Times Literary Supplement
AUGUST 16th 2002

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LETTER FROM BOMBAY - face to face with the men who loved Charlotte Bronte!

On my first morning here, I walked the hot dusty streets gleefully: Bombay was a home from home. I live in Manchester and to my eyes, earth has not anything to show more fair than Manchester’s Victorian exuberantly gothic Town Hall. How odd, then, to come halfway across the world and find whole streets of familiar brick and terracotta filigree and fandangle. It was as if I had stepped into the Cottonpolis of a parallel universe, equally wet but filled with parrots and palm trees, all basking beneath a tropical sun. I couldnt help feeling Charlotte Brontë would probably have felt at home here too, though most of the great buildings in both Bombay and Manchester – where she began writing Jane Eyre while her father was undergoing an eye-operation – were built after her death.

The world is full of unfinished novels, but those left unfinished when celebrated authors die mid-sentence – like Charles Dickens’s Edwin Drood or Jane Austen’s Sanditon – are particularly poignant. They often get printed, despite their vulnerable state, as their missing endings make them intriguing and their lack of final polish can reveal much about the way writers work. Charlotte Brontë’s Emma is only two chapters long, and little more then a slight first draft: a merest hint at the masterpiece that might have evolved had she lived. Although deftly edited by Brontë’s husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, about five years after her death, for publication in Thackeray’s new Cornhill Magazine, the story is full of inconsistencies and puzzling inconsequentialities. A young heiress, Matilda Fitzgibbon, has been left at a small private school run by the snobbish Miss Wilcox, who becomes distraught to discover that neither her pupil’s rich Papa, nor his supposed fortune, exists. This colourful scenario is too scanty and scatty for us to be able confidently to predict Charlotte Brontë’s intentions – even the “Emma” of the title never appears. Jane Austen’s Emma was published in 1816, the year Charlotte Brontë was born. It is the Austen novel of which she famously remarked: “the Passions are perfectly unknown to her … Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet …” One of the most famous Emmas of the nineteenth century, Emma Hamilton, was the mistress of Nelson, whose title Duke of Brontë had influenced the Reverend Patrick Brontë to change his name from Brunty when he came from Ireland.

Late one night some months ago, idly surfing the Internet, I found some books that had once belonged to Arthur Bell Nicholls for sale by auction. Internet auctions differ little from saleroom auctions in that, even in the privacy of one’s own parlour, one can get alarmingly carried away. Thinking it would be wonderful to own something that had once belonged to Charlotte Brontë’s husband, I placed a bid. Ten days later, it was less wonderful to receive an email requesting $180 for three books I did not want: turgid liturgical volumes, each signed and dated by Nicholls when he had been at Haworth as Patrick Brontë’s curate, in the months before his marriage to Charlotte. In Thackeray’s introduction to “the last fragmentary sketch from the noble hand which wrote Jane Eyre”, he quotes from Nicholls's account of the writing of Emma: One evening, at the close of 1854, as Charlotte Nicholls sat with her husband by the fire, listening to the howling of the wind about the house, she suddenly said to her husband, “If you had not been with me, I must have been writing now.” She then ran upstairs, and brought down and read aloud, the beginning of a new tale. When she had finished her husband remarked, “The critics will accuse you of repetition.” She replied, “Oh, I shall alter that. I always begin two or three times before I can please myself.” But it was not to be. The trembling little hand was to write no more. A few months later, after only nine months of marriage, the thirty-eight-year-old novelist died from excessive bleeding in pregnancy. Nicholls lived on in Haworth, looking after his aged father-in-law until he died, enduring the publicity from Mrs Gaskell’s sensational biography of his wife (written with indecent haste after her death). He then took the surviving Brontë dogs, servant and everything of sentimental value connected with Charlotte, back to his home town of Banagher in Ireland, where he married his crippled cousin and lived quietly as a gentleman farmer. When the package of musty books arrived from Sotheby’s, a photograph fell out of one of them, together with a letter sent in 1970 to Winifred Gerin, Charlotte Brontë’s 1960’s biographer. The books had been sold by her estate. The photograph, taken in 1904, depicted Arthur Bell Nicholls as an old man, standing with his dog Pincher and a little girl outside his home, Hill House. The letter was from the girl (now aged seventy-eight), whose father had been the Rector at Banagher before the First World War, congratulating Gerin on her biography. “The Nicholls were our nearest neighbours and dearest friends. I was devoted to Mr Nicholls and looked on him as a sort of extra grandfather …”

I propped the picture on my desk and found myself increasingly haunted by this kindly old man whom Brontë mythologists have often treated badly. It is typical that Thackeray’s account, intended merely to emphasise the early stage of the unfinished work, has been frequently quoted out of context, to berate Nicholls for discouraging his wife’s writing. Mrs Gaskell abused him because he did not give her everything she required for her own intrusive biography, while Charlotte’s friend from schooldays, Ellen Nussey, bitterly resented his usurpation of her role as confidant and took every opportunity to paint him in a bad light. Sadly, Charlotte herself was the cause of his greatest trial after her death. While going through her papers, poor Arthur Bell Nicholls discovered letters from James Taylor in Bombay, and was distressed to think he had not been her only suitor. It is said that the widowed Nicholls should have been perturbed by those letters, for there is no doubt that he is the unsung hero of the whole Brontë story. Charlotte was amazed by how happy being Mrs Nicholls made her. She was delighted, on her honeymoon in Ireland, to discover how modest her husband had been in not revealing in Haworth what a genteel family he came from. His correspondence with Martha Brown, the servant who nursed Charlotte in her final illness, has never been published in its entirety, but reveals a profound concern for Martha’s welfare. He urged her to make her home with him and his second wife, as a friend rather than as a servant, and kept in constant touch till the day she died. Meanwhile he safeguarded the Brontë treasures until the day of his own death (when his widow was tricked out of many of them), ensuring their preservation for posterity. Just before going to Bombay, I had visited Banagher and found Hill House for sale. It was still recognizable from the photograph, although it has lately been used as a guest house and is badly in need of attention. The land immediately around it, which Nicholls used to farm and where, presumably, Patrick Brontë’s dogs, Plato and Cato, are buried, has recently been sold off for an upmarket housing development. The estate agent kindly let me wander through the rooms which, despite bed-and-breakfast furnishings and lime-green fittings, proved an unnerving experience. It was here that an old man had lived with his memories, and it was odd to think that the handwritten manuscript of Emma was still in the house when the photograph was taken (it is now in Princeton University Library). One of the last letters written by Nicholls, preserved at the Brontë Parsonage museum, is to the father of the little girl in the photograph, asking to borrow a saw to deal with a fallen tree and enquiring about the child’s health.

Having read that Taylor is buried in the Sewree Christian Cemetery in north Bombay, I felt I ought to go and pay my respects. I knew from an obituary in The Times of India, cited in a biographical note in Margaret Smith’s invaluable Letters of Charlotte Brontë (2000), that James Taylor’s grave was located near the entrance gates. I headed north, past the grand white porticoed Royal Asiatic Society building where Taylor worked, through miles of crowded shanty towns, whose squalor even Dickens could never have previsioned, where multi-storey shacks cling to every inch of pavement, and are home to many of Bombay’s 15 million population. The amount British Airways charged me for excess baggage the following day would keep whole streets here in food and clothing for years. I found Taylor’s grave within minutes of entering the cemetery – and found myself face to face with a man who had proposed to Charlotte Brontë. A life-sized portrait is carved in a stone roundel on top of the big impressive gravestone. I could see for myself the “determined dreadful nose in the middle of his face which, when poked into my countenance, cuts into my soul like iron. Still, he is horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious, and with a memory of relentless tenacity.” James Taylor died in 1874 after tripping over in the billiard room at his club (presumably after one tipple too many). As I was photographing the stone, the men looking after the cemetery assumed he must be a relation of mine and offered to clean up the grave for 1,000 rupees (about £15). When I returned the next day they had not only cleaned the grave but had also painted in the lettering so that I could photograph it: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES TAYLOR SECRETARY TO THE BOMBAY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND TO THE BOMBAY BRANCH OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY AND REGISTRAR OF THE BOMBAY UNIVERSITY WHO DIED ON THE 29th APRIL 1874 AGED 57 YEARS. THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IN TESTIMONY OF ITS ADMIRATION OF HIS HIGH CHARACTER AND OF ITS APPRECIATION OF THE ABLE AND ZEALOUS SERVICES WHICH HE RENDERED TO THE CHAMBER AS ITS SECRETARY FOR A PERIOD OF NEARLY 10 YEARS FROM SEPTEMBER 1864 TILL HIS DEATH

Taylor died as he had lived. The architecturally elaborate gravestone is impressive but impersonal. It formally commemorates a man whose “high character” is admired, but who inspired none of the sorrowful affection expressed “in loving memory” on most of the other less ornate, less expensive, graves nearby. It is, however, a lovely spot for a disappointed man to end up. The cemetery was once a botanical garden, and the lush green tropical vegetation still affords the unquiet graves (it is right next door to a busy road and bazaar, and under a flight-path) pleasant respite from the sweltering sun.

© CHARLOTTE CORY

note: I visited Bombay (to write this letter) shortly after September 11th 2001. In fact, I flew from London Heathrow that day just as the security tightened there in the wake of what were thought at the time to be hi-jackings. It was only after I arrived in Madras that I heard what had happened in New York. When I arrived in Bombay, some three weeks later, I noticed that the Bombay stock exchange had stopped its clocks on Sept 11th out of solidarity with America because its own World Trade Centre had been bombed a decade before. It was strange to be concerned with this bit of Bronte research at such a time, in such a particular historical context. CC

See further article about another Taylor memorial in Bombay

Charlotte Cory was in Bombay with Greaves Travel, specialists in travel to India. She stayed at the historic Taj Hotel on the beautiful waterfront, overlooking the Gateway to India.

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