The Brontës and Glass Town Wars (Part 2) - Celia Rees

In a previous post, I described the genesis of my new novel, Glass Town Wars. In that post, I hadn't got much further than the initial idea. All writers know that, no matter how good an idea is, the proof of the pudding is in the writing.  

To re-cap, for those of you who either missed my post or who can't be bothered to click on the link, I'd had an idea for a book which would take a boy from the present and pitch him into the fantasy world of the Brontë siblings, a world which they called The Glass Town Federation and then Angria. I had a device for getting him there and I knew what I wanted to happen (he would meet the young Emily Brontë) but didn't have much beyond that. Crucially, although I knew something of Glass Town, Angria and Emily's later world of Gondal, I had yet to study the juvenilia in any detail. Cowardice on my part. I didn't want to discover that the idea wouldn't work and that I'd have to scrap it, especially as I'd more or less sold it to a publisher. 

I had my set up. So, now it was time to address the juvenilia. The Brontë siblings' early writing is contained in a number of tiny little handmade books (see my post, 18th October). Luckily, these have been collected, deciphered, edited and published in handy volumes, like Christine Alexander's Tales of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal.  

     

I began to read and found a world that was precociously brilliant, brimming with creative exuberance and dazzling, instinctive, natural talent: fascinating, elaborate, complex - and completely crazy. The Brontë siblings wrote from childhood into adolescence and young adulthood and they wrote a lot. They drew on anything and everything to make the worlds they were creating: current newspaper stories, events local and historical; they filched wholesale from writers they admired and liberally incorporated stories that they had heard: local legends and folk stories, fairies, ghosts, ghouls and witches. They peopled the world with whoever they wanted in it: dukes and duchesses, friendless young women and cigar smoking gentlemen, pirates, low life thugs and body snatchers, doctors, journalists and printers. Everything, anything, they wanted to happen, happened. One of their earliest inventions were the mile high Genii who could build cities in the middle of no-where, preside over the rise and fall of empires – the Genii, of course, were the Brontës themselves. 

Branwell's Map of Glass Town Federation and Angria 

They founded their world at the mouth of the River Niger in Africa with Glass Town as its capital, yet less than a day's ride away, Parrysland (Emily's territory) was suspiciously like Yorkshire, Rossland (Anne's territory) was like Scotland because they admired the work of Sir Walter Scott. And so on. Across their world, wars raged, revolutions erupted and were suppressed, characters were killed off and resurrected, love affairs conducted, marriage vows made and broken. All of this was written, not in story form but in reports, articles, announcements, poems and advertisements in tiny volumes that are really magazines and newspapers, written for, about and by the citizens of Glass Town. The whole complex fantasy grew from a box of wooden soldiers given to Branwell on his ninth birthday. The size of the miniature publications had been carefully calculated by him so that they were the correct dimensions for the original wooden soldiers. The body of writing changed as the siblings grew older but the books containing it were always small, the writing always tiny because this was a secret world. They were writing for themselves, not for anyone else. 

I found much to admire. I particularly loved the different forms their writing took but the anarchic nature of much of it meant the fantasy world lacked any kind of cohesion, internal logic, or discipline. They were children, writing like all children do, without hindrance and constraint, simply writing about what they wanted to write about, what they wanted to happen, as children might write fan fiction now. They were writing to please themselves, not an external reader. All young writers tend to have this is common and this way of writing often continues on through adolescence to young adulthood as it did with the Brontës, although that is probably the subject of a different blog.

 Page from Branwell's notebook

I admit to being a bit foxed. Even in fantasy there has to be internal logic within a story and there was none here. The only way forward, other than abandoning the enterprise altogether, was to embrace the craziness. Tom, my modern character, is my commentator: it doesn’t make sense to him, either. I looked past the writing to the young authors themselves. There was conflict there, especially between Branwell and Charlotte. As they grew older, their vision diverged sharply. They wrote against each other in rival Glass Town publications. Branwell's focus was on politics, war and fighting, Charlotte preferred palace intrigue and romance. I also detected rebellion in the ranks. At some point, Emily and Anne must have tired of being bossed by the older two and decided to found their own world of Gondal. That was the point where I would introduce Tom. Nothing written by Emily or Anne has survived, apart from some poems, so I had carte blanche. Rebellion would mean war in Glass Town and out of it. 

The young Brontēs had given me a fascinating world, not least the Great Glass Town, beautifully described in detail - they were talented writers even as children - and a fabulous cast of characters from the Dukes Wellington  and Douro to Branwell's lowlife 'rare lads': D'Eath, Sneaky, Tom Scroven, Dick Crack-Skull and Richard Naughty. A perfect villain in the person of the Duke of Northangerland aka Rogue. Haughty dark beauties, like Lady Zenobia Ellerington and the passionately independent Augusta Geraldine Almeida, A.G.A., Emily's character who will become Queen of Gondal. 

Northangerland aka Rogue

I'd take my cue from the Brontës - anything goes. In the background is the gaming that got Tom into this in the first place. Got him in, but can’t get him out again. Fantasy Past meeting Fantasy Present. But fantasy doesn't exist in time and space. So if a character from one world can enter another, why not the other way round? Anything can happen, right? So if a boy from the present can go to Glass Town, why not take Emily Brontë into our fantasy worlds: Apocalypse, Zombies, Grand Theft Auto, Gotham City? I don't think she'd have been phased by it, not one little bit. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Ten Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Branwell Brontë by Katherine Clements

Branwell Brontë, self portrait

This year marks the bicentenary of Branwell Brontë's birth. The Brontë Parsonage Museum is celebrating with a fantastic new exhibition dedicated to ‘the forgotten Brontë’, curated by Simon Armitage. With this, the recent BBC biopic To Walk Invisible, which focuses heavily on Branwell (read my review here), it seems much is being done to rehabilitate Haworth’s failed literary bad boy. While his reputation as dissolute alcoholic, opium addict and failed artist might hold truth, his place in the Brontë legacy remains fascinating and crucial. Here are ten nuggets I’ve recently learned about him:

1. He was ambidextrous. It’s said that Branwell could write equally well with either hand and could even write two different letters at the same time.

2. He was a Freemason. Championed by family friend John Brown, Branwell was inducted into the Three Graces Lodge on 29th February 1836. He was young – not yet nineteen – but with John Brown’s recommendation he thrived, rising to Master Mason and becoming Secretary in 1837.

3. He was a member of the Haworth Temperance Society. His father, Patrick, was key in establishing the Haworth branch and acted as president from 1834. Branwell became secretary for a time and would have signed the pledge, ‘We agree to abstain from Distilled Spirits, except for Medicinal Purposes and to discountenance the Causes and Practice of Intemperance.’

4. As a child, he collaborated with all three sisters on their writing, spending many hours in the creation of the Angrian and Gondal sagas. Some have argued that Branwell was the key creative force in the household. Scholars have identified clear threads in the Brontë novels that link back to their childhood stories (in fact, they never really stopped inhabiting the fantasy worlds that they created as children), leaving us to wonder if the sisters would have become the writers they did if it hadn’t been for their brilliant, imaginative brother.

5. Branwell hoped to become a painter and planned to study at The Royal Academy. A note, found among his papers, reads: ‘Sir, Having an earnest desire to enter as a probationary student in the Royal Academy, but not being possessed of information as to the means of obtaining my desire, I presume to request from you, As Secretary to the Institution, an answer to the questions – Where am I to present my drawing? At what time? And especially, Can I do it in August or September.’ We don’t know if a final draft of this letter was ever sent, though both Charlotte and Patrick mentioned the plan in other correspondence. It’s not clear whether Branwell ever made the trip to ‘present his drawings’ – there are no letters on the subject in the archives of The Royal Academy.

6. He did, however, give us the only surviving portrait of his sisters – the now famous image that hangs in The National Portrait Gallery, as well as the fragment (usually said to be Emily) that hangs beside it. Originally a portrait of all four siblings, painted sometime around 1834, Branwell subsequently replaced himself with a pillar. No one knows why.

Branwell's portrait, with his own image painted out © National Portrait Gallery

7. In 1837 he wrote to the poet, William Wordsworth. After an unsuccessful stint as a professional portraitist in Bradford, Branwell transferred his ambitions to poetry. Wordsworth never replied to the lengthy epistle, though he did mention it to fellow poet Southey (to whom Charlotte had similarly written for advice), expressing disgust at Branwell’s audacity and saying that the letter contained ‘gross flattery and plenty of abuse of other poets.’ The letter survived and is currently on display at the Parsonage, on loan from the Wordsworth Trust.

8. Branwell is said to have read part of an embryonic draft of Wuthering Heights aloud, as his own work, in a pub near Haworth. Local poet, William Dearden, recalled the event many years later and the story was corroborated by a mutual acquaintance. Both claimed that Branwell’s tale was so similar that when Wuthering Heights was published they recognised it immediately. There are several theories as to how this could have happened but, as Daphne Du Maurier points out in her biography of Branwell, the seeds of Heathcliff can be traced back to the Angrian stories and the siblings often borrowed from each other’s work. As Charlotte put it, Wuthering Heights was ‘hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.’ Could it have been based on Emily’s collaborations with Branwell?

9. He couldn’t hold down a job. He left a position as tutor for the Postlethwaithe family of Broughton House under a cloud, was dismissed from his post as station master at Luddenden Foot over discrepancies in the accounts and was sacked from a position as tutor for the Robinsons at Thorpe Green where, it's often claimed, he had an affair with the mistress. Branwell’s mental downfall is often attributed to this last doomed romantic entanglement, but whether it really happened, or was a figment of his imagination, has never been proven.

10. He probably never knew of his sisters' publishing success. By the time his three sisters had their first novels published in 1847, Branwell was already seriously ill, suffering from alcohol and opium addiction, and increasingly mentally unstable. The sisters famously kept their identities secret, even within their close circle, and may have decided that it was best to keep Branwell in the dark, for fear of a volatile reaction. Though hard to believe, there is no evidence that he ever knew. It is a sad demonstration of the chasm that had opened between Branwell and his sisters as their stars ascended and his health declined.

A drawing by Branwell, of death at his bedside.

The cause of death on Branwell’s death certificate is ‘chronic bronchitis and marasmus’ (wasting of the body). It’s likely he was suffering from tuberculosis – the same illness that was soon to take both Emily and Anne. Branwell last left the Parsonage on 22nd September 1848. He was found in the lane between the church and the Parsonage, unable to walk home. He was put into the bed he shared with his father and died two days later. 

Charlotte said of her brother 'I seemed to receive an oppressive revelation of the feebleness of humanity; of the inadequacy of even genius to lead to true greatness if unaided by religion and principle. When the struggle was over … all his errors, all his vices, seemed nothing to me in that moment … he is at rest, and that comforts us all. Long before he quitted this world, life had no happiness for him.'

Mansions in the Sky is on at the Bronte Parsonage Museum until 1st January 2018.

My previous post about Charlotte Brontë.

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Top Withens: The 'Real' Wuthering Heights by Katherine Clements

This is the plaque that greets you when you reach Top Withens. Thousands of tourists make the steep climb from Haworth to see the ruins that supposedly inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I feel sorry for the ones that turn up with their expensive Nikons and Thermos flasks, buffeted and muddied, to find that this isn’t the ‘real’ Wuthering Heights at all. Brontë scholars tend to agree that there’s no such thing. So why has the legend become attached to this tumbledown farmhouse on the moors?

The first definite association with Top Withens appears in a nineteenth century edition of the Brontës' work. In 1872 publisher George Smith commissioned an artist to illustrate a new anthology. He wrote to Ellen Nussey, a close friend of Charlotte’s, asking if she know the names and locations of the ‘places so vividly described’ in the sisters’ work. Frustratingly, we have no record of Nussey’s reply but Smith certainly wrote to thank her for her help. When the edition appeared, Wuthering Heights included a drawing of the Sladen valley, with three isolated farmhouses in view: Near, Middle and Top Withens.

I’ve visited several times myself, in different seasons and different weathers, while researching a work in progress that’s set in the area. Depending on which path you take it is possible to find yourself completely alone, with no human habitation in sight and nothing but a vast sky, the call of curlew and the whistle of the ever-present wind to spark the imagination. It feels wild and remote. As poet, Ted Hughes put it:

Moors …

Are a stage for the performance of heaven.

Any audience is incidental.  

Top Withens, March 2015

We have a tendency, these days, to romanticise these moors. The Brontë sisters would not have experienced them as we do, with our waterproofs and wellies, a place to be visited before retreating to the safety of Haworth for a cream tea or a pint in The Black Bull. In the past the moors were seen, rightly, as dangerous places, savage and deadly, the blanket bog a path straight down to Hell.

But Emily Brontë loved the moors. They were a playground and an escape. As an adult she walked them regularly, alone or with her sisters and they feature heavily in her writing. Her fictional interpretation of the landscape has become one of the reasons for our own romantic view, but she would have been well aware of the hardship and danger for the people who lived and worked there.

The first recorded owner of ‘Wythens’ (later to become Withens or Withins) was George Bentley, a clothier who bought the land from Thomas Crawshaye in 1567. Of the Crawshayes and those that came before, we have no knowledge. On his death, George bequeathed his estate to his grandson William and in 1591 the land was divided between William’s three sons, as detailed in his will. Three farmhouses were allocated to the three men: Near, Middle and Top Withens. You can still find the ruins of all three.

The next recorded owner of Top Withens doesn’t appear until 1813; a John Crabtree who, in turn, leased it to Jonas Sunderland. Jonas, his wife Ann and their descendants lived at Top Withens until the end of the nineteenth century. It’s likely the family would have known the Brontë siblings, at least by sight. By the time the house passed to Ann Sharpe (née Sunderland) and her husband, Samuel in 1888, the area had already been dubbed ‘Brontë Country’ (the term first appears in a guidebook of that year).

The Sunderlands at Top Withens

By 1895, Ann Sharpe was dead, leaving Samuel to bring up their young daughter, Mary, alone. It must have proved too hard a life for Samuel – a year later they had moved to a valley farm named Sheep Holes and the house was abandoned.

As far as we know it stayed that way until the early 1920’s when an invalided ex-soldier named Ernest Roddie took up residency. The Yorkshire Evening Post ran a series of articles about him and even sent a reporter to interview the mysterious Ernest, who lived alone with just his dogs and chickens for company. Following his first winter he said:

‘I think Top Withens is the place for me all right. We have some rough weather up here … It’s been fearful cold since Christmas and there are days when the snow’s been so thick I couldn’t get the cart down to Stanbury.’ But, he said ominously, ‘a man can’t be lonely at Wuthering Heights.’

How much of this is poetic license on the part of the journalist we’ll never know, but by 1926, the harsh lifestyle had beaten Ernest too and he moved back down to Haworth, leaving the house to the elements.

Top Withens circa 1930

The crumbling ruins have been a source of scholarly conflict ever since. A grade II listing in the 1950s was revoked in 1991 and clumsy concrete repairs do little to retain any historical authenticity. The Brontë Society famously repudiated the link with Wuthering Heights, as the firmly worded plaque suggests, but Brontë fans still come from all over the world to pay homage.

Emily would have known Top Withens as a working farm inhabited by the Sunderland family. Its situation at the top of the valley on the edge of the windswept moor may bring to mind the setting of the Heights, but the building itself is not the house described in her novel.

Several other houses that Emily would have known have been put forward as prototypes, including Ponden Hall (also mooted as the model for Thrushcross Grange) and High Sunderland Hall, now sadly demolished. Although perhaps too grand for a farmhouse, my money is on the latter. But I expect it’s not that simple. My current project is similarly set on an isolated working farm on the West Yorkshire moors. I’ve used elements from several local houses to create a fictional one. I suspect that's exactly what Emily did too.

High Sunderland Hall

Perhaps the association with Top Withens is just a romantic myth but when you stand by the ruins, look out over the desolate moorland and think of the people that made a life here, it’s hard not to be swept up by the atmosphere. I’ll leave the description to someone who knew it better than I ever will…

"Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff's dwelling. `Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed; one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.


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Charlotte Brontë's Birthday by Katherine Clements

This month, while many of my fellow history girls are celebrating the Bard, I’ve been thinking about another important literary landmark: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë.

Charlotte was born on 21st April 1816. In fact, this year marks five years of Brontë bicentenaries, with Branwell’s birth in 2017, Emily’s in 2018 and Anne’s in 2020. The Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum are celebrating with a programme of events, exhibitions and publications, including a new collection of short stories inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracey Chevalier.

The Brontë sisters by Branwell Brontë, Charlotte on the right. Owned by the National Portrait Gallery.

A year or so ago, when I was contemplating setting my next novel on the Yorkshire Moors, I made the pilgrimage to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth – the house where the sisters lived and wrote – seeking something of the landscape and atmosphere that so inspired Charlotte and her siblings. The museum is filled with a fascinating collection of furniture, artefacts and personal possessions that give a real insight into the women behind the words. So, in a nod to one of my literary heroines, here are ten things I learned about Charlotte that day…

1. Charlotte’s first ambition was to be a painter.
Charlotte was a keen artist and exhibited two drawings in an exhibition in Leeds in 1834. Many of the 180 drawings that have been attributed to her are accomplished copies or adapted versions of other artists’ work and the Parsonage has several original nature paintings. But when her publisher asked her to illustrate the second edition of Jane Eyre she declined – revisiting her portfolio she reflected, ‘I feel much inclined to consign the whole collection of drawings to the fire.’

2. She was self-conscious about her height
Charlotte was small – though don't know her exact height, estimates based on her clothing suggest she was about four feet-ten inches. Dresses and shoes on display at the Parsonage certainly bear this out. George Smith, Charlotte’s publisher, describes his first impression of Charlotte and Ann as ‘two rather quaintly-dressed little ladies’ and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote 'her hands and feet were the smallest I ever saw'.

3. Lowood School in Jane Eyre was based on Charlotte’s own experience
The sisters all attended the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire. Conditions were harsh, rations frugal and discipline strict. An outbreak of typhus sent them home in 1825 but the two elder siblings, Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis soon afterwards. Charlotte blamed the school for their deaths and the deterioration of her own health. She even modelled Lowood School's infamous Mr Brocklehurst on her real headmaster.

4. She was almost sued for defamation
The founder and head teacher of the Clergy Daughter’s School, Rev William Carus-Wilson, didn’t take kindly to Charlotte’s unflattering representation and sought legal advice. Court action was only avoided when Charlotte penned an apology, stating that she’d exaggerated the details for dramatic effect. She gave Carus-Wilson permission to publish her retraction, but he never did.

5. She had bad teeth
Elizabeth Gaskell noticed Charlotte’s dental problems when they first met, writing to a friend that she had ‘many teeth gone.’ Charlotte supposedly spent some of her earnings from Jane Eyre on dentistry, writing woefully to her friend Ellen about a proposed visit to a dentist in Leeds.

6. She received proposals from three men
Despite her unfortunate teeth, she attracted the attentions of Reverend Henry Nussey, brother of her friend Ellen in 1838. She refused him – she wasn’t in love. Her second suitor, Rev David Pryce proposed to her the following year after meeting her only once. Despite falling for her married tutor during a stay in Brussels (an interlude that inspired the novel Villette) Charlotte eventually married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s curate, accepting his second proposal in 1854.

7. She was ambitious
Keen to avoid the limited work open to her as a governess or teacher (all three sisters had attempted these careers with little success or happiness) Charlotte encouraged her sisters to publish their writing. It was she who led the approach to publishers and, by outliving her sisters, experienced the most success in her lifetime.

8. Her first book sold only two copies
Writers – take heart! Despite her ambition, the first volume of poetry by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, published in 1846, was paid for by the sisters themselves and sold only two copies. After the success of their novels, and Anne and Emily’s deaths, a second edition, edited by Charlotte, was issued in 1850 and has remained in print ever since.

9. The ‘madwoman in the attic’ was inspired by real life
It’s often said that the inspiration for Bertha in Jane Eyre came from Charlotte’s 1839 visit to Norton Conyers, a 17th century manor house near Ripon that reputedly housed a real madwoman in the attic. There are other more convincing models for Thornfield Hall itself, including Ellen Nussey’s home Rydings and North Lees Hall in Derbyshire, but Charlotte’s visit to Norton Conyers must have sparked her imagination.

10. She may have died of morning sickness
The exact cause of Charlotte’s death in unknown. She fell pregnant and became very ill shortly after her marriage in 1854. Elizabeth Gaskell writes that she suffered ‘sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness’. Her death certificate, dated March 31st 1855, states that she died of tuberculosis, the same disease that killed her sisters, but opinion is divided and we’ll probably never know.

If you’d like to find out more about Charlotte’s life, I recommend the new biography by Clare Harman. And the Brontë Parsonage Museum website is a wealth of information, including details of the Brontë 200 celebrations.

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