Bruce Springsteen said you can’t start a fire without a spark; I believe that a spark is also essential to kickstart great works of art and creativity, and it was just such a spark that lit up Haworth Parsonage on this week in 1836.
There can be no other family which has produced such a gathering of geniuses than the Brontës, and this is all the more remarkable considering that the Brontë family were not wealthy and that the children had little formal education in their infancy. We will never be able to fully understand how three sisters produced such great works of genius in such a short space of time, theirs is a unique genius, but we can pinpoint a moment when the first catalyst for their creativity arrived: July 5th 1836.
Three years later Charlotte Brontë, 13 at the time but 10 in 1826, gave an account of that important moment:
“Papa bought Branwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds. When Papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke!’ when I had said this Emily likewise took one up and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part. Emily’s was a grave-looking fellow, and we called him ‘Gravey’. Anne’s was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him ‘Waiting-boy’. Branwell chose his, and called him Buonaparte.”
In 1841, Branwell Brontë, then 14 but 9 at the time of the event, also recalled what happened, but his recollection had a slightly different slant:
“When I first saw them [the 12 wooden soldiers] in the morning after they were bought, I carried them to Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They each took up a soldier, gave them names, which I consented to, and I gave Charlotte Twemy (i.e. Wellington), to Emily Pare (Parry), to Anne Trott (Ross) to take care of them, though they were to be mine and I to have the disposal of them as I would. Shortly after this I gave them to them as their own.”
We see, then, two acts of thoughtfulness. Patrick Brontë, returning from a trip to Leeds, decided to bring his son a gift of a set of soldiers. Branwell decided to share them with his sisters. Almost immediately the four Brontë siblings began to compose stories, ‘plays’ as they called them, around the 12 soldiers. The tap to their immense imaginations and creativity had been turned, and it would not be shut off again except by that final curtain which waits for us all.
It is worth noting as well that this gift came a year after the deaths of the oldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. The four remaining Brontë siblings became an incredibly close knit unit, but they still loved to play. We have an account of one occasion when the young Brontës played a trick on their old housekeeper Tabby Ackroyd. Left in the care of Tabby, the children began acting out one of their plays. They were so immersed in their characters, and carried their acting so far, that Tabby had to run screaming from the house to fetch help from her nephew William, saying:
“William! William! Yah mun goa up to Mr Brontë’s for aw’m sure yon chiller’s all gooin mad, and I dar’nt stop ith house ony longer wi’em; and aw’ll stay here woll yah come back!”
Seeing how frightened his Aunt Tabitha was, William marched off to the Parsonage, only to be greeted by a ‘great cackling of laughter’ when he came in sight of the children. They were delighted at how effective their playing and acting had been.
This huge power of play, this great love of creativity, would soon be captured in tiny books small enough for the toy soldiers to read; it would soon be captured in stories told as the siblings walked round and round their dining table; it would soon be captured in poetry printed in a book attributed to Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; it would soon lead to some of the greatest novels ever written, books that will be read for as long as human life exists on this tiny, beautiful planet of ours. A tiny spark from the gift of twelve soldiers was all it took to change the course of literary history forever, even if they were just writing in the dark. I hope you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post.
Very interesting.
Amazing how small, seemingly insignificant acts can have such an impact. Their imagination was so powerful…I often wonder what it would have been like to truly know them.