'The Bank-Bill reached me safely: I assure you I felt rather proud of its amount;

I read this on the Facebook page of the Bronte Society.

Does anyone know what this 500 pound would be worth now?

After receiving news that Shirley has been accepted for publication, Charlotte writes the following to George Smith on 14 September 1849:

'The Bank-Bill reached me safely: I assure you I felt rather proud of its amount; I am pleased to be able to earn so much, for Papa will be pleased too when I tell him. I should like to take care of this money: it is Papa's great wish that I should realize a small independency if you could give me a word of advice respecting the wisest and safest manner of investing this £500, I should be very much obliged to you. I have already a few shares in a Railway, but these are so much fallen in value of late that I hardly like to venture on so uncertain an investment a second time. A hint on the subject - provided it costs you no trouble - would be very acceptable to me.'

Charlotte Bronte, a Tory

Politically a Tory, she preached tolerance rather than revolution. She held high moral principles and, despite her shyness, was prepared to argue for her beliefs.
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The Taylors were an old and respected, but unconventional, Yorkshire textiles family. The six children were encouraged by their father, a fierce radical in religion and politics, to develop independence of thought and action and freedom of expression.

Joshua Taylor was an educated, cultured and strongly cosmopolitan influence upon them. The Taylors exported cloth to Europe and America and had strong European connections. They often travelled in Europe on business and pleasure and had relatives living in Brussels. In the 1830s Charlotte Brontë sometimes stayed at Red House. She greatly enjoyed her visits, writing that:

‘… the society of the Taylors is one of the most rousing

leasures I have ever known.’ (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, 15 April 1839)
 

Mary Taylor later wrote about Charlotte’s visits:

‘We used to dispute about politics and religion. She, a Tory and clergyman’s daughter, was always in a minority of one in our house of violent Dissent and Radicalism.’ (Mary Taylor to Mrs Gaskell, 1856) RedHouse-MaryTaylor ----------------------------------

Tory refers to those holding a political philosophy (Toryism) commonly regarded as based on a traditionalist and conservative view which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom. English Tories from the time of the Glorious Revolution up until the Reform Bill of 1832 were characterized by strong monarchist tendencies, support for the Church of England, and hostility to reform, while the Tory Party was an actual organization which held power intermittently throughout the same period.^[11] Since 1832, the term "Tory" is commonly used to refer to the Conservative Party and its members. wiki/Tory  

The Conservative Party traces its origins to a faction, rooted in the 18th-century Whig Party, that coalesced around William Pitt the Younger (Prime Minister of Great Britain 1783–1801 and 1804–1806). Originally known as "Independent Whigs", "Friends of Mr Pitt", or "Pittites", after Pitt's death the term "Tory" came into use. This was an allusion to the Tories, a political grouping that had existed from 1678, but which had no organisational continuity with the Pittite party. From about 1812 on the name "Tory" was commonly used for the newer party. wiki/Conservative_Party
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Mr. Bronte himself had been living amongst these very people in 1812, as he was then clergyman at Hartshead, not three miles from Rawfolds; and, as I have mentioned, it was in these perilous times that he began his custom of carrying a loaded pistol continually about with him. For not only his Tory politics, but his love and regard for the authority of the law, made him despise the cowardice of the surrounding magistrates, who, in their dread of the Luddites, refused to interfere so as to prevent the destruction of property. The clergy of the district were the bravest men by far. There was a Mr. Roberson, of Heald's Hall, a friend of Mr. Bronte's, who has left a deep impression of himself on the public mind. He lived near Heckmondwike, a large, straggling, dirty village, not two miles from Roe Head. It was principally inhabited by blanket weavers, who worked in their own cottages; and Heald's Hall is the largest house in the village, of which Mr. Roberson was the vicar. At his own cost, he built a handsome church at Liversedge, on a hill opposite the one on which his house stood, which was the first attempt in the West Riding to meet the wants of the overgrown population, and made many personal sacrifices for his opinions, both religious and political, which were of the true old-fashioned Tory stamp. He hated everything which he fancied had a tendency towards anarchy. He was loyal in every fibre to Church and king; and would have proudly laid down his life, any day, for what he believed to be right and true. But he was a man of an imperial will, and by it he bore down opposition, till tradition represents him as having something grimly demoniac about him. egaskell/cbronte
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Disraeli is not the only early Victorian Tory novelist whose brilliance puts today's fictionally challenged Conservative MPs in the shade. This writer was intensely interested in politics from early childhood and was reactionary enough to have opposed the franchise-extending Reform Bill of 1832. Perhaps surprisingly to those who see her as a radical feminist, I'm talking about Charlotte Brontë, who made her contribution to the "condition of England" novel in 1849, a few years after Disraeli completed his trilogy.
Shirley, Charlotte Brontë's second published novel, is a story of industrial unrest and class conflict which confounds some of today's critics with its failure to address Chartism. Yet to appreciate it artistically it's important not to make anachronistic judgments. Indeed, putting it in a Disraelian context might be a new way of making sense of this novel which many readers, fresh from the exhilaration of reading the more instantly appealing Jane Eyre, have found so strange and difficult.
Though she retained her hero-worship of the Duke of Wellington, Brontë had by 1849 modified her politics to the extent that she could no longer be accused of being an intransigent "high Tory". The high Tories in Shirley are shown to be as limited in their way as the Whig manufacturer whose heart has become a machine. Instead, in the character of Shirley Keeldar, Brontë offers something that looks suspiciously like a modified Young England Toryism. As an enlightened aristocrat, Shirley is the fount of regeneration in the district: not only does she relieve the distress of the poor with her paternalistic charity, but the manufacturing interests are dependent on her too if they are to survive (in a more humane form). She is also close to the land, which she worships as mother nature in Romantic vein, and prefers feeling and imagination to reason and commerce.  In her flambuoyant disregard for social convention, Shirley has what could almost be called a female Byronism which recalls the young Disraeli. If, politically, the novel has something in common with Young England, aesthetically it harks back to Disraeli's earlier works. Despite the dazzling figure of Shirley Keeldar, though, the novel is fundamentally anti-idealistic. Its anti-Utopian stance sets it in a line of Tory pessimism going right back to Swift and Dr Johnson. guardianreview

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Besides Mary Taylor's deep friendship with Charlotte Bronte, there are many other motivations to read this fascinating novel. Mary Taylor is wonderful at descriping the working class as complex and interesting characters and her politics are more radical than Charlotte's. Taylor manages to capture the Yorkshire dialect without snobishness. Charlotte was a political Tory/conservative and could often write harsly of the poor working class struggle for equality and respect (see her novel Shirley). And for anyone who has studied Victorian feminism, this novel is a great reflecting point. It's a shame that Mary Taylor did NOT save her letters from Charlotte nor hand them over to biographer and fellow Victorian novelist aElizabeth Gaskell, because the intellectual and literary discussions the two writers would have engaged in would have been fascinating to read -- especially their positions on women's education, marriage, children, and careers. Miss-Miles-Tale-Yorkshire-Years 

Weblogs and the Brontes

Charlotte Brontë’s fleshy female characters are often portrayed as requiring discipline and self-control. Corpulence is equated with mental inferiority inVillette as the Belgian pupils are depicted as lacking the requisite discipline for intellectual pursuits. Lucy Snowe describes the dining habits of one of her students whose:

quantity of household bread, butter, and stewed fruit, she would habitually consume at “second dejeuner” was a real world’s wonder – to be exceeded only by the fact of her actually pocketing slices she could not eat.[1]  

Bronte Horoine
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G.H. Lewes, above, known best today mostly for being the lover of George Elliot, was an influential  journalist, author and literary critic of the mid 19th century. He  incurred Charlotte Bronte’s wrath by intimating, after the publication of Jane Eyre, that she might profit by writing less melodramatically, and gave her Jane Austen as an exemplar and inspiration. 

Charlotte wrote: 
"If I ever do write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call “melodrama”; I think so, but I am not sure. I think too I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s “mild eyes”; “to finish more and be more subdued”; but neither am I sure of that. When authors write best, or at least, when they wrote most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master, which will have its own way, putting  out of view all behests but its own, dictating words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new moulding characters, giving unthought- of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is this not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?…

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say you would rather  have written “Pride and Prejudice” or “Tom Jones’” than any of the Waverly Novels? I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with near borders and delicate flowers- but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy- no open country- no fresh air- no blue hill- no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in they elegant but confined houses.These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.

Now I can understand admiration fo George Sand- for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout(…yet she has a grasp of mind which if I cannot fully comprehend I very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound; MIss Austen is only shrewd and observant. Am I wrong – or were you hasty in what you said?

 Austen Only
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Chapter 1 

Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good. But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of this century: late years—present years are dusty, sunburnt, hot, arid; we will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the midday in slumber, and dream of dawn. 

Moore placed his hand on his cousin's shoulder, stooped, and left a kiss on her forehead..
Gutenberg

Delaisse writes: I'm so excited - reading Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, and there's a passage that describes the moors where I live, right where I live! The moors I've mentioned many many times on this blog! I have to share the passage with you right now (even though I was in bed and about to go asleep!). It's from the twelfth chapter, titled "Shirley and Caroline" 

- Shirley said she liked the green sweep of the common turf, and, better still, the heath on its ridges, for the heath reminded her of moors: she had seen the moors when she was travelling on the borders near Scotland. She remembered particularly a district traversed one long afternoon, on a sultry but sunless day in summer: they journeyed from noon till sunset, over what seemed a boundless waste of deep heath, and nothing had they seen but wild sheep: nothing heard but the cries of wild birds.

'I know how the heath would look on such a day,' said Caroline; 'purple black: a deep shade of the sky-tint, and that would be livid.'

'Yes, quite livid, with brassy edges to the clouds, and here and there a white gleam, more ghastly than the lurid tinge, which, as you looked at it, you momentarily expected would kindle into blinding lightening.'

'Did it thunder?'

'It muttered distant peals, but the storm did not break till evening, after we had reached our inn: that inn being an isolated house at the foot of a range of mountains.'

'Did you watch the clouds come down over the mountains?'

'I did: I stood at the window an hour watching them. The hills seemed rolled in a sullen mist, and when the rain fell in whitening sheets, suddenly they were blotted from the prospect: they were washed from the world.'

On this day in 1849 Charlotte completed her novel Shirley

Charlotte Brontë's second published novel, Shirley (1849), followed by two years the very popular Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. In Shirley, Brontë abandoned first-person narration by the main female character—which she had successfully employed in the earlier effort and which would reappear in Villette (1853)—in favor of an omniscient third-person narrator and not one, but two, principle characters, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. In a further departure from her earlier success, Brontë moved out of the realm of the purely personal to include elements of the social and political as well. Set in Yorkshire during the time of the Luddite unrest—a labor movement that began in 1811-1812 in an effort to protect the interests of the working class—the novel consists of two narrative strands woven together, one involving the struggles of workers against mill owners, and the other involving the romantic entanglements of the two heroines.

e text /brontec/shirley/
Work in progres /scharlotte-brontes-shirley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It was not all machinery that the Luddites opposed, but rather "all machinery hurtful to commonality".
www.mindfully.org/Reform/Luddite-History
yas.org.uk/content/treasures/luddites

Charlotte Bronte, of all people, gives the best description of the Luddites’ motivation in her novel Shirley. She describes how at the same time as the war closed export markets for Yorkshire’s woollen mills, “…certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life.”

She then goes on to give a short lesson that every political and business leader should learn by heart. “Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings.” in-praise-of-the-luddites

Shirley

ShirleyContemporary critics found Shirley (1849) inferior to Jane Eyre. In the Edinburgh Review, G. H. Lewes complained that the novel lacked “all unity in consequence of defective art” . However, recent criticism has discovered in Shirley a significant condition-of-England theme as well as a clearly feminist discourse. Patricia Ingham, for instance, considers Shirley an industrial novel that successfully tackles both gender and class issues during the Industrial Revolution in England.

Shirley was published at the end of the “Hungry Forties,” a decade of profound social unrest. In the novel, Charlotte Brontë both refracted some of Carlyle’s concerns raised in “Signs of the Times” (text) and “Chartism” as well as Disraeli’s anxiety about the two nation divide and also blended them with the Woman Question. The novel has a complex plot: an unromantic tale with two interpolated social commentaries: on the history of the Luddite riots in the cloth-making district of Yorkshire, and on the struggle for female independence from male dominance in patriarchal society. At the outset, the narrator assures its readers that they will not find narrative a conventional romance.

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.

In other words, Shirley, which differs considerably from Jane Eyre, declares its affinity with Benjamin Disraeli’s Sibyl and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South. The novel contains an explicit social discourse about the Condition of England aimed at highlighting the class and gender divide and its possible social consequences.

In early 1812, Luddism spread to Yorkshire, where croppers, a small and highly skilled group of cloth finishers, turned their anger on the new shearing frame that they feared would put them out of work. Soon Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act which made machine-breaking a capital offence. The following passage, in which Brontë proves to have a fine ear for the local dialect, suggests that the author sympathises with workers who are most concerned with the loss of employment. They do not want to destroy machines because of ignorance but because they believe that factory owners will constantly reduce the number of employees thanks to the introduction of labour-saving machinery.

“I’ve not much faith I’ Moses Barraclough,” said he; “and I would speak a word to you myseln, Mr. Moore. It’s out o’ no ill-will that I’m here, for my part; it’s just to mak’ a effort to get things straightened, for they’re sorely acrooked. Ye see we’re ill off, — varry ill off: wer families is poor and pined. We’re thrawn out o‘ work wi’ these frames: we can get nought to do: we can earn nought. What is to be done? Mun we say, wisht! and lig us down and dee? Nay: I’ve no grand words at my tongue’s end, Mr. Moore, but I feel that it wad be a low principle for a reasonable man to starve to death like a dumb cratur’: — I will n’t do’t. I’m not for shedding blood: I’d neither kill a man nor hurt a man; and I’m not for pulling down mills and breaking machines: for, as ye say, that way o” going on ’ll niver stop invention; but I’ll talk, — I’ll mak’ as big a din as ever I can. Invention may be all right, but I know it isn’t right for poor folks to starve. Them that governs mun find a way to help us: they mun mak’ fresh orderations. Ye’ll say that’s hard to do: — so mich louder mun we shout out then, for so mich slacker will t’ Parliament-men be to set on to a tough job""

Brontë did not witness the Luddite riots, although she had some first-hand accounts of them from her father, who sometimes acted on behalf of the authorities during the riots. Like Carlyle and Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë is concerned with the plight of the industrial workers. She is aware that the revolt against the unemployment caused by the introduction of machines during the early phase of the Industrial Revolution might lead to major social upheavals. However, what Brontë eventually offers is a simplified solution to remedy the antagonism between masters and workers. Her solution is based on an idealised co-operation and co-existence between benevolent masters and loyal workers. As Patricia Ingham points out in the conclusion of her analysis of Shirley “The novel speaks for the working class but still cannot let them speak for themselves. They remain what Carlyle in Chartism (1839) called ’that great dumb toiling class which cannot speak’”

The Woman Question — that is, issues regarding women’s legal status and their roles in both the public and private spheres — parallels the Condition-of-England Question in the novel. The eponymous character, Shirley Keeldar, is one of the first independent and strong-willed heroines in English literature, who anticipates the New Woman at the end of the Victorian era. Shirley’s foil, Caroline Helstone, represents a conventional Victorian female: she is shy, submissive and self-repressed. Both women struggle, each in their own way, to find happiness and fulfilment in life, but the epilogue of the novel demonstrates that options available to women were very limited. They both fail to find self-fulfilment outside conventional marriage.

As Rosemarie Bodenheimer has demonstrated, “paternalism is an assumption central to Charlotte Brontë’s imagination of human relations.”  Brontë proposes in Shirley paternalism as a solution to both industrial disputes and the Woman Question. Paternalism seems to have been advocated by Victorian writers as an alternative to a number of social ills. Victorian paternalism was a consequence of the laissez-faire doctrine. It offered an alternative to free-market economy by defining the relationship between employers and employees based on humane principles. Paternalism propagated the vision of an industrial society as a big hierarchical family with benevolent employers and dependent employees who revived the old master-servant relationship.

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