ABSTRACT
In 1856, one year after Charlotte Brontë’s death, Elizabeth Gaskell gained access to her friend and fellow author’s earliest literary manuscripts. “I have had a curious packet confided to me,” she later recalled, “containing an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space – tales, dramas, poems, romances, written […] in a hand which it is almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass” (Life 111-12). Gaskell does not exaggerate. The packet of writings that she received on that day contained all the juvenile writings of Charlotte Brontë and her siblings, most written in a miniature script and many contained in volumes that measure about five centimeters (two inches) in height. Despite their miniscule size, these books contain a vast amount of material; the writings in these volumes are longer than all the Brontë siblings’ published manuscripts put together. Gaskell estimates that “they would make more than 50 vols of print” (Letters 398). The miniature books of the Brontës offer a startling disjunction of form and
content: they are miniscule in size, but massive in scope, recounting the epic story of the foundation of Glass Town in West Africa and its ongoing military, political and domestic evolution. In this essay, I argue that the imaginative scope of the Brontës’ miniature books is enabled by the size of the volumes. Although the books were originally composed in miniature to match the proportions of a set of toy soldiers given to Branwell Brontë by his father, the alternate scale of the books detached the Brontë siblings’ imaginations from the full-scale world of Haworth and permitted them to imagine a far-flung miniature British empire in Africa. In physical relation to their toys, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë were transformed from powerless children into gigantic “Genii,” or gods, who preside over the Glass Town empire. But while the miniature books initially allow the Brontë siblings to invent
and rule over a fantastic world on a vast scale, they evolve, for Charlotte Brontë in particular, into a sophisticated project of literary imitation and innovation in which she conceives of Glass Town as a virtual reality – a fantastic space that she imaginatively inhabits even as she consciously acknowledges it as a fiction. In his book As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Michael Saler argues that, in the fin de siècle, an “ironic imagination” emerged which allowed individuals “to inhabit the imaginary worlds of
the real that the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Africa of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886-1887) did not exist, in order to indulge in the “virtual reality” fantasy that these imaginary spaces were real places that could be collectively discussed, described and debated. In this essay, I trace three ways in which Charlotte Brontë experimented, literarily and psychologically, with the idea of the virtual reality of the fantastic fictions she shared with her siblings. First, Charlotte Brontë relinquishes the exhilarating experience of complete power over her toy soldiers in order to identify intimately with their point of view and to imagine Glass Town through their eyes. Second, Charlotte Brontë borrows the forms of contemporary periodicals in order to give Glass Town the full appearance and characteristics of reality, while still acknowledging its fiction through sly references to the real world. Third, and finally, Charlotte Brontë develops an internal psychology for her characters, which both resonates with her own feelings of powerlessness and exhibits the unique epistemological problems posed by being a fictional character with an awareness of one’s own fictionality. While Glass Town functions as a virtual reality for the Brontë siblings in several respects, Charlotte Brontë also fails to maintain the ironic distance which Saler describes as necessary for a virtual reality, instead exploring her reverberating sympathies for her characters. As she grows increasingly invested in the world of her fictions, Charlotte Brontë delves into the themes of power and powerlessness, knowledge and its limits, which pervade her later fiction.
