Jones Hayden, Brussels Brontë Group Master of Ceremonies, bookgroup leader and sometimes tour guide, took us on an engaging journey to find the funny in the Brontës. His talk to the group on Saturday, Feb. 7, focused on the Brontë sisters’ novels, but also touched on their letters and the essays they wrote while in Brussels.
Jones started by explaining the inspiration for his presentation. It came during a BBG trip to Haworth and the surrounding Brontë Country in June 2025, organised by Helen MacEwan and Joanne Wilcock. We were told it had something to do with “sticky chicken” and someone saying that the Brontës aren’t funny! So, being Jones, he decided to take up the gauntlet in honour of the literary ladies and set out to prove that they did have a sense of humour.
Admittedly, when one thinks about the Brontës, humour is not the first thing that comes to mind. However, Jones managed to pull out numerous instances in the sisters’ novels in which humour is evident, having intermittent laughing fits himself as he did so. One of his favourite episodes is in Villette when Lucy Snowe shoves a wayward student into a cupboard.
We can also see different kinds of laughter in Jane Eyre: Bertha laughs (madly, hysterically); Bessie the maid laughs; and Blanche Ingram also laughs, albeit satirically.
In Chapter 4, we are introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst and it would seem that his name is actually a very good joke on Charlotte’s part. The word brocklehurst in Yorkshire dialect, so John Sutherland tells us, literally means “wood that smells of fart” and it is highly likely that Charlotte was well aware of this. Another good name is Miss Scatcherd, also used by Anthony Trollope in Doctor Thorne.
Charlotte’s sense of humour can also be seen in the repartee between Jane and Rochester through much of the novel, such as in Chapter 14 when Rochester says: "You examine me, Miss Eyre .. do you think me handsome?" And she bluntly responds: "No, sir." In Chapter 37, Jane laughs gleefully as she reflects that she can “fret” Mr. Rochester out of his melancholy by sparking his jealousy.
In Shirley, the mocking description in Chapter 7 of “the curates at tea” and some of the very chapter titles are also a great source of humour (for example, Chapter 18 “Which the Genteel Reader is recommended to skip, Low Persons being here introduced”).
Such humour expressed by a woman was frowned upon in the middle of the 19th century. Jones quoted Sarah Stickney Ellis, an English author focusing mostly on women's roles in society: “By the mid-nineteenth century, theories of laughter clarified that laughter asserts a superiority incongruent with women’s societal role.”
This would certainly appear to have been the opinion of G.H. Lewes, who wasn’t at all amused by Charlotte’s description of the curates in Shirley, stating that the “offensive, uninstructive and unamusing” representation of them showed “a female and inexperienced hand.” However, this was in 1850, before he started his relationship with George Eliot, so we can hope that he afterwards softened on the subject.
Other evidence of Charlotte’s sense of humour can be seen in Villette, not only in the student-in-the -cupboard scene in Chapter 8, and also in the amusing observations around the Cleopatra painting in Chapter 19. In The Professor, Crimsworth amusingly criticizes his English compatriots after mass, and a bit of comedy can also be found in the wrestling match in the street in Chapter 24.
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| Are the Brontës funny? |
Anne’s writing was not lacking in humour either. In Chapter 7 of Agnes Grey, the narrator lightly writes: “As I cannot, like Dogberry, find it in my heart to bestow all my tediousness upon the reader, I will not go on to bore him with a minute detail of all the discoveries and proceedings of this and the following day.” Even in a novel dealing with such serious themes as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne was able to insert a few humorous brushstrokes. According to a 2017 article by Mimosa Stephenson in Brontë Studies – “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Calvinist Humour” – Calvinist humour “presupposes that its characters are fallen human beings who see clearly the faults of other human beings but are sure they are above such failures themselves.” Helen Graham and Gilbert Markham, both being devoutly Calvinist, could be said to fall into this category. The novel also boasts Mr. Boarham, who bears another fabulously appropriate name and could be compared to the self-important yet clueless Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, as the exchanges between him and Helen Graham in Chapter 16 demonstrate. Helen tells the would-be suitor:
"I know you as well as I ever shall, and better than you know me, or you would never dream of uniting yourself to one so incongruous – so utterly unsuitable to you in every way. ... You may save your indulgence and consideration for some more worthy object, that won't tax them so heavily."
Finally, what had Jones to say about Wuthering Heights? In my humble opinion, he left the best for last. Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly to some like myself, he found a wealth of humour in the pages of Emily’s novel. From the very first chapter, we are almost immediately plunged into a laughable situation with the hapless Lockwood finding himself well out of his depth at Wuthering Heights. Young, full of himself and constantly misreading the room, he commits one faux pas after another and observes his surroundings, his host and all the occupants of the house with a certain indignation and a growing realisation of their utter strangeness.
Heathcliff treats him like a sort of idiot whom he has to put up with, and the episode between Lockwood and the dogs gives rise to several very amusing passages:
“… Mr. Heathcliff and his man climbed the cellar steps with vexatious phlegm: I don’t think they moved one second faster than usual, though the hearth was an absolute tempest of worrying and yelping. …”
and
“What the devil is the matter?” he asked, eyeing me in a manner that I could ill endure after this inhospitable treatment.
“What the devil, indeed!” I muttered. “The herd of possessed swine could have had no worse spirits in them than those animals of yours, sir. You might as well leave a stranger with a brood of tigers!”
The hilarity continues in Chapter 2. Not quite knowing what to make of the young Catherine and her cousin Hareton, Lockwood again puts his foot in it:
“A beautiful animal!” I commenced again. “Do you intend parting with the little ones, madam?”
“They are not mine,” said the amiable hostess, more repellingly than Heathcliff himself could have replied.
“Ah, your favourites are among these?” I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats.
“A strange choice of favourites!” she observed scornfully.
Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits.
Later in the novel we see an exchange between Nelly Dean and Hindley which also cannot help but raise a laugh:
"... But, with the help of Satan, I shall make you swallow the carving knife, Nelly! You needn't laugh, for I've just crammed Kenneth, head-downmost, in the Blackhorse marsh; and the two is the same as one – and I want to kill some of, I shall have no rest till I do!"
"But I don't like the carving knife, Mr. Hindley," I answered; "it has been cutting red herrings – I'd rather be shot if you please."
The thought of poor “Kenneth” head-downmost in the marsh is perfectly slap-stick, and Nelly’s preference to being shot rather than having to swallow a smelly carving knife is funny even by today’s standards.
Nor must we forget the inimitable Joseph, with his broad Yorkshire dialect and hypocritical bible-thumping which literally causes Lockwood to have diabolical nightmares. As Nelly Dean says, Joseph is: “… the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours. …”
Jones especially relished Joseph’s use of the word “nowt” (nothing or nobody in the Yorkshire dialect) to assail most of the other characters in the novel (as memorably vocalized by Prof. John Bowen of the University of York in a 2018 BBG talk):
“marred, wearisome nowt!”
“gooid fur nowt, slatternly witch!”
“ye’re a raight nowt; and shoo's another”
“nasty ill nowt”
Jones’ presentation was punctuated by many chuckles from the audience, proving that indeed, we should try to remember that the Brontës were not simply the sum of the tragedies which marked their relatively short lives. But they could apparently also laugh, and make us laugh, even today.
Georgette Cutajar
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