Victorians! discussion

Section 1: Volume I Chapters 1-7
Description of Haworth, society, family, early years and Juvenilia.

Many critics have said that this biography reads like a novel; was this your impression in these opening chapters?

What were your reactions to the first chapter and its rather melancholy ending?

Gaskell uses chapter two to describe the people and the place where Charlotte grew up; how does this deepen your appreciation of her character and her novels?

How is her early life reflected in her novels?

The first chapter does seem to be about a person making a journey...a pilgrimage? The "traveler" goes from the railway to a manufacturing town (through which she passes "hastily"), along a 4-mile road the first half of which is "tolerably level", suggesting some seriousness of purpose. The road becomes more difficult, getting "pretty steep" as it ascends higher and higher to what we find out is a stone marker at the end. I was so convinced of this "pilgrimage" taking place that I imagined Gaskell walking the entire way, until I ran into the horse having trouble getting his footing, and more to the point, a "driver". There is a reverence for names and dates: names on the church pews, how old some parts of the church are...and of course the inscriptions, and their focus on ages. I was struck by the abrupt ending...unmitigated. Grief? We are left with the year of Charlotte Bronte's death (1855)...and the year this book was published (1857).

Followed this way, the text does have the feel of a novel. I get a sense of the traveler's heaviness and need to be at this spot.

Linda wrote: "The first chapter does seem to be about a person making a journey...a pilgrimage?"

That's a really good point, Linda, and I agree it does sound just like a pilgrimage. Gaskell would have been one of the first of the millions who were to follow her in making the trip to Haworth to see the Brontë home and, of course, the graves.

I also felt the opening chapter was almost cinematographic; one of those opening scenes which begins with a general view of the surrounding area and then pans around and zooms in, taking in more detail until we arrive at the church and the memorial tablets. The abrupt ending with the final addition to the "mournful list" does convey grief to me, the sense that an unfillable void has been left behind.

Having recently read Jude the Obscure, I am struck by Patrick Bronte's successful entry into Cambridge at age 25. Gaskell is right to make much of CB's father at the start of her life of the novelist. Rev Bronte's origins were no less obscure than Jude's. He was born in Ireland, adopted out at the age of 6, ran away at 15. Perhaps more traumatic a childhood than Jude had. But Patrick starts a school for kids, a smart move that helps him become a tutor in a rector's family later, and it is the rector who mentors him into Cambridge at 25. Obviously, this is man of remarkable strength of character and intelligence. Great genes set the groundwork for CB's life. It's interesting that Mendel's work was first published in 1866, still another instance of the brilliant thinking going on during Vic era, and its impress on the great writers current with it.

Pip wrote: "Many critics have said that this biography reads like a novel; was this your impression in these opening chapters?"

I agree! The language used to describe places, events, and people is no different than in a novel, and while reading, I have to remind myself that this is not a fictional story.

What I thought most striking in these first chapters is the depiction of Cowan Bridge School. It seems much worse, to me, than Lowood in Jane Eyre. How dreadful, it must have been a horrible time for Charlotte.