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GASKELL AND THE BRONTËS

Literary Manuscripts of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) and the Brontës
from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds


The Library of the University of Leeds is one of the most substantial research libraries in the United Kingdom. Its origin, like the University's itself, is in science. Edward Allen Brotherton (1856-1930), whose benefactions transformed the Library in its formative years, was born in Manchester to a family involved in the textile trade, the eldest of six children. From a modest beginning, he established the largest private chemical manufacturing firm in the Great Britain and increasingly enjoyed a significant public life as a politician. He was Member of Parliament for Wakefield, 1902-10 and 1918-22; Mayor of Wakefield, 1902-03; and Lord Mayor of Leeds, 1913-14. At the outbreak of the 1914-18 War he raised and equipped at his own expense the 15th Battalion, the West Yorkshire Regiment (known as the 'Leeds Pals'). Created baronet in 1918, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Brotherton of Wakefield in 1929. Two years previously, he had given some £100,000 to pay for a new library building for the University of Leeds, an institution that had grown from the Leeds School of Medicine (founded 1831) and the Yorkshire College of Science (1874) and had been formally opened as a university in 1904. At the laying ceremony of the foundation stone in 1930, Lord Brotherton announced his intention to leave his own private library of books and manuscripts to the expanding University. The Brotherton Library, with its imposing domed reading room, opened in 1936. In due course, it gratefully received the bequest of its benefactor's personal collection, to be known as The Brotherton Collection. With the addition of the Parkinson Court and Parkinson Tower, prominent features in the modern cityscape, the Brotherton Library complex assumed the shape that, from its Woodhouse Lane elevation, has not changed to this day.

Particularly rich in nineteenth-century material, Lord Brotherton's extraordinary collection included a major set of poetic manuscripts by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and associated correspondence. A substantial amount of material relating to Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was given to the Library together with a considerable collection of manuscripts by the Brontë family, concentrating on those of the unhappy and ill-starred brother of the novelists, Branwell Brontë. The Brontë and Gaskell material - its purchase guided by W. J. Wise and Clement Shorter - formed already a significant collection when Lord Brotherton died and successive librarians at Leeds have added to it. Chris Sheppard, the current Head of Special Collections, has been particularly active in developing its nineteenth-century strengths. The most substantial Brontë manuscript items Sheppard has purchased for the Library are the pair of Branwell's Angrian stories 'Real Life in Verdopolis' and 'The life of ... Percy' bought at Christie's New York (Grolier sale) in April 1980, and a group of 5 poems by Branwell acquired from Sotheby's, London, in December 1996. The most substantial addition to the Gaskell collection was the manuscript of Sylvia's Lovers bought at Christie's London in June 1986. Nineteenth-century material in general in Special Collections has most recently been augmented by the donation of the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, which includes a further Charlotte Brontë letter, material by Beardsley, George Eliot, Beerbohm, Ruskin, Baron Corvo, and a major collection of Oscar Wilde manuscripts and publications.

Writing to an autograph collector, Elizabeth Gaskell's widowed husband William regretted that no reliable likeness of her survived. 'I'm sorry to say there is no good photograph of my dear wife', Mr Gaskell wrote in August 1879, fourteen years after her death: 'The only one, indeed, which exists . does not at all do her justice'.1 But if a photographic record of Elizabeth Gaskell's physical appearance has only inadequately been preserved, she left behind a substantial corpus of letters, many held in the Brotherton Library, and other personal writings, that provide a different, more convincing picture. For the late nineteenth-century novelist and journalist Margaret Oliphant (1828-97), the business of writing and the duties of domesticity were closely related: at once pulling in different directions but also, in complex ways, mutually supportive. Gaskell would also manage authorship with her domestic, family role; indeed, her fiction drew imaginative sustenance from the structures of family life. It is neatly appropriate that one of the earliest items of substance in the Leeds collection is, accordingly, an engaging instance of Gaskell's representation of her family before the beginning of her public career. In the pages of the 1835 diary, included on reel 2, dedicated to her then 6-month old daughter Marianne, the 25-year old Elizabeth Gaskell charts with affectionate detail the daily stages of her young daughter's growing up. Writing and domesticity are in responsive union. 'Marianne is now becoming every day more and more interesting', Gaskell observes: 'She looks at and tries to take hold of everything. She has pretty good ideas of distance and does not try to catch sunbeams now, as she did two months ago. Her sense of sight is much improved lately in seeing objects at a distance, and distinguishing them. For instance I had her in my arms today in the drawing-room, and her Papa was going out of the gate, and she evidently knew him, smiled and kicked She begins to show a decided preference to those she likes.'.2 The careful observer would become in due course one of Victorian England's most celebrated fictional realists.

The family theme continues in the Brotherton's collection of Gaskell's letters to her daughters, the now older Marianne (Polly), and Margaret (Meta), Florence, and Julia included in reel 3 (12-15). Describing her time to her children while away from home, Gaskell's letters are full, informal, affectionate; her detailed accounts of friends and family members, clothes, food, and furniture, are periodically broken off by efforts to corral her offspring into writing more frequently and more promptly. Gaskell took full advantage of the regularity of the mid-nineteenth-century postal service: it allowed her almost the illusion of being physically present in the family home. These letters were not an opportunity for the author to try out ideas for stories. Her public life is largely excluded in the witty correspondence about day-to-day events. But this is not true of her correspondence with friends or acquaintances from the wider literary world, including the small but significant collection of letters to John Forster (1812-76), friend and later biographer of Charles Dickens. Elizabeth Gaskell moves on a wider stage and in a richer culture among such men and women. A continuing story in the Forster correspondence is Gaskell's effort to obtain a copy of Tennyson's poems, preferably from Tennyson, for the aging Lancashire working-class radical, weaver, journalist, and poet Samuel Bamford (1788-1872). Unable to afford a copy, even second hand, Bamford had committed many of the Laureate's poems to memory. Through Forster's help, Elizabeth is able to give the poet, who long ago had been gaoled for allegedly 'inciting discontent' at the meeting in Manchester which became the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819, a presentation copy from Tennyson himself, to his delight. The final description of the old radical, standing entranced in the street reading 'Sleeping Beauty', is neither sentimental nor unconvincing. Gaskell's last comment to Forster could hardly better reveal the generosity behind her own action: 'Thank you for the great pleasure I have had'.3

Two celebrated women from the public world appear in other parts of the Brotherton's Gaskell correspondence. To the hymn translator and educationalist Catherine Winkworth (1827-78) on 15 October 1854 Gaskell wrote admiringly and at great length about Florence Nightingale - 'She is like a saint . Is she not like St Elizabeth of Hungary?' 4 But it is an earlier letter - 25 August 1850 - to the same correspondent that contains a description of perhaps the most significant of Elizabeth's meetings with other prominent women. Visiting Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth (the physician, educationalist, and sanitation expert James Kay Shuttleworth was the author of, among other works, the influential Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester [1832]), Mrs Gaskell enters the drawing room to meet

"a little lady in black silk gown, whom I could not see at first for the dazzle in the room; she came up & shook hands with me at once. I went up to unbonnet &c. came down to tea, the little lady worked away and hardly spoke; but I had time for a good look at her. She is (as she calls herself) undeveloped; thin and

more than a head shorter than I, soft brown hair not so dark as mine; eyes (very good and expressive looking straight & open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth and many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad, and rather over-hanging. She has a very sweet voice, rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort, admirable and just befitting the occasion. There is nothing overstrained but perfectly simple."5

Thus Elizabeth Gaskell's first impression of Charlotte Brontë, whose controversial Life of Charlotte Brontë she would publish in 1857. Brontë appears under this scrutiny in poor condition - 'tiny', 'reddish face', missing teeth, undeveloped. Much of the rest of Gaskell's account in the Winkworth correspondence dwells on the hardships of living at Haworth and with the ogre Gaskell perceives as the half-mad Patrick Brontë. The seeds of her later sturdy criticism of the sisters' home and father are obvious. Patrick, she told Catherine Winkworth, was subject to fits of rage which he visited in violence not on people but on household objects; he sawed up dining room chairs despite the pleas of his sobbing wife, he filled a room with choking smoke as he angrily burnt a hearthrug to exorcise some personal demon. He was, in Gaskell's reckoning, a man utterly careless of his children. He 'never taught the girls anything', she claimed, he barely expressed a word at the publication of Jane Eyre, and was indifferent to their comfort. '"At 19"', Gaskell says Charlotte told her, '"I should have been thankful for an allowance of 1d [one penny] a week. I asked my father, but he said What did women want with money[?]"'6

Such views went more or less unmodified into the first edition of the Life. And they were contested. The stories of the chair sawing and hearthrug burning - which went straight into the book - met with flat repudiation from those who knew Patrick, and Gaskell, reluctantly, removed them from the third edition. Juliet Barker thinks that Lady Kay Shuttleworth had some responsibility for embroidering tales about Patrick and indeed about the awfulness of Haworth.7 Gaskell's account - which was the standard life of Charlotte for over a century - certainly needs to be measured against Barker's revisionary 1994 biography. There, Gaskell's criticisms are read as a strategy for defending Charlotte against a general social disapproval:

"Mrs Gaskell explained her inclusion of the sensational stories about Patrick's 'eccentricities' by saying, 'I hold the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of the life of his daughter.' Yet those who knew Patrick well, including his friends and his servants, did not recognize him in Mrs Gaskell's portrait: the words they used to describe him were uniformly 'kind', 'affable', 'considerate' and 'genial'. Like her picture of 'barbaric' Haworth, Mrs Gaskell's portrayal of Patrick as a half-made recluse who wanted nothing to do with his children was intended to explain away those characteristics of his daughter's writings which the Victorians found unacceptable."8

Lord Brotherton's collection of Gaskell material was substantial. But the recent purchase of the partially incomplete manuscript of Sylvia's Lovers (1863) added to it considerably. Having become more or less a literary celebrity with Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), Gaskell's association with 'condition of England' fiction - industrial fiction, or social problem fiction as it would be subsequently known - was solidified with North and South in 1854-5. This novel about Margaret Hale's removal from a southern village to the northern town of Milton and subsequent involvement with the lives of working families and the industrialist John Thornton sensitively dramatized debates - without obvious parti pris - about the responsibilities of workers and employers in the new industrial centres of the mid-century. The Swedish novelist and feminist Frederika Bremer wrote to Gaskell on 29 September 1854, in a letter in the Leeds collection, to describe the ethical power of her early fiction. The novel, Bremer said, 'had never a larger and nobler sphere of action than now a days' and Gaskell's interventions in debates about the relationships between workers and employers, about the misunderstandings of classes and conditions of modern industrial labour, exemplified the kind of moral labour that Bremer thought the novel could do. But Gaskell's later fiction marked a change of direction. Sylvia's Lovers was not a novel of modern industrial life. Set in a Whitby ('Monkshaven') during the Napoleonic wars, it was, to be sure, immersed in knowledge of one form of commercial activity - whaling - but its principal focus was on the complexity and tragedies of the inner life of ordinary men and women. The story of Sylvia Robson's love for Charley Kinraid, and the desperate treachery of the usually decent Philip Hepburn to secure her hand in marriage, moves from the quietly observed world of early nineteenth-century provincial England into a domestic narrative of profound resonance about the human costs of morally ambivalent action. The manuscript includes suggestive alterations - the Yorkshire dialect seems to have given Gaskell most difficulty - and it is smudged by the compositors working directly from the author's unmarginated foolscap. It is incomplete: pages 1-146, for instance, of volume I, and 1-10, 167-180, of volume 2, are missing. Single sheets in the possession of other collectors occasionally come up for sale.

Letters in the Brotherton Collection reveal the genesis of Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë. But manuscripts by and about the Brontës themselves form the material of the second half of this microfilm publication and, appropriately, include Charlotte Brontë's accounts of meeting Gaskell. The Brontës' home at the Parsonage in Haworth is close to Leeds, just north west of Bradford, and is now open to the public as a museum and library. There, the Revd. Patrick Brontë served as perpetual curate from 1820 till his death in 1861, and his extraordinary daughters and son lived and died. Their mother - Maria - had passed away in 1821 and little is known of her life. But the Brotherton collection includes a glimpse of her religious thinking in the apparently unpublished manuscript of her somewhat severe essay on 'The Advantage of Poverty in Religious Concerns'. This takes the opportunity to find spiritual gain in material loss. 'What is poverty', Maria asks, 'Nothing - or rather a something which, with the assistance, and blessing of our Gracious Master, will greatly promote our spiritual welfare, & tend to increase, & strengthen our efforts to gain that Land of pure delight' 9 Pure delight was elsewhere for Mrs Brontë; hardship merely advantageous in drawing one closer to it: it must have been a doctrine with which the poor of Haworth were not unfamiliar.

Although lacking a major literary manuscript like that of Sylvia's Lovers, the Brotherton collection of writing by Charlotte Brontë provides suggestive biographical evidence. Her exercise book from her time in Brussels at the beginning of the 1840s shows her efforts to learn fluent French and to translate Walter Scott, while another volume includes the beginning of a curious meditation, in French, on 'L'Immensit de Dieu'. There are glimpses of opinions on religious subjects, and her desire for a new Dr Arnold - in correspondence on reel 5, number 10 - to rid the Anglican church of Puseyites. More substantially, on reel 4, Charlotte's account of meeting Mrs Gaskell is matched, in a manuscript memento of Charlotte's friendship with her future biographer, with more of Gaskell's consequential discussion of Haworth and the Revd Brontë. Charlotte remarks on 1 July 1851 that the author of Mary Barton was a 'woman of many fine qualities and deserves the epithet which I find is generally applied to her - charming'. Gaskell on the other hand is revealed determined to judge Patrick harshly:

"He was very polite & agreeable to me; paying rather elaborate old-fashioned compliments, but I was sadly afraid of him in my inmost soul; for I caught a glare of his stern eyes over his spectacles at Miss Brontë once or twice which made me know my man."10

A final substantial collection of letters from Charlotte's husband, the Revd A. B. Nicholls, rounds off the biographical material (Nicholls' hand-copied collection of his wife's poems are found on reel 4 [2]). The account to Ellen Nussey of Charlotte's final illness, associated, it now seems, with pregnancy, is remarkably reserved; Nicholls retains his formal composure throughout even when commemorating, on 14 February 1855, his just departed wife which he does with the crisp, rather impersonal epithet: she was 'as good as she was gifted'. 11

Defending the Brontës after their death was a task that fell largely to Charlotte's life-long friend Ellen Nussey, many of whose letters to inquirers and Brontë authors are included on reel 4 (6). But perhaps of most personal interest in the Nussey material is the biographical note on Emily Brontë, whose character and private history have tantalized biographers since her death in 1848. 'So very little is known of Emily Brontë', Nussey aptly remarks, that 'every little detail awakens an interest.' She offers what little she can:

"Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely loveable[.] She invited confidence in her moral power. Few people have the gift of looking and smiling, as she could look and smile - one of her rare expressive looks was something to remember through life, there was such a depth of soul and feeling, and yet shyness of revealing herself, a strength of self-containment seen in no other - She was in the strictest sense a law unto herself, and a heroine in keeping to her law - She, and gentle Anne, were often seen twined together as united statues, of power and humility - they were to be seen with their arms lacing each other in their younger days whenever their occupation permitted their union."12

In the paucity of material, it is a valuable account and concludes with a long, affectionate description of Emily's fondness for her dogs.

Branwell Brontë's drawings, letters, and poems round off the Brontë part of the collection. Here is to be found his polished translations of Horace's Odes, one in the possession of the Georgian poet and dramatist John Drinkwater (1882-1937). A brief extract suggests their fluency, and Branwell's debt as a translator to eighteenth-century precedents:

".. The Merchant, when 'at home at ease'
May shudder at tempestuous seas,
And, scarce escaped from oceans war,
May praise the pleasures of the shore,
Yet - shuddering too at poverty,
Again he seeks that very sea.
" 13

More characteristic of Branwell's literary activities are the Angrian manuscripts, comprising both poems and stories, written out in the tiniest of hands. Angria was the Brontë children's imaginary kingdom, which grew out of early games with toy wooden soldiers. Sometime before November 1834, Emily and Anne left these behind and created a new kingdom called Gondal - many of Emily's poems were to have their origin in its now largely lost tales including some of her most distinguished such as 'Remembrance'. Around the same time, Branwell and Charlotte formed Angria and Branwell's literary creativity was to be nurtured by its possibilities too as material on reel 7 amply demonstrates. Another striking feature of the Brotherton's Branwell collection is the corpus of his pen and ink drawings. Some reveal his wit, others the temperamental, even violent side of his nature, others his gloom; there is dark humour in his little drawing of an old tombstone leaning dangerously into the ground and with only one word visible -- 'Resurgam', and a sense of a deeply troubled mind in the sketch of a strong man, chained, which is solemnly entitled 'Myself'. The ink sketch of 'Our Lady of Grief' is a stunning image from this gifted, precarious figure whose achievements come more sharply into focus with knowledge of the Brotherton's still growing collection.

NOTES

With thanks to Chris Sheppard and the staff of Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

1 Reel 1 (2).
2 Reel 2 (3).
3 Letter to John Forster, 1849, reel 2 (11).
4 Letter to Catherine Winkworth on 15 October 1854, reel 3 (17).
5 Letter to Catherine Winkworth, 25 August 1850, reel 3 (17).
6 Ibid.
7 Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 107
8 Ibid.
9 Reel 4 (1).
10 Reel 4 (5).
11 Reel 6 (15), fol.4.
12 Reel 5 (12).
13 rEEL 7 (20)



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