The Young Charlotte Brontë

William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). The Lake for Miniature Yachts, ca. 1888. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Terian Collection of American Art

[Begin Page 319]

Figure 1.

[Harvard Houghton Library, MS Lowell 1 (6) page 1 (seq. 2)]

Pictured above is a small hand-sewn manuscript of twenty pages, covered in faded yellow paper.¹ Dated August 1829, it is titled Blackwood's Young Men's Magazine, "edited by the Genius CB." That would be Charlotte Brontë, at the age of thirteen. With this issue, she took over from her brother Branwell the editorship of their collaborative project. Modeled on the popular Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the magazine produced at Haworth Parsonage each month was crammed with plays, poems, reviews, fictional journals, stories. The title page of each issue was carefully lettered in imitation of print, with serifs adorning the capital letters. Articles on serious subjects—the presidential election of 1828 in America, the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill in England—were suitably serious in tone. But the advertisements that appeared at the end of each issue, as in the endpapers of most publications of the time, were exuberant jeux d'esprit: "GRAND DISCOVERY!!!! Captain Brainless has lately discovered a method by which men may get rid of their money." "TO BE SOLD A reel of thread, by Corporal Needle of Sewing Street, Cotton Square." "YOUNG Man Naughty will instruct pupils in the elegant art of assassination."

As Charlotte replaced her twelve-year-old brother as editor (other writing projects claimed his time) both used the pages of the magazine to comment on the transition. In the issue for July 1829, the last under his editorship, Branwell ended his tenure with a "Concluding Address to my Readers":

We have hitherto conducted this Magazine & we hope to the satisfaction of most (no one can please all) but as we are conducting a Newspaper which requires all the time and attention we can spare from other employments, we have found it expedient to relinquish the editorship of this Magazine but we recommend our readers to be to the new Editor as they were to me. The new one is the chief Genius Charlotte. She will conduct it in future, though I shall write now and then for it.²

Handing off the mantle of editorship, he commends his sister to the magazine's readers. But six months later, in the issue of Blackwood's Young Men's Magazine for December 1829, Branwell laments the decline in seriousness that has come under Charlotte's reign:

All soberness is past and goneThe reign of gravity is doneFrivolity comes in its placeLight smiling sits on every face.³

Charlotte counters with a poem of her own in which she debunks her brother's pretensions. She calls her poem "Lines by One who was Tired of Dullness upon the Same Occasion."

Through the second half of 1829 and throughout 1830, Charlotte, aged thirteen to fourteen, would continue as editor, writing most of the stories, dialogues, poems, and plays herself, and occasionally in collaboration with her brother. She, too, addresses readers in a tone of gravitas, assuring them in the issue for August 1830, as she begins the "Second Series" of the Young Men's Magazines, that it "will be conducted on like principles with the first," and that "the same eminent authors" will be engaged to contribute to it.

In physical appearance, Blackwood's Young Men's Magazine is remarkable. It is tiny—about two and a half inches high. Its pages are covered with miniscule writing, too small to decipher without a magnifying glass—and difficult even with one. In part this was a matter of economy. Paper was expensive, and the children sometimes wrote on unwanted scraps—pieces of sugar bags, or parcel wrapping, or wallpaper. But beyond sparing the use of paper, the miniscule writing insured that what the children wrote would be protected from the eyes of adults. It remained their own secret. Within the hand-sewn covers of these...