Charlotte Brontë Manuscripts:
Two Sketches and Her Holograph Preface to The
Professor
by
Janet Butler
I
Over the years, Charlotte Brontë's Professor has
attracted relatively little critical attention—which may be why no one
appears to have noticed the two short passages (totalling little more than a
hundred words) pencilled in her hand on the separate manuscript of its
"Preface" at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
The manuscript of The Professor is bound with a copy
of
the "Preface," the latter, however, not in Charlotte's handwriting but that
of her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls; this "Preface" was printed with the
novel when it was first published in 1857, two years after Charlotte's death.
Along with Nicholls'
clarifying note (dated 22 September 1856), the "Preface" has accompanied
subsequent reprintings of
The Professor. Yet the Pierpont
Morgan also holds Charlotte's own pencilled draft for this "Preface,"
complete with her deletions and revisions, thus making it of interest in its
own right (see Appendix). The card catalogue description of it reads: "The
Professor, preface; original autograph manuscript, written in pencil. 1½
p. 8
." It is more than likely that Charlotte wrote out this
"Preface" in
January of 1851, sure in her own mind that her publishers would, following
her successes with
Jane Eyre (1847) and
Shirley
(1849), reconsider and agree to publish
The Professor,
written
five years earlier. They did not, and the manuscript—as well as
"Preface"—was put away "in a cupboard" until Nicholls should bring
it
to light again a year or so after his wife's death (SHB 3: 206-207).
The manuscript of the "Preface" is one sheet of paper folded once on
itself so as to make two leaves; each of the four pages is (length by width)
approximately 18.1 X 11.5 cm (or 7½ X 4½ in.).[1] The "Preface" begins on the recto
of the
first leaf and concludes a little more than halfway down the
verso—hence
the catalogue description of "1½ p."
But, on the recto of the second leaf, taking up slightly more than five
lines, is pencilled the following in Charlotte's hand:
C'est possible—" and he lipped his cigar in a peculiar |
manner
that he had when he was a little posed and | puzzled without being
displeased. "And can I marry or not?" | she pursued. "Mademoiselle, I
don't dislike to put the question | to myself—I am an egoist and like
to
linger over points im-|portant to myself
There is no more, not even a final period or quotation mark.
It is necessary to turn the manuscript upside down in order to read the
fourth page, which now appears as a first page. The surface is covered with
arithmetic; evidently Charlotte had been trying to figure out the number of
pages which one of her handwritten manuscripts would produce in print, for
the vocabulary of "letters per line," "lines per page," and "letters per page"
covers the entire area. Near the top of the page, however, and crossed out
with a large "X" and further overscored with some of the arithmetic are the
following six lines, again in pencil and barely decipherable:
About this time *befel [ab. del. 'occurred'] that grand
['event' del.]—a fête day of | Mlle
Pauline.
*and it was upon [ab. del. 'All the masters'] this occasion I
*enjoyed [ab. del. 'felt in'] to | its fullness the *advantage
[ab. del. illeg.] of my privileged position as professeur | de
pensionnat de demoiselles—I received a note of invitation. | Not
indifferent to me now the small document—nor unattractive | the
scene
to which it offered admission
The crossed-out word in the third line is illegible. The eighth word in the
penultimate line is difficult to make out: "document" seems the most likely
reading.
[2]
II
What are these two new passages at the Pierpont Morgan?
Brontë scholars will recognize the second one as a re-working
of The Professor. If, therefore, we are to hazard a guess as
to
a possible date, we must quickly review the circumstances of its
composition and probable revision.
In February of 1842, Charlotte and Emily went to study French at the
Pensionnat Heger in Brussels; this was to prepare them to become (along
with Anne) headmistresses of their own proposed school at Haworth. On 1
January 1844, at age twenty-seven, Charlotte left Brussels for the last time.
There followed two years of personal, private suffering.[3] During her twenty months at the
Pensionnat she had unwittingly—and probably until the very end,
unknowingly—fallen in love with her "dear Master," the very
dynamic
but also very married Constantin Heger. Then in April of 1846, on behalf
of all the sisters, Charlotte wrote Aylott and Jones about their possible
interest in "three distinct and unconnected tales" (SHB 2:87). These were
to be Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's Agnes
Grey, and Charlotte's The Professor, a short novel set
in
Brussels. Tellingly, Charlotte originally titled it The Master.[4] By the time The
Professor reached the firm of Smith, Elder in July of 1847, it had
been rejected five times since the summer of 1846 (SHB 2:152-153).
William Smith Williams, reader for Smith, Elder, also rejected the hapless
manuscript, but his two-page letter was so courteous and specific that
Charlotte wrote back that she (or, rather, Currer Bell) would like to send
him a three-volume manuscript then nearing completion.[5] Three weeks later she sent him
Jane
Eyre which was quickly accepted and published on October
16th.
But the Brussels experience was recent enough and dominant enough
in her life that she still needed to see it in print, albeit fictionally disguised.
Jane Eyre was not enough. Just two months after that novel's
publication, she wrote William Smith Williams a letter dated 14 December
1847 in which she took up a question he had evidently put to her regarding
a second novel, perhaps to be serialized; Currer Bell wrote that a
three-volume novel would feel more natural than a serialization, and then
went on: "Respecting the plan of such a work, I have pondered it, but as
yet with very unsatisfactory results. Three commencements have I essayed,
but all three displease me. A few days since I looked over "The Professor."
. . . My wish is to recast "The Professor," add as well as I can what is
deficient, retrench some parts, develop others, and make of it a
three-volume work—no easy task, I know, yet I trust not an
impracticable
one" (SHB 2:161-162). She went on to ask his judgment of this proposal
"before I take any step to execute the plan I have sketched," and concluded
by asking, "and what confidence have you that I can make
it [
The Professor] better than it is?" Unfortunately, Williams'
response to this posed problem is not extant, and Charlotte's next surviving
letter to him (28 January 1848) does not refer to any specific manuscript;
indeed, for the first few months of 1848 there is really nothing in her
correspondence to indicate if the work she has in hand is still
The
Professor or if it has turned a corner and become
Shirley.
Yet in her 1983 study, The Early Writings of Charlotte
Brontë, Christine Alexander suggests that a recasting of
The Professor was taking place sometime during the fall and
perhaps winter of 1847-48. She points to an untitled manuscript known
sometimes as John Henry and sometimes as The
Moores;[6] the narrative
breaks
off after the opening of chapter three, but its focus on the two Crimsworth
brothers (whose names are now changed to Moore) points to a revision of
the early chapters of The Professor. Of equal interest is
Alexander's reference to "an earlier preface to The Professor,
about which little is known" (Alexander, 223). This manuscript (Bonnell
Collection, Haworth) breaks off after one and a half pages. It consists of
Currer Bell's critique of the narrator, William Crimsworth, as well as "the
same summary of the early lives of the two brothers, Edward and William,
that we find in The
Professor, in John Henry, and in the juvenilia"
(Alexander 224).
"Three commencements have I essayed . . ." Alexander suggests that
John Henry (or The Moores) is one of these
three
"commencements," and that perhaps the little known and as yet unpublished
earlier "Preface" (in the Bonnell Collection) is still another (222, 223). We
might now speculate that the "professeur de pensionnat" fragment in the
Pierpont Morgan is a portion of the third of the three "commencements"
made late in 1847.
On the other hand, we must not overlook the likelihood that Charlotte
was tinkering with The Professor as late as January of 1851
as
she raised the question of its publication once again with Smith, Elder and
optimistically prepared the (Pierpont Morgan) "Preface" against its
presumed acceptance. Indeed, she remarked in the "Preface" that "to have
reached him [the reader] in the form of a printed book, this brief narrative
must have gone through
some struggles—which indeed it has"; this suggests that in January
of
1851 she must at least have outlined to her publishers how she might
develop the narrative if only they would agree to publish it. But whether the
date is 1847 or 1851, the fragment's reference to "Mlle Pauline" would
indicate that Charlotte had actually been thinking along the lines of the
more developed "three-volume work" proposed in her December 1847 letter
to William Smith Williams: the Paulina Mary Home of
Villette
apparently has an antecedent in the French-named "Pauline" in the fragment
under discussion, and "Mlle Pauline" might have been intended to remedy
the "want of varied interest" for which Williams had criticized
The
Professor (Gaskell, 317).
The first of the two fragments at the Pierpont Morgan—"C'est
possible'"—is at once more elusive and more suggestive. Elusive, in
that
we do not know the principals involved and therefore cannot even hazard
a date. But the fragment is also suggestive in its directness: it has the force
of a waking dream, and unlike the "professeur de pensionnat" fragment, it
is written without difficulty or correction of any kind. Moreover, it captures
attention by means of its alliterative patterning and unusual lexical
choices.[7]
But, for Brontë scholars, this passage has more importance than
its possible relationship to The Professor. True, since it is on
the same sheet of paper not only with the "Preface" but also with the
evident developing of The Professor's protagonist, the
"professeur de pensionnat," it may in some way be related to that early
novel. On the other hand, one might argue an even stronger relationship to
what that same Brussels material would eventually become:
Villette.
In support of this conjecture, we should note that the first language
of the man in this passage is French, not English. Moreover, his habits of
cigarsmoking and self-dramatization disqualify him as little William
Crimsworth and his "demure Quaker countenance" (SHB 3:207). Finally,
the sexual tension in the passage is reminiscent of scenes between Jane Eyre
and Mr. Rochester, between Lucy Snowe and M. Paul. However, the
question which "Mademoiselle" puts to the man, "And can I marry or not?"
is not consonant with the conditions of being a governess in someone else's
home; nineteenth-century governesses simply did not work and marry
simultaneously. It is, however, just the question which a young, would-be
headmistress might put to her mentor. Charlotte's experience in England
had been with headmistresses who did not marry, but in Brussels she saw
Mme. Heger functioning daily as both headmistress and married woman.
The fragment, then, might be the first groping toward the character
of M. Paul in Villette, specifically towards the kind of baiting
he indulges in with Lucy Snowe in the chapters titled "A Burial" and "The
Watchguard." Tonally, there are similarities between this tiny fragment and
the finished novel.
The two fragments reproduced here are not mentioned in the card
catalogue at the Pierpont Morgan. Herbert Cahoon, Curator of Autograph
MSS,
informed me that the "Preface" was purchased by Pierpont Morgan himself
from the London firm of Pearson, booksellers, in February of 1909. It does
not seem that anyone has examined the autograph "Preface"—or
either
of these two fragments—in the intervening years.
[8]
Appendix
(MA 32, Pierpont Morgan Library)
Preface
This little book was written before either "Jane Eyre" or "Shirley" |
and yet *no indugence can be solicited for it [ab. del. 'the
plea
of a first attempt'] on the plea of a first at-|tempt. A first attempt it
certainly was not as the pen | which wrote it had been *previously worn
down a good deal ['previously worn down **a good deal
[intrl.]
['exercising' del.] ab. del. 'down' ab.
del. 'worn and hackneyed'] in a ['secret' del.]
prac-|tice
of some years. I had not indeed published anything before I | commenced
the Professor" — but in many *a crude [ab. del. 'an']
effort
destroyed al-|most as soon as composed. I had *got over [ab.
del. 'exhau' ab. del. 'man'] ['any' del.]
*any
such [ab. del. 'an early'] taste | *as I might once [ab.
del. 'for the redundant'] have had for *the [intrl.]
ornamented and redundant compo-|sition — and had come to prefer
what
was plain *and homely' [ab.
del. simple and | direct'] | At the same time I had adopted a set of
principles on the | subject of incident etc. such as would be generally
approved in | theory, but the results of which when carried out in practice
| often procure for an author more surprise than pleasure. | ['The strictest
resolutions to eschew what was [unreal' del.] ['improbable'
del.] | startling were mine | The most religious
determination'
del.] I said | to myself that my hero should work his way
through life | as I had seen real living men work theirs — that he
should
| never get a shilling he had not earned — that no sudden turns |
should
lift him in a moment to wealth and high station — that | ['to'
del.] whatever *small [ab. del. 'ease']
competency
he might gain should be won by the | sweat of his brow — that
before
he could find so much as an | arbour to sit down in he should master at
least half the ascent | of the hill of Difficulty — that he should not
even marry a beauti-|ful wife, nor a *lady of rank [ab. del.
'great nor a rich'] lady [undel. in error] — as Adam's
son he
| should *share [ab. del. 'have'] Adam's doom —
& drain
throughout life and a mixed | and moderate cup of enjoyment. |
In the sequel, however, I found most Publishers in general [end
of recto page] | scarcely approved this system, but would have liked
something | more imaginative and poetical — something more
consonant
with | a highly wrought fancy, with a native taste for pathos — |
with
sentiments more tender — elevated — unworldly —
indeed until |
an author has tried to dispose of a M. S. of this kind he | can never know
what stores of romance and sensibility lie | hidden in breasts he would not
have suspected of casketing such | treasures. Men in business are *usually
[ab. del. 'often'] thought to prefer the real | — on trial
this
idea will be often found fallacious: a pas-|sionate preference for the wild
wonderful and thrilling — the | strange, startling and harrowing
agitates
*divers [intrl.] souls that show a calm | and sober surface.
|
Such being ['ent' del.] the case — the reader will
comprehend
that to have | reached him in the form of a
printed book — this brief narrative | must have gone through some
['difficulties' del.] struggles — which | indeed it has
—
and after all — its worst struggle and strongest | ordeal is yet to
come
— but it takes comfort — subdues fear — leans | on
the staff of a
moderate expectation — and mutters under its | breath —
while lifting
its eye to that of the Public, |
"He that is low need fear no fall." |
Works Cited
- Alexander, Christine. The Early Writings of Charlotte
Brontë. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
- Brammer, M. M. "The Manuscript of The
Professor,"
The Review of English Studies, ns, 11 (May 1960):
157-170.
- Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. London:
Smith,
Elder & Co., 1857; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1969.
- ____. Shirley. London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1849,
rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
- Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte
Brontë.
London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857; rpt. New York: Penguin Books,
1975.
- Wise, Thomas James, and John Alexander Symington, eds.
The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and
Correspondence
(The Shakespeare Head Bronte), 4 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1932.
- Wroot, Herbert E. "Sources of Charlotte Brontës Novels:
Persons and Places," Brontë Society Transcriptions 8,
no.
4 (1935), Supplementary Part.
Notes