[In the following essay, Brammer discusses the fair copy of Brontë's The Professor, examining the nature of the changes made to that copy by the author and her husband William Bell Nicholls.]

Charlotte Brontë completed the fair copy of The Professor on 27 June 1846.¹ Her original draft, presumably finished by April of that year,² has not, so far as is known, survived; but the fair copy of this particular novel is of some interest. It is well known that after a series of ‘ignominious dismissals’ from various publishers, the manuscript was returned with a courteous and reasoned refusal from Smith, Elder and Co. Soon after their publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte was contemplating a revised Professor,³ but her publishers evidently advised her not to attempt it. However, little more than a year after she had completed Shirley, she again turned to her first novel, and some time before February 1851, when George Smith finally persuaded her to abandon the idea, she wrote a Preface ‘with a view to publication’.

Alterations in the fair copy may therefore include revisions as late as 1851 as well as those made in preparation for the initial attempt at publication. It seems unlikely that alterations would postdate Villette (1853), in which most of the Brussels material had been re-used; and The Professor was locked up ‘in a cupboard by himself’ after his ninth and final rejection in February 1851.

The Professor was eventually published after the author's death. Mrs. Gaskell refused George Smith's suggestion that she should edit the novel, but, anxious that Kay-Shuttleworth should not be allowed to do so, she insisted that Mr. Nicholls ought to be entrusted with the task.⁴ She and Kay-Shuttleworth agreed that several ‘objectionable passages’ should be removed, for The Professor was ‘disfigured by more coarseness and profanity in quoting texts of scripture disagreeably’ than any of her other works.⁴ In the event she was very dissatisfied with the extent of Nicholls's editing. He had, nevertheless, bowdlerized The Professor to some extent, as an examination of the manuscript shows. His cancellations are of considerable interest.

Finally, the fact that the novel was not seen through the press by Charlotte Brontë herself meant that the printed text was not entirely accurate. A number of misreadings occur, and the author's punctuation and capitalization are sometimes seriously distorted.

I. ALTERATIONS IN THE MANUSCRIPT⁵

The 340 pages of The Professor manuscript contain between 270 and 280 alterations of various kinds. Many pages contain only one alteration: few have more than two or three. About fifty of the instances mentioned are insertions of words or phrases above the line of writing—most of them in ink, three apparently in pencil. Many are single word insertions (typically, the addition of an adjective to a descriptive phrase), and only about half a dozen are longer phrases of some significance.

The author made most of her alterations by crossing out a word or phrase with a single horizontal stroke of the pen, and writing the new phrase above the line. Thus the original words are usually legible. But one alteration, on MS. p. 48, is in a handwriting which one may fairly assume to be that of Nicholls—since he is the acknowledged editor and since there is a close similarity between the writing of the alteration and that of his transcript of the Preface. The heavy, black obliteration of the rejected words on p. 48 is almost certainly his doing, and it would seem reasonable to suppose that he was responsible for similar cancellations elsewhere in the manuscript. One passage, heavily inked out, has been replaced by a phrase in Charlotte Brontë's handwriting (MS. p. 47): on MS. p. 248 light diagonal strokes in her faded brownish ink are clearly visible as well as the darker cancellations of Nicholls. In both cases the original was probably of a type that Nicholls wished to cancel much more thoroughly than the author had done.

I assume therefore that it was he who so carefully inked out the word ‘God’ in the following passages:

MS. p. 48 (chap. v, p. 76)
          God damn your insolence! (Altered to ‘Confound …’)
MS. p. 141 (xiv. 235)
          God! How the repeater of the prayer …
MS. p. 247 (xxii. 117)
          God confound his impudence!
MS. p. 306 (xxiv. 206)
          Oh God! And I pitied the fellow …

These exclamations are provoked by themes or characters which produced a violent reaction in the author's mind. They are also part of The Professor's realism: an Edward Crimsworth would have said ‘God damn’ rather than the petulant ‘Confound’. Hunsden, delighting in provocative speech and excited by his battle of wits with Frances, would have spoken more emphatically than Nicholls allows him to do. On the other hand, it might be argued that Charlotte Brontë, in her attempt to portray masculine characters and to assume the character of a man as narrator, mistook coarseness for masculinity. ‘God confound his impudence!’, the professor's reflection on Hunsden's cool manner of making himself at home, is disproportionately strong; his earlier exclamation, provoked by the gabbled prayers of the Roman Catholic scholars, is hardly well chosen in a diatribe against irreverence.

Nicholls also appears to have cancelled, or to have confirmed the author's cancellation of, two longer passages. On MS. p. 129 (xii. 215) the phrase ‘but when passion cooled’ is followed by three very heavily cancelled lines. On MS. p. 248 (xxii. 118) after the sentence ‘There is no use in attempting to describe what is indescribable’ occur four heavily cancelled lines. The first passage is unfortunately quite illegible: but the ascenders and descenders of letters in the second are clear, and most words decipherable with a fair degree of certainty.⁶ In the following version the words in italics are dubious: those bracketed are illegible in the manuscript: the conjectural reading is based on the apparent length and spacing of the words.

… describe what is indescribable. I can only say that the form and countenance of Hunsden Yorke Hunsden Esq resembled more the result [of an amour] between Oliver Cromwell and a French grisette than anything else in Heaven above or in the Earth beneath.

The author's cancellation must have left the original text plainly legible: Nicholls therefore inked out each word so that the passage should not be read by publisher or printer.

Charlotte Brontë may have cancelled the sentence before sending the manuscript to any publisher at all, but it is conceivable that, looking over The Professor after the publication of Jane Eyre, and knowing the public reaction to her account of Rochester's amours, she decided to cut out the passage at this later stage. It should be noticed that the cancellation on MS. p. 129 occurs in a context where the word ‘passion’ is already a danger signal; and that, on MS. p. 180 (xviii. 6-7), where the words ‘a warm, cherishing touch of the hand’ have been altered, about one-third of the page seems to have been cut away—a method of excision frequently used by the author in, for example, the manuscript of Villette, and not necessarily to be attributed, therefore, to Nicholls.

The Cromwell passage is, I think, rather amusing: an odd quirk of Charlotte's imagination which adds one more piquant association to the already bizarre collection of associations surrounding the character of Hunsden. One regrets the loss of any detail which throws light on the way in which she imagined him. ‘Oliver Cromwell and a French grisette’ help to define her previous description: Hunsden has a tall figure, but his lineaments are ‘small, and even feminine’; ‘character had set a stamp upon each’ of his ‘plastic features’; ‘expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses she wrought, giving him now that of a morose bull, and anon that of an arch and mischievous girl; more frequently, the two semblances were blent, and a queer, composite countenance they made’ (iv. 61-63).⁷ Again, the exotic comparison shows Hunsden's affinity with Zamorna; and in another sense ‘Cromwell’ links him with Angria, where romantic liaisons of the great Ruler with lesser mortals had been a major theme. In fact reaction against Angria and all it symbolized, rather than a desire for literary decorum, may have been the more or less conscious motive of Charlotte's cancellation.

One other cancellation is probably by Nicholls. It occurs on MS. p. 47 (v. 74) where three or four words are obliterated after ‘I may work’, and ‘it will do no good’ is inserted above the line. It is not written directly above the cancelled phrase; it begins towards the end of the cancellation and extends to the word ‘but’ in the following clause. The original words are by no means clear, but they may have been ‘I may work and toil and sweat’. ‘It will do no good’ may replace the cancelled phrase: it may be an addition to it—no comma appears after ‘work’ in the manuscript, though some punctuation is obviously required. It is not unusual for the author to omit commas, and the placing of the new phrase is not very important by itself, but other considerations support the idea that she may have retained the old phrase, and that it was Nicholls who objected to it. ‘… and toil and sweat’ might have offended Nicholls's sensibility, but Charlotte Brontë's was surely more robust: the phrase ‘I may work, it will do no good’ sounds jerky, yet other alterations show that the author was sensitive to rhythm, and made slight changes for the sake of euphony and balance, not in order to avoid it. The words are appropriate in an emphatic context, picking up the idea of ‘toiling like a slave’, and anticipating the Israelites ‘crawling over the sun-baked fields of Egypt’. It seems unlikely that Charlotte would reject the phrase because ‘sweat’ is not strictly appropriate—in any case the idea of physical as well as mental fatigue is clearly present. If the author was responsible for the deletion, then one can only regret that in this instance her second thoughts entailed the loss of an apt and vigorous phrase.

It remains to consider the changes for which the author alone was responsible. Two main kinds are observable: those made primarily to affect the meaning, and those apparently dictated by a stylistic preference. The second group, as one might expect at a late stage of composition, is the larger.

Some of the meaning-changes are very minor ones. For example, ‘letters’ becomes the more accurate ‘words’ in ‘my nature was not his nature, and its signs were to him like the words of an unknown tongue’ (ii. 34). ‘Lies’ becomes ‘rests’ in the phrase, ‘a stranger who rests half-reclined on a bed of rushes’ (xvi. 266); ‘luminous shadows’ becomes ‘luminous phantoms’ (vii. 104). More interesting, and possibly more significant, is the substitution of ‘visions’ for ‘romance’ in the following passage: ‘… your aspirations spread eager wings towards a land of visions where, now in advancing daylight,—in X—daylight—you dare to dream of congeniality, repose, union’ (MS. p. 46; v. 73). The contrast is one of ‘Romance and Reality’; but perhaps ‘a land of romance’ would have been misleading—implying a world of the imagination which the dreamer would recognize to be ‘unreal’, not ‘in this world’; whereas his ‘visions’ are potentially realizable. But the original shows clearly that the passage is in the main stream of Charlotte Brontë's thought in The Professor. All these, and many similar corrections, show the author's scrupulous concern for accuracy.

Other alterations are more fundamental. Very revealing, for instance, is an insertion in Chap. iii (p. 39) where the last sentence of the first paragraph originally ended, ‘I looked weary, solitary, kept down like some desolate governess; he was satisfied’ (MS. p. 28). The phrase ‘tutor or’ is inserted, apparently as an afterthought, above the line, before ‘governess’. It looks as if Charlotte had not realized the unsuitability of her first phrase until a late stage of revision—showing at the same time how closely the professor's experiences were identified with her own, and, as many critics have said, how inadequately she realized his masculinity.

Another hardly disguised allusion to personal experience differs curiously from its first version. Charlotte originally wrote:

Amidst this assemblage of all that was insignificant and defective, much that was vicious and repulsive (I except the two or three stiff, silent, decently behaved, ill-dressed British girls), the sensible, sagacious, affable directress shone like a steady star. …

(MS. p. 123; xii. 206)

The alteration, ‘by that last epithet many would have described’ instead of ‘I except’, is inserted above the line. The reason for the clumsiness of expression is now clear: the writer wished to change her parenthesis without remodelling the entire sentence, and the result is an awkward compromise. The main sentence expresses, very emphatically, Charlotte's own point of view; the parenthesis suddenly twists round to the opinion of the ‘many’, undefined, yet presumably of the class of the ‘insignificant and defective’ or the ‘vicious’. ‘Repulsive’, too, is inapt—not because it is too strong (compare the previous description of the ‘daughters of Albion’ and the phrase ‘meeting hate with mute disdain’ on p. 204 of the same chapter), but because it carries physical connotations, appropriate to the unwashed Amelia or ‘swinish’ Flamandes, and obviously, as the manuscript makes clear, originally intended for them and not for the ‘clean and decent’ English girls. Why then did Charlotte make the alteration? Partly, I think, because she wished Mlle Reuter's superiority to have its full value. The whole chapter is cleverly constructed: the charm of the ‘sensible, sagacious, affable directress’ is developed by contrast with her pupils and later by the romantic garden scene, only to be cruelly dispelled by her conversation with Pelet. The exception of the British girls blurs the black and white contrast which the author desired to produce, and makes the professor's infatuation less pardonable.

A third example occurs in the important opening paragraphs of Chap. vii. A new stage in William Crimsworth's life is beginning. His experiences at X—are over; and he, like Charlotte, will feel the joys and sorrows of exile in Belgium. This is the third paragraph of Chap. vii as it stands in the printed text:

Third, Belgium; and I will pause before this landscape. As to the fourth, a curtain covers it, which I may hereafter withdraw, or may not, as suits my convenience and capacity. At any rate, for the present it must hang undisturbed. Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods—haloed most of them—but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, re-sealed in monuments. Farewell luminous phantoms!

The manuscript reads as follows:

… for the present it must hang undisturbed. Belgium! I repeat the name, now as I sit alone near midnight—it stirs my world of the Past like a summons to resurrection. Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic …

(MS. p. 64; vii. 103)

The sentence, ‘Belgium! I repeat …’ to ‘resurrection.’ is cancelled, but rewritten as in the printed text, after the words ‘can produce’.

Various explanations are possible. The simplest would appear to be that we have an instance of haplography, caused by the repeated ‘Belgium!’, and that the passage was rewritten as the clearest means of rectifying the error. In this case the original full stop after ‘resurrection’ and possibly the slight difference in phrasing (‘I repeat the name’), require some explanation. Or the sentence which now stands first may have been an afterthought—a rhetorical expansion which the author realized would be better placed for its cumulative effect before the climax, the grand crescendo-diminuendo of the final sentence. The third possibility is that the cancelled sentence existed in its first (manuscript) position in the original draft, and that the paragraph ended with the words ‘can produce’. The manuscript punctuation supports this theory, and the ‘I repeat’ is still appropriate—the paragraph opens with the words ‘Third, Belgium …’. We must then assume that the whole of the existing paragraph from ‘the graves unclose’ to the end is an afterthought, a flight of the imagination irresistibly aroused by the memories crowding into Charlotte Brontë's mind: partly, no doubt, carried away by her delight in the purple passage for its style's sake, but much more powerfully moved in spirit by the still vivid recollection of her life in Brussels. Her words have a poignancy more in keeping with the sad autumnal memories of Lucy Snowe than the tranquil ‘sweet summer evening’ of the professor.

One other instance may show her consciousness of the difficulties of first-person technique. In the sentence ‘Her mission was upstairs; I have followed her sometimes and watched her’ (MS. p. 320; xxv. 228), ‘I have followed’ replaces a cancelled, unfinished phrase, ‘there she entere[d]’—as if Charlotte suddenly remembered that the ‘I’ of the story was not an omnipresent narrator.⁸ The scene is conceived as a drama or mime (cf. ‘in low soliloquy’), and the numerous parentheses are rather awkward: notice too the slight discrepancies in tense and time: ‘I have followed her sometimes …’; ‘the night I followed …’; ‘that evening at least, and usually I believe …’ (xxv. 228-9). This clumsiness is understandable if the interpolations were introduced at a late stage in composition.

It is noticeable that passages dealing with Hunsden often contain an especially large number of alterations, and though these may not be individually very significant, they show perhaps some of the difficulty Charlotte found in presenting this character.

For example, pages 326 to 333 of the manuscript (xxv. 237-47), which are concerned with Hunsden and the Lucia affair, contain seventeen alterations or insertions, some of appreciable length and importance; whereas a random selection of non-Hunsden passages yields results like the following:

MS. pp. 47 to 54 (v. 75-vi. 85) (last interview with Edward): six alterations—one by Nicholls.
MS. pp. 79 to 85 (vii. 128-38) (Pelet and his pupils; Madame Pelet): seven alterations.
MS. pp. 144 to 149 (xiv. 240-50) (pupils and first lesson at Mlle Reuter's): four alterations—one important.
MS. pp. 212 to 218 (xix. 58-68) (professor's first visit to Frances's room): four small alterations.

Even the carefully revised opening of Chap. vii yields only ten alterations in MS. pp. 64 to 70 (vii. 103-13), though these are admittedly fairly substantial.

The Hunsden alterations indicate, I think, that his character had not completely crystallized in the author's mind—that she was still shaping it as she revised her fair copy. Hunsden originally had a ‘tall figure’ and ‘dark locks’: the final version reads, ‘a tall figure, long and dark locks …’ (MS. p. 38; iv. 61), an addition not very appropriate to the rest of the sentence, where ‘figure, voice, and general bearing’ ‘impressed me with the notion of something powerful and massive’ in contrast to the ‘small, and even feminine,’ lineaments. But the Byronic (and Angrian) ‘long locks’ accentuate the essential romanticism of the character—a romanticism partly intentional, but possibly, as here, acting more powerfully on Charlotte's imagination than was consistent with the nature and dimensions of the character or book.

Two or three omissions affect the character of the professor. In Chap. xiv the author at first wrote, ‘Once I laid my hand on her [Sylvie's] head and stroked her hair gently in token of approbation’ (MS. p. 145; xiv. 242); ‘… and stroked her hair gently …’ is cancelled. In Chap. xviii, ‘… a rare glance of interest, or a warm, cherishing touch of the hand; deep respect …’ becomes ‘… a rare glance of interest, or a cordial and gentle word; real respect …’ (MS. p. 180; xviii. 6). In both cases the final version deliberately avoids the warmth and physical intimacy of the original; in the first case understandably enough: contemporary readers found the professor's descriptions of his pupils unpleasant: and Charlotte herself must have realized that caresses between master and pupil were in somewhat dubious taste. In the second instance, she wishes to make physical attraction between William and Frances secondary; and there is considerable artistic value in the reserve and remoteness maintained right up to the climax of the uncontrollable ‘tiger-leap’ impulse in Chap. xxii. (Compare, ‘… her hand shrunk away …’, xxii. 155.) That such exclusion is intentional seems conclusively proved by a third deletion, this time almost immediately before the ‘tiger-leap’. The passage which now reads, ‘… no child, but a girl of nineteen; and she might be mine’ was originally, ‘… a girl of nineteen, and I stole a look at Jane's face and shape; they pleased, they suited me, the well-formed head, the expressive lineaments, and she might be mine …’ (MS. p. 277; xxiii. 162). The passage which follows makes it quite clear that Charlotte was not being coy or prudish in making this omission. She is merely underlining a theme important in this and in her better-known novels: the primacy of spiritual affinity. The professor's feeling is strong because it is an ‘inward glow’, and remains so until its revelation can be expressed fully and without reserve. On the other hand, Charlotte has been careful not to exclude physical attraction entirely. In Chap. xiv, ‘chiefly’ replaces ‘but’ in ‘… the toil-worn, fagged, probably irritable tutor, blind almost to beauty, insensible to airs and graces, glories chiefly in certain mental qualities’ (MS. p. 144; xiv. 240).

These changes in meaning do, I think, throw light on Charlotte's treatment of her own experience in this first novel, and possibly reveal some of her difficulties in dealing with certain characters or themes. It remains to consider changes in expression which seem to have been made primarily for the sake of style.

The stylistic alterations are varied in character, but a high proportion of them (about one-third) arise from the writer's desire to avoid repetition of a word or phrase. For example:

1. MS. p. 6 (i. 7): ‘determined hostility’ becomes ‘persevering hostility’. Cf. ‘determined race’ (top of p. 7) and ‘determined enmity’ (previous sentence).
2. MS. p. 9 (i. 13): ‘further intercourse’ becomes ‘further communication’. Cf. ‘future intercourse’ later in the same sentence.
3. MS. p. 9 (i. 13): ‘will I think operate’ becomes ‘will I fancy operate’. Cf. ‘I do not think’ beginning the same sentence.
4. MS. p. 17 (ii. 26): ‘that was passing’ becomes ‘that was going on’. Cf. ‘we passed’ and ‘Workpeople were passing’ on the same page.
5. MS. p. 19 (ii. 28): ‘drew out’ becomes ‘took out’. Cf. ‘drawer’ in the same sentence.
6. MS. p. 23 (iii. 35): ‘small fund’ becomes ‘slender fund’. Cf. ‘small lodgings’ earlier in the same sentence.
7. MS. p. 46 (v. 73) ‘be found in’ becomes ‘be derived from [his society]’. Cf. ‘find pleasure in’, p. 72.

These may be taken as typical. Similar examples occur throughout The Professor at irregular intervals, but with no very noticeable concentration in any one part: that is, the book seems to have undergone a fairly systematic pruning at this level. In Charlotte Brontë's writing the iterative habit is unusually strong, and so natural to her style that it persists at a very late stage of composition. Often the repeated words are the key to a character or situation, for her attitudes are usually strongly defined. It is significant that she does not invariably alter the second of a pair of words. Each sentence has been carefully considered, and, as in Example 2, the first element may be changed. This seems to point to a later rather than a concurrent re-reading.

Sometimes she is unnecessarily eager to avoid recurrence. The repeated ‘think’ of Example 3 was natural and emphatic, more appropriate to spoken words than ‘I fancy’, though the whole speech is, of course, intentionally rather stilted. But one would not quarrel with most of the alterations: ‘slender’ and ‘derived’ are satisfactory, possibly preferable to the original. (The latter may indeed be purely stylistic preference: the connexion with ‘find’ is rather slight.) Sometimes the change is a definite improvement: the ‘persevering hostility’ of Example 1 is a total variation on the previous ‘determined enmity’; in this, in its rhythmic quality and its formality, it is entirely in keeping with the peculiar mannered rhetoric of the whole passage.

The Preface to The Professor leads one to expect that stylistic changes will be away from the ‘ornamented and redundant’ and towards the ‘plain and homely’. But one or two instances of an opposite tendency occur, and it is interesting to speculate on the motives for these.

For example, the opening chapter of the Brussels section, already in an ‘ornamented’ and poetic strain, has been even more refined in revision. ‘My happiness possessed an edge whetted to the finest …’ becomes ‘My sense of enjoyment …’; ‘… he shall see a glorious sunrise …’ becomes ‘… he shall behold …’; ‘over a mountain horizon …’ becomes ‘over the eastern horizon …’ and ‘I mounted now a hill …’, ‘… the hill …’ (MS. p. 65; vii. 104-5). The very minuteness of the alterations is revealing. The author wishes to give her picture the greatest possible definition, her mood the greatest possible exultation.

Early critics remarked on the ‘unchecked naturalness of expression’⁹ in The Professor; or, if they were less favourably disposed, its ‘rough, bold, coarse truthfulness of expression, … compressed style’.¹⁰ The manuscript shows how often Charlotte intensified her already ‘bold’ style: adding a defining adverb or adjective, choosing a stronger noun or verb. ‘Always’ is inserted in ‘Edward's letters had been such as to prevent the engendering or harbouring of delusions of this sort’ (MS. p. 8; i. 11); ‘Continual’ in ‘I will place my cup under this dropping’ (MS. p. 21; ii. 32). ‘Many’ replaces ‘some’ in ‘… many called me miser at the time’ (MS. p. 23; iii. 36). ‘Pittance’ replaces ‘salary’ in ‘… the master grudged every penny of that hard-earned pittance’ (MS. p. 35; iv. 54). It is noticeable that most of these serve to bring out the harshness of Edward Crimsworth or the keen resentment of William against Edward.

This kind of intensification is closely linked with character, and occurs in clearly defined areas rather than in diffusion throughout the novel.

There is, however, a more general tendency to add descriptive details: X—becomes a ‘mushroom’ place (MS. p. 31; ii. 48); Vanderkelkov not only ‘moon-faced’ but ‘thick-set’ (MS. p. 74; vii. 120); Caroline's teeth are ‘sparkling’ (MS. p. 101; x. 166) (though her hair is no longer ‘jetty’); and the fact that the professor ‘crossed the Place royale’ is a later addition (MS. p. 201; xix. 41). The impression given is one of vivid recollection of reality: Charlotte described things clearly because they were in every detail clear to her inward eye.

Examples of the opposite process—lowering of style, reduction of emphasis—are comparatively rare, and not very significant. In Chap. xxv, for example, ‘the doom preparing for old Northern despotisms’ becomes the tamer ‘sentiments entertained by resolute minds respecting old Northern despotisms’ (MS. p. 327; xxv. 239); and in Chap. xii an ornately developed metaphor is simplified: ‘She laid her hand on the jewel within;’ was originally, ‘she laid her hand on the brooch of the cornelian [carnelian?] heart within; …’ (MS. p. 125; xii. 208).

Minor stylistic changes abound. They are of various kinds, but on the whole show Charlotte's concern for the more closely defined as opposed to the general term. ‘Observing’ replaces ‘seeing’ (MS. p. 117; xii. 195), and ‘perceived’, ‘saw’ (MS. p. 39; iv. 60); ‘re-cast’ for ‘sported with’ maintains a figure of speech in Chap. iv (MS. p. 40; iv. 63). Such changes are more noticeable towards the end of the novel.

Some alterations are made for the sake of euphony: ‘innate’, for example, was a rejected first term in ‘redolent of native and ineradicable vulgarity …’ (MS. p. 143; xiv. 239); ‘heath’ became ‘moorland’ in Chap. xxv; ‘whose waters still run pure, whose swells of moorland preserve in some ferny glens, that lie between them, the very primal wildness of nature …’ (MS. p. 325; xxv. 236); and ‘still’ became ‘hushed’ in ‘The north was hushed, the south silent …’ (MS. p. 204; xix. 45).

Such alterations give convincing evidence of a minute and thorough revision. It would seem that Mrs. Gaskell's famous description of Charlotte Brontë's method of writing requires qualification. She praised her ‘singular felicity in the choice of words’: ‘One set of words was the truthful mirror of her thoughts; no others, however identical in meaning, would do. … She never wrote down a sentence until she clearly understood what she wanted to say, had deliberately chosen the words, and arranged them in their right order’ (Life, Chap. xv). This may have been true of the ‘pencilled scraps of paper’ seen by Mrs. Gaskell: it certainly was not true of the fair copy of The Professor.

II. THE FIRST EDITION

It is obviously important that the printed text should accurately represent the manuscript of a writer who took so much care over minute details. And on the whole Charlotte Brontë was well served by her publishers. They were careful and reliable, and she appreciated their giving her works ‘every advantage which good paper, clear type, and a seemly outside can supply’ (S.H.B., [Shakespeare Head Brontë] ii. 149). She also thanked them for punctuating the proof-sheets of Jane Eyre, as she thought their ‘mode of punctuation a great deal more correct and rational’ than her own (S.H.B., ii. 142).

One therefore expects Smith, Elder's edition of The Professor to be of a good standard: and comparison with the manuscript shows in fact a high degree of accuracy. There are, however, some half dozen errors that would no doubt have been corrected if the author herself had read the proofs:

1. ‘cup’ has been misread ‘cups’ in Chap. ii (MS. p. 14; ii. 22). An elaborate ‘p’ is responsible. The correct version is obviously preferable: ‘a valley … held in its cup the great town of X—’

2. ‘Semi-collong?’ in Chap. x should be ‘Simi-collong?’ (MS. p. 102; x. 168).

3. Charlotte Brontë was not responsible for the incorrect use of ‘perspicuity’ in Chap. x. She wrote ‘perspicacity’ (MS. p. 105; x. 172).

4. ‘Look at this little woman! …’ should be ‘… this little real woman …’ (MS. p. 107; x. 175).

5. ‘worky-day’ has been ‘corrected’ to ‘work-day’ (MS. p. 120; xii. 199).

6. It was ‘“inconvenant”’ and not ‘“inconvenient”’ for the professor to overlook his pupils (MS. p. 128; xii. 213).

7. The Crimsworths' maid is quite clearly ‘Mimie’ and not ‘Minnie’ (MS. p. 312; xxv. 215).

All these errors have been retained in subsequent editions, except for No. 6, corrected in the Dent edition of 1893, and its later reprints.

The printed version also gives little idea of the nature and extent of Charlotte Brontë's capitalization, which is extremely idiosyncratic. A certain amount has been retained, but this is often misleading, for it underlines some passages at the expense of others to which the author gave equal emphasis. It is also quite conventional, marking, for example, many of the personified abstracts, but reducing to normality words which for the author had a very special kind of life.

Notice, for instance, the inconsistent treatment of two similar passages—both dealing with Mlle Reuter, who often provokes this kind of analysis. In Chap. xx capitals are retained: ‘… I knew her former feeling was unchanged. Decorum now repressed, and Policy masked it, but Opportunity would be too strong for either of these—Temptation would shiver their restraints …’ (MS. p. 231; xx. 90). Yet the personification here is less strongly realized than in Chap. xv, where the capitals are omitted. I give the manuscript version:

… the fact is that as it was her nature to doubt the reality and undervalue the worth of Modesty, Affection, Disinterestedness, to regard these qualities as foibles of character; so it was equally her tendency to consider Pride, Hardness, Selfishness as proofs of strength. She would trample on the neck of Humility, she would kneel at the feet of Disdain; she would meet Tenderness with secret contempt, Indifference she would woo with ceaseless assiduities; Benevolence, Devotedness, Enthusiasm were her Antipathies; for Dissimulation and Self-Interest she had a preference—they were real wisdom in her ‘eyes’—Moral and physical Degradation, mental and bodily Inferiority she regarded with indulgence … to Violence, Injustice, Tyranny she succumbed, they were her natural masters—. … (MS. p. 155; xv. 260)

In Chap. iv the original capitalization shows that words which now appear to be merely qualifying adjectives should have the force of nouns: ‘… they two should have been my household gods, from which my Darling, my Cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the tender and the mighty, should never, either by softness or strength, have severed me …’ (MS. p. 33; iv. 52).

Capitalized words often occur in the ‘visionary’ passages: in Chap. v, ‘you dare to dream of Congeniality, Repose, Union’ (MS. p. 46; v. 73), and in Chap. vii, ‘Thoughts, Feelings, Memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods …’ (MS. p. 65; vii. 103). The capitals mark these qualities as ‘visions’: Charlotte Brontë evidently feels and intends that we should feel them to have a palpable form. However uncongenial to modern taste, this is undeniably the mode of her imagination. Their absence, too, weakens the affinity with eighteenth-century prose and poetry which is an important element in her style. Again, capitals, by their purely mechanical function of arresting the eye, indicate a special emphasis, which would require, if the passage were spoken, a slow enunciation with marked pauses; and it is clearly most important to bring out the rhythmical qualities in, for example, an evocation of the past like that in Chap. vii, where the ‘meaning’ is primarily emotional.

There is plainly too much capitalization, and many instances—the characteristic marking of ‘“The Climax”’ (MS. p. 45; v. 72) and ‘The Garden’ (MS. p. 91; ix. 149), and of ‘He’ (Hunsden) (MS. p. 248; xxii. 118)—were considered by the printers too eccentric to be acceptable. I think, nevertheless, that a case can be made out for more than occurs in the First Edition. The original ‘Master’ especially can be justified, for its capitalization is a useful reminder of the centrality of the ‘master’ theme: at iii. 38, for example, it is Edward Crimsworth who is the ‘Master’ (MS. p. 24) whereas later it is, of course, William to whom Frances turns as the ‘Master in all things’ (MS. p. 318; xxv. 225).

We are fortunate that in The Professor (unlike Villette, where many phrases are literally cut out) so many of the author's first thoughts may be examined. The manuscript allows us to see something of the careful craftsmanship which, together with a more fortunate inspiration, helped to create Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. Not least, it reveals the need for a text which shall more accurately represent the author's intentions.

Notes

1. Date given in the autograph manuscript of The Professor, p. 340.

2. See letter to Aylott and Jones, 6 April 1846. (Shakespeare Head Brontë [hereafter S.H.B.], Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (1932), ii. 87.)

3. Letter to George Smith, (S.H.B., iii. 206-7).

4. Letter to Emily Shaen (S.H.B., iv. 208).

5. A microfilm copy of the autograph manuscript has been consulted, and quotations from it are given by courtesy of the present owners of the manuscript, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

6. The Pierpont Morgan Library kindly undertook to examine the passages by means of ultra-violet and infra-red photography, but the experiments were unsuccessful. The Curator writes: ‘In addition to lining out the passages very heavily [? the Rev. Nicholls] also scraped through the lines (probably gutted them with a small pen knife). I fear that they are not recoverable.’

7. Quotations are taken from the First Edition of The Professor, 1857.

8. The episode derives from Mary Percy's visit to her children's nursery in History of Angria, Part 111 (29 April 1836: S.H.B., Miscellaneous Writings, ii. 148) where the narrator is an impersonal observer.

9. The Critic, 15 June 1857.

10. Athenaeum, 13 June 1857.