"She was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once and she defying us.... I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance; she never took an aversion to me though."
In Chap. IV. of Jane Eyre Bessie says to Jane Eyre, after the latter has asked her not to scold:—
"Well, I will, but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be afraid of me. Don't start when I chance to speak sharply."
"I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you."
Jane suggests Bessie dislikes her, to which is replied:—
"I don't dislike you.... I believe I am fonder of you than of all the others."
"You don't show it."
"You sharp little thing!... What makes you so venturesome and hardy?"
The idiosyncratic appeal Tabitha Aykroyd made to Charlotte is related identically wherever she is portrayed. That Charlotte Brontë had been initially entranced by her fairy tales, and the old songs she sang, is shown more especially in the phases she gives of Tabitha as Bessie and as Ellen Dean. Thus we read in Jane Eyre, Chap. IV., in the close of the scene just given:—
"That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; ... in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchaining stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine." And in Wuthering Heights, Chap. XXII., Ellen Dean says of Miss Catherine Linton (see my reference to this character as a phase of Charlotte Brontë, in my preface):—"From dinner to tea she would lie doing nothing except singing old songs—my nursery lore—to herself, ... half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express." So in the same work, Chap. XXIV., the same Catherine says:—"He was charmed with two or three pretty songs [I sang]—your songs, Ellen." The italics are Charlotte Brontë's.
Jane Eyre, Chap. III., says:—
Bessie had now finished ... tidying the room ... she sang:—
I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for Bessie had a sweet voice—at least I thought so. But now, though her voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness. Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly: "a long time ago," came like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn. She passed into another ballad.
Tabby Aykroyd going to the Parsonage when the motherless Charlotte Brontë was but nine, Charlotte seems to have been drawn to look upon her as a new-found friend, and afterwards she idealized those memories associated with her. It is noticeable she had been impressed in childhood by her singing and the sympathetic sweetness of her voice. There is a world of meaning—a gracious waiving aside of qualifying fact in the sentence, "Bessie had a sweet voice—at least I thought so." Charlotte was fond of Scottish ballads, and in Villette, Chapter XXV., she identifies herself in her phase as Paulina (see my further reference to this phase of Charlotte Brontë) with a a love for a Scottish song. With Tabitha Aykroyd she loved to associate the singing of her favourite ballads, as we have seen in her reference to the songs of Tabitha in her phases as Bessie of Jane Eyre and Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights. And so it is we find Mrs. Dean telling us in Chapter IX. of Wuthering Heights, 'I was rocking Hareton on my knee, and humming a song that began:—
Whether traits of Nancy Garrs or her sister, or Martha Brown, the other Brontë servants, contributed to Charlotte's portrayal is doubtful. I think they did not. We see in this chapter the original of Bessie of Jane Eyre was certainly the original of Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights—Tabitha Aykroyd; and as Charlotte Brontë portrayed Mrs. Dean as an elderly woman servant, before she began Jane Eyre, we must decide the question of the real age of the original of Bessie by that fact. Confirming is the portrayal of the same character by Charlotte as the elderly Hannah in Jane Eyre. See my chapter on "The Rivers or Brontë Family."[25]
Of "Dean" or Tabitha Aykroyd in the rôle of Hannah of the family "Jane" says:—"I had a feeling that she did not understand me, ... that she was prejudiced against me." Nevertheless she says to her: "You ... have been an honest and faithful servant, I will say so much for you."
Much stress is placed by Tabitha Aykroyd, as Nelly Dean, and Bessie, on Charlotte Brontë's passionateness. Says Mrs. Dean of Catherine in Wuthering Heights:
"The doctor had said that she would not bear crossing much, she ought to have her own way; and it was nothing less than murder in his eyes, for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her, ... serious threats of a fit ... often attended her rages."
Thus I find there is a connection between Catherine's "fit of frenzy" and delirium in Wuthering Heights, Chapters XI. and XII., and the scenes attendant upon Jane's fit of frenzy in Jane Eyre, Chapters I., II., III. The one is told by Charlotte as from Tabitha Aykroyd's (Bessie's) standpoint, the other from Catherine's (Charlotte Brontë's), an inversion of attitude which proves Charlotte Brontë to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights.
By her Method II.: altering the age of a character portrayed, Charlotte Brontë gives us Tabitha Aykroyd as a young woman in Bessie; and by the same Method II, in the scene just read from Wuthering Heights, we have an instance of her presenting, as an incident in womanhood, an incident which the testimony of Jane Eyre and other evidences show occurred really in Charlotte's own childhood. As she relates in Jane Eyre, her dread was "such dread as children only can feel"; and she goes on to say "this incident [of the locked room] gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day." Thus in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Charlotte paints an excellent picture of the matter-of-fact but good-hearted Tabitha Aykroyd going to the room in response to her, Charlotte Brontë's, frantic appeal, sceptical and certainly unsympathetic.
The part played by the wild summoning of Tabitha to the room, the references to "a fit," the ghost and haunted chamber, the dread of the mirror, the suggestion that the frenzy of fear was wilfully assumed, the piercing scream, Tabitha Aykroyd with her basin and her final suggestion of sleep, are in themselves ample evidence that Charlotte Brontë in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre drew this scene from an experience of the kind in her own childhood. In each work stress is laid by her upon her own hypersensitiveness, and we learn how the Brontë household misunderstood her excessive passionateness and misread it as wicked acting[26].
We see Tabitha best in Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights, as Hannah of the Rivers family of Jane Eyre, and by Currer Bell's Method II., alteration of age of the character portrayed, as Bessie of that work. Tabitha Aykroyd lives and breathes her life through the pages of Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to-day, and ever will she remain in literature, a real Yorkshire woman amazingly translated from the wide Yorkshire hearth with its great, wind-whitened fire and smell of hot cakes, to the pages of two of the finest examples of the English novel. Her portrayal I declare to be one of the most admirable achievements in the works of Charlotte Brontë.
Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontë biographer, relates that a friend of Charlotte Brontë said Charlotte had told her "a misfortune was often preceded by the dream which she gives to Jane Eyre of carrying a wailing child. She, Charlotte Brontë, described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing.... The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was ... present to susceptible people...." This in the main explains the origin of the child-apparition as an omen of disaster in Charlotte Brontë's works.
It would seem by Charlotte's statement in Jane Eyre that Tabitha Aykroyd, as "Bessie," was responsible for the origin of this little superstition; and it is instructive to find the child-apparition as an ill-omen in connection with Tabitha Aykroyd as Mrs. Dean in Wuthering Heights. I have shown John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw represent Branwell Brontë; we may notice, therefore, that the child-apparition is given equally in Wuthering Heights and in Jane Eyre as coming before disaster or disgrace to Branwell Brontë.
| Wuthering Heights. | Jane Eyre. |
| Chapter XI. | Chapter XXI. |
| Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition as a token of calamity to Branwell Brontë. | Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition as a token of calamity to Branwell Brontë. |
| ———— | ———— |
| Says Mrs. Dean [Tabitha]: "I
came to a stone which serves as
a guide-post to ... the Heights
and the village.... Hindley
[Branwell Brontë] and I held it
a favourite spot twenty years
before, ... and ... it appeared
that I beheld my ... playmate
seated on the ... turf, ... his
little hand scooping out the
earth."[27] "Poor Hindley!" [Branwell Brontë] I exclaimed involuntarily. I started—my bodily eye was cheated in the belief that the child lifted its face and stared straight into mine! It vanished in a twinkling; but immediately I felt an irresistible yearning to be at the Heights. Superstition urged me to comply with this impulse—"Suppose he were dead! ... supposing it were a sign of death!" |
Presentiments are strange
things! ... and so are signs....
Sympathies I believe exist
(for instance, between far-distant
... wholly estranged relatives).
When I was a ... girl I
heard Bessie [Tabitha Aykroyd]
say that to dream of children
was a sure sign of trouble....
During the last week scarcely
a night had gone ... that had
not brought ... the dream of
an infant which I ... watched
playing with daisies on a lawn or
... dabbling its hands in running
water.[27] It was a wailing
child this night, ... a laughing
one the next, ... but whatever
mood the apparition evinced ...
it failed not ... to meet me....
I grew nervous.... It was
from companionship with this
baby-phantom I had been roused
... when I heard the cry: and
on the ... day following ...
I found a man [Bessie's husband]
waiting for me; ... he was ...
in deep mourning, and the hat
in his hand was surrounded with
a crape band. "I hope no one is dead," I said. And the man replies that John Reed [Branwell Brontë] had got into great trouble and was dead. |
Branwell Brontë was not dead when Charlotte Brontë wrote those two versions, but it seems certain that an apparition of a child in some period of Charlotte's life preceded a further debasement of Branwell, the original of Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed. We may note Charlotte Brontë's Method II., in regard to Hindley.
In Charlotte Brontë's The Professor we find reference to her child-phantom wailing outside, and to the eerie, premonitory signal made against a lattice, as in her Wuthering Heights:—
| Wuthering Heights. | The Professor. |
| Chapter III. | Chapter XVI. |
| Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. | Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. |
| ———— | ———— |
| While leading me upstairs she
[Zillah, the stout housewife] recommended
that I should hide
the candle and not make a noise,
... they had so many queer
goings-on. He sleeps and is awakened by— The branch of a fir that touched my lattice.... I listened doubtingly, ... I heard the gusty wind and the driving of the snow;... I heard also the firbough repeat its teasing sound.... I ... endeavoured to unhasp the casement, ... knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the ... branch; instead of which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice-cold hand.[28]... I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it and a melancholy voice sobbed—"Let me in—let me in!" ... As it spoke, I discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window.... Still it wailed "Let me in!" and it maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear. "How can I?" I said.... "Let me go, if you want me to let you in." I stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer, ... yet the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on! "Begone!" I shouted; "I'll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years." |
Take care, young man [recommended
"the herdsman's wife"],
that you fasten the door well,
... whatever sound you hear
stir not and look not out. The
night will soon fall, ... strange
noises are often heard ... you
might chance to hear, as it were,
a child cry, and on opening the
door to give it succour ... a
shadowy goblin dog might rush
over the threshold; or more
awful still, if something flapped,
as with wings, against the lattice,
and then a raven or a white dove
flew in and settled on the hearth,
such a visitor would be a sure
sign of misfortune. The stranger, left alone, listens awhile to the muffled snow-wind. |
In Wuthering Heights Charlotte Brontë has worked the child-phantom into the story proper, setting it for the spirit of the departed Catherine, who as a child again (Method II., altering age of the character portrayed) seeks Heathcliffe. The building of the child-phantom in the plot of Wuthering Heights created a peculiar state of affairs; but as we have seen by Charlotte Brontë's reference to it in the extract from The Professor, she was impressed by its possibilities of giving a weird spiritual atmosphere, and she did not extend the idea in The Professor. The substance of Charlotte Brontë's two versions of the child-phantom wailing outside a house for admittance is identical:—
| The Professor. | Wuthering Heights. |
| Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. Young stranger admonished by the good housewife that there are queer goings-on thereabouts. | Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. Young stranger admonished by the good housewife that there are queer goings-on thereabouts. |
| Subjunctive Mood. | Indicative Mood. |
| Something might brush against the lattice, and a phantom-child might wail outside for succour, On opening to admit it an awful, supernatural incident might occur. | Something brushes against the lattice, and a phantom-child wails outside for succour. On opening to admit it an awful, supernatural incident occurs. |
Thus we perceive the famous child-phantom incident in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights had its origin (1) in Montagu's lonely-house incident; (2) in Charlotte Brontë's awe of a child-apparition; (3) in Charlotte Brontë's Method II., alteration of age of character portrayed, by which Catherine the woman becomes a child again; and (4) in Charlotte Brontë's notion, as evidenced in Shirley, Chapter XXIV., that a loved dead one can "revisit those they leave"; can "come in the elements"; that "wind" could give "a path to Moor(e)"—Heath(cliffe), "passing the casement sobbing"; that the loved dead one could "haunt" the wind. These, then, we see were the notions in Charlotte Brontë's head responsible for Catherine's returning so sensationally to the abode of her lover as a child-spectre. For Catherine's love for Wuthering Heights was not simply because of the place and its moors, as so many writers have wrongly contended, but because it was associated with Heathcliffe.[29] Let my reader peruse again the "wailing child" passages I quote from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in Chapter II. of The Key to the Brontë Works.
Truly the testimony of Charlotte Brontë's child-phantom were alone the sign-manual that she and none other wrote Wuthering Heights.
The uncommon stress Charlotte Brontë has laid upon the outlandishness of the Wuthering Heights country and its solitudes assuredly would have been absent from that work had she drawn her background from the comparatively characterless Haworth moors on the skirts of manufacturing towns, and not from impressions created in her mind by Montagu's description in his Gleanings in Craven of the wildest and weirdest scenery in Yorkshire. There has been a noticeable tendency on the part of town-bred, and also of romantic, biographers to be awed by the ordinary moorland surroundings of Haworth, and to associate with them all the wildness of the Craven or Scottish Highlands, though Miss Mary Robinson, whose work entitled Emily Brontë is in effect an "appreciation" of Wuthering Heights, says frankly regarding the house standing beyond the street on the summit of Haworth Hill, shown as the original of Wuthering Heights, that to her thinking "this fine old farm of the Sowdens is far too near the mills of Haworth to represent the God-forsaken, lonely house." But of course an author can place a given abode against any background. Wuthering Heights has been connected by some people with a locality called Withins—how wrongly a reference to the origin of Gimmerton and Gimmerden alone shows. The primary origin of the name and title of "Wuthering Heights" I reveal in the final chapter on "The Recoil."
The following passage from Wuthering Heights tells that Charlotte Brontë's imagination was enjoying the latitude of a half-realized, suggested background. It reads just like the traveller Montagu with his horse, attendant servant on horseback, roadside inns, hostlers, and description of country. But the connection of Montagu with Lockwood of Wuthering Heights we have already seen in the early chapters of The Key to the Brontë Works:—
1802—This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the North, and on my journey ... I unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. The hostler at a roadside public-house was holding a pail of water to refresh my horses when a cart of very green oats ... passed by, and he remarked—
"Yon's frough Gimmerton, nah! They're allus three wick after other folk wi' ther harvest."
"Gimmerton?" I repeated; my residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy. "Ah, I know. How far is it from this?"
"Happen fourteen mile o'er th' hills; and a rough road." A sudden impulse seized me to visit Thrushcross Grange. It was scarcely noon, and I conceived that I might as well pass the night under my own roof as in an inn.... Having rested a while, I directed my servant to inquire the way to the village; and, with great fatigue to our beasts, we managed the distance in some three hours. I left him there, and proceeded ... down the valley alone. The grey church looked greyer, and the churchyard lonelier. I distinguished a moor sheep cropping the short turf on the graves.... The heat did not hinder me from enjoying the delightful scenery above and below; had I seen it nearer August, I'm sure it would have tempted me to waste a month among its solitudes. [Be it observed he would rather have done so than have gone to "the moors" of his friend.] In winter nothing more dreary than those glens shut in by hills,[30] and those bluff, bold swells of heath.
So we too would imagine, judging by Montagu's description of the district in his little work.
Throughout Wuthering Heights we hear mention of Gimmerton, but it is apparent the village was "dim and dreamy" to Charlotte Brontë—somewhere about the little valley we should imagine, to conclude by general observations. However, clear it is that Gimmerton and Gimmerden were drawn by Charlotte Brontë merely from impressions created in her mind by other than a personal acquaintance with the district. Where then, and in what peculiar circumstances, did Charlotte receive these suggestions—suggestions that must have appealed to her at a time immediately coincident with her commencing this foundling story with the house of mystery, the inhospitable host, the uncouth man-servant, and the candle-bearing bedside visitant—all from Montagu's book? My evidence declares these suggestions also came from Montagu's little work, and that the originals of Gimmerton in Wuthering Heights, and Gimmerden, or the valley of Gimmerton, were Malham and Malhamdale, or the valley of Malham. This district Montagu describes as being "most interesting ... in its own variety of wildness."
I believe Kilnsey Crags, which Montagu describes on the last page of the letter next to that written from Malham, figured in Charlotte Brontë's mind as the originals of Peniston Crags ("Peniston" may have been suggested by Montagu's mention of Pennigent). Montagu's description of Kilnsey Crags I will place side by side with the reference to Peniston Crags in Wuthering Heights:—
| Montagu. | Wuthering Heights. Chapter XVIII. |
| ———— | ———— |
| Kilnsey Crags. | Peniston Crags. |
| A lofty range of limestone rocks ... stretching nearly half a mile along the valley, and rendered perhaps, more striking by contrasting with the vale immediately at its base. | The abrupt descent of Peniston Crags particularly attracted her notice; especially when the setting sun shone on it and the topmost heights, and the whole extent of the landscape, besides [by contrasting] lay in shadow. |
Clearly Joseph's "leading of lime" from Peniston Crags in Wuthering Heights was suggested to Charlotte Brontë by the "Kiln" of Kilnsea Crags, and Montagu's reference to the crags being limestone. Dean describes them to Cathy, and her words are simply Montagu's description—treated antithetically—of Gordale Scar in the Malham letter:—
| Montagu. | Wuthering Heights. Chapter XVIII. |
| In the clefts in the rocks' sides, or wherever a lodgement of earth appears [is] the ... yew. | They were bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish ... a tree.... One of the maids mentioning the Fairy Cave, quite turned her head.... |
In his Malham letter Montagu describes a Fairy Cave, and of course Gimmerton has the Fairy Cave in its neighbourhood. It is placed under the Crags, but we have no description in Wuthering Heights:—
| Montagu. | Wuthering Heights. Chapter XVIII. |
| Montagu has a boy-guide "adapted to show the prominent features to strangers." He takes Montagu on to Malham, where Montagu sees the Fairy Cave. This boy-guide was called Robert Airton, and he was aged twelve.[31] | Says Catherine Linton to the boy Hareton:—"I want ... to hear about the fairishes, as you call them.".... Hareton opened the mysteries of the Fairy Cave and twenty other queer places. But ... I was not favoured with a description of the interesting objects she saw. I could gather, however, that her guide had been a favourite. |
The name of Linton appears in Montagu in the letter next that in which he describes the Fairy Cave. We may understand that Charlotte Brontë's romantic imagination was entranced, as she says Catherine Linton's was, with the mention of the Fairy Cave; and Jane Eyre is testimony that after writing Wuthering Heights she turned again to consider its possibilities of suggestion.
In fact, I find that Charlotte Brontë when she chose the name of Janet Eyre for herself was also calling herself the Fairy Janet. And where, then, read Charlotte Brontë of the fairy Janet Eyre? The evidence of Montagu's work proves that when she wrote the name Eyre, she was implying by this Derbyshire variant the name Aire or Ayre, meaning the river Ayre. Where acquired Charlotte Brontë so intimate an acquaintance with the history of the Fairy Janet of the Aire as to take upon herself poetically, the rôle of that Craven elf and her name?
Mr. Harry Speight recently, in The Craven Highlands, told us "the Fairy Jennet or Janet was queen of the Malhamdale elves" who frequented the enchanted ground round the source of the Aire. But prior to Montagu's dealing with Janet's Cave, the home of the Malhamdale fays, the queen-elf had been referred to as Gennet. Montagu spelt the name Jannet, and later writers having referred to him, the fairy cave now bears the name Janet's Cave. A Malham writer prior to Montagu referred only briefly to the Fairy Cave, and quite prosily. In his Malham letter Montagu says:—
"Leaving a farmhouse at the entrance of the vale to the left, we [he and his boy-guide] proceeded over two fields, then ascended about twenty yards, suddenly turned an acute angle, and penetrating some bushes we stood at the entrance of a deep and narrow glen, before a perpendicular fall of water. At the foot of this cascade is
Jannet's Cave.
It is so called from the queen or governess of a numerous tribe of faeries, which tradition assures us anciently held their court here; and as there may be some of my readers who may like at the moonlit hour to be entertained at one of Jannet's banquets, I will give an idea as to the mode of obtaining admission into such society.... On the evening when I first learned the mystic lore, the golden sun had kissed every flower, even unto the retiring lily, and was gliding westward when, from the heart's couch of a moss rose, there came the eldest daughter of faeryland, probably the self-same Jannet's daughter, saying:—
and who, upon being informed that I was desirous of swearing allegiance to her sweet mother, said that she would bring intelligence whether I might be admitted to her pretty vassalage; she then bade her attendants bring her car, which was a leaf of a favourite hyacinth, drawn by two lady-birds who were guided by reins of gossamer; the mellow horn of the herald bee summoned her attendants, who, to the number of twenty, obeyed the call; and taking the coronets from off their brows, made low obeisance to their young princess, which she pleasingly acknowledged. Then they each captured a sphere of thistle-down, and seating themselves thereon, followed their princess; who, attended by her guards, each armed with a maiden's eye-lash, journeyed onwards towards the realms of enchanted ground. I should think that not many minutes elapsed when the cavalcade returned, and the charter written upon the leaf of a 'forget-me-not,' with the gold from a butterfly's wing, was placed into my hand by 'a fay,' with injunctions not to divulge the secrets of the order. I would have promised but awoke from this pleasant dream."
We will now read Montagu's description of the Fairy Janet, and a fairy coming to him at sundown when adapted by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre.
Adèle asks Rochester whether she is to go to school without her governess, Jane Eyre:—
"Yes," he replied; ... "for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me."
"... But you can't get her there...."
"Adèle ... late one evening ... I sat down to rest me on a stile ... when something came up the path.... Our speechless colloquy was to this effect—
"It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said.... It told me of the alabaster cave and silver vale.... I said I should like to go.... 'Oh,' returned the fairy.... 'Here is a talisman which will remove all difficulties' and she held out a pretty gold ring...."
"But what has mademoiselle [Jane Eyre] to do with it? I don't care for the fairy...."
"Mademoiselle [Jane Eyre] is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.
But Adèle assures him she made no account of his "contes de fée."
For the present it is enough to know that in the main and ostensibly the Fairy Janet Eyre was Charlotte Brontë's adaptation of Montagu's Fairy Janet, the queen-elf of the Malhamdale fairies, said to frequent the enchanted land round the source of the Aire.
The fairy idea, Charlotte discovered, served well to give a certain gallantry to Rochester's bestowing of epithets. These the reader may have interest in finding in Jane Eyre. For instance, when Jane, returning from her visit to a dead relative, informs Rochester, he says:—
"A true Janian reply! [italics mine]. Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other world—from the abode of people who are dead, and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I'd touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf!—but I'd as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis-fatuus light in the marsh."
A few lines lower Rochester asks:—
"Tell me, now, fairy as you are—can't you give a charm?"
And then farther down:
"Pass, Janet: go up home and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold."
When Rochester's bed is in flames, and he awakes to find Janet has thrown water upon it, he demands:—
"In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?"
And so I might continue. It is observable Charlotte Brontë never allows Rochester to call Jane Eyre "Janet" and "fairy" in the same breath. She permits the use of Janet, however, when the fairy notion is concealed, as when Rochester says:
"Just put your hand in mine, Janet, that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me."
Certain it is that in Charlotte Brontë's inmost heart her autobiographical self was called Janet Aire.[32]
Charlotte Brontë's conceptions, when she let her imagination have play and forgot the world of readers were, like Jane Eyre's thoughts, "elfish." See the fairy tale, The Adventures of Ernest Alembert (attributed by Charlotte Brontë to her pen in her fifteenth year). It has been remarked this story is not in the handwriting Charlotte Brontë affected at this period, and that the manuscript has not Charlotte's customary title-page.[33] In view of the evidence of The Key to the Brontë Works, it is of interest to make a comparison between Alembert and Montagu's Gleanings in Craven, published eight years later than the date Charlotte Brontë ascribed to its completion. The association of the family of Lambert with hypothetical high treason and with being extinct; with the Malham country as described by Montagu—the references, so frequent in his pages, to the awe inspired by the wildness of the scenery, to the underground torrent, the contrasting range of crags, the lake, the fairy cave, the fairy and the admittance into faerydom; to "the mellow hum of the bee," etc., are interesting in the extreme, seeing by aid of Montagu that Malham as presented by him became Gimmerton of Wuthering Heights. Whether "coincidence" has to do with this matter of Alembert and Montagu, or Charlotte Brontë has for some reason ante-dated Alembert, I leave to the reader to decide.
| Montagu. | The Adventures of Ernest Alembert. |
| Montagu, speaking of the
church of Kirkby-Malham, "in
the ... vale of Malham," says:—"Some
of the Lamberts are
buried here—here is a monument
to ... John Lambert, who aided
Cromwell in his murder of Charles
the First (as all did who were
implicated in Cromwell's rebellion)[34]—after
the Restoration lived
he died banished and forgotten at
Guernsey. The family is now
extinct." In the chapter on Malham, Montagu accepts a guide who takes him up the vale of Malham. He mentions Malham Lake, or Tarn, and says of the River Aire in the connection that the water "delves into the mountain, and does not appear again until it reaches the village of Airton, below Malham." |
Charlotte Brontë begins by
relating that there once lived an
Ernest Alembert. One of the
Alemberts having been "beheaded"
for "high treason,"[34]
"the family had decayed" until
the only survivor was Ernest
Alembert. We are told that he
beside a valley; and the
river became a lake. A stranger
putting him under a spell,
[A]lembert accepts him for a
guide, and they wend their way
up the valley. [A]lembert finds himself at a place where the torrent goes underground. |
| We have descriptions of wild moor, "tremendous" precipices, and "grand and terrific cataracts":—"At last we attained the summit of the mountain, when, looking down in the chasm beneath, horror and immensity were defined with thrilling truth." | We have descriptions of wild moors and precipices, and foaming cataracts. When they stopped to rest after a climb "the scene was grand and awful in the extreme.... The mellow hum of the bee was no longer heard.... Above rose tremendous precipices, whose vast shadows blackened all that portion of the moor [see "Peniston Crags," page 59], and deepened the frown on the face of unpropitious nature." |
| Montagu and his guide go to a cave—the cave of the Fairy Janet. Montagu falling asleep as it were, a fairy comes to his side and tells him he is in the realm of fairies. She promises to induct him into the wonders of faeryland, and "the mellow horn of the herald bee" summoned her attendants. And so on. See Charlotte Brontë's mention in Alembert of "the mellow hum of the bee." | [A]lembert and his guide go to
a cave. Farther on the guide
vanishes, but [A]lembert wakes
to find him by his side as a fairy
[Charlotte Brontë, Method I.,
interchange of the sexes], who
addresses [A]lembert as follows:— "I am a fairy. You have been, and still are, in the land of fairies. Some wonders you have seen; many more you shall see if you choose to follow me." And so on in extension. |
I have often wondered why no one has ever observed before that the hand which wrote The Adventures of Ernest Alembert must assuredly have written every line of Wuthering Heights. We may well understand why Charlotte Brontë in Wuthering Heights wrote of Catherine Linton that "the mentioning the Fairy Cave quite turned her head" with interest. And that the original of the Fairy Cave in Wuthering Heights was the Fairy Cave of Malhamdale Montagu mentions at such length in his Malham letter, the use of the names Linton and Airton in the connection irrefutably proves without other appeal: Hareton—that variant of Aire, cannot be associated with Derbyshire like "Eyre"; and despite the use of "Eyre," Aire was the name in Charlotte Brontë's mind, just as "Airton" was when she wrote "Hareton."
Both the "boy-guide" and "Gimmerton's mist" were obviously suggested to Charlotte Brontë for Wuthering Heights by Montagu, the original, as I have shown, of Lockwood:—