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Bronte Juvenilia
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Michael J. A. Howe |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Childhood fantasy is often stifled by the imposition of adult demands. The Brontë children escaped such censure, however. Writing without the requirement to put neat handwriting before creative expression, they developed storytelling skills that are reflected in their adult writings. Michael J. A. Howe describes the imaginary world chronicled by the Brontë children, revealing their sources of inspiration in the experiences of real people and the places they read about. |
 he early literary lives of the Brontë family exemplify the capacity for juvenile efforts at writing and the circumstances giving rise to them to influence as well as portend literary careers. Each of the four younger Brontë siblings, whose mother had died when the eldest, Charlotte, was only five, became seriously involved in writing as a recreational activity at around the age of ten. Soon after the deaths in 1825 of the two oldest sisters, Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), the older of the four surviving children, Charlotte (born 1816) and Branwell (born 1817) started to produce a series of tales about imagined worlds. |
The earliest compositions were little more than extensions of childish play, bearing all the usual hallmarks of childish writing.  They were poorly spelled, largely unpunctuated, and closely modelled upon the stories and newspaper articles that the children had most recently been reading. Remarkably, however, a firm habit of writing about imaginary worlds became established, and it persisted for a decade, making major invasions into the growing authors' time. Over the years the initially childish efforts at writing became more and more sophisticated and adventurous, and they increasingly took verse as well as prose form. A degree of continuity was maintained, however, in the content as well as the form of the narratives, and certain of the story characters that first made their appearance in the early 1830s were still being written about at the end of that decade. For all of the Brontës, their childhood literary activities were immensely important influences on their later capabilities and accomplishments, providing frequent and regular opportunities to practise and extend the writing skills that all authors depend upon. |
Sources, style and form
The imaginary worlds had their beginnings around 1826, when Charlotte and Emily, who shared a bed, invented simple unwritten plays, not unlike those created in many children's imaginary play. The very first of the Brontks' plays took most of the characters from toys, especially their brother Branwell's toy soldiers. The earliest surviving play that was written down, by Branwell, is set in Lorraine and concerns the imaginary intrigues and battles between would-be rulers, in the course of which the imagined events include a rebellion and a siege. As the Brontës' biographer Juliet Barker notes, most of the essential elements of their juvenile writings were already in place at that time, including political rivalries, battles, and rebellions that are played out within fantasy kingdoms (Juliet Barker, The Brontës, 1994, p. 152). Numerous sources were drawn upon. A particularly important inspiration was Blackwood's Magazine, a monthly journal containing a wide mixture of articles ranging from fiction to political satire and humour. Branwell's toy soldiers were given names and pressed into service as fictional characters. |
The received view that the Brontës led a solitary existence, isolated from the events in the world outside their parsonage home at Haworth, set in the moors of northern England, is far from accurate. The children enjoyed at least two Yorkshire newspapers and had access to a good range of books. Accounts by travellers which the children had read, and various historical descriptions, all found their way into the Brontë juvenilia. The earliest writings were undoubtedly imaginative, but more imitative than original, with little in the way of mature ideas or realistic characters. |
From this early stage, the plays and stories were written in minuscule writing, in minute hand-made books. The writing was too small for adults to read without the aid of a magnifying glass. This had the practical consequence of ensuring that the stories were never the subject of grown-ups' censure. So despite their abysmal spelling and often non-existent punctuation, these early efforts never attracted the kinds of comments such as the ubiquitous 'careless: could do better' with which successive generations of teachers have discouraged the creative impulses of their pupils. There was no pressure on the Brontë children to mask their productions with an unnatural veneer of maturity, and no need to make fair copies. All that mattered was that their own brother and sisters could understand the writing, and for them the lapses in grammar, spelling and punctuation created no cause for complaint. |
On occasions the father, Patrick Brontë, who was a more benign and stimulating parent than Brontë mythology has allowed, as well as being an active reforming churchman, gently remonstrated with his children about the inaccessibility of their written compositions, but to little permanent effect. As late as 1833, when Charlotte was seventeen, his Christmas present to her was a notebook at the front of which he thought it necessary to make the written plea that 'all that is written in this book, must be in a good, plain and legible hand' (Barker, The Brontës, p. 201). |
It is clear from their juvenilia that none of the Brontës suddenly or unpredictably arrived on the literary scene as a fully-fledged novelist. Not one of the children gave any early indication in these early efforts of having some rare innate talent or natural gift for authorship. As with all children's first attempts at written expression, in every case the earliest of a Brontë sibling's writings are thoroughly childish and naive, and composed of immature sentiments that are inexpertly expressed. The maturity and mastery that are evident in the Brontës' published works only came much later, following many years during which they constantly gave themselves practice in writing, and experimented at it, their efforts fuelled by the obvious delight that came from manufacturing stories about imaginary worlds. |
From fact to fiction
Understandably, the children were drawn to what they found exotic and dramatic. Toy soldiers newly added to Branwell's collection were quickly shared out among his siblings, given names, and provided with invented backgrounds. One box of soldiers quickly became the 'Young Men', a brave band of twelve young Englishmen who had landed in an African kingdom after an exciting journey that involved dangerous adventures. Once in Africa these heroic young men encountered further dangers, which included 'an Immense and terrible monster his head touched the clouds was encircled with a red and fiery Halo his nostrils flashed forth flames' (Barker, The Brontës, p. 154). |
From time to time a character would be transformed into an entirely different individual. For instance, a soldier that Emily initially named Gravey suddenly acquired the name of a real person, the Arctic explorer William Perry, whose adventures had recently been described in Blackwood's Magazine. But Emily's older sister Charlotte often refused to permit such transformations. After naming one of her soldiers after her current hero, the Duke of Wellington, she insisted on keeping him in the cast throughout a number of plays, until she eventually permitted him to be superseded by his sons. |
The character of Perry was not the only borrowing from Blackwood's, which had also supplied the African setting. The Brontës had discovered in Blackwood's Magazine a lengthy review of a book describing an expeditionary mission from the west coast of Africa into the interior. The stories about the Young Men lifted a number of place names and names of kings from that report. The imaginary land took up a large chunk of western Africa, and included a number of features that were real, including the Gambia and Niger rivers, and some that were based on real places, such as a city at the mouth of the Gambia that was renamed Verdopilis by Branwell and Verreopolis by Charlotte, as well as others that were entirely fictitious. |
The young authors decided to divide the region into a confederacy of states, each of which was ruled by a soldier belonging to one of the children. Other soldiers ruled over islands situated off the coast. The land as a whole became known as Glasstown. Later, following the destruction of its main city at a later stage in the development of the stories, it was to be renamed Angria. Within Glasstown were to be found a rich range of people, places, events, and buildings, drawn partly from the children's own experiences and partly from things they had read about in books and newspapers. There were both a fashionable aristocratic society and a lower sphere of life centred around inns and taverns and buildings similar to ones seen only in biblical paintings as well as others based on Yorkshire wool mills. As in the real world, Glasstown had its share of political and dramatic activities, with wars, revolutions, plots and counter-plots, and a heady mixture of dramatic events. |
Sometimes this vivid imaginary world fused with the real world, and a diary entry could switch from everyday life to the imagined land and back again in a single sentence. Thus in one story Charlotte suddenly abandons a description of the island inhabitants of the story constructing a new school to insert an impassioned report of her family's reactions to political changes relating to Roman Catholic emancipation, an issue of the day that aroused strong passions in a clergyman's family. |
Growing sophistication
As the children grew older, the stories became less childish, wittier, and more original, reflecting their authors' increasing sophistication, but no less playful. Irony became more evident. References to drinking and drunkenness in their characters reflected the narrators' increasing knowledge of the real world. Both Charlotte's and Branwell's stories began to demonstrate an impressive and growing knowledge of classical language and literature, with classical references and allusions becoming common. The fourteen-year-old Charlotte had the cast of one story conversing in French. |
There was never the slightest doubt that all the authors gained immense enjoyment from the activity of writing. The need to escape or retreat from reality may sometimes have been a contributing influence, and the sheer volume of the production could be seen as evidence of a commitment that seemed at times obsessive, but signs of the authors' pleasure in what they were doing punctuate all the writing. Quite often the different authors, writing under their various pseudonyms, would tease each other or poke fun at their siblings' productions. |
The spelling only gradually improved, and punctuation was still getting very little attention even in the stories written in their authors' late teens. In 1829, when he was not yet twelve, Branwell increased his output by starting a magazine that appeared at monthly intervals. It contained articles on all kinds of subjects, mostly written by himself but with a few contributions by Charlotte. Its title, after the model being imitated, was 'Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine'. It was as tiny as the other volumes, being just over two inches high. From the outset, many of the articles appeared under various pseudonyms belonging to characters from the imaginary world of Glasstown, such as 'Captain John Bud', Glasstown's fictitious historian. |
The complex interweavings of fiction and reality are exemplified by the fact that another of the fictitious contributors to the magazine, the Glasstown poet 'Young Soult' was actually based on a real person, Marshal Soult, a commander under Napoleon Buonaparte. But as was to happen not infrequently in the Brontës' later juvenile writings, a character invented by one sibling might be mercilessly abused by another. Young Soult, for example, whose inventor, Branwell, regarded him with some affection, is fiercely attacked in one of Charlotte's pseudonym's productions, where he is amusingly but sharply caricatured as a pompous poetaster named 'Henry Rhymer'. |
Magic and mystery are frequent ingredients in the earlier stories. There were a number of borrowings from The Arabian Nights in Charlotte's tales, and she also adapted legends and tales mysteries that had appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. Fabulous and exotic locations were favoured, even in connection with characters based on real men and women. For instance, Charlotte situated her Duke of Wellington in a white marble palace among olive trees, palms, and myrtles, and other characters were placed in settings filled with gold and diamonds. The playful author was not too solemn to nudge her readers with an occasional comment on her own facility at creating incongruous mixtures of fantasy and reality. She broke off at one point from a description of the magnificence of a lavishly decorated emerald dome to point out to any reader who might not have already noticed it, that 'you are gazing on the production of a mighty imagination' (quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 161). |
Later childhood
It might have been expected that as the children matured their imaginary worlds would lose some of their allure. But that did not happen until well into adulthood. There was simply no need to entirely abandon the societies that had been invented with the first Glasstown stories, because within the imagined worlds there was ample scope for developments catering for the newer interests and preoccupations of authors who were no longer children. Some of the later creations were complex literary achievements, often scholarly as well as creative, sometimes in verse form rather than prose. |
The two youngest sisters, Emily (born 1818) and Anne (born 1820) contributed more frequently as time progressed, although the majority of the surviving booklets are by Charlotte and Branwell. Political elements became more prominent. Detailed histories were supplied. Characters were more effectively delineated and developed, with one of Branwell's creations, 'Alexander Rogue', an evil person who had appeared in a number of stories (including some by Charlotte, who calls Rogue 'deceitful, bloody and cruel' as well as 'skilled in all the sleight-of-hand blackleg tricks of the gaming table') taking centre stage in the first of the books to depart from the miniature form of the earlier ones (quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 188). The main city of Glasstown was actually destroyed in a revolution (brought on by the actions of the demagogic Alexander Rogue), and replaced by a new city, Angria, but a number of the Glasstown inhabitants remained as characters in the post-Glasstown books. At around the same time the two youngest sisters, Emily and Anne, invented their own independent world, Gondal, situated in the Pacific Ocean. |
From the beginning, the depletion of people and events of the imagined worlds had some of the attributes of a soap opera, albeit an uncharacteristically literary and political one. As in modern soap operas, the fictitious societies were depicted as being largely self-sufficient and isolated from the outside world, and successive episodes focused on different characters and situations. In the case of Gondal, unfortunately, although a substantial amount of Gondal poetry and later prose still exists, all the earlier prose narratives have been lost. Gondal was Emily's and Anne's secret world, from which Branwell and Charlotte were excluded. Like Glasstown and Angria, the world of Gondal was one in which warfare and politics alternated with romantic intrigues. Juliet Barker has observed that the women of Gondal are more active and resourceful than those inhabiting the other worlds, as might be expected in a universe devised by only female authors. In contrast with the beautiful but passive playthings who pine for their Angrian lovers, the strong-minded ladies of Gondal take more forceful parts in the stories. |
The fact that the creative activity of writing about an invented world was a joint exercise contributed enormously to the authors' enjoyment. It was a marvellous game, in which each participant eagerly ingested and responded to their sibling's latest instalment. Cooperation and competition were equally in evidence. As ever, one Brontë was likely to deal harshly with another's characters. Branwell and Charlotte each constantly reacted to the new developments in the other's fiction, and not infrequently tried to outmanoeuver the other. Certain of Charlotte's dashing and lovesick young men were transformed by Branwell into cynical politicians. Charlotte retaliated by rewriting the early life of Branwell's anti-hero Alexander Rogue, whom she now revealed to have started off as a handsome young soldier, forced into a life of crime and debauchery only after being unfairly exiled from Glasstown. On one occasion, after Branwell had the gall to kill off a favourite heroine of Charlotte, his sister instantly resurrected her, declaring that the report of her death was simply a rumour designed to arouse the people against an oppressive aristocrat. |
Conclusion
As the authors approached adolescence, the love lives and romantic preoccupations of Glasstown's inhabitants came increasingly under the looking glass. By 1831 the fifteen-year-old Charlotte, now an enthusiastic reader of Sir Walter Scott's romances and obsessed with Byron--as were numerous young women at the time--was writing a lengthy poem in which one of the heroines laments her aristocratic lover, a marquis, who has abandoned her for another woman. The latter affair was also described in another story, this time in prose. Love and romance now became the dominant topic of Charlotte's fiction. During this period all the men she writes about are dashing, tall and attractive, and all her heroines beautiful. They are also invariably aristocratic, even if their high birth is sometimes a secret, hidden from all until the final pages. The romantic ingredients of the stories are frequently combined with melodrama. Passionate but unprincipled dark-eyed beauties are besotted with amoral male characters whose scornful sneers betray their wicked natures. But there are also more profound and thoughtful passages, in which serious issues are discussed. Many elements of the Brontë sisters' published novels can be detected in their later juvenilia. |
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