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Updated: May 2, 2025
That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no, they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet, the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness. He will not give up the sordid tragedy
Gaskell also for the Life of Charlotte Brontë, which is one of our best biographies. The scene of this fascinating romance is laid in Exmoor in the seventeenth century. The story abounds in romantic scenes and incidents; its descriptions of natural scenery are unsurpassed; the rhythmic language is at times almost equal to poetry; and the whole tone of the book is wholesome and refreshing.
Gaskell describes how a little later she met Charlotte Bronte at a quiet country-house, and how Charlotte was reduced from tolerable health to a bad nervous headache by the announcement that they were going to drive over in the afternoon to have tea at a neighbour's house the prospect of meeting strangers was so alarming to her.
Gaskell had no doubt noticed at some time this shield stamped on the outside of the book, and bearing the impression of it unconsciously in his mind, had reproduced it in his imagined revels. I said as much to my brother, and he was greatly interested, and after examining the shield agreed that this was certainly a probable solution of that part of the mystery.
Gaskell had never even seen. After I had read these letters and other documents with which Miss Nussey furnished me, I suggested that, if I could not write a book, I might still make one or two interesting magazine articles out of the materials in my possession.
In the autumn of 1842 I had occasion to make a journey to Nuremberg in company with my partner Mr. Gaskell. We had been invited to a conference with the directors of the Nuremberg and Munich Railroad as to the supply of locomotives for working their line.
There is no story more grim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that which Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy's ruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, and rage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he would go to his sisters and say: "The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it.
M. Héger gave the sisters private lessons in French without charge, and for some time preserved their compositions, which Mrs. Gaskell copied. Mrs. Gaskell visited the pensionnat in quest of material for her biography of Charlotte, and received all the aid M. Héger could afford: the information thus obtained has, for the most part, we were told, been fairly used.
Sure enough, we satisfy ourselves very speedily that the parent we have been accustomed to denounce as having blighted three or four young lives, and cheated English literature out of several good novels, was by no means the savage depicted by Mrs. Gaskell, or even by Mr. Reid.
Gaskell that for the pianoforte. It was, I think, in March 1842 that John purchased for his rooms a piece of furniture which was destined afterwards to play no unimportant part in the story I am narrating. This was a very large and low wicker chair of a form then coming into fashion in Oxford, and since, I am told, become a familiar object of most college rooms.
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