How different the course of Charlotte’s life – and all their lives might have been had Mr. Brontë kept the girls at home, tutored by Miss Branwell in needlework and housekeeping, and by their own reading. The Cambridge-educated clergyman had decided to instruct Branwell in Latin and Greek himself. Understandably, perhaps, he felt at a loss to cope with five girls. Maria, the eldest, patiently taught Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne how to read and count. Yet they needed some kind of formal education. Casting about for an inexpensive school, he found what seemed to be a godsend for a parson trying to raise a family on £200 a year: Cowan Bridge, a school for daughters of the clergy, newly founded by a Rev. William Carus Wilson, vicar of Tunstall.
A Cowan Bridge prospectus sheds some interesting light on the education of young ladies in 1825. For £14 per year students were clothed, lodged, boarded, and – last – educated.
Maria and Elizabeth were enrolled at the Clergy Daughters’ School in July 1824. They were examined and the results entered in the school register: Maria “reads tolerably, writes pretty well, ciphers a little, works [i.e., sews] very badly, knows a little grammar, geography and history”; Elizabeth “reads little, writes pretty well, works very badly, knows nothing else.”! This estimation of the girls’ abilities certainly does not tally with other reports of their cleverness. Perhaps Maria’s and Elizabeth’s shyness prevented their doing well when examined; perhaps the things they did know were not asked – or perhaps the school authorities were unable to recognize ability when they saw it.
In the next weeks, having heard nothing adverse about the school from his two eldest daughters, Mr. Brontë decided that Charlotte should follow. He himself accompanied his eight-year-old daughter in a coach the fifty miles from Haworth to Cowan Bridge in Lancashire.
Upon arrival, Charlotte too was examined and the following judgment succinctly penned in the register: “Entered school August 10, 1824. Reads tolerably – Writes indifferently – Ciphers a little and works neatly – Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments – Altogether clever of her age but knows nothing systematically.”
Despite her distress at having to leave home and her extreme timidity in the new surroundings, Charlotte was overjoyed to be reunited with Maria and Elizabeth. Mr. Brontë himself spent the night at the school and was so satisfied that he left next day determined to send Emily to join her sisters.
Cowan Bridge, however, proved a disaster for the Brontës, and one of the bitterest episodes in Charlotte’s often bitter life. Years later, still lacerated by the memory, she wrote her experiences into her novel, Jane Eyre. The Rev. William Carus Wilson became Mr. Brocklehurst —
“A black pillar! such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight, the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital.” The name Cowan Bridge she altered to Lowood, and painted a grim picture of an inhuman institution seen through the eyes of the child, Jane Eyre:
The refectory was a great, low-ceiled, gloomy room; on two long tables smoked basins of something hot, which, however, to my dismay, sent forth an odour far from inviting. I saw a universal manifestation of discontent when the fumes of the repast met the nostrils of those destined to swallow it; from the van of the procession, the tall girls of the first class, rose the whispered words:-
“Disgusting! The porridge is burnt again!”
“Silence!” ejaculated a voice … A long grace was said and a hymn sung; then a servant brought in some tea for the teachers, and the meal began.
Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess: burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it.
The spoons were moved slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished.
Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted…
The next day commenced as before, getting up and dressing by rushlight: but this morning we were obliged to dispense with the ceremony of washing: the water in the pitchers was frozen. A change had taken place in the weather the preceding evening, and a keen northeast wind, whistling through the crevices of our bedroom windows all night long, had made us shiver in our beds, and turned the contents of the ewers to ice….
During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and, after their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented our stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church; but within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold: we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning.
Sundays were dreary days in that wintry season. We had to walk two miles to Brocklebridge Church, where our patron officiated. We set out cold, we arrived at church colder: during the morning service we became almost paralysed. It was too far to return to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat and bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our ordinary meals, was served round between the services.
At the close of the afternoon service we returned by an exposed and hilly road, where the bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summits to the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces. …
How we longed for the light and heat of a blazing fire when we got back! But, to the little ones at least, this was denied: each hearth in the school-room was immediately surrounded by a double row of great girls, and behind them the younger children crouched in groups, wrapping their starved arms in their pinafores.
Charlotte raged not only against her own physical and mental suffering at Cowan Bridge. Her charge against the institution was far more severe, for quite literally she blamed Mr. Wilson’s school for the deaths of Elizabeth and Maria. Maria’s persecution, illness, and death are also recounted in Jane Eyre in the story of Helen Burns, but the truth is even more pathetic.
A gentle, dreamy, untidy creature, Maria did not fit well into the rigid routine of the boarding school, despite her great abilities as a student. She could not be punctual; she could not keep her possessions in order. Her tardiness, her absent-mindedness, her constant cough – and, not least, her obvious mental superiority – drew down the wrath of a particular mistress, Miss Andrews, on her head. If Maria had rebelled perhaps the tyrant would have been checked, but she accepted the humility of constant punishment with silent dignity. Her passivity only drove the frustrated and sadistic Miss Andrews to new cruelties.
In Jane Eyre there is a scene in which Miss Scatcherd orders Helen Burns to fetch a bundle of twigs, and then, commanding the girl to loosen her pinafore, delivers a dozen stinging strokes on her bare neck. This incident may well have happened; if not, there were other real punishments just as brutal.
Mrs. Gaskell, without revealing Miss Andrews’ name, gives this testimony of a fellow pupil of Charlotte and Maria:
“The dormitory in which Maria slept was a long room, holding a row of narrow little beds on each side, occupied by the pupils; and at the end of this dormitory there was a small bed-chamber opening out of it, appropriated to the use of Miss Scatcherd. Maria’s bed stood nearest to the door of this room. One morning, after she had become so seriously unwell as to have had a blister applied to her side (the sore from which was not perfectly healed), when the getting-up bell was heard, poor Maria moaned out that she was so ill, so very ill, she wished she might stop in bed; and some of the girls urged her to do so, and said they would explain it all to Miss Temple, the superintendent. But Miss Scatcherd was close at hand, and her anger would have to be faced before Miss Temple’s kind thoughtfulness could interfere; so the sick child began to dress, shivering with cold, as, without leaving her bed, she slowly put on her black worsted stockings over her thin white legs (my informant spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flashed out undying indignation). Just then Miss Scatcherd issued from her room, and, without asking for a word of explanation from the sick and frightened girl, she took her by the arm, on the side to which the blister had been applied, and by one vigorous movement whirled her out into the middle of the floor, abusing her all the time for dirty and untidy habits. There she left her. My informant says, Maria hardly spoke, except to beg some of the more indignant girls to be calm; but, in slow, trembling movements, with many a pause, she went downstairs at last-and was punished for being late.”
Charlotte, the smallest girl – helpless – witnessed this scene and never forgot.
Reading the account, we are as indignant as Maria’s schoolmates in the bare dormitory that cold morning. Oddly enough, however, the fictional Helen Burns is unsatisfactory as a character and leaves many readers not only unmoved but critical.
Charlotte insisted again and again that Helen Burns was exactly like Maria, but she failed to capture the human quality of her adored sister. Helen Burns is too good; we cannot sympathize with such superhuman patience and resignation.
After a public whipping, for example, Helen proclaims, “It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you; and besides, the Bible bids us return good for evil.” This is irreproachable theoretically, but Jane Eyre’s reaction impresses us as sounder, even though the thought of a child striking back at an adult is rather disquieting: “When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should – so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.”
Even less comprehensible to a modern reader is Helen’s willingness to die because, had she lived, she would only have sinned. “By dying young,” says Helen, “I shall escape great suffering. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world; I should have been continually at fault.” This is unhealthy, and unhealthiness is unfortunately the chief impression Charlotte’s fictional account of her sister conveys, particularly when we learn that Helen was actually the favorite of “Miss Scatcherd.”
Charlotte revered Maria almost as a saint, but one is relieved that Charlotte herself was a faulty, healthier sinner.
Charlotte evidently did not realize how closely Maria’s philosophy corresponded with the teachings of the man she hated so violently, Mr. William Carus Wilson. The director of Cowan Bridge was also a pamphleteer of mean but widely admired abilities. The chief product of his pen was a series of revolting little stories about “good” children and the contented and even eager way they embraced early death. He was a man who could clasp his hands in enthusiastic approval over this inscription on a child’s tomb:
When the archangel’s trump shall sound,
And souls to bodies join;
Thousands will wish their stay on earth
Had been as short as mine.
In The Children’s Friend for December 1826, one of his periodicals, he tells with relish of the death of young Sarah Bicker at Cowan Bridge from inflammation of the bowels:
I had heard from the teachers that she had expressed a desire to depart and to be with Christ and I was anxious to assure myself that her hopes were well founded. The following conversation took place:
“Sarah, are you happy?”
“Yes, very happy, Sir.”
“And what is it makes you happy?”
“Because Jesus Christ died to save me and he will take me to heaven.”
“And he will save all men?”
“No, Sir, only those that trust in him…”
On the Sunday evening she was taken ill, she was asked by a school-mistress, “If she should like to die?”
She answered “Not yet”
“Why?”
“I should wish to have time to repent, and be a better child.”
Mr. Wilson draws the moral clearly. “I bless God that be has taken from us the child of whose salvation we bave the best bope and may her death be the means of rousing many of her school-fellows to seek the Lord while be may be found.”
It is disturbing to reflect that a man who actually believed, as his many writings bear witness, that little George, or Jane, or Kitty was better off dead because sinless was the director of a children’s school.
But Mr. Wilson was not an exception. His Children’s Friend was just one of dozens of Sunday school publications that preached the same philosophy, and most of his contemporaries found him a highly moral, sincere, and intelligent man. The small Charlotte Brontë judged him immoral, hypocritical, and benighted.
In the late winter and early spring of 1825 the grim subject Mr. Wilson enjoyed idealizing became a tragic reality. Maria’s cough had grown more wracking, her small frame more wasted. In February, Mr. Brontë journeyed to Lancashire to fetch home his eldest daughter “in ill health,” according to the testimony of the school register. Then in April a low fever broke out among the girls. Charlotte recorded the experience in Jane Eyre:
That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded school-room and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital. Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection … The teachers were fully occupied with packing up and making other necessary preparations for the departure of those girls who were fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of contagion. Many, already smitten, went home only to die; some died at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly, the nature of the malady forbidding delay.
Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Emily, who had joined her sisters the previous November, all escaped the infection. Paradoxically, this period of death, sickness, and sorrow was one of liberation for Charlotte and her sisters.
Lessons were suspended, the regime relaxed.
…they let us ramble in the wood, like gipsies, from morning till night; we did what we liked, went where we liked: we lived better too…. our breakfast-basins were better filled: when there was no time to prepare a regular dinner, which often happened, [the house-keeper] would give us a large piece of cold pie, or a thick slice of bread and cheese, and this we carried away with us to the wood, where we each chose the spot we liked best, and dined sumptuously. My favourite seat was a smooth and broad stone, rising white and dry from the very middle of the beck, and only to be got at by wading through the water; a feat I accomplished barefoot.
Then came news from Haworth. Maria was dead. Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Emily could not return home for the funeral.
On Branwell, who observed day by day her suffering and slow decline, his sister’s death was engraved for life. Years later, in his poem Caroline, he recorded with nightmarelike clarity the morbid details of her death and burial:
…She lay with flowers about her head—
Though formal grave-clothes hid her hair!
Still did her lips the smile retain
Which parted them when hope was high,
Still seemed her brow as smoothed from pain
As when all thought she could not die…
They came-they pressed the coffin lid
Above my Caroline,
And then, I felt, for ever hid
My sister’s face from mine!
Then Elizabeth, less brilliant than Maria, but almost as stoically good, fell into a decline. By the end of May her condition was grave enough to warrant her being sent home to Haworth in the care of a trusted servant. Thoroughly alarmed, the school authorities were willing to take no more chances with the vulnerable Brontës.
Charlotte and Emily were dispatched immediately to William Carus Wilson’s own home, and Mr. Brontë was summoned to come to fetch them back to Haworth. Despite their great relief to be home at the parsonage again, they found no escape from sorrow: Elizabeth drooped and sickened, and in a few weeks she too was borne through the low lych-gate to be laid beside her mother and sister.
When Jane Eyre was published, Lowood was immediately identified as Cowan Bridge – much to Charlotte’s consternation – and a great cry of indignation went up from Mr. Wilson’s friends and the many distinguished patrons of the school. And the Cowan Bridge Controversy, as it came to be known, is hardly settled today.
Did Charlotte tell the truth or didn’t she? Evidence suggests she did – or nearly. And one suspects that, besides harshness, bad and scanty food, cold, and neglect, another charge could be leveled against the Clergy Daughters’ School—an inadequate curriculum and staff. If the inclusion of ventriloquy in the course list does not inspire doubt, then Mr. Wilson’s description of his nepotistic staff must.
“I have already engaged professional teachers of more than ordinary talent to assist me in superintending the Education of the Students,” he announces in a prospectus. “Their abilities need no comment from me; they have already distinguished themselves by their accomplishments. I could afford instances of such, but seeing they are members for the most part of my own family, I refrain from motives of delicacy.”
When first-class education for girls was so desperately needed, when so many women faced poverty from lack of skill and training, it is discouraging to think that Cowan Bridge was probably just one of dozens of schools that fell severely short of its goal.
Unlike Maria, Charlotte did not collide with the rigid disciplinarians of the school. The headmistress, indeed, did not remember her, stating in a letter to Mrs. Gaskell, “Of the two younger ones (if two there were) I have very slight recollections, save that one, a darling child, was quite the pet nursling of the school.” “The pet nursling” is, of course, not Charlotte but Emily. Charlotte did impress some of her schoolmates as a bright, clever little child, but many years later, in a letter to her publisher, she herself said of those ten months at Cowan Bridge, “My career was a very quiet one, I was plodding and indus-trious, perhaps I was very grave, for I suffered to see my sisters perishing, but I think I was remarkable for nothing.”
Outwardly obedient, hard-working, and quiet, Charlotte seethed inside, and the Cowan Bridge affair is interesting not so much for what it tells us about the school as for what it tells us about Charlotte Brontë.
So many facets of the child that were to characterize the woman emerge.
We see, for example, Charlotte’s capacity for intense resentment and hatred and, at the same time, her compulsion to suppress her feelings under a mask of conformity and submission.
“I am a hearty hater,” she once wrote her good friend Ellen Nussey in a moment of frank revelation; but few people were ever to see this side of her personality – until, perhaps, they found themselves pilloried in the pages of one of her novels.
Reading Jane Eyre, one is struck too at how deep the resentment runs against Mr. Brocklehurst, both as an authority figure and, if one takes into account the obvious phallic symbolism with which he is so antagonistically described, as a male. This hostility too was to play a key role in her art and life.
Again, we are struck by the child’s independence of mind – her immunity against cant and hypocrisy, her strongly developed critical faculty. Yet Cowan Bridge also shows us that Charlotte’s emotions could sometimes distort her critical judgment and bias her irrevocably, even against fact.
At the same time, Cowan Bridge changed Charlotte. It robbed her of childish spirits and confidence and taught her to distrust life. The world, Charlotte concluded, was likely to offer you a cup of happiness and then snatch it from your outstretched hand. The child formulated a new but permanent philosophy: Be slow to reach out – and expect the worst.
hexafu 