The Key to the Brontë Works / The Key to Charlotte Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights,' 'Jane Eyre,' and her other works.

were responsible for the "plot" of Jane Eyre including an insane lady who wanders out of her chamber at night and dons a vapoury veil.

And evidence of the enthusiasm with which Charlotte Brontë applied herself to Jane Eyre is the fact that she at once took from Montagu's little volume for this her second story based upon the book's suggestions, the names of

Thus far we see Charlotte Brontë drew Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre from the same source; that in a word, Jane Eyre, was Charlotte's second attempt to utilize and amplify the suggestions in Montagu's work which had appealed to her when she began Wuthering Heights, and we see the suggestions she utilized in Jane Eyre always bear unmistakable relationship to those she had utilized in her Wuthering Heights. But the use Charlotte Brontë made of Montagu's book was not in the nature of literary theft; that volume simply afforded suggestions which she enlarged upon.

I shall presently show how I find Jane Eyre is the second attempt of Currer Bell to enlarge upon suggestions that had appealed to her when she first read Montagu. For a commencement I will refer to the early construction of her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. As simple stories they both are based upon the description Montagu gives of an isolated hostelry with an inhospitable hostess, a midnight apparition, and an air of mystery that surrounds the hostess and a peculiar, uncouth servant, to whom I have already alluded. The stage properties of this narrative, the characters, and the "action" or plot, I will give side by side, as they appear severally, first in Montagu, next in Wuthering Heights, and finally in Jane Eyre. Herewith the reader will have excellent examples of the two chief methods I find Charlotte Brontë employed often when she drew from a character in more than one work or instance, or when she desired to veil the identity of her originals. Charlotte Brontë's Methods I. and II., being discovered equally in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre show, as conclusively as any other evidence, that she was the author of both works. No consideration whatsoever can alter the iron fact or depreciate from its significance, that it was absolutely my discovery of Charlotte Brontë's Methods I. and II., which revealed to me the sensational verbal and other parallels between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre I give in The Key to the Brontë Works:—

Read carefully:—

Charlotte Brontë's Method I.—The interchange of sexes. Thus the original of A may be a woman, and the original of B a man; but A may be represented as a man, and B as a woman.

Charlotte Brontë's Method II.—Altering the age of a character portrayed. Thus the original of C may be young, and the original of D old; but C may be represented as old, and D as young.

The literal extracts to which I have referred I print as occurring in the three works:—Montagu the original, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. I will first give the substance, or subject matter, side by side:—

In the literal extracts I now give the reader will perceive that in the description of the bedside, candle-bearing apparition in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë followed Montagu almost word for word, and in the whole staging of the midnight episode at the house of the inhospitable host in Wuthering Heights followed him entirely in outlining the story. Both the Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre versions give unequivocal evidence of being refractions from Montagu conveyed through one brain alone, the peculiar idiosyncrasy and elective sensitiveness of which are undeniably recognizable as Charlotte Brontë's:—

Truly Montagu's description of the coarse-voiced, thick-set, country-bred servant, and his implication with the mystery of the lonely house had impressed Charlotte Brontë considerably. Whether she portrayed him as the Joseph of Wuthering Heights or, by her Method I., as the Grace Poole of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë respects the original associations of this character as they were figured to her by Frederic Montagu's little fiction of "A Night's Repose." Herewith have we evidence as to mental idiosyncrasy and elective-sensitiveness recognizable as Charlotte Brontë's—proof that her brain and none other was responsible for both the Wuthering Heights and the Jane Eyre versions of the midnight incident from Montagu.

CHAPTER III.

The cuckoo story derived obviously from the history Montagu gives of the foundling became thus the backbone of Wuthering Heights; but it is possible that the cuckoo story requiring the foundling should be painted with all the viciousness and cruelty of character necessary to his part, Charlotte Brontë found herself dissatisfied with the story. And portraying herself in the narrative as Catherine Earnshaw, her hero became M. Héger. This naturally led to an awkward clashing. Whether the extreme "demonism" of Heathcliffe must be understood as being in the main due to his rôle as the "cuckoo," who was to oust the poor farmer's offspring "like unfledged dunnocks," to quote Mrs. Dean, I will not in this chapter inquire.

Turning again to Montagu's book, Charlotte saw a further suggestion that contained excellent "plot" possibilities. This was the question of lunacy being an exception to the objection against the separation of husband and wife, Montagu's relation being Barry Cornwall (to whom, by the way, Thackeray dedicated Vanity Fair), who was a Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. To Charlotte Brontë, however, the subject came simply as a useful suggestion. She had no views upon it, and she desired only that her heroine would marry Rochester, the hero with an insane wife. At heart Charlotte was indifferent as to the vital point, even nullifying the very theme of the plot by making Rochester aver that if Jane Eyre had been the mad wife, he would still have loved and cherished her.

It would appear that in conjunction with Montagu's remarks on lunacy and the separation of husband and wife, an extract he gives from Shelley is also responsible for a wife's lunacy being the theme of the plot of Jane Eyre. The extract which Montagu quotes in the Malham letter is where the poet speaks of "The Waning Moon" as like—

Thus was evidently suggested to Charlotte Brontë the hanging up in the closet of the "vapoury veil" for the stage purposes of the "insane lady"; and in Jane Eyre Montagu's night-wandering, candle-bearing hostess became a lady who passed, after the manner of the lines he quoted,—

became Mrs. Rochester. Norton Conyers, a house near Ripon, it is said, is associated with the story that a mad woman was once confined there.[17] If Charlotte Brontë was familiar with this story, and we are told the interior is somewhat similar to the descriptions of Thornfield, we can understand that, perusing Montagu's book at the time when she was utilizing his narrative of the candle-bearing, hideous-faced, white-clad midnight visitant in a house of mystery, she would the more readily appropriate the further suggestions his work contained in regard to a wife's insanity, and the "veil-clad" apparition of a night-roaming insane lady. It is important to note, however, that the evidence of my preceding chapter proves indubitably the "mad woman" was but a secondary suggestion—the primary suggestion responsible for the plot of Jane Eyre being that of Montagu's midnight apparition. And just as the thick-set country-bred servant denotes in the question as to the origin and author of the candle-bearing bedside visitant in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, the "gauzy veil" likewise denotes as to the origin of the mad woman of Jane Eyre. So we read in the beginning of Chapter XXV. of Jane Eyre, that Jane leaves the vapoury veil in the closet:—

Then farther on we read that:—

which is simply an antithetical paraphrase of Montagu's quoted verse on "The Waning Moon" which, like

And in the same chapter of Jane Eyre we read finally that the insane lady, who has come out of her chamber,

CHAPTER IV.

Seeing Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, was drawn, as I find, by Charlotte Brontë for her autobiographical self, the real commencement of that work, in so far as personal narrative was concerned, is the diary extract she wrote of herself in her earliest childhood.[18] In Jane Eyre she placed her earliest childhood memories at the beginning of the story. I will give extracts side by side, when it will be seen they agree practically word for word. It is of course undeniable that none but Charlotte Brontë herself would or could have penned these incidents of her own childhood.

Thus we see the "volume-hurling" incident with which John Reed is associated had its origin in some incident connected with Charlotte Brontë's childhood and her brother Branwell. As Catherine, Charlotte Brontë calls Hindley "a tyrant" in this connection, and as Jane Eyre she calls John Reed "a tyrant" here. Branwell, as John Reed, is made to tell Jane in connection with this incident that "all this house belongs to me, or will do"; and as Hindley Earnshaw he tells his sister Catherine, "You forget you have a master here." By Charlotte Brontë's Method II., altering the age of a character portrayed, Branwell is represented in the Wuthering Heights scene as a man in years. Without further appeal it was likely enough that Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, was drawn for Charlotte Brontë's brother, seeing Catherine was Charlotte. Herewith we find an explanation for a fact Mr. Francis A. Leyland has strongly emphasized in his work The Brontë Family, that in Wuthering Heights incidents (the carving-knife incident, etc.) and epithets known by his intimates to have been common to Branwell Brontë are associated with Hindley Earnshaw in the days of his moral deterioration. That deterioration is reflected in the portrayal of the latter end of John Reed in Jane Eyre; in Wuthering Heights it is given in detail. As for Emily Brontë, she always liked and commiserated with Branwell Brontë.[20]

I hope the attempt to interfere with this tradition recently has no relation to the fact that I briefly stated in my Fortnightly Review article that John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw were one and the same. It is plain to see that if Emily really liked Branwell, as people stated who gleaned from hearsay, she could not have portrayed him as Hindley Earnshaw. But a wrong estimate of the nature of the evidence I promised to bring has been formed if it were thought I should base my book upon such a point. It is enough that Charlotte Brontë's private letters regarding Branwell are quite in agreement with her own harsh portrayals of him in her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

It is interesting to recall Branwell avowed he, and not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. This fact and the association of Branwell Brontë incidents and epithets with the book induced Mr. Leyland to advocate Branwell's authorship. The Key to the Brontë Works shows the absurdness of such a claim. Mr. Leyland suggested Branwell may have collaborated with Emily; and he professed to discover a break in the style. I find, however, that though there were violent psychical fluctuations in the mood of the writer of Wuthering Heights, the book is throughout the work of Charlotte Brontë. This may be proved alone by the Chapter III., with which I now deal: it is the "key" chapter, and is, so to speak, a microcosm of Wuthering Heights, as the reader will perceive by help of my index. Whosoever was the writer of this third chapter wrote the whole of Wuthering Heights, and we see it was Currer Bell.

By Charlotte Brontë's Method I., interchange of the sexes, the interloper Jane in the early chapters of Jane Eyre and the interloper Heathcliffe in the early chapters of Wuthering Heights become one and the same; and Hindley's tyrannizing over Heathcliffe is John Reed's (Branwell Brontë's) tyrannizing over Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë). Again, by Method I., interchange of the sexes, old Joseph, in Charlotte's Wuthering Heights version of the rainy day incident in her childhood, serves the part of the servant Tabitha Aykroyd, for whom Bessie in the Jane Eyre version of the rainy day incident was drawn. (See "Joseph" and his bit of garden, Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXIII.; also my footnote on page 47.) Thus Charlotte Brontë as Catherine tells us that when she was banished from the comfortable fire "Joseph" sermonizes, and that she hoped he might give "a short homily for his own sake"; and in the scene in Jane Eyre drawn from the same incident Jane was left to Bessie, who "supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof."

Catherine's story of the rainy day in Wuthering Heights was written by her in childhood on "a 'red-hot' Methodist's tract." Hence it is interesting to read Charlotte Brontë's words in Villette, where as Lucy Snowe she says she had "once read when a child certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts seasoned with ... excitation to fanaticism." As Caroline Helstone[21] in Shirley, Charlotte tells us she had read "some mad Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; ... from these faded flowers Caroline had in her childhood extracted the honey—they were tasteless to her now." Let the reader compare Charlotte Brontë's reference to Briar Chapel and the shouts, yells, ejaculations, frantic cries of "the assembly" in Chapter IX. of Shirley with the references in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights to the frantic zeal of "the assembly" of the chapel of Gimmerden Sough. It will be at once recognized that the former is but the extension of the other, amplified by the same hand.

Thus, in the light of the name Branderham ("Brander'em," from "brander," a hot iron over a fire) for the name of the zealous Rev. Jabes Branderham,[22] of the chapel of Gimmerden Sough, of Wuthering Heights, we see a connection with the play Charlotte Brontë makes upon "burning and fire" in the hymn sung at Briar Chapel in Chapter IX. of Shirley:—

In the rainy day incident Charlotte Brontë as Catherine vowed "she hated a good book," and this rebellion against the thrusting upon her of religious "lumber," as she calls it in Wuthering Heights, was a characteristic of her childhood shown also in the "Jane Eyre and Mr. Brocklehurst" incident, where the latter asks—

At heart, however, Charlotte Brontë was a true Christian, though disliking excessive zealousness in the demonstrations of the members of any church. Read what M. Emanuel says in Chap. XXXVI. of Villette; the last paragraph. Lockwood tells us in the incident connected with Catherine's diary that "a glare of white letters started from the dark as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines." This, Charlotte Brontë's idea of spectral writing running in the air, occurs in Chap. XV. of Jane Eyre, where Rochester speaks of a phantom hag (see Charlotte Brontë's phantom hag in Chap. XII. of Wuthering Heights), who "wrote in the air a memento which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front." Says Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, continuing:—"An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began ... to decipher her hieroglyphics"—the diary.

CHAPTER V.

"Tabby," said Mrs. Gaskell, "had a Yorkshire keenness of perception into character, and it was not everybody she liked." That Tabitha Aykroyd would readily appeal to Charlotte Brontë as fitted for the narrator of the histories in Wuthering Heights we may easily perceive by reading Mrs. Gaskell's further words on this Brontë servant:—

"When Charlotte was little more than nine years old ... an elderly woman of the village came to live as servant at the parsonage. She remained there, as a member of the household, thirty years [Hannah was thirty years with the Rivers family in Jane Eyre—an approximate date, of course, when that work was written] and from the length of her faithful service, and the attachment and respect she inspired is deserving of mention. Tabby was a thorough specimen of a Yorkshire woman of her class, in dialect, in character. She abounded in strong, practical sense and shrewdness. Her words were far from flattering, but she would spare no deeds in the cause of those whom she kindly regarded. She ruled the children pretty sharply; and yet never grudged a little extra trouble to provide them with such small treats as came within her power. In return she claimed to be looked upon as a humble friend.... Tabby had lived in Haworth in the days when the pack-horses went through once a week.... What is more, she had known the 'bottom' or valley in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the 'beck' on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them. [See references to 'Bessie's' fairy tales in Jane Eyre, Chaps. I., II., and IV.].... No doubt she had many a tale to tell of bygone days of the countryside: old ways of living, former inhabitants, decayed gentry, who had melted away, and whose places knew them no more; family tragedies and dark superstitious dooms; and in telling these things, without the least consciousness that there might ever be anything requiring to be softened down, would give at full length the bare and simple details."

Says Mrs. Dean, the Yorkshire servant who narrates the family tragedies of Wuthering Heights just after the manner of Tabitha Aykroyd:—

"Jane" says of Mrs. Dean as "Bessie" of Jane Eyre, Chap. IV., Method II., altering the age of characters portrayed:—

"Mrs. Dean"[24] in her turn says of "Catherine"—Charlotte Brontë:—