The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell Read Free Book Online

more than customary premarital jitters. “My husband is not a poet or a poetical man—and one of my grand doubts before marriage was about ‘congenial tastes’ and so on,” Brontë wrote during her honeymoon, having realized that Nicholls offered a connection that was “a thousand times better than any half sort of psuedo sympathy” (Charlotte Brontë to Catherine Winkworth, July 27, 1854; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, pp. 279-280). If Brontë was personally happy in her choice, she was equally happy to have provided assistance and companionship for her father through her marriage: “ ‘Papa has taken no duty since we returned; and each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice, I feel comforted to think that this marriage secured papa good aid in his old age’ ” (p. 448). Nicholls kept his promise “to comfort and sustain [Patrick’s] declining years,” (p. 444) living with him until his death in 1861.
    Gaskell loads Brontë’s marriage with recuperative possibility and expresses the hope that “the slight astringencies of her character... would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace” (p. 447). Brontë saw things similarly, if more pragmatically and with less certainty. “If true domestic happiness replace Fame—the exchange will indeed be for the better,” she told her former teacher, Margaret Wooler, shortly after marriage. Significantly, Brontë struck through the more certain, present-tense verb, “is,” and replaced it with the conditional “will be” (Charlotte Brontë to M. Wooler, September 19, 1854; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 290). Gaskell edited out that sentence, although she included the rest of the letter in the Life. Brontë goes on to explain that her curate husband “ ‘often finds a little work for his wife to do, and I hope she is not sorry to help him.’ ” Brontë’s coy, but jarring, use of the third person to distinguish the role she plays as “wife” from her true self, casts doubt on the sincerity of her complacency when she adds, “ ‘I believe it is not bad for me that his bent should be so wholly towards matters of real life and active usefulness; so little inclined to the literary and contemplative’ ” (p. 449). Nicholls and Brontë did seem on the path to a truly companionate marriage. Significantly, Brontë read aloud to him an unfinished novel she was working on, a practice she shared with no one but her sisters. “As to my husband,” she wrote to a friend just before her death, “my heart is knit to him” (Charlotte Brontë to Amelia Taylor, February 1855; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 327).

Patrick Brontë
    The portrait of Brontë’s father that emerges from the Life is one of public benefactor and domestic tyrant. While Gaskell extols Patrick’s “diligent” attention to his parishioners in his role as Haworth’s perpetual curate, his tolerance of nonconformists, and a freedom from dogmatism that enables him “fearlessly” to take “whatever side in local or national politics appeared to him right,” it is hard to view these laudable qualities through the dense fog of anecdote cataloguing his “volcanic wrath.” Most of these details, such as his burning his children’s colored boots and slashing his wife’s silk gown because he thought them too “gay and luxurious,” were provided by an unreliable source and omitted, at Patrick’s request, in the revised third edition of the Life. Gaskell attributes Patrick’s peculiarities, such as his alleged propensity to work off his rage by “firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession,” to his “passionate, Irish nature,” and insists that she mentions these instances of “eccentricity in the father” not to “judge them,” but because they are necessary “for a right understanding of the life of his daughter” (pp. 45, 46).
    But the Life is internally inconsistent on