Graham Watson, author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, gave an illuminating talk to the Brussels Brontë Group on his investigations into the writing and reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Graham began his presentation on Saturday Oct. 11 by saying that there has always been division and divisiveness amongst Brontë fans, due in large part to the subjectivity in the biographies written about the literary family and to fluctuations in sentiment over time, leading to a constant recalibration of the Brontë sisters. His research focused on Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte and the relationship between the two writers.
Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë has been maligned from day one as being based on “unreliable” sources. Graham decided to launch his own investigation into those sources and decide for himself.
His question to the BBG audience was whether we knew who it was who first called Gaskell’s sources unreliable. We didn’t. His reply: her father Patrick Brontë. Patrick’s critique was that since Gaskell is a novelist she should be allowed “a little romance” – but therefore couldn’t be relied upon.
Graham starts his book with the first meeting between Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell at Briery Close in Windermere, the holiday rental house of the Kay-Shuttleworth family. Sir James and Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth were friends of Mrs Gaskell; and Lady Janet, who had befriended Charlotte, wrote to Gaskell asking her to meet Charlotte and take her under her wing. A meeting was set up and the two did indeed become friends.
Over the years, Gaskell was to write many letters about her meetings with Charlotte. This is where it gets interesting. According to Graham Watson, and based on his first-hand reading of these letters, it was Charlotte herself who told stories about her own life to Gaskell and who described herself and her “oddness” and hardships in life. She also mined her own life for use in her novels, and this made it even easier for fact and fiction to merge. Gaskell was merely taking notes as it were; however, as Gaskell herself was a writer of fiction, it was all too easy to accuse her of making things up. Was she unreliable? Graham posited that our view of Gaskell may be biased. She did admit to errors, but he is convinced that this was the result of a political decision she made together with her publisher in order to avoid being sued by people who objected to how they were portrayed in her biography of Charlotte. Gaskell therefore “falsely” confessed to error on her own account and was consequently labelled unreliable.
Patrick Brontë features heavily in Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. A complex man, prone to explosions of temper, his relationship with his eldest surviving daughter was difficult. This is clear from Charlotte’s own letters. They would argue and sometimes fell out with each other.
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| Graham Watson talking about Patrick Brontë |
Patrick took his vocation very seriously, believing that his job was to save souls. He seemed detached from his daughter, and evaded certain questions that Gaskell asked him during her research for the biography, Graham said.
It is known that after Charlotte’s death Patrick and Arthur Bell Nicholls destroyed some of Charlotte’s letters. One of those was a letter from Charlotte about Anne’s death. Patrick cut this into fragments, some of which have survived and have been put back together; but Graham wonders how a father could destroy a letter by one of his daughters describing the death of another daughter.
The talk about destroying things led to the speculation about a second novel that Emily Brontë may or may not have been writing. There is no evidence that Charlotte destroyed Emily's "second novel" (if it existed at all). Could it have been Patrick? We'll never know. There is also no evidence for the accusation against Charlotte that she blocked the publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
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| Graham Watson discussing Arthur Bell Nicholls |
Arthur Bell Nicholls, who eventually married Charlotte, is an ambiguous figure in Brontë biographies, and the reality was indeed rather complex. It can be surmised that Charlotte was a difficult person to get close to, but once won over, it was well worth the effort. Did she and Nicholls love each other? A quick check of his audience confirmed Graham’s impression that most people think that he loved her but that she didn’t really love him so much.
But he believes that Charlotte did grow to love Arthur, and she even wondered, after seeing how he had suffered public gossip and “humiliation” on her account, whether she herself was worthy of him. After Charlotte’s death, Arthur refused to be interviewed by Mrs Gaskell, not necessarily because he wanted to censor anything, but because he was uncomfortable with it. He was also opposed to the idea of a biography because he had a good idea of the media attention which would follow it.
Nevertheless, it was Arthur who suggested Gaskell contact Ellen Nussey, a move which he then regretted as Ellen was to go on to tell all. Nussey asked Mrs Gaskell to not name her or her family members in the Life, and the author honoured this request to her own detriment.
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| George Smith |
Charlotte’s publisher George Smith features as a rather romantic figure in Gaskell’s biography. According to Graham, however, although he was possibly slightly flirtatious in his dealings with Charlotte, he was primarily a businessman interested in the power of celebrity. A manipulative “doer,” he did not baulk at outright lying in order to achieve his ends. For example, he told Charlotte that “Thackeray would love to meet” her, when in fact he had never had any contact with Thackeray whatsoever. He knew that if the two popular authors did indeed meet up there would be great media attention.
The arguments that started immediately upon publication of the Life began with Patrick Brontë (who in spite of quibbling with details also praised the biography). Patrick was soon joined by Lydia Robinson, Branwell’s erstwhile married lover who threatened to sue Gaskell and her publisher. The house servant Martha Brown testified that she had helped Charlotte destroy all of the letters from Lydia Robinson; so had the issue gone to court, Gaskell couldn’t provide documentary evidence of the claims in the book about Mrs. Robinson. In light of this and Patrick’s complaints, the biography was withdrawn, re-written and re-edited. There were three editions in six months and the passages that were excised were about Lydia Robinson and Patrick Brontë’s behaviour.
An item of special interest for the Brussels Brontë Group is that on a trip to Brussels, Elizabeth Gaskell stayed at an English boarding house on Toison d’Or. This was advertised in Bradshaw’s Illustrated Hand Book.
Graham Watson’s fact-filled talk certainly piqued the audience’s interest in his book The Invention of Charlotte Brontë. He claimed that everything in it is verifiable against written evidence, and he tries to correct a lot of the mistaken assumptions about Charlotte and her family which arose from the myriad of complex factors influencing Mrs Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
These are some of the interesting points which arose from audience questions after the talk:
- Gaskell went to Rome for fourteen weeks just after her book was published and left her husband William and publisher George Smith to deal with the aftermath.
- any claim that there are photographs of the Brontës is bogus.
- the copyright holder of all of Charlotte’s papers was her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls. He waived his rights to her letters upon the instigation of Mrs Gaskell.
- Gaskell did not have Patrick Brontë’s consent to write what she did about him.
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| Rowan Coleman and Graham Watson our Oct. 11 BBG speakers |
Georgette Cutajar
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