Many authors begin writing in childhood, but that the Brontës did so seems peculiarly apt. There is something childlike about their sensibility, with its merging of fantasy and reality, its mixture of rebelliousness and awe at authority, its blending of submission and self-assertion. Like the Brontës, children can be passionate and impulsive, but they also crave a certain discipline and appreciate the need for order. If they can be anarchic, they can also be brutally authoritarian. They like to know who is in charge, even if it is only to calculate what they can get away with. They can also be violent, and the sisters’ novels are laced with a sometimes murderous aggression. Almost all relationships in their world are power struggles, spiced from time to time with a sadistic delight in making others suffer and a masochistic drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities.

Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or middle of the road about these extremist fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic wars of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or romatic, than realist. They are closer it sensibility to the histrionic, hyperbolic Dickens, who took the games he plaed with his children with alarming seriousness.

The violence set in early with the Brontës. In a fragment by Charlotte reprinted here, the proteagonist, irritated by the presence of a grubby urchin in a house to which he has been invited for tea, suddenly seizes a poker and strikes him to the ground, even though the child had merely been standing gormlessly about. “The scream that he set up was tremendous, but it only increased my anger. I kicked him several times and dashed his head against the floor, hoping to stun him.’ This kind of thing would pass almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. When the child’s horrified family come running in, the hero, anxious to stay in the house a little longer for his own selfish reasons, coolly lies through his teeth, informing them that their “sweet little boy” fell down as they were playing together.

Children can find ambivalence hard to handle, loving their parents but also raging against them, and some of the Brontës’ fury and frustration arose from their own Janus-like situation. They were English but also Irish, the offspring of a father who had blazed a remarkable trail from a poverty-stricken Ulster cabin to Cambridge and Anglican orders. “Brontë country” for the Irish is the stretch of County Down, where he was born, and Bramwell, the feckless, drunken, stage-Irish brother whose first name was actually Patrick, was once burned in effigy by the plain people of Haworth with a potato in his hand. [Terry Eagleton wrote about Branwell in the LRB of 8 July 1993.] The Brontës may have tried to become plus anglais que les anglais, in a long tradition of literary emigration to these shores, but their neighbours weren’t fooled.

The family was lower middle-class, caught between a head-hearded contempt for the gentry whose pampered brats the girls were forced to teach as governesses, and a High Tory distain for the politically disgruntled working class on their door-step. The West Riding of Yorkshire was one of the stoutest strongholds of Chartism, and the children’s early years witnessed the ruination of thousands of handloom workers in the region. In classic petty-bourgeois style, the Brontës admired hard work and frugality while feeling a cut above the populace, and respected their social superiors while also resenting them In these childhood writings, this tension is resolved in the figure of the Byronic lord, at once rebellious and respected, in whom it is not hard to see a dry run for Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester.

A kind of upper servant, at home neither in the kitchen nor in the drawing-room, the Victorian governess was a painfully displaced figure, at once cultivated and something of a skivvy; and when the genteel-poor sisters were sent out to work, their sense of internal exile, already strongly marked in their childhood scribblings, became even sharper. Anne’s bitter, melancholic poems, some of which are reprinted here, sing the joys of being an outlaw, but also reflect on its costs. A similar tension can be found in Emily’s impressive early verse, some of which also appears here.

As women writers, the sisters were internal exiles of a different kind, semi-outsiders in a male-dominated literary world. That women could write as they did struck some contemporary reviewers as outrageous, even obscene. They had dealings with literary London from a far-flung provincial outpost, proud of their cosmopolitan cultivation yet firmly rooted in their own region. As if all this were not ambiguous enough, they were also stranded like D.H. Lawrence between country and city, full of a Romantic yearning for the moors and likely to have witnessed a good deal of urban destitution. According to Christine Alexander, the erudite, meticulous editor of this volume, there were 18 small textile mills in Haworth alone. The children were bred in the womb of industrial modernity, among the smokestacks of early Victorian England, and the emotional pattern of their work obliquely reflects the passions and conficts of the period. Their novels don’t protray bread riots or mass rallies but they belong unmistakably to the Hungry Forties.

[...; ensuing column-and-a-half section contains remarks on Branwell’s life, death and writings.]

A typical early Charlotte story begins in a luxurious palace in which the ground suddenly splits open and an evil spirit appears in the sky. Wildness and civility lie side by side, as they did in a parsonage full ofspiritual gentlefolk on the Yorkshire moors. But they also overlap in the condition of childhood, which is on the cusp of nature and culture. Children are more natural than adults in the sense of being more innocent and spontaneous, but also in the sense of being more savage and unruly. They thus illustrate what is defective in civilisation as well as what is valuable in it. Besides, nature in the Brontës’ writing is in the process of shifting from its Wordsworthian to its Darwinian sense, which makes its violence and ruthlessness all the more evident. Children are small smelly goats (or kids), little Calibans on whom nurture has yet to have much effect. As instances ofunreclaimed nature, they are as appealing as they are alarming. Heathcliff is a heathen living on a heath, at once brutish and vibrant. The Victorians could never decide whether children were angels or demons, as Dickensian sentimentalism vied with evangelical disapproval. The fact that they are relatively free from social constraints, like the young Heaffcliff and Catherine footloose on the moors, is part of their allure; but it is also what makes them callous, selfish, anarchic and potentially dangerous. Wuthering Heights is much concerned with the way a surfeit of civility can sap your vigour, but a deficiency of it can make you predatory and pitiless. Culture transcends nature, but must acknowledge its roots in this humble stuff.

From the viewpoint of the civilised Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff and Catherine are frozen in some timeless mythological sphere, locked in a sexless, infantile symbiosis which could never have matured into an adult relationship. Indeed, what the couple share is scarcely a relationship at all, since there is no question of otherness involved. Looked at in another light, however, there is a utopian aspect to this ferociously violent love, one which cuts through social hierarchies and disdains the whole business of property, inheritance and the marriage market. It is a mark of the novel’s eminently dialectical structure that it refuses to allow the reader a simple choice between these readings.

Perhaps the Heathcliff-Catherine relationship is as sexless as it is because the two, unknown to themselves, are half-siblings, with an unconscious fear of incest. There is certainly a case to be made that in presenting his family with Heathcliff, old Earnshow is actually palming off one of his bastards on them. Yet children unsettle gender distinctions in any case - not exactly because they are sexless, but because they are neither men nor women. Boys are especially enigmatic in this respect, being puny, piping males. Jane Byre - small, waif-like, rather sexless in a sexy kind of way - is really a child. There is a good deal of cross - gendering and cross-dressing in the novels: Ruch ester dresses up as a female gypsy and his tall, muscular, swarthy wife, Bertha, looks uncannily like a female mirror-image of him. Shirley is really a Carlyean hero in drag. Charlotte’s female protagonists tend to veer between feminine passivity and masculine self-seeking, occasionally enlisting the former in the cause of the latter. If they find male power cruelly oppressive, they also see in it an alter ego. Among other things, it represents the condition in which they themselves would no longer need to be victims.

One reason children figure so much in Victorian fiction is that they are among the most vulnerable human beings, and thus symbolise a social order in which many men and women are weak, victimised and spiritually orphaned. The image of the afflicted innocent is powerful, though conveniently limited: the child cannot understand the systemic causes of its suffering, is powerless to alter them and demands instant relief rather than fundamental social change. Children are natural reformists. Viewing a predatory system through the eyes ofa child hits itwhere ithurts butlers it off the hook.

Like Dickens, the Brontës associate childhood with death, nature and eternity. So did Wordsworth, who along with Blake effectively invented childhood for English literature. There is, however, an irony involved in writing about your early years in Wordsworth’s reflective manner, since the act of writing itself distances you from the pre-literate, unreflective child, testifying to your loss of Edenic innocence at the very mormanyou mean to recapture it. The child enjoys a kind of freedom the adult lacks; yet because he does not meditate on this freedom, and because this carefreeness is actually part of it, there is no depth of experience there to be re-created in later life. You’re only happy when you don’t know it. Writing while you are still a child, as the Brontës did, has the advantage of narrowing the gap between innocence and experience.

There are times when the Brontës seem sick with longing for that personal prehistory known as childhood. This can be dangerous for a writer, since too intense an experience of one’s early years threatens to de-realise what comes later. The paradisal quality of one’s childhood can become a prison. What allowed the Brontë children to avoid this trap, as these writings demonstrate, is their precociousness. To be precocious is to up the balance between nature and culture firmly on the side of the latter, to live your childhood as if you were already an adult. You can thus stand askew in your own youthfulness, and so avoid being haunted by it for the rest of your days. Yet nothing is more amusingly childlike than a wise head on young shoulders. One thing that marks these writings as juvenile is their self-conscious effort at sophistication.

At an extreme, then, children can’t win. Either they live as spontaneously as Wordsworth’s roaming boys, in which case they have no spiritual depths to re-create later and thus no experience of childhood in speak of; or they are little Paul Dombeys, sunk in lugubrious self-reflection and equally bereft of yo off. But life is not lived at an extreme, except in Wuthering Heights; and the Brontë sisters, who were nurtured by their childhood but not incarcerated by it, managed this paradox better than most. [End.]