There is a letter, printed by Mrs. Gaskell, from Charlotte Bronte to Ellen Nussey, in which Miss Bronte, when a girl of seventeen, discusses the best books to read, and expresses a particular devotion to Sir Walter Scott.

Scott gathered the disparate strands of contemporary novel-writing techniques into his own hands and harnessed them to his deep interest in Scottish history and his knowledge of antiquarian lore. The technique of the omniscient narrator and the use of regional speech, localized settings, sophisticated character delineation, and romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined by him into virtually a new literary form, the historical novel. britannica

Walter Scott also had the creative and technical brilliance to reassert the place of romance at the heart of a literary culture, nationally and internationally. To read Scott is to be made aware of the strong shaping force of stories in a wider culture, and in literary history. It is fitting, then, that the period in which he was so prominent has been modeled along fictional lines of special interest to readers and historians of romance. blackwellreference

Walters Scott's study hall

a/gothicromantic.com

 

It was Byron, the story goes, who forced Sir Walter Scott to invent Romantic fiction

 

The difference between Waverly and a Gothic novel is that the setting is more than a spooky backdrop—the local people and history are crucial to the development of the story. In a sense, they are the story. This regional, folk-oriented writing, rich in quaint habits and dialect, was pioneered by Maria Edgeworth.

 

Walter Scott died in 1832. Most of his best fiction—Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe—had been written in the decade immediately following Waverly, and his final years saw both Sir Walter’s talents and finances in decline. Yet Romantic fiction’s last flowering was still to come, close by on the barren Yorkshire heath. This is the setting for Wuthering Heights (1847), a novel about an isolated farming family with deep, inbred passions, and their struggle against the civilizing influences of the outside world. Emily Brontë could hardly have been more different from Sir Walter Scott. Solitary and obscure, she, like her character Catherine Earnshaw, spent most of her life in the isolation of rural Yorkshire, and was close only with her father, brother, and her two sisters Charlotte and Anne. And her book was a very different sort of book from Waverly. Gone is the history, the marching troops, the curious rustic customs and the Byronic hero waylaid by adventure. Wuthering Heights, with its setting of a few square miles of moors, is Romantic fiction distilled to a simple flame.

 

Wuthering Heights is a singular masterpiece, a wild and haunting novel that disturbs even modern readers desensitized by graphic images and cinematic blood. It represents an introspective farewell for the Romantic tradition that, even then, was fading. walter_scott

A Byronic hero. That man of loneliness and mystery.

The Brontë children had a copy of Moore’s book, read it repeatedly, and offered it as reading to their friends. In a letter to Ellen Nussey, Charlotte writes, “for Biography, read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s Life of Nelson, Lockhart’s Life of Burns, Moore’s Life of Sheridan, Moore’s Life of Byron [. . .]” (Barker 220). Moore’s biography was especially useful to the Brontës as they interpreted and presented their own versions of Byron.

 

There were primarily three different kinds of reactions to Byron during the middle of the nineteenth century, and each Brontë sister represents a different kind of response. Emily is considered the most Romantic of the three sisters, thus it is not too surprising to find that she consistently provides a full-scale adoption of Byron in both her poetry and her novel Wuthering Heights. 

In contrast, Anne seems the most stereotypically Victorian of the three, and therefore tends to exhibit large-scale rejection of Byron in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And finally, while Charlotte’s poetry demonstrates imitation of Byron, Jane Eyre allows for co-option of him only after punishment and reform, making Charlotte somewhat ambivalent about Byron.

 
There are at least three significant conclusions that can be reached as a result of tracing Byron’s influence on female authors across the whole of the nineteenth-century. First, Byron is extremely relevant over the course of the hundred years. He is still interacting with the English, even after he’s been dead for two generations. This demonstrates how popular he really was, how varied and how lasting his image became.

His influence helped to shape many of the key literary characters in all of British

literature; his heroes become Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Rochester in Jane Eyre.

etd.lsu.edu

 

A Byronic hero:

• A Byronic hero exhibits several characteristic traits, and in many ways he can be considered a rebel. The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has many dark qualities. With regard to his intellectual capacity, self-respect, and hypersensitivity, the Byronic hero is "larger than life," and "with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his certainty of self-identity, he loses also his status as [a traditional] hero" (Thorslev 187). 
• He is usually isolated from society as a wanderer or is in exile of some kind. It does not matter whether this social separation is imposed upon him by some external force or is self-imposed. Byron's Manfred, a character who wandered desolate mountaintops, was physically isolated from society, whereas Childe Harold chose to "exile" himself and wander throughout Europe. Although Harold remained physically present in society and among people, he was not by any means "social."
• Often the Byronic hero is moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue. He also has emotional and intellectual capacities, which are superior to the average man. These heightened abilities force the Byronic hero to be arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, and extremely conscious of himself. Sometimes, this is to the point of nihilism resulting in his rebellion against life itself (Thorslev 197). In one form or another, he rejects the values and moral codes of society and because of this he is often unrepentant by society's standards. Often the Byronic hero is characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed sexual crime. Due to these characteristics, the Byronic hero is often a figure of repulsion, as well as fascination.

Tom Winnifrith comments that a "study of the Brontes' juvenilia provides confirmatory evidence of the sisters' preoccupation with the aristocracy, their emancipation from Victorian prudery, and the attraction of the Byronic hero, beautiful but damned" .

ByronicHero

wiki/Byronic_hero

Zenobia

Zenobia Ellrington was a significant figure in the Brontës' early writing and as a strong, intellectual woman, she was a forerunner of the great Brontë heroines to come. The drawing is also interesting for its connection with the Countess of Blessington, whose portrait is believed to have provided the model. Certainly Lady Blessington's literary career and private life accord well with Zenobia's role in the early writings, and Charlotte would also have been aware of her friendship with Lord Byron, whose influence on the writings of all four Brontë siblings cannot be overestimated. Although Charlotte is famous for her writing rather than her drawing, she did consider a career as a visual artist at one time.

• Medium: pencil on paper
• Dimensions: 9 x 7.9cm
• Art Fund Grant: £2750 ( Total: £11,550)
• ArtFunded in: 2009
• Vendor: Private collection

Provenance

Margaret Illingworth; purchased at Dawson's of Pall Mall, late 1960s; private collection; by descent; through Bloomsbury auctions. zenobia-marchioness-ellrington

‘The Young Men’s Magazines’

News release: Bronte Parsonage Blog

The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire is appealing for help from funding bodies and members of the public to acquire an important Charlotte Brontë manuscript which is to be auctioned at Sothebys in London on Thursday 15 December. 

The manuscript, previously untraced and unpublished, is expected to fetch between £200,000 - £300,000 and contains three works by the young Charlotte Brontë, produced in September 1830 when she was 14 years old. It is part of a series of  manuscripts known as ‘The Young Men’s Magazines’ which were inspired by a box of toy soldiers bought for Branwell Brontë by his father in 1826.

The soldiers sparked a remarkable burst of creativity from the young Brontës who began creating stories which were handwritten into tiny books intended for the toy soldiers to ‘read’. Their minute scale and miniature details, such as title pages and advertisements, were modelled on a popular publication of the time, Blackwood’s Magazine. The Brontë Museum has the largest collection of these little manuscript books in the world and they are amongst the most popular exhibits with visitors and have also been the subject of much scholarly research in recent years.

The little books chart Charlotte Bronte’s development as a writer and reveal how many of her early themes carry over into her published novels. The first piece in the manuscript to be sold at Sotheby’s recounts how a murderer is driven to madness after being haunted by his victims, and how ‘an immense fire’ burning in his head causes his bed curtains to set alight, prefiguring the well-known scene in Charlotte’s novel, Jane Eyre, in which Rochester’s insane wife sets light to his bed curtains.

This manuscript is currently in a private collection and has never previously been published. It’s certainly the most significant Brontë manuscript to come to light in decades, but we should also see this as a national treasure with significance to our broader literary heritage. It would be very sad indeed if this wonderful manuscript were not repatriated or was again lost to a private collection. We feel very strongly that it belongs here in Haworth and we’re appealing for people to get in touch if they can help us raise the funds to make sure it does return, so that visitors can enjoy it, either here at the museum or through our on-line resources.

Andrew McCarthy

Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum

As an independent charity the museum is constantly trying to raise funds to support its work, a fundamental part of which is seeking to acquire such important Brontë material and making it accessible to the public.

It’s very difficult for us to compete in a market where these items can fetch such high prices and we need the support of organizations and individuals to make sure that they are returned to Haworth. If anyone feels they can make a financial contribution to help us, this would be very much appreciated

Andrew McCarthy

Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum

I really hope

 The Bronte Parsonage Museum 

will succeed.

The manuscript belongs there!

Patrick Bronte teaching methods

Lessons were an integral part of life in the Brontë household. Patrick gave instruction to his children at regular times each day, “adapted to their respective ages and capacities” (Dearden 1857, qtd. in Barker 1994, 855), but he expected them to take responsibility for managing the outcomes. They were encouraged to commit their lessons to memory and they did so by discussing, playing and weaving new information  into their latest stories and journals. This was a far cry from the dull reciting of numbers and grammar practised in most schools at the time and satirised by Dickens in  Hard Times. At Crofton Hall, Maria and Elizabeth had used Mangnall’s Historical Questions, a standard textbook for repeated question and answer lessons that Charlotte again encountered with less rigour at Roe Head. Patrick Brontë’s teaching methods were radically different. The early biographer Mrs. Chadwick, possibly on the authority of the servant Nancy Garrs, reported that he regularly “made a practice of telling them stories to illustrate a geographical or history lesson, and they had to write it out the next morning. Consequently they thought it out in bed—a habit Charlotte continued all her life in connection with her stories” (63). His accent on storytelling and the primacy of the imagination marks Patrick Brontë as an inheritor of the Romantic tradition. For him, storytelling was as important in cultivating the mind as history and globes. He delighted in tales of adventure and regaled his  children and their friends with “strange stories . . . of the extraordinary lives and doings of people who resided in far off out of the way places but in contiguity with Haworth—stories which made one shiver and shrink from hearing, but they were full of grim humour & interest for Patrick Brontë and his children” (Brontë 1995, I: 600). It was just such local histories of family scandal and usurpation that later fed into the strange events of Emily’s Wuthering Heights. No doubt Patrick also entertained them with tales of Ireland. Charlotte’s mix of political allegory and  fairytale in  Tales of the Islanders (Brontë 1987, I: 21, 99, 140, 196) displays the same fascination for the gothic and the supernatural. Despite her shyness, she had inherited her father’s gift for storytelling and gained a reputation at Roe Head for regaling her schoolmates with stories of sleepwalkers, combining “all the horrors her imagination could create, from surging  seas, raging breakers, towering castle walls, high precipices, invisible chasms and dangers” (Brontë 1995, I: 592). 

A study of natural history and a love of nature was also part of Patrick Brontë’s Romantic ethos. Natural Theology sanctioned the study of nature as a means of revering the earthly grandeurs and design of Creation. Natural history could be justified as morally useful, and the Evangelical movement, which Patrick Brontë supported, gave religious sanction to such pursuits as bird watching and geology. Thus he subscribed to Wordsworth’s view that the beauties of nature were a beneficent force, and he allowed his children to roam freely on the moors accompanied by a servant and later by the family dog. Locals reported that he himself took the children with him on his own “rambles among the hills” (Barker 1994, 108), drawing attention to particular birds, plants or geological formations. 

His books by the naturalists Bewick, Audubon, Goldsmith, and “White of Selbourne” (recommended by Charlotte to one of her  school friends) indicate the extent of his interest in this field and his belief that the hand of providence was in every page of the “great book of  Nature”, the young Charlotte’s second “best book” and a phrase often repeated in the Brontë juvenilia (Alexander and Smith 2003, 338). Patrick’s own verse typically proclaims the beauty of nature as a manifestation of God: 

With heart enraptured, oft have I surveyed, 

The vast, and bounteous works, that God has made. 

The tinkling rill, the floods astounding roar, 

The river’s brink, and ocean’s frothy shore

Patrick Bronte teaching methods

The Brontes and the Bible.

In all his teachings and writing Patrick had emphasised the importance of reading the Bible and his children knew their Bibles inside out. The children each had their own Bible and Prayer Book. Emily was given a bible by her father. Anne had a Book of Prayer from her godmother Fanny Outhwaite and a Bible by her other godmother Elisabeth Firth. Charlotte's New Testament was a gift of the Morgans. 
Patrick was to use the various copies of the Bible and Prayer Books as a tool for instructing the children in the classics. 
the Brontes and religion
The Evangelical Revival

Sketches from Branwell Bronte

 

Branwell Brontë was a promising writer and artist with a rich imagination. Although he was the first of the Brontë siblings to appear in print, he would never gain money or success and was destined to live in the shadow of his three sisters.

In his novel Branwell, Douglas Martin describes how: As the only son, Branwell … is expected to make the fortune for the family and immortalize the Brontë name. Given no formal education, he is painstakingly tutored by his father, and writes endless stories and poems with his sisters in 

their small parsonage home. Haunted by the early deaths of his mother and sister; both named Maria, Branwell is unable to reach his heart’s desire: to be a great artist. He roams from job to job, as painter, railway man, and tutor, constantly writing and sketching, as his sisters spin and fume on the dark moor with the stories that will immortalise them. 

 

maths.mq.edu.au/bronte

branwell_bronte sketches

The life of Feild Marshal the Right Honourable Alexan[d]er Percy, autograph manuscript, 1835

 

leeds branwell

Branwell Brontë, The Monthly Intelligencer

 

Branwell Bronte The Monthly Intelligencer

The inspiration and imagination of the Brontes.

In the autumn of 1825, Tabitha Aykroyd was employed as cook and housekeeper at Haworth. Her influence on the Brontë children, particularly on Emily, was monumental. Tabby, as she was known, was a native of Haworth and brought to the children the folklore of the Yorkshire moors:


 She told of fairies that danced by the bed-sides in the moonlight, and of those who had seen them. When the peat glowed red on the kitchen hearth and shadows stretched across the stone floor, Tabby made the warm air seem alive with creatures of the fern and heather. (Simpson, 27)

The imaginations of the Brontë children, fired by Tabby's fascinating folktales, encountered the door, in 1826, to further development when the Reverend Mr. Brontë presented twelve wooden soldiers to Branwell. The four siblings created characters and islands around these toys and developed an oral literature that would later be transformed into poetry, constituting the well-known "Gondal" saga that Emily and Anne continued long after Branwell and Charlotte lost interest. Of special note is Emily's choice of names for her special heroes: Sir Walter Scott and the Lockharts. The literary reference seems to indicate an acquaintance with literature, an idea reinforced by Charlotte's "History of the Year 1829": 

We take two and see three newspapers a week. We take the Leeds Intelligencer, Tory, and the Leeds Mercury, Whig, edited by Mr. Baines, and his brother, son-in-law, and his two sons, Edward and Talbot. We see the John Bull; it is a high Tory, very violent. Mr. Driver lends us it, as likewise Blackwood's Magazine, the most able periodical there is. The editor is Mr. Christopher North, an old man seventy-four years of age; the 1st of April is his birth-day; his company are Timothy Tickler, Morgan O'Doherty, Macrabin Mordecai, Mullion, Warnell, and James Hogg, a man of most extraordinary genius, a Scottish shepherd. Our plays were established; Young Men, June 1826; Our Fellows, July, 1827; Islanders, December, 1827. These are our three great plays, that are not kept secret. Emily's and my best plays were established the 1st of December, 1827; the others March, 1828. Best plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones. Their nature I need not write on paper, for I think I shall always remember them. The Young Men's play took its rise from some wooden soldiers Branwell had; Our Fellows from Aesop's Fables; and the Islanders from several events which happened. (Qtd. in Lane, 63)

The Young Men’s play gave rise to an imaginary colony in Africa called Angria, peopled by the characters represented by the toy soldiers. Although all four of the children were involved in the play at first, Emily and Anne soon branched off into their own imaginary kingdoms, leaving Charlotte and Branwell to manage the affairs of Angria by themselves. Both brother and sister wrote stories, poems, articles, and histories about the colony, and it seems that they were often at odds with each other regarding how events should proceed. Because many of the Angrian tales do not survive, scholars of the Brontë juvenilia face difficulties in piecing together details of the characters and the overall story of the colony.


Charlotte eventually became the dominant creative force behind the play, and she developed complex, interconnected plots that drew on the often-stormy relationships between several main characters. These plots were also strongly influenced by recent events in the political world, as well as by Charlotte’s current choice of reading material. Magical elements permeate the early stories, in which the four siblings feature as all-powerful Genii who control the colony. By the later stories, Charlotte was more interested in the political machinations and romantic entanglements that she wove into her complex plots, leaving the world of fairy tales behind. Her writing shows the influence of various histories and legends, stories like the Arabian Nights, and the literature of Byron, Scott, and contemporary writers.                  

The inspiration and imagination of the Brontes.

Belshazzar's Feast   John Martin

The children's imagination was also influenced by three prints of engravings in mezzotint by John Martin around 1820. Charlotte and Branwell made copies of the prints Belshazzar's Feast, Déluge, and Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (1816), which hung on the walls of the parsonage.^[38]

Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon

Martin's fantastic architecture is reflected in Glass Town and Angria, where he appears himself among Branwell's Juvenilia^[39] and under the name of Edward de Lisle, the greatest painter and portraitist of Verdopolis,^[40] the capital of Glass Town. One of Sir Edward de Lisle's major works, Les Quatre Genii en Conseil, is inspired by Martin's illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost.^[41] Together with Byron, John Martin seems to have been one of the artistic influences essential to the Brontës' universe.^38]

john-martin

The inspiration and imagination of the Brontes. What did the Bronte children read?

The periodicals that Patrick Brontë subscribed to were a mine of information for his children. The Leeds Intelligencer, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, conservative and well written, but better than the Quarterly Review that defended the same political ideas whilst addressing a less refined readership, (the reason why Mr Brontë did not read it);^[33] were exploited in every detail, and Blackwood's Magazine in particular, was not only the source of their knowledge of world affairs, but a map of Africa published in it in July 1831, interested them immediately because it confirmed their world of Glass Town which they had situated in West Africa.^[34] Their knowledge of geography was completed by Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography of which there was a copy at the parsonage.^[35]

Blackwood's was conceived as a rival to the Whig-supporting Edinburgh Review. Compared to the rather staid tone of The Quarterly Review, the other main Tory work, Maga was ferocious and combative. This is due primarily to the work of its principal writer John Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Christopher North. Never trusted with the editorship, he nevertheless wrote much of the magazine along with the other major contributors John Gibson Lockhart and William Maginn. Their mixture of satire, reviews and criticism both barbed and insightful was extremely popular and the magazine quickly gained a large audience.

For all its conservative credentials the magazine published the works of radicals of British romanticism such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through Wilson the magazine was a keen supporter of William Wordsworth, parodied the Byronmania common in Europe and angered John Keats, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt by referring to their works as the "Cockney School of Poetry". The controversial style of the magazine got it into trouble when, in 1821, John Scott, the editor of theLondon Magazine, fought a duel with Jonathan Henry Christie over libellous statements in the magazine. John Scott was shot and killed.^[1]

By the mid-1820s Lockhart and Maginn had departed to London, the former to edit the Quarterly and the latter to write for a range of journals, though principally for Fraser's Magazine. After this, John Wilson was by far the most important writer for the magazine and gave it much of its tone, popularity and notoriety. By the 1840s when Wilson was contributing less, its circulation declined. Aside from essays it also printed a good deal of horror fiction and this is regarded as an important influence on later Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and Edgar Allan Poe; Poe even satirised the magazine's obsessions in "Loss of Breath: A Tale A La Blackwood," and "How to Write a Blackwood Article." The magazine never regained its early success but it still held a dedicated readership throughout the British Empireamongst those in the Colonial Service. One late nineteenth century triumph was the first publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of the magazine.
Blackwood's_Magazine
Quarterly+Review