The Brontës' Christmas E-Book

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Brontës' Christmas invites you to step back in time and explore the delights of a Victorian Christmas through the eyes of our most beloved authors. While the Brontë family's celebrations weren't the most exuberant, Victorian society cheerfully embraced the newfound idea of Christmas as a time for feasts, decorations, the exchanging of gifts and parlour games. Through a selection of seasonal recipes, letters, poetry and extracts, The Brontës' Christmas meanders back in time to explore long-forgotten customs, including Vessel Maids and furmenty; the spice cake that Charlotte took around to her husband's parishioners; and childhood games enjoyed by the family. This festive season, curl up and experience a Haworth Christmas.

Leseprobe

First published 1996

This revised and updated edition first published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© The Estate of the late Maria Hubert, 1996, 2024

The right of The Estate of the late Maria Hubert to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 761 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE BRONTËS AT CHRISTMAS

THE OLD MAN IN THE CHARIOT

CHRISTMAS IN THE COUNTRY 1827

THE ISLANDERS

THE LEGEND

THE HOLLY TREE

CHRISTMAS CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE POETS

MUSIC ON A CHRISTMAS MORN

TABBY’S ICY ACCIDENT

CHURCH-DECKING

THE SPARKLING BOUGH

THACKERAY’S CHRISTMAS CRITICISM

THE CHEERFUL HEARTH

JUVENILE PARTIES – A REMONSTRANCE CONCERNING THEM

CHRISTMAS AT WUTHERING HEIGHTS

DECEMBER

A BALL, A GAME OF CHARADES AND CHRISTMAS BAKING

THE PANTOMIME

A CHRISTMAS REMEMBERED

THE MAHOGANY TREE

CHRISTMAS STORMS AND SUNSHINE

ANNUALS, ALBUMS AND CHRISTMAS ART

THE MAGIC LANTERN

A TRAGIC CHRISTMAS TALE

CHARLOTTE’S LAST SPICE CAKE

THE WASSAIL CUP OF ‘OLD OCTOBER’

THE GREAT YORKSHIRE SPICE CAKE

CHRISTMAS CUSTOMS IN BRONTË COUNTRY

THE TRADITIONAL FESTIVE BOARD

THE CHRISTMAS PARTY

AN IMPOSTER AT CHRISTMAS

A NEW YEAR FÊTE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Introduction

Whereas it is true that a Brontë Christmas was a very austere affair and, in their family, dinner parties would have been virtually unknown, it has to be acknowledged that the society around them was moving on.

By the time that Charlotte died in 1855, the Christmas-card industry was well on its way, following the initial private publishing of Sir Henry Cole’s first Christmas card in 1843. The penny post was a success, opening up all sorts of opportunities for the developing and increasingly aspirational Victorian middle class.

The Brontë’s home county of Yorkshire was particularly renowned for its traditions and embraced a very jolly Christmas. The county, with its mills and mines, was undergoing something of a social revolution: fortunes were being made and the notion of the ‘self-made man’, as opposed to one who had inherited wealth, was widely accepted, even if they hadn’t yet knocked on the doors of the aristocracy.

Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall, or the Humorists: A Medley, was published initially in 1822, when the Brontë girls were still very young; it was popular, describing a notional country-manor Christmas in all its glory. Twenty-five years on and the stage was set for the introduction of Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree via The Sphere and The Illustrated London News, with the attendant middle-class desire for emulating their social betters. Change was in the air, printing was widely available with steel plates, and a plethora of artists well able to see their work mass produced in newspapers and, indeed, attempts at colour reproduction for the emerging greetings-card market.

Already in Germany, various Christmas decorations were being made, including candle holders for the Christmas tree – the first (albeit large) hand-blown Christmas baubles being sold at first through Coburg market, but soon to be exported. The appetite was already there as the developing and increasingly industrialised retail market was set to explode. The middle classes had disposable income. Victorian entrepreneurs were able to raise capital and exploit the trend.

Much of this would seem to have bypassed the Brontë sisters, but even so their father bought some wooden soldiers for the girls’ brother, Branwell, that gave rise to Charlotte’s stories based on them, beginning with the The Twelve Adventurers, written when she was 13.

They were creative, but the overall feeling is one of austerity. This has to have contrasted greatly with what was going on around them in Yorkshire society at large.

It might be a case of the Reverend Brontë fearing for the morals of his daughters in an increasingly aspirational and materialistic world. He put all his faith in his only son, Branwell, who was destined (or so he thought) for fame and success. In today’s environment, the girls would probably be regarded as abused.

All their writings, at least in comparison with their contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, are subdued when it comes to celebration. Thackeray was indeed read by Charlotte and they became literary friends, but one wonders what the witty and gregarious Thackeray made of the almost eremitical isolation of Charlotte and her sisters.

He went on to evolve with the changing times, writing a number of satirical articles on the family Christmas later in his life. One can but wonder if the Brontës had survived longer would they have embraced the emerging and sometimes rumbustiously colourful Victorian Christmas.

They were contemporary with Charles Dickens but, sadly, shared little of that gentleman’s enthusiasm for the season, which is a pity. One cannot help but get a feeling that the idea of guilt at any form of Christmas celebration suffused the atmosphere of the Reverend Brontë’s household.

What is certain is that some of Charlotte’s illustrations turned up in published Christmas cards within a decade or two of her death. These were undoubtedly pirated, but everything was up for grabs in the days before copyright laws. Whatever the developing commercial Christmas market had in store for Charlotte and her sisters, one thing is certain: they did not benefit!

Their short lives could have marked the transition from the country Christmas of Austen to the urban goodwill of Dickens. This is one of literature’s might-have-beens. Sadly we will never know how much happier their festive season might have become.

Andrew Hubert von StauferMarch 2024

The Brontës at Christmas

MRS GASKELL

It is important to introduce Elizabeth Gaskell into any work on the Brontës, no matter how lightly written it may be. As the first and contemporary biographer of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell gave us the first valuable glimpses into the family’s private lives, and her biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was not to be challenged until 1932 when Messrs Wise and Symington produced a grand four-volume work, based on papers and letters which had gone astray through the family of Charlotte’s husband.

On 16 June 1855, shortly after her death in that same year, Charlotte’s father sent a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, who had been a family friend during the latter years, asking her to undertake the writing of a biography. She had been used to writing novels, and perhaps this shows in her approach to the biography, which is very accessible. Her blunt honesty regarding the treatment of the children by their father, comments made by the staff, and defamatory comments about school life, was a source of annoyance, and caused some of these remarks to be withdrawn from the original book. However, it shows better than any the background which spawned such a tragic family: the repression, the frustration and disappointment which may have been instrumental in the dissipation of Branwell, and the rather dour attitudes which appear in many Brontë writings.

The following extract chronicles some of the Brontës’ Christmases, which pass with rather less momentum than other events such as visits to London or a summer trip to the sea. Such occasions were described almost ecstatically by comparison. Yet Christmas was a time when all the family travelled to be together, no matter how far away, so the Christmas family gathering had obvious importance to them, but then seems singularly lacking in event, or at any rate, the permitted events were not considered important enough to mention in letters or diaries.

Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857 and gives a clear and contemporary account of the attitudes of the time, as well as the personal family restraints within which the Brontës grew up. She begins her biography by painting a picture of this ‘landscape’, and drawing on the writings of others to add colour. In the following she uses the text of one Dr Davy, to describe the kind of life Charlotte’s mother grew up in, in Cornwall, some decades before:

Visiting then was conducted differently from what it is at present. Dinner parties were almost unknown, except at the annual feasting time. Christmas too, was then a season of peculiar indulgence and conviviality, and a round of entertainments was given, consisting of tea and supper. Excepting at these two periods, visiting was almost entirely confined to tea-parties, which assembled at three-o’clock, and broke up at nine, and the amusement of the evening was commonly round some game of cards, as Pope Joan, or Commerce. The lower class was then extremely ignorant, and all classes were very superstitious; even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous. There was scarcely a parish in the Mount’s Bay that was without a haunted house, or a spot to which some story of supernatural horror was not attached. Even when I was a boy, I remember a house in the best street in Penzance which was uninhabited because it was believed to be haunted, and which young people walked by at night at a quickened pace, and with a beating heart. Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, and still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, and a low state of morals, were naturally associated with it . . .

I have given this extract because I conceive it bears some reference to the life of Miss Brontë . . .

Later, on 19 January 1831, Charlotte is sent to Roe Head School near Kirklees, and in 1835 she goes back there as an assistant teacher. Around this time the school is moved to Dewsbury, where the Brontë girls – Charlotte and Anne – feel the air is not so good. (A later biography by Pinion states that the move was in 1837.) The next extract from Mrs Gaskell’s biography refers to the following Christmas, that of 1836:

When the sisters met at home in the Christmas holidays, they talked over their lives, and the prospect which they afforded of occupation and remuneration. They felt it was a duty to relieve their father of the burden of their support, if not entirely, or that of all three, at least that of one or two; and, naturally, the lot devolved upon the elder ones to find some remunerative occupation. They knew that they were never likely to inherit much money . . . But this Christmas of 1836 was not without its hopes, and daring inspirations. They had tried their hands at story-writing, in their miniature magazine long ago; they all of them ‘made out’ perpetually. They had likewise attempted to write poetry; and had a modest confidence that they had achieved a tolerable success. But they knew they might deceive themselves, and that sisters’ judgements of each others’ productions were likely to be too partial to be depended upon. So Charlotte, as the eldest, resolved to write to Southey. I believe (from an expression in a letter to be noticed hereafter) that she also consulted Coleridge; but I have not met with any part of that correspondence.

On December 29th her letter to Southey was dispatched; and from an excitement not unnatural in a girl who has worked herself up to the pitch of writing to a Poet Laureate and asking his opinion of her poems, she used some high-flown expressions, which, probably, gave him the idea she was a romantic young lady, unacquainted with the realities of life.

This, most likely, was the first of those adventurous letters that passed through the little post office of Haworth. Morning after morning of the holidays slipped away, and there was no answer; the sisters had to leave home, and Emily to return to her distasteful duties, without knowing whether Charlotte’s letter had ever reached its destination.

The Christmas which was known to the Brontë children was not, by all accounts, the Christmas which they enjoyed.

Yorkshire, particularly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seemed to be divided on the festivity, and not by any level of social class, but by religion: the same division which separated father from son and wife from husband during Cromwell’s Commonwealth era. One half of Yorkshire behaved as if there had never been a hint of reform, with all the joy and merriment of the ‘Old Christmas’; the other half fought against all but the meanest acceptance of the birth of Christ as a reason to rejoice.

Throughout their novels, especially Charlotte’s, there are almost wistful references to Christmas Charades, Wassail Cups and numerous preparations for ‘Old Christmas’. Christmas time is always present, even for little tragedies, as in the tale of the dead lover in Villette and the mysteriously abandoned little pupil in Charlotte’s last and unfinished novel, Emma.

Their own diaries and letters seem to drift over the festive season with little mention, though the family always tried to be together for the Christmas holidays. Did they celebrate the way their characters did, with fine foods and balls? Did they play a game of charades, like the one described so vividly in Jane Eyre? Perhaps that will forever remain a mystery along with the identity of Emma!

Maybe the ‘guisers’ bringing their Christmas songs were discouraged from the parsonage door, along with the little Vessel Maids with their half-Christian half-pagan custom, but the Brontë children would have seen them in such a small close-knit community as the village of Haworth, and known all about the customs to which they were possibly not party. They were probably not allowed to decorate their father’s church, but surely would have attended the services there and sung the great Christmas hymns. Some of these are attributed to John Wesley himself and could surely not have been disapproved of. It is difficult to believe that they did not enjoy the Christmas table, guests and other innocent enjoyments of the season, yet Charlotte, who opened her heart to her old school friend Ellen Nussey about everything from a trip to the seaside to proposals of marriage, never once mentions anything resembling a Christmas activity in the Brontë household!

The Old Man in the Chariot

AN EXTRACT FROM ‘THE SEARCH AFTERHAPINESS’ – JUVENILIA FROM 13-YEAR-OLDCHARLOTTE BRONTË.

The Brontë children amused themselves by inventing numerous fantasy lands, which they turned into plays and ‘bed-plays’, stories played out under cover of the bedclothes away from the strict discipline of their Aunt Branwell and father. They were influenced by such literature as Arabian Nights and Paradise Lost. These fantasy adventures appear to have begun in 1826, after their father brought back a gift of twelve soldiers from a trip to Leeds. The event is chronicled by Charlotte herself:

Papa bought Branwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds; when Papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed, ‘This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke!’ When I said this, Emily likewise took one up and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part. Emily’s was a grave looking fellow, and we called him, ‘Gravey’. Anne’s was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him, ‘Waiting-boy’. Branwell chose his, and called him, ‘Buonaparte’.

Thus began the stories of ‘The Twelve Adventurers’ by Charlotte. In 1830, when he was 13, Branwell created an elaborate story based on these adventures in which he described Glass City, where the twelve ‘Young Men’ had their history. In her description of her tale, Charlotte says that it is set in Glass town, and indeed her soldier the Duke of Wellington, and other characters from the children’s history appear, though it is not strictly part of that history.

It is reproduced here with Charlotte’s own spelling and punctuation. The story is about a nobleman called O’Donell who embarks upon a journey of self-discovery, and meets others on the way. The story takes up where they meet a strange old man whom they persuade to tell his story, although the old man’s identity remains a mystery!

I was the son of a respectable merchant in Moussoul. My father intended to bring me up in his own trade but I was idle and did not like it. One day when I was playing in the street a very old man came up to me and asked me if I would go with him. I asked him where he was going. He replied that if I would go with him he would show me very wonderful things. This raised my curiosity and I consented. He imediatly took me by the hand and hurried me out of the city of Moussoul so quickly that my breath was almost stopped and it seemed as if we glided along in the air for I could hear no sound of our footsteps. We continued on our course for a long time till we came to [a] glen surrounded by very high mountains. How we passed over those mountains I could never tell. In the middle of the glen there was a small fountain of very clear water. My conductor directed me to drink of it. This I did and imediatly I found myself in a palace the glory of which far exceeds any description which I can give. The tall stately pillars reaching from heaven to earth were formed of the finest and purest diamonds the pavement skarling with gold and precious stones and the mighty dome made solemn and awful by its stupendous magnitude was of one single emerald. In the midst of this grand and magnificent palace was a lamp like the sun the radience of which made all the palace to flash and glitter with an almost fearful grandeur. The ruby sent forth a stream of crimson light the topaz gold the saphire the intensest purple and the dome poured a flood of deep clear splendour which overcame all the other gaudy lights by its mild triumphant glory. In this palace were thousands and tens of thousands of fairies and geni some of whom flitted among the blazing lamps to the sound of unearthly music which dyed and swelled a strain of wild grandeur suited to the words they sung . . .