Charlotte Bronte and a case of mistaken identity

CLAIRE HARMAN

Published: 30 September 2015

Chalk drawing by George Richmond, 1850, left © National Portrait Gallery, London; photograph, right, date unknown, © Brontë Society

A s the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth approaches (April 21, 2016), many picture editors, exhibition organizers and publishers will be looking round for a suitable image of the author and perhaps feeling a little disappointed with the available choices. Only two pictures of Brontë survive that were made from life: the first, crudely painted by her brother Branwell when she was a teenager (in the group portrait known as “The Brontë Sisters”), makes the subject look doughy and dull; the second, a chalk drawing commissioned by the publisher George Smith in 1850 and executed by the fashionable artist George Richmond, veers the other way towards flattery. When Richmond’s portrait was published as the frontispiece to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, two years after Brontë’s death at the age of thirty-eight, it drew some blunt comments from the subject’s old friend Mary Taylor. “I do not altogether like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness”, she told the biographer; “I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose.”

Taylor was by no means the only person to remark on Brontë’s un-beautiful appearance. Gaskell herself had written of her subject’s “plain, large and ill-set features”, “crooked mouth and large nose”, and in private had been even more specific about “a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad and rather overhanging”. George Smith was so impressed by the prominence of Miss Brontë’s brow that he took her to a phrenologist in 1851 to have it analysed, but thought little of her personal charms, recalling that her head “seemed too large for her body” and that “her face was marred by the shape of the mouth and by the complexion”. William Thackeray described Brontë as “homely-faced”, “without a pennyworth of good looks”, while his daughter Anne recalled their famous visitor’s defensive and unpleasant demeanour: “I remember how she frowned at me whenever I looked at her, but perhaps it was specially at me – at least so I imagined. There was a general impression of chin about her face”. These plain-speaking judges did all grant Brontë one outstanding feature; large, shining eyes “of extraordinary brilliance and penetration”. From their descriptions, it seems safe to conclude that Charlotte Brontë had an unusually large brow, large expressive eyes, a wide mouth collapsing over missing teeth and a big nose (like her father, whom she was said to resemble). Richmond’s portrait, for all its prettification, does actually indicate those characteristics in a veiled form. Read all: http://www.the-tls/The Times Literary Supplement

 

A wedding invitation from the BBC

 

Haworth and the Parsonage are great locations for film and tv and with Charlotte’s bicentenary year just around the corner, we are receiving even more media enquiries than usual.     We are very excited to be working with BBC Bristol on their one hour Brontë documentary and are looking forward to welcoming the crew to the Parsonage next month.  'Living Like a Brontë'  will be presented by Martha Kearney, Lucy Mangan and Helen Oyeyemi and will air on BBC2 in the spring.

The week of filming will culminate in a re-enactment of Charlotte’s marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls and everyone is invited!  The BBC would like Brontë fans and local residents to line Church Street and celebrate as Charlotte enters the church on her wedding day. We think this will be a lovely way in which to end the year and hope that many of you will join us.  Filming will take place outside the museum on Friday 11 December and anyone interested should contact rebecca.yorke@bronte.org.uk in order to receive further information as details become available. 

Charlotte Bronte, did she use opium? Or do we see the creation of a new Bronte Myth?

Charlotte Brontë kept this journal while working as a teacher at Roe Head school in West Yorkshire. The pages shown here were written in August 1836. In the journal she records both imaginary happenings in Angria and the banalities of her everyday life as a teacher:

What I imagined grew morbidly vivid,...All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable and half ecstatic: miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly; ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. ...Then came on me, rushing impetuously, all the mighty phantasm that we had conjured from nothing to a system strong as some religious creed. I felt as if I could have written gloriously - I longed to write. The spirit of all Verdopolis, of all the mountainous North, of all the woodland West, of all the river-watered East came crowding into my mind. If I had had time to indulge it, I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than any thing I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.

- See more at:bl.uk/collection-items/charlotte-brontes-journal

Claire Harman in her new biography is suggesting Charlotte Bronte was using laudanum/ opium during the time she was a teacher at Roe Head. What does her suggest this:

• Branwell and Charlotte were both reading Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. The young Brontes were fascinated by the book. 
• Branwell later told a friend that he had experimented with opium eating after reading de Quincy. Claire Harman thinks it is unlikely, given the opportunity, Charlotte would not have joined him in some testing of the magical drug.
• Phantasms as Charlotte discribes in her Roe Head diary are like the phantoms that was commonly used to describe opium -induced reveries.
• Claire Harman uses a foot-note: Christina Alexander brought readers' attention to something Charlotte wrote 3 years after the priod in Roe Head "Now Thownshend, so suffering, how far did I err when I had recourse to the sovereign specific which a siple narcotic drug offered me"
• Opiates, laudanum drops were a common tranquilliser in the Brontes time, easily available over de druggist counter. 

There is one person who ever asked Charlotte Bronte if she was using opium during the time she was writing Vilette and that is Elizabeth Gaskell.

“I asked 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, &c.  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 she had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling asleep, – 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 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.”.

 

One of the things why I love Charlotte Bronte is because of this answer. It is giving such a good expression of creativity. I love: Specially 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 am interested in the process of creativity, I am a painter myself. And I found many testimonies of creative people like painters, writers who are telling exactly the same. And I have experienced it myself.

Elizabeth Gaskell is ending with: I cannot account for this psychologically: I only am sure that it was so, because she said so. Claire Harman is asking: Maybe Charlotte being evasive, making a rather specious distinction about the size of a dose and if so, why?

To my surprise in a review in  the theguardian  the question mark is gone. When Gaskell had asked Brontë about fact and fiction in the novels, she got some unexpected answers. Brontë was evasive about whether she had based the opium trance in Villette on personal experience (in an age when opium was readily available and often used.

It starts to become a truth. Is this the way in the past Bronte myths were created? I wonder is it enough for a biographer to use a question mark, without having a real prove? What is the real prove Claire Harman has? Did she forget that the Brontes from their childhood on were full of imagination?
Is it so incredible to think that Charlotte made her work on her own power of creating? Charlotte was a teenage girl when she was working as a teacher at Roe Head. Is it so strange she had strong visions and feelings? I had them when I was a teenager and I certainly did not use opium.

Beautiful pictures of the Haworth moors in autumn.

 

Autumn on the Haworth Moor heart-emoticon
Thanks to Vesna Armstrong © 2015

 Over on the blog: vesnaarmstrong.blogspot.co.uk

 

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