Charlotte Bronte by Jessica Cox

Author:Jessica Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Hesperus Press
Published: 2011-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Bereavement

While Charlotte was still flush with the success of Jane Eyre, and working earnestly on her next novel, she experienced the first of the three tragic losses that were to befall her in quick succession in the coming months. Following the publication of Jane Eyre, life at the parsonage had grown ever more difficult as a consequence of Branwell’s continued decline. He became increasingly reliant on alcohol following his dismissal from the Robinson household, funding his habit by begging his father for money or incurring debts that his father was then forced to pay. In 1846, his former employer, Mr Robinson, died. Branwell professed to have hoped that such an event might clear the way for a union with his former mistress. However, following Mr Robinson’s death, Branwell claimed that his marriage to Lydia Robinson was prevented by a clause in her husband’s will that threatened to disinherit her if she saw her former lover again (an anecdote that seems to anticipate Casaubon’s treatment of Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch). There was no such clause, although whether or not Branwell was aware of this is unclear. Nevertheless, the incident seemed to plunge him further into despair, for which he continued to seek solace in drink and drugs.

Charlotte witnessed her brother’s decline and the destruction of the family’s hopes for him with an increasing sense of frustration and despair. If she empathised in any way with his apparent unrequited love for Lydia Robinson, in light of her own feelings for M. Heger, she had no sympathy or respect for his manner of dealing with it, having herself largely internalised her unhappi-ness at the separation from Heger. Branwell’s letters suggest a distinct tendency towards melancholy, pessimism and despair: disappointed in love, he refused to pursue his dream of a literary career, believing that his work would merely be overlooked by publishers and libraries, and referring to his inability to write whilst suffering ‘from agony to which the grave would be far preferable’. This sense of hopelessness prevailed for the rest of his life, as he increasingly sought solace in alcohol and opium: ‘If I sit down and try to write,’ he wrote to a friend in 1847, ‘all ideas that used to come clothed in sunlight now press round me in funeral black; for really every pleasurable excitement that I used to know has changed to insipidity or pain.’ Fearful of inflicting further pain on their already suffering brother, Charlotte and her sisters refrained from telling him of their own literary successes, and he was to die unaware that all three of them were published authors.

Following Branwell’s further deterioration in the wake of Robinson’s death, Charlotte described his behaviour as ‘intolerable’: ‘he is continually screwing money out of [Papa] sometimes threatening to kill himself if it is withheld from him […] [H]e will do nothing – except drink, and make us all wretched.’ Branwell’s gradual decline had a significant effect on his immediate family: not only was he a financial burden, with

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