: “The Byronic model of romance was thrilling from a masculine viewpoint, but gave Charlotte no escape from the sense that women, even heroines, were helpless pawns in men’s world, with at best a masochistic kind of recompense” (10). Stoneman highlights that Charlotte Brontë also found a rhetorical way to temper the masculinist Byronic figure: “Charlotte did have a weapon against overweening masculinity, and this was irony,” best represented by the “flippant, insubordinate and sarcastic” Lord Charle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Charlotte Brontë from the beginnings: New essays from the juvenilia to the major works
• 1. Redefining the Brontë canon: A tribute to Christine Alexander
• 2. On early style: The emergence of realism in Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia
• 3. The miniature world of Charlotte Brontë’s Glass Town
• 4. “Mortal hostility”: Masculinity and fatherly conflict in the Glass Town and Angrian sagas
• 5. Reading the imperial imaginary of “A Leaf from an Unopened Volume”
• 6. The not-so new Gothic: Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia and the Gothic tradition
• 7. Revisioning the double: From The Spell to The Professor and Shirley
• 8. Queer Charlotte: Homoerotics from Mina Laury to The Professor
• 9. Charlotte Brontë’s Ashworth: From adapted Angrian villains to recurring sibling pairs
• 10. From Angria to Thornfield: Charlotte Brontë’s cross-period development of the Byronic hero
• 11. Apocalyptic visionaries: Charlotte Brontë’s love–hate relationship with the Romantic figure of the poet-prophet
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index