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Before he can intervene the girl is stabbed to death and when he leaps
into the canal to avenge her he himself is captured by the murderer,
whom he recognizes but names only as T_e. The text, with its vivid
description of madness, is particularly significant : it is a precursor
to one of the most famous scenes in Charlotte Brontë’s later fiction:
the moment in Jane Eyre when Bertha, Mr Rochester’s insane wife
(who was, like Lord Charles, kept in the attic) seeks revenge by setting
fire to the bed-curtains in her husband’s chamber.
The Midnight Song
is the second piece in the magazine. It strikes
a very different tone and is, appropriately, the work of a different
fictional character, Lord Charles’s brother the Marquis of Douro.
Over the years Douro increasingly became the central character
holding together the Glass Town saga, gaining new titles as Duke of
Zamorna and King of Angria, and Gerin identifies him as Charlotte’s
prototypical Byronic hero: “To ignore Zamorna [i.e. Douro] is to lose
the very concept from which Rochester sprang – the love not only
of Charlotte’s adolescence but, as time would show in all essential
traits, of her life.”
Journal of a Frenchman
is the third work in this manuscript
.
This
is the second instalment of the work which begun in the previous
issue with a young man celebrating the death of his tyrannical father
and inheritance of a title. “Paris Glass Town” was Branwell’s kingdom
and it is possible that they worked together on this piece, although it
is in the same hand as the others. In this second episode the young
Baron arrives in Paris, is presented at court, and goes to a ball hosted
by the “Comtess Du Ouvert”, in a narrative that dwells on luxury and
vanity. It focuses on such details as food, drink and costume, gives a
detailed account of the narrator’s foppish and effeminate preparations
for his first ball (“...I first washed myself in rose-water with transparent
soap then got myself shaved till my chin was smoother than satin:
next my cheeks received a fresh bloom by the addition of a little
rouge...”) and describes the social etiquette of the Tuileries Palace
with considerable aplomb for a fourteen year old girl who had never
left the north of England. Charlotte still finds an opportunity to give
her narrator a gothic nightmare (“...I was doing penance for some
trifling fault by lying all night in a coffin while the ghost of my father
constantly haunted my sight hovered round me...”) but the narrative
ends with the whirl of dance.
provenance
Sale Sotheby’s London, 15 December 2011, lot 46.
Upon Charlotte Brontë’s death in 1855 her surviving manuscripts
passed to her widower, the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, who moved to
Ireland in 1861. In 1895 Nicholls was approached by Clement Shorter,
acting on behalf of the bibliographer, collector, and forger T.J. Wise,
who purchased the bulk of the manuscripts for £400. No complete
list of these manuscripts is known but since this manuscript was not
included among the residue of Nicholls’s collection (sold at Sotheby’s
26 July 1907, 19 June 1914, and 15 December 1916) it can be assumed
that it was among Wise’s purchases. Folders and slip-off cases
similar to that protecting this manuscript are also found with some
of the manuscripts from Wise’s collection. Wise sold many of the
individual manuscripts to a range of collectors, and this manuscript
has remained in private ownership in Continental Europe until the
present time. Charlotte Brontë’s manuscripts were dispersed in the
nineteenth century but the vast majority are now in institutional
collections in the UK and USA.
literature
Alexander, C.
A Bibliography of the Manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë.
Keighley, 1982. –
The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë 1826-1832,
ed. C. Alexander. Oxford, 1987. - Dalsimer, K. “The Young Charlotte
Brontë”, in
The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth,
Volume
3, 2010, pp. 317-339. – Gerin, W.
Charlotte Brontë: the Evolution of
Genius
. Oxford, 1967