Just Visiting: Charlotte Bronte (2 of 2)

(continued from previous post )

Lesley Krueger continues:

How to find out whether Charlotte Brontë toured Bethlem? I’m a novelist, far from a Brontë scholar, and this was a little part-time quest. I decided to start at the Bethlem Hospital archives, which I visited last November to research my new novel. Archivist Colin Gale told me he had never seen a reference to a visit by Brontë in any of the archival material, but kindly checked the 1853 visitor’s book—and drew a blank. No Charlotte Brontë, no John Forbes, no “Currer Bell:” Brontë’s pen name. But there were precious few other names that year, either. The book seems to have been neglected in 1853, and it was impossible to take the absence of Brontë’s name as proof she’d never stepped inside.

Back home in Toronto, it occurred to me that while Charlotte Brontë may not have written about her visit to Bethlem, perhaps Forbes did. Dr. Robin A.L. Agnew is the author of a short biography of the doctor, who was knighted in 1853.¹ The Brontës aren’t mentioned, but in his footnotes Agnew refers to a collection of Forbes’s unpublished personal papers held by descendants in Australia. I assumed that someone in the Forbes family would have noticed the name “Charlotte Brontë” years ago, but couldn’t help wondering if Forbes had made a reference to Bethlem in early 1853 obscure enough that its significance had been missed. “On a visit to Bethlem with a friend …?”

Robin Agnew proved to be both helpful and gracious. Emailing from England, he confirmed that he had never seen the Brontë name in any Forbes papers, but he put me in touch with David Forbes, a surgeon in Australia who is a direct descendent of the Victorian physician. With equal kindness, the Australian Forbes dashed my hopes. Not only is there no mention of Charlotte Brontë in the papers, there is nothing about Bethlem. No joy, either, from other Forbes papers held by the University of Aberdeen, despite the long-distance help of deputy archivist Andrew MacGregor.

That left me with one other obvious avenue: Brontë’s publisher, George Smith, with whom she stayed during her visit to London. George Smith, A Memoir With Some Pages of Autobiography, was privately published in 1902 by his widow, Elizabeth Smith.² It contains several articles Smith published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1900, including a memoir of Charlotte Brontë written almost fifty years after he had last seen her. Smith was 76 years old at the time and would die less than a year later, but his biography makes it clear that he was sharp until the end, and I had seen respectful references to the memoir in most authoritative Brontë biographies.³

In Smith’s affectionate portrait of the author, I finally found my reference, obviously known to biographers but going maddeningly unquoted in their published works.

“Charlotte Brontë stayed with us several times,” Smith writes. “The utmost was, of course, done to entertain and please her. We arranged for dinner-parties, at which artistic and literary notabilities, whom she wished to meet, were present. We took her to places which we thought would interest her—the ‘Times’ office, the General Post Office, the Bank of England, Newgate, Bedlam.”

Bedlam. So there we are.

Or are we? Someone’s memory fifty years after the fact can’t entirely be trusted. Yet Smith is convincing, providing details that ring true. “One thing that which impressed her very much,” he notes, “was the lighted rooms of the newspaper offices in Fleet Street and the Strand, as we drove home in the middle of the night from some City expedition.”

“At Newgate,” he says, in an anecdote often quoted, “she rapidly fixed her attention on an individual prisoner. This was a poor girl with an interesting face, and an expression of the deepest misery. She had, I believe, killed her illegitimate child. Miss Brontë walked up to her, took her hand, and began to talk to her. She was, of course, quickly interrupted by the prison warder with the formula, ‘Visitors are not allowed to speak to the prisoners.’”

I think Charlotte Brontë probably paid her visit to Bethlem, and I would be delighted if anyone could tell me definitively with whom. Smith never names the “we” who took her. Smith and Forbes? Forbes alone, at Smith’s behest? Perhaps the latter, since Smith provides no eye-witness description of the author’s reaction to the hospital, or repeats anything she said. Of course, that was my original hope in trying to track the visit down, and despite some further checking, I remain disappointed. It would have been wonderful to see the asylum through Charlotte Brontë’s eyes. But that is where fiction can come in, and maybe where it will—since, Reader, I am writing a novel.

Lesley Krueger’s last novel was The Corner Garden from Penguin Books. Her new novel, The Resident Thief, will be published in 2013.

1 The Life of Sir John Forbes (1787-1861) by Dr. Robin A.L. Agnew, StewART Anthill, 2009.

2 Now available online through the Open Library.

3 Prince of Publishers: A Biography of the Great Victorian Publisher George Smith, by Jenifer Glynn, Allison and Busby, London and New York, 1986.

First Person Narratives 7

Gail Hornstein, Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoake College and sometime visitor to the Archives & Museum, makes passing reference to our modest displays (though not to her visit) in her recent book Agnes’ Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. She is also the author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World, a biography of the psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Fromm-Reichmann is most well-known today for being the real-life “Dr Fried” in Joanne Greenberg’s fictionalised autobiography, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about which we have previously blogged. A Jewish psychoanalyst, who emigrated to America in the 1930s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann controversially – but apparently, at least in some cases, successfully – treated schizophrenia with psychotherapy (and not medication).

Dr Hornstein has recently made the latest edition of her bibliography of ‘first person narratives of madness’ available on her website. We think we have spotted at least one unchecked (and uncheckable!) reference in this bibliography. Alas, as far as we know the existence of a 1620 Petition of the Poor Distracted Folk of Bedlam is no more than a rumour. Naturally, we would be delighted to be proved wrong about this! The bibliography is nevertheless an extremely valuable resource for those interested in first person narratives of mental distress.

Moving from first to third person narratives, we are glad to say that a short e-book entitled Illustrious Company: Authors, Artists and Other Adventurers in Bethlem Hospital is now available for download onto Kindle e-readers at Amazon and Amazon UK. It has been written by our Archivist with contributions from Canadian authors Aislinn Hunter and Lesley Krueger. Regular readers of this blog may recognise some but not all of its text. The book is already cheap to download, but watch out for special promotions to make it even cheaper over the summer.

Just Visiting: Charlotte Bronte (1 of 2)

This month’s post (and another one to be published in July) on Charlotte Brontë in the Just Visiting series is written by our guest blogger, the Canadian author Lesley Krueger.

My small quest began with a plan mentioned in one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters, written on January 19, 1853 while she was on a visit to London from her home in Haworth, Yorkshire. “Being allowed to have my own choice of sights this time—I selected the real rather than the decorative side of Life—I have been over two prisons ancient & modern—Newgate and Pentonville—also the Bank, the Exchange ‘the Foundling Hospital,’—and to-day if all be well, I go with Dr. Forbes to see Bethlehem Hospital.”¹

Did Charlotte Brontë actually go to Bethlem? I scribbled a note at the time to check whether the visit came off, little knowing how crooked a trail I would walk before satisfying myself—more or less—of the answer.

It’s such a tiny detail, of little importance to most of the biographers who have excavated the life of Charlotte Brontë from her birth in 1816 through her authorship of Jane Eyre to her death in 1855, about two years after the planned visit. Most of those who mention her January sightseeing tour skim over the details while using it to speculate about Brontë’s psychology and perhaps her intentions. Did she plan to write one of the social-issue novels so popular at the time? Was she drawn to prisons and hospitals for the insane because of the mental and physical breakdown of her brother, Branwell Brontë, before his death in 1848?

My focus was different. I had dipped into Margaret Smith’s magisterial three-volume compilation of Charlotte Brontë’s letters while starting research on my fifth novel, ranging over mid-nineteenth century sources to get a feel for the texture of the period. I knew that my novel would be centred on a notorious member of my husband’s family who was incarcerated in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at the Bethlem Royal Hospital during the 1840s and 50s. Drawn up short by reading that Brontë might have visited Bethlem at the time, I wanted to confirm the visit and, more important, discover whether she had left any record of her impressions of the hospital and its inmates.

I quickly found that there is no further reference to Bethlem in any known Brontë letter, and the many biographers whose books I consulted wrote that the visit had come off without saying how they had confirmed this. In a footnote, Margaret Smith writes that on January 28, Brontë presented a copy of her new novel, Villette, to Dr. John Forbes, the physician who was supposed to take her to the hospital, inscribing it personally “in acknowledgment of kindness.”² This could be taken as confirming the visit, but I wondered if it was enough.

Forbes was a distinguished lung specialist, a friend of Brontë’s publisher George Smith and a former schoolmate of Smith’s father in Scotland. In 1849, at Smith’s suggestion, Brontë had consulted Forbes about the care of her sister, Anne Brontë, who was dying of tuberculosis. It seemed possible that the visit to Bethlem had not come off, but that Brontë wished to thank Forbes for agreeing to take her, and for his help with Anne. After all, she signed books on January 28 for several friends and acquaintances.

Why was I sceptical? Brontë was often ill and painfully shy, and it was common for her to cancel visits. In her biography, Elizabeth Gaskell records a rather charming incident during a visit Brontë made to her house in Manchester in April, 1853.

“One evening we had, among other guests, two sisters who sang Scottish ballads exquisitely. Miss Brontë had been sitting quiet and constrained till they began “The Bonnie House of Airlie,” but the effect of that and “Carlisle Yetts,” which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time up and down the street; she upbraiding herself all the while for folly, and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory rather than on the thought of a third sister who would have to be faced if we went in. But it was of no use; and dreading lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance.”³

A woman so highly strung, burdened with memories of her brother’s breakdown and facing the daunting edifice of Bethlem, might just as easily have paced up and down outside, got back in the carriage and asked to be driven home.

( to be continued )

¹ From The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, volume 3, 1852-1855, edited by Margaret Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004. p. 108.

² ibid. p. 109.

³ The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1874 edition. p. 416.