The imaginary worlds of the Brontë children.

Brontës The British Library’s

Major new exhibition

 Out of this World:

Science Fiction but not as you know it

 reveals the imaginary worlds of the Brontë children.

 

Victorian children

(not the Bronte Sisters)

In their childhood, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë created imaginary countries collectively called the Glass Town Federation. Branwell and Charlotte invented the kingdom of Angria, while Emily and Anne created the world of Gondal. They became obsessive about their imaginary worlds, drawing maps and creating lives for their characters and featured themselves as the ‘gods’ (‘genii’) of their world.

Their stories are in tiny micro-script, as if written by their miniature toy soldiers.The Brontës wrote about their imaginary countries in the form of long sagas which were ‘published’ as hand-written books and magazines.

The Young Men’s magazine (the history of which is told by Branwell in 'The History Of The Young Men From Their First Settlement To The Present Time'), contains an introduction where Branwell gives an account of the toy soldiers which gave rise to the game that resulted in creating imaginary worlds. Originally a place of fantasy, Glass Town, the capital of the Federation, assumed the characteristics of the 19th century city.

The map of Glass Town drawn by Branwell has a prototype - a map of real explorations in northern and central Africa in 1822-1824, while the hero of the saga was the real Duke of Wellington – a foreshadowing of what would later become the established genre of alternative histories. At some point Emily and Anne stopped contributing to the Glass Town and Angria stories in order to create their own imaginary world of Gondal, probably as a rebellion against their older siblings who usually gave them inferior roles to play in the games. Unfortunately, the chronicles of this imaginary place written in prose were lost and only poems are now known. As with the Glass Town writings, these poems are concerned with love and war and explore various modes of identity.


Emily Brontë’s Gondal poems relate to characters in the stories, who came from either side of two warring factions. Early biographers of Emily assumed that the events described in the poems related to her own life, but instead they were figments of her extremely active imagination, and, like Wuthering Heights, not directly written from personal experience. Charlotte Brontë’s poem ‘The Foundling’ tells the story of a young man who emigrates to Glass Town. There he gets involved in politics, falls in love and discovers that he is of a noble background.
While the sense of fantasy is strong, there are teasing examples of what might be called the beginnings of science fiction.“I hope the exhibition at the British Library will challenge what people think of as science fiction and show that it is not a narrow genre, but something that appears in many times, cultures, and literary forms. It embraces works of utopian and speculative fiction that many people may not consider as 'Science Fiction', such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Orwell’s 1984 and Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife.”

kleurrijk brontesisterschildhood-fantasy-is-often-stifled-by.

.lib.harvard.edu

 

Charlotte Bronte visit to the Lake District.

Charlotte Bronte stayed at Brierly Close in August 1850, seeing the Lake District for the first time. She found the countryside ‘exquisitely beautiful’. It was here that she met the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. The two became such firm friends that Mrs Gaskell wrote the first biography of Charlotte Bronte.

Published on June 2006

A previously unpublished letter by Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, is expected to fetch up to £15,000 at auction after surfacing among a pile of papers in an attic.
The 1850 missive to William Smith Williams, her publisher’s reader, contains forthright views on literary and society figures of her day and her love of the Lake District.
Bronte writes that during a visit to the Lakes, she met future biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell: “I like her very much; her manner is kind, candid and unassuming.” The letter was penned three years after Jane Eyre’s publication. The letter was found in the attic of a house in a village on the Sussex- Surrey border.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S first interest in the Lake District must have been awakened when she wrote to Southey in 1837, and afterwards to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Southey had pressed a wish to see her if she visited the English Lakes. In those days money was not too plentiful at the Haworth parsonage, and much as Charlotte Bronte would have liked to pay a^visit to the Lake District it was all but impossible.
Alas ! when she did get an opportunity of going, Southey had been dead for seven years, Hartley Coleridge had recently died in 1849, and Wordsworth in April, 1850, so that the poets in whom she was specially interested had all passed away.

As Branwell Bronte had been at Broughton-in-Furness in 1839, and had visited Hartley Coleridge,

Charlotte Bronte would have heard something of the beauties of the English Lakes at least ten years before she herself became a guest at Briery Close, Windermere.
The English Lake District, so redolent of the poets associated with its name, was an ideal spot for Charlotte Bronte to visit, and, although she had been away from home for six weeks in the June and July of 1850, her father persuaded her to accept an invitation from Sir James Kay Shuttleworth

and Lady Shuttleworth to a house known as Briery Close, which they ad rented on the shores of Lake Windermere, just above the little landing stage at Low-wood. The house is still there, but it has been recently altered; it had been renovated previously and enlarged, so that it is a more palatial mansion than when Charlotte Bronte visited it. The house is sheltered by trees, and is approached from the shore of Lake Windermere by a steep, winding path. The view from the house is the same as in Charlotte Bronte's days, and Coniston Old Man and Langdale Pikes can be seen overlooking the lake. Dove Nest,
where Felicia Hemans lived, can be seen among the trees in the distance, and the view, up and down the lake, is magnificent.

Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, who knew Mrs. Gaskell in Manchester, before he was acquainted with Charlotte Bronte, had invited the author of Mary Barton to meet the writer of Jane Eyre. One who was present to meet the two novelists at this time described Charlotte Bronte as extremely nervous
and shy, looking as if she would be glad if the floor would open to swallow her, whilst Mrs. Gaskell sat bright, cheerful, and quite at ease. Hitherto the two writers had not met. Charlotte Bronte did not approach the house from the lake, but from Windermere Station, the railway having been opened in 1847.

 

Windermere Station

She arrived at Briery Close on 18th August, 1850, and Mrs. Gaskell a day later. Sir James K. Shuttle wroth never seemed weary of inviting Charlotte Bronte and trying to give her pleasure; he had written two novels himself, Scars dale, dealing with the Lancashire border, and Ribblesdale. Charlotte Bronte
seemed to be nervous in his company, though she tried to appreciate his kindness, and he certainly was very good to her.
Fortunately Mrs. Gaskell wrote a long descriptive letter concerning her first meeting with Charlotte Bronte. It has been said that Mrs. Gaskell did not keep a regular diary, but she did, perhaps, what was better: she made notes of her visits to distinguished people, and she wrote long letters to her husband
and others, which were of great use when she needed material for her stories. Had she known that she was to be the biographer of Charlotte Bronte, she could scarcely have been more particular in recording her impressions of her friend. This will readily be admitted by reference to her letters.
Much as Charlotte Bronte enjoyed the scenery, " My visit passed off very well ; I am very glad I went.

The history of this photograph.

This photograph - held to be a photograph of Charlotte Brontë (died 1855) taken during her honeymoon in 1854 - is by Sir Emery Walker, died July 22d, 1933.

wikipedia:CharlotteBronte

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http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20089747,00.html

The photograph is believed to have been taken during a serene period in Charlotte's life—about the time of her marriage in 1854, at age 38, to the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls. Charlotte's happiness was brief; she died nine months after the marriage, as a result of complications of a pregnancy. The photo—a glass-copy negative made by Sir Emery Walker (1851-1933) some years after the original was taken—is thought to be a companion piece to a honeymoon photo and is marked with Charlotte's name on the back. It surfaced in early October at an exhibition of family portraits that were on loan from the National Portrait Gallery to the Brontë museum, which is located at the family home in Haworth, Yorkshire. The Gallery had discovered the picture when members of the staff belatedly got around to cataloging a collection of glass negatives, which they had rescued from the Walker estate in 1956. (A flood in the basement fortunately speeded up the work.)

In 1986, the Bronte Society received a bequest of Mrs. Seton Gordon, the granddaughter of George Smith, publisher of Charlotte. She said her grandfather, eager to collect memorabilia from the authors he published, had accumulated letters, drawings and manuscripts. Forgotten among this collection was a small photo-card in sepia on the back, the words "Within a year of CB's death and accompanied by a letter from Emery Walker dated January 2, 1918, which showed clearly that it s'agisait of the original glass negative that is at the NPG.