17 - This Is the Story of Three Girls - the Brontes, part 3

Transcript

Speaker: but camera Hello everyone and welcome once more to The Wonder Camera. This is your podcast about curiosity in which three dilettantes info dump about their latest or some of their long-term obsessions. My name is Jen Rempel. I am here with Dave Powell and Tracy Anderson Powell on this lovely day. And this is your third and final episode with the fabulous Bronte family.

Speaker: Should i just jump right in? Yes, i don't although I do want to issue a correction. We are recording this in mid-May 2026, and it is cold as balls right now.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. for So it's not a lovely day. it's it's You know what? We're all in a good mood. It's pleasant. But ah for the record, it sucks outside right now, and I'm annoyed. Sorry about that. For the record, it's ah pretty nice out here in BC.

Speaker: so We're supposed to be outside doing outside gardening-type things, and it's just too cold for that. I'm not here to rub salt in the wound. No, I'm just going to get like, hauled off into the ditch by a Yeti.

Speaker: I'm sorry about that. I hope there's no Yetis. um No, they'd be an invasive species. ah They're not indigenous to the boreal forest. And ah you can legally shoot them as a result, but ah it just makes them mad. It's a whole thing. imagine if somebody introduced Yetis into this ecosystem?

Speaker: Oh, God, it people were sport hunting Yetis. Oh, man. All those downhill skiers got to watch out for that. ah free Oh, my God. so So speaking of sport hunting yetis, how about that Bronte family?

Speaker: You know, that's an excellent segue because they were all about that yetis. I was going to try and segue um something about the discomforts of Athabasca being compared to the, let's just say, sewage situation in Howarth, Yorkshire in the 1840s.

Speaker: that Some things you should feel lucky for. And that, my friends, is the sewer, which we'll talk about. oh no. Yeah. So I'm trying to segue from yetis to sewers, all these things, but we're getting there. Okay.

Speaker: So to recap a bit, last episode where we left off, it was about the year 1839. Charlotte is 23 and is 19. They finished their schooling. They were at Rowhead doing some teaching as well.

Speaker: That's all done. So they're back home at the Howarth Parsonage. I do want to interject, and I might have mentioned this, and ah spoiler for how this is done behind the scenes, there's been a bit of a significant break between the recording of part two and today, which will mean Tracy and I need our memory jogged. But rowhead, that just means fish egg head.

Speaker: yeah Yes. Okay, fish aid a Fish Egg Head School it is. Please continue. Because they were at the school where their sisters got tuberculosis and passed away, and then they went to a different school. They were at home being educated for a couple of years, and then they went to Row Head, yep, the Fish Egg Head School.

Speaker: And they did, yeah, they they finished their schooling there, and they went back to work as teachers for a while. So by the time they're 23, Cheryl's 23 and 19, They go at home for a bit. um Anne gets a job as a governess for the Ingham family at a village called Merfield, where she had a miserable time. Oh, right. These were the monster kids, weren't they? Yes. So we mentioned that she wrote Agnes Gray about her time as a governess and how those children were basically basically horrible psychopaths whose yeah parents indulged them at every whim and she had a terrible time.

Speaker: Yes. Emily of also went to teach at a school in Halifax, Yorkshire. Had a miserable time. She told her students that she liked the school dog more than she liked any of them.

Speaker: So Emily, more irascible type. Meanwhile, Branwell, of course, he's sort of our, you know, claim to have been robbed on the way to London, therefore couldn't go to art school, ends up in Bradford as a portrait painter, quickly gives that up because he kind of can't focus. ah He also been given a position as a tutor, which he promptly lost due to negligence, a.k.a. being drunk down the pub instead of working.

Speaker: So 1840, they are all back home. Patrick, Tabby, their servant, aunt Elizabeth and their father, the four kids. The girls, Charlotte or the women, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, I guess they, Branwell probably is too. They're all having kind of existential crises to figure out what to do with their lives. Fair. Remember, the women have fewer options.

Speaker: Basically, they're limited to caring for kids, basically. Whereas Branwell, world's his oyster. you know But he's the inveterate fail son. Yes, exactly. The world's his oyster and he fucked it up.

Speaker: No, and he stabbed himself really badly trying to shuck that oyster. Oh, that's much better. Because he was drunk. Because he was drunk. Yes. You'll never make it as an oyster shucker around these parts. I'd affect a Midlands accent, but I can't.

Speaker: No, I can't do that. No oysterman he... And that might come up later in a more raunchy way, which whether he's into oysters, but we'll get into that. ah Anyway, the women, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, brilliant women, they are in their early 20s. They don't like teaching. They don't like kids. Not into them.

Speaker: they't They don't hate them. Or maybe they do. Emily probably does. But their their gender has barred them from the ah really hot in the 1840s oyster scene in the Midlands.

Speaker: That's right. Oysters and barges and trains. That's kind of what's going on there, I guess. Yeah, exactly. This is a famously landlocked part of England, ah just rotten with oysters. Indeed. you Anyway. yeah This is one of those episodes, too. Speaking of rotten with oysters, this might be a bit of a gross one because we're coming back a bit to the public health aspects of their lives. So any listeners with sensitive stomachs, keep listening. Tough it out. I believe in you.

Speaker: It's fascinating stuff, too. So, yes, I believe you, too. You can keep it down. If you keep this down, you'll be sitting pretty. What are their options, right? One of their options was to set up their own school. So their father had done this. Remember, as a young man back in Ireland, he'd set up his own school, probably just him tutoring some kids on his own, like at his house or whatever. But this would allow them to take in day pupils, So the very least, they got to teach.

Speaker: It gives them more independence. They're running things on their own. and they have the freedom to choose where to live because they do not like being away from home, particularly Emily. I read so one of the biographies. Emily left Haworth. After they moved in, she left Haworth in terms of visiting other villages maybe four times in her life. Oh, wow. She was home most of her life.

Speaker: And if I don't get out of the house at least once a day, I go squirrely. Yeah. I mean, she left the house, but like didn't leave Hauer at all. like She would do a lot of wandering on the moors and stuff, but she did not leave home for an extended period of time, except for a few times in her life where she was teaching or being a student. Yeah. so I can't even imagine that. Yep.

Speaker: Something like, I think I read also, I believe somewhere off the top my head, Jane Austen never left something like a 25-mile radius of the city she was born in in her entire life. Oh, wow. That's how little, you know, how hard it was to travel. so Yeah. that just makes That makes perfect sense to me. Yep, yep. Yeah, so speaking of travel, Charlotte and Emily want to be more competitive in the market. Anne, as we said, Anne is sort of more accomplished that than them in terms of languages like French and German and Latin. and are Yes, the boys' language. Yes, exactly. So Anne has a lot to offer. She's got a job already. Charlotte and Emily say, want our own school. Let's offer something more.

Speaker: So they sort of want to... go somewhere different. So in May 1840, Anne took up another position as governess with the Robinson family of Thorpe Green near the city of York.

Speaker: This is can be very fateful for the family. She's only 20 at this time. I have a picture of her on slide eight. That picture was drawn by Charlotte, who I would say is as good as, if not better, of an artist than Branwell.

Speaker: Yeah. If you look back at the portraits he did... for example. he's just straight up better. And I was going easy on Branwell, but if I compare that to his self-portrait from above, good lord, man.

Speaker: Yeah. So they're all very talented women. Yeah. You know, not that Branwell's not, but it's all about doing the work. So yes, this is a drawing. This is Anne from about five five a few years later. This is 1845. So Charlotte drew that.

Speaker: um Charlotte and Emily had a plan to go to Brussels, Belgium. um This was mainly Charlotte's idea, of course. So she Charlotte's more adventurous. um Charlotte's friends, Martha and Mary Taylor, were already in Brussels. They were at the Chateau de Kuckelberg.

Speaker: school in Brussels. And that particular establishment was a bit too pricey for the Brontes. So they were recommended the more affordable school called the Pensiona Hegea. I'm pronouncing that as best as I can.

Speaker: So Charlotte and Emily persuaded their aunt Branwell, Aunt Elizabeth, to help pay for their travel and tuition because she does have some money and the girls, is kind it's going to, or the women, it's going to, call I call them the girls, but you know what i mean.

Speaker: Not like a good diminishing way, but it's just no, it is a it's a common term. And also when you've got a gaggle of like, for example, you a sports team of men, they'll often be called the boys. It's just that's there is a distinction here that's not patronizing. We get what you're saying. Okay. Yeah. I think anybody who's listened to a past episode will recognize that your angry feminist credentials are pretty rock solid. Yes. And the funny thing is about that is I'm planning a new episode for the future and you ain't heard nothing yet. But that's something we'll get into for another episode down the road. So Charlotte and Emily, yes, they pay. Sorry, they're persuade their aunt Branwell to pay, help pay for their travel and tuition to maybe give them a down payment on school that they could rent, like a building. But here's what Charlotte wrote to her aunt.

Speaker: Papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme, but whoever rose in the world without ambition? When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge University, he was as ambitious as I am now.

Speaker: I want us all to go on. I know we have talents, and I want them to be turned to account. I look to you, aunt, to help us. I think you will not refuse. I know if you consent, it shall not be my fault if you ever repent your kindness.

Speaker: She got a point. Yeah. Bet on us. We're awesome. Just bet on us. Yeah. yeah so there average chance Yeah. Lent him a hundred pounds. Oh, wow. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. February, 1841, Charlotte and Emily head to Brussels and they are accompanied by Patrick.

Speaker: They are 25 24. Charlotte's older. charlotte's older ah Yeah, they go over Brussels, Patrick comes with them, checks it out, makes sure everything's above board, and he heads back to Yorkshire right away.

Speaker: So Pensionnat Regère in Brussels was run by Madame Claire Zoé Perron and her husband Monsieur Constantin Regère. best I can do. All of the instruction was in French and included singing, music, drawing, Latin, German, etc. Just a wider range of subjects than they have accomplished. There's about 40 other students at the school.

Speaker: These are for usually the older teenagers. So Juliet Barker in her book notes that Charlotte and Emily don't really fit in all that well at the Pétit Chonet just because they were two of the few English women there and they were a bit older than their fellow pupils.

Speaker: So Charlotte, though, did her best to make friends, and she did throw herself into her studies. and She really did well. She was probably the most adventurous of the three Bronte sisters. She would end up doing the most traveling and socializing of them all.

Speaker: And also just because she, spoiler alert, happens to live longer than them. She also seems to have been more resilient and more personable. She's a lot more adventurous and less prone to homesickness than her siblings.

Speaker: So it's her idea. She wants to go to Brussels. And part of it is just she wants to travel. Like, yeah. And I've done this myself. Like, I've done schooling in a foreign country just because I wanted to go there. And that's awesome. get it. Yeah. You are driven to get your ass out of Canada as frequently as possible. And I strongly respect it Thanks.

Speaker: I appreciate that. Brussels, of course, though, more difficult for Emily. She's definitely more brusque in her personal personality, as we said. She's a bit aloof. Winifred de Guerin, in her biography, quotes a schoolmate of Emily's from this time.

Speaker: And this is a schoolmate. I am afraid my recollections of Emily Bronte will not aid you much. I simply disliked her from the first. but So she's honest. Her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure, contrasting so strongly with Charlotte's small, neat, trim person.

Speaker: Although their dresses were alike. always answering our jokes with, I wish to be as God made me. So what she's saying here, though, just as an aside, is we made fun of her clothes and her looks.

Speaker: And she said, well, I'm just as God made me. one i What I get that she is the... ah hardcore introvert, probably with a severe case of RBF and is and ah and also because she carries herself probably with a lot of closed body language as well as being, you know, just sort of like, you know, taller, a little ungainly and a little awkward. She's immediately seen as, oh, you don't like us. You're not like us. Boo. Time for the bullying. Yeah. Many such cases. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. And the main thing, they don't the the reason they don't like her is because she taught my three youngest sisters music for four months to my annoyance. And she'd only take them in play hours so as not to curtail her own school hours, naturally causing many tears to small children. The eldest 10 and the youngest 7.

Speaker: So basically she's saying she would, i couldn't believe she would finish her own schooling before she would teach my sister's piano. And that meant they had less time to play. I'm sure they'll get over it.

Speaker: Who cares? Yeah. and just yeah like yeah like But anyway, i' I think this person's kind of mean, but I don't know. I don't know. I think Emily was probably pretty crusty too. so It sounds like Emily was probably not ah warm because she was just inherently uncomfortable doing all of this stuff. yeah And as a result, nobody gave her benefit of the doubt on a single thing and and you know so forth and so on.

Speaker: Exactly. So this friend concludes, Charlotte was so devotedly attached to her and thought so highly of her talents. Almost as though, like, I can't believe it, but no, it was because she was talented and smart.

Speaker: So, Winifred Guerin also notes that Monsieur Heger, one of the instructors, he had reservations, however, about Emily's character as well. Though he rated her genius higher than Charlotte's, he considered she was egotistical and exacting compared to Charlotte, who was always unselfish, and in the anxiety of the elder to make her younger sister contented, she allowed her to exercise a kind of unconscious tyranny over her. It's just sibling stuff, different personalities, Charlotte's more conciliatory, tries to make her sister happy...

Speaker: And it's seen as... Yeah, and he's all aamics this is also a... And yeah again, some people could have been awful or not. We don't really know. But this is very much a kind of political relationship between siblings, the different personalities, and the person who is difficult and the person who is accommodating.

Speaker: The difficult person will generally, ah you know... slowly evolve kind of tyrannical relationship with the accommodating person. doesn't mean that it's necessarily abusive or cruel, but it does mean that the difficult person always gets her way and knows that I can be a little bit awful in a way the accommodating person does not permit herself to be. And this is just interpersonal dynamics, seen it a million times.

Speaker: Exactly. Not unfamiliar. The famous story, that rather infamous story of Emily. This is outside of Belgium, but it indicates something of her character. Her basically punching and slapping her dog in the face. Oh, repeatedly because it would climb up on the beds of the clean bedspreads upstairs.

Speaker: and That's a story that gets bandied about. so another one is that she was supposedly bitten by a rabid dog. And rather than tell anybody, she went to a hot iron in the fire and cauterized the wound herself.

Speaker: If she was bit by a rabid dog, she would been dead very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. i't know yeah So, however, ah getting bit by a dog and cauterizing with an iron, maybe maybe maybe it happened. It's also the sort of thing that could get ah she treated herself. And then the story grows in the telling. yeah But it does sound like she was unpleasant. Yeah.

Speaker: It does. and It's funny. I did. I read this a Guardian article that i'm going to write reference a bit later, but it's pretty mean spirit. And and basically it's like, why does everyone like Emily Bronte? She's a fucking Tory. And i'm like, oh, and it's from the Guardian. that's right We're going to cancel people um for its like their political business positions in the 1840s. I know it's pretty granted. I ah come on.

Speaker: it's Yeah, it's pretty funny. But the and the beating her dog in the face, supposedly, no, she adored animals and adored these dogs. But if the dog fucked up, she'd beat it about the face.

Speaker: well and also, so striking dogs was... I don't know. well Again, what mask are we supposed to like her or not? It doesn't really matter. it doesn't matter. it doesn't. She is beyond my opinion of her personality. It really matters, you know, the art she made, right? Yes, exactly.

Speaker: Speaking of that art, she wrote something, an essay in Brussels that stuck with me. I read it maybe when i was a teenager and I've thought about it a lot. This essay is called The Butterfly. yeah Sorry.

Speaker: No one ever suspects the butterfly. i know the reference you're doing, but that was... yeah You know Bart Simpson? i know it was the butterfly. I tell you, the butterfly.

Speaker: I couldn't help myself because whenever I read the but butterfly, it is in that voice. yeah Incredible. a laugh. Yeah. Anyway. So, I apologize. She... but I don't apologize. she Emily begins this essay by describing a walk on the moors when she has this revelation.

Speaker: It was summer. The sun was still shining high in the west, and the air resounded with the songs of birds. All appeared happy, but for me, it was only an appearance. I sat at the foot of an old oak, amongst whose branches the nightingale had just begun its vespers. "'Poor fool,' I said to myself. "'Is it to guide the bullet to your breast, or the child to your brood that you sing so loud and clear?

Speaker: Silence that untimely tune. Perch yourself on your nest. Tomorrow, perhaps, it will be empty.' But why address myself to you alone? All creation is equally mad. Behold those flies playing above the brook.

Speaker: The swallows and fish diminish their number every minute. These will become, in their turn, the prey of some tyrant of the air or water. And man, for his amusement or his needs, will kill their murderers.

Speaker: Nature is an inexplicable problem. It exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live.

Speaker: Yet nonetheless, we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world. At that moment, the universe appeared to me a vast machine constructed only to produce evil.

Speaker: so that's Emily. It's a very Werner Herzog. You can see where he may be. Oh, I. The birds, the singing, they are screaming in pain. Right?

Speaker: So the essay, i find that interesting because I pretty much agree. Like, yeah, you know, you look around, it's... Kill or be killed, right? So the essay... Yeah, yeah nature is brutal. Yeah.

Speaker: Red in tooth and craw. Red in tooth and craw. Sticks in my red craw. Anyway. Red in tooth and claw. I mean, the essay, she kind of has to end it happily. So she sees a butterfly notes, you know what?

Speaker: As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose porous beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination.

Speaker: So basically, hey, you know what? Life sucks, but there's a heaven. So after we're dead, it'll be great. but yeah Rest in peace, Emily Bronte. You would the Smiths.

Speaker: Honestly, just yes, she would have. It's great. So existentialism kind of hadn't been invented yet. But, you know, there's people have been thinking about these problems for a long time. Very impressive. I think she wrote that. was She's like 23. Good essay. Yeah. Stuck with me for a long time. very Lots to think about. So, regardless, Emily and Charlotte both did thrive, basically, at the pensionnat, and they had a much better time there than at their English boarding schools, for sure. but but they're there for nine months in Brussels. Unfortunately, their aunt Branwell gets sick.

Speaker: Oh, no. Oh, no. She's on her last legs. We better get home. Mm-hmm. They returned for the funeral and to support the family. um She, man, Elizabeth Branwell, she died of, let's just say the opposite of cholera.

Speaker: Cholera is when you have diarrhea until you die She was killed by constipation that lasted for 10 days. Oh, my God. Can you imagine? So I looked into some of the medical literature from the eighteen forty s Constipation that severe. won't be TMI one time. I thought my appendix was about to explode.

Speaker: I was in severe agony. I'm like, oh my God. I went to the emergency room. I never felt the such pain. Doctor presses around. He's like, I'm just listening me to the bathroom. I'm like, I don't know. I'm not a pervert. I don't track this stuff. Yeah. And he goes, well, that's your colon. And I'm like, I'm going to go home now.

Speaker: Be very embarrassed. I couldn't imagine severe pain like that for 10 days. When Dave and I moved to Athabasca from the Okanagan, I was at home in the Okanagan by myself because Dave was away working. And... And I thought that I could live off the same diet that I did in university. Oh, no. Which is like all noodles and powdered iced tea. Oh, no.

Speaker: The duration of the move. But, yeah, constipation, not fun. had to go through that for 10 days, I'd want to die, too. I solve constipation problems the same way i solve complex math problems. You just work it out with a pencil.

Speaker: Oh. Hey. Hey guys, we told was going be a gross one. Because past this, I was also horrified. Because I also learned something else.

Speaker: If you get that constipated, guess where this shit goes? Backwards. It comes out your mouth. Yeah. oh I did not. I was like, oh my god.

Speaker: And I read this article from 1847. It was like you know, as we've all discussed, sometimes the vomit becomes fecal. And I'm like, as we've all discussed? And I go, hey mom, did you know this horrible fact? She's like, oh yeah, I've heard about that.

Speaker: like That's awful. I don't like that. oh One quick thing I want to read. i don't want to and I don't want to make this poor woman's death just like kind of a joke because it's a horrible way to die. was kindly, wonderful woman who was like a mother to those children.

Speaker: A mother. But yes, this is an excerpt from an 1847 article on bowel obstructions by surgeon Benjamin Phillips. So, a young man of 18 or 20, wishing to put an end to an obstinate diarrhea, a he had a quantity of hard eggs.

Speaker: So, I don't know how many... Oh, Sorry, we're laughing. He ate a quantity of hard eggs. Obstinate constipation followed and resisted all remedies. The patient had all the symptoms of vulvulus, I guess. Sickness, constipation, abdominal pain, and tension. He was bled. like what's that going to do? And purgatives of various kind were administered, but without effect.

Speaker: Oh, no. The urgency and the symptoms increased, and the vomited matter became fecal. Oh, Quicksilver was administered, the fecal vomiting persisted, and he died some days afterwards. oh The intestines are prodigiously distended between the stomach and a column of hardened feces, which is impacted in the jejum.

Speaker: So anyway, i sometimes I have trouble writing these episodes because I get on like a rabbit hole. yeah all And the medical literature from the eighteen hundreds is That's going to be like a Halloween episode.

Speaker: the This also ah going back to discussions on prior episodes about the common approach to diseases, the diet that is kind of the fascist diet, for lack of a better term, where people live off of literally nothing but beef products. ah the RFK Jr. and Jordan Peterson special, which is we will eat nothing but steak and beef tallow and ah yogurt at least because RFK Jr. calls them ferments. But the key thing here is there is nothing resembling fiber in this all-beak diet.

Speaker: They are all going to go in that terrible way yeah because they cannot conceive of a vegetable because that's too feminine for them to eat.

Speaker: Oh, my God. It is wild how being healthy and sensible and kind and diligent is gay. yeah You what I'm saying? Everything's gender, man. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: Yeah, it's... Anyway, i'm speaking of gender, Aunt Branwell, again, she's a really kind woman. She took care of them when she needed them most. Like, she was there for them their whole lives. Yeah. She left Charlotte, Emily, and some inheritance. So a bit of money, not specified, but this would be a bit of money to fall back on should they ever get desperate later on in their careers. Remember, she also funded their tuition to Brussels.

Speaker: ah She left Branwell Bronte nothing but a decorative wooden box that he'd admired. Presumably because he wouldn't need the money, right? He's a brilliant young man. He's going to go on to a fabulous career. Whereas, you know, these young women would need to scrape ah scrapby get jobs, work, or marry...

Speaker: I don't know why I said marry a weatherman. That was a typo. Sorry. can't help but laugh. They would need to marry a wealthier man in order to provide for themselves. They're not wearing they're not marrying weathermen. Okay, sorry. they'd have to marry a wealthy guy or get jobs, right? Which they're trying to do, right?

Speaker: So Branwell, he'll be fine. He's a dude. He can do whatever he wants. So that makes sense, right? Yeah. or Or she was worried that he was going to drink up all the money. Yep. Yeah, exactly. So because at this point, he's already drinking, probably using laudanum, which laudanum, that shit rocks. It's opium dissolved in alcohol. Oh, wow.

Speaker: Which part of me is ooh, give me. But also, you don't want to go down that track. yeah Because i speaking of dying of constipation, opiates. oh Yeah, that'll do That'll do it.

Speaker: Okay, so they're home. Their aunt has passed away. The funeral happens. She's buried in the in the so in underneath the church, as they all were. After Christmas break, Emily was to stay home. So she's done with Brussels. She had fine time there, but she's ready to stay at home. yeah Charlotte wants to go back. So she, however, wants to work as a teacher now at the pensionate.

Speaker: She probably had an ulterior motive because she has developed a massive crush on Monsieur Eger, the married professor. oh no. So remember, Claire-Zoie Perron, Madame Eger, she actually runs the school. She's in charge of everything.

Speaker: Constantine Eger, he's just such an instructor. But he's very, very close with these young women. You know, and he's he's impressed by Charlotte and Emily and their intelligence and things like this. So she has a huge crush on him.

Speaker: So yes, he's married, though. Absolutely no evidence the feeling was returned. No. Look, I think everyone's been there. Having a crush on a teacher. This is not new. Yeah.

Speaker: So apparently, no again, no evidence the feeling was returned. Madame Eger seems to have noticed this attraction, though, on Charlotte's behalf. And she sort of starts shutting that shit down right away. oh yeah.

Speaker: Kind of gives Charlotte the cold shoulder. Made it pretty uncomfortable for Charlotte to stay employed there. So she has kind of a bad time with this obsession with this man who's really not available to her at all, right?

Speaker: So she's pretty heartbroken. She goes back to Haworth. And she does use use this experience to write her first novel, The Professor. It's about a professor at a Belgian school. As well as another... Right what you know. Yeah, exactly. And another novel, Valette, which is about a student at a Belgian school. But these are, again, sounds funny because right what you know, but really it's...

Speaker: important for women, especially at this time, when women novelists are becoming more prominent, to write about their actual lives and experiences. Because you remember, you have somebody Robert Southey telling Emily, or no, Robert Southey telling Charlotte, oh, you shouldn't write. Just have kids. Because they don't want to hear it. It's part of it.

Speaker: They don't want to hear about women's actual experiences because then you realize, oh, governesses have souls in the parlance of the time. Yeah. Yeah. they don't want to hear it, right? No, they push us against the social current. It's boat rocking.

Speaker: Exactly. Yes. So, yes. Anyway, she uses this time to write novels later on. So, yeah, again, write what you know, like we said. She goes back to Howarth, writes several letters to Monsieur Ege, and never gets a single response.

Speaker: Oh, Girl. Probably because his wife gets them. That's right. We've been there. Yes. We've been there. Gets ghosted. um they're Interestingly enough, some of her letters survive. One of them in particular, I don't think she ever declared. like She would say things like, oh, I miss you so much. I wish you would talk to me kind of thing.

Speaker: Not yeah maybe being straightforward, like, I'm in love with you. But he tore up one of her letters and threw it away. And his wife picked all the pieces up and sow um sewed them back together to preserve this letter. So no one's really sure why.

Speaker: But no, apparently the feelings were not returned. She gets ghosted. All right, move on. So situating ourselves again, they are back from Brussels. Emily and Charlotte are at home in Haworth again. And they all kind of start writing. It's hard to say if they ever stopped writing fiction. Certainly when they were on their own, ah they were like Emily and Anne in particular, when they're at these horrible jobs as governesses or at schools, they're half living in fantasy world, right? Right. This is happening throughout. Yes. Yeah, yes, this is still going on, right?

Speaker: While Charlotte and Emily were in Brussels and Anne was at Thorpe Green, Branwell actually had gotten a job. He's a clock on the new Leeds and Manchester Railroad. Daphne du Maurier is like, this is like a guy getting a job with NASA at the time. Because...

Speaker: At the time, railway, it was just being built going through Yorkshire. Yeah, so it's kind of exciting, you know, and he's, you know, going to maybe get a position that pays well. He uses local local connections. He gets a position with the railroad at 75 pounds a year.

Speaker: Not great, necessarily. Steady income. His father makes about 100, what do we say, 130 pounds a year or something like that? Oh, yeah. So he's making some money, but he's living at home. So he does well at this. He gets promoted to position as station master at a station called Ludenden Foot.

Speaker: I nearly double this. So he's making like 130 pounds a year. He's found a career. yeah Things are looking up. Yay. Starting to straighten up. Fly right. All right. And then he got fired. Oh, I'm surprised. Why do you think he got fired? Drinking.

Speaker: Yes. Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte. Great book. She speculates that he had a hard time staying put. It's kind of boring. He's at at the station all the time. He's a station master. He's in charge of things.

Speaker: They look at the books. There's just doodles all over the place. Oh, no. He's doodling in the books. He can't really hang out. he Again, maybe ADHD. He can't really seem to sit still. And she knows that, oh, there's pubs and barges nearby. So all the guys he likes to hang out with are nearby. He can go drink with them. Oh, just, you know.

Speaker: take the afternoon off, perhaps. That's what he did in his tutorial job. This guy gets so many chances. Yeah. He probably took off to go drinking during work hours. He seems to just not be able to help himself, right? But after about a year, there are some financial irregularities that emerge in the books.

Speaker: Oh, no. So presumably, Branwell was borrowing cash from the till. ah Interestingly enough, it seems like Juliet Barker, she's like oh, no, no it was probably the other guy. This author, Juliet Barker, who wrote Wild a Genius on the Moors, she seems to really want to protect Branwell and be biased towards him for some reason.

Speaker: Maybe it's the Bronte reputation, but this is what Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the biography, I would think definitively on Branwell... She says, Bronte the station master and Wolvin the ticket collector, so this is his subordinate assistant, were jointly responsible for the bookkeeping at Ludenden Foote Station. Both had to appear before the auditors of the railway company when the books were found to be at fault.

Speaker: There was a discrepancy in the figures entered. The price of the ticket sold did not tally with the sums received. Closer examinations of the ledger showed haphazard entries, with rough sketches of the station master's acquaintances in the margins.

Speaker: Oh, my God. Oh, boy. The ticket collector admitted that the station master had often been absent from duty. So station master Branwell is absent from duty. Neither could explain what had happened to the missing money.

Speaker: Theft was not proved, but careless bookkeeping was. Wolven kept his post. Branwell's services were no longer required. Yeah. What does this sound like? Well, and...

Speaker: What Branwell looks like to me is someone who ah lets retroactively diagnose him as being extremely ADD and or in some way just unable to deal with basic things like impulse control and focus.

Speaker: And he falls into alcohol quite young and never climbs out. And he ends up with the rest of development because the situation here is he's behaving like a 16 year old in this serious career job. And every five. Yeah, that's exactly it. And so he gets serious chances and is unable to ah relate to them as serious chances.

Speaker: Yeah. And part of it also go ahead control himself. Yeah. Part of it, too, is he has a bit of an attitude problem because he's told you're a brilliant genius. You're better than this.

Speaker: So again, i didn't quote this extensively, but reading in the Daphne du Maurier, he's writing poetry the whole time. he does think He's in fantasy world too half the time, right? So he's really romantic ideas going on in his head.

Speaker: He's just some station master working at the railway. It's not romantic. It's not cool. No. Or whatever. at the time You know i mean? So it's not enough. And he kind of he thinks pretty highly of himself and his talents. It's almost like he's too good.

Speaker: Oh, and that part is that part of part of this is he's very clearly ah because he was the big shot in the small town. Yeah. And also everybody is heaping praise on him nonstop as the chosen one of this family while he's surrounded by these brilliant young women. Yeah. Yeah. He's just kind of a monster.

Speaker: yeah He just sucked. ah And again, he's allowed to suck. Some people just suck. They do not exactly be that ah not need to be canonized. And the the urge to whitewash historical figures is very destructive.

Speaker: Yeah. Like the Michael Jackson movie that just came out. Not pick on this guy, but yeah pretty... Bad project in my mind. Okay. But eventually, and again, we'll see more. More people. lot There's more stuff coming out about him all the time, too. Yeah.

Speaker: It's just people like to whitewash this stuff, and we'll get to that for sure in a moment. Because Anne, okay, she's able to finagle a position for Branwell again as a tutor with the Robinson family in 1845. So Anne stays with the Robinson family for like five years. She's a governess there for quite a long time. Good relationship with them.

Speaker: Hey, your son's 14. My brother needs a job. Yeah, I guess, you know, let's help him out. Give him another chance. Right. Okay. Yeah. So Charlotte Emily come back home and Howard, they're working. So they're writing a lot of fiction. they're trying to get their school going. And then what happens?

Speaker: Branwell got fired again. oh there boy. So here's what Branwell says happens. Branwell says that he had been caught in a love affair with Mrs. Robinson, one Lydia Robinson. She's in her 40s at this time, apparently in love with her husband, has, I believe, two or three kids.

Speaker: He's like, oh, they caught us in a love affair, so I was fired. Branwell goes around telling everybody who will listen that hit himself and Lydia Robinson were deeply in love and that she wants to be with me, but she can't. And she's just sick over this.

Speaker: So because of love affair, he was fired by Mr. Robinson. mean, he threatened to kill him and everything. So this story goes around Howarth and everybody buys it. So his parent, his dad, his aunt, his sisters, their friends, they all buy into this. Basically, it's Branwell was fired because that whore Lydia Robinson seduced this poor young Tudor. Yeah, it's always the woman's fault.

Speaker: Yes. So the story goes, ah he got fired because they were in love. He's telling everybody this, whatever. And quits working with the Robinsons. She's out of there. Interesting. So Mr. Robinson, her Lydia's husband, dies about a year later.

Speaker: and apparently Branwell was visited by a local tough who warned him to stay away from Mrs. Robinson forever because Mr. Robinson had said in his will that were his wife ever to marry again, she would forfeit her inheritance. Therefore, she can't marry Branwell and he has to stay away from her forever or else.

Speaker: Did anybody ask her Thus, his poor heart was broken. Sensitive young man. And that's why his life goes off the rails at this point. He falls completely into alcohol and opium addiction and that's it.

Speaker: He's done. Wow. And that's a yes, he's done basically. Yes. Good question, Tracy. Did anybody ask her? yeah Mrs. Laudanum, are you trying to seduce me? and mrs Pretty sure. What's funny is some people think that's where the name Mrs. Robinson came from because this story is still to this day kind of the one that people go with. I think the whole thing's a fucking lie. Yeah, I think again, this is from Daphne du Maurier. She's writing this in the early late 50s, early 60s. She's looking at all the evidence.

Speaker: No evidence of an affair on Lydia Robinson's part. None whatsoever. No one knows for sure why Branwell was dismissed, but here's something interesting. I find this kind of plausible. See what you guys think. ah So Branwell's charge when Edmund Robinson was 14 years old, 1845. The family leaves for Scarborough on vacation from near York, and they leave this boy in Branwell's care for a few days, apparently.

Speaker: This is controversial, but whatever. Edmund joins his family in town in Scarborough on July 17th, and Branwell is immediately fired by letter by Mr. Robinson. Immediately.

Speaker: As soon as the boy gets there, something happens. We're firing this guy. Again, here's quoting Daphne du Maurier. The direct evidence suggests that the boy or the servant who accompanied him for the lad of 13 or 14 would hardly have traveled alone on his arrival in Scarborough gave some account of the tutor, which warranted instant action on Mr. Robinson's part.

Speaker: Okay. Now, Branwell goes home. he basically gets totally trashed. Yeah. And he's freaking out. So in a letter to Ellen Nussie, this is what Charlotte writes. It was 10 o'clock at night when I got home.

Speaker: I found Branwell ill. he He is so very often owing to his own fault. So he's getting drunk and getting sick. I was not, therefore, shocked at first, but when Anne informed me of the immediate cause of his present illness, I was very greatly shocked.

Speaker: He had last Thursday received a note from Mr. Robinson sternly dismissing him, intimating that he had discovered his proceedings, which he characterized as bad beyond expression. oh wow. And charging him on pain of exposure to break off instantly and forever all communication with every member of his family.

Speaker: We have had sad work with Branwell since. He thought of nothing but drowning his distress of mind. No one in the house could have rest. So what does this sound like is going on? It doesn't sound like a love affair. This sounds like something worse, doesn't it? Yeah, does. sounds like an assault, yeah. Yes. So, yeah, the implication from Du Maurier is that there's molestation happening, right?

Speaker: Again, just this is Du Maurier. The word proceedings and bad beyond expression and on pain of exposure sound as if they're being quoted direct from Mr. Robinson's letter.

Speaker: Father and sisters alike would have demanded, but what have you done? Horror, shame, remorse, and then half a bottle of whiskey would be Brownwell's first measure of protection. I mean, look, I've been there, right? hate to say it. But those vodka instead, you get less sick that way anyway.

Speaker: want to give people tips. A man who is stupefied by alcohol. Sorry, cannot answer questions. Do not follow Jen's alcoholism tips. Don't. It's bad. A man... I've been sober for almost almost eight years, so there's that.

Speaker: Again, I'll repeat this. A man who is dupefied by alcohol cannot answer questions. Yeah.

Speaker: the robinsons keep silence for sake of anne and to spare mr bronte having learned something go brand well which and his father's near-b blinddness and uncertainty of health might have proved a deathb blow Right? it is It is possible that, left at Thorpe Green with Edmund and free from the constraining presence of his employer, he had attempted in some way to lead Edmund astray.

Speaker: No other proceedings, bad beyond expression, would quite seem to warrant pain of exposure, and a charge, again, to break off instantly and forever all communication with every member of the family. So... that yeah This sounds like he's lying and he's covering up. Yeah. And here, this kind of sealed this for me. I mean, well, one more thing. DeMaurier is like, I looked at Mrs. Lydia Robinson's books. She's constantly referring to her husband as my angel.

Speaker: It's like, she was in love with her husband. Like, what is this? Okay. But here's this too. This kind of seals it for me. As to young Edmund, to make certain he would run no risk of future contamination with undesirable characters in or about Thorpe Green, he would be sent away in the care of a clergyman, the Reverend Theophilus Williams of Charlton-Macwell near Somerton in Somerset, in short, as far away from Yorkshire as possible.

Speaker: Young Edmund remained with Mr. Williams for five years until he was 18. Now, it's a priest. You might be going, you know, out of the frying pan into the fire. you know what i'm saying? But it's pretty telling. He's being tutored by this young man. Something bad happens. Okay, we're sending you away right away. Like, as far away as possible to live with a priest.

Speaker: Right? Yeah. So, I read one author who was like, it's homophobic to think that Bradenwell molested that boy. I'm like, is it no no, it's no not. It's probably what happened. Or maybe he just got him drunk.

Speaker: Maybe just took him to the pub. You know what mean? knows? But it sounds he's not having an affair with this woman, and that's what's happening here. Also, as spoiler for my upcoming episodes, being gay does not mean that you are incapable of sexual violence. Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly. And I understand that there is no end of myth making and bigotry surrounding this, but it also does happen. Yeah. Two things can exist at once.

Speaker: We have to look at things realistically, because another interesting case is Oscar Wilde. Because he's become a cause celeb for gay rights, but as far as I understand, having sex with young teenage boys.

Speaker: Oh. And was sort of doing kind of a namblet effect. Oh, no doing is to eat Kind I mean, this is what I recall. I'm thinking about things. I read a lot about him like 20 years ago. So I'd have to revisit Oscar Wilde, but it seems kind of like... The... m Pedarasty, to use the specific term, is a, oh God, that's an entire rabbit hole to go down. It is. Maybe for another time.

Speaker: We'll do the pedarasty episode. Yeah, exactly. oh But yeah, what I find frustrating is Juliet Barker goes in all in on the Lydia Robinson myth. seems irresponsible to me um Lydia Robinson threatened to sue Elizabeth Gaskell because she wanted to mention her by name in her biography of Charlotte Bronte they really want to trash this woman and blame her for Bradwell's downfall they really do oh yeah because their brother is innocent yes they're yeah so it's genius yes gotta protect him at all costs yes hasn't he suffered enough

Speaker: But Juliet Barker goes all in on this. And she bases it on the idea that, oh, actually, Edmund edmund maybe didn't go to Scarborough later on. He was there with him the whole time and wasn't alone with Branwell. But he would have been alone with him at other times. Who cares? He's alone with his family now and perhaps has the opportunity to tell them something.

Speaker: Or the servants do or something. Or Anne told them. Because Anne actually quit right before Branwell was fired. Yeah. Oh, yeah. She left their service because she sounds like she what someone was going so maybe she said something, actually. Anyway, we're never going to know for sure. But it to me, the fact that all these biographies, Wikipedia pages sort of go with the Lydia Robinson thing as most likely, which to me is irresponsible.

Speaker: I think Daphne du Maurier called it, but we'll never know. Regardless, that's the end for Branwell, though. That's it. Like, he sinks further and further into alcoholism, opium addiction. The reason he would tell people, oh, no, ah there's a clause in her will that she can't marry again.

Speaker: Because it's an easy cover. It's an easy cover. Yeah. Yeah. She remarried like a year later. because people would ask, well, Branwell, if she's so in love with you, why aren't you getting married? Her husband's dead. And I wonder if they're kind of provoking, like, well, this fancy lady's in love with you. How come she's not marrying you? Oh, no, threatened to kill me because we're so in love and she'll lose her fortune. No, she married another guy. And also, some of these authors are like, well, she moved on real fast and married another rich guy.

Speaker: You can't deplore a society for giving women no career options and then get mad when you think they're being gold diggers. Yes. ah Well, at ah counterpoint, you can and people do all the time. It's just wild. It's just patriarchy. mean, you can. mean, you can. It's about power. i again That's the thing. Hypocrisy ah is in these cases. It's always about power. Why do you say one thing and do another? Because it's about winning. It is about patriarchy and dominating women and making sure men rule everything.

Speaker: That's right. and in this case, too, it's more convenient to blame a woman than to actually look at what Branwell's doing in the face, especially if it is involving maybe molesting a young boy. That really was. Like, they knew probably that that William Waitman was pretty gay. if they're calling him Miss Cilia and Amelia, this is what, like, cure it. Yeah.

Speaker: they know people They know homosexuality exists. Like, they live in the world. They're human beings. But they can't acknowledge it, like, at all. Especially in this case. Like, this is the end for Branwell. And I think he knew it. Yeah. Because he's done, right? Yeah. rest of his days he's at home drinking he's out drinking with his friends at the pa he's at home so this is winifred garin in her biography of brianwell it has already been seen how brawell's uncontrolled passion his desperate gestures his apocalyptic language had entered in into the emotional climate of weathering heights but he was no fictional character he was ever present in the house in everyday life he was a permanent threat to security when stuuppefied by drink or drugs

Speaker: While the whole family had to learn to live with the threat, in an emergency, it was Emily who acted. So this is family friend John Greenwood related the incident of Branwell setting the curtains of his bed on fire while deeply drugged. He often stayed in bed all day.

Speaker: An incident that occurred after Mr. Bronte's return from Manchester. He'd gone there for cataract surgery. So happening to pass his open door and see the flames, Emily shot down to the kitchen for a newer of water before anyone else had recovered from the initial shock or been able to rouse the supine Branwell.

Speaker: Drenching the bedding, Emily dragged Branwell out, throwing him unceremoniously into the corner into a corner of the room, pulled the flaming curtains down, and stripped and doused the bed, all with lightning speed. Her only comment when it was over was to say, don't tell Papa. oh So you got enabling. Mr. Bronte had to be told nevertheless, and it was presumably because of this incident that he took Branwell to sleep in his room.

Speaker: If you go to the Howarth Parsonage, they've recreated Branwell's filthy-ass bedroom. It's like, yeah, this is the room of an alcoholic. Oh, no. But yeah, so now he's 20, I think he's like in his late 29. He's 29, 30, sleeping in his dad's room because he can't take care of himself. Wow. Causing chaos for the whole family. Yeah. everyone's back home, right? Anne left Thorpe Green, you know, right before he was fired. so she should probably do something about this. So she's back home.

Speaker: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne now are just spending all their time writing. right? Taking care Brad and all. But they would complete household tasks during the day. i guess ki and Emily loved baking bread. And then that that show, To Walk Invisible, the the miniseries or the movie, it's so she's baking bread for half the thing, but it's funny. So they would do household tasks during the day, and their evenings are in the parlor. They're reading, writing, critiquing each other's work. They're pacing around, talking, well, late into the evening. Yeah.

Speaker: So it's like a writer writer's workshop every night almost. Yeah. Wow. But around this time, Patrick had to go to Manchester for cataract operation. Again, i could have gone on a deep rabbit hole on this because at the time, again, what they're doing, I'm not sure if they had cocaine at this time. They probably did. But what they would do to do cataract surgery at this time is they would do a little slit in your lens, put in a little tiny little thing and scoop out the goo.

Speaker: Scoop out the cloudy goo and pull it out. Oh, wow. yeah Oh, dear. And you had to be awake and conscious. So they're doing this. I don't believe there are nerves on your eyeballs, but can you know it ah doesn't hurt, but it sounds like the most uncomfortable, unnerving, unsettling and on other things, unspeakable a thing you could. Yeah.

Speaker: 1840s literature on medical, this cataract surgery, it is amazing, actually. Because to them, it was like a miracle. of course it Because cataracts, long-standing issue, right? So, was yeah, you slice in,

Speaker: Literature is quite interesting this. But, yeah. So, he comes home he has to rest for a while. But in the summer of 1845, Charlotte discovered Emily's hidden stash of poems.

Speaker: She's blown away. Emily does not share her poetry. It's very personal to her, right? But Charlotte, so she's pretty mad. But Charlotte recognizes Emily's talent immediately. And so she, again, is the one who's hatching a plot to get themselves published.

Speaker: ah She says, look, yeah I'm writing poetry, so is Anne. Let's put a volume of poetry together because she recognizes Emily's poems are the strongest. So the selling point is Emily, but we'll throw in ours too.

Speaker: So they decide to do this under the gender ambiguous pen names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. So Currer is Charlotte, Ellis is Emily, and Acton is Anne.

Speaker: Got it. Yeah, so Charlotte writes this. This is why they chose those names. Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine...

Speaker: While we did not like to declare ourselves women because, without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called feminine, we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.

Speaker: No shit. A vague impression. noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality and for the reward of flattery, which is not true praise. So they're saying women don't get a fair shot. So these names are gender ambiguous.

Speaker: Yeah. Again, right? They're aware of gender. They're aware of... The spectrum of things they wear. Again, for a long time, women have been aware of these problems, right? So they are self-published this time. So they paid the publisher, using some of their savings, their inheritance, to print ah this book of poetry.

Speaker: Unfortunately, only two copies sold. oh But they were encouraged by some very positive reviews. I couldn't imagine. I should try and look up if any copies of this are still exist, of that book.

Speaker: Because I could not imagine how many millions of dollars. Priceless, really. Yeah. So, you know, they still keep going. You know, they endeavored to get their novels published because they're writing novels as well. So they've been working on these in secret. Again, Patrick and Branwell don't know about this. Nobody does.

Speaker: So Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, she sends it out to many, many, many publishers and they all reject it. oh It won't actually be published until after the Bronte's become well-known, but they do have some quick successes. So the publisher, at Smith Elder and Company, based in London, they published Jane Eyre by Charlotte, a.k.a. Currer Bell, in October 1847, and they published Agnes Grey by Anne Acton Bell, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Ellis Bell.

Speaker: are published by Newbie in December that year. So Jane Eyre is published by Smith, Elder & Co. Agnes Gray and Wuthering Heights are published in the same volume together by Newbie Publisher.

Speaker: Jane Eyre. I did not know all these books were published around the same time. Yep. Yep. Because they're working on them forever, so they all just sent them out. Charlotte, you can imagine, had sent out The Professor in just years and years, are like months and months at least of rejection. It's to pretty tough. But yeah, Jane Eyre, immediate sensation as well. And I said before, I love Jane Eyre. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: The identity of Kerr Bell, of course, is much speculated upon, but Charlotte managed to keep things a secret for quite a while until there was a copyright issue that forced her to reveal her identity to the publishers.

Speaker: So eventually Anne and Charlotte have to go to London to prove their identity and actually say, no, we are three different people. Although Emily refused to go. Because and as far as i understand, Anne's publisher had sold the American copyright to Jane Eyre.

Speaker: Because he assumed that that was the same person, that Acton Bell actually wrote Jane Eyre. He thought Currer Ellis and Acton were the same person, so they have to physically go to London and be like, this tiny little Charlotte is like, no, I'm actually Currer Bell. And everyone's like, you It's amazing.

Speaker: Because Jane Eyre is a great book. A good woman? Yeah, kind I mean, yeah So I love Jane Eyre. It's a first-person narrative of basically a young woman who's sort of orphaned. She's growing up in these horrible boarding schools. She has to get do this thing where she becomes a governess. all these She has these trials and tribulations. She becomes a strong, independent woman who doesn't need no man.

Speaker: But she does get the man, which, again, it's of its time because this man is kind of a piece of shit. But anyway, I love Jane Eyre. It's a good book. It's mostly about independence. And this is Anna Merlin had a good piece in Flaming Hydra that I read. It's a about actually the Wuthering Heights movie, I think, but this is a good bit on Jane Eyre and why she loves Jane Eyre more. I'll quote this here.

Speaker: So over the years, Jane Eyre came to interest me less as a tortured love story than as a book about demanding independence and the right to search for our own meanings in a time and social structure that didn't allow for either.

Speaker: I thought a lot about how Jane seeks solace through nature, drawing, teaching, being of service, and her insistence on maintaining her dignity and her free will, even when it hurts, even when it costs her something dear.

Speaker: Her fidelity to herself is the through line and heartbeat of the book, not something we just see in the love story between her and Rochester. Before she even leaves her odious aunt's home as a child, she gives her a titanic dressing down for being cruel and unjust, declaring, "'I will never come to see you when I am grown up.

Speaker: And if anyone asks me how I liked you and how you treated me, i will say the very thought of you makes me sick and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.'" So Jane Eyre, yeah, you wouldn't see women in novels, in fiction, addressing their so-called betters this way. Because what is it really about? It's a book about a young abused woman who grows up to have self-respect and dignity, basically. It's a great book. I really liked it. It does end with her marrying a guy who's kind of a penis-to-same, who has a crazy so-called wife in the attic. but

Speaker: As one does. I love it for a surprise. Mine's upstairs right now. Yeah. I'm the crazy wife. No. So actually there's a Jean Rhys novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, from the point of view of the mad woman in the attic. It's very good. Oh, I've heard of that. Because there's issues there too, because I believe she's a Creole woman in the novel. So there are issues. Yeah. So it's really interesting. And what I will say about the whole Emily's a fucking Tory. Yeah, they all kind of were.

Speaker: Like she writes Shirley, the Luddite rebellion is in the background, but she kind of, it's more, they're sort of like o feminists without necessarily the class consciousness Yeah.

Speaker: Or they don't develop it so much, right? Yeah. But this is eighteen forty s right? Yeah, I was about to say class consciousness was in the process of being invented at this time. Even invented. Yeah, exactly. yeah And ah they are ah highly secluded women who have spent most of their lives cooped up in a manor house making stories amongst each other.

Speaker: It's not like they were political activists against, ah you know, abolition in the U.S. or... turning the Irish into mulch or something like that. or Like, it doesn't matter.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly. But people do, again, they want to, again, apply these specific standards. I mean, enjoy it. It's not that problematic. It's fine. Like, in the era they were in, and you'll see, you know, and they weren't, like, again, and what a Tory was then versus what a Tory is now is very different. Yeah. So... Even so... It doesn't matter. Who cares? It doesn't matter. It's it's so irrelevant.

Speaker: Yes. ah Like, what do you do? Retroactively say, OK, you're no longer allowed to read Wuthering Heights. Yeah. what what What are you talking about? I know. OK, so the personal politics of the person who wrote it was, you know, some ah were on the like not at like the like outset of social progression, except the fact that these are also seminal feminist works because they are.

Speaker: Defining, you know, independence and free thought and pushing against social norms as women in a way in the pop in ah popular fiction that others really had not previously, at least at the same scale. So, like, I i really do hate this. need to ah go to the particularly historical figures and then look at, well, you know, would she have politically agreed with me at the time? And if not, well, then we have to frown and shake our heads in some way. If they're a political actor for some court ah for some force of evil, then sure.

Speaker: That's different. It's about what they did. And what they did was write important feminist works. Yeah. Well, like Dostoevsky. I love Dostoevsky, but he became a total reactionary. Yeah.

Speaker: It doesn't take away that like Karma Punishment is like the most amazing novel ever written. Like it doesn't matter. And he still has a good point. Like it's who cares? It's part of life's rich passion. well and Just allow people to exist who don't ah like let people be wrong about something. It's fine. Just let just let someone be wrong. Deal with actual political movements and actions, because this is very different from, for example, tearing down the myth of Christopher Columbus as this great man who discovered America when, in fact, he was a deranged, ah you know, murderous guy.

Speaker: Sadistic psycho. Yeah, exactly. he was really He was an insane sadist by the standards of the time. Yeah. And so that and the myth around him is about his actions, not about his deep personal beliefs that ah don't that wouldn't have affected the course of his actions. No, like that. That's the difference.

Speaker: God. doesn't Yeah, it is it is what you do, not what you say. Because it is like, I don't care people, I'm not a racist in my heart. Okay, well, you were a racist in your actions. and You know what I mean? Yeah, and that matters so much more. don't care what's in someone's heart of hearts. God. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker: But I do appreciate that, sort of, back to Jane Eyre, Charlotte kind of does use Jane Eyre to get revenge. Because the thought he makes me sick and all I'll tell everyone how cruel you were to me. And that's basically what she's doing in Jane Eyre with depictions of, I forget, Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Yes. It's basically Cowan Bridge, right? So lot of speculation, particularly after people found out who Kerr Bell actually was. They're like, oh, now I know who that was.

Speaker: That was Cowan Bridge School. like They started putting the dots together. yeah that's about ok so People are like, oh who is this about? Who's that based on? ooh cool um but This is a bit later on. yeah so Emily's Wuthering Heights is also an immediate sensation. Although, this is a very different book.

Speaker: It is so insanely popular even now. Of course, we just had the Wuthering Heights movie come out. Have you guys seen that? No, no I heard it sucked. It's interesting.

Speaker: It's not... great it's very not like it's taking basically a narrow sliver of the book and makes a lot changes i i enjoyed it but again i might might have mentioned before listening to the in bed with the right podcast and i discussed how this the sexual politics are pretty fucked up but again it was interesting but uh that is uh that's a strong sell on that movie i tells you One thing that this is my little pet peeve. A lot of the critics are like, I can't, there's that movie, that the the set dressing was ridiculous. And the scene with the alcoholic father, it shows him alone in a room piled high with bottles.

Speaker: That's not realistic. I'm like, yeah, it is. When I saw that scene, was like, oh, wow. They got my number all right. You what mean? Because that is, I'm have you seen An Alcoholic's House After a Bender? Yeah. They didn't have fucking recycling, okay, back in the day. Like, no, that actually was a realistic scene. So all these, like, critics on podcasts being, oh, that was so silly. like, no, wasn't. That actually was one of the more realistic aspects of that film. Anyway, very popular book. It's been adapted countless times to films, other books, fiction, TV series. Very different to the novels that Charlotte and Anne wrote.

Speaker: So Charlotte and Anne are more realistic. They've moved away from sort of the fantasy worlds of Gondal and Angria, and they're talking about their own experiences, like writing about being a governess, being a teacher, this kind of thing.

Speaker: Wuthering Heights is basically a huge, again definitely a gothic of romance. Yes. The plot is extraordinarily convoluted. It's like a multi-generational story of doomed, unrequited love,

Speaker: revenge on the Moors told by multiple narrators. So this guy shows up at this village. Oh, what's so what's with that Wuthering Heights over there? Oh, let me tell you. and And so it's like telling it from different perspectives. Very complicated. I read it like 20 years ago. I'm not going to get into the details of the plot because it's more important the way it was sort of received.

Speaker: So again, this is that mean-spirited Guardian article by Catherine Hughes. This is what I'm going quote it. She really is like, ugh, don't like Emily. She's the fucking Tory lady. But basically it's like, when the reviews of Wuthering Heights appeared following publication in December 1847, they comprised a sort of chorus of disapproval that would send most debut authors into a funk.

Speaker: Several reviewers acknowledged the book had a sort of strange power. All of them proceeded to shred it to pieces. No. So we have authors, you know, reviews saying incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive because it is like a nasty story of a young orphan boy being brought in and raised in sort of a very cruel household. And there's...

Speaker: Unrequited love and digging up of dead bodies, this kind of thing It is a dark book. Well, I'm not sure if this still counts as, ah even though it's a gothic romance, it's not a book of the role of these sort of romance period, which are the slice of life, very ah sort of, but also kind of positivistic kind of stories of, you know, people living their lives. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. People...

Speaker: Couldn't handle Wuthering Heights. To me, it's shocking because you read now and you're like, yeah, it's a gothic story. It's kind of weird. i was ahead of its time, right? But yeah, but this is one of the reviews. This is Doug, I don't know who Douglas Gerald's weekly newspaper.

Speaker: so the reviewer wrote, how a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters is a mystery. Oh, I'm sorry. That was Graham's Ladies Magazine from the United States.

Speaker: They said, this author, how could they have not killed themselves? Oh, boy. Incredible. People took literature a lot more seriously that back then, too. Yeah. and so This was also the publication that wondered if the author, at this time still known as Ellis Bell, had simply been eating too much cheese.

Speaker: They're having bad cheese dreams. Oh, my God. People loved it. It's a fun book. It's goth. It's entertaining. Sorry, this is Douglas Gerald's newspaper. He didn't say the suicide thing. That was the ladies' magazine.

Speaker: Gerald's... Whoever Gerald is, his weekly newspaper writes, Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book, baffling all regular criticism. Yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it, and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about In Wuthering Heights, the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance. And anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love, even over demons in the human form.

Speaker: The women in the book are of a strange, fiendish angelic nature, tantalizing and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself. So she's really, there's emphasis sort of on like the tales of the weird ass families that populated Yorkshire Moors, you know, based on sort of local legends, myths, gothic fiction, all this kind of stuff. And plus their own Angrian and Gondel fantasy worlds and the behavior of Branwell.

Speaker: Because he was a menace at home, like we say, a threat to their safety. Constantly screaming and yelling, lighting things on fire. Yeah. So the whole time, the sisters have been keeping their publication plans a secret from both Patrick and Branwell.

Speaker: They probably didn't want to explain to their father their failure because they paid for their poetry books themselves. Yeah. Probably don't want to, if they don't pan out, don't want to be embarrassed. Keep it a secret. And they really didn't want to undermine Branwell.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Because he thought writing novels would be good make money too. And you can't have him feeling bad for himself for wasting his talent. It's interesting. The women are so diligent, working in secret, not bragging. And Branwell is nothing but talk.

Speaker: Never see that happen ever again. men i my It is a great pet peeve when somebody succeeds at doing something that another person was simply dreaming about doing. And then they get upset that, well, you, you know, you took away my thunder from this thing i was probably never going to do.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Like you're just a complainer. You're just a complainer. Go away. Yeah. Yeah. Charlotte claimed that Branwell never knew they published anything, but I'm just not sure if that's true. But yeah, so finally, they're publishing their novels. They're on track. Happiness and success. Smooth sailing for all the Brontes from now on, right? Yay! Nothing ever happens again. Yeah. Ever again. Famously, the happiest, most long-lived family of all time.

Speaker: That's right. Yeah. But unfortunately, you know, Branwell did die. No one is sure exactly what killed him. He was certainly suffering from alcohol abuse disorder, may or may not have had delirium tremens, so withdrawal, probably. Basically, is he's sort of begging and borrowing and stealing money wherever he can and getting people to bring him drugs, going down to the pub.

Speaker: He's still going outside to drink, outside of the house, and He's an old father who kind of indulges him. And sometimes when people are threatening violence, you just give them the money they want. It's like, fine, go drink, whatever, whatever will stop you. So anyway, he's not doing well. By the end, again, he's forced to share a room with his father.

Speaker: He would be sort of sleeping all day and then being fucked up and raging all night, hallucinating, getting sicker and sicker. He dies on September 24th, 1848. eighteen forty eight um They think it's bronchitis and sort of wasting away. but yeah He drank himself to death. yeah And ah the actual re ah the actual specific symptom or illness that took him out is kind of secondary.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly. So he's kind of his own worst enemy, if ultimately. So Elizabeth Hardwick, in her article from the 70s, writes, there were five daughters and one son in the Bronte family. I mean,

Speaker: Two of them passed away very young. And the father unluckily placed his hopes in his son, Branwell. It is only by accident that we know about people like Branwell, who seem destined for the arts, unable to work at anything else, and yet have not the talent, the tenacity, or the discipline to make any kind of sustained creative effort.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. Ouch. I know how that feels. Yeah. To continue, she says, very early, he fell under the spell of alcohol and opium. His ravings and miseries destroyed the family peace, absorbed their energies, and de depressed their spirits.

Speaker: He had to be talked to, watched over, soothed, and protected, and nothing really availed. So he's constantly being enabled, right? Yeah. Brandmo destroyed his life with drugs and drink and died of a bronchial infection at the age of 31. That's about that.

Speaker: He's buried in the church with the rest of his family. If only he had a podcast. Honestly, i feel like i'm I need to be creative in some way I always want to paint and draw and do things. And I never like, what is my what is my niche?

Speaker: Could be this. Yeah, i feel that too. It's an outlet. Yeah. Thank you for listening, everyone. This is our creative outlet. We hope you enjoy it too. But after Branwell's death, Emily declines immediately.

Speaker: she attends She attended Branwell's funeral Sunday after he dies and never left the house again. She has tuberculosis. Oh, no. She also refused all medical treatment. So this is a very rough time. Charlotte writes very heartbreakingly about the distress she felt, at basically watching Emily waste away.

Speaker: A lot of pain, a lot of discomfort. She's kind of unwilling to try to get better. So Emily just basically shuts right down. Also noted by other authors that she was sort of Branwell's main champion among the sisters.

Speaker: Charlotte was like, I'm done with this. i I've had enough. Right. Emily and Anne seem to be like, oh, do we can. Right. Charlotte's the oldest. Remember, I'm kind of helping him. Sounds like somebody who built this very structured kind of small world around herself and being the person that could help run well through everything. And his carer probably was a huge part of her identity.

Speaker: Yep. Yeah, probably. yeah Yep. So barely a month after Branwell's death, Emily did not even answer when spoken to. So uncommunicative as she'd always been, as though afraid of revealing herself, as Ellen Nussie had noted, even when pleased, her most expression of thanks had often been no more than a smile.

Speaker: One of those rare things that Ellen Nussie again thought were something to remember through life. so She smiled so rarely that when she did, it was you'd never forget it. Oh, wow. Yeah, very sad. by By then, the final and alarming stage of Emily's withdrawal into herself had been reached.

Speaker: The severe cold and cough had, to the horror of the family, been recognized as inflammation of the lungs by the 2nd of November. Her illness, its relentless progress, the emaciation, the fever, the shortness of breath, the pain in the side, all confirmed the family's terrors of worse to come.

Speaker: You can't even imagine. I mean, I can't imagine that now. Personally, I've never had a family member decline like this. Obviously, people have. yeah But it's rough. No, you got the consumption. Yep. but The consumption, yeah. It consumes, yeah. It wastes away. yeah If you could look at slide number nine, this is the couch that Emily passed away on.

Speaker: Aw. I took that picture at the Hayworth Parsonage. Oh. Yeah. It looks suitably ominous and sad. But yes, Emily, Yeah. So Emily passed away on December 18th, 1848. Yeah, on the couch, probably there. Only three months after Branwell died.

Speaker: Wow. She was, again, like the rest of the family, buried in the church at Hauer. So they were buried inside the church, underneath the stones inside the building, not out in the cemetery. But she was only 29. And her dog keeper would howl at her door for weeks on end. I feel like every episode I do involves a dog being sad.

Speaker: Which sort want to say. What the hell, Jen? Poor dogs. have to go hug my dog after. it Don't punch him in the face. Oh, no. Like Emily Bronte. No. Don't punch your dog in the face. That sounds like a good a good life lesson. Don't punch your dog in the face. Yeah. That's some merch for us. We're taking a strong stand as the Wonder Camera. Do not punch your dog in the face. Not once.

Speaker: We're anti-dog face punching. Yeah. Yes. We've got to be quite clear. This is our strongest political take. Everything else we've said just leads to this. Yeah, that's right. So now it's just Patrick and Anne and Charlotte in the parsonage.

Speaker: So, and they have Tabby Ackroyd, who's kind of helping out here and there, but she's not living with them anymore. So Anne and Charlotte, they continue their routine as much as they possibly can. So they're doing household chores, walking on the moors, writing, reading, pacing, talking with each other.

Speaker: And completes another novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And this is about a young woman who has taken her son sort of on the run to flee from an alcoholic, abusive husband. oh Oh. Perhaps inspired by Branwell's behavior, perhaps things she saw at Thorpe Green...

Speaker: ah The notion, I think the word perhaps here is doing so much heavy lifting, directly inspired by the fact she lived with an out of control, ah violent ah brother who was killing himself with addiction. That's, you know, and then, yeah, it's pretty obvious. Can you imagine how Patrick must have felt? He's buried four of his children. Oh, my God, that poor man.

Speaker: I know. I just... His wife, his sister-in-law, four of his kids. Yeah. Yep. No, I know. And we'll see how it goes. And then, because now it happens, Anne gets sick. Oh, no.

Speaker: Even while Emily was declining, so Emily was sort of, or sorry, Anne was kind of always in delicate health for a while. She'd been suffering from tuberculosis as well. So by the time Emily is dying, Emily is like noticing, hey, Anne's not doing so well.

Speaker: Like, that is the psychological horror of this to me, is you're in living in a house where you're like, oh, I'm dying. Oh, she's gonna she's next. She's going to die too. Yeah, this has the feeling, weirdly, of like a zombie survival thing, except there's no zombies.

Speaker: It's just you have this somewhat transmissible disease in the home. and And again, it doesn't take you out that quickly. So there's this dawning horror that I'm next.

Speaker: Yeah, it's horrible. You know, very sadly, i i went to the ah the Van Gogh house where he lived before he died. And the tour guide was like, Van Gogh and his brother Theo were very, very close.

Speaker: And she speculates, this guy, that he killed himself because he knew his brother was dying. And he couldn't live without him. Aww. oh So I couldn't imagine this. Seeing, like you're dying. Your sister, you can see she's dying, too. It's like, fuck, and you're all young. Yeah. Right? So, yeah.

Speaker: And for Charlotte as well, like, ooh, what's happening? And we again, their father, yeah. So, yeah, again, even Emily had noticed Anne's worsening cough. She she probably knew that both of them weren't goingnna last that long. Yeah.

Speaker: So May 1849, this is, so Emily passes away in December 1848. This is May of the next year. so oh six months later, five, six months later, Charlotte, Anne, and their friend Ellen Nussie leave for Scarborough on the coast. So they're hoping that a state, the seaside would help Anne's health. And she'd gone to Scarborough with the Robinson family and really liked it there. It's in the North Yorkshire coast. Yeah.

Speaker: Sadly, it did not help. her and it's very sad to read in the biography of charlotte bronte so to them describing yeah we took this really nice hotel we decided to go all out we sat in the room watching her last sunset with her like it's very sad oh she kind of just wastes away and declines so anne passes away herself on may 24th 1849 she's only 29 wow so yeah and i found this sad too she was buried in scarborough So she's the only member of the immediate Bronte family not buried Haworth.

Speaker: They just thought it would be too stressful to try and get her body back on the train. i do understand that. They're going through a lot. from Yeah. So Anne's like, it's okay. Yeah. So Charlotte returns to a very... oh go ahead. I just realized something I was doing spectacularly wrong. They're in Yorkshire and Haworth.

Speaker: Yorkshire is not in the Midlands. I'm a fraud. It's in the North. Midlands. Well, you're saying Midlands accent. I'm like, yeah, it sounds about right. No, there's but there's a Yorkshire accent. Yorkshire sounds like Yorkshire. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's ah they're not in the Midlands. They're north of the Midlands in a place called the North.

Speaker: Anyways, continue. So for anyone who is screaming at their computer or whatever, Dave has now rectified this. Send abuse to contact the wonder camera dot C.A. Thank Absolutely. Our UK listeners, i slag off on the UK all the time, but it's with some love.

Speaker: So know that, uk listeners, we have some love for you. um i Yeah, I used to be a huge anglophile. I'm not going to get that. my whole fill lot My whole theory of ah English literature degrees is soft power, colonial propaganda, but I won't get into that. I mean, it is, but also English literature can be beautiful at the same time. Fucking good stuff. Two things can be right at the same time. Yeah, exactly. Like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, the Brontes, that essay about how everything's evil That's nice. Anyway, so charlotte Charlotte returns home and it's a very quiet house. So Elizabeth Gaskell describes Charlotte's new life this way. It's very sad. It's just her and her dad.

Speaker: So she went on with her work steadily, but it was dreary to write without anyone to listen to the progress of her tale. Yeah. To find fault or to sympathize while pacing the lengths the length of the parlor in the evenings as in the days that were no more.

Speaker: Three sisters had done this. Then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk. And now no one was left. Sorry. And now one was left desolate to listen for echoing steps that never came to hear the wind sobbing at the windows with an almost articulate sound.

Speaker: Now, again, if you look at that picture of Howarth, I think if you go back to slide like four, this is back in the 1850s. It's much more desolate than now. There are so many trees and it's beautiful now. If you look at now, it's just like this barren, like a house on top of a barren hill with a graveyard right outside your windows.

Speaker: Right. it's And your sisters are all dead and they're buried in the church. Yeah. So it's nice, but it's back then it's even kind of more bleak. This is where ghost stories come from.

Speaker: That's true. Yeah. It's another rough time for Charlotte, but she threw herself back into her writing. So she completes the novel Shirley. I have not read this one yet. This is a social realist novel of class and romance, sort of about class. But this is one where she's talking more again about women's roles and women's rights.

Speaker: And it's set against the backdrop of the backdrop of the Luddite rebellion. My description facile. I have not read this book. I haven't read this novel. My understanding from the criticism is that modern day, like I mentioned, the Luddite Rebellion is happening in the background. She's not talking about what these people are going through and why they're protesting. It's just sort of happening. The main focus is the character Shirley and her progress is becoming an independent woman.

Speaker: Yeah. now Again, understanding where ah she's coming from. I don't think that a deep understanding and also she's not going to write this from a Luddite perspective. The Luddite is another.

Speaker: I remember you talking early on about how the Luddites were kind of a menace ah to Patrick. And so because of that, it's going to be a like a force of nature rather than a again, don't don't look into these.

Speaker: Don't look into this kind of book and then go, oh, this, you know, fail to understand the Luddites completely. It's not what the book is about. Find a different book for that. Yeah, exactly. It's a different book. Yeah.

Speaker: Other authors. I do appreciate somebody who came along later on in the century, somebody like Emile Zola and his social realism. Love it. I enjoy Brontes, but I also take them at the situation of their what their focus is. It's not necessarily ultra-realistic. What I appreciate about Charlotte Bronte is, particularly with Jane Eyre, she's like, and my characters, these aren't these gorgeous, beautiful heroines. like She explicitly says, Jane Eyre is kind of frumpy.

Speaker: Rochester, he's ugly. He's not this, like, handsome guy. Like, they love each other and for their personalities and whatever. But she makes it the point to say she's not outwardly this, like, gorgeous sort of Kathy from Wuthering Heights with her curly ringlets and, you know, princess. You know what mean? Like, she's being realistic and she wants to make it clear. My heroines are normal women.

Speaker: And I really appreciate that. love that. Yeah. Again, as a... Growing up as a fat little bullied girl, having a heroine like Jane Eyre, or like... I like it. you know, she really liked, she insisted that her characters be normal, except for, I believe her friend, i think it was Mary Taylor kind of got frustrated with the novel, Shirley and Valette ending in marriages for the main characters. So she still kind of falls into that common trope of the marriage is the happy ending, but this is these, she's writing popular fiction.

Speaker: Right. Like that this is what her story is. Right. So she's talking about women within this context as well. And who cares? What's wrong with wanting to get married? Right. Because she wants that potentially You're allowed to want to get married. It's fine. It's not anti-feminist to want to be in a relationship. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: Or anti-proto-feminist as it were. So after Shirley's published, people start guessing at the true identity of Carrer Bell and thus of Ellis and Acton. So locals start recognizing some characters and details, right?

Speaker: Charlotte also gets to kind of enjoy the fame that comes with being honest about her identity because now that Branwell is dead... Like, they told Patrick, he's like, so happy for you. This is great. And Patrick, their father, quite quickly is happy for them and excited. Right. And Branwell, he's not around, so whatever. And of course, unfortunately, some of her sisters aren't. But she's, Charlotte by herself now kind of enjoy that independence. Right. She can be a celebrated author and be happy with it. That's a nice thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: So her publishers had known who Charlotte was after that visit with Anne to London a few years prior. So during this time, after Anne passes away, she's visiting London more often. She has friends come, because she's lonely too, of course. So she goes to London more, she's more adventurous. She makes friends with the novelist and essayist Harriet Martineau, who I believe actually was an abolitionist.

Speaker: So she's in these... sort of progressive circles in the UK right now. So Harriet Martineau, I believe abolitionist, prominent feminist, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, she becomes quite good friends with.

Speaker: So she's doing well. Everyone in Howarth sort of finds out who Currer Bell is. So Arthur Bell Nichols was Patrick's curate in Howarth. He'd been there. I can't remember how long he was there for, but he was sort of around the family for quite a few years, maybe five or six years.

Speaker: So he finds out and he reads Shirley and he's really into it. So again, Arthur Bell Nichols had been in Howarth for a couple of years, working closely with Patrick as a curate, so he's well acquainted with the family as well.

Speaker: And it's interesting that they chose the name the last name Bell. Is it a coincidence that it's Arthur Bell Nichols? Or... Someone to maybe had a crush. Anyway, Mr. Nichols ah was one who had seen her, referring to Charlotte, this is Elizabeth Gaskell, almost daily for years, seen her as a daughter, sister, a mistress, and a friend.

Speaker: He was not a man to be attracted by any kind of literary fame. I imagine that this by itself would rather repel him when he saw it on the impression in the possession of a woman. That's not great. yeah But he didn't care, obviously, because he was a grave, reserved, conscientious man with a deep sense of religion and of his duties as one of its ministers.

Speaker: In silence, he had watched her and loved her long. The love of such a man, a daily spectator of her manner of life for years, is a great testimony to her character as a woman. So there's a bit more going on here. So how deep his affection was, I scarcely dare to tell, even if I could in words.

Speaker: She did not know. She'd hardly begun to suspect that she was the object of any peculiar regard on his part. When, in this very December, I believe this is 1854, 53, he came one evening to tea. After tea, she returned from the study to her own sitting room as was her custom, leaving her father and his curate together.

Speaker: So this is Charlotte sitting by herself in the study. Presently, she heard the study door open and expected to hear the succeeding clash of the front door. Instead came a tap and like lightning, it flashed upon me what was coming.

Speaker: So he comes in she's like, he's going propose. Like she just kind of knows. Yeah. Yeah. So he entered, he stood before me. What his words were, you can imagine his manner. You can hardly realize, nor can I forget it. He made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection when he doubts response.

Speaker: The spectacle of one ordinarily so statue-like, thus trembling, stirred and overcame, gave me a strange shock. I could only entreat him to leave me then hen and promise a reply on the morrow.

Speaker: ah i asked if he I asked if he'd spoken to Papa. he said he dared not. so I think I half-lead, have put him out of the room. so it's pretty cute. Like, he's a super shy, like, would you marry me? And she's like...

Speaker: I got to think about it. Did you tell my dad? No, I'm scared. like you get Very cute. break Yeah. This is adorable. It is. So Mr. Nichols leaves. Charlotte goes immediately to her father and told him all.

Speaker: This is again, quoting from Elizabeth Gaskell. This is Patrick always disapproved of marriages and constantly talked against them. ah But he more than disapproved this time. He could not bear the idea of this attachment to Mr. Nichols to his daughter.

Speaker: So, this is hilarious. Patrick was opposed to this marriage because, get this, he didn't think a poor Irish curate was a good enough match for his wealthy and famous daughter. Oh, pull the ladder up, why don't you?

Speaker: Because, and remember him, he's all, he was his younger days is trying to marry all these rich women, and now he's like, you're not good enough for me, my daughter. Oh, God. The exact same position.

Speaker: So I wonder if Branwell comes by his arrogance quite honestly. Like, I get the sense that Patrick is quite arrogant, actually. Like, might be a good dad, is intelligent, very dutiful pastor, but just... Yeah.

Speaker: He's hot shit. So Charlotte turns down Arthur Bell next. And he left Howarth completely out of shame. But Charlotte and Arthur would communicate by letter in secret, actually for a few months, until finally she had her way and married her man.

Speaker: So, this is to quote from Juliet Barker. Patrick had never been able to gainsay his daughter when she decided something, and he now, reluctantly and with bad grace, conceded that Charlotte and her suitor should be allowed to meet. Aww. sweet of him. So, the attitude is so bad. He didn't even go to her wedding. Really? Like, yeah. So...

Speaker: He gets over it. So Patrick seems to have realized that Arthur Bell Nichols was a good man who could provide security for himself and his daughter in his old age. like and What's she going to do? Like, why would she like she's ah kind of a homebody anyway.

Speaker: i think she had been proposed to before. And my understanding is she had hoped maybe Charlotte to marry one of the publishers. But this stuff didn't work out. Yeah. Charlotte and Arthur got married on the 29th of June, 1854. This is very cute. This is Elizabeth Gaskell.

Speaker: Well, it's, yeah. So it was fixed that the marriage would was to take place on the 29th of June. Her two friends, I believe it's Ellen Nussie and Mary Taylor, I believe, arrived at Howarth Parsons the day before, and the long summer afternoon and evening were spent by Charlotte in thoughtful arrangements for the morrow and for her father's comfort during her absence from home. So she's going on honeymoon.

Speaker: Yeah. When all was finished, the trunk pack, the morning's breakfast arranged, the wedding dress laid out. Just at bedtime, Mr. Bronte announced his intention of stopping at home while the others went to church for the wedding. oh So the night before, he's like actually, I'm not going to go.

Speaker: What was to be done? Who's to give the bride away? There were only the only to be the officiating clergyman, the bride and bridegroom, the bridesmaid and Miss Wooler. Okay, that's the the friend, Miss Wooler. Yeah. The prayer book was referred to, and there it was seen that the rubric enjoins that the minister shall receive the woman sorry i miss this wrong and there it was seen that the rubric andjoins and the minister shall receive the woman from her father's or friend's hands, and nothing is specified to the sex of the friend.

Speaker: So Miss Wooler, ever kind in emergency, volunteered to give her old people away. ah So continue with Gaskell.

Speaker: seeing her look like a snowdrop as they say her dress was white embroidered muslin with a lace mantle and white bonnet trimmed with green leaves which perhaps might suggest the resemblance to the pale wintry flower Aw, that's lovely.

Speaker: Yeah. So, Arthur moves into the parsonage, and the two went on honeymoon in Ireland, where she met his family. And again, their marriage seems to have been extremely happy. So, Charlotte becomes pregnant soon after the wedding.

Speaker: And so, as we all know in fiction, happily ever after. Unless the woman dies in childbirth. Yeah, you know, that's a story's end, right? With with with the wedding and then they're happy and we don't go to. Yeah, she publishes a ton more celebrated books and it's wonderful.

Speaker: And that's the end of the podcast. See, guys? No, okay. Unfortunately, will quote Elizabeth Gaskell again from the biography. "'Mr. Nichols and she went to visit his friends and relations in Ireland and made a tour by Killarney, Glen Gariff, Tarbert, Tralee, and Cork, seeing scenery of which, Charlotte says, some parts exceeded all I had ever imagined. I must say I like my new relations. My dear husband, too, appears in a new light in his own country.

Speaker: More than once, I have had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides.' Some of the old servants and followers of the family tell me I am a most fortunate person. For that, I have got one of the best gentlemen in the country.

Speaker: I trust I feel thankful to God for having enabled me to make what seems a right choice. And I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honorable man. This is cute, too. and So this is how Gaskell ends. she The Elizabeth Gaskell biography is basically an authorized one.

Speaker: So she does not talk about Constantine Eger at all. Totally elides. She mentions him as a professor, but totally elides their letters and her feelings for him.

Speaker: So this is how she finishes off her story of... Charlotte's wedding. Henceforward, the sacred doors of home are closed upon her married life. We, her loving friends, standing outside, caught occasional glimpses of brightness and pleasant, peaceful murmurs of sound, telling of the gladness within. And we looked at each other and gently said, after a hard and long struggle, after many cares and many bitter sorrows, she's tasting happiness now.

Speaker: We thought of the slight astringencies of her character and how they would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace. We remembered her trials and we were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes.

Speaker: Those who saw her saw an outward change in her look, telling of inward things. And we thought and we hoped and we prophesied in our great love and reverence. But God's ways are not as our ways.

Speaker: Way to go, gone Thanks a lot, God. Exactly. Seems like a jerk. yeah If I believed in God, I don't think I'd like him very much. and I think he's fictional. So, Charles' pregnancy did not go well.

Speaker: Early 1855... she starts experiencing extreme severe nausea. So severe she could not eat. And she began vomiting blood.

Speaker: Oh dear. Severe nausea, right? This is a syndrome I was gonna look up. it's ah It's a known thing now that can be treated today. Charlotte made a will in February. So she left her entire estate to her husband.

Speaker: Trusting him that he would take care of Patrick with that money. Because she's a rich author now, right? She lingers on for about six weeks. Being very, very sick, nauseous, can't eat, can barely drink, throwing out blood, all this horrible stuff. They knew she was going to die.

Speaker: They wrote to her friends and were like, yeah, this is coming. She lingers on for about six weeks and passes away on March 1855. Oh, wow. Yep. Morning sickness. Ugh. oh wow yep morning sickness ah Not even morning sickness. extreme like it's It's a syndrome, but man, unbelievable. So unfortunately, during the time preceding her death, Charlotte had kind of fallen out of touch with her friend Elizabeth Gaskell.

Speaker: And she's distracted. She's married, has a new life, whatever. So when Elizabeth Gaskell heard that Charlotte had died from severe morning sickness, she said this. this is from ah Juliet Barker. Interestingly, having asked John Greenwood, a friend of the family, for further details and discovered that her friend had died in pregnancy, Mrs. Gaskell regretted even more that she had not kept in touch.

Speaker: How I wish I had known. it is no use regretting what has passed, but I do fancy that if I had come, i could have induced her, even though they had all felt very angry with me at first, to do what was absolutely necessary for her very life.

Speaker: Implication here is she could have had an abortion. Yeah. So, again, if the thought of abortion had occurred to Mrs. Gaskell, had it occurred to Charlotte, her father or her husband? Who knows?

Speaker: i mean, it was certainly around, but it was also, I think, in the context of a health related abortion. When you are married and having your first kid, I don't think people conceived of it in that sense at that point.

Speaker: I mean, that's something I want to look into more because abortion didn't even become illegal until like after this. No, it was just frowned upon like morally. ah Medically safe, ah medically safe and reliable abortions were what kicked off the Catholic Church moving hard, ah hard ah towards the abortion bans because then ah they were no longer something that you could only really do secretly and illegally.

Speaker: That's right. Well, not illegally, but ah the notion that respectable doctors would not do it. No. Yeah. And sorry, I sound like I was choking there because I was. i drank some Dr. Pepper and I was like, that's right. but anyways, that is right, Dave. Yeah. It was doctors didn't want and doctors and actually police officers being like, I'm sick of being called to scenes of women bleeding to death because had abortion. So and again, not to give credit to police, but, you know, we are a pro choice podcast. Anti punching your dog in the face.

Speaker: Pro women having a choice. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so we're coming to the end here. i Just a few more things to wrap up. Arthur Bell Nichols stays on at the Parsonage, and he did indeed take care of Patrick for the rest of Patrick's life. Oh, wow. Again, imagine Patrick. All his kids are dead. yeah Soon after Charlotte's death, the chaos surrounding her legacy kind of begins, right? Because people already figured out she was. By the time she passed away, they were already becoming very famous, and Howarth was becoming a tourist location already.

Speaker: So again, a lot of gossip is bandied about. They want to kind of control the narrative. So they do hire, or they collaborate rather, with Elizabeth Gaskell. She's, elizabeth again, is a novelist already in her own right. She's friends with Charlotte. She writes sort of the, for I believe it comes out in 1857 1898.

Speaker: First sort of definitive biography of Charlotte. And again, it omits a lot. It omits the constant in Eger. She blames Lydia Robinson for Branwell's downfall. Does not mention her by name, though, because Lydia Robinson threatened to sue.

Speaker: Oh. Because it was probably a lie. Yeah. yes So all this gossip bandit about, they want to control the narrative. They said they write this novel. Some people are air contentious. It makes Patrick sound a little bit more harsh than he was, perhaps. Yeah.

Speaker: It does it kind of fuel some other myths that weren't true. It's going to be published to serve a purpose at that point rather than it's going to be about protecting the legacy and the family as opposed to ah being true.

Speaker: Yes, that's right. And again, she she says, oh, it's too private. I can't get into the stuff about their marriage and honeymoon whatever, which, you know, that's fair. Okay. But yeah, so again, and pretty immediately, they're a famous literary family. So tourists interested in in the lives of the Brontes start making pilgrimages to the village and to Hauerth. The Bronte Society eventually buys the parsonage. It's a museum now.

Speaker: Again, their novels and poetry non-stop popular since they were published. I don't think they've ever been out of print. and Of course, you know their first pop poetry volume is not, but their individual poems have been published. and Novels always in print, movies, books, adaptations, comic books, TV, everything. yep Hugely famous. Patrick outlived his entire family.

Speaker: He dies in 1861 at age 84. And i forgot to look up how. i assumed he died of just old. But yeah, 84, he did live long enough to see his daughter's huge, immense rise to fame. And he did welcome the friendship and adulation of their fans too.

Speaker: Oh, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he sees them and he was like, you know, I did a good job of raising these kids, which he did with the girls. Branwell, though, it's hard to say because there's a lot of enabling and yeah a lot of telling Branwell he's great and all this stuff. They could have done a better job there. But, you know, he's also going to do what he's going to do.

Speaker: um All of, again, all of the Bronte family, after Patrick passes away, they were all buried beneath the paving stones in the church, except for Anne, who's still in Scarborough. I believe there were plans to maybe reinter her, but she's in Scarborough still. yeah Arthur Bell Nichols returns to Ireland and eventually does remarry.

Speaker: He passes away in 1906. Again, probably of old because he's 87. He's the one who took the a lot of their furniture with him to Ireland. and the So that portrait you see, that the pillar portrait that Branwell did, yeah um you can see it's all folded up.

Speaker: Because he just took it with him, folded it up, it's all creased up. Oh, yeah, sorry, slide 10, you can see Arthur Bell Nichols. Yes. Really handsome fella. Yeah. Looks nice. Yep, slide 11, you can see where, this is from Howarth Cemetery, you can see where Tabby was buried on this plaque here. Slide 12 is a bad photograph, it' very blurry, from inside the church at Howarth, which is a memorial plaque, to again, their father, or mother, six children, God, what a tragedy.

Speaker: Yeah, all those people. And again, slide 13, you can see the pillar where the family is buried in the vault. So the the cemetery was full of paving slabs, basically. I'll talk about that in a second. But they were all buried within the church itself. So less common, but that was more common back then, right? Yeah. okay end of our tale of the Brontes. But I have one more thing to tell you. Because given all of this death, you might want to say, what was going on in Howarth?

Speaker: Was that shit normal? Turns out, the a lot of problems with sanitation. Now, oh remember, i think I told you way back in the first episode that the parsonage, the church, and the cemetery, they're on top of the hill in Howarth.

Speaker: yeah Yes. Water runs downhill. So anything contaminating that groundwater is running downhill. Also runs 1849, Patrick commissions a report to investigate the sanitary conditions in Howarth. And the resulting Babbage report, so-called for the guy who wrote it, one government inspector named Benjamin Herschel Babbage found this. Now, this summary, I'm going to send you the link later. It'll be in the show notes. The report is interesting to read because it is a vivid portrayal of how goddamn filthy life was in the in Yorkshire.

Speaker: in yorkshire So imagine the town of Athabasca has a population of, what, 2,900 people? Roughly, yeah About that. Yeah. So 1840's Howarth has about 2,600 people. So the Babbage Report finds, in summary, I took the summary from another site, and I will quote the report in a moment, there were 69 toilets for 2,500 people. Ooh. So imagine Athabasca, there's 70 toilets in all of Athabasca.

Speaker: That's crazy. Now imagine some of those toilets have no doors, and they're lined up along 50th Street. Okay, so you're not 50th Street, there's some porta-potties and doors wide open. They used to just, I guess, when I think of classic pre-plumbing bedpan behavior, you're tossing it out the window so it runs through the gutters, and this will be the next step in modern sanitation, which is still heinous.

Speaker: Yep. Oh, it's heinous. 24 houses shared one toilet. Ooh. Seven houses had no toilet access at all. So there's 11 water pumps for the entire village. Two of these are out of order.

Speaker: One tap was within two meters of a large cesspit in the middle of Main Street. Oh. There were no drains, and the human and animal effluent ran down the sides of the steep street. Because Howarth is extraordinarily steep, too. Yeah. So imagine Athabasca at a, like, ah whatever. Well, everyone's just on the hillside in the valley, right?

Speaker: Because a lot of the town is 45-degree angle, but it's sort of terraced. Yep, that's true. That's true. So, Howarth does have a higher mortality rate. It's comparable to, like, the east end of London, which if you've read your, if you've read of your Mayhew, I believe, or Jack London, east end of London was vile. Yes.

Speaker: So this is a village with the sanitation levels of a city. The city at that point in the point in time. yeah Yeah. No, because it says, oh, there was a summary that I got from another one, not from AI, but from another website by somebody who read it. It says this there's a cesspit in the middle of Main Street with a nearby tap. There were cesspits all over. The report says like basically every almost every backyard there was like animal awful from slaughterhouses, feces, human shit in like puddles, standing puddles.

Speaker: All over the place. Almost all the backyards, all the businesses. Absolute filth. It would reek. So 42% of children born in Haworth died before the age of six.

Speaker: So higher child mortality rates, lower, ah slightly lower by about five years, I believe. I can't remember of a lifespan on average. Five years is significant.

Speaker: I believe, yeah. Something like that, yeah. So again, as you mentioned, Dave, all the sewage is flung into the streets, runs down the gutters, no sewers. There are several standing middens of awful in town. Awful.

Speaker: O-F-F-A-L. So that's like... Industrial pollution, maybe, from they're doing the wool trade. They use lot of water, probably. it's industrial effluent slaughtered animals. Chemicals treating the wool. And and again, industrial effluent slaughterhouses.

Speaker: It's just all of the gross and unhealthy stuff possible. Yep. yeah ah one guy quoted in the report or who was spoken to in the report says that he his house was right next to one of these middens and it would frequently leak through the walls onto the floor. gross. Human waste and filth.

Speaker: Yep, constantly leaking into the water supply, through the walls, into people's houses. This is a quote. I mean, read the report. It's absolutely... So, I'm quoting the report now. Whilst the number of privies is so limited as to be injurious to health, their situation in many instances is not less repugnant to all ideas of decency.

Speaker: Two of the privies used by two dozen families each are in the public street, and not only within full view of the houses, but exposed to the gaze of passersby. oh and whilst a third, as though even such a situation were too private, is perched upon an eminence commanding the whole length of the main street. Oh my God. So you are on the throne. On top the hill and you're looking down, taking a dump. Staring down loftily. Like just saying, hey, Ralph, as you're taking your morning shit. And he's like, hey, Dave.

Speaker: Oh. yes As though that were too private. This is even personal in eminence. Like it was commanding the length of the main street. so imagine you're Athabasca at top of a building. Like, hey guys. Yeah. So. so ah Maintain eye contact while just fully dropping ah fully dropping auce a Assert dominance.

Speaker: Imagine, and I have to say, I, now, this has been my problem for a while. if I see, like, in a museum or in a painting, women with these gorgeous, lovely sort of proto and mid-Victorian dresses, the huge hoops and the sleeves, I'm like, how you wiping your butt?

Speaker: Oh, God, yeah. Like, you have someone doing that for you? I know you're probably not because women didn't actually wear like crotch covering underwear until like late 1800s. Yeah, often wonder. So they could just squat. You could just squat and do your business. I often wonder how they dealt with menstruation.

Speaker: You know what? I still don't really know. got to look into that too because I actually don't. I think genuinely had like cloths tied up and then just discarded the cloths and got other ones. heard of like rags. like, are they just cramming them up there or what? Yeah. heard of rags, but I'm like, how? Anyway, that's maybe another episode because it is interesting. Yeah.

Speaker: But yes, so we're thinking about back to this horrible cesspit, the toilet commanding an eminence of the town. The cesspit of this privy lies below it and opens by a small door into the main street. Occasionally, this door is burst open by the super incumbent weight of night soil, aka shit, and ashes. The super... into the public street Take a moment. The super incumbent weight of night soil.

Speaker: What an incredible ah little piece of English there. yeah It is so laden with horror and meaning. The super incumbent weight of night soil and ashes. I recommend this report, like seriously. And they overflow into the public street. It's very short. And at all times, a disgusting effluvium escapes through this door into the street. Oh, I don't want any effluvium.

Speaker: No, don't want a fluvium. Within two yards of this suspect door, there is a tap for the supply of water to the neighboring houses. yay Because, as bad, to quote again, the babbage, bad as is this state of things, perhaps the most crying want of Haworth water, of which there an absolute darth in the dry season.

Speaker: this is, again, quoting the report. I found that the inmates of a respectable house in Town End Bottom were in the habit of sending regularly for their water for cooking to Springhead, which is about a quarter of a mile distance, and at the bottom of a steep hill.

Speaker: It was stated to me in evidence that about 150 houses are dependent for the supply of water upon the head well. That supply from it is so scanty in the summertime that in order to have water for Monday's washing, the poor people are in the habit of going there at two or three o'clock in the morning in order to wait for their turn.

Speaker: to fill their cans and buckets from the slowly running stream. This is a bit of a slightly cleaner water, but it's still the bottom of a hill. all is filth yeah It also stated that the water of this well is very bad at this season, so in the summer, and that it is sometimes so green and putrid that cattle, which have been driven there to drink after tasting the water, have turned away and refused to touch it again. oh wow. The cows are like, ugh. The cows are like, what is this? Like, it's a green, putrid water. This is what they are,

Speaker: drinking So gross. So, why is it so putrid, though? Well, the churchyard, right across from their house, is full of graves. It is a yeah tiny, tiny space. And this is, again, quoting from Babbage, According to the return furnished to me by the parish clerk, it would appear that 1,344 burials have taken place there during the last years.

Speaker: And I believe he quotes the space of something like an eighth of an acre, or very, very tiny, very tiny space. That is very tiny. Yes. So Babbage noted that the wealthier inhabitants of the village tried not to use the pump water.

Speaker: so Again, like we said, they tried to go further afield at like six, in the yeah two or three in the morning, right? But essentially, the residents of Howarth were baking with, cooking with, bathing with, and drinking the shit-filled, disease-riddled, liquefied at putrefaction of their decomposing friends and loved ones.

Speaker: Oh. Well, that... that Now... Is that going to make you a brilliant writer? Is that going to make alcoholic? Apparently. going to lend you gothic sensibility? Yes. Probably going to kill you when you're in your 30s.

Speaker: Except for Patrick, who lived to 84. I'm in my 40s. And so, therefore, if I drink the Fluvium, I can become a genius.

Speaker: And I'll live because I'm no longer going to die in my 30s. It's a perfect plan. We're past the age where ah fluvium effluvium of corpses can kill us. That's It makes us stronger. We're we're just immortal.

Speaker: Tracy? Yep. Fetch me my effluvium. Effluvium! And if you look at... I need my effluvium. My effluvium is coffee. But if you look at this picture, I got picture 14. I took that at Howarth last summer. You can see they were very packed in. And the history of cemeteries in Europe in general is fascinating because a lot of them...

Speaker: they were packing in bodies. Yeah. Packing them in. And so they would regularly have to dig them all are close. Throw them into, yeah, throw them into like a open grave or a mass pit. So that's why the Paris catacombs, they're all just, they had dig up all these cemeteries to make room for more bodies. So that you see that now, this is how, earth they're not burying people there anymore, but you can see how packed in they are. Yeah. yeah And it's mostly slabs. so saying that's not good either because if you have all these concrete or rather stone slabs for the grave markers, it's not allowing the decomposition maybe to...

Speaker: dry the bodies they're just decomposing into sludge no no they're they're they're rotting instead of being yeah and so there is just a pool of ah bronte goo and the pool of bronte goo i understand that they're under the church rather than in the graveyard but we'll call it but same difference uh which then infects everything and ah people die from the infected water and then go back to the goo and the circle of life continues Circle of life. That's right. and today they did clean things up.

Speaker: So this report was carried out actually when Charlotte was still alive and they probably did start doing some sanitary measures. So they cleaned things up. Of course, eventually they had modern sewage, plumbing, all this stuff. And now if you look at picture 15, Howarth Village is sort of the Bronte amusement park that you see today. As it should be. Wonderful. Which honestly, good. I'm fine with that. It's cool. It's a cute village. It's doing better than probably the other villages.

Speaker: Good old Sylvia Plath is buried not 10 miles away. Oh, wow. So if you go up to Howarth, you can go visit Sylvia as well at the Hebden Bridge, which is actually creepier than Howarth.

Speaker: Oh, that is for my Sylvia Plath episode. So yeah, that was the Brontes. Amazing. What a story. Thank you, Jen. It was great to hear you info dump about a great passion of yours.

Speaker: Great passion. yeah Very, very interesting. And now I'll let you all the audience go. We hope you enjoyed that as well. Next week, it is Dave. Oh, yes. ah With my great passion, ah where as we are dilettantes and we always claim to not be experts on things,

Speaker: ah I'm going to be talking about something I'm kind of an expert on. So it's going to be fun. And as someone who thought I would bang out a quick episode because I know so much, I am now six books in and I have no idea how many episodes this is going to be.

Speaker: We'll see you in ah the next two weeks. We'll see you soon. However many episodes it takes, I understand that feeling completely. God help us all. This is going to one part and it became two, it became three. So yeah it's all good. All right. Bye, everyone. right bye Bye, everyone.

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