16 - This Is the Story of Three Girls - the Brontes, part 2

Transcript

Speaker: Hello, everyone, and welcome again to The Wonder Camera. This is your podcast about whatever it is we three dilettantes find distracting at any given moment. So my name is Jen Rumpel. I am here with Dave Powell and Tracy Anderson Powell.

Speaker: And we are The Wonder Camera. Welcome to part two of our tale of the Brontes. How are you guys feeling about last week's episode? ah Delighted, excited, thrilled, also very sad.

Speaker: I'm sure nothing sad will happen for the rest of the story. So I'm looking forward to nonstop good news about the Bronte family. Nothing but smiles and rainbows. ah It's going to be great. Well, yeah I guess we'll have to wait and see. They were never touched by sadness again.

Speaker: Yes. That's why it's a good story worth telling. Yeah. Everything's just smooth sailing and that's it. So part two is just saying that. Bye. It'll be a very short part. Yeah. okay Yeah, so again, we're we're going to go return to the Brontes at Howarth Parsonage. So remember, their mother and two sisters have passed away.

Speaker: So it was Maria and Elizabeth have died of tuberculosis within months of each other. So despite the deaths of these two eldest daughters, um the remaining four children, of course, need to be taken care of and educated and provided for.

Speaker: So Patrick Bronte, their father, he had given up on the idea of remarriage after those three pretty disastrous proposals we heard about last time. And ah thankfully for them, Aunt Branwell, that's their mother's sister, had chosen to remain in Haworth in order to help care for her nieces and nephew.

Speaker: So we're going to pick our story back up in 1825. So this time Charlotte is nine. And as the eldest child, she's, of course, charged with helping to teach and care for her younger siblings. Love that.

Speaker: Parentification in large families. Yeah. Yeah. Branwell eight years old. Emily is seven. Anne is five. So the children become very close during the next five years as they all remain home in the parsonage to be educated by Patrick for the time being. Probably pretty traumatic to send two kids off to school and have them die. ah Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: Send three girls to school. Two of them come home or don't come home at all. or ah This is one of those cases where I become pro homeschooling. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the modern age, probably should be illegal because i personally think homeschooling is just a cover for abuse. But hey, you know, back when the mileage varies, but I would say the weird religious abuse is certainly one of the driving forces.

Speaker: Yeah. yeah I don't think, I think if you have good public schools, to set your children up for living in the real world, because i think we're going to find out homeschooling doesn't always work out for kids in this case, but yes, they're all taught the basics, all children. So there's all the three girls and the boy, they're all taught, The basics of history, geography, literature, these kind of things, reading and writing.

Speaker: Branwell, of course, as the boys, taught Latin and Greek as well. There's evidence that the girls picked up some of this a teaching. Certainly they picked up a lot of the, you know, classical, you know, tales of Greece and Rome. Anne would later learn Latin herself, although Charlotte and Emily would not. So instead, the girls would have lessons in household tasks like sewing in addition to basic... think I'd rather learn Latin Greek.

Speaker: Yeah, I did not like sewing as a child. I wish I could sew just because I would be like to like to be able to make my own clothes. but Yeah, I would love to do that. yeah When I lived in the Netherlands, we had to take sewing and embroidery. Oh, really? Yeah, and this was 1991, so I was 10 to 11. So ah our equivalent of ah grade 4 or 5, because they also put me in grade 4 because they felt their grade 5 was...

Speaker: too advanced for a Canadian, which was probably true ah because their grade four or their grade four was a year step up from my grade four. Yeah, makes sense. I'm not slow, eh? I'm just Canadian. That's exactly it. I'm from Canada and they think I'm slow, eh? I embroidered a ship on this pillow. But that's cute. Embroidery is fun. These are useful skills actually for boys and girls to be taught.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. I'm not saying that. I'm not to denigrate sewing. We're denigrating gender roles. And the fact that to this day, all boys have to learn ancient ah ancient Greek and then Latin. And all girls have to learn how to sew.

Speaker: That's right. Yeah. Just that's how it is, man. But it actually is surprising how these gender roles do stick around. Like sewing is useful for any skill for anybody and for it be of the girly thing. Like my brother-in-law is a man, obviously. He won the sewing top sewing prize in high school in grade 12. Oh, nice. yeah Good on him.

Speaker: That's what I say. Okay. But yeah, so I mean, Branwell probably should have been taught more useful skills, but we'll talk about that later. Oh, no. um they're They're all very voracious readers. They're basically reading anything they can get their hands on. So they're get reading newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, novels, ah very interested in the printed word. So they're going to read anything really, but they prefer fiction, you know, like most kids do.

Speaker: Now, we know Howarth is relatively isolated, but they do have pretty good local lending libraries. They have some subscriptions. So their favorite reading material is Blackwoods Magazine.

Speaker: This is probably the most important literary magazine of their day, and it was their favorite. So it is rather conservative, sort of Tory-leaning, you know, sort of proto-Victorian, conservative social bent as well.

Speaker: So these aren't radicals, right, in this family. They're they're pretty conservative, right? Right. yeah This is a, again, a ah maybe not economically, but culturally ah middle class family who are very much of the beliefs of the time aside. Yeah, just right there.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly so. Yeah, and this is Regency era, right? This is, I believe it's Georgian. So it's pre-Victorian. I believe Victoria comes to the throne in 1842. This is right before Victoria comes to power. Regency, Georgian, sort of. Late Regency. Regency ends around bla late thirty s Yeah, that's okay. That's about right. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah Yeah. So you're right. Yeah. So they're they're very bookish kids. If my mother's listening to this, she's screaming at me right now. But go on. sure. Feeling someone gets, being in a room when somebody gets something kind of wrong on a podcast, I think we shared a meme about this, is the closest you'll ever come to feeling like a ghost.

Speaker: Because you were screaming the correct information on the people on the podcast. You just don't have it right and you cannot affect them. Exactly. we'll We'll take our feedback. But also, yes, if you're screaming at the podcast right now, I was going to actually go into like, what is the Georgian era versus Victorian? But I'm like, it's a bit too detailed for this podcast, but maybe it actually wasn't. oh i it's It's fine. It's the same thing. It's it's Regency Pre-Victorian. You understand it's relatively conservative, right? Yes.

Speaker: So, yeah. these are these are If you say Proto-Victorian, that actually kind of makes people think, oh, so these Victorian ideas that we understand because they're kind of in popular culture are nascent.

Speaker: Yes, exactly. But you get the conservatism, especially as it comes to things like gender roles. And again, we'll talk about that more for sure. Again, we have that already with their education. They're already being educated differently, the boys and the girls. So, all right. um dear remind Just one more interjection. George was the regent. That's why it's called the regent Sierra and Georgian.

Speaker: Oh, okay. Well, we're both right. But I was also a little bit wrong. Really? I just have no clue what I'm talking about. Anyways, continue. Georgian Regency.

Speaker: It's all good. Same same difference. All right. So these kids are very bookish, but they're also very playful. they have owned They owned a lot of toys. You know, they weren't like totally buttoned down, you know, bookish nerds. They are playful and they can cause a ruckus if they want. Think about having four kids around the same age. That was my family, actually. Oh, wow. Pretty closely. Yeah, I have three siblings as well. About the same age differences, too. So yeah, we were pretty rowdy when we were little. So I can just imagine these four kids are cooped up in the Howarth parsonage, not even going to school, right? Educated at home. Yeah, at least if they're going to school, you can blow off some steam.

Speaker: They're just cooped up in this house, which is, from what you're saying, not quite big enough for everybody. And there is the one master of the house and the sister and then servants. But this is still probably considering what operating a household means and the amount of sheer labor that goes into that. There's judge and just not enough attention to go around.

Speaker: No, no, it's very difficult. And they will become very close. And we'll we'll see that, of course, as we go. um All right. So ah crucially, Patrick gave Branwell a set of 12 toy soldiers and these would sort of spark their imagination. These figures would inspire this sort of imaginary world that the four siblings would create together.

Speaker: So, you know, kids play with action figures now and Barbies and G.I. Joes and whatever. They're doing this with these these soldiers. Right. There's acting out. Yeah. They call them the young men plays. So it starts off sort of just acting out plays as you would with toys as a kid. And later on, though, they develop this into a whole imaginary world.

Speaker: Oh, wow. In they start writing the stories down. So Branwell would come up with Glass Town and the the sort of the city of Ang... or I believe it was the region of Angria, the country, and these sort of like these colonial fantasies to a degree, right?

Speaker: Glass Town Africa. This is very similar to my kids. My fantasies weren't quite as colonial because it wasn't, you know, England in the eighteen thirty s but Nonetheless, the ah notion of, you know, just using your imagination, playing with toys as a kid, and then turning that into ah what what they call now like lore, where you're doing world building and creating a narrative.

Speaker: I mean, this is why I am still obsessively into role playing games, right? Yeah, that's actually, I never heard that connection, actually. But yes, this is really close to what that is, yeah. Yeah, exactly. All role-playing games did is they ah put rules of conflict around these kinds of imaginary things, even though they came the history of role-playing games is a different thing. But that's the entire thing, is that, all right, well, I want my town to beat your town. How do we decide that? Let's introduce dice. Okay, well, what do the dice mean? Who's better at what? And then off you go.

Speaker: Yeah, no, makes total sense, actually. And in this case, too, like they are creating it's a very, very elaborate world. I you can read you can find and read these stories. I, you know, for me, they're juvenilia, not super interesting. So I haven't read them myself, but they're very elaborate lore.

Speaker: Very um they would write them down. The other thing is, too, is they would write them down in very, very tiny, almost like minuscule microscopic handwriting. So they're basically writing miniature newspapers for their soldiers to read.

Speaker: So you can, these books still exist and they're very, you go to the Bronte Museum and you can see this very, very tiny. So Charlotte would write them down very, very tiny print and then sew them together in little booklets. so That's fantastic. I love that stuff.

Speaker: Very elaborate. So they're already getting involved in writing and publishing their own work essentially as children. Yeah. And one of the reasons I like to do to use tiny script was because the older people in the house had poor eyesight. So their dad like could not read what they were writing down. That's what I assume they were writing so tiny for. And i'm sure they're doing 72 hours of handwriting training each day.

Speaker: And so as a result of that, ah the printing is still going to be legible at that, at you know, that very small size when they're writing in like three point font. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they're able to do it. Very tiny. I used to do that when I was younger. Right. Really, really tiny.

Speaker: oh really? Yeah. I don't know why. Sorry, go on, Tracy. No, I'm just saying i don't know why I did that, but there is a ah great deal of joy taken in making the tiniest letters possible.

Speaker: Well, it's it's like a craft, right? You're making a thing. and And my printing is better than it used to be, but you needed a Rosetta Stone to read my handwriting when I was a kid, except for the one year I lived in the Netherlands where they trained me in handwriting. And my parents were astonished at how my handwriting became very neat. And then I moved back to Canada and then immediately forgot everything. And it all went to hell. as As I forgot how to speak Dutch, so too did I forget how to write coherently. Dutch is jammer, Dave. Jammer, unfortunate.

Speaker: ah there you go. Education system in the Netherlands is clearly better, I suppose. i mean, the answer is at least in 1991, yes. Yeah. yes yeah Probably more so now, but I don't know anything about the Dutch education system at K-12 now, or if it's K-12 even. But yeah.

Speaker: Fair enough. I know very little myself. all right So they're writing on these tiny little books, keeping them secret. um Branwell and Charlotte sort of develop Glass Town and Angria. Emily and Anne develop the imaginary world of Gondol.

Speaker: So these stories, these are imaginary kingdoms peopled by the powerful and the wealthy. So you're imagining they're imagining royals and nobles and soldiers and ladies, et cetera. Right. the protagonist of all the fiction stuff they're reading.

Speaker: Exactly. It's not necessarily real world tales, which, of course, they're kids. Why would they be? But we'll see how this develops later on. Yeah. Not fantasy, because that's a genre, but fantastical.

Speaker: Exactly, yeah. So Juliet Barker notes this. So she says that the Brontes were unique in their total absorption in the fantasy worlds they had created, an involvement that was at times to bring them into conflict with the real world.

Speaker: Equally unique is the fact that the play element continued to be an important part of the creative process even into adulthood. As late as 1845, when they were in their middle 20s, Emily and Anne whiled away a train journey by pretending to be royalist prisoners escaping from Gondel.

Speaker: That sounds like a great way to spend your 20s, to be honest. Again, I relate so strongly to all of this. Well, yeah, that's the thing, because think about this. If you're imaginative, intelligent young child or even, you know, young adult, you're living in a Howarth, which is pretty boring. You have bigger dreams. Yeah, of course. You're going to imagine all these fantasy scenarios and act them out and, you know, pretend. And it it seems fine to me, right? But there is something called maladaptive daydreaming, which I have to look into.

Speaker: Yes. Oh, that sounds like something I would have been guilty of. Yeah, myself when I was a kid, probably too. Sort of escaping into fantasy yeah rather than maybe confronting problems or issues. I mean, this is no longer daydreaming, but I would say it is a cultural phenomenon now with how...

Speaker: deep you can settle in to your um ah to online hobbies and online hobbies that include either engaging in fandoms or again, engaging in your own imaginative works, imaginative works.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: ah you know you go too far with it and although i think the they can't tell the difference between what's fictional and what's real is a lazy way to approach that i don't think it's a good way to think about these things It does mean that they are almost like an addict where it becomes a it becomes a burden on them living their real life. and or not burden, a complication.

Speaker: Being a functional adult is compromised by the fact you can't get out of these fictional places. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. And again, i think yeah all of us can be guilty this to a degree, but you know, to a degree, it's to a degree. As long as we're all sort of functional. but I'm, I'm a functional adult. I swear.

Speaker: I know. Me too. I know. I'm, you know. Well, for me, it's things like, there used to be a sort of novel reading, Moral Panic, where it's like, these young women reading novels, it's giving them big ideas. I kind of get it because it's a sort of scenario, I believe it's like Madame Bovary, when you go to the ball and realize how great life can be, when you have to go back home to the everyday, you're like, shit. Yeah.

Speaker: this sucks and it does, you know, lead to, so can lead to dissatisfaction in your own life. But ideally you would take that dissatisfaction and turn it into creative output or moving your life towards a dream rather than sort of, and it's, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but there is a, you know, it's the, ah the dose makes the medicine.

Speaker: ah And so a decent amount of, you know, imaginative works, fantastical thinking, escapism, creating these things, I think that makes people clever and charming and ah too much of it. And ah you become a cave dweller in your own room, living off of buckets of fish heads. And we just don't want that.

Speaker: No, exactly. You've got again, it's it's in degree. Yeah. Yeah. One one Tylenol makes my headache go away. 40 Tylenol makes my liver go away. yeah exactly Okay, yeah. So we'll back to the Bronte. So they start developing more distinct personalities, of course, as they grow up. At this early age, Charlotte and Branwell become particularly close and closer in age, as do Emily and Anne. So they're kind of pairing off a little bit, although they are they're all fairly close.

Speaker: Again, Branwell was seen from an early age as sort of this gifted genius. So you hear stories, he's ambidextrous, so he could write with his left hand and his right hand, and he could read both Latin and Greek, and could supposedly do, oh, he can write Latin with left hand and Greek with the right.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Stupid human tricks. but Which, admittedly, that's pretty impressive. That is. That's a pretty great stupid human trick. It is. If it's true, and if he wasn't just writing gibberish, right? Well, and maybe you could like practice writing one specific word or one specific word.

Speaker: It's it can be a lot of things rather than I am writing full paragraphs off the top of my head in two languages at once. It can be something maybe a little more deceitful than that, but it doesn't mean it is impressive.

Speaker: No. Yeah, it is. It is. But we're going to get into Branwell. He's very interesting. So his education was prioritized and he's expected to go on to do big things. So, again, as the only boy, there's going to be a lot of expectations placed on him as he is the one child in this family with the freedom to follow essentially whatever career path he wanted.

Speaker: Right. Right. He's going to become an important person yeah and the sisters are going to ideally marry an important person. yeah That's right. And support their brother, of course.

Speaker: Yeah. this is interesting. This is Winifred Guerin. She wrote biographies of all four of the Bronte children. So she says, if Branwell Bronte was born with an extravagant sense of the high destiny he would achieve, he was not alone in holding it.

Speaker: It was fostered and fanned by all those who stood nearest to him and who, from the beginning, made a distinction in his treatment from that of his sisters. In this, should be hastily added, his sisters themselves wholeheartedly shared, neither questioning nor seeking to undermine the position accorded to their only brother.

Speaker: The little girls might receive the petting of servants, the confidence and attention of their father, but it was Branwell who was the main purpose, the fond hope and pride of that bereaved father's heart. That is a very classic family dynamic where you are the chosen one and y'all ain't.

Speaker: Yep. Yep. And at this time, it's based solely on his gender. ah And this is not an uncommon attitude to this day. of course not. It's just, you know, people talk about, oh, feminism has gone too far. Bullshit. We have a lot of work to do. You've also used gender reveals about men crying when they find out they're having a girl and having little temper tantrums. Meanwhile, a nearby mountain is burning down. Yeah, it's great. I know. I know. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker: Anyway, this is still an issue to this day, but we know Charlotte, Anne, and Emily were beloved, of course, but they were not held to the same level of expectation, of course. They're held to higher standards of conduct and responsibility, however...

Speaker: Yes, because they're girls and you got to behave like a good girl and grow up into a virtuous woman. Right. We're going to see how this plays out regardless, though. So in reality, the girls do have far more limited options.

Speaker: And as they get older, they're going to need to find some way to take care of themselves. and Winifred Guerin calls this the problem of their future. Interesting. Brandwell's like, oh, well, he's going to be great. Take it for granted. There you go. So 1831, the families have five years together, being educated at home, writing their stories, really developing these imaginary fantasy worlds. yeah But Charlotte turns 14, gets the time where, you what are you going to do with your life, right? She's sent back to school.

Speaker: This time she goes to a place called Rowhead. That's R-O-E. Rowhead and Murfield. This is about 40 kilometers from Howarth. Okay. ah This time Patrick himself knew the woman who ran the school. and It was a much better, much healthier situation for Charlotte.

Speaker: we have really yeah We have almost entirely eradicated our consumption problem here. That's right. yeah i mean Close quarters, you never know. But there are no rampant outbreaks of disease so far. So she's going to do well there. And while she's there, she makes lifelong friends with women. Ellen Nussie.

Speaker: and Mary Taylor. These are two other people. another reason that it's important to go to school and not be homeless. Well, yes, that's the thing, because biographers have mentioned how isolated these kids were, which is why their imaginary worlds were so intense. It's sort of there's Branwell stays at home. He never goes to school. There's sort of he's out playing with the boys in the moors sometimes. And there he's more freedom just to go outside and do things. So people have said that Branwell probably had more of an active life in terms of being outside. Right, because he's just socializing with the ah sort of village boys and things like that.

Speaker: Meanwhile, the girls are just cooped up and going slowly deranged. Yeah, yeah. Flying kites at night. It's unwholesome. Yeah, really walking along on the moors. The girls do walk along on the moors, but that yeah, we'll get to their theirre sort of friendships later. mean, momentarily.

Speaker: I love, ah there is something deeply romantic about being a sad, isolated teenager and then just walking the moors. I know. Honestly, like I had some mores to walk on. I would have been a much happier teenager or would my melancholy would have been a little more romantic. Sorry. It sort of made you more romantic about it. Yeah.

Speaker: I often think i I have my issues with with Morrissey. I think he's a piece of shit. But if I had discovered the Smiths when I was in high school, I'm like, would it have been better or worse? Yeah.

Speaker: I discovered the Smiths when I was 40. I never got them. And then for some reason in my 40s, I'm like, yeah, I'm into this band. Yeah. And oh yeah, I'm listening to... Go on.

Speaker: Go ahead. Sorry. Jens first. Oh, yeah, I discovered them when I was at university. And I was like, remember sitting on the bus listening to There's a Light That Will Never Go Out and just breaking into the hugest smile the hilarity and wonder of those lyrics. It's such a good song.

Speaker: What a heavenly way to die. It's such a funny song. And like, I appreciate that i found Morrissey at a time where I could appreciate the ironic nature of the melancholy. Yeah, was there is not going to die with my crush, you know? It's, it yeah, it is. it it's It's a vibe. And I think Morrissey would be a fun episode at some point.

Speaker: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Because what a weird prick. my god I don't know anything about him. British people, British musicians. They're all fucking racist. It's so like, no, I would say all of them. They're not all racist. So many of them. you met American musicians?

Speaker: Well, you know what? Yeah, i you know, I shouldn't single out the British. i'm well i I understand that there is still a specific kind of racism in British musicians, which is prevalent in a lot of people who sing music for people who are not necessarily racists.

Speaker: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so we're going to talk about Charlotte arriving at Rowhead. So this is Mary Taylor, lifelong friend of Charlotte, describing her arrival at Rowhead.

Speaker: This Mary. i first saw her charlotte coming out of a covered cart in very old-fashioned clothes and looking very cold and miserable she was coming to school at miss wooler's when she appeared in the schoolroom her dress was changed but just as old she looked a little old woman so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something and moving her head from side to side to catch sight of it she was very shy and nervous and spoke with a strong irish accent and Ellen Nussie, her other friend, says this. she never seemed to me the unattractive little person others designated her but certainly she was at this time anything but pretty

Speaker: even her good points were lost Yeah. her naturally beautiful hair of soft silky brown being then dry and frizzy-looking screwed up in tight little curls showing features that were all the plainer from her exceeding thinness and want of complexion she looked dried in a dark rusty green stuffed dress of old-fashioned make detracted still more from her appearance So people love to... blundering years.

Speaker: I know. And people like to make a big deal, but, oh, Charlotte was so plain and unattractive. She was a normal human being who looked normal. You know, she wasn't as gorgeous... her friend, what an ago.

Speaker: Yeah, I know. That's the thing. She's just a normal girl. And I think what they're trying to emphasize here is they're they're being basically raised by aunt who's older than them who has different fashion sense.

Speaker: Yes. So when I was in seventh grade, I got my haircut by a woman who was still living in the 80s and gave me a gigantic puffy perm. Oh, I have one of those. In the nineteen ninety s yeah And it literally ruined my life. And I'm not joking. Cruel children. it was my haircut.

Speaker: started it all. Like, unbelievably so. But this is the thing, like, the in Charlotte's case, she's coming into a school where people are nice to her. And so they're recognizing, it sounds mean, but what they're trying to say is actually...

Speaker: She's way cooler she She's a young, awkward girl who'd been isolated, had no friends. They don't know what the fashion sense it They don't know what the style is, right? Yeah. Imagine the tight little curls they'd have hanging down is a very ah Regency hairstyle, right? Yeah. Things like that. So she's sort of old fashioned, very, very tiny.

Speaker: She's very small. her sure Her growth was kind of ah supposedly stunted by her time at the Cowan Bridge School. Wayfish. She's very tiny. Yes, wayfish. Exactly. And unfortunately, so her friends did try to get her to play sports with them, but she was so nearly blind, she couldn't even see the ball if they were throwing ball. my God, that's a good lesson. It sucks. Yeah, so she just took to quieter pursuits.

Speaker: She's very homesick at first, but she actually adjusted adjusts quite quickly to life at Rowhead with her much kinder teachers and kinder fellow pupils. So she's very smart and she quickly moves to the top of the class in terms of her grades.

Speaker: She's doing well. Branwell, meanwhile, is back home. he had a hard time with Charlotte being away because the two of them had become very close, right? Yes. He keeps himself busy you know with his own schooling and he's working on the Glass Town saga.

Speaker: these stories. Anne and Emily, meanwhile, are developing this world of gondol. It's the imaginary world that they would share. Anne and Emily would become each other's closest friend. So this is interesting. Juliet Barker notes this.

Speaker: Alone among the Bronte girls, Charlotte made friends with several girls of her own age and class, which were to last a lifetime. Emily would briefly befriend a fellow pupil in Brussels.

Speaker: Anne's sole recorded friend, Anne Cook, died only a year or so after she left Rowhead. Oh, wow like Jesus Christ, can you imagine your only friend outside your family just dying?

Speaker: Oh, man. This is what I mean. They're isolated, isolated. Yeah. Charlotte really is the only one who seems to have wanted son of more than Haworth, at least in terms of...

Speaker: visiting and, you know, at least terms adventure. She developed a healthy social life, right? Yeah, yeah, she yeah, exactly. she And an interest in having one even. yeah That's right. Yeah, that's right. So it's interesting. Branwell, of course, had more friends, way more friends. He's much more social than his sisters. So as a young man, he would, again, play with the local lads on the moor. And as he got older, he would make more friends his own age.

Speaker: We'll get back to him. So of course, yes, Charlotte is thriving at Rowhead. So after 18 months, she would be 16. She graduates and returns home. And of course, her job then became educating Emily and Anne.

Speaker: Yeah. So she's 16. She comes back, teach her sisters. Charlotte's friend again, Ellen Nussie, would pay a visit to Howarth Parsonage in 1832. Yeah. So she's describing Emily and Anne. So this is ah from Juliet Barker again. So Emily, now 15, had a, quote, lathsome, graceful figure and was the tallest in the house after her father. So Emily, again, this is Ellen Nussie describing Emily.

Speaker: Her hair, which was naturally as beautiful as Charlotte's, was in the same unbecoming tight curl and frizz. And there was some want of complexion. She had very beautiful eyes, kindly kindling liquid eyes. Sometimes they looked gray.

Speaker: Sometimes dark blue, but she did not often look at you. She was too reserved. She talked very little. She and Anne were like twins, inseparable companions, and in the very closest sympathy, which never had any interruption.

Speaker: Anne, dear gentle Anne, was quite different in appearance to the others. She was her aunt's favorite. Her hair was a very pretty light brown, and in falling curls fell on her neck in graceful curls.

Speaker: She had lovely violet blue eyes, fine penciled eyebrows, a clear, almost transparent complexion. these are what the girls are looking like at this time as teenagers. So Emily's extremely tall and is sort of known as Emily's more brusque. We'll get to her later. And a sort of quiet, gentle um girl. And they're both ok all very close. Yeah. So Ellen did not mention Branwell.

Speaker: in these later recollections. Again, i and quote Juliet Barker. Of Branwell, whose later career rendered him unmentionable in Ellen's eyes, she had nothing to say, except that he studied regularly with his father and was already learning to paint in oils, because even at this early date, all the family expected him to have a distinguished career as an artist.

Speaker: From other sources at the time, however, yeah, we learned that he was small for his age, but good-looking, with his father's aquiline nose and high forehead. Afflicted with his sister's poor eyesight, he was obliged to wear glasses, and he wore his hair, which was the reddest in the family, rather long in what he considered an artistic fashion.

Speaker: So you get a sense of these people as they're teenagers now. So Branwell is learning to paint. He's hanging out with friends more. He develops relationships with men working along the canal, which we'll talk about later. He's writing and he also starts drinking at some point.

Speaker: Loves hanging out in the pub. loves to go down the pub with boys. Yeah. So he would later develop a very quite close friendship with this local sculptor, Joseph Leyland.

Speaker: He, Joseph Leyland would go on to some local renown, but would never become like a national figure. Uh, Branwell also had an art tutor at this time who, uh, unfortunately was not very good. Oh, no. He didn't train Branwell how to mix his oils properly to get the right tone, especially for like flesh tones.

Speaker: So if you see the slides I sent you, if you look at slide number six, this is a painting Branwell made in 1833. So you can see this painting. Yeah. you can see it's left. It's Anne, Emily and Charlotte.

Speaker: And now what do you notice? ah What else do you notice about this painting? ah There's a ghost. Yeah. So first of all, okay, this is the, it's called the pillar portrait.

Speaker: So it looks pretty ratched up. It's actually now in the national portrait gallery in London. Oh, cool. So can see it there, which yeah, lucky to do. yeah, you see it's all folded up. It's kind of looking pretty battered. It's um three women, obviously, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily.

Speaker: And in the back you see, yes, a pillar. And what that actually is, is Branwell, who painted himself out of the portrait. Okay. and Now, I wonder if somebody else painted him out, and I will talk about that a bit later, but he, this is sort of seen as like, oh, look, he's so self-deprecating, or he's so despairing, he hates himself so much, he painted himself out. we Who knows? It could have just be that he didn't like it, he didn't have time. not a finished portrait, per se, but it's very, very famous now. This is sort of one of the very few portraits of the Bronte sisters made in their lifetime. No photographs of them, of course.

Speaker: So, yeah, um the next slide, this is a sketch of himself at a later date. it's So slide seven. You can so see it. You know, it's kind of a he looks sort of professorial artistic hair kind of swept forward looking yeah a romantic figure.

Speaker: He's got the kind of pointy features of his dad. Yeah. Yeah. and Yeah. i do I totally get the I have the sort of the shaggy windswept artist vibe going on.

Speaker: Yep. Okay, so he would do a second portrait of himself and his sisters, but apparently it was so bad it got destroyed. So it was them sitting on a table, I believe, and ah this portrait was described, this is, again, Juliet Barker, this portrait was described by one visitor to the parsonage in 1858 who saw it hanging in pride of place on the stairs as a shocking daub, not up to the rudest signboard style.

Speaker: Ooh. So there is, you can Google it. There's portrait of Emily that was cut out of that main painting, but, and she, her skin is green, basically. It's not very good. Yeah. So he didn't paint very well or he couldn't mix the oils properly or something, but you know, if you look at it now, again, you compare it to somebody somebody like a Gainsborough, obviously it's not the greatest, but you know, he's a young man still. He painted this as a teenager. I'd call this a promising work.

Speaker: Yeah, he's a teenager. he's yeah This is good work. i like This a better than a lot of teenagers. And yeah I can see why they're investing in it in him as an artist. Because yeah you know put another decade on that kid, you've got someone great.

Speaker: That's right. That would take work, you see. so yeah, the four siblings, okay, they're all going to be at home again 1832 to 1835, enjoying what Charlotte would call a delightful monotony.

Speaker: It's nice. They're hanging out. They're learning. They're reading. They're writing their stories. it seems kind of a cozy time. yeah Yeah. 1835, they'd all be separated once more because it's Emily's turn to get a formal education. And ah they decide to send her to Rowhead. So she goes back to Rowhead with Charlotte that summer. Charlotte's returning there to be a teacher. And Emily is going to be a student.

Speaker: The deal was that Emily would be educated for free as long as Charlotte would provide teaching services. Okay. But Emily did not do well at all. She really could not thrive when she was away from home for any length of time.

Speaker: Really interesting. So she, this is Winifred Guerin on Emily at her time at Rowhead. Nothing could console Emily. Years later, Charlotte tried to give a credible account of what Emily's sufferings had been at Rowhead.

Speaker: It had nothing to do with Rowhead. Only Charlotte knew, by intuition and fellow feelings, that what nearly brought Emily to the grave was the severance from Hauer. Now, maybe they're being bit melodramatic. Like, I don't know she died of homesickness almost, but she's really struggling. She did not thrive when taken out of the house, basically. No.

Speaker: Nope. And even then, Charlotte dared not avow what applied in her own case as well, that it wasn't home they missed so terribly, but the stimulus to creative writing which the moors of home afforded. So the timeless days Emily in particular lived out in the heath. The unbounded horizon that drew her ravished eyes were the only setting possible for a soul like hers, suspended between two worlds.

Speaker: Fantasy world, the real world. Right, I get that. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils, wrote Charlotte. Without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school and from her very own noiseless, very secluded but unrestrained and inartificial mode of life to one of disciplined routine, though under the kindest auspices, was what she failed in enduring. So her nature proved here too strong and for her fortitude.

Speaker: Every morning when she woke, the vision of home in the moors rushed on her and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. i knew only too well. So, again, you think about this. Emily is not somebody who's bound by gender norms either.

Speaker: She just wants to be herself and live free and like write her poetry and walk around. Which, yeah you know what? Who doesn't? You're going to school. You're forced into these roles. You're forced to behave a certain way. You're forced to dress a certain way. got to comport to...

Speaker: Could not adapt to that. Nope. Nope. Couldn't and didn't really want to. So she goes home and in order to not lose the free tuition deal, Anne is sent to Rowhead and Emily's place. Anne is very different. So she is determined not to be a burden to her family. So she's basically resolved to do whatever it takes to set herself up for future independence.

Speaker: Now, should we mention here, none of the three girls were banking on good marriages to support them. They are not including this as a possibility for themselves at the moment. Maybe they are in the back of their minds, but they're not banking on this at all. They don't seem to particularly want to get married, it seems, and they were not all that interested in children either.

Speaker: Again, which is unfortunate given that one of This is the number one expectation that's going to be placed on them by literally everyone. But interesting. So this very free, this very kind of like secluded but free world they had where they're creating this sort of fantasies amongst amongst each other.

Speaker: And also being, you know, brilliant and well-educated. They are, they're there that they see, no, I can be something different and I have to be something different.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. It's hard for them because they're not really seeing what options are available to them. Again, one of the two career options available to them, again, is teaching, being a governess, or it could be some ladies' maid and hang out with some old woman, right? I mean, the reason, yeah, so the reason they're pursuing a formal education is because they want to be able to set themselves up at least for a career as a teacher or a governess, right? Yeah.

Speaker: Some rumored suitors, I might talk about this more next time, but it doesn't really come up that much. So the Reverend William Waitman, this is a bit later on, this is when they're sort of in their 20s, he becomes one of Patrick's curates.

Speaker: And he was said to have had a flirtation with maybe Emily, maybe Anne, maybe Charlotte. This guy was a big flirt, probably known to be quite unserious. Interestingly enough, Charlotte would refer to this man, William Waitman, in her diaries and letters as Miss Celia Amelia.

Speaker: she goes She, her pronouns in referring to William Waitman, Miss Celia Amelia, flirting with all the ladies. Pretty sure this guy was gay. I would say that. So Elizabeth Hardwick writes this.

Speaker: Now she's writing in the 70s, so I'm not sure what way she's using gay here. Anne Bronte is thought to fall in love with a gay flirtatious young curate. William Waitman.

Speaker: But this love was a secret suffering, a mute, hidden torment. Maybe. we kind of don't know. And does she mean gay as in happy or gay as in homosexual? like we kind of It's in the 70s, so it's kind of ambivalent to me.

Speaker: it seems happy in this sentence, actually. I would say in this context, it very much sounds like the sort of carefree, lighthearted kind of gay. yeah Yeah. But if they're calling him Miss Celia Amelia... Well, again, he definitely still could have been gay.

Speaker: yeah Oh, yeah, yeah. This is kind of interesting, yes. But unfortunately, Anne would still be heartbroken the death of William Waitman of cholera in 1842. Again, Anne's best friend dies.

Speaker: Her suitor dies. Not good luck here. Again, I'm going to go back to my public service announcement. What's cholera? What's death by cholera? I know what cholera is, but I'm not actually sure about the symptoms of the disease. But it's when ah your poop is not far enough away from ah where ah you spend the most of your life.

Speaker: Yep, that's what causes it. And cholera is dying of diarrhea. essentially. o Oh, great. Sucks. Yeah. So just from the WHO, just so we're all aware of this, cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by consuming water or food contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholera.

Speaker: So currently it's a public, a global public health threat and indicates inequity and lack of social and economic development. Now this is in g England in the 1840s. Access to safe water, basic sanitation and hygiene is essential to prevent cholera and other waterborne diseases. Yeah.

Speaker: Now people can be treated, of course, with antibiotics and you need and intravenous fluids. yeah Again, easily treatable now, although unfortunately 1.3 to million cases a year and between 21,000 and 143,000 deaths from cholera worldwide each year today. Yeah.

Speaker: So it is the conditions, yes, you're imagining ah developing nations, cholera outbreaks. This is what's happening in Howarth in the eighteen forty s So William Waitman apparently was a very good guy, good curate. He was visiting people who were sick with cholera and came down with it himself because probably he's drinking the same water they're drinking too, right? Right. And the trick with cholera and how it spreads it is that if everyone is shedding themselves to death, well, that's going to get places. And so it just continues to spread.

Speaker: And we're going to talk more about Howarth and their sanitation issues next episode. But for now, back to our story. We go to the summer of 1835. Charlotte is 19, Anne is 15, and they're off to Rowhead.

Speaker: Branwell is now 18, and he's off to London. Or was supposed to have been off to London. Oh, no. Yes. Branwell was supposed to have gone to London to apply to become a student at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Speaker: So... the Royal Academy is and perhaps, what we were sorry, it was and perhaps still is, though not sure, the premier art school in the UK. So, of course, it's pretty difficult to get into.

Speaker: Nevertheless, Branwell got himself packed up, the family scraped together his tuition money, and off he went to London. Oh, no. Where he's promptly robbed and sent back home to Haworth, empty-handed and definitely not a Royal Academy student.

Speaker: Oh. Oh, man. Or was he? Or. The thing with Branwell is, is Branwell is a liar. ah A fucking liar. Sorry, my Fargo quote. He's a liar. Because, I'm not saying it takes one to know one when it comes to alcoholics, but very deceitful.

Speaker: Because he probably was not robbed. Probably somewhere along the way to London, he chickened out. Or he realized he wasn't actually talented enough to compete. Or he was so dazzled by the metropolis that he was seeing for the first time that he couldn't hack it and had to go home. Because you think about London at this time. London is the biggest city in the world. Yeah.

Speaker: And to go from Howard to London, it'd be pretty overwhelming, I would imagine. So here's what we know. Go ahead. this This kid is 18. Yeah. yeah Drinking too much. And has a, I'm no good with fine with currency conversion, but a bazillion pounds in his pocket.

Speaker: Yep. Yep. He's got money. He's going on Probably needed a minder. Yeah. So a draft of an application letter exists to the Royal Academy, but there's actually no evidence that Branwell ever actually did apply to the Royal Academy.

Speaker: So historians have looked at no documents from the Royal Academy indicate this. Who knows? They might've been lost at some point. this is a long time ago. So Bronte myth has it that Branwell basically spent all the family savings gambling and drinking in London.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: or after he realized that he wasn't talented enough to compete and become a great artist or he might not have even admitted it to london at all and he might have spent the money on drink and games in a local town perhaps bradford which was one of the stops on the way So no one knows what happens, but regardless, Branwell was supposed to have lied about this. So he claimed he was robbed on the way to London, thus excusing his return to Howarth empty handed.

Speaker: So again, a lot of early biographers tell one of these tales. So Juliet Barker was researching in the 90s. She found no evidence that any of this was true. so we don't know.

Speaker: So Barker argues that Branwell may or may not have gone to London in 1835, but he probably never actually applied for admission to the school. Right. so this is Winifred Guerin and her biography of Brandt Mulbronte.

Speaker: This is, uh, he came back without any money. What he told his astonished father and aunt and what shortly ran like wildfire through the village was that before he had really reached the city, he had fallen prey to sharpers and been robbed of most of his money.

Speaker: In this form, the tale reached Ellis Chadwick many years later through howard folk who still remembered that deplorable return. so this is known in the village. So pity for Branwell's experience rather than disapproval of his wasted opportunities was the first reaction to his tale.

Speaker: So that his family gradually guessed something of the truth that his London journey eventually appeared to them in its true aspect of moral failure. is apparent from the absolute silence in which they passed it over.

Speaker: So, no direct reference to it can be found in the Bronte correspondence of the time, nor in any later statement of theirs. Branwell might, for all the evidence supplied by his family, never have gone to London at all.

Speaker: So, she concludes, by their reticence alone, the sorry the magnitude of their disappointment can be measured. The first major disappointment suffered on his behalf. Yet it was rather a disappointment for Branwell than a disappointment in Branwell as yet.

Speaker: So basically, he probably drank all their savings, came home empty handed and said, oh, I was robbed. Thus, he's innocent. And thus just had to continue living the lie and the family knowing Branwell, while the entire village is going, did you hear that he got robbed? And it's the gossip of everything. Remain stonily silent about it in their correspondences because it is a shame rather than sin.

Speaker: scandalous tale about how their son was wronged and again ah having been and having known a lot of highly irresponsible 18 year olds uh how he specifically lost the money matters a little less than it is almost certainly he spent the money idiotically and then had to cover for it it's just this is a common story Exactly. yeah oh yeah. This is not uncommon at all. And it's unfortunate that they trusted him enough, you know, but maybe they didn't know... And you get so they didn't tied up in this is the big thing the family is doing. The notion that he just...

Speaker: squander that opportunity is probably not even entering into their minds because he hasn't done anything at that level before. yeah And it's such a big deal that you don't associate everything together and go or even consider, well, what if he just spends all the money? No, that'd be foolish. That's nonsense. He's been involved in all of this. Of course he wouldn't.

Speaker: It's unthinkable. Yeah. What the shit, Bronwell. Yeah, that's right. Again, think of expectations. Yeah. So it's basically a whole tangle of lies and we'll never know what really happened exactly. But we can guess.

Speaker: All we know is that after this escapade, neither again, neither Bronwell nor his family spoke of it ever again, at least to anyone outside the family. And again, i' not's saying it takes I'm not saying it takes one to know one, but this becomes very easy. Once you're an alcoholic, you can really spot other alcoholics pretty easily.

Speaker: And something that many alcoholics will do is sabotage themselves. So this is a very well known thing in say like AA circles. The AA big book mentions this specific phenomenon of alcoholics sabotaging themselves.

Speaker: So they will, the alcoholic, maybe maybe you'll have a big job interview coming up, a very important work presentation. maybe you're Amy Winehouse and you're launching your new tour in Belgrade, Serbia.

Speaker: And in spite of all the pressure, you decide to get trashed right before. So if you've seen Amy Winehouse in Belgrade, absolutely wasted on stage. And you think, oh, no, I get that now because she was under an enormous amount of pressure and she blew it. And it looks something like, and again, I, people of if you drink, this is a well-known phenomenon.

Speaker: People blow it and they go on a bender right before a big, stressful life event. And they totally blow it. And this seems to be maybe what Branwell did. Anyway, despite his lack of formal credentials, he was able to set himself up as a portrait painter in Bradford in 1838.

Speaker: But we'll return to this venture later on. So Anne and Charlotte are Rowhead. Emily stays home and she's helping take care of the household, writing poetry, walking on the moors and daydreaming about the imaginary world of Gondal.

Speaker: So 1837, though, to everybody's surprise, she actually got a job as a teacher at a girls' school called Law Hill. This is in Halifax, relatively close to Haworth as well. But again, she hates being away from the parsonage.

Speaker: Winifred Guerin says, the size of the school, the number of pupils and her own complete lack of experience made the task an overwhelming one at first. So Charlotte, commenting on it to Ellen Nussie, was convinced that Emily would never stand the strain.

Speaker: She's quoting Emily. Oh, sorry. She's quoting Charlotte. My sister e has gone as teacher in a large school of near 40 pupils near H. power I have had one letter from her since her departure.

Speaker: She wrote 2nd of October, and it gives an appalling account of her duties. Hard labor from six in the morning until near 11 at night with only one half hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she will never stand it.

Speaker: So, Winifred Guerin. To a girl of her independent character, there was not much at Law Hill that could appeal to her. She once told a classroom of unruly girls that the only individual she liked in the whole establishment was the house dog.

Speaker: um Oh my god, that is such a my teacher is having a breakdown thing for the teacher to say. Isn't it though? ah i hate all of you. Only the dog. Only the dog. And she's, so she's outspoken. She's herself. She cannot handle. And it it is like, if you read about women's lives, look, I guess anytime in history, to be honest, but so much of it is drudgery.

Speaker: Why are you having to do hard labor teaching chores from six in the morning to 11 at night? Again, this is why we have unions. This is why we have labor rights, et cetera, et cetera. But this sucks.

Speaker: Yeah. so yeah It's a bad job. Yep. She's at Law Hill School for six months and then quits. enough. All right. Yeah. So back to Charlotte and Anne. They both come home from Rowhead in 1838. Anne had attained a mastery of music, singing, drawing, French, Latin, German, history, English, arithmetic and geography.

Speaker: <unk> Latin in there, too. She's very accomplished, particularly as regards her mastery of Latin. So again, she feels well prepared to take on a teaching role, which she did in March of 1839.

Speaker: She becomes a governess to the Ingham family at Blake Hall. This is near Huddersfield. So I'm going to quote Daphne du Maurier again, daphne de morier rather from her biography of Bradenwell Bronte. This is, back at home things became quieter than ever anne with silent determination took a post as governess with mrs inham of blake hall merfield No one could dissuade her from so doing.

Speaker: The youngest Bronte had a strong will beneath the quiet facade. The desire to earn her living and so spare her father's purse was synonymous with freedom. A month or so later, Charlotte also tore herself away from the insidious delights of Charlotte Vernon in love with her own brother-in-law. Now that Charlotte Vernon and her brother-in-law, this is all glass town, angry fantasy world. So they're all deeply invested in this. anyway, that's just who that is, right? Yeah.

Speaker: just the In love with her brother-in-law, that's imaginary. so So she Charlotte takes a post as temporary governess with a Mrs. s Sidgwick of Stone Gap. The eldest and the youngest were earning money.

Speaker: The other two, Branwell and Emily, were not. Emily, brushing the carpet, sweeping the stairs, or peeling potatoes in the kitchen under Tabby's eye, was as insulated from intrusion as a hermit crab.

Speaker: Wow. Because she is basically a hermit. Like she, it's interesting that there there are notions of freedom for Anne and Charlotte. It's getting out of the house, getting my own job, being independent. That's freedom to me for Emily. It's staying home, being with the family, not worrying about my job or making money yet and worrying about my fantasy world and writing poetry and baking bread.

Speaker: So I get that her idea of freedom is isolation. Yeah, and what's Branwell's? Blug, blug, blug. Yeah. Not great. Yeah, so Anne's experience at Blake Hall in Murfield. This would inspire her novel Agnes Grey.

Speaker: This is the story of a governess who has to deal with ah some really awful, spoiled, and psychopathic children. Yes, really. If you take Agnes Grey at face value and...

Speaker: These kids were psychopaths. Agnes Grey includes scenes of animal torture, oh which, read yes, readers found very shocking at the time. and Yeah. Difficult to believe. But the stories that Anne tells in Agnes Grey were apparently corroborated by Charlotte and others in Anne's life. So...

Speaker: The main story that is disturbing from this novel is the oldest boy basically rips up a bunch of baby birds. Jesus. like literally. And then when Agnes Gray confronts him about this, he says, well, it's fine. And my dad likes it, too.

Speaker: So she's exposing these wealthy, spoiled children as absolute monsters. And people don't want to hear that. But we'll get to that later when Agnes Gray comes out. Yes. But right. Right. the book reminds herself The book is a future thing. This is just the event that will inspire the future book.

Speaker: book Yeah. So got it if that specific thing happened, I can't really see her making that up, honestly. And unfortunately, knew some psychos when I was growing up, too.

Speaker: Well, and there is a legendary quality to ah British school kids and particularly the wealthier ones. And yeah even if that precise story did not happen exactly as it is written, because this is a work of fiction and stories grow larger in the telling.

Speaker: The fact that these weren't the these inspired this means that the point of these kids being ah absolutely dreadful and cruel is, you know, taken. And the fact that they were cruel is probably true.

Speaker: Yeah. Oh, yeah. if that exactly happened, it doesn't really matter. What matters more is the cruelty. That's right Because that's what she's exploring here. So Anne also was not able to discipline the kids. The parents are like, meh. you said, in the book, she says, no, our dad said it's fine. He likes to kill birds too. So great. Anne found herself in an impossible situation. This is Winifred Guerin.

Speaker: So on the one hand, she defaced mutiny from the kids. And on the other hand, nothing with which to reinforce her authority. Because governesses are seen as non-entities. The way governesses are treated, they're non-entities, they're slaves, nobody gives a shit about them.

Speaker: They're seen as valueless in the sense of members of society. You know what i mean? They're not valueless, but they're very... We know Britain's a very, very class-based society. it's Yeah.

Speaker: Probably even worse back then. so she there was definitely worse back then. Oh, yeah, yeah. This woman knows Latin and French and German and all this shit. And they're like, oh, well, just babysit these kids, these little monsters. Yeah.

Speaker: Hard for her, right? So she never imagined such a situation possible. The little Inghams were not only the naughtiest children she'd ever met, they were a revelation in naughtiness.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Yeah. Indeed, they were so novel in her experience of childhood that she could explain them only, like many subsequent pedagogues in her shoes, by attributing their particular brand of wickedness to the age in which they lived.

Speaker: Right. So writing sometime after the event to Ellen Nussie, Charlotte defied her friend to be able in her turn to live in an unruly, violent family of modern children, such, for instance, as those at Blake Hall.

Speaker: So therein lay Anne's dilemma. Her own standards of upbringing were hopelessly outmoded in this modern home. I take issue with that. I don't think it's a modern home. This is an eternal problem. yeah this is yeah this This is a common and very easy thing to fall into. We see all the time, which is that the problem is modernity rather than the problem is these people are assholes with too much wealth.

Speaker: yes And again, not all wealthy kids are also the same way. It sounds like this family was particularly horrific. This is wasn't like a random sample of ah the wealthy people. Maybe the kids had a dad who tortured animals, too. And it was the animal torturing family that happens. And when you have wealth, you can get away with being the animal torturing family. But the notion that, oh, well, in the good old days, nobody was ever mean to animals and children all behaved well is nonsense. It's just she knows she comes from an old fashioned family or at least showed up at school wearing old fashioned clothes and hair and has ah this very sort of pocket of time thing going on with ah with Hallworth.

Speaker: So you go, oh, well, it's because I'm traditional and they're modern and traditional is morally superior. Yeah, she's wrong. yeah Yeah, that's right. It's it's it's incorrect. It's a very, very common thing to think. So I don't blame her for it, but it's yeah's wrong.

Speaker: Yeah. And this is the thing, too. These four children were quite or at least the girls were very isolated. So this was you could see this be insanely shocking to Anne. Like what? Because they love Insanely shocking to anybody, I hope. Well, it would be. Yes, that's true. That's true. Yes. But in these isolated children.

Speaker: kids who really had very limited interactions with people outside of their their own family they're like what is this this is possible like jesus so yeah i can see them being um freaked out and yeah what i was gonna say was i can see also why patrick didn't want branwell to go to school because if he's this delicate boy maybe I'm going to hint later on, maybe he was gay.

Speaker: Right. And I, this is a very, very, you cannot speculate on this because he's long dead and we don't know, but he is not your average person. tough boy, tough, you know, Yorkshire lad, right? He's delicate. He's fragile. They keep him home. The girls go to school there. They struggle as well. And I wonder if it's part of it is Patrick knows, especially for Branwell, like keep him away from these psychos. I don't know. Maybe that's part of it. Because i again, like you're saying about British public public school, notoriously abusive.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. Legendarily. The I think another reason that could enter into that is simple gender stuff, which is that Patrick, who is a smart, educated man himself, was like, I know how to teach this kid to be odd to grow up to be a man. i have all the skills necessary. I don't know what the hell to do with daughters.

Speaker: Yeah. Oh, yeah. yeah and ah And the and although, ah you know, his ah his now deceased wife and now sister in law are taking that over.

Speaker: They're not Patrick. And so and Patrick wants to make sure. And also, if the goal is to get them married off, they also need to be socialized and introduced to other families in that kind of sense.

Speaker: who That kind of thing. i I think that is. But also isolating Bronwell because he is a sensitive boy. ah It's just, you know, all all ah this certainly important. Yeah, more than one thing can be true. Yes, exactly. Well, and the fact that he doesn't ah he hasn't knocked anybody up at this point is actually a good indicator that maybe he was gay genuinely if he is living the life of an alcoholic artist in his teen years. Yeah, we're going to talk about that some more.

Speaker: yeah. Fair enough. No, it's very interesting where some biographers... Because what I'm learning now, i read about, i read many of these books that I'm drawing upon. I read a lot of them 20, 30 years ago when i was high school, early university, reading about the Brontes. Reading all this stuff and looking at, say, the Du Maurier biography next to Barker's, you really see so much of it is biographers really having to speculate. Yeah. But I'll get into this more because I disagree with some of them more than others, right? Yeah.

Speaker: Okay, so back to Brownwell, though. Anne doesn't do well at Blake Hall. She's struggling. The children are evil and awful. She's actually fired after nine months because she wasn't doing well there. And they basically were saying, our kids are awful. Why aren't you fixing it? But also, you can't discipline them.

Speaker: Yeah, you have the authority to do anything here. And the kids are probably awful because the parents are awful because yeah despite the social role of the governess, ah I at least know enough tropes about that job to know the governesses did not have literally no authority in every situation they were in. it is very likely that these ah this family just sucked.

Speaker: Yep. And then you blame her. On top of the social forces. Yeah. Yeah. And then they blame her. Oh, you didn't do a good job. Well, all right. So she gets out of there at least. Okay. So Branwell, he's back home still. He's mainly writing poetry. He's working on his so-called Angrian tales. Angria is this land, colonial land of all these populate people by all his, you know, fantastic figures. His portrait painting business in Bradford fails pretty quickly.

Speaker: Thing is, as you can see, he's okay, but he's not amazing, right? I don't know if he would have been accepted into the Royal Academy. ah You can see more. Oh, I had a link to more of Branwell's paintings. There's also the fact that ah he's an alcoholic 18, 19 year old trying to run his own business.

Speaker: Yeah. There is a certain amount of, and I understand that running your own business in the 1830s is a very different thing than now, but there is a certain requirement of self-discipline and getting the job done on time.

Speaker: The quality of the work might be secondary to his ability to just produce for money and prioritize that over having fun and also over addiction, which matters more than the having fun because addiction is not a moral failing. Yeah.

Speaker: Well, that's the thing. it it It can become one if you know it's a problem and then you do nothing to fix it. Yes. And well, it's the old Mitch Hedberg bit. Alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

Speaker: yeah Honestly, yeah. No one ever says, damn it, Otto, you have lupus. Yeah. Well, you know what? That's true. It's such a thing. i'm Oh, man, I'm going to do an episode, I think, on AA and the Blue Book because it actually is fascinating. though Oh, I'm interested in that.

Speaker: I have opinions about AA and they're necessarily positive. And I think you have a lot. Oh, good. I'm pleased. And you have a lot more experience than I do for obvious reasons. Yeah, that would be very interesting to cover. But it is the notion of it being a disease. I have some sympathy with. I think it's a very useful framework for treating people as human beings.

Speaker: treating them for an illness specifically, but there is a certain line where it becomes choosing to participate in it further versus not. And whether somebody is able to get to the point where they can choose to quit drinking is another story though.

Speaker: Yep. So I don't know. I'm talking myself into a circle here, but regardless, brought Brownwell's sort of, he's struggling. um Yeah. And I'm self-censoring not to go down another half hour tangent. We'll save that for a future episode. Yeah, because I'm going to talk about that in a future episode for sure, because it's very fascinating. um I had had a link to more of his paintings, but I've lost it. I'll send it to you later. But he's not great.

Speaker: He's fine. i don't think he would have been accepted to the Royal Academy, perhaps, because if you look at, again, the artists of the day, he would need a lot more practice and a lot more work. And again, he's only a teenager, right?

Speaker: Well, the other thing is, again, the work of actually getting better and improving it your at your and improving at it. All of this is compromised by the fact that he's not functional.

Speaker: Yes. So if so, that potential that I talked about, you have to be able to realize that. Yeah. And again, do you have, yeah, like the very ability to do that can be a challenge.

Speaker: So this is a Winifred Guerin, kind of brutal, but I find it brutal because I'm like, Ooh, I kind of have this problem myself. I think I have Brandmel Bronte disease, which is probably ADHD. Anyway, is this is, well,

Speaker: Winifred Guerin's estimation of Branwell as an artist. So she's imagining him in London face to face with some of the great works of the artists of the day. so Here's her imagination of this scenario. Face to face with the masterpieces of Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence, he realized the hopelessness of trying to compete with them.

Speaker: To emulate them even from afar meant drudgery, and madly as he admired, indiscriminately as he praised the wonders of painting, he knew quite well that he lacked the one requisite for achieving anything by it himself, the force of character to pursue any objective to its end.

Speaker: so This is why, um and I'll interject, this is why i dropped out of ah music school because I went into a prestigious jazz program as a trombonist.

Speaker: And then I saw I would have to practice trombone for five to six hours a day for the rest of my life. And I thought that sucked and I didn't want to do it. And to this day, I am a trombonist. Check out my band, Ram Shackle Fancy.

Speaker: But I am a mediocre trombonist who doesn't practice a lot and plays well enough for my hobby band. And I'm very happy to be there because I set my bar and achieved it.

Speaker: And once you recognize the discipline and also the love for the practice that is required for mastery, ah and one of the things about if he had ADD,

Speaker: And you need to, if your brain doesn't want to hyperfixate on that, you cannot make your brain hyperfixate on that because I have ADD. And one of the things up ah somewhat recently diagnosed, one of the things that was really stressed to me was that if your brain doesn't like something,

Speaker: You cannot make it like it. You cannot just will yourself into accepting this as something that's good. One of the reasons the podcast works on my part is I can like just dive in on ah the reading and the writing and the researching and all the audio work, you know all the all the stuff we do on this podcast because my brain likes it. And therefore, I don't fight. ah I don't fight executive dysfunction to get the work done.

Speaker: Good. Yeah, I still do because get this. I am also a newly minted member of the Recently Diagnosed with ADHD Club. Woohoo! Welcome to the club. This podcast is now officially neuro-delicious.

Speaker: delicious We are. You're delicious. That's right. Because I, the whole, and it's funny because just as an aside, I thought... that it would be impossible for me to have that because I did well in school. I did well in school because that was my hyper fixation. Yeah.

Speaker: I love reading and writing. And also it manifests differently in women and girls where doing well in school is not a sign of not having ADHD for women and girls because oftentimes the social pressure. So for me, what Brandwell doesn't have, it seems, is...

Speaker: The outside, he's no sense of shame, perhaps, because I have traits of ADHD. I have a hard time finishing anything. My little niece said to me couple weeks ago, Auntie Jen, ah do you ever finish any paintings you start? oh And I was like, oh actually, no, I don't.

Speaker: Yeah. And I can if there is a penalty for not doing it. So unfortunately, I do have traits of this. I can get things done, but there has to be a consequence. Like I have to have a script to read to my friends tomorrow morning. So I better get this fucking done. So it has to be a consequence. And so Branwell doesn't have that or is losing the ability to have consequences. Even myself, in the depth of my alcoholism, held it together enough to try not to like lose my job.

Speaker: or really fuck something up real big, right? Yeah. Holding it together just enough. He's kind of not even doing that. So here's the thing. We we just heard... Oh, go ahead, Dave. As somebody who, and again, I found out i have ADD very recently, and I think the thing about neurodivergence is it's just way more common than we first thought, because the more we learn about it, the more we go, oh, lots of people operate this way.

Speaker: when i was If I had become an alcoholic when I was 18, I would have been exactly like Bronwell, it's just I didn't have art. I kind of had music, but the notion of squandering everything given to you Absolutely did that at his age ah to the great dismay of my parents, ah who I love very deeply and thankfully have sorted my life out. But I was a wastrel at that age. And i oh, God, yes, I I dropped out of ah of ah university like multiple times.

Speaker: Multiple. And the prestigious draft the prestigious jazz program, which yeah I had great idea. Yeah, passed the audition to get it to get in there. No, that one to the fair was a fair dropout. I should have dropped out.

Speaker: But the other ones, no. i I should have had my education far earlier. And I could not ah devote myself to basically anything and eventually got to the point where I could keep a job. But no, ah the coping mechanisms to deal with ah my executive dysfunction, which I now have the language for, largely came about by meeting this lovely lady who helped me sort my life out. Love you, Tracy. Oh, that's so sweet. best Yes. Who is also ADD, we have to mention.

Speaker: All right. Yay. All three of us. Yes. That's why we're neuro delicious. Yes. I feel i almost felt guilty being diagnosed, but I was like, you know what? Kind of explains a lot. So and the the coping mechanisms, because if you're talking autism, it's masking with ADD. don't really mask it. But the coping mechanisms, women have to learn in a way men do not, because men are allowed to get away with more shit than women.

Speaker: Exactly. yes And this is what's happening in this story. Back to the actual narrative. All right. i wasn't I wasn't trying to do that on purpose. No, no. It's just a perfect segue.

Speaker: It is. Yes. So, so Winifred Guerin is like, oh, he saw these actual good painters and realized he could never do do the hard work. Here's Elizabeth Hardwick writing in the 1970s. She took a dimmer view. ah Here's Elizabeth Hardwick on Brandoel Bronte. One story has poor Branwell visiting the National Gallery and, in the presence of the great paintings there, despairing of his own talents.

Speaker: This is hard to credit, since the example of the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre. o In any case, nothing leads us to think Branwell lacked vanity or expansive ideas of his own importance.

Speaker: Also, the deterrent of Branwell's own nature made any further impediments unnecessary. His nature was hysterical, addictive, self-indulgent. Well, here's the thing, right? ah And as I jump in on literally everything you say to make the podcast last six hours. this is the point. This is what we're doing.

Speaker: He was the hottest shit in Haworth, right? He was the main character of his family, and he's going to be the main character of the village too. So all of the people he's hanging out with are poorer than he is and do not have the same opportunities he does. well And he knows things they do not because he is educated and brilliant. So he's probably an intolerable prick.

Speaker: That's the thing. ah really think this guy, ah there is quite good, excuse me, I believe it's miniseries film in 2016. It's called To Walk Invisible. It's a dramatization of a part of the Bronte's life. Excellent casting, excellent characterization, lovely, perfect set design. Looks great. Problem is little bit too expository.

Speaker: It's doing a lot of telling, not showing. But that said, you really get a good sense of how this guy was a burden to his family. You really see the chaos into which he throws his family. I think that's a good series to watch. It's miniseries, short movie. It's about two hours. It's interesting.

Speaker: I have quibbles with some of the myth making it does, which again, that will come in next week's episode. That said, really interesting and really ah vivid portrayal of an alcoholic, I would say.

Speaker: Excellent work by that actor whose name I can't remember. Okay, so we've just heard Elizabeth Hardwick's view. So she basically says, know, Branwell, he could look at a Gainsborough and he could look at his gorgeous portrait and say, I could do that.

Speaker: But yes she's her view is that, no, he doesn't realize he sucks. Like, he just thinks he's awesome. and And that's also why he's likely not putting in the work to skill up, right? Because if he's stuck as a mediocre artist, I think the notion of him being awed by the great works is a very contemporary view of that sort of thing.

Speaker: with ah rather than no he was a deluded egomaniac who was too deep in the bottle and too dysfunctional to recognize that, no, if he wanted to get great, he had to work to get great.

Speaker: Yep. And just didn't. Yep, exactly. So again, Branwell, other people have commented and you can see he's about as good as a sign painter. You know, you you imagine back in the day they had signs out on the shingle kind of thing. It's like, oh, optometry, medicine, etc. You know, that's kind of the style it looks like, actually. Again, he could have developed the skills though again, right? Because everybody has to learn. He's only a teenager. Right. But again, he seems to have been allergic to hard work. Right. Yeah.

Speaker: Unfortunately, he seems to have been contemptuous towards his subjects as well. So Dave's into link to some of these portraits he did paint, mostly elderly people, the sort of the good folks of Howarth, the good folks of Bradford. He's painting sort of local gentry and he's like, I'm better than you.

Speaker: hu It's kind of the attitude he seems to have, right? So we see a pattern emerge with Branwell. He can never finish what he starts. He'd rather hang out around, hang around with mates in the pub drinking than pursue his artistic career and his work.

Speaker: He starts joining all the clubs in town, too, to get his name out there because he's kind of a dilettante guy who thinks he's awesome. He becomes a Freemason, all this stuff. He's really kind of flailing, right? Now, to me, again, this is sort of the classic scenario of the supposedly gifted child come face to face with the real world and with real competition for the first time in their lives and immediately giving up in the face of even a little pressure and hard work.

Speaker: Yeah, he dipped his toe into the water and found out the water was cold. Yeah. Many such cases, unfortunately. This is not an uncommon story. Big fish in a small town, right? Yeah. Gets out there and is like, ah, fuck.

Speaker: Maybe I actually have to work. I don't want to do that. Sounds again, like we said, like ADHD. Again, maybe other pressures at work as well. um So this is Daphne du Maurier. So she's Daphne du Maurier. I was writing in the late 50s, early 60s.

Speaker: I believe homosexuality was illegal at that time in England still. So she's sort of hinting in her biography that Branwell seems to really enjoy the company of ah the bargies, the boaties. So he can be found when he's, you know, supposed to be in his Bradford studio working on these paintings. He'll just fuck off and go down to the canal.

Speaker: So he could be found drinking and carousing with the bargies or the boaties. These are the barge men who work the local shipping canal. So again, ah really pretty. I've been up there, actually. The canal running, this is from Daphne du Maurier, quoting, the canal running from Littleborough to Todd Morden and passing Sowerby, Ludenden Foot and Hebden Bridge was the chief means of transport for stores and material to be used in the construction of the railway, So this is before there's even trains going up there.

Speaker: they're They're using a lot of canal shipping. The north of England, tons and tons of canals. Wales, tons of canals. Some of them are still useful. Hebden Bridge, I was there last summer, walked along the canal, very pretty. Okay, and i back to Du Maurier. Every day, barges traveled to and fro, anchoring for the night, very often in the cul-de-sac or basin at Luddenden Foot, when the bargees, the barge workers, would spend their evenings at the Woodman, the Weaver's Arms, or the Anchor and Shuttle.

Speaker: Typical pubs names, right? She seems to implying that there's homosexuality. To me.

Speaker: but a fine physique these were the people who'd prefer to draw and paint not dull drab creatures like mr and mrs kirby she seems to be implying that there's homosexuality and to me To me, she can't outright say this guy's gay and nobody can because we don't know.

Speaker: Again, maybe he just likes hanging out with dudes because he lives in again, looking at gendered terms of the day at home. He's in a very feminine household with a lot of women. So gets out there and do it every month and just get trashed without just casually socializing with women just didn't happen.

Speaker: That's right. You weren't allowed. That's right. Mm hmm. You had to hang out with dudes. Yeah. That's a good point. That's true. So regardless, Branwell's career as a portraitist was over quite soon. He gets a job as a tutor to two young boys in a town called Broughton-in-Furness. If that's a pronunciation, I don't know.

Speaker: I did my best. He's fired in six months due to negligence. Oh, boy. Oh, Branwell, the poor fail son. Apparently, he didn't show up for work one day and was found trashed in the local pub.

Speaker: Totally, completely plausible. Mm-hmm. And yet, here is where i get into a bit of frustration with some of the biographers. Juliet Barker, who I've been quoting quite a bit, speculates here, though, that he fathered a child with a servant girl at the house.

Speaker: And that's why he was fired. Speculate. So there's nothing based on nothing. She literally looks up. Who are some women around that time who were pregnant? All of them were married to local men relatively quickly. I think it's all made up on a whole cloth. And I don't really understand why.

Speaker: so i'm breaking with her interpretation here because she seems and we'll get to this later next time she seems really invested in branwell as being this like handsome ladies man and it really does seem like she makes a story about a whole cloth it seems like she had found one letter but somebody back in the day saying oh branwell had a bastard son but virtually zero evidence whatsoever and i think she's doing this to set the story up for another huge, frankly infuriating Bronte myth that I'm going to talk about next week. And again, i don't want to make this all about Bronte, because or Branwell, I mean, i don't want to center the man in the story of three women, but it's part of their story because the focus, all of them growing up, was this man is going to be the hero of our family.

Speaker: Oh, I understand. And also, young this is genius women yeah And the ones who go off to write some of the most famous books of all time, I know that's going to be a lot of what you're talking about in part three.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, yeah. So he gets fired. i I don't know why she would make that up. I don't think if Branwell had had sex with a servant woman, he would have been fired at all. My family history is directly recently made up of women who were raped by the men they were servants to.

Speaker: In my own genealogy, I have this. And this is why, again, this isn't a digression. This is why fucking hate Downton Abbey. At first, I thought it was entertaining, but what you realize they're doing is they're doing nostalgia for the old days. They're saying, oh, no, no, bad bad masters were rare. Most of the time, servants loved being servants, and the masters were kind to them, and they all got along. That is a lie.

Speaker: of course. The abuse of women servants by the men of the house was rampant and a given. If Branwell had had sex with some local woman and got her pregnant, nobody would have given a fuck.

Speaker: He would not have been fired for that at all. If anything... He would have bragged about it. i d The thing that comes and I'm going to be talking about this in my upcoming episode as well is when you have the power to do what you want.

Speaker: This has an immediate and terrifying meaning. If you are a man and there are women and there were women not subordinate to you. And this is a near universal truth. where there are, ah where this power dynamic exists. It's just a fact.

Speaker: And the thing that got me about Me Too is not and that by me and by my Me Too, I mean the massive numbers of revelations about various celebrity figures being sex pests is how is when it stopped and how many more happened.

Speaker: there are to talk about there because this was primarily about ah this was primarily about entertainers actors people in the movie industry and okay well what about literally any context where people of power i know yeah it is it's literally any context and it's again that at the time was standard part of the day and again with julia barker i don't understand why she throws this out there and again I'll get to some more of this later to me it seems bizarre but I actually see it's part of a larger myth making project she's trying to do but I will talk about that next time so I'm going to wrap up now since we're coming to the part two

Speaker: Again, lots of cover. I wanted to make this to make this a two-parter, but I knew we'd get into digressions and have some interesting discussions. So I'm going just wrap up with this. and This little incident that I found was good place to stop here. So this is it we're going to go back a little bit to 1837.

Speaker: Charlotte and Branwell are both writing. And so they decide to reach out to their favorite authors and get some advice. So Charlotte wrote to one Robert Southey, and Branwell wrote to William Wordsworth. You've probably heard of William Wordsworth, yes? yeah Oh, yeah.

Speaker: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, a very, very famous. My parents hate that poem. Which I do now because it's so like, that's the one, right? Yeah. He wrote a lot of very, very famous very famous romantic poems. Have you heard of Robert Southie? Robert Southie? Yes.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. If you were a literature student, you might've heard of him, but he's not well known took classes, but I took classes enough. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure Southie now is known mainly for this.

Speaker: What happens next? Okay. So Robert Southey, he's one of the British romantic poets. He's sort of, he's older. He's born in the 1770s. He's around the same age as Patrick. He emerged, you know as ah the romantic poetry movement emerged sort of in England in in england in the late 17th century, early 19th century. Excuse me, at the time Charlotte wrote to him, Robert Southey was poet laureate of Britain.

Speaker: So she sent him a batch of poems. Now Charlotte is not known for her poetry, which is fair. She sends him some poems and solicits his advice. So, Sotheby admitted that she did have poetic talent. However, he also wrote this.

Speaker: But it is not with a view to distinction that you should cultivate this talent in poetry if you consult your own happiness. i who have made literature my profession and devoted my life to it, and have never for a moment repented of the deliberate choice, think myself, nevertheless, bound in duty to caution every young man who applies as an aspirant to me for encouragement and advice against taking so perilous a course. So, he's like... A lot of young but loting men write to me and ask for advice. I say, don't do it.

Speaker: So continue on. Do not be a poet. How yeah this way does madness lie? That's what he's saying, yes. Now, he suddenly continues, you will say that a woman has no need of such caution. There can be no peril in it for her.

Speaker: in a certain sense, this is true, but there is a danger of which I would, with all kindness and all earnestness, warn you. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind, and in proportion is...

Speaker: all the ordinary uses of the world seem too flat and unprofitable you' will be unfited for them without becoming fitted for anything else So he's doing this thing where you're going to get big ideas from these novels, and then you're going to be happy with your lot in life.

Speaker: that's what he's saying Yeah, now he continues. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she's engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.

Speaker: To these duties you have not yet been called, and when you are, you'll be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek an imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may,

Speaker: will bring with them but too much. Now, this is a convoluted way of saying, get over this. Women can't pursue literature because one day you're going have kids and a husband and that's more important. You'll get over it. too busy.

Speaker: You want to be a famous poet now, but you know what? One day you'll have kids and family and life will be so stressful that you won't even worry about it. hu This poet laureate... who tells everyone, don't get involved in writing, especially women.

Speaker: Like, come the fuck on. Yeah. So he's telling her to quit, basically. Yeah. He's saying, yeah, write poetry for now, but once you settle down and have kids, you're going to forget all about it. Charlotte took this advice to heart for a while.

Speaker: Elizabeth Gaskell, her first biographer, writes that the stringent letter made her put aside for a time all idea of literary enterprise. So she just took it to heart. Mm-hmm. Branwell, on the other hand, did not get a reply at all.

Speaker: William Wordsworth, of course, is a very famous romantic poet. We know who he is. Was so disgusted and repelled by Branwell's letter that he didn't even reply.

Speaker: Oh, Daphne du Maurier says, Branwell's letter disgusted the aging poet who told Savi, who was his friend, that it contained gross flattery and plenty of abuse of other poets.

Speaker: So Branwell had. Oh my God. He's edge lording. oh yeah. So this is what Branwell had written to William Wordsworth, who is friends with all the big poets of the day. This is Branwell. Surely in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open. If a better man can step forward, meaning Branwell.

Speaker: He's saying everyone who's writing right now sucks. I'm the only one who can fall into the breach to be the poet of our age. I would hate to die. And the poems he sent were not good.

Speaker: They weren't great. They're not great. They're mediocre. He's a media. Branwell is a mediocre man. This is what have to come away with discovering. And he thinks he's hot shit to the point where he's writing to William Wordsworth saying everyone sucks but me.

Speaker: Yeah. So he's actually lucky Wordsworth didn't respond. Yeah. So yeah again, here, don't reach out to your heroes. I will also say, who cares what they think, to be honest? Who cares? No, don't. Don't write because they don't want the competition.

Speaker: Don't have heroes. Well, no, why even? Yeah, honestly, people are people. Yes, yeah exactly. And they're all flawed and weird and they're just like you. It's just they they happen to be very good at something that you ah that you admire. But The eight that like the this 18 year old energy of where in the times where everybody sucks, but I'm the one genius is going to step forward and you understand this because you're my idol. So sounds like somebody trying to send an impressive tweet to Elon Musk.

Speaker: Yes, I know. It's very much that energy and I despise it. Yeah, I know. Recognizable phenomenon. I started off, I was sort of, I've always sort of felt bad for Branwell, empathetic to him as an alcoholic. I'm now recovery. But I'm like, no, this guy's fucking insufferable. Like, I'm sorry.

Speaker: It's my attitude towards him is very much soured and we will see next week. What else happens? Okay. So again, not sure if Southey's response or Wordsworth's non-response would have been preferable, but guess again, next week, I've surely, you know, Branwell's straighten up and fly, right?

Speaker: yeah Charlotte's going to get married. She'll forget all about her literary ambitions and everyone will be happy. They are absolutely. ah Well, thank you so much, Jen. Tap those ambitions down, ladies.

Speaker: Everyone else gets to do it but you. And if your brother is smarter and an alcoholic, too bad. He's still better. That's the attitude. Men shouldn't be poets and women can't be poets. That's what we're taking from this. Yeah. Yeah, good point. all right, so that's the end of part two of The Brontes. Part two of The Brontes. Part three next week. um Looking forward to it because I feel like...

Speaker: when I do a one or two parter or they two two or three parter, they get better as they go. Cause you build up to sort of the, the story and the the the point I'm making with all these little sides and things. So hope you guys enjoyed that.

Speaker: That was great. fun so All right. I'm looking forward to yours coming up soon and we'll be recording hopefully next week and will see you all soon. Bye bye everyone. but Bye.

Speaker: Thank you for listening to The Wonder Camera. Find us under The Wonder Camera on Blue Sky, YouTube, and Instagram.