{"id":1789,"date":"2016-07-28T22:41:59","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T21:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/?p=1789"},"modified":"2016-07-29T07:09:45","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T06:09:45","slug":"reader-he-burned-them-charlotte-bronte-shipwreck-and-the-ladys-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/2016\/07\/28\/reader-he-burned-them-charlotte-bronte-shipwreck-and-the-ladys-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader, he burned them: Charlotte Bronte, Shipwreck and the Lady’s Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sadly, good news stories are rare these days. So when they come along, I tend to cling to them like precious cargo that can keep me afloat amidst the torrents of awfulness threatening to pull us all under\u00a0in this unsettling and violent world.<\/p>\n

\"Bronte\"<\/a>One of the best news stories of the past ten days or so is surely\u00a0the restoration of a book belonging to, and filled with annotations and sketches by, the Bronte family to their Haworth home. The purchase and repatriation of the salt-water stained copy of Robert Southey’s\u00a0The Remains of Henry Kirke White<\/em>\u00a0was made possible by a \u00a3170,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, in addition to\u00a0a further \u00a330,000 raised by a\u00a0V&A Purchase Grant Fund and Friends of the National Libraries. As the\u00a0BBC news website noted, this particular copy of Southey’s work\u00a0was especially remarkable because of the story surrounding it. A treasured artefact of a life prematurely cut short, the book was ‘one of a few possessions saved from a shipwreck shortly before Maria married Patrick Bronte in 1812’, and bore an inscription from Patrick that read: ‘the book of my dearest wife and it was saved from the waves. So then it will always be preserved’. Preserved though it was, the book was nonetheless sold after Patrick’s death in the early 1860s and spent nearly a century in the US before its recent and happy return to Haworth.\u00a0[1]\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

After initially reading this story on the BBC news website, I spent a good 40 minutes trawling through\u00a0as many different versions of the same story as I could find. Each told more or less the same version of the same series of events in more or less the same language, as news outlets tend to do today just as they did in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What I was fruitlessly looking for, I soon realised in my obsessive re-reading, was an answer to an unposed question: What else survived the shipwreck?\u00a0[2]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Based on the news coverage, you would be forgiven for thinking that only Southey’s\u00a0Remains of Henry Kirke White<\/em> was saved from the briny deep in 1812. But this was not the case. Especially prized by Charlotte Bronte was a set of volumes that kept the young woman\u00a0away from her lessons and hungering after a literary career of her own: a collection of the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>the full run of which periodical extended well beyond the date of the shipwreck (from 1770 to 1832).<\/p>\n

We don’t know exactly how many copies of the magazine Charlotte and her siblings inherited in the years after their preservation from the shipwreck, although we have some sense of which volumes survived because of the detail with which she later recalled them. Our evidence comes in the form of a letter dated 10 December 1840 to Hartley Coleridge in which Charlotte expressed regret that<\/p>\n

I did not exist forty of fifty years ago when the Lady\u2019s magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree\u2014In that case I make no doubt my aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement\u2014 [\u2026] and I would have contested the palm with the Authors of Derwent Priory\u2014of the Abbey and Ethelinda. You see Sir I have read the Lady\u2019s Magazine and know something of its contents\u2014though I am not quite certain of the correctness of the titles I have quoted …\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"DP<\/a>

LM XXVII (Jan 1797): 12-13. \u00a9 Jennie Batchelor. Not to be reproduced without permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, Bronte’s recall is accurate. Like her, I have spent many happy hours reading the anonymous\u00a0gothic novel\u00a0Derwent Priory\u00a0<\/em>(serialised 1796-97 and later attributed to Mrs A Kendall), George Moore’s Grasville Abbey<\/em>\u00a0(1793-97) and the unsigned ‘Athewold and Ethelinda’ (1797). The fact that Bronte remembered this fiction was remarkable because she did not have the copies before her. Although she vividly remembered the brine ‘discoloured’ pages of the magazine over which she pored ‘on holiday afternoons or by stealth when I should have been minding my lessons’, the volumes had long since left her possession by the time she wrote to Coleridge in 1840:<\/p>\n

One black day my father burnt them because they contained foolish love-stories. With all my heart I wish I had been born in time to contribute to the Lady\u2019s magazine.\u00a0<\/em>[3]<\/strong><\/p>\n

The sense of horror\u00a0and betrayal of her father’s act was evidently very much alive to Bronte years after it had been committed and clearly ran as deep as her affection for a magazine and an associated writing culture – ‘when the Lady’s magazine was flourishing like a green bay tree’ – that she sorely lamented the loss of as an aspiring professional writer.<\/p>\n

I refer to\u00a0Bronte’s letter frequently when I talk to people about the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em> and I use it for lots of different reasons. For one thing, as an example of a near contemporary reader’s response to the magazine it is rare. The fact that this is an example of so well known a writer as Bronte only makes it more valuable, not least because it means that I don’t have to rely solely upon my own powers of persuasion to get people to take the magazine seriously. Don’t take my word for it that the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em> is interesting and was influential, here’s what Charlotte Bronte thought about it …<\/p>\n

But of course what is most interesting about this story is the tale of survival and destruction around which it turns and the complex\u00a0psychodrama it plays out. For every fact the letter seems to give us – that Bronte read the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em>, that she associated it with the successful promotion of women’s writing, for instance – at least one question is begged – did she really think that unpaid journalism was preferable to a life of professional authorship\u00a0and did she share any of her father’s views of its foolishness, for example. Most insistently, however, the question that nags at the reader of the letter is this: How could Patrick Bronte destroy volumes\u00a0that evidently meant so much to his daughter and which had been\u00a0saved, along with the Southey, from the waves?<\/p>\n

In many ways, I feel that the broader\u00a0piece of research to which our current Leverhulme project is related – a book I am writing about the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em>‘s place in Romantic literature and culture – is an attempt to answer this question. The rage, which is at once unique to\u00a0the Bronte family and yet also eerily emblematic of the fate of the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em>, one of the most successful women’s magazines of all times and yet all but silenced in literary history, would certainly take many more words to explain than I have in this blog post.<\/p>\n

For now though, I am struck by something I had lost sight of until the news stories of the past week or so. The\u00a0Bronte Parsonage Museum’s acquisition of\u00a0Maria Bronte’s copy of what has been repeatedly described as the treasured and invaluable Remains of Henry Kirke White\u00a0<\/em>reminds me that what is most important and too often forgotten is that the\u00a0Lady’s Magazine<\/em> was valued enough to be saved. Not only that but it was valued enough by at least one of Maria Bronte’s\u00a0daughters enough to be read, re-read and remembered. The story of the destruction of copies of\u00a0The Lady’s Magazine<\/em>\u00a0by a man who likely never read it (it was far more cynical about love than foolish) should not mute the more triumphant and arguably more telling one about its survival against the odds. These volumes will never be returned to Haworth, but given the personal and, I would argue, textual legacies that the magazine undoubtedly bestowed\u00a0Charlotte Bronte, they never really left there.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/strong>\u00a0http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-england-leeds-36844945 <accessed 28 July 2016><\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0<\/strong>Prior to her marriage to Patrick Bronte, Maria sent for her possessions to be shipped from Penzance, but the vessel ran aground of the Devonshire coast en route.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0<\/strong>The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Vol. 1, 1829-1847, ed Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 240.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr Jennie Batchelor<\/strong><\/p>\n

School of English<\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Kent<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sadly, good news stories are rare these days. So when they come along, I tend to cling to them like precious cargo that can keep me afloat amidst the torrents of awfulness threatening to pull us all under\u00a0in this unsettling and violent world. One of the best news stories of the past ten days or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39796,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39796"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1789"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1806,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions\/1806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}