Brontë Studies

The Journal of the Brontë Society

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‘Cut from life’: The Many Sources of Branwell

Brontë’s ‘Caroline’

Edwin John Moorhouse Marr

To cite this article: Edwin John Moorhouse Marr (2019) ‘Cut from life’: The Many Sources of
Branwell Brontë’s ‘Caroline’, Brontë Studies, 44:2, 218-231, DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2019.1567169

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2019.1567169

Published online: 19 Mar 2019.

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 € STUDIES,
BRONTE Vol. 44 No. 2, April 2019, 218–231

‘Cut from life’: The Many Sources of

Branwell Bront€e’s ‘Caroline’
Edwin John Moorhouse Marr

This essay argues that, far from just being morbid, Branwell Bront€e’s poem
‘Caroline’ (1845) engages with a wide body of contemporaneous death writ-
ing. The first part of my argument contextualizes ‘Caroline’ within the wider
body of Branwell’s poetry, before I argue that one of his sources for
‘Caroline’ can be found in an 1828 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine. I then
compare ‘Caroline’ to the graveyard poets, with Branwell identifying the
grave as the locus for unravelling the mysteries of the future-life. Finally,
I place ‘Caroline’ in the historical moment of nineteenth-century
death culture.

KEYWORDS Blackwood’s Magazine, Branwell Bront€e, ‘Caroline’, death culture,

graveyard school, Wordsworth

Introduction
A search of Victor Neufeldt’s complete edition of Branwell Bront€e’s c. 155 poems
finds 37 references to death, another 35 for dead, 44 for dying, 11 for corpse
and 33 for grave.1 There are 9 coffins, 7 references to burial, 25 to funeral, 12
for worm (in Branwell’s writing nearly always symbolic of decomposition) and
42 for tomb. This is a collection of poems punctuated by death, and this is with-
out considering the high body counts of Branwell’s war-fuelled prose.
Traditionally, critics have traced Branwell’s preoccupation with death to his own
experiences of childhood bereavement. In this paper, however, I will move away
from these biographical readings and instead propose that Branwell’s gloomy
poetry should be read in the light of wider cultural and literary attitudes towards
death. To prove this, I will trace the key influences on and sources for Branwell’s
1845 poem ‘Caroline’, a poem that encapsulates many of the common images of
death that define Branwell’s poetry. I have divided this paper into four distinct
sections. The first places ‘Caroline’ within the context of Branwell’s other
Caroline poems, and considers why this poem stands out within Branwell’s writ-
ings. I will next foreground the importance of Branwell’s obsessive reading of

# The Bront€e Society 2019 DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2019.1567169

 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 219

Blackwood’s Magazine and will seek to prove that ‘Caroline’ had its origin not
exclusively within Branwell’s own experience of childhood loss, but rather within
two stories published in Blackwood’s January–June 1828 edition. I will then turn
to the mid-eighteenth-century graveyard school of poetry and its observers’
attempts to unravel the realities of the corpse’s condition post-death, in order to
provide textual evidence that this genre directly influenced the young Branwell.
Finally, I will argue that the increasing uncertainty surrounding the role of the
corpse in the resurrection in the period leading up to the composition of
‘Caroline’ helped to fuel Branwell’s anxiety-filled depictions of burials
and bodies.
First, it is important to identify some of the biographical readings that I wish
to nuance within this paper. Many critics have seen the 1825 deaths of
Branwell’s two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, as directly inspiring his poetic
preoccupation with death. Daphne du Maurier epitomizes this critical vantage
point when she comments:
[i]n 1825 the sudden deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, coming as they did just before
his own eighth birthday, shocked the little boy into an apprehension that would
never leave him, that would for years to come fill his dreams by night, however
much energy and fury he put into his day.2

Certainly, Du Maurier is right that Branwell was prone to fitful sleeping. A letter
he wrote in 1846 to his friend Joseph Bentley Leyland states that ‘my nights are
dreadful’.3 But this letter immediately follows the supposed affair with Mrs
Robinson at Thorp Green, not his sisters’ deaths twenty-one years earlier. David
Harrison goes even further by proposing that Branwell was so traumatized by his
sisters’ deaths that ‘he refused to believe that Maria, and now Elizabeth, were
dead [ … ] As was the custom to kiss a loved one as they lay in their coffin,
Branwell refused to do so’.4 Unfortunately, Harrison does not provide any evi-
dence for this claim, and, whilst the experience of losing Maria and Elizabeth
undoubtedly affected the young Branwell enormously, I have not come across
any diary entries or letters that insinuate it as the biggest driver of his poetic car-
eer and life, as Harrison and Du Maurier suggest. In a similar way, Winifred
Gerin asserts in her biography of Branwell: ‘the day would come when, after
twelve years of repression, the terrible experience of [Maria’s] funeral would rise
to the upper layers of his consciousness again and prompt the sequence of his
“Caroline” poems’.5 Gerin is also guilty of conflating biography with literature
by proposing that in 1837, after burying the trauma of his sisters’ deaths for
twelve years, Branwell was finally ready to express his grief in the form
of ‘Caroline’.

Contextualizing ‘Caroline’
The Caroline sequence of poems ran between 1837 and 1845 and, according to
Branwell’s first biographer Francis Leyland, it was ‘distinguished by a similar
220 EDWIN JOHN MOORHOUSE MARR

train of thought and reflection, and by similar sentiments of piety and devotion,
and also by the same gloom and sadness of mood, which pervade the poems of
his sisters’.6 Leyland is clear that Branwell’s poetry stands comparison to the
more macabre verses of Charlotte, Emily and Anne; unsurprising considering
the extent to which the family collaborated on their death-filled juvenilia. Yet
Leyland, like Du Maurier and Gerin after him, also has little doubt that
under the name of Caroline, ‘Branwell indicates his sister Maria’.7 Whilst a
considerable portion of Branwell’s poetry tackles death and bereavement, the
Caroline sequence stands apart for its representation of a sibling’s death, the
child in her coffin, and of course, their shared use of the Caroline character.
Notably, the death seems to occur at different stages of Caroline’s life. In an
unnamed poem of 1838, Caroline’s sister Harriet, disgraced by sexual trans-
gressions and herself now dying, cries out for ‘C a r o l i n e’ to return to
her side and comfort her as she did in their childhood, her drawn-out cry of
her sister’s name highlighting how, even after all this time, she is still desperate
for her sister’s companionship.8 ‘Caroline’s Prayer. On the change from
Childhood to Womanhood’ (1842) describes another form of death as Caroline
grieves for the loss of ‘childhood’s shores divine!’, therefore suggesting her sur-
vival into adulthood.9 Meanwhile, ‘On Caroline’, written in 1842, details the
eponymous heroine surrendering her ‘palace for a pall’.10 ‘Sir Henry Tunstall’,
also from 1842, features Caroline’s father decreeing, ‘Caroline I’ll bid farewell
once more: / Nor mourn, lost shade, for [ … ] thou’rt gone before’,11
referencing the popular and consoling Christian saying of ‘Not lost, but gone
before’, which, as Michael Wheeler explains, transforms ‘the earthy death-day
of the departed [into] his or her heavenly birthday’.12 Gerin also considers ‘Sir
Henry Tunstall’, arguing that this poem with its more optimistic outlook on
death ‘exorcises once and for all the ghost of Caroline’.13 Alas, Gerin’s chron-
ology is flawed from the outset, and, far from signifying the end of the
Caroline sequence, Branwell would continue to produce poems focusing on
the death of a sibling for several years after ‘Tunstall’, as evidenced by the
1845 ‘Caroline’ that marks the end of the sequence and the centre of
this study.14
I am simply calling this 1845 poem ‘Caroline’ to distinguish it from the
rest of Branwell’s frequently untitled poetry. This piece centres on the young
Harriet struggling to come to terms with her sister Caroline’s death, as even
in her adulthood the sound of the funeral bell ringing ‘wakens memory’s pen-
sive thought / To visions sleeping — not forgot’.15 Whilst these grief-filled
memories lie dormant, the slightest stimulus is sufficient to awaken her recol-
lections and draw her back to the day when her young sister was ‘cut from
life’ (BB, l. 231), suggestive of Caroline’s physical erasure from life, but also
evocative of how Branwell himself cut the key images of ‘Caroline’ from life,
culture and literature. ‘Caroline’ represents an edited version of another
 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 221

unnamed poem from 1837 that Branwell extended significantly, tightening the
rhyme scheme, making the sentences more coherent and the stanzas less frag-
mentary. As an example, the 1837 draft describes Harriet’s memories of her
sister’s funeral as follows:
There was one moments wildred start
One pang — pang well! —
And — And the fountain of the heart
My tears of anguish fell!16

In contrast, the same section in the 1845 version reads:

There was one moments wildred start
One pang remembered well —
When first from my unhardened heart
The tears of anguish fell.17

The fact that these same lines occur at lines 133–36 in the earlier version and
lines 189–92 in the later suggest how much Branwell had added to the text.
Moreover, there is a fragmentation in the earlier draft entirely absent in the later,
a possible indication of the author’s desperation to write the images down on
paper as rapidly as possible, only to edit them later. An example of this fragmen-
tation emerges when Branwell writes, ‘And — And the fountain of the heart’, the
dashes, a common feature of Branwell’s poetry, suggesting the narrator is break-
ing down with grief and unable to form a syntactically complete sentence. In a
similar way, the repetition of ‘and’ implies the narrator’s struggle to find the
words to express her grief, while the impersonal ‘the’ insinuates a sense of dis-
tance on the part of the narrator from her trauma, as if she were unable fully to
take ownership of her heart and its grief. In contrast, the 1845 poem replaces
this with the line ‘When first from my unhardened heart’; the adjective of
‘unhardened’ suggesting that the long years have toughened Harriet’s heart when
compared to her childhood sorrow, whilst the ‘my’ gives Harriet a possession
over her anguish, absent in the earlier manuscript. If the 1837 poem featured a
narrator struggling to vocalize her emotional turmoil, by 1845 Branwell finally
seems able to present a narrator able to express her bereavement. To edit his ear-
lier work was normal practice for Branwell, with word changes or line alterations
common revisions, but in essence completely to re-write a poem eight years
later, whilst keeping the main images unchanged, was significantly more unusual,
and suggests the extent to which the themes of this poem lingered in
Branwell’s mind.
As part of these revisions, Branwell created a far more sophisticated rhythm,
with the alternating iambic trimeter and tetrameter of the ballad form clearly vis-
ible in this later text. Both the 1837 and 1845 versions nevertheless utilize an
unusual and inconsistent rhyme scheme with some stanzas in the aforementioned
ballad form whereas others are entirely composed in iambic tetrameter. This
irregularity certainly seems appropriate in a poem defined by grief and confusion,
222 EDWIN JOHN MOORHOUSE MARR

the narrative lacking cohesion as Harriet’s thoughts and sense of linear time are
prone to breaking down, dragging her back towards past trauma. The use of the
ballad form, albeit an unconventional ballad, immediately makes one think of
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, as Charles Wharton
Stork has explained, ‘Although both Wordsworth and Coleridge were strongly
influenced by the common ballad, they were attracted by this form for very dif-
ferent reasons’. For the former, the ballad was desirable for ‘its directness and
simplicity of style’. In contrast, for Coleridge, it was the ballad’s ‘remoteness
from modern life’ that made it appealing.18 In Branwell, both the Coleridgean
and Wordsworthian attitudes towards the ballad are to some extent united.
Here, the ballad is both a simplistic meter, appropriate for the child-like inno-
cence of ‘Caroline’, and it also signifies an attempt to move away from the real-
ities of modern life, fitting for a poem concerning memory and for characters
that frequently lie between reality and the Angrian worlds of the juvenilia.
Whilst on the subject of Wordsworth’s ballads, it is also worth considering his
‘Lucy’ poems, written between 1798 and 1801. It seems to me that this series sig-
nifies another potential source for ‘Caroline’. For instance, ‘She Dwelt Among
the Untrodden Ways’ (1799):
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!19

The use of the ballad form, the emphasis on death and the writing of an entire
series of poems dedicated to a single, female figure is certainly reminiscent of
Branwell’s ‘Caroline’. These similarities should not be surprising. As Juliet Barker
contends, Wordsworth, along with Byron, were the two poets who ‘most influ-
enced [Branwell’s] own style’.20 In 1837 Branwell sent poetry to Wordsworth
asking him to ‘pass your judgement upon what I have sent you’, highlighting
how he was writing with Wordsworth’s particular poetic style in mind.21 The
poem Branwell sent was ‘The Struggles of Flesh with Spirit’, and it shares a nar-
rative trajectory with Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, completed
in 1804 and published in 1807. Both poems detail the connection to God that
one feels in childhood, with Branwell writing:
Heaven still guides his azure eyes
Toward its expanse so wild
As veiled in darkness their [sic] he lies
A little Angel Child!22

This poem therefore represents a surprising strain of religiosity from the typically
secular Branwell, clearly paralleling Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’, a poem that analo-
gously celebrates the child as being close to God as ‘Heaven lies about us in our
infancy’.23 In contrast, once the child matures, both writers recognize that he or
she becomes distanced from spirituality. Branwell writes that Earth comes ‘’tween
 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 223

it and heaven’ (‘Flesh/Spirit’, l. 81), whilst Wordsworth laments how man forgets
‘the glories he hath known, / And that imperial palace whence he came’
(‘Ode’, ll. 84–85). This is just one of many examples of Wordsworth’s influence
on Branwell, and it demonstrates the extent to which Branwell was subsuming
the earlier poet’s work into his own and strengthens the case for the similarities
between ‘Lucy’ and ‘Caroline’ being more than just coincidental, but rather a
deliberate attempt on the part of Branwell to emulate his literary hero.

Blackwood’s Magazine
Du Maurier and Leyland are not the only scholars to have sought life-models for
Branwell’s ‘Caroline’. Ivy Holgate published an early piece of Branwell criticism
in the form of her 1958 essay ‘The Key to “Caroline”’. Holgate proposes that
Caroline is not drawn from Maria or Elizabeth at all, but rather ‘Caroline
Dearden [the] gentle, lovely, pious’ daughter of Branwell’s acquaintance, the poet
William Dearden, and that Harriet is modelled on Susan Dearden, Caroline’s sis-
ter.24 Whilst Holgate only identifies a trilogy of ‘Caroline’ poems, a result of the
inaccessibility of Branwell’s poems in the twentieth century, she nonetheless raises
some interesting points, particularly her suggestion that Caroline Dearden’s home
at ‘The Hollins’, about ten miles from Haworth in the village of Warley, could
have inspired Woodchurch Hall, Branwell’s residence for Caroline and Harriet.
Nevertheless, having re-read one of Branwell’s letters to the editor of
Blackwood’s, I propose an argument for a different source for ‘Caroline’:
while a child ‘Blackwood’ formed my chief delight, and I feel certain that no child
before enjoyed reading as I did, because none ever had such works as ‘The
Noctes’, ‘Christmas Dreams’, ‘Christopher in his Sporting Jacket’ to read [ … ]
‘Long, long ago, the day on which she died. That hour so far more dreadful than
any hour that now can darken us on this earth, when she, her coffin, and that
velvet pall descended, — and descended — slowly, slowly — into that horrid clay
[ … ].’ Passages like these, sir (and when the last was written when my sister died)
— passages like these, read then and remembered now, afford feelings which, I
repeat, I cannot describe.25

The lines Branwell quotes are taken from ‘Christmas Dreams’, a morbidly philo-
sophical lament on the death of a sister from the January 1828 edition of
Blackwood’s. Throughout ‘Christmas Dreams’, one can find much in common
with ‘Caroline’. For instance, the image of the ‘coffin and [ … ] velvet pall,’ the
‘long’ hours, emphasizing the length of childhood grief, and the burial ‘into that
horrid clay’, all images shared by ‘Caroline’. As Branwell claims, this story pub-
lished three years after his sisters’ deaths, when combined with his own experi-
ence of childhood grief, goes a long way to explaining Branwell’s preoccupation
with the themes of ‘Caroline’. Another link between Branwell’s poem and
‘Christmas Dreams’ can be found in the form of memory. Most of ‘Caroline’ is
told through Harriet’s reflections, with memory disrupting the present and
224 EDWIN JOHN MOORHOUSE MARR

mitigating cruel mortality by suggesting that one cannot truly die as long as there
are others to carry on one’s name. Allusions to ancestry achieve a similar effect,
established through Harriet’s emphasis on ‘Woodchurch Hall [ … ] in old ances-
tral glory’ (BB, ll. 24–29), suggestive of the family’s lineage and their inability to
die out. Whilst this quasi-humanist concept of memory transcending death is
only suggested in ‘Caroline’, it is explicitly addressed in ‘Christmas Dreams’, as
the anonymous writer claims ‘who can complain of the shortness of human life,
that can re-travel all the windings and wanderings [ … ] at which memory
pauses’.26 Memory here is life-extending, granting the individual the power to
return to an earlier time and relive the past, something Branwell references
throughout ‘Caroline’.
Juliet Barker, however, posits that ‘Branwell was confusing the timing of the
Blackwood’s piece with that of “The Twin Sisters”, a somewhat turgid poem on
the death through consumption of a girl, coincidentally called Maria, whose twin
sister Anna, unable to bear life without her, also dies’.27 Barker is certainly right
to call ‘The Twin Sisters’, published in Blackwood’s in 1825, turgid. The opening
describes the sisters Maria and Anna as ‘Fair as two lilies from one stem which
spring, / In vernal fragrance sweetly blossoming’,28 and is overflowing with a
cloying sentimentality entirely at odds with Branwell’s melancholy aesthetic.
Whilst we should not overlook ‘The Twin Sisters’, particularly the Branwellian
imagery of the ‘long-drawn sigh’ the ‘damp cold grave’ and the ‘worms’ (‘Twin
Sisters’, p. 533), I am unconvinced that Branwell simply confused his chronology
as Barker suggests. Especially as Branwell is clear that it was the coffin descend-
ing into the clay that particularly stuck in his mind, a moment missing from ‘The
Twin Sisters’ but present in ‘Christmas Dreams’.
Significantly, ‘Christmas Dreams’ was also published next to ‘Christmas
Presents’, which considers a group of young girls and the Christmas gifts they
received. Notably, two of the characters are ‘Harriet Brisbane’ and ‘Caroline
Graham’.29 Unlike critics of the 1950s, we have learnt to view claims that there
exists one ‘key’ to a text with suspicion. Still, the shared names, the coffin being
lowered into the ground, the horrors of ‘that day’, the importance of memory
and Branwell’s own acknowledgement that these stories appearing near his sis-
ters’ deaths added to their poignancy, it seems clear that these Blackwood’s tales
formed one of the models from which Branwell was inspired to write ‘Caroline’.

The graveyard school

In her revisionary article ‘Second Thoughts on Branwell’, published posthu-
mously in 1998, Du Maurier herself recognizes that she had placed too great a
stress on Branwell’s own encounters with death as his core poetic inspiration.
Refining her earlier argument, she writes of how ‘much of the religious agony of
Branwell’s Caroline and Harriet poems was not so much his own misgiving but a
deliberate attempt to write like Cowper or Hogg’.30 Focusing specifically on
James Hogg, poems such as Hogg’s ‘The Flying Tailor’ taken from The Recluse
 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 225

(1814) direct the reader to look ‘On the left-side, thou wilt espy a grave, / With
unelaborate head-stone beautified’.31 It is certainly not difficult to see how such
a vocabulary of gravestones, burial sites, corpses and coffins may have inspired
Branwell, and let us not forget that when Branwell wrote to the editor of
Blackwood’s in 1835 it was Hogg he promised to replace.
It is not only Hogg who shaped Branwell’s and society’s focus on the disturb-
ing aspects of death. From the mid-eighteenth century, the graveyard school had
turned death into a direct source of poetic inspiration. Graveyard poetry is
defined by its observers meditating in a graveyard at length on the transience of
human existence, the body’s condition post-death and the realities of the post-
mortem world in a style inspired by Hamlet’s ubiquitous ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’
scene. While at its narrowest Eric Parsiot proposes that the term refers to just
four authors: Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young and Thomas Gray,
‘At its broadest, the “graveyard school” incorporates a veritable host of popular
poetry and prose of the early to mid-eighteenth-century’.32 Poems such as
Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45), with the ‘dreary grave’ and ‘foul decay’,33
had emphasized the corporeality of the grave as a bleak place of morbid corrup-
tion, and Parnell in ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ (1721) writes of ‘Arms, angels, epi-
taphs, and bones’, as his narrator reflects on the equality of the grave where all
men must surrender to the corruption of the earth.34 The graveyard school con-
sistently rejects the tomb as a spiritually comforting environment for reunion
with God, presenting it instead as a bleak and corrupting monument to
human mortality.
As a genre, relatively little research has been carried out on graveyard poetry,
and still less comparing it to the works of the Bront€es. Yana Rowland’s 2006
The Treatment of the Themes of Mortality in the Poetry of the Bront€e Sisters is a
notable exception, with Rowland arguing that ‘[t]he meditativeness of the grave-
yard and the informativeness of the grave [ … ] are features of both the works of
the graveyard poets and the young Bront€e sisters’.35 One can certainly see what
Rowland means by turning to Charlotte’s High Life in Verdopolis (1833). Here,
the atheistic anti-hero Northangerland decrees, ‘The Grave, Corruption,
Annihilation are the only followers of Death’ in a way strikingly reminiscent of
the cold mortality of the graveyard school.36 Nevertheless, Rowland’s thesis
focuses specifically on the Bront€e sisters, rather than Branwell, something I will
extend here by arguing that we see elements of the graveyard school’s nihilistic
language throughout Branwell’s entire œuvre.
Turning back to ‘Caroline’, Harriet actively tries to imagine her sister’s condi-
tion after burial as a way of elucidating the mysteries of mortality, lamenting
how ‘beauty soon should turn to clay!’ (BB, l. 232). I have already mentioned
that the image of ‘horrid clay’ is present in the Blackwood’s article, but returning
to clay in death is also a popular graveyard trope. Robert Blair’s The Grave
(1743) discusses the deceased’s ‘clay tenement’,37 whilst Night Thoughts has thir-
teen references to clay. The corpse returns from ‘clay to clay’, and is ‘born of
clay’, while the grave is built of ‘clay condensed’ and constructed of
226 EDWIN JOHN MOORHOUSE MARR

‘fouler clay’,38 to name just a few. The clay serves as a symbol to remind the indi-
vidual of the realities of death as something unclean and unpleasant, yet it also
represents a bedrock, particularly in the case of London, on which entire cities
are constructed, suggesting how the living build their communities on top of the
dead. By reflecting on Caroline’s corruption into ‘clay’, a word Branwell uses
thirty-eight times throughout his poetry, Harriet herself is embodying the role of
graveyard poet, standing by the tomb and meditating on her sister’s corpse. As
Eric Parisot has highlighted, ‘the frustrated knowledge of the afterlife and the
immediate vicinity of the dead’ represent the two central tenets to the graveyard
aesthetic.39 Both are present in ‘Caroline’. The entire poem signifies Harriet’s
proximity to the graveyard, both physically in her narrative retelling of the
funeral service, but also mentally through her inability to move on from her
childhood grief, symbolically carrying the graveyard within her. Returning to the
first of Parisot’s criteria, there is certainly no spiritual comfort in a post-death
existence here. Partly, this may be indicative of Branwell’s own spiritual ambiva-
lence — his relationship with the church was, after all, notoriously vexed — and
it is also symptomatic of a culture of enlightenment moving away from blind
acceptance of spiritual truths and instead seeking tangible evidence for what the
post-death experience actually entails.40
So desperate is Harriet to return to Caroline and grasp the mysteries of her
condition post-death, she ‘almost prayed that [she too] might die’ (BB, l. 267).
She is halted, however, by the recollection that ‘If I did, my corpse must lie / In
yonder dismal tomb’ (BB, ll. 269–70). This representation of the tomb, not as a
place of eternal rest but as a dismal locus of decay and corruption, is, once again,
a clear example of Branwell’s refiguring of graveyard themes. Returning to Blair’s
The Grave, the narrator seeks to ‘paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb’ (Grave,
l. 6) and Night Thoughts describes the ‘mouldering tomb’ (NT, l. 691), demon-
strating how Branwell is tapping into a long literary tradition of representing the
horrors of the grave. Branwell also borrows from the graveyard school’s
emphasis on the transience of human existence. In ‘Caroline’ the flowers, bloom-
ing under the window, symbolize what Harriet has lost. As she states:
flowers which wave below!
No — not these flowers — they’re long since dead,
And flowers have budded, bloomed and gone. (BB, ll. 88–90)

Harriet turns to the blossoms as a way of further connecting to the past: the
same flowers now blooming that were in flower at the time of her sister’s death.
But, as Harriet realizes, everything, even the flowers, must bloom, fade and die.
Symbolic of the short lifespan of Caroline, the flowers become a psychological
signifier for the complex emotions the poem presents. The flowers also seem to
be a reference to Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1751), and the
famous line: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweet-
ness on the desert air’.41 This is not the only example of Gray’s influence within
Branwell’s literature. ‘The Revenge’, one of Branwell’s Angrian sagas, features
 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 227

the line ‘Full many a flower blighted by thee now lies / Exposed to winters blasts
and stormy skys’42 in an even closer allusion to Gray’s Elegy. In both Branwell’s
and Gray’s schemas flowers symbolize the shortness of human existence, and
how so many lives are destined to a premature end out of sight, exactly the fate
allotted to Caroline. We know from Bob Duckett’s work on the library at
Ponden Hall, the largest in the area and one the Bront€es had access to, that three
of the staple graveyard poems that Branwell borrows images from, Blair’s The
Grave, Gray’s Elegy and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, were all held within
its collection.43 Therefore, it is not difficult to see how Branwell may have phys-
ically been able to engage with this genre, and how he responds to their lamenta-
tions on death within his own verses.

Nineteenth-century death culture

Following the graveyard school, the rise of Gothic literature further brought
death to the fore, injecting death practices with a strong sense of uncertainty
through its emphasis on ‘the undead, the revenant, the corpse, or a patch-
work of corpses brought back to life’.44 Indeed, one only needs to look at
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) or Polidori’s The Vampyre (1817) to find exam-
ples of the grave becoming a transitional setting where the boundaries
between life and death grew troublingly indistinct. As the nineteenth century
continued, anxiety-inducing questions about the future-life and the body’s role
in the resurrection became only more frequent. To try and unravel these
uncertainties, society turned to the corpse as the ‘nexus of all spiritual
imagery’, to borrow a phrase proposed by Alan Bewell.45 In a century where
industrialization, invention and reform were asking fundamental questions
about what we can achieve in life, it is little wonder that death was likewise
challenged, and that writers such as Branwell were responding to these
doubts, dreads and debates within their writing.
Remembering the day of her sister’s death, Harriet describes how, ‘My Mother
lifted me up to see / What might within that coffin be’ (BB, ll. 129–30). The
moment of revelation is chilling, perhaps especially to a contemporary reader
unused to such death practices, as we, like Harriet, are compelled to bear witness
to the contents of that casket. The act of looking is itself significant. As Deborah
Lutz argues in her essay on death culture and relics in Wuthering Heights,
‘Heathcliff’s amorousness comes to be about peering into, touching, and eventu-
ally trying to get into a postlife place. Dwelling with death means, in this novel,
dabbling in its tangible, touchable presence’.46 As Lutz explains, Emily Bront€e in
many ways followed the graveyard school’s preoccupation with understanding
death by trying to make the intangible tangible, the untouchable touchable and
the non-present present. Yet, part of what makes Wuthering Heights such a trou-
blingly violent text is that it does not stop at merely meditating on death, as the
graveyard poets did, but rather it tries physically to tear down the boundaries
between the living and the dead, most obviously in the scene where Heathcliff
228 EDWIN JOHN MOORHOUSE MARR

climbs into Catherine’s grave. Heathcliff’s mentality seems to be that, if the grave
will not offer up its secrets willingly, then it must be made to do so by force. In
light of Lutz’s argument, Harriet’s act of peering inside the coffin becomes, like
Heathcliff’s act of actually climbing inside it, a way of connecting to the dead
and comprehending death, emphasized by her mother’s compulsion to:
Look at your sister and my child
one moment, ere her form be hid
For ever ’neath its coffin lid. (BB, ll. 138–40)

Far from finding familiarity within Caroline’s corpse, Harriet instead realizes
just how far removed her sister has now become. Harriet’s mother was
forced to remind her that the strange body before her is still her sister, only
accentuating further Caroline’s post-death transformation. Again, the impera-
tive to ‘look’ should also be read as a plea to observe the dead, to turn to
the body as the seat of the resurrection, especially after Lutz’s and Bewell’s
arguments that the corpse became the locus for unravelling spiritual uncer-
tainties with regard to the future-life. Harriet certainly tries to find something
comforting within the strange situation that lies before her, telling herself that
her sister was lying ‘as I had seen her lie / On many a happy night before’
(BB, ll. 149–50). Whereas Heathcliff attempted to elucidate the death/life div-
ide through physical actions, Harriet is operating on a far more psychological
level, using logic rather than brute force to try and comprehend the mysteries
of the future life and find familiarity within an inherently unfamiliar situ-
ation. Harriet is far from alone in these tactics. As Pat Jalland has written of
one of the families she analyses in her socio-historical study Death in the
Victorian Family:
The parents endeavoured to explain Jessy’s death to their three older children, who
were taken to kiss the corpse ‘with affectionate concern’ [ … ] For two days the
parents were consoled by having Jessy’s body close to them [ … ] acknowledging
that it was the physical closeness that comforted them, ‘for of her spirit we
know not’.47

Once more, the future-life is intangible. In its place, the family Jalland studies
must turn to the corporeality of death, keeping the body physically close to feel
close to the deceased child. Far from being morbid or gruesome in his medita-
tions on Caroline’s corpse, Branwell is merely engaging with contemporary death
practices, representing the body as the sole connection between life and
future-life.
The true pain for Harriet comes when ‘They came — they pressed the cof-
fin lid / Above my Caroline’ (BB, ll. 185–86), consuming Caroline into the
burial process. She is obscured from view by the wider world and abandoned
to corrupt in her darkened home, the very antithesis of Woodchurch Hall
with its ancestral lineage and childhood memories. As Harriet follows her sis-
ter’s coffin to ‘its last dark dwelling-place’ (BB, l. 209) even the traditional
 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 229

comforts of a Christian funeral service do not provide her with solace.

Instead, all Harriet hears is:
Some one’s voice amongst them cry —
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life —
He who believes in me shall never die!’ (BB, ll. 215–17)

Far from providing succour and the thought of the eternal afterlife the words,
taken from John 11. 25, seem empty and meaningless. The fact that Harriet does
not even recognize them as coming from the vicar, instead just hearing ‘Some
one’ utter them, further removes any spirituality from the funeral service. When
seen through the eyes of a child, the very elements of death that are normalized
within nineteenth-century Christian society become strange and unfulfilling.
Harriet can vividly recall the ‘unnatural strangeness of that day’ (BB, l. 220) as
the crowds of people, the words of the funeral service, the lowering of her sister’s
coffin into the ground, all serve to corrupt and distort her familiar sister. Whilst
Harriet may constantly be looking for signs of familiarity and answers to the
mysteries of the future-life, all she is left with is a disturbing, cramped symbol of
human mortality.
In conclusion, whilst Branwell’s own experience of childhood loss almost cer-
tainly influenced his adult emphasis on death, his representations of grief, cor-
rupting graves and spiritually ambiguous funerals should also be read in the light
of broader changes towards how death was depicted and conceptualized in the
nineteenth century. Instead of just being morbid and springing ‘from the deepest
feelings, and from sorrows the most poignant’,48 as Leyland supposes, Branwell
Bront€e’s poetry should also be acknowledged as emerging over a key period of
change and anxiety towards the corpus and celebrated for drawing on and refi-
guring a rich and varied body of death writing and death culture.

Notes
1 4
It is difficult to decide on an exact number as so
many of Branwell’s poems exist as revisions or
fragments. See Victor Neufeldt, The Poems of
Patrick Branwell Bront€e: A New Text and
5
Commentary (London and New York:
Routledge, 2015).
2
Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of
6
Branwell Bront€e (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1972), p. 26.
3
‘Patrick Branwell Bront€e. A Complete Transcript
of the Leyland Manuscripts Showing the
7
Unpublished Portions from the Original
8
Documents in the Collection of Col. Sir Edward
A. Brotherton, Bt., LL.D.’, collected and
9
transcribed by J. Alex Symington and arranged
with notes by C.W. Hatfield, Bront€e Society
Transactions, 6.35 (1925), 277–312 (p. 295).
David W. Harrison, The Bront€es of Haworth,
Yorkshire’s Literary Giants: Their Lives, Works,
Influences and Inspirations (Victoria: Trafford,
2002), p. 63.
Winifred Gerin, Branwell Bront€e: A Biography
(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1972), p. 12;
hereafter Gerin.
Francis A. Leyland, The Bront€e Family with
Special Reference to Patrick Branwell Bront€e
Vol. I (London: Hurst and Blackett Publishers,
1886), pp. 210–11; hereafter Leyland.
Leyland, p. 211.
Branwell Bront€e, Unnamed, in Neufeldt, p. 207,
l. 243.
Branwell Bront€e, ‘Caroline’s Prayer. On the
Change from Childhood to Womanhood’, in
Neufeldt, p. 225, l. 18.
230 EDWIN JOHN MOORHOUSE MARR

10
Branwell Bront€e, ‘On Caroline’, in Neufeldt, p. Songs. Vol. III (Edinburgh: Arch. Constable &
228, l. 3. Co., 1822), p. 157.
11
Branwell Bront€e, ‘Henry Tunstall’, in Neufeldt, 32
Eric Parisot, Graveyard Poetry: Religion,
p. 251, ll. 484–85. Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century
12
Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell and the Poetic Condition (London: Routledge, 2013),
Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University p. 1.
33
Press, 1994), p. 29. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, <https://www.
13
Gerin, p. 158. gutenberg.org/ebooks/33156> [accessed 9
14
Ivy Holgate, ‘The Key to “Caroline”’, Bront€e November 2018] (ll. 34 and 1333); hereafter NT.
34
Society Transactions, 13.3 (1958), 251–59 Thomas Parnell, ‘A Night-Piece on Death’,
(p. 259). <http://www.bartleby.com/332/416.html>
15
Branwell Bront€e, ‘Caroline’, in Neufeldt, p. 267, [accessed 23 January 2018] (l. 42).
ll. 79–80; hereafter BB. 35
Yana Rowland, The Treatment of the Themes of
16
Branwell Bront€e, Unnamed, in Neufeldt, p. 503, Mortality in the Poetry of the Bront€e Sisters
ll. 133–36. (Plovdiv: Plovdiv University Press, 2006),
17
Branwell Bront€e, Unnamed, in Neufeldt, p. 269, p. 105.
ll. 189–92. 36
Charlotte Bront€e, High Life in Verdopolis, ed.
18
Charles Wharton Stork, ‘The Influence of the by Christine Alexander (London: British Library,
Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge’, 1995), p. 32.
PMLA, 29.3 (1914), 299–326 (p. 299). 37
Robert Blair, The Grave, <http://www.bartleby.
19
William Wordsworth, ‘She Dwelt Among the com/333/115.html> [accessed 23 January 2018]
Untrodden Ways’ (2016), <http://www.bartleby. (l. 35); hereafter Grave.
com/145/ww147.html> [accessed 8 February 38
NT, ll. 365, 468, 470, 715.
2017] (ll. 9–12). 39
Parisot, p. 3.
20
Juliet Barker, The Bront€es (London: Phoenix, 40
F.B. Pinion, for instance, has argued that
1995), p. 263; hereafter Barker. Branwell ‘refused church attendance and the
21
Harold Orel, The Bront€es: Interviews and
consolations of religion’ in his 1975 book A
Recollections (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Bront€e Companion (London: Macmillan, 1975).
Press, 1997), p. 35; hereafter Orel. 41
22
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country
Branwell Bront€e, ‘The Struggles of Flesh with
Church-Yard (London: J.F. Dove, 1820), p. 493;
Spirit’ in Neufeldt, p. 121, ll. 51–54; hereafter
hereafter Elegy.
‘Flesh/Spirit’. 42
23 Branwell Bront€e, ‘The Revenge’, in Victor
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of
Neufeldt, The Works of Patrick Branwell Bront€e
Immortality from Recollections of Early
Volume 1: Volumes 1827–1833 (London and
Childhood’, <http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.
New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 135.
html> [accessed 24 March 2018] (l. 167); 43
Bob Duckett, ‘The Library at Ponden Hall’,
hereafter ‘Ode’.
24 Bront€e Studies, 40.2 (2015), 104–49.
Holgate, p. 259. 44
25 Misha Kavka, ‘The Gothic on Screen’, in The
Orel, pp. 33–34.
26 Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed.
Anon., ‘Christmas Dreams’, Blackwood’s
by Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge
Magazine (1828), pp. 1–6.
27 University Press, 2012), p. 211.
Barker, p. 861. 45
28 Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the
Anon., ‘The Twin Sisters’, Blackwood’s Magazine
(1825), pp. 532–33; hereafter ‘Twin Sisters’. Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the
29
Anon., ‘Christmas Presents’, Blackwood’s Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale
Magazine (1828), pp. 7–13. University Press, 1989), p. 190.
46
30
Daphne du Maurier, ‘Second Thoughts on Deborah Lutz, ‘Relics and Death Culture in
Branwell’, Bront€e Society Transactions, 23.2 Wuthering Heights’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction,
(1998), 155–58 (p. 156). 45.3 (2012), 389–408 (p. 390).
47
31
James Hogg, ‘The Flying Tailor; Being a Further Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family
Extract from The Recluse’, Poetical Works of (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 170.
48
James Hogg: The Poetic Mirror. Miscellanies. Leyland, p. 226.
 €’S ‘CAROLINE’
THE MANY SOURCES OF BRANWELL BRONTE 231

Notes on contributor
Edwin John Moorhouse Marr is currently working towards his PhD in English
Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, where he also teaches as an
associate lecturer. His thesis explores the production of railway space within nine-
teenth-century literature. He completed both his BA and MA at Anglia Ruskin
University, with an undergraduate project on Universal Salvation in the works of
Anne Bront€e and a postgraduate dissertation on grief and death in the works of
Branwell Bront€e. His research in general is concerned with the Bront€es, but he is
also interested in the impact of industrialization and travel within nineteenth-
century literature.
Correspondence to: Edwin John Moorhouse Marr. Email: edwin.marr@an-
glia.ac.uk