time—and Charlotte obtained for herself the names of Currer Bell from Montagu's book which, as I show, contained the "plot," etc., of Wuthering Heights, for her own use in the Brontë poem publishing project of 1845-46—it is most important to note that but some months after Emily's diary entry Wuthering Heights was offered by Charlotte to Messrs. Aylott and Jones, with The Professor and Agnes Grey—on April 6th, 1846. The literal evidence of The Key to the Brontë Works does not require that we ask by what miracle the "contented" Emily Brontë, who had collaborated three and a half years with Anne on The Gondal Chronicles, and declared an intention at the end of July 1845 to "stick firmly" to their composition, could come, in addition to preparing her poems for the press, to begin and to finish Wuthering Heights by or before April 6th, 1846.[9]

After Charlotte Brontë's return from Brussels the degeneracy of her only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë, a young man ambitious, but not successful, as an artist, made him an object of her disgust and antipathy, and we find she portrayed him unflinchingly as Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and again as John Reed of Jane Eyre. Emily, we have been told, liked her brother, though an attempt was made somewhat recently to dissipate the tradition.[10] But Charlotte, after the deaths of her elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest of the family, obviously was piqued from childhood by the advantage Branwell's sex gave him over her seniority, more especially as he seems to have been brutal to her:—See "A Rainy Day in Charlotte Brontë's Childhood," in The Key to the Brontë Works.

It may be observed Charlotte Brontë went to three schools, and that each had a remarkable influence upon her life and literature. The first was the Clergy Daughters' School in the Kendal locality, to which her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily also went upon the death of the ailing Mrs. Brontë at Haworth. The second was Miss Wooler's school already mentioned, and the third the Brussels pensionnat. The fact that Jane Eyre virtually opens with the Clergy Daughters' School incidents—incidents drawn from her child-memory regarding the temporary mismanagement of an establishment which subsequently has proved a most useful foundation—shows she began Jane Eyre with the utmost possible fidelity to truth in so far as regarded herself and her associations. The story of how this famous work was sent in 1847 to a firm of publishers who had just declined her novel The Professor is well known history, as is the relation of the subsequent success of the book and the elevation of Charlotte Brontë to the highest recognition.

Wuthering Heights had been published as Ellis Bell's work, a nom de guerre that also had appeared over Emily Brontë's poems. It was issued under the condition that the next book by its author went to the same publisher, a Mr. Newby, which, of course, made impossible thereafter Charlotte Brontë's acknowledging her authorship of this work, as the next book by the author of Wuthering Heights, her Jane Eyre, was published by another house. But there are evidences in Shirley that despite her nervous apprehensions, and her letters show she was very much afraid of this Mr. Newby, who afterwards asserted she wrote Wuthering Heights, she therein carefully placed significations of her authorship of Wuthering Heights.

Villette was published in January 1853, and in the June of 1854 Currer Bell married her father's curate, the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, whom she previously had refused. She married him, it may be, as a final immolation of herself on the altar of Right and Duty. Her married life was but for some few months—it was so short we yet call her Charlotte Brontë. Her father outlived her by six years. The last survivor of the young Brontës, she died in March 1855, within a month of old Tabitha Aykroyd, her best loved woman friend and companion apart from her own kinsfolk. Charlotte Brontë, with other members of her family, rests in the grey fabric which is the modern representative of that early described as the church of St. Michael the Archangel de Haworth. Her message is yet with us; the tablets of her life she has bequeathed to posterity, and the key to open the way to their repository is now in our hands. Her genius has shown the price of right-doing and the grim and dangerous valley through which Virtue must go ere break of Day.

CHAPTER II.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CANDLE-BEARING BEDSIDE VISITANT AND THE UNCOUTH SERVANT IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE."

My evidence shows that between 1837 and 1847 Charlotte Brontë was perusing very attentively a little volume entitled Gleanings in Craven, or the Tourist's Guide, by one Frederic Montagu of Lincoln's Inn, son of Basil Montagu, second (natural) son of John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, whose ancestor brought Charles II. over from Holland on the Restoration in 1660 and therefor received his earldom.[11] The book, which had never been associated by any person with the name or works of Charlotte Brontë till I wrote my article, "The Key to Jane Eyre," upon it for The Saturday Review, was in the form of "Six letters to a friend in India," addressed as, "My dear Howard ... now at Bombay," and was dedicated by special permission to the Duke of Devonshire, a fact not mentioned save in the early editions. It was printed at Briggate, Leeds, by A. Pickard, and published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838. Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall & Co. were the London publishers.

Frederick Montagu was a gentleman travelling in Yorkshire for his health's sake it seems, and it occurred to him to relate in epistolary form the story of his adventures. He had read the local writers, but it is most clear Charlotte Brontë was particularly influenced in the construction of her great masterpieces, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, by his purely personal contributions. It was not only as a gleaner of local hearsay that Montagu wrote the long panegyric upon Miss Currer which obviously resulted in Charlotte Brontë's choosing the name, but as one whose attention had been drawn to her literary eminence. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who in his Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836) spoke so good a word for Basil Montagu, Frederic's father,[12] under whom he had studied for the bar, also devoted in those Reminiscences many pages to Miss Currer and Eshton Hall. Thus we read in Montagu's Gleanings in Craven:—