"Black" Rage and White Women: Ideological Self-Formation in Charlotte Bronte's African Tales

Abstract

Critics of Charlotte Bronte's juvenilia have noticed the passionate interest in contemporary politics reflected in her early writings: her fascination with the Duke of Wellington, the characters named after other contemporary figures, the allusions to current affairs, such as Catholic Emancipation, and the important formative influence of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Yet the way in which the Bronte children's early tales are most fundamentally involved with British politics has received virtually no sustained attention. From their very beginnings, as the prominence of the Duke of Wellington might suggest, the Bronte children's juvenile tales are centrally about imagining the British empire. The story of the founding of the children's imaginary world is well known. As it is usually told, the game grew up around the twelve toy soldiers the Reverend Bronte brought home for Branwell one June night in 1826. The next morning Branwell brought his soldiers into the girls' bedroom to show them to his sisters, and Charlotte leapt out of bed, seized a soldier, and named him after her military hero, the Duke of Wellington, who had been posted in India and had defeated Napoleon in the Napoleonic Wars. Following her lead, each of the children chose and named a soldier to use as a personal hero. The twelve individually carved and individually named soldiers became the first characters in a childhood game which was to develop into the creation of a complicated imaginary world: a city called first Glass Town and then Verdopolis, expanding into the larger region of Angria, about which Charlotte and Branwell were to write hundreds of pages over the next thirteen years.1 But two crucial aspects of the story are given little attention by Bronte biographers and critics. The retellings of this story tend not to emphasize the historical specificity of this imaginary world: Glass Town is an imaginary British colony established by British soldiers on the west coast of Africa. The Bronte children, avid readers of the Tory journal Blackwood's, founded their fictitious colony on the Niger river delta, near Fernando Po, following one Blackwood's writer's advice on how to strengthen the British position in Africa.2