ABSTRACT
Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia remained for years beyond the public’s reach. As Thomas Wemyss Reid explains in his 1877 monograph, her work “lost its vogue” as the public turned to newer novelists (228-29). Reid’s biography aimed to revive interest in Charlotte Brontë’s life and her novels by focusing on her unpublished letters,5 noting that as yet no pen, not even Gaskell’s, had been able to “do full justice to one of the most moving and noble stories in English literature” (viii). Regrettably his account reads more like a hagiography than a biography: “Even now it is with a tender and a reverent hand that one must touch these ‘noble letters of the dead,’” for “the soul of Charlotte Brontë stands revealed in these unpublished pages” (5-6). In regard to her “early literary ventures,” he sighs, “we find little here” (5). Thomas J. Wise, a collector and bibliographer, obtained these early manuscripts
from Nicholls in 1895. Unfortunately, Wise proved to be disreputable in handling and selling Charlotte Brontë’s manuscripts and letters and was eventually exposed as a “forger and charlatan” (Duckett 188). His mishandling of Charlotte Brontë’s early efforts caused them to be “scattered among libraries of England and America, valued as literary curiosities but deemed worthless in content” (Ratchford Legends xix). Still, as Christine Alexander notes, “Wise brought many of the manuscripts to public attention through references in A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of the Members of the Brontë Family” (Something About Arthur 10). In 1898, Butler Wood, editor of the Brontë Society’s Transactions, records that Wise lent the museum a few of Charlotte’s early manuscripts, including her juvenile poem, “We Wove a Web in Childhood,” for public display, but added that “they have no value as literature” (45, 44). Two decades later, Clement K. Shorter produced his two-volume work The
Brontës: Life and Letters (1908), which, like Reid’s biography, pays considerable attention to the Brontës’ letters. In his brief acknowledgment of the juvenilia, he mentions that besides “some eighteen booklets” of unpublished manuscripts described by Gaskell, there exist “at least eighteen more from the pen of Charlotte” from 1829-1838 (61).6 In his perusal of these booklets, he describes these pieces only in terms of Charlotte’s “hero-worship” of the Duke of Wellington and his two sons, adding that he cannot decide if they are “fairy tales or dramas of modern life” (62). Shorter’s decision to transcribe one particular manuscript, “An Adventure in Ireland” (1833), reflects his biographical bent, for the narrative offers, according to him, proof that Charlotte Brontë had “heard something of her father’s native land” (63). These early manuscripts were treated as curious artefacts of “Charlotte’s unusual precocity and the strange home life of the Brontë children,” but were not particularly considered as revealing early literary endeavors (Ratchford, “Angrian Cycle” 494). May Sinclair describes how the Brontës’ juvenilia was an escape from the monotony of their childhood, for “they could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of Wellington down to the citizens of Verdopolis” (11), recognizing the life of the mind evident in
the myth writings, saying the children could not “stop writing”: “Their fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes” (14). Charlotte’s juvenilia thus became part and parcel of the folklore of the Brontë Parsonage, her early texts consigned almost as kindling.7
