Being Branwell Brontë

No one has wanted to grow up to be Branwell Brontë, not even Branwell Brontë. The famous group portrait of his famous sisters, which he painted, contained a strange blank mass of off-color paint separating Emily and Charlotte: as it faded, a ghostly image emerged from the mass, that of Branwell Brontë, who had been hastily erased from the family portrait, most likely by Branwell Brontë. Self-portraits with greater staying power include the “lurid fantasies” sketched in the accounts of Sowerby Bridge railway station, where he briefly held a position as assistant clerical secretary: “He was particularly keen on pen portraits of himself,” Terry Eagleton notes, “hanged, stabbed or plunged into eternal perdition.”

“It can’t have been easy to have been the brother of those sisters,” Eagleton also says, and he’s far from the first to say it; but it can’t have been that hard either, even for someone, like Patrick-called-Branwell, so fully burdened with the weight of unfulfilled literary ambition. In the early years, Charlotte was unfaltering in praising her brother as the genius of the family, and to the bitter end she and her sisters played down their superior talents to the extent of not bothering him with the painful fact that their works were being published.

In a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte wrote: “ … about Mr. Branwell Brontë the less said the better. He never knew Jane Eyre was written although he lived for a year afterwards …” To her publisher, she was clear as to motive: “My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature … he was not aware that they had ever published a line. We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied. Now he will never know.”

By all accounts a gifted child, Branwell’s inability to match his sisters’ literary endeavors was not for want of trying, but his profligacy was as precocious as any artistic ability he may have had. He was, in Mrs. Gaskell’s version of events, “thrown into chance companionship with the lads of the village – for youth will to youth, and boys to boys,” which is to say, he quickly found and developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for the service at the Black Bull pub in Haworth.

For the most part, Branwell (in Valentine Cunningham’s charming summary) “dragged out his dismal progress as provincial rake mainly in the Yorkshire of his birth.” In 1835, however, he struck out for London, apparently with the aim of attending the Royal Academy as an art student, and with some assistance from those oppressive sisters, since Charlotte left home to work as a governess to help pay his fees. (The sisters were, of course, “portionless” daughters of a parson, and expected, therefore, to marry or make their own way. Branwell was a bonus.) The letters of introduction he carried went unused and the money he had was spent in a pub in Holborn. He returned home with an unlikely story of being mugged.

Branwell continued to write, and to bring his writing to the attention of anyone who would listen. The death of James Hogg, a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, inspired him to write to Blackwood’s suggesting a replacement. That letter included the following gems:

"SIR, - Read what I write.

"And would to heaven you could believe it true, for then you would attend to and act upon it.

"I have addressed you twice before, and now I do it again. But it is not from affected hypocrisy that I commence my letter with the name of James Hogg; for the writings of that man in your numbers … when I was a child, laid a hold on my mind which succeeding years have consecrated into a most sacred feeling ...

"Now, sir, to you I appear writing with conceited assurance; but I am not; for I know myself so far as to believe in my own originality, and on that ground I desire of you admittance into your ranks. And do not wonder that I apply so determinedly: for the remembrances I spoke of have fixed you and your magazine in such a manner upon my mind that the idea of striving to aid another periodical is horribly repulsive ...

"Now, sir, do not act like a commonplace person, but like a man willing to examine for himself. Do not turn from the naked truth of my letters, but prove me – and if I do not stand the proof, I will not farther press myself on you. If I do stand it – why – You may have lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you you may gain one in Patrick Branwell Brontë."

Harold Orel (The Brontës: Interviews and Recollections) kindly notes that “the final paragraph of this letter … may have been considered too brash to warrant an answer.”

Branwell also forwarded a substantial sample of his poetry to William Wordsworth:

"Now, to send you the whole of this would be to mock upon your patience; what you see does not even pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child. But read it, sir; and, as you would hold a light to one in utter darkness – as you value your own kind-heartedness – return me an answer, if but one word, telling me whether I should write on, or write no more."

The word never came. It is possible that he did not help his cause by opining to Wordsworth that, “Surely, in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward.”

Back on Earth, Branwell had greater success with his other writing, letters to friends who would extend him credit for gin. With some aplomb, at more or less the same time, he was briefly secretary of the local Temperance Society. And he tried his hand at portrait painting in Bradford, but (Eagleton again) “spent most of his time engaged in raffish carousals with louche artists in Bradford’s George Hotel.”

To overcome his replenishable capacity for disappointment, he embarked on opium addiction to improve upon his hardening alcoholism, and ran up considerable debts. To address the debts, he took the Sowerby Bridge railway job, from which, after a year, he was fired for, among other derelictions of duty, embezzling over eleven pounds. Next up was a post as tutor, where, unhelpfully, he fell in love with the pupil’s mother. He was sent packing from the property by the father, who also amended his will to cut off the wife’s inheritance, should she ever decide to marry Branwell Brontë. In June 1846, Branwell wrote to his friend: “Through the will she is left quite powerless … The Executing Trustees detest me, and one declares that if he sees me he will shoot me.” This letter was accompanied, as was now his custom, by a full-page pen-and-ink sketch entitled “Myself” showing a bulky male figure with wrists bound, tied to a stake, in the midst of flames.

That was about it for Branwell, who took to bed. Three more years of regular opium and drink at every opportunity, mixed with pathological brooding on lost love, saw him out. His final written words, shortly before his death in September 1848, were a brief note to his father’s sexton, John Brown, which began: “Dear John, I shall feel very much obliged to you if you can contrive to give me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure.”

Robert Collins laments the note: “When put into words, one man’s agony quickly becomes his contemptible folly in the eyes of others. How could the dying Branwell Brontë have known that his desperate plea … would somehow survive to blacken him for almost a hundred and forty years after …” The desperation is real, but Collins somewhat misses the point by confining it to Branwell’s final request for gin. You can shuffle the pages of the biography and draw one at random, and there’s poor Patrick, being Branwell Brontë all over again.

SIR, - Read what I write. And if the fear of insanity or death does not give you a reason to choose sobriety, God grant you you may gain one in Patrick Branwell Brontë.