I must be frank with you and say that I
am afraid the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little of
Charlotte Bronte's residence in your inoffensive neighbourhood. I have
to paint a background to my picture, and I find none but the gloomiest
colours. They have to be what the art-critics of the eighteenth century
called "sub-fusc." But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the fault,
or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius. She was here, in
this wholesome and hospitable vicinity, for several months, during which
time "she felt in nothing better, neither humbler nor purer," and
looking back upon it, she had to admit that it was "a poisoned place"
to her.

I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me, that on such an
occasion as the present, and especially when dealing with a group of
writers about whom so much as has been said as about the Brontes, it is
wise not to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, one
aspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history seems to
have given us, under the heading "Dewsbury," a rather grim text, from
which, nevertheless, we may perhaps extract some final consolation. Let
me say at the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dewsbury
is not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years from 1836 to 1838,
the Bronte girls had been visitors to Kubla Khan, and had been fed on
honey by his myrmidons at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome would yet have been
"poisoned" to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and the disagreeable
position of a governess, it was not the rough landscape of your moors,
nor its lack of southern amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. It
was not in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors at
Heald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed and patient
crater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am almost persuaded that, if you
had lived in Dewsbury sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on very
quiet days a faint subterranean sound which you would never have been
able to guess was really the passion, furiously panting, shut up in the
heart of a small, pale governess in Heald's House schoolroom.

If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your hands, for I confess
I do not see how it could be otherwise, and do scarcely wish that it
could have been. Let us not be too sentimental in this matter. Figures
in literature are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. The
more perso