Journal

called godly deprivations. Charlotte’s two eldest sisters died as a result of the
poor treatment and the disease associated with the school. The traumatic
experience left her as the eldest of the surviving children, expected to assume
the leadership role her talented sister Maria had fulfilled so well. She was also
affected by Wilson’s books for children and his monthly magazine The Child’s
Friend, which had widespread publication throughout Britain. Their
detrimental psychological effect on children like the Brontës should not be
underestimated. They included dire warnings of eternal damnation for
children struck down by God, without time for repentance and as
punishment for their sins. This was supposed to encourage good behaviour.
Wilson regarded a good child’s death—like that of Charlotte’s sisters and of
Helen Burns in Jane Eyre—, however painful, as something to thank God for,
and a means of encouraging other children to ‘seek the Lord’ and find
salvation. He is brilliantly satirised in Jane Eyre as the Revd Brocklehurst, one
of the many clergy that Charlotte Brontë sees as a whited sepulchre, a travesty
of true Christianity.
At the age of 15, Charlotte went to Roe Head boarding school in Mirfield
for a year and a half, and then returned as a teacher three years later. There she
again encountered Anglican clergymen who held similar Calvinist beliefs. Both
she and her sister Anne became depressed, largely as a result of brooding on
such beliefs, worrying during their adolescent years about their unworthiness
and the resulting eternal damnation. Fortunately they also met clergymen of
other persuasions: they were strongly influenced (in Anne’s case we might say
‘saved’) by the Moravians, especially the Revd James La Trobe who visited the
school and comforted Anne with his more humane message of the saving
grace of Christ. The Moravians were a small protestant denomination from
Europe that was well established in the Manchester area and who preached
the doctrine of Universal salvation.
This was a formative time for Charlotte. She was now nineteen and although
her employer Miss Wooler was kind, Charlotte was impatient, passionate and
constitutionally unsuited to teaching the uninterested daughters of the local
woollen manufacturers. Her mind was elsewhere, as it had been throughout
her childhood: focussed on her ‘silent, unseen land of thought’ 6 —the
imaginary kingdoms of Glass Town and Angria that we’re the creative
inspiration for her early writing. Her many stories, poems and plays (more in
quantity than all her novels combined) centred first on the Duke of
Wellington and then on his eldest son Arthur Wellesley, the Marquis of Duro,
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