According to those who had met her, the problem with George Richmond’s famous 1850 chalk drawing of Charlotte Brontë was that it just wasn’t ugly enough. Elizabeth Gaskell, her biographer, described her subject as having “a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain”. William Thackeray’s daughter, Anne, recalled “there was a general impression of chin about her face”. Her friend Mary Taylor went farther: “I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large, disproportionate nose.” Friends: you can always count on them.
So we may not have seen a true likeness of Brontë, but if you want to get a sense of the author of Jane Eyre, you need only walk into Sir John Soane’s Museum in central London and there she is.
The centrepiece of a small show marking the 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth — and her five trips to London after the publication of Jane Eyre — is a petite mannequin wearing a modest dress owned by the author. It’s a ghostly sight. The outfit has a waist of just 23 inches and a bust of 29; the height can be no more than 5ft. Down the skirt, marking the blue floral sprigs, there is a light stain, scrubbed but not removed. When you learn the story behind the dress, that mark becomes tragic.
This is the dress that the Yorkshire-born writer had made for a dinner party at the London home of William Thackeray in 1850. Brontë, who had become famous overnight following the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847, idolised the writer of Vanity Fair, which was being serialised at the time. “All is true in Thackeray: if Truth were again a Goddess, Thackeray should be her high-priest,” she wrote to her literary editor in March 1848.
Thackeray was not so kind in return. When he invited her to a dinner party at his home, he failed to mention that he had also invited many other society women — just the sort he had satirised in Vanity Fair. She arrived in her homely dress — which would have been “the finest thing she could have afforded”, says the exhibition’s curator, Charlotte Cory — only to find herself surrounded by women in silks.
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The night was a spectacular failure. Thackeray was an imposing figure in the literary world, not only intellectually and socially but physically. Next to Brontë, he must have seemed a giant. What’s more, Brontë, who was painfully shy, ignored the other guests and scowled at Thackeray’s daughter. She was short-sighted but, like the best of us, a little vain: she did not wear her glasses when she was out and so could not see far.
“She spent £14, two thirds of what she would earn in a year, on the train fare
Nor did she offer the kind of clever conversation the guests had expected of the writer behind the celebrated Jane Eyre.
Thackeray, for his part, was reported to have skulked off to his club halfway through the evening. “Currer Bell”, the mysterious author of Jane Eyre, had been the toast of literary London and Charlotte Brontë was decidedly not. The mark on the skirt sums it up perfectly.
After the phenomenal success of Jane Eyre, Brontë paid five visits to London. The first was unplanned. In July 1848, after months of friendly exchanges with her literary editor, George Smith, she received an abrupt letter accusing her of lying to him. At this point not even he knew the true identity of Currer Bell, whose Jane Eyre had been rescued from the slush pile. “[The author’s] true identity was a great guessing game for literary London. Was it a man or a woman? People thought it must have been Thackeray’s governess,” says Cory.
TC Newby, who had published Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (under the name Acton Bell) and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Ellis Bell), tried to trade on Currer Bell’s success by claiming that all three were the same person and that he had Currer’s latest work too — The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Smith was incensed: had his protégée been pulling the wool over his eyes all this time? No sooner had Charlotte received the letter, than she set out for London with Anne.
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In a cabinet, you can see Charlotte’s notebook, where she kept a meticulous record of her accounts from that trip — she spent £14, which is about two thirds of what she would earn in a year as a governess, on an overnight train to London. Tellingly, she paid for second-class seats to Leeds but first class from Leeds to London. They travelled second class all the way home. When the pair arrived at Smith, Elder & Co at 65 Cornhill, Charlotte presented herself to Smith with one of his letters addressed to Currer Bell. You can imagine his surprise.
Reassured, Smith wined, dined and entertained the writers, who returned to Yorkshire happy and with their literary reputations restored. By the time of her next visit to the capital in 1849 for the publication of Shirley, Charlotte had buried her brother Branwell, then Emily and Anne. We know that in 1850, when a baby hippo arrived at the zoological gardens, she was sent a free ticket and wrote at length about the animals she saw.
Cory, who is also an artist, has reinterpreted Richmond’s portrait of Brontë to fit with the physical descriptions of her. On the night of the Thackeray dinner party, a 19-year-old John Everett Millais had walked up to Charlotte and said he would love to paint her. Yet she said no — the following day she was going to see Richmond. “To me that’s one of the great losses to the nation,” says Cory.
In 1851, Charlotte visited the Great Exhibition five times with the scientist and inventor Sir David Brewster, who invented the Brewster stereoscope — which you can see at the museum — for viewing 3-D photography. How she managed to avoid being photographed while surrounded by such photographic technology is a wonder.
On these occasions, she stayed with Smith, who was eight years her junior, and his family in Bayswater. Brontë had fallen for the publisher but he was only interested in her words. So she sent him and his mother up in Villette. Nevertheless, when she visited for a final time in 1853 to correct proofs, she was surprised by his family’s iciness towards her. Having married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte would die in childbirth just two years later, aged 38.
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As it happens, Charlotte never visited the Sir John Soane museum, “but she should have done”, says Cory. “This is her guidebook to London,” she says, pointing out in the cabinet a delicate book, which is propped up with smelling salts. “It says that we have ‘one of the most unique and interesting exhibitions in London’. She enjoyed sightseeing, so she should have come.”
You get the feeling that the author of Jane Eyre, a novel so full of descriptions of domestic interiors, would have enjoyed this Georgian haven of art and architecture. And now she has finally made it.
Charlotte Brontë at the Soane is at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London WC2, to May 7