On this day in 24 september 1848 Branwell Bronte died

Patrick-branwell-bronte

The trailer of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights

The  trailer of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, originally distributed by the Guardian. 

Elizabeth departed

The visit gave Charlotte temperary cheer and encouragement. Mrs. Gaskell departed with a present for Charlotte’s favotite little Julia (daughter of Elizabeth) and with many intentions  of renewing very frequently the pleasure we had in being together. We agreed that when she wanted bustle, or when I wanted quiet, we were to let each other know, and exchange visits as occasion required.

Elisabeth Gaskell tells about her visit to Charlotte Bronte in 1953: ""We went, not purposely, but accidentally, to see various poor people in our distant walks. From one we had borrowed an umbrella; in the house of another we had taken shelter from a rough September storm. In all these cottages, her quiet presence was known. At three miles from her home, the chair was dusted for her, with a kindly "Sit ye down, Miss Bronte;" and she knew what absent or ailing members of the family to inquire after. Her quiet, gentle words, few though they might be, were evidently grateful to those Yorkshire ears. Their welcome to her, though rough and curt, was sincere and hearty""

Watercolor of Elizabeth Gaskell by Meta, the daughter of Elizabeth Gaskell 1865

We were so happy together; we were so full of interest in each other's subjects. The day seemed only too short for what we had to say and to hear.

I understood her life the better for seeing the place where it had been spent - where she had loved and suffered. Mr. Bronte was a most courteous host; and when he was with us, - at breakfast in his study, or at tea in Charlotte's parlour, - he had a sort of grand and stately way of describing past times, which tallied well with his striking appearance. He never seemed quite to have lost the feeling that Charlotte was a child to be guided and ruled, when she was present; and she herself submitted to this with a quiet docility that half amused, half astonished me. But when she had to leave the room, then all his pride in her genius and fame came out. He eagerly listened to everything I could tell him of the high admiration I had at any time heard expressed for her works. He would ask for certain speeches over and over again, as if he desired to impress them on his memory.

egaskell/bl-egaskell-cbronte-

Mrs Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte, what did they talk about?

We talked over the old times of her childhood; of her elder sister's (Maria's) death, - just like that of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre; of those strange, starved days at school; of the desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way, - writing or drawing; of her weakened eyesight, which prevented her doing anything for two years, from the age of seventeen to nineteen; of her being a governess; of her going to Brussels; whereupon I said I disliked Lucy Snowe, and we discussed M. Paul Emanuel; and I told her of ----'s admiration of Shirley, which pleased her; for the character of Shirley was meant for her sister Emily, about whom she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans, - great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth. 

One day, Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil-painting, done by her brother, of herself, - a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen, - and the two other sisters, girls of sixteen and fourteen, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes. . . . Emily had a great dog - half mastiff, half bull-dog - so savage, etc. . . . This dog went to her funeral, walking side by side with her father; and then, to the day of its death, it slept at her room door; snuffing under it, and whining every morning.

I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, - vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc.
She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep, - wondering what it was like, or how it would be, - till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened.


I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it.
I recollect, too, her saying how acutely she dreaded a charge of plagiarism, when, after she had written Jane Eyre; she read the thrilling effect of the mysterious scream at midnight in Mrs. Marsh's story of the Deformed. She also said that, when she read the Neighbours, she thought every one would fancy that she must have taken her conception of Jane Eyre's character from that of "Francesca," the narrator of Miss Bremer's story. For my own part, I cannot see the slightest resemblance between the two characters, and so I told her; but she persisted in saying that Francesca was Jane Eyre married to a good-natured "Bear" of a Swedish surgeon.


We talked about the different courses through which life ran. She said, in her own composed manner, as if she had accepted the theory as a fact, that she believed some were appointed beforehand to sorrow and much disappointment; that it did not fall to the lot of all - as Scripture told us - to have their lines fall in pleasant places; that it was well for those who had rougher paths, to perceive that such was God's will concerning them, and try to moderate their expectations, leaving hope to those of a different doom, and seeking patience and resignation as the virtues they were to cultivate. I took a different view: I thought that human lots were more equal than she imagined; that to some happiness and sorrow came in strong patches of light and shadow, (so to speak), while in the lives of others they were pretty equally blended throughout. 
She smiled, and shook her head, and said she was trying to school herself against ever anticipating any pleasure; that it was better to be brave and submit faithfully; there was some good reason, which we should know in time, why sorrow and disappointment were to be the lot of some on earth. It was better to acknowledge this, and face out the truth in a religious faith.

Mrs Gaskell tells.....

"I don't know that I ever saw a spot more exquisitely clean; the most dainty place for that I ever saw. To be sure, the life is like clock-work. No one comes to the house; nothing disturbs the deep repose; hardly a voice is heard; you catch the ticking of the clock in the kitchen, or the buzzing of a fly in the parlour, all over the house. Miss Bronte sits alone in her parlour; breakfasting with her father in his study at nine o'clock. She helps in the housework; for one of their servants, Tabby, is nearly ninety, and the other only a girl. Then I accompanied her in her walks on the sweeping moors the heather-bloom had been blighted by a thunder-storm a day or two before, and was all of a livid brown colour, instead of the blaze of purple glory it ought to have been. Oh those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole world, and the very realms of silence! Home to dinner at two. Mr. Bronte has his dinner sent in to him. All the small table arrangements had the same dainty simplicity about them. Then we rested, and talked over the clear, bright fire; it is a cold country, and the fires were a pretty warm dancing light all over the house. The parlour had been evidently refurnished within the last few years, since Miss Bronte's success has enabled her to have a little more money to spend. Everything fits into, and is in harmony with, the idea of a country parsonage, possessed by people of very moderate means. The prevailing colour of the room is crimson, to make a warm setting for the cold grey landscape without. 

There is her likeness by Richmond, and an engraving from Lawrence's picture of Thackeray; and two recesses, on each side of the high, narrow, old-fashioned mantelpiece, filled with books, - books given to her; books she has bought, and which tell of her individual pursuits and tastes; not standard books.

"She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw; and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals, ('stippling,' don't the artists call it?) every little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.


art of the brontes

The moors were brown and dull.

24 corners sent me a reaction:

Hello Geri! I'm so happy that Charlotte and Elizabeth had met...there couldn't have been a better person at the time to write the biography...Mrs. Gaskell did a beautiful, realistic, and very touching job of it. If I remember right, the heather on the moors had had a bad time of it that September and Elilzabeth never got to see the moors in all their purple glory, much to Charlotte's chagrin. xo J~

19 century cab

Hi Jessica,What you write is true. In the Brontes of Juliet Barker I read: When Mrs. Gaskell was in her cab to go to the parsonage she found everything lead-coloured, even the moors, which should have been a blaze of purple, were brown and dull.

Greetings from Geri.

Elisabeth Gaskell visit on 19-09-1853. "the room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture".

At the parsonage gate Elisabeth Gaskell was ”half blown back by the wild vihemence of the wind which swept along the narrow gravel walk"". 
Charlotte gave Mrs. Gaskell the warmest welcome. 

Mrs Gaskell about the dining room: "the room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture".  Everything in her departure has been new within the last few years; and everything is admirable for its simple, good, sufficient for every possible  reasonable want and of the most delicate and scrupulous cleanliness. "I don't know that I ever saw a spot more exquisitely clean; the most dainty place for that I ever saw". 

Mrs. Gaskell had been given Aunt Branwell's old bedroom, the largest in the house, and she tried hard  to find something favourable to say about it. "The view is really beautiful in certain lights, moon light especially. "
From Juliet Barker "the "Brontes""
Dining room picture: guardian.co.uk//writers.rooms.charlotte.bronte

September 1853 Elisabeth Gaskell visits the Parsonage and stayed for four days.

It was a dull, drizzly Indian-inky day, all the way on the railroad to Keighley, which is a rising wool-manufacturing town, lying in a hollow between hills - not a pretty hollow, but more what the Yorkshire people call a 'bottom,' or 'botham.' I left Keighley in a car for Haworth, four miles off - four tough, steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. 

The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it, - grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to poor, hungry-looking fields; - stone fences everywhere, and trees nowhere. 
Haworth is a long, straggling village one steep narrow street - so steep that the flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, that the horses' feet may have something to cling to, and not slip down backwards; which if they did, they would soon reach Keighley.

But if the horses had cats' feet and claws, they would do all the better. Well, we (the man, horse, car; and I) clambered up this street, and reached the church dedicated to St. Autest (who was he?); then we turned off into a lane on the left, past the curate's lodging at the Sexton's, past the school-house, up to the Parsonage yard-door. I went round the house to the front door, looking to the church; - moors everywhere beyond and above. The crowded grave-yard surrounds the house and small grass enclosure for drying clothes.