The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë: An Edition ed. by Victor A. Neufeldt

Abstract

R E VIE W S Browning and Schoolcraft, look like errors in judgement rather than interesting examples in a coherent and useful argument. TERRY GOLDIE / York University Victor A. Neufeldt, ed., The Works of Patrick Branwell Bronte: An Edition, Vol. 1 (New York and London: Garland, 1997). xxviii, 464. $84.00 (U.S.). The first of the three-volume The Works of Patrick Branwell Bronte makes me wonder whether the nineteen poems that the brother of the Bronte sisters published during his lifetime con­ stitute authorship, and whether this attempt to produce him as an author is entirely justified. The Writings of Patrick Bran­ well Bronte might have been more appropriate, since the vast majority have negligible literary merit (volume one was written from the ages of nine to thirteen). Neufeldt himself cautions that all but a handful “were never meant for actual publica­ tion. They are the result of childhood play and adolescent fan­ tasy, often written in the headlong rush of fevered composition” (xxviii). It strikes me that juvenile writings require an inordi­ nate amount of effort to discover the crude origins of mature themes or motifs. In the case of Branwell Bronte, moreover, there is no mature work to illuminate. There are, however, good reasons for reading this volume and the others to come. The first is its contribution to Bronte biography. Neufeldt rightly blames Charlotte Bronte for origi­ nating the myth of Branwell as the “Profligate Son” ;1 she wrote with relief at her brother’s death, “It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent” (xvii). The image of Branwell as ir­ responsible, licentious, alcoholic, and drug addicted has sur­ vived even Juliet Barker’s modifications (in her 1994 biography o f the Brontes) supported with impressive historical evidence.2 Neufeldt takes Terry Eagleton to task for perpetrating the leg­ end even while reviewing a book whose aim is to contradict it. “Nowhere,” says Neufeldt, does Eagleton mention, in a re­ view of Robert Collins’ edition of two previously unpublished tales, Branwell’s “publications or ... his success as a transla­ 95 ESC 25, 1999 tor of Horace’s Odes” (xix). Neufeldt’s edition carries the onus of correcting the myth: “A just, informed assessment of Branwell ’s achievement will not occur until all of his work has been published” (xix). Neufeldt believes that Charlotte’s disappointment in her brother was partially founded on ignorance of his literary suc­ cess. He claims that she must not have known of the nine­ teen poems that Branwell had published in newspapers before his early death, and that thus gained a wider readership than the sisters’ poems and placed him among poets with estab­ lished reputations. It seems unlikely, however, that Charlotte would not have recognised Branwell’s pseudonym, since it was invented in the course of their collaborative plays, and was a name readily acknowledged and used by Branwell’s friends in correspondence. It seems more likely that the poems that Branwell published before Poems By Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell actually constitute the literary promise that Charlotte regarded as wrecked by her brother’s personal dissolution. Although volume one does confirm previous observations of Branwell’s early erudition and classical education, and is “remarkable for the seriousness and pretension with which the thirteen year old boy sets about the task of producing ‘great’ literature,” 3 I am not sanguine that these “works” will lay to rest the myths. Collins makes the persuasive case that Branwell came to inhabit his fictional alter-ego(s) Rougue/Alexander Percy/Northangerland, who provide a “pattern of despair” that he eventually followed.4 As ‘psychobiography,’ or portraits of an individual’s psyche, Branwell’s contribution to the chronicles o f Glass Town (the imaginary kingdom he shared with Char­ lotte) is startling in its obsessive repetition of the masculinist activities o f war-mongering, political machinations, and bloody battles. There is a taste for the gruesome not surprising per­ haps in a precocious young boy, but shocking in its detail. The Poems of “Young Soult the Rhymer” (Branwell’s pseudonym and the poet of Glass Town) contains “The Ammon Tree Cut­ ter,” which tells of the capture and punishment...