Brontes and Branwell

I’ve always been fascinated by the Bronte family who were born in Yorkshire, at the end of the Regency era.  Their parents were a Cornish mother and an Irish father.  Patrick, the father, was from a poor farming background in Northern Ireland.  He was a clever young man and overcame his poverty to go to Cambridge, as a “sizar”, i.e. a student who is taught for free in return for undertaking some duties in the college…

It was a hard life for him, to get from poverty and a peasant upbringing to being a curate of the Church of England.  He became Curate of Haworth in 1819. . By then he was married to Maria Branwell, a young woman from a middle class Cornish family and they had a growing family.

Patrick was interested in literature –he wrote some poems and tried his hand at stories.  But he was not as talented as his children would become.  He was very busy with the work of a curate in a poor Parish.  Haworth was full of poor families, and had very limited facilities. The infant mortality rate was high and hygiene conditions were appalling by modern standards.  He had to function as a sort of social worker and activist, trying to get conditions improved.

He was a good hearted man, but was in many ways awkward in his social relations.  Possibly it was difficult for him to mingle in society, when he had come from such a modest background.  As he grew older, he became reclusive and only did as much “mixing” as was necessary for a clergyman.  This had an effect, a negative one, on his children.  However he was an intelligent well-meaning man, and in spite of his stiffness, he was a kindly loving father.

He and Maria had six children, 5 girls and one son.  But when Anne, the youngest was a baby, Maria died of cancer.  Her husband became more retiring, but he did make one attempt to marry again, to find a mother for his brood. Alas, he made a comical mess of it, writing to an old flame and reminding her that she was still single… provoking the lady to write back angrily and with a tart refusal.  He gave up then, and seems to have resigned himself to living alone.  He brought in his sister in law, Elizabeth Branwell, to keep house and look after his children.

The Bronte children were highly intelligent and had a strong creative impulse, hat clearly came from their father.  But his social isolation affected them.  They were not used to mixing much outside their own circle and apart from Branwell, found it hard to make friends. 

Patrick’s income was moderate, as a perpetual curate and he didn’t have a lot of friends or influence in the church, to secure a better paid or more comfortable living. 

The money was adequate while he was alive, but when he knew that when he died, his family would have nothing.  He needed to ensure that they were equipped to earn their living.  He educated Branwell himself, believing that his son was a very talented young man who would be able to help look after the girls financially.  The girls would probably have to go out as governesses, since that was almost the only job a genteel girl could do.  So he sent them to a school for the. “daughters of clergymen” which was supposed to provide a good education at low cost.  However, like a lot of private schools at the time, it was badly run, and conditions were terrible.  The food was bad, the discipline was harsh.  The girls were poorly fed, the building was extremely cold.  Patrick’s 2 eldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, were taken seriously ill during an epidemic.  Patrick brought them home, together with Charlotte and Emily who had been sent there more recently.  However it was too late, the older girls both died. Charlotte never forgot the callousness with which she and her sisters had been treated and took her revenge by writing about the school in Jane Eyre.

The girls were educated at home for a time... Patrick must have been desperately disappointed with his choice of a school to help educate his girls.  Later- he found a more pleasant school, Miss Woolers, in Yorkshire and sent Charlotte there, first.  She was happy there, made a few friends and furthered her education.  She even spent time there as a teacher.  But Emily who came to the school a bit later, hated being away from home and soon departed.  She was the most reclusive of the girls.  All of them were shy, and disliked going among strangers or leaving home.  They hated the thought of being governesses, having to move away from their home and family, mix with a strange family and put up with spoiled children.  Anne and Charlotte did not like the work but forced themselves to do it.  Emily again found it nearly impossible and only worked briefly as a teacher in a girls’ school.

The family’s traumas certainly affected the children a lot, in different ways.  Patrick’s preference for a quiet reclusive life added to their natural shyness and made it positively painful to them, to work away from home.  Charlotte had a few outside friends, and Branwell had many because he was the only one who did enjoy social life.  However their isolation and enjoying each other’s company helped them to create the fictional worlds that they wrote about – Angria and Gondal...which were the seed bed for their later writing.   Their home education made them far better read than most children of their age.  Emily particularly loved the outdoors around Haworth, which became an important part of her writing. 

I think that Emily was more affected by her mother’s death than the other children.  They were very shy, but with Emily it was much worse.  I believe that her mother’s death, when she was very young, followed by the experience at their awful school, made her deeply suspicious of people, and she trusted almost nobody. She preferred animals to people.   Yet it is possible that her isolation and her deep and unusual nature fostered her genius, and helped her to develop as the most brilliant of them all in terms of being a writer.

 Branwell, the only boy, also wrote and was a painter, and he had some talent.  Yet he was unsuccessful and again, perhaps the family’s situation had something to do with it.  He was more outgoing than his sisters or father, but he lacked their strength of character.  He was spoiled by his family, because they believed that he would be the one who might make the family’s fortune or at least earn a good living and help his sisters.  But his writing was heavy and turgid and he had no success as a poet or novelist.  He tried painting for a living, for a time but wasn’t very successful.   He started to drink and use opium, which was a popular drug at the time and was prescribed for all sorts of pains.  But the drinking and drug abuse weakened his health and eventually he found it hard to keep down a job... while his sisters worked and also wrote.

I think that again the family’s isolation and their “oddness” added to Branwell’s problems.  He wasn’t really used to social life in his home.  Maria Bronte had been a lively lady who would have probably helped her husband and children to have a more normal outgoing life, meeting other people. But her death hurt the family and made them cling to each other all the more.

When Branwell went away from home to work as a portrait painter, he did get friendly with other painters and men he met in pubs etc., but he still was awkward and bumptious; foolishly he put off possible helpers and patrons by his seeming arrogance. He was a much weaker character than the girls, and because of that, he may have found drinking and drug use, a help towards relaxing in social situations.   I think he was also dimly aware that he wasn’t really as talented as his fond family thought and he failed at the various jobs he took up.  He worked as a portrait painter, then as a clerk on the railways, and also as a tutor.  He had some literary talent and did some good translations of classic poetry, but he wasn’t creative.  His one attempt at a novel was never finished and it was a heavy and unreadable work.    

Later as is well known, he secured a job as a tutor to the Robinson family, in Yorkshire...His sister Anne was governess to their girls, and got him the post.  Branwell did prosper in that positon at first; his pupil wasn’t very clever, but he himself could be an entertaining talker at times.  So he got on better with the family.  However, he may have become involved in a love affair with Mrs Lydia Robinson, the children’s mother, who was a lively lady, married to a husband who was in poor health.  It’s never been very clear how far the affair went – it is possible that Mrs Robinson was kindly to him, enjoyed a bit of flirtation, and Branwell began to imagine that it meant more.. And that he had had a full blown affair with her.  Eventually he was dismissed, by Mr Robinson, possibly because there had been an affair and he had been  caught.  Possibly however, it might have been for some other reason.  It might have been that there was a light flirtation and that Mrs Robinson was getting tired of it, or worried that Branwell was taking it too seriously.   

Branwell came home, began to drink more heavily and told everyone who would listen that he had been dismissed for being in love with Mrs Robinson and that she would marry him when she was free... However he boasted so much, was incoherent… so it is hard to decipher what the truth was. His family, deeply religious people, who were also very naive, were terribly shocked by his behaviour.   They had neve encountered anything like this.  They tended to blame Mrs Robinson rather than Branwell- whom they regarded as an innocent young man who didn’t know much about the scandalous ways of “high Society”.   Lydia Robinson was 17 years his senior and she was in their view a wicked “bad woman,”  who had seduced him and then abandoned him. 

Branwell however made his love affair into an excuse for drinking more, getting into debt and idling at home.  He seems to have made himself believe that when Mr Robinson died, Lydia would send for him and they would marry.  When she was set free sometime later, however, she did not contact him.  Instead, she was apparently quite upset by her husband’s death, and then went on with her life, administering the estate for her son, and trying to get her daughters married off...  If Lydia had ever been at all involved with Branwell, she now ignored him completely, and he was devastated.  Whether he had imagined the whole thing, or there had been something behind it, he had convinced himself and his family that he had been in love and was desperately unhappy….and that she had treated him very badly.

Branwell went downhill after the Robinson disaster, and went on drinking, over spending, and refusing to do anything but moan and bewail his lot.  His family were sympathetic, but increasingly worn out by his selfish weakness.  Eventually he died, at the age of 31.  He wasn’t a very likable young man, but his family were grieved by his death.  He was the one Bronte who never achieved anything in the literary world.  Possibly it was due to his background and family circumstances...

In a week or 2, I hope to write a bit more about the Bronte family, as individuals and how their isolated lifestyle affected them in different ways.