SOURCE: Collins, Robert G. Introduction to The Hand of the Arch-Sinner: Two Angrian Chronicles of Branwell Brontë, edited by Robert G. Collins, pp. ix-xliii. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Collins offers a comprehensive introduction to two of Brontë's Angrian chronicles, The Life of … Northangerland and Real Life in Verdopolis, describing their inception among the tales of the Brontë children's “Great Glasstown Confederacy” and noting their emphasis on the figure of the Luciferian anti-hero.]

I only feel that every power—
And Thou hadst given much to me—
Was spent upon the present hour,
Was never turned, my God, to Thee;
That what I did to make me blest
Sooner or later changed to pain;
That still I laughed at peace and rest,
So neither must behold again.

8 August 1841.¹

To reduce a man's life to a chronology is, paradoxically, to leave everything—or nothing—to the imagination. For a century and a half, Patrick Branwell Brontë has been defined as absolutely as anyone associated with literature could conceivably be. However, his image to even the cultivated mind is certainly that of a literary character, a Dickensian grotesque, rather than of a complex personality who produced a body of creative work which might conceivably be interesting in itself. Branwell's influence on literature is, simply, that of a horrible example impressed to great effect on three gifted sisters. As phrased in a dubious tribute in the 1940s, a century after Branwell's death:

In due time, each in her own fashion and according to the light in which his personality and his actions were regarded was to set down her reactions in writings that stand today among their finest work. As a figure in literature Branwell was thus destined to play no mean part; not, indeed, the part he had been encouraged to hope for and believe in; yet a form of immortality not less secure for the exchange of role to that of pitiable, sordid, but undoubted inspiration.²

At about the same time that this was written, the most serious attention that had yet been accorded to the Brontës' early writings resulted in three books by the scholar Fanny Ratchford which appeared between 1933 and 1964. In The Brontës' Web of Childhood, Ratchford made great claims for the so-called Juvenilia as ‘the conclusive answer to most of the long-studied, much-discussed Brontë problems’. However, she then went on to declare: ‘They explode the myth of Branwell's mental endowments, showing that his earlier precocity held not a spark of genius and that his development ceased after his fifteenth or sixteenth year.’³

How complete a view Ratchford actually had of Branwell remains a question, but her conclusion was less original than she suggests. Long before, in his Charlotte Brontë and her Circle (1896), Clement Shorter had delivered a near-contemptuous dismissal of the Brontë son. Characteristically, the chapter of Shorter's work devoted to Branwell, rather than being a sampling of Branwell's own work, consists almost completely of excerpts from the later letters of Charlotte in which she bitterly complains of her brother. However, Shorter himself had, as an approved judgement on Branwell, Mrs Gaskell's authorized biography of Charlotte written some thirty-nine years before (in fact, Shorter edited a new edition of that biography in 1900). Thus, the standing view leads back in a straight line to Charlotte herself, who in those final three years of Branwell's life saw her brother succumb fully to despair and that despicable weakness of which she grew completely intolerant.

It was, of course, Charlotte who largely defined the family to her friend and subsequent biographer, Mrs Gaskell; Charlotte who at this time wrote the many letters to Ellen Nussey in which Branwell's disintegration is recorded; Charlotte who reported to Mr Williams, of Smith, Elder, her London publisher, the final days and hours of Branwell's life and the death that she defined as a welcome, if sad, blessing upon the weary family. But there had been twenty-eight years of life for Branwell before his dismissal from the Robinson family in 1845, in that clouded incident that propelled him finally and irretrievably into the darkness of opium and alcohol. And for at least half of those years, he wrote.

But the image of the lost soul quickly became fixed, and Branwell Brontë has had few defenders since that autumn of 1848 when, after three years of crushing personal agony, he became the first of the three young adult Brontës to die within an eight-month period. Often vilified, at best he has been damned with condescending pity as the weak-willed, drunkard brother of those tragically romantic heroines—Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—who burned with brief, brilliant accomplishment before being snuffed out by the iron hand of an impersonal fate. (There is, obviously, as much romance inserted in the Brontës' life as exists in their fiction.)

Such a dramatic view of destined end is, to be sure, a natural stimulus to myth, and fatality is the guiding element of what has become the Brontë legend: the myth of the lonely house in the remote northern reaches where three sisters of divine genius uttered their inspired thoughts together, while all around the darkness closed in. They have become priestesses through whose voices timeless spirits spoke briefly, all too briefly, as though a Shelleyesque veil had momentarily been lifted and Eternity had made itself manifest. In this legend, such intense power cracks its human vessel; with their mission fulfilled, the chosen spirits are drawn back to a truer, happier existence, while those of us who remain behind as readers in their timeless texts are witnesses, testifiers to the truth that has been ritually revealed.

But such a legend requires another presence in the house, Caliban to their collective Miranda, an earth-bound demon whose nature is that of the debasing flesh. Branwell is the faulty fourth vessel, flawed in the emotional fire of life just as they were refined and made beautiful by it. He is the element of pathos at the edge of the drama, by the contrast with which their greatness is known more immediately, the shining prince to whom great ability was attributed and on whom great deference was lavished—and wasted—for, with poetic justice, it is the shy sisters, the trio of Cinderellas, who are resplendent under their burlap. It is they who prove, through dramatic reversal, to be the true heiresses of a grand destiny. If life was not kind, the verdict of romanticized history is.

As for Branwell, what use does history have for him after that? He is, without question, the faltering weakling, the boy who never grew up, the golden lad turned into the contemptible 31 year-old failure who virtually took his own life, distraught over an unhappy love affair. In some literary Madame Tussaud's of the collective mind, he is forever staggering up the Parsonage lane, gin-soaked; he is the drug-crazed Branwell, hallucinating all night while his aged father lies, a haggard sleepless guardian, beside him. He has become rigidified as the human rubbish that Charlotte—that single-minded soul suddenly on the brink of the greatest personal success to be achieved by any one of the family—could scarcely bring herself to speak to for the last two years of his life, the lost brother whom Mrs Gaskell called ‘the bane of his sisters’ lives, and who, when she saw a piece of his writing, perplexed and astonished her by his mastery:

In a fragment of one of his manuscripts which I have read there is a justness and felicity of expression which is very striking. It is … drawn with much of the grace of characteristic portrait-painting in perfectly pure and simple language, which distinguishes so many of Addison's papers in the Spectator … But altogether the elegance and composure of style is such as one would not have expected from this vehement and ill-fated young man.⁴

She had, of course, never met Branwell, and her knowledge of him was derived chiefly from Charlotte's letters and directly from Charlotte during the visits they exchanged before the younger woman's death. In any event, Mrs Gaskell seems to say, as a wastrel Branwell should not have been such a good writer.

Obviously legends are made out of more than the figures in them—and less, also, for the figures must always be trimmed and shaped to fit the form which validates the legend. What need has the Brontë legend for such factual elements as that the author of Wuthering Heights, the romantically reclusive Emily, was apparently the most tolerant, forthright, and best-natured for the four Brontë children who lived to adulthood; that from mid-childhood until well into her adult life Charlotte wrote romances of adultery and emotional drama which match modern soap operas; that the father, Patrick Brontë, was a published poet and novelist of competence, if not genius, well before the children were born; that the entire family was extraordinarily interested and well-read in current politics and public affairs; that Branwell, in the surviving accounts of friends who knew him well, is everywhere described in warm and admiring terms; or that for a period of at least a dozen years, from early boyhood on, Branwell was an incredibly prolific writer, turning out hundreds of thousands of words of prose narrative, as well as poetry which has been misattributed to Emily because of its merit?

But legends and sympathetic reaction aside, the question remains as to whether Branwell is important only in relation to his gifted sisters, as a model for them of the pampered youth living at fever-pitch, the dissolute young man caught in the addiction of opium, alcohol, and self-pity. That Branwell, the abject failure, certainly did exist; at least there is considerable evidence supporting such a view of him. The testimony of Charlotte in the Gaskell biography and in her correspondence—indeed, Branwell's own letters—as well as the accounts of drinking-friends and observant neighbours verify that Branwell's addictions were deep-rooted and destructive, that he was every bit as much of a burden on the family as has been said. And fairness aside, there seems a rough poetic justice in the fact that the favoured son proves himself unworthy; without the romance in their personal lives that one might wish for them, the three sisters of genius seem to deserve a foil, if nothing else. And there is a sense of balance for a modern generation devoted to redressing the inequities of the past: as he failed, they rose; brother and sisters alike were touched with fatality, but theirs was triumph where his was failure.

None the less, the evidence establishes that Branwell was for many years the reverse of an idler. He wrote a great deal of both prose and poetry, by some counts more than all the published writings of his three sisters. As Winifred Gérin, the most reliable of a small number of generally unreliable biographers of Branwell, observed:

Of his vices and misfortunes, all too much has been written by his sisters' biographers. Everybody knows he drank, took opium, and wrote equally fluently with both hands—at times with both hands at once, and in moments of bravado in Greek with his right and in Latin with his left. Of the multiple and contradictory facets that made up his complex personality, however, very little has so far been made known.

And, as she also noted: ‘The greater part of Branwell's writings has remained unknown and even unsuspected by the general public.’⁵ Thirty years later the situation remains essentially the same.

It is probably best to begin with an admission. If what survives today is a clear indication, Branwell's writing, when forced into a comparison with that of his sisters, is inferior by almost all the traditional criteria with which we judge serious fiction. With regard to structure, drama, and psychological sensitivity, for instance, his work is easily criticized. Structure to him was relatively the same from the age of 12 or 13 until his death; it consisted of an apparently endless series of incidents detailing military and political battles, punctuated by riotous carousing. Drama took the form of restless action; flaring anger, morbid brooding, and brutal arrogance constantly recur in place of inner sensitivity. In short, Branwell chose to record the ego, which he not infrequently seemed to believe was the soul—although instinctively he treated it as the soul's curse; embodying it in the character who quickly assumed the central position in his writings.

And yet there are any number of striking scenes and memorable characters in his narratives. Rarely sentimental, although often melodramatic, frequently stirring in his tales of brutal conflict, often lyrical in his observation of landscape and nature generally, Branwell shares qualities with his sisters although he is a writer very different from them. Unlike Charlotte, Branwell did not write tales. His writings of passion, vaunting ambition, and war are the histories of an elaborate social myth, a fictional grid that turns Angria into England, Africa into the contesting powers of Europe, his ‘great men’ into the brutal barons of a feudal anarchy. Splendour, luxury, emotional hyperbole, and dissipation are everywhere present; the heroes—Northangerland and Zamorna—each are married at least three times and have additional mistresses. With Charlotte, he makes a world; unlike her, he did not write formal novels. He is, simply enough, the author of fictional chronicles. As such, his structure is understandably episodic and digressive rather than a formal shaping of an integral idea arising from the subject. If he is to any degree a novelist, it would have to be the picaresque form with which he is to be identified.

His most important work was a long, continuing biography of the fictional Alexander Percy, an amoral adventurer whose characteristics, appetites, and activities both explore and open out the range of the exotic romantic hero/anti-hero of the earlier nineteenth century. Known familiarly at an early point in the writings as Rougue (Rogue, in Charlotte's more orthodox spelling when she wrote about the same character), as his career unfolds Percy becomes established formally as Lord Viscount Elrington (Ellrington, to Charlotte), the Earl of Northangerland, and Prime Minister of Angria. In the later years, Northangerland is the name commonly used.

The most dramatic figure in the kingdom of Angria or, for that matter, in any of the so-called ‘Angrian writings’, he is also one of the most realistic of the Luciferian villain-heroes of the period. Created in full character by Branwell, Percy became, in the view of later biographers such as Daphne du Maurier and Winifred Gérin, a succubus who fed upon his master, a model of asserted will for which Branwell's own actual life could provide no parallel. He lived with that figure from his tenth year to the last desperate days of his life.

Moreover, it is evident from his very approach that Branwell became closely identified with his anti-hero long before he began to sign his own letters with the name of Northangerland. Because of this fascination with his fictional character, Branwell presents him as a gigantic figure caught in the toils of his own perversity. Since he thus tends to dominate Branwell's narratives, traditional structure is made irrelevant, for Northangerland lives for each passing day, frequently cursing the past and contemptuous of the future. In some ways, then, Branwell is a modernist who created an amoral protagonist making his existential way through life, literally creating in himself each new day, which would not otherwise exist. I am—therefore the world is.

On such grounds, then, one may approach Branwell's chronicles and find still alive in them the intense pressure of the youthful writer's own personality. All writers, but perhaps children in particular, necessarily present images towards which they are by their nature drawn, which their mind has first invented and regarded. Just as, in the early pages of the novel, plain Jane Eyre emerged as a rebellious child from the Red Room, imbued indelibly with Charlotte Brontë's independence and integrity, so Alexander Percy, however grown in height over his youthful amanuensis, utters his words of disdain and shakes his fist to the dark heavens which Branwell himself thus defies. As a projection of Branwell, Alexander Percy is of some immediate intrinsic interest to us, of course, since he rages against the limitations of this world and finally stands, like all creatures of ruin, as a metaphor for the limitations of the stalwart individual confronted by indifference, hostility, or persecution. Jane Eyre is a success in part because Charlotte Brontë, in her writing, grew out of herself into the finer, most purposeful, more ideal human personality realized in Jane. Alexander Percy, on the other hand, while taller and more powerful physically than Branwell, is less than him, only a part of him, and that not necessarily the better part; a literary character, unlike Charlotte's Jane he is not made more fundamentally human, but is rather a warped part of a man, an exemplar of the destructive impulse, the defiance, even hatred, of the involuted ego towards anything that would restrain it in any way.

None the less, some of the fascination that such a figure had for Branwell is transferred to us, for the man who will not serve and is indomitable, whatever force is applied against him, is more than a curiosity. He has deep roots in us, however ashamedly we disavow them; while we probably dislike Alexander Percy, we do not have the contempt for him that, through the literary relationship, we suspect he feels for us. He is the outlaw, the anarchist, the despoiler, the unnatural father, the taker of women, the man of unrestrained appetite, who respects and concedes little and fears nothing. Like Lucifer, he is the arch-revolutionary; he will not serve.

But Branwell himself gets caught in Pandemonium; he has no god greater than himself to bring him out of the pit. Having created an Antichrist in his own image, he becomes locked inside the figure. Consider those late letters to Joseph Leyland or John Brown, the former begging an hour's company and signed Northangerland, the latter pleading pathetically for gin on credit even as his life shortens to weeks. He has created himself as a Hindley Earnshaw—one might have said a Heathcliff, except for the fact that Emily's protagonist, raging egoist that he is, still yields to one power greater than his solitary self, that of the passion of profound love. (In contrast, Percy's great love for his second wife Mary becomes nothing more than intensified bitterness when she dies. This loss may, as Branwell suggests, help to explain his contempt for all other creatures, but unlike Heathcliff, Alexander Percy sees his dead beloved as Lear regards the just-murdered Cordelia—dead, dead, dead.)

Branwell's fiction lacks traditional structure, then, because the familiar interplay of negative and positive values is not present in it; there can be no resolution, only a succession of encounters. As such, his narratives are at odds with the highly structured and largely domestically pointed English novels of the mid-nineteenth century, and find little place among them. However, as chronicles of a particular sort they resemble certain aspects of twentieth-century fiction, those works of encounter and strung-together incident out of which is created the life-progress of an individual as a series of events which encapsulate chance and fatality, and so deny order.

Certainly it is too much to say that Branwell Brontë consciously sought such a definition. His work, however, is composed along precisely such lines; his life-view was involuted in a similar way, and it may be that a modern reader can follow his narratives with a greater appreciation of character regarded for its own sake than traditional literary critics might believe. In fact, Emily Brontë's masterpiece shares some of the same characteristics; despite the double frame mechanism as a device for getting the story told, the story itself is the chronicle of a thirty-year-long fatal relationship containing much of the same feverish exchange of self-centred passion which characterized Branwell's fiction. But without that equal intensity of personality which dramatically links Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, Branwell's work seems to lack an end, a destination.

This is not to say that there is no contest present, for underlying all the Juvenilia is the complex love-hate relationship of Percy and Arthur Wellesley, Northangerland and Zamorna. But despite the tens of thousands of words lavished on it by Branwell and Charlotte within the early work, the Northangerland-Zamorna relationship is never made clear; nor is it resolved—to the end it remains the continuing struggle of two gigantic personalities caught on the same ground. Charlotte retained the essentials of it, of course, and refined it in the successive contests of will which Jane Eyre, William Crimshaw, Lucy Snowe, and the two heroines of Shirley each successfully undergo. (Interestingly, while Charlotte and Branwell each wrote about both Northangerland and Zamorna, Charlotte's picture of her ideal hero tends to darken in the later accounts; she makes Zamorna closer to Northangerland in ruthlessness and egoism. Yet Branwell, in The Life of … Northangerland, actually makes Percy evolve into a lost soul for us, while Charlotte simply changes her attitude towards Zamorna from the earlier to the later figure, as can be seen in the more sentimental ‘Marian Hume’ writings when compared with the later ‘Elizabeth Hastings’, episodes where Zamorna is treated as a cliché womanizer.) But Branwell was to make no greater use of the emotional exercises of the Juvenilia, and it is on this material that we must judge him.

Although the ‘Angrian’ writings of the Brontës were, in fact, a body of material that was added to well into their twenties (in Branwell's case, perhaps, up to within the last year of his life), casual readers of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are apt to think of these writings as a charming, rainy-day activity shared by four talented children. The miniature books on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, looking like dummy volumes in the library of a doll's house, reinforce that view. Their contents, since they are largely illegible to the unaided eye, do not intrude on their charm; they strike one as the artefacts of play, much like Branwell's famous toy soldiers. However, such a sentimental impression is a far cry from the larger part of the actual narrative content of the so-called Juvenilia, which has come to be known synonymously, if somewhat inaccurately, as the Angrian writings. The word ‘Angria’ is traceable to a pirate kingdom on the Malabar coast of the Indian Ocean, long forgotten today but famous for its successes at the end of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth century; it took its name from its founder, Kanhoji Angria, an Indian admiral who organized a powerful pirate fleet which for many years not even the European powers could defeat, a corsair who reared a city state which became legendary in its wealth.

Actually, the kingdom of Angria itself was a late development for the Brontës as writers. Branwell created it in 1834, when Charlotte was almost 18 and he was nearing 17. Emily, 16 that year, and Anne, a year younger, at the same time created a kingdom of their own, Gondal. Since that name, coincidentally, is taken from a plateau in the central part of India, they may well have chosen it in part through Branwell's influence; in any event, the coincidence of characters' names in the Angrian and Gondalian writings is quite striking. Anne and Emily's early pieces of prose fiction have not survived. Over the five years preceding this split of fictional territories, however, the four young Brontës had written a great many tales centring on ‘the Great Glasstown Confederacy’, an associated group of kingdoms, each with its own capital and ruler but with a common capital city and parliament in Verdopolis. The fictional founders were English soldiers and explorers; the setting, that of coastal western Africa, the topography of which the Brontës were acquainted with, partly from travel books and geographies, partly from their current reading in Blackwood's and other magazines.

In time, in their own tales they transformed the landscape and climate to that of England. As early-nineteenth-century English children, they had been reared to see Africa not as an integral foreign culture so much as an extended England, a base for a transplanted English society. A study of the periodicals read by the Brontës at this time reveals that articles on the colonial experience, the founding of capital cities and government buildings in such places as Sierra Leone, and the opportunities for fortunes to be made and personal distinction recognized and given free rein were all extremely popular. Imperialism, in one sense, meant the transfer and expansion of English institutions; in short, making the world English. Consequently, there is not too much of the exotic fairy-tale in these so-called ‘juvenile’ writings. In fact, after the first few years what little fantasy element there is will more often be found in Charlotte's work rather than that of Branwell.

Simply stated, the stories tell of an English society, colonial but independent, building a parliamentary monarchy and beset by certain wars and revolutions, into which elements of current European history are laced. Most of the interaction is between the aristocracy and their respective followers of the adjacent states which make up the Confederacy. Many of the confrontations take place in parliament; much of the intrigue occurs in gaming-rooms or in city streets; the wars which erupt are composed of battles that take place on realistic sites—as in the famous ‘Massacre at Dongola’—transposed from such recent events as the Ashanti Wars or the Peninsular Campaign.

The rulers in the earlier of these writings were objects of youthful hero-worship. In several cases they were drawn from actual contemporary public figures, such as Arthur Wellesley, better known historically as the Duke of Wellington, and his two sons, Arthur and Charles Wellesley, as well as from the celebrated explorers, William Edward Parry and Sir John Ross (all of whom, ironically, outlived Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë). Some of the Angrian characters were composite figures, whose names were drawn from literature, as in the case of Percy, or were phonetic echoes of actual persons (for example, the name Elrington), while some were simple descriptive names which clearly survived from childhood into the adult writings (such as Sneaky, or Sneachi, as it is variously spelled). In fact, the associated kingdoms of the Verdopolitan Confederacy are an empire; to spend much time in the great mass of surviving manuscript, particularly that of Branwell, is to realize quickly that it represents a fictional reproduction of the imagined political life of the United Kingdom itself, fraught with the scheming and intrigue of Shakespeare's history plays, with an added heavy emphasis on the more modern contest between republican and conservative views, as well as the logic behind the extension of empire.

Further, except for certain of the wars (and even these have a distinctly modern-European character), the natives are not very much dealt with, since the imagination of the Brontës was not stimulated by the exotic reality of Asia and black Africa for its own sake to any great extent.⁶ Rather, it was a form of realism, a freshly invented European or (even more specifically) British culture that they chose to work with; a world familiar but new, in which they created a society notable for its political manipulation, avaricious greed, ruthless and reckless contest between powerful personalities, and—related to the latter—invariably unhappy romantic love relationships. Within this society the basic philosophical conflict is between anarchy and order, republicans and royalists, individual ego and social responsibility, liberal and conservative, with the authors apparently coming down on the latter side in each case. None the less, both Charlotte and Branwell were fascinated by (and demonstrated at length) the attractiveness of the rebel figure. As noted, for Branwell, less conservative than his sister, the larger-than-life arch-sinner becomes a lonely world unto himself. This is the subject that lies at the core of their narratives, the ruined Lucifer, the title figure of one of Branwell's better-known poems (1836), hurtled down to the dark wasteland, unconquered from without but victim of his own nature. It is an image which had become a living concept for Branwell by his adolescence.

Traditionally, the Brontë legend has as its first chapter the magical story of Branwell's toy soldiers, the incident which is said to have released the great flow of creativity in the four young Brontës. The story is told by Branwell himself in one of his early Glasstown manuscripts, as well as by Charlotte in a separate account. In 1826, when Branwell was 9, his father went to Leeds on a trip and returned late at night. He brought back a present for the boy, a box of twelve toy soldiers. Far from being a first set, they represented a supplement to an older one, which by then was battered and incomplete. It was not Christmas but, as Branwell carefully dates it, 5 June. Next morning he called his sisters from their beds to see his new figures. Each of the girls was allowed to select one, which became her soldier and for which she chose a name, although they were to remain his possessions. (Soon after, he gave each sister full ownership of her chosen figure.) Charlotte named hers ‘Wellington’; Branwell, significantly, named his favourite ‘Buonaparte’. These effigies became the Twelve Adventurers—later, the ‘Twelves’—the focus of a series of childhood games of a dramatic and then a literary nature, an imaginative extension of the recent Napoleonic wars, which had been the greatest public concern of the earlier part of the century and, in the years following, a particularly strong and continuing interest for all of the Brontë household, in which the icons of Wellington and Nelson gave way only to that of God himself. In a family headed by a father whose greatest secular interests were literature and military matters—Patrick Brontë had wavered between a career in the Church or the army, and all his life retained an interest in military ordnance—the Brontë children began writing at length, creating adventures involving the heroic figures from whom the soldiers had been named.

First they began with games—called ‘plays’—such as the ‘Play of the Islanders’ which Charlotte subsequently dated to 1827. Initially their heroes were known as the ‘Young Men’; Branwell's 1830 account of the ‘History of the Young Men’, while not the first reference, lays out in detail much of the foundation of the Glasstown saga. Composed of elements drawn from contemporary explorations, such as those of Mungo Park in Africa, and the Blackwood's Magazine accounts of the arctic explorers Parry and Ross, there were intermingled references drawn from the Arabian Nights and Aesop's Fables. The four Brontë children, for example, created themselves as Genii, the immense creatures who built Verdopolis at a stroke. The toys themselves were soon ignored; a few years later, Branwell wrote that the actual effigies had already disappeared. However, they had served their purpose; they had been the catalyst that unlocked a world of inspired imagination, a taste for heroic activity and profound emotion. The story of the toy soldiers is a beguiling one, and therein lies its danger, for such guile leads us down the garden path. These soldiers were not operetta sentimentalists.

Since almost all of the succeeding manuscripts, including many of the later years, were written in an extremely minute hand, which does not always yield readily even to modern magnification, only scholars in modern times have read at length in them. When first written by Branwell and his sisters, the narratives apparently were read aloud, probably selectively, by the individual authors to one or more of the others. However, they were certainly kept as a secret between the four younger Brontës; in many hundreds of letters to Ellen Nussey, sometimes on what was practically a daily basis, Charlotte never divulged the fact of their existence. If their father ever read them it would logically have been only after Charlotte's death, when he was in his eighties, and since he had serious problems with his eyesight for much of his later life this seems unlikely, although not impossible. Charlotte's brief marriage meant that the Reverend Arthur Bell Nichols, her husband, became custodian of all the family papers after her death, and had forty years in which to read them before selling most of them to T. J. Wise in the last years of the nineteenth century. Most certainly he would have glanced at the manuscripts; he may well have read in them at length. However, such solitary acquaintance would be largely inconsequential except for the possibility that, if he did read Branwell's manuscript material carefully, he would very probably have destroyed any amount of it out of kindness to the memory of the unfortunate youth. It is clear that Branwell's writings would have seemed both immoral and anti-religious to Charlotte's husband and Patrick Brontë, when one considers that many of the passages in the pages still left to us have been described in such terms by critics of our own time. Even Charlotte, youthful free-thinker that she was in her Angrian writings, in her mature years had become more religiously conservative, as is evident in both The Professor and Villette, as well as in the Gaskell biography. As recorded in her letters, she regarded with condemnation what she not unreasonably viewed as her brother's atheism, and was relieved, if not forgiving, when he apparently prayed on his deathbed.

Their writings for the first few years are adolescent, if not childish. However, by about 1833 the manuscripts of Branwell and Charlotte fall into a very different pattern than might be expected. Now young adults, their interests are those of serious political conflict and personal emotions, tied to the archetypal heroic figures who have attracted them for most of their lives. They are writing fictional history now, but it is not that of a remote period. On the contrary, it is history foreshortened, crammed into a forty- or fifty-year period, with the costume element eliminated and with all of the characters of this history still very immediate in their interest. The Anglo-African nations of the Confederacy evolve even as the model-soldier figurines of their childhood fade into august personages, who retire to the rear of the drama as two younger generations successively occupy centre-stage.

Increasingly, too, while the characters and the overall story-line are common to both Branwell and Charlotte, the protagonists of his manuscripts are more often Alexander Percy and his sons, while the central male figure in Charlotte's tales is most often Arthur Augustus Adrian Wellesley, the Duke of Zamorna and Emperor of Angria, son-in-law of Percy. Wellesley is, of course, a more conventional hero; in the Angrian chronicles he assumes the role of the historical Duke of Wellington, becoming his own father as the saviour of Europe in defeating the anti-monarchical menace of Napoleon. He returns to the kingdom of Wellington's Land, in the Anglo-African empire, where he summarily demands of parliament in recognition of his services to them the vast undeveloped lands to the east which will then be known as Angria. The Duke of Zamorna receives his kingdom much as, say, Marlborough had received Blenheim and large estates from a grateful nation, or as large tracts of land in the American wilderness had been granted to aristocrats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, Zamorna overcomes the opposition on this occasion largely through the support of the powerful Northangerland, now his father-in-law and subsequently prime minister of Angria.

Writing continuously after 1834, it would seem, Branwell and Charlotte rapidly developed Angria as a mighty nation in its own right, with large and elegant cities and a Byzantine political situation. Zamorna's life, detailed by Charlotte, is a mixture of firm and wise government, accented by a series of sensual encounters, legitimate and otherwise, with various beauties from the Verdopolitan aristocracy, and climaxing in the civil wars raised against him by Northangerland. In Charlotte's hands the romances, the emotional consequences, the tragic realization of love and death are recounted over and over, much of it through the eyes of the several women who are romantically related to Zamorna and, to a lesser extent, Northangerland.

Branwell's chronicles are made of more brutal stuff, as is his chief character, Alexander Percy. In the six volumes of Letters of an Englishman, written between 1830 and 1832 (the manuscripts of which are in the Leeds University Brotherton Collection), Branwell details Percy's role as a destroyer of civil peace, the revolutionary architect of a civil war that rocks the Verdopolitan Confederacy. Executed at the end of that early work, Percy is revived and goes on to a career as an outlaw and general rogue. By 1834, with the establishment of the new nation of Angria, Percy, now generally known as Northangerland in his middle-age and grown publicly respectable in the role of chief minister to the emperor, is none the less the same man as the early atheist intellectual, the pirate, the compulsive gambler, the rapacious cattle-dealer, the adulterer, the seducer and betrayer of countless women, the master of and rallying-point for all the thieves, swindlers, and republicans of the nation. He is cursed as always with a compulsion towards power and the inability to defer to anyone, even the monarch he helped to create and towards whom he always has a sinister advisory role. Inevitably he reverts to the role of the Dark Archangel, crying havoc as leader of the anarchic Republican faction. In what must be regarded as the dramatic high point of Angrian history, he raises a mighty rebellion and at first succeeds, to the point of making Zamorna a fugitive. In a significant episode, however, Percy secretly arranges for Zamorna to escape just as his followers are about to execute the defeated monarch; always there exists between the older and the younger man a bond of fused love and hatred.

As The Life of … Northangerland and Real Life in Verdopolis clearly show, Alexander Percy, throughout his long career, from early years through jaded middle-age, is a classic demagogue. In this, too, the echo of the Council in Hell in Paradise Lost reverberates. Branwell, in his time, was not alone in seeing demagoguery as a manipulative device commonly employed by the rebels and destroyers of history, and in being thrilled by it. Democracy, as a growing force, always seemed to be the fine face of demagoguery; in this view, the leader of the mob is perforce a powerful personality who uses lesser men by natural right. At that, Branwell's Percy is not the least effective of his species. His role as head of a group of scoundrels, most of whom are lifelong associates, is one he has inherited from his even more dissolute, but less effective, father, the first Edward Percy. (Subsequently Alexander Percy's own oldest son, disowned by him, is also an Edward Percy.) As a law unto themselves, the Percy men have been violent and rebellious back to their first appearance in the north of England, before Shakespeare spoke of them.

Reminiscent of an eighteenth-century Hellfire Club in many ways, the present Northangerland group is as unprincipled a collection of individualists and quarrelsome scoundrels as might be imagined (Branwell knew his Peregrine Pickle and other Smollett novels very well). The gang follows Northangerland because he exceeds any one of them in ferocity, drinking capacity, womanizing, and contempt for authority. Sharing both his good fortune and his bad, they display not so much loyalty as a bond of interwoven crime, a common conviction that scoundrels must hang together or they will assuredly hang separately. Over the years, the members of Percy's party are always out for vile pleasures and the main chance; they amass considerable wealth through cattle speculation, piracy, highway robberies and hijacking of goods, and manipulation of public funds and political interests; but they throw away as much again in endless gaming, drinking, sexual debauchery, conspicuous waste, and over-reaching. These are the ‘rare lads’ who appear repeatedly in the Angrian chronicles.

Paradoxically, however, most members of Alexander Percy's personal guard are themselves professional men and, in fact, make up the wealthier elements of Angrian society. With their great mansions and frequently ruinous gambling activities, they exist just one step below the great titled aristocracy, most of whom are entrenched royalists, loyal first to Wellington and then to Zamorna, and thus natural opponents of the opportunistic adventurers led by Northangerland. An exception to this, the Earl of Caversham, one of the few old titles in Percy's company, is a particularly unsavoury figure, who for brief financial gain conspires without hesitation in the murder of his oldest friend, Alexander Percy's father.⁷ Caversham and Jeremiah Simpson, the usurer (and, known in other writings as Macterrorglen, a revolutionary commander), were early cronies of the first Edward Percy, who as an adventurer on the run had established the Percy family line in Anglo-Africa. Several others—Hector Montmorency, Arthur O'Connor, George Gordon—are the sons of early companions of the elder Percy. Thus the posse comitatus that Alexander Percy heads throughout most of Branwell's chronicles is, in large part, shown to be an inheritance from his father. Actually, the word ‘inheritance’ is inadequate, for a received curse would more accurately describe what operates in Alexander Percy's life.

In two major elements of earlier nineteenth-century Romanticism, Branwell is not only a man of his age but a particularly intense voice of it. He shares with greater poets such as Byron the concept of the extraordinary man and the ‘received curse’, the latter deriving from the solitary role, the alienation, which the former, the ego, inevitably imposes; these two psychological elements constantly recur in his narrative. They are, in fact, represented in a curiously intertwined way at the dramatic level.

From an early age Branwell was an extensive reader, steeped in Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge drama, as well as in classical literature with its sense of a curse as an expression of fatality. This notion accorded well with his own dramatic sense of life, since it confirmed the special identity of the self. The contempt of Byron's Manfred for all other beings except the object of his fatal love, or—from the same poet—the Gaiour's single-minded revenge for the loss of his beloved and his subsequent withdrawal from the world, is not dissimilar to Alexander Percy's brooding upon the loss of his second wife and regarding the rest of the world with hatred thereafter—except, of course, for the art that went into each work. But the Brontë Milton was also an extremely well-thumbed volume (the hand-annotated copy still exists). Like Blake and many others, Branwell took the romantic view of the dark angel. The figure of Lucifer as a first principle of rebellion against law touches upon basic religious myth and explains man in contest with his God, as well as—and again this is seen in Byron—the three successive ‘falls’,⁸ in the third of which Cain through envy introduces violence and murder to the world. The three stages are necessary, one to the other. As a principle of pride and rebellion, Lucifer is the incarnation of a curse engendered by man's fateful indomitability, human courage carried to the heavens, which itself is linked to his unhappy destiny by its false promise of a self-determined destiny. Lucifer has many minions—those who live by him are gathered unto him, in an involuted form of the good man's relationship to his God—and it is these emissaries of Lucifer who represent the tempters and deceivers, the figures of Mephistopheles pretending to serve the dissatisfied Fausts of the world.

But for Branwell, interestingly, the curse is first dramatically manifested in its ugliness. The demon is scarcely disguised. Throughout Branwell's chronicles the avatar of sin and death is Percy's mentor and familiar spirit, the repulsive old Yorkshireman Robert Patrick King, better known as 'Sdeath.⁹ Effectively, the figure of 'Sdeath is the embodiment of the curse on Alexander Percy and, though less interestingly, his father before him. One is reminded of the figure of Gil-Martin, a much more sophisticated demonic familiar in the The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg, a Blackwood's writer for whom Branwell had the highest regard (and whom, in a well-known letter to Blackwood's, written when he was 18 on the occasion of Hogg's death, he praised fulsomely as the author who had had the greatest shaping influence on his life). Where Hogg has the antinomian protagonist of his novel create the demon in his own image through his damning of mankind generally—Gil-Martin, whose features reflect the successive victims of hatred, begins as pleasing and handsome but eventually becomes a repulsive mirror-image of Robert Wringhim—Branwell has 'Sdeath as both the shaping tutor to, and the mocking tool of, his master. The role of the grand sinner, however, is reserved for Alexander Percy himself; it is he who corrupts others, having been first corrupted himself; it is he who begins, like Milton's Lucifer, to show the marks of his degradation, a ruined archangel who has debased himself.

In contrast, 'Sdeath is a principle of evil. While withered and repulsive, he stands outside time, at least on a human scale. When beaten, as appropriate to a foul thing, he cannot be killed. Already described as an old man when he originally becomes the attendant of the first Edward Percy in that man's dissolute youth, he emigrates to Africa with him, pandering to his master's vicious whims always. A constant source of Biblical quotation in mocking fashion, the devil quoting scripture, the old man will later be echoed, radically reduced in importance, in the figure of the vicious old retainer, Joseph, in Wuthering Heights. In Branwell's Life of … Northangerland, 'Sdeath names himself as tutor to the small boy Alexander Percy, encouraging the child's wilfullness and rudely displacing Sergeant Bud, here shown as a cultivated, intelligent, and responsible figure who henceforth has no influence whatsoever over Alexander's moral life. Subsequently 'Sdeath is the murderer of his old master, Edward Percy, whose murderous tool he has long been (the sword that Percy has lived by), as well as of Alexander Percy's first wife, Augusta, who is first admired extravagantly by 'Sdeath for her resoluteness in crime. He remains the vicious tool and counsellor in villainy all through Alexander Percy's youth and middle age. At that time, 'Sdeath, a centenarian at least by any reckoning, is still practising his trade of assassin and evil messenger, still exhorting Alexander Percy—and spouting Biblical injunctions, since no one is a more obvious believer than the devil himself.

The heart of any Faustian legend is, of course, the infernal demon as willing tool; as such, he makes it possible for the protagonist to sin mightily. In a symbolic lending of his demonic powers, he makes the victim extraordinary but thereby also enmeshes him inextricably. In short, such a devil serves only in order to conquer in the end; the devotion of 'Sdeath to his ‘master’ is that of the demon who cherishes the victim he corrupts, for the very sake of the growing corruption. Correspondingly, the ostensible master of such a tool abhors him as demon increasingly, even as he is more and more completely dependent on him. It is this aspect of the relationship to which James Hogg devoted the later part of the Private Memoirs and Confessions.

However, it is in the early life of Alexander Percy that 'Sdeath as demonic principle is defined explicitly for us by Branwell. The incarnation of evil, seen in its most unvarnished and repulsive form, 'Sdeath none the less cannot be dismissed. As the Devil himself, he is the true father of a possessed Northangerland. The following exchange from The Life of … Northangerland is far too purposeful to be taken as banter:

‘It's a braw cheild that doesn't know its own feyther. Thawrt greeting [weeping] to part wi' thy Daddie [Edward Percy], Aw guess, and doesn't know that here he is beside thee, and, lad, that thaw can nivver part wi' him, eh?’

‘I think you are the Devil’, shouted Alexander. …

‘And Aw am’, he shouted in return. ‘And thaw's made war' guesses nor that, and Aw made falser answers, too.’

[Later, on departing, he says] ‘Goid neight t'ye, my Son.’

‘And eternal night to you, Old Satan’, exclaimed Alexander.

If God is the merciful Father of the redeemed, Satan conversely is the merciless progenitor of the sinner. Embodying intrigue, corruption, betrayal, and murder, he is both necessary to Alexander Percy and an object of his hatred. Evil having its own immortality, on the several occasions when he is shot or otherwise violently attacked by Percy, he reappears shortly after, more hideous for his ugly wounds but grinning mockingly as he takes his accustomed place, which is never then denied to him. In short, parallel to, but the reverse of that between Percy and Zamorna, there is a special kind of love-hate relationship between Percy and 'Sdeath; even as the former is himself seen as a towering Lucifer, he abhors the contemptible figure of his most devoted underling.

What Branwell seems to suggest through the 'Sdeath figure is a projection of evil which is also a reflection of self. 'Sdeath is, so to speak, the evil deed, while Percy is Lucifer, tormented by his own self-love. Milton's Satan is primarily treated as ‘the adversary’; he remains Lucifer in Branwell's hands, is himself a victim, damned through a monstrous ego that cannot accept restraint and which in time makes opposition his own reason for existence, yet writhes in a horrible suffering, too. Interestingly, in Branwell's earlier story ‘The Pirate’ (1833) Alexander Percy tries to kill 'Sdeath:

Rougue [Percy] crying, ‘I have done with thee, thou wretch’, took the ugly heap of mortality and hurled it into the sea. When it touched the water a bright flash of fire darted from it, changed it into a vast genius of immeasurable and indefinable height and size, and seizing hold of a huge cloud with his hand, he vaulted into it, crying: ‘And I've done with thee, thou fool’ and disappeared among the passing vapours.

Ere he departed, three vast flashes of fire came bursting and round them were the Chief Genii Talli, Emmi, Anni; he that ere this [was] the little hideous old man was the Chief Genius and Branni.¹⁰

The dramatization of Branwell and his sisters as ‘Geniuses’—in the Arabian Nights' sense of the jinni, a nature spirit or tutelar deity—went back to the enactment of fanciful scenarios leading out from the inspiration given them by the episode of the twelve toy soldiers. What is astonishing here, given his lifelong use of old 'Sdeath as the embodiment of evil, is Branwell as author deliberately identifying himself with the repulsive figure, with the principle of the demonic. In an obviously Manichean twist, he unites the evil 'Sdeath with the ‘Chief Genius’ or ruling power. Thus, he himself is both Percy and 'Sdeath alternately. Also, there is particular interest in the fact that Branwell linked his sisters, as writers, to the evil figure, even as he made himself synonymous with him in a psychological fusion of seducer and victim, of the pure and the impure, of the damned and the innocent. Unquestionably the writer is pouring his complex characterization out of himself, but Branwell would begin his seventeenth year shortly, and was no longer playing with supernaturalism for its own sake. Certainly Charlotte, and probably all three of the girls, heard this tale from Branwell and would seem to have accepted it casually. Whatever the limitations of ‘The Pirate’ as straightforward adventure narrative, it was an integral part of the Percy saga, of which Charlotte was writing tandem versions along with Branwell at this time.

For Branwell, as for Byron before him, the Pirate figure is very important. It becomes an avatar of the Luciferian figure in the actual world of physical strife and contest, a world where men are not saved by sentiment. While much has been said concerning the influence of the Byronic hero on the Brontës generally, it is probably equally true to say that the Pirate figure was a parallel influence on first Byron and then Branwell, for ‘the Pirate’ was a real identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He was not simply lawless, but a law unto himself, the ruler of his own personality, in a world where all other men were lesser creatures and his authority was absolute. The island of Madagascar in the eighteenth century was divided into pirate principalities, for example. The original Angria, the Malabar pirate Kanhoji Angria, whose principality was named after himself, is more striking yet. But his kingdom fell, too, in time. The curse on such figures is the ancient one of rivalling the Godhead, and damnation is the price paid. It is, surely, a situation fascinating to the mind of a dreaming youth.

Daphne du Maurier has written an interesting modern account of Branwell Brontë's life on the guiding theory that he was early enslaved by the ‘infernal world’. In fact, the very designation was a descriptive phrase used by Charlotte and Branwell, even when they were adults, to refer to their imaginary empire; they referred to it also as ‘the nether world’ and saw it as a place of enchantment, with themselves as the enchanted. Hogg (whose Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was published only six years before Branwell wrote his ‘History of the Young Men’ and ‘Tales of an Englishman’) had suggested that Satan could usurp one's body and thus carry out any excess, any evil, of which the soul of the self could be supposedly innocent. If God could descend into one's body and inform it with the sweetness of grace, then the opposite could hold true, as the Manichean view assumed. It is a thrilling notion but, too long played with, perhaps a dangerous one.

Admittedly, a fascination with the demonic, which is the flamboyant element of the spiritual, is natural to imaginative children, and the Brontë sisters were also gripped by it. But Branwell moved farther afield than his sisters for, as noted earlier, from some time in his boyhood he became a purposeful atheist. Living recurrently in his father's parsonage throughout his life, from the age of 15 he apparently ceased to be a regular church-goer. At the time of Aunt Branwell's death, when all of the girls were away from Haworth and he was there as the sole mourner with his aged father, it was remarked among the parishioners that he had not been in the church for several years preceding.

But if one is an atheist, all activity reduces to relative values and impulses. Simply put, at one end there is the social benefit of the many, which requires a subordination of self in the name of common love, symbolized by Christ, who represents the victim as hero. At the opposite end, though, is the assertion and enhancement of the individual, the egoist who will not serve, represented in myth as Lucifer and in human history as the hero of self-determining action, or the extraordinary man. Christ as selfless love, Lucifer as rampant ego; these symbolic values probably transcend orthodox religion sufficiently for us today. That they did so a hundred and fifty years ago for a youthful atheist surrounded by traditional religion is doubtful.

Branwell's lifelong fascination with the figure of Lucifer is well known. His first acquaintance with his close friend Joseph Leyland followed hard on an exhibition sponsored by the Northern Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts at Leeds in the summer of 1834, in which one of the outstanding pieces was Leyland's gigantic bust of Satan. (There is a significant coincidence in the fact that among Leyland's few surviving pieces is a life-size relief medallion of Branwell in profile.) As mentioned earlier, the Brontë family copy of Milton's Paradise Lost was a basic text for the children, and like many of their books was freely annotated by them with observations and questions. The poetry of Branwell, recently collected, is filled with Lucifer poems, linked with Northangerland and himself. The romance of Lucifer, for Blake or Byron or Branwell Brontë, is easy to chart, for it accorded very well with the times and the expectations of late Romantic and early Victorian world-views, a world of early industrialism, colonialism, and exploding energy. For the young pre-Victorians, the dynamic myth told them that the world was there before them for the taking if only they were indomitable enough, if only they dared to be as great as they could be, if only they chose to be the extraordinary man.

The importance of this figure for an understanding of Branwell's writing cannot be over-emphasized, for in his chronicles and particularly in the extraordinary man, Alexander Percy, one clearly sees both the attraction of the rampant individualist for Branwell and his own eventual tragedy as it developed from that attraction, and is recorded in a poem such as his ‘Azrael, or Destruction's Eve’:

We say that He, the Almighty God
That framed Creation with a nod,
His wondrous work so well fulfilled
That—in an hour—it All rebelled!—
That though He loves our race so well
He hurls our spirits into Hell—
That though He says the world shall stand
Eternal—perfect—from His hand,
He is just about to whelm it o'er
With utter ruin—evermore!—

(85-98)

'Away with all such phantasies!—
Just trust your reason and your eyes!—
Believe that God exists when I
Who, here—this hour—His name deny,
Shall bear a harder punishment
Than those whose knees to Him have bent.
Believe that He can rule above
          When you shall see Him rule below;
Believe that He's the God of love
          When He shall end His children's woe …

(103-12)

A Thought for Earth far more beseems
          Than childish gazing at the skies.
          'Tis Earth—not Heaven—shall shortly rise;
'Tis Man—not God—shall soon avenge;
          And if there be a paradise
We'll bring it in the coming change!—

(125-30)

But, not surprisingly, out of this serviceable rationalist verse comes a final view that is destructive, even cataclysmic. Azrael, we remember, is the destroyer, the Angel of Death, and as he drinks with his own familiar, Moloch—‘just a simple glass of wine | Will drive the demon power of evil | To his and our good lord, the Devil! | Come, drink this draft and—feel divine!’—he plots the overthrow of Heaven. ‘So—when Lord Azrael saw the wide | Commencing waste assume its form, | Grim Gladness buoyed his heart—.’¹¹

In this and other works of Branwell there stirs the Luciferian urge towards power, power over men and power over things which, some decades later, would be manifest in the development of the dynamo for Henry Adams or in the philosophy of Nietzsche. But there was no such singleness of thought for Branwell or Northangerland, no system of belief, only the emotional impulses of an undirected and over-stored mind.

Time has edited the great Romantic thinkers, of course, to accommodate the subsequent growth of egalitarianism, which in any event had its roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But a fiery poetic attack on prevailing institutions and monarchical privilege, as uttered by Shelley or Byron, is far from being a belief in undifferentiated equality. The great dream of the Romantic artist was not based on democratic anonymity but on the heroic individual who would assault injustice; it envisioned the shattering of traditional barriers to allow the uninhibited fulfilment of the naturally extraordinary person. This view celebrates freedom as the release of personality to accomplish its greatest individual destiny. Emerging democracy for the general, as manifested, say, in the new American proletarian, was a mental and, literally, a social disease which was little approved as a practical reality by most serious thinkers. This was the age of Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, of Emerson's Representative Men, of history composed of larger-than-life figures leaving footprints in the sands of time. From 1750 to 1850, certainly, the greatest writers of the time call for a meritocracy but not for the unrestrained democracy we are apt to think of today. It is worth remembering that most educated Europeans thought of the French Revolution as a bloodbath, and the reactionary Napoleon was the most popular figure in Europe as emperor. Republicanism went wrong when it was taken over by the great unwashed; they properly remained the raw mass they had always been, but the use of them as a means towards enlightened power by the worthy individual was as right as was their obligatory acceptance of him as leader.

Such an individual was to be recognized through his indomitable ‘Will’ or asserted strength of personality, of course. Yet this temperament led him to a contradiction of roles, eventually. The demagogue was justified in that, as antagonist to the entrenched authority or system of values, he is seen as the protagonist of the masses who consider themselves excluded from the benefits which they covet. In an underlying logic, he frequently embodies for his followers their private ambitions, frank avarice, or secret desires. Perversely, then, the use of personal popularity to organize the masses becomes acceptable to those manipulated. The egoist as leader often establishes his independent role by being the most haughty, the most contemptuous of figures; but as an outsider to the Establishment, who asserts himself as the role model for the anonymous rebel in the mob, he will be applauded in his personal arrogance so long as the objects of his attack are believed to be established privilege and long-entrenched positions. Where legal authority is viewed as a barricade, the protection of the status quo, the archetypal rebel tears down such barriers to the cheers of the multitude and has a thousand hands raised to do the actual demolition.

So Branwell creates Alexander Percy in the levelling of the jail in Real Life in Verdopolis. Quick to recognize the invariable resentment of the numerical majority in any social body, the demagogue asserts himself as their champion, and is granted licence by them. Ironically, having been so placed above them, he sees himself as entitled to (and generally receives) the actual fruits of the rebellion.

Branwell, born two years after Waterloo, perversely adopted Napoleon as his early hero, the first great modern leader in this tradition of the dictator lifted up and idolized by the populace. That he chose Napoleon as the name of his preferred figure in the toy soldier incident is initially significant in that the French emperor was a resurgent foil to Wellington, Charlotte's ideal figure as ‘the Saviour of Europe’. At the same time, he was a figure of majesty, of absolute right. As Branwell recognized, the extraordinary man always rises by a combination of aristocratic opposition and popular worship. The image goes back to the early tyrants of Greece whom Branwell read about in his father's study. It is, of course, a precarious role: once the demagogue ceases to be the active antagonist of the status quo he loses his popular identity, unless still another outside force threatens the community and so restores his role as champion. So it is that Northangerland must ceaselessly agitate and manipulate, for he cannot be a builder. A primitive ordering of society recurs each time a new popular champion is crowned, just as—seen from another point in the social process—each new revolutionary success begins a process of consolidation that eventually leads to another revolution.

In any event, the man of destiny must first know himself as an extraordinary man. As we see in Alexander Percy (and as we can extrapolate of Branwell), to be only one of the mass, even to be initially satisfied to be such, is ipso facto an impossibility for him. Thus, the loneliness, the separateness, the emotional strain, the trial imposed by his incipient destiny for Percy, as conceived by Branwell. If he is really an extraordinary man, he is, paradoxically, compelled to be free, he must, like Lucifer, Napoleon, Byron's Manfred or the Giaour (or somewhat later, but more clearly still, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov) prove his distinction by his freedom from the restraints, the moral law, imposed on and accepted by others. Hence, the insistence on being a law unto himself.

Admiration, then, is the force that propels such an extraordinary man to power; not only Napoleon but his nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, was a popular hero, as are equally Northangerland and Zamorna. The many admirers of Napoleon saw him as fighting against the inertness of an outworn world, and so they believed that any who opposed him acted out of resentment of his natural merit. His astonishing initial success then created a new leviathan, the self-crowned emperor, against whom would appear Charlotte's youthful champion of Britain, Arthur Wellesley, the fictional Duke of Wellington. The standing argument between Robert Moore (on behalf of Napoleon) and the Reverend Helstone (championing Wellington) in Charlotte's second published novel Shirley is an exact parallel in fiction to the debate that engaged western Europe in the earlier years of the century. Essentially, the separate Angrian writings of Charlotte and Branwell can also be recognized as a contest. That is, the drama of Wellington and Napoleon, fictionally carried forward through Zamorna and Northangerland, is one in which Charlotte eventually reasserts the primacy of society and domesticity.¹² Branwell, obdurate to the last as Northangerland, drinks the bitter dregs of the unregenerate rebel, the unbroken egoist.

To begin with, the two young Brontës were philosophically alike in their conception of their respective heroes, although in practice each of their protagonists expressed himself primarily according to the temperament of the respective author; that is, through protection of the state and impassioned love-relationships for Charlotte's Zamorna, and through rebellious action for Branwell's Northangerland. The historical Wellington was, of course, prime minister of England from 1828 to 1830, just when Verdopolis was built. Charlotte's tribute to him in his middle age consisted in restoring him as a youthful romantic hero, giving him all that he might want in his political life, and more. As noted, she did this by turning him into his own son, reconceived as the saviour of Europe against Napoleon but now emperor himself of a new and shining nation which he is building through force of personality. At the same time, in her own youthful tolerance, she granted him the personal freedom of countless mistresses and an imperious manner with subordinates. She even allowed him, as an extraordinary man, the ruthlessness needed to set aside his own wife out of resentment against his father-in-law, Northangerland.

Such admiration espouses no popular political system; it celebrates Zamorna as a remarkable individual whose personal qualities are the justification for whatever he does, however unacceptable such actions might be from another person. He is, by his own view, beyond question; when he demands and receives a kingdom from a nerveless parliament, its very response confirms his greatness in the text. With both Charlotte and Branwell, then, at this time, the aim was not towards a benign average, of which they were themselves contemptuous, but a heroic reach towards the tangible forms of power.

Branwell's childhood hero, Napoleon, goes through an even more significant evolution. This figure was quite early transformed into Sneaky, or Sneachi, who becomes one of ‘the Twelves’, the founders of the Confederacy, and is in turn retired to the background as a royal eminence. While Alexander Sneaky has children, they do not, as in Charlotte's case, take over the foreground. Branwell, without regressing, simply switches characters, bringing in Alexander Percy to be more active, ruthless, and daring than any other of the Angrian characters. Literature is a great seducer, particularly one's own writings, and it seems that for Branwell, at 14 or so, Rougue was the figure towards whom everything so far had been leading, as though at the beginning of manhood he required this surrogate to live through.

During the early childhood of the Brontë children their father, according to his own account, kept a mask in his study. In a family game, he would give it to each of the children to wear in turn, while they were asked questions, which the wearing of the mask allowed them to answer freely. Analogously, Alexander Percy was developed as the figure through whom Branwell spoke to the world, however hidden from the world in his nearly invisible handwriting the tales of Angria remained. Eventually a vital shift occurred, and it was as Northangerland that Branwell himself regarded the world. Briefly stated, through Percy, Branwell became the outlaw, the antagonist to Zamorna, who, as authority or law, eventually reasserted the traditional values through the pen of Charlotte. Through Percy made real on his sheet of paper, Branwell became the pirate, the thief, the contemptuous lover, and the tragic consciousness whose emotional demands the world was inadequate to fulfill. The mask of the elder Patrick Brontë was turned into the tiny booklets of Letters of an Englishman and the sheets of Real Life in Verdopolis, which came to life far too successfully; the young writer who, except for his sisters on occasion, was also his own exclusive audience eventually could not remove the mask.

Branwell's obsession and his fate, then, seem traceable at least in their general outlines to certain aspects of his time. It is worth repeating in this connection that the Brontë household in the 1830s was probably as well-read and intellectually informed as any in England. Charlotte and Branwell's generation is that of the agonized sceptics—Tennyson, Browning, Arnold. In a sceptical world the romantic demagogue as popular hero is himself a displacement of supernatural force, which in some way he tries to take into himself, either physically or intellectually. Accordingly, while aristocracy as a concept continues, it is no longer an established order but a natural order made up of those with the will and intelligence to create themselves as such. Nature's noblemen, many self-proclaimed, replace those of hereditary title. By 1848, the year of Branwell's death, the thrones of Europe in the familiar image are teetering; everywhere, it seems, the ‘common man’ is exhorted, invited to take hold of his own destiny, generally under the guidance of a revolutionary leader. What Branwell's contemporary, Dostoevsky, the revolutionary turned conservative, called in the Epilogue to Crime and Punishment a brain infection, a disease sweeping into Russia from Europe, in which men were driven mad with the belief that they were God—this epidemic was already in full course.¹³

In some ways, then, Branwell's chronicles are those of the imagination of his time. His problem may, in fact, have been that he imbued Northangerland with characteristics which it was too easy for him to believe in himself; he was his own best reader of these private chronicles. As noted, Branwell in his adult years commonly used the name of Northangerland in correspondence with his friends, who apparently came to accept it readily, sometimes addressing him by that name in their responses.

Obviously he was both hypnotized by the figure he had created and aware of the inevitable self-destructiveness of such a character, for in time this self-destructive element is what Branwell himself purposefully reveals about Percy. Ironically, Northangerland in the chronicles provides a pattern of despair which Branwell will eventually follow.

Without the redeeming ordinary emotions of a Raskolnikov, Branwell's hero has nowhere to go. Like Emily's Heathcliff—or even Anne's Gilbert Markham—to whom in many ways he bears a remarkable resemblance of personality, he can unhesitatingly smash another man in the face in a moment of spontaneous anger; but unlike the two of them he lives only for himself even when he broods on and on over the death of his beloved wife. Since Mary Percy in Branwell's tales (in contrast to Emily's Catherine Earnshaw) is irretrievably dead, she remains a death agony within the bitter Percy. Suffer from her death though he does, he cannot believe in anything outside himself, not even her spirit, as Heathcliff believes in an enduring Catherine. Both are prisoners in the flesh, but while Heathcliff eventually finds his heaven, Percy has nowhere to go outside himself. Conversely, while Zamorna probably represented Charlotte's ideal at an early stage of her life, she grew beyond him. Northangerland achieved a more immanent, a more compelling existence in Branwell's life; and rather than growing out of him, he was taken over; life creating fiction was in turn taken over by it.

In this, Branwell was an invisible member of a diverse community of European writers of his time, all of whom individually saw the heart of that moment with extreme clarity. Better men, perhaps, saw it as the loss of a necessary principle; Branwell's curse was that he was swallowed by the world which he envisioned. Stendhal created a Julian Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir who, faced with a world in which cynicism had apparently displaced human love, chose to reassert love even though it meant dying out of this life. Like Raskolnikov or Heathcliff, it gave him a place to go to, to earn, to win redemption by the selfless love of creature for creature even if it be in some trackless Siberia of the human spirit. Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Stendhal—all were far greater than Branwell in what they achieved.

But perhaps none suffered through the crucial question of the self without the mitigating grace of love more painfully than did Branwell. And perhaps none needed it more than did he, as evidenced by the Lydia Robinson episode that sits as a terminal illness over the horrifying last few years of his life. Again, that nineteenth-century clinical term—‘marasmus’, a ‘wasting away’, the death certificate with which his life was sealed. Almost a hundred years before the literary discovery and exploration of that trackless desert of the Waste Land, Branwell had become one of the skeletons bleaching in the pitiless sun.

Since little of Branwell's work has been available for the common reader to judge, its merit has remained largely undefined. One thing that is clear to anyone who has studied the existing manuscripts is that they are the surviving portions of a much larger body of work. This is rather to be expected than otherwise. The Brontë family rapidly dissolved after Branwell's death; two of his sisters died within the next nine months; his surviving sister, within another seven years; his father, already of advanced age, shortly after that. The home was taken over by strangers and extensively remodelled; the personal effects of the Brontës were scattered or destroyed. Some (no one knows how many) of the surviving manuscripts were eventually taken to Ireland by Charlotte's husband, Arthur Bell Nichols, where, a half-century after Branwell's death, most of whatever remained in Nichols' possession was sold to T. J. Wise. Wise added to the confusion by separating portions of manuscripts and selling off single sheets. What was lost in each of these long periods of neglect will never be known, but certainly Branwell, as the least known, least published, and most readily dismissed member of the family, would not have had much chance of being preserved in manuscript through special consideration. On the contrary, when we consider that even the manuscript of Wuthering Heights has not survived, it is remarkable that we have as much of Branwell's work as we do.

His writings, in any event, have so far had little effect on his reputation. Since so much of his work was done between his thirteenth and twenty-fifth years, in a great sustained outpouring, with little of the prose recopied and very little of it edited, and since almost all of it was in that scarcely legible minute hand, practical problems of accessibility have denied Branwell's work a reading. Prior to Tom Winnifrith's The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë (1983), the only trade-book publication of Branwell's work¹⁴ was that included in the grab-bag two volumes of the Miscellaneous and Uncollected Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë in The Shakespeare Head Brontë (nineteen volumes), of some sixty years ago, of which one thousand copies were printed, guaranteeing that circulation would be restricted for the most part to libraries (and not a great many of those). Further, much of what is included there of Branwell's work is in the form of facsimiles of undeciphered manuscripts, thus remaining virtually illegible to casual readers.

Even Branwell's friends from his Bradford and Halifax periods, Joseph Leyland, William Deardon, and Francis Grundy, would have heard only some of the poetry and at best a page or two of the more dramatic prose—as suggested in the famous episode where, a few years before the publication of Wuthering Heights, Branwell allegedly read a scene from that work to his cronies in a local pub, speaking of it as his own, and raising a storm of controversy that continued into the following century. To be sure, few scholars today pay much heed to the notion that Emily's masterpiece was written by Branwell. Yet there are more substantial reasons for knowing Branwell's writings.

The Brontës were a very close-knit group, and all through their childhood and youth shared an interest in writing, both in subject-matter and world outlook. For much of that time the evidence indicates that Branwell established the direction of their writing, and as the only boy tended to dominate his sisters with their generally willing compliance and even admiration. There is a significant echo in the characterization of all the youthful writings of the Brontës, with the basic figures probably those of Branwell. (Certainly the AGA of Emily's poetry, particularly as reconstructed by Fannie Ratchford, seems closely related to Alexander Percy's ruthless first wife, Augusta di Segovia, in Branwell's chronicle.) A very limited number of names recur in all of their writings, as do kinds of characters—for example, Ellen, governess of young Alexander Percy, and Nelly Dean of Wuthering Heights, whose proper name is Ellen; as well as the repeated names of Arthur, Alexander, Gerald/Geraldine, Mary/Maria, and others. Heathcliff, and even Rochester, can be seen in more than embryonic form in the personality of Alexander Percy, while Arthur Huntington of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall could be Percy in any one of several of Branwell's manuscripts, were we to read Anne's account from the side of the male figure. A good number of Branwell's better poems closely resemble those of Emily, in part because they bespeak a similar emotional and dramatic context, while there is absolutely no indication and little likelihood that he knew her work before he wrote, or even that her poems were written before his. (For example, she was clearly active in the five-year period before the publication of the Bell poems, during most of which time he was with the Robinsons when he either wrote no poems or, more likely, passed them on to Lydia Robinson, who would certainly have destroyed them in the family crisis that ensued.) There is, in short, a rich opportunity for a comparison of his work with that of his sisters, which may well add considerable colour and depth to our understanding of all their writings.

Before this can be done very seriously, we need to see Branwell's work in a parallel form to theirs, corrected and edited, transposed from the frequently confusing flood of inspiration in the manuscript, the almost completely unpunctuated, indifferently spelled, ink-blotted, sometimes repetitious cataract of words.

The two works edited here [in The Hand of the Arch-Sinner], The Life of … Northangerland and Real Life in Verdopolis form an excellent introduction to Branwell's art, and give an accurate view both of his strengths and limitations as a writer. For this reason, the aim of the editor has, throughout, been that of providing a reader's edition, that is, a work readily available in form and meaning to any intelligent reader.

Since Alexander Percy was far and away his most important literary character, The Life of … Northangerland is of obvious importance. Written in 1835 when Branwell was 18 and had already been writing about his hero/anti-hero for several years, it is necessarily retrospective. That is, having shown the imperious and egoistic demagogue as a mature man, having made him in his own chronicles (if not in Charlotte's) what was called the leading light of that shadow world of Verdopolis, he had, in fact, turned his own fictional world into a backdrop for Alexander Percy.¹⁵ Thus, when he writes of the family background of his hero, of his childhood experiences, youthful passions, and eventual share in the murder of his father, he is obviously explaining how Alexander Percy got that way, accounting for the man who stands as the Lucifer figure in the chronicles generally, and in doing so revealing his own state of mind. Appropriately, then, the chronicle entitled Real Life in Verdopolis, although written two years earlier by the 16 year old Branwell, shows Alexander Percy as the mature demagogue, Rougue/Elrington, in his later marriage to Zenobia, in his rabble-rousing, particularly, and in his hidden role as leader of the thieves and outlaws of the nation, as well as in his compulsive opposition to the Aristocrats in parliament. Taken together, while both display the open-ended characteristics of Branwell Brontë's chronicles, they provide us with an effective portrait of his obsessive vision.

Notes

1. The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. Tom Winnifrith (Oxford, Shakespeare Head Press, 1983), 121. Subsequent references to the poetry refer to this edition.

2. Lawrence and Elizabeth Hanson, The Four Brontës: The Lives and Works of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë (Oxford, OUP, 1949; New York, Archon, 1967), 189. Branwell-bashing goes on apace, sometimes quite vigorously considering the length of time since his death. In a letter to the New York Times (travel section, 30 June 1984) a member of the US branch of the Brontë Society, identified as ‘Book Reviewer for the Brontë Newsletter’, warns literary tourists to eschew the lure of the Black Bull in Haworth. ‘May we suggest that a walk on the nearby moors might prove more enjoyable and helpful to an understanding of the Brontë genius? Bemoaning the wastrel brother's downfall and making a shrine of the chair in which he sprawled drunkenly would be to waste precious time, as he did.’

3. While Fanny Ratchford was undoubtedly the most active scholar dealing with the Juvenilia prior to Christine Alexander's magisterial study (see n. 7 below), she seems to have felt no great obligation to read the original manuscripts, with the possible exception of those written by Charlotte. In her notes, she makes frequent reference to transcriptions that she has received from C. W. Hatfield. The indefatigable Hatfield worked for years on the unpublished manuscripts, producing extensive transcriptions that survive in longhand and typescript, most of them in files in the Brontë Parsonage Archives, Haworth. A chaotic but fascinating collection that includes copies of many odd sheets of Branwell's work, the originals of which are scattered, the Hatfield transcriptions are probably the chief means by which most visiting scholars of the last half-century have had access to the Brontë Juvenilia. Hatfield, of course, did not transcribe the two chronicles presented in this volume.

4. Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Clement K. Shorter [The Haworth Edition] (New York and London, Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1900; AMS edn., 1973), 190.

5. Winifred Gérin, Branwell Brontë (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), pp. vi, v. Gérin, in a companion biography, Anne Brontë (London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959), further observed: ‘Branwell, who has found such scant sympathy among the biographers of his sisters was yet, it is too often overlooked, adored by them all. Even at his most degraded he was cast off only by Charlotte, who having loved him best from early childhood, was the most disillusioned by his failure’ (p. 180).

6. An exception is the native prince Quashia Quamina, who opposes the English and wars against them, after being adopted and raised by their leader, the Duke of Wellington. In Branwell's accounts, he later becomes a cohort of Alexander Percy, and is said to have engaged in various criminal activities, including the slave trade. In successive writings he becomes progressively lighter-skinned, golden, even. Eventually, with his contemptuous manner, exotic origin, and adoptive background, as well as his striking appearance, the later Quashia might be said to anticipate the image of an early Heathcliff (described as a ‘Lascar’), who may even have been inspired in part by him.

7. Caversham is, incidentally, also the villain of Charlotte's ‘Something About Arthur’, in which he betrays the youthful Arthur Wellesley. See Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983), for information on this and other ‘juvenilia’ of Charlotte Brontë.

8. The first fall brings discord into heaven. Envy, born of pride, is the archetypal sin of Lucifer. He in turn feeds the pride and envy within Eve (cf. Milton) resulting in the second fall, which alienates man from Paradise. The third fall is that of Cain induced by Lucifer (cf. Byron's Cain) which alienates man from man.

9. The name is an imprecation common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, standing for ‘God's Death’, in analogy to the old oaths ‘'sblood’ or ‘'swounds’.

10. ‘The Pirate’, The Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë [The Shakespeare Head Brontë], ed. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, 2 vols. (Oxford, Shakespeare Head, 1936-8), i. 174 ff.

11. Winnifrith, Poems, 141-54.

12. By 1848, the year of Branwell's death, Charlotte's rejection of her own earlier, and his lifelong, celebration of the rebel figure was absolute. In a letter to Miss Wooler, dated 31 March, she says with a certain self-consciousness about her impending thirty-second birthday: ‘I have now outlived youth; and … certain things are not what they were ten years ago; and, amongst the rest, “the pomp and circumstance of war” have quite lost in my eye their fictitious glitter … little doubt have I that convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface; in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust, by their violence, the vital energies of the countries where they occur. That England may be spared the spasms, cramps, and frenzy fits now contorting the Continent, and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray. With the French and Irish I have no sympathy. With the Germans and Italians I think the case is different; as different as the love of freedom is from the lust for license’ (Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, 366). Angria, in either the life of her Zamorna or Branwell's Northangerland, reveals little distinction between the love of freedom and the lust for licence, ego being the hallmark of both heroes.

13. Improbable as it may seem, Dostoevsky and Branwell were born within four years of each other, with Dostoevsky's first novel appearing two years before Branwell's death. While they obviously did not know each other, they shared the same dramatic post-Napoleonic world.

14. At the time of the present writing, the release of a new edition of The Poetry of Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. Victor Neufeldt (New York, Garland Press) has been announced.

15. Although Charlotte's characterization of Alexander Percy is milder than Branwell's and conveys little of the passion attributed to the figure by her brother, she surely was familiar with his Alexander Percy. It is surprising, then, that in a letter transcribed by Hatfield and printed in the Brontë Society Transactions (1950, p. 16), she refers to herself as a ‘Richardsonian author’ who might write a six-volume work in which the Angrian characters would appear, with ‘Percy my Mr B.’ The latter is, of course, the lusting hero of Pamela, and the playful reference suggests that she scarcely considered Percy to be a contemptible figure. Mrs Gaskell prints part of that letter, omitting the reference to Percy. (Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, 194) Charlotte, then 24 years old, obviously still had Percy as a spontaneous reference. It is worth noting, too, that Charlotte in her ‘Devoir’ ‘Sur La Morte De Napoleon’, written in Brussels and dated ‘31 mai, 1843’, spells out appreciatively the very traits of the Extraordinary Man celebrated by Branwell, although she contrasts them subsequently with those of the man of integrity—the noble Wellington. This exercise, written when she was 27, could easily be an Angrian manuscript.