The Life of Charlotte Bronte (80 page)

John Tiplady Carrodus (1836—1895), a child prodigy violinist born at Keighley, Yorkshire.

The tablet is in error. Anne Brontë was twenty-nine when she died.

Alphonse de Lamartine, Lajos Kossuth, and Henrik Dembinsky were nationalists active in the French, Hungarian, and Polish revolutionary movements of 1848.

Critical consensus is that this should read “bed plays.”

Hugh Blair, a Scottish Presbyterian preacher, lectured and wrote about writing style.
His Lectures on Rhetoric
and
Belles Lettres
(1783) was translated into many European languages.

Elizabeth Rowe,
Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters, from the Dead to the Living
(1728).

Walter Scott, Scottish poet and novelist, wrote the novel Kenilworth (1821).

“Jane Eyre,” Vol. I., page 20.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), early epistolary novelist, author of Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747-1748), and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754).

Gaskell is mistaken; Brontë wrote to Hartley Coleridge (see endnote 6 to volume I, chapter VIII), not Wordsworth.

Mr. Collins, curate at Keighley, and William Weightman (see endnote 11 to volume I, chapter VIII).

M. is Mary Taylor, and G. is Gomersal, her home. B. is Ellen Nussey’s home, Brookroyd.

Taylor, Mary’s sister.

The Château de Kokelberg was the Brussels finishing school attended by Mary and Martha Taylor.

Scott describes the sport, “Shooting at the Popinjay,” “as an ancient game formerly practised with archery, but at this period (1679) with fire arms. This was the figure of a bird decked with parti-coloured feathers, so as to resemble a popinjay or parrot. It was suspended to a pole, and served for a mark at which the competitors discharged their fusees and carbines in rotation, at the distance of seventy paces. He whose ball brought down the mark held the proud title of Captain of the Popinjay for the remainder of the day, and was usually escorted in triumph to the most respectable change-house in the neighbourhood, where the evening was closed with conviviality, conducted under his auspices, and, if he was able to maintain it, at his expense.”—Old Mortality.

Catherine Wooler, one of the sisters who ran the school Brontë attended at Roe Head. (see endnote 1 to volume I, chapter VI).

Devoirs (no accent) are composition exercises.

Peter the Hermit (c.1050-1115), a leader of the First Crusade (begun in 1096).

She was nourished on the Bible (French).

The “long vacation” (French) ran from mid-August to October.

That is, the Dixon family.

The Wheelwrights; Laetitia, the eldest daughter, would become Brontë’s lifelong friend.

Catholic devotional readings (French).

Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Criticism
(1711). part 2, line 32: “Hills peep o’er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise! ”

Deo Volente (Latin) means “God willing.” steeped in a kind of cold, systematic sensuality, than she had before imagined it possible for a human being to be; and her whole nature revolted from this woman’s society. A low nervous fever was gaining upon Miss Brontë. She had never been a good sleeper, but now she could not sleep at all. Whatever had been disagreeable, or obnoxious, to her during the day, was presented when it was over with exaggerated vividness to her disordered fancy. There were causes for distress and anxiety in the news from home, particularly as regarded Branwell.
³
In the dead of the night, lying awake at the end of the long deserted dormitory, in the vast and silent house, every fear respecting those whom she loved, and who were so far off in another country, became a terrible reality, oppressing her and choking up the very life-blood in her heart. Those nights were times of sick, dreary, wakeful misery; precursors of many such in after years.

Mary Taylor emigrated to New Zealand.

The Reverend Edmund Robinson.

Lydia Robinson’s father was the Reverend Thomas Gisborne, a prominent Evangelical.

The character of Joe Taylor, Mary’s brother, is under discussion.

Brontë’s The Professor (1857) was edited and published posthumously by Arthur Bell Nicholls.

Margaret Wooler
.

Anne, Ellen Nussey’s sister, afterward referred to as A.

“She” is Amelia Ringrose, the future wife of Joe Taylor.

Ellen Nussey.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811—1863).

Thackeray’s pseudonym.

Brontë seeks advice regarding Thomas Newby, Emily and Anne Brontë’s unscrupulous publisher.

The title of an early novel (published 1847) by British critic and author G. H. Lewes.

The title of a novel by G. H. Lewes, published in 1848.

Evangelical (Low Church) clergyman Charles Simeon (1759—1836) helped found the Church Missionary Society.

Smelling salts.

The Robinson daughters, Elizabeth and Mary.

John
Forbes, physician to the Queen.

Margaret Wooler was supposedly the model for Mrs. Pryor.

The Yorkes were based on the Taylor family. ‡The daguerreotype was an early form of photograph, produced on a silver-coated copper plate.

The Rev. Hammond Roberson (see endnote 7 to volume II, chapter VI) was the original for Mr. Helstone.

Frances Atkinson, Brontë’s godmother.

The Athenaeum, a weekly periodical founded in 1828, covered the arts and sciences.

Eugène Forçade.
Revue des Deux Mondes,
November 15, 1849 (see Allot, ed.,
The
Brontës:
The
Critical
Heritage,
pp. 142-146; see “For Further Reading”).

London.

The Times, December 7, 1849 (seeAllot, pp. 148-151).

George Smith’s mother often served as Brontë’s hostess and chaperone in London.

Laetitia Wheelwright.

Thackeray’s novel, published in installments
(1848-1850).

Julia Kavanagh (1824-1877), novelist.

The Nusseys.

Greenwood (see endnote 1 to volume I, chapter XIV). ‡George Smith commissioned George Richmond (1809-1896), who also drew Gaskell, to undertake Brontë’s portrait.

Catherine Gore (1799-1861), a “silver-fork novelist,” depicted life in high society.

Eliza Fox (later Bridell), painter and friend of Gaskell.

Lady Kay Shuttleworth.

Sir James Kay Shuttleworth.

John Manners (1818-1906) and George Smythe (1818-1857) were both active in Disraeli’s “Young England” group, which promoted a romantic and aristocratic type ofToryism.

[Sydney Dobell], Palladium, September 1850 (see Allot, pp. 277-283).

Dobell likened Brontë to the Amazon warrior queen Penthesilea in the review he wrote for the Palladium.

English critic John Ruskin wrote
The Stones of
Venice (1851-1853), on Venetian architecture.

James Taylor, manager of Smith, Elder and Company, proposed to Brontë on or near April 4, 1851.

The lecture series was titled The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century.

Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-1885), a minor poet and reform-minded politician.

George Smith’s mother.

Elisa Félix (1820-1858) was the model for Vashti in Villette.

Literary patron Samuel Rogers (1763-1855).

“When found, make a note of” is the byword of Captain Cuttle in Dickens’s
Dombey and Son
(1847).

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), author known for the novels
Tristram Shandy
(1760-1767) and
A Sentimental Journey
(1768).

A reference to Gaskell’s The Moorland
Cottage
(1850).

Marianne was Gaskell’s eldest daughter, Julia her youngest. Florence was her third.

Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) was a Swedish novelist.

Brontë to James Taylor (in India), November 15, 1851.

Thackeray,
Henry Esmond
(1852), a novel about eighteenth-century life.

Presumably Charles Dickens is meant as the first writer of the day.

Ellen Taylor.

Lumpkin is the trickster son in Oliver Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to
Conquer
(1773).

Gaskell was working on her controversial novel Ruth (1853).

Amelia Taylor, Joe Taylor’s wife.

Novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852.

Arthur Bell Nicholls came to Haworth as curate in May 1845.

The reference is to Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887), essayist, novelist, and children’s author.

Joe and Amelia Taylor.

The reference is to Sydney Dobell’s unfinished modern epic, published in 1854.

Gaskell is intimating that Brontë is pregnant.

Flossy was Anne’s spaniel.

John Forster, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848).