After her return home, she employed herself in teaching her sisters, over whom she had had superior advantages. She writes thus, July 21st, 1832, of her course of life at the parsonage:—
“An account of one day is an account of all. In the morning, from nine o’clock till half-past twelve, I instruct my sisters, and draw; then we walk till dinner-time. After dinner I sew till tea-time, and after tea I either write, read, or do a little fancy work, or draw, as I please. Thus, in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course, my life is passed. I have been only out twice to tea since I came home. We are expecting company this afternoon, and on Tuesday next we shall have all the female teachers of the Sunday-school to tea.”
It was about this time that Mr. Brontë provided his children with a teacher in drawing, who turned out to be a man of considerable talent, but very little principle. Although they never attained to anything like proficiency, they took great interest in acquiring this art; evidently, from an instinctive desire to express their powerful imaginations in visible forms. Charlotte told me, that, at this period of her life, drawing, and walking out with her sisters, formed the two great pleasures and relaxations of her day.
The three girls used to walk upwards towards the “purple-black” moors, the sweeping surface of which was broken by here and there a stone-quarry; and if they had strength and time to go far enough, they reached a waterfall, where the beck fell over some rocks into the “bottom.” They seldom went downwards through the village. They were shy of meeting even familiar faces, and were scrupulous about entering the house of the very poorest uninvited. They were steady teachers at the Sunday-school, a habit which Charlotte kept up very faithfully, even after she was left alone; but they never faced their kind voluntarily, and always preferred the solitude and freedom of the moors.
In the September of this year, Charlotte went to pay her first visit to her friend E. It took her into the neighbourhood of Roe Head, and brought her into pleasant contact with many of her old schoolfellows. After this visit, she and her friend seem to have agreed to correspond in French, for the sake of improvement in the language. But this improvement could not be great, when it could only amount to a greater familiarity with dictionary words, and when there was no one to explain to them that a verbal translation of English idioms hardly constituted French composition; but the effort was laudable, and of itself shows how willing they both were to carry on the education which they had begun under Miss Wooler. I will give an extract which, whatever may be thought of the language, is graphic enough, and presents us with a happy little family picture; the eldest sister returning home to the two younger, after a fortnight’s absence.
“J‘arrivait à Haworth en parfaite sauveté sans le moindre accident ou malheur. Mes petites soeurs couraient hors de la maison pour me rencontrer aussitôt que la voiture se fit voir, et elles m’embrassaient avec autant d’empressement, et de plaisir, comme si j’avais été absente pour plus d‘an. Mon Papa, ma Tante, et le monsieur dont mon frére avoit parlé, furent tous assembles dans le Salon, et en peu de temps je m’y rendis aussi. C‘est souvent l’ ordre du Ciel que quand on a perdu un plaisir il y en a un autre prêt à prendre sa place. Ainsi je venoit de partir de trés chérs amis, mais tout à l’heure je revins à des parens aussi chers et bons dans le moment. Même que vous me perdiez (ose-je croire que mon depart vous était un chagrin?) vous attendites l’ arrivée de votre frére, et de votre sœur. J‘ai donné a mes sœurs les pommes que vous leur envoyiez avec tant de bonté; elles disent qu’elles sont sur que Mademoiselle E. est trés aimable et bonne; l‘une et l’autre sont extremement impatientes de vous voir; j‘espére qu’en peu de mois elles auront ce plaisir.”1
But it was some time before the friends could meet, and meanwhile they agreed to correspond once a month. There were no events to chronicle in the Haworth letters. Quiet days, occupied in teaching, and feminine occupations in the house, did not present much to write about; and Charlotte was naturally driven to criticize books.
Of these there were many in different plights, and according to their plight, kept in different places. The well bound were ranged in the sanctuary of Mr. Brontë’s study; but the purchase of books was a necessary luxury to him, and as it was often a choice between binding an old one, or buying a new one, the familiar volume, which had been hungrily read by all the members of the family, was sometimes in such a condition that the bed-room shelf was considered its fitting place. Up and down the house, were to be found many standard works of a solid kind. Sir Walter Scott’s writings, Wordsworth’s and Southey’s poems2 were among the lighter literature; while, as having a character of their own—earnest, wild, and occasionally fanatical—may be named some of the books which came from the Branwell side of the family—from the Cornish followers of the saintly John Wesley—and which are touched on in the account of the works to which Caroline Helstone had access in “Shirley”:—“Some venerable Lady’s Magazines, that had once performed a voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm”—(possibly part of the relics of Mrs. Brontë’s possessions, contained in the ship wrecked on the coast of Cornwall)—“and whose pages were stained with salt water; some mad Methodist Magazines3 full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; and the equally mad Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living.”f
Mr. Brontë encouraged a taste for reading in his girls; and though Miss Branwell kept it in due bounds, by the variety of household occupations, in which she expected them not merely to take a part, but to become proficients, thereby occupying regularly a good portion of every day, they were allowed to get books from the circulating library at Keighley; and many a happy walk, up those long four miles must they have had burdened with some new book into which they peeped as they hurried home. Not that the books were what would generally be called new; in the beginning of 1833, the two friends seem almost simultaneously to have fallen upon “Kenilworth,”g and Charlotte writes as follows about it:—
“I am glad you like ‘Kenilworth;’ it is certainly more resembling a romance than a noveclass="underline" in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter’s pen. Varney is certainly the personification of consummate villany; and in the delineation of his dark and profoundly artful mind, Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature, as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions, so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge.”