‘A Just and Liberal Landlord’: Manliness, Work, and the Landed Gentleman in the Brontës’ Novels

Abstract

The Brontës’ many striking depictions of landowners are rife with ambiguities, particularly as these characters are seldom presented at work in their traditional roles as landlord and magistrate. While the Victorian landed gentleman’s status was partially predicated on not having to work for money, both the new Victorian professional ideal and traditional conceptions of paternalist care affected the ways this class was viewed by middle-class commentators at mid-century. In the Brontës’ novels, traditional paternalist responsibilities are fused with aspects of the professional ideal in depictions of reformed landed gentlemen, but even this new, ideal figure is represented as unsatisfactory. In this article, I consider how landowners were written about in contemporary periodicals and how the Brontës engage with these expectations. The Irish tenant and landlord problem, which was covered extensively in the periodical press, shaped Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in a profound way, as the novel serves as an important, but until now overlooked, reworking of Maria Edgeworth’s representations of landowning masculinity in Castle Rackrent (1800). The Brontës repeatedly depict landowners retreating into the domestic sphere, which I argue forms an implicit narrative challenge to this figure’s social authority. This article opens up new ground for the examination of Victorian discourse on professionalization in relation to the Brontës’ works and a consideration of the ways in which this discourse was applied to landowners both in the periodical press and the Victorian novel.

Key words:

• Brontës
• masculinity
• professionalism
• paternalism
• land ownership
• Castle Rackrent

Notes

1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. by Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 104–105.

2. Susan E. Colón, The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 13–14.

3. Colón, p. 24.

4. For instance, out of recent studies, Laura Fasick briefly cites Shirley in the introduction to Professional Men and Domesticity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), while Jennifer Ruth discusses only The Professor in Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006). Alfred D. Pionke discusses Trollope, Thomas Hughes, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens in The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838–1877 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), but not the Brontës.

5. Colón, p. 4.

6. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 1.

7. Tosh, p. 2.

8. Marianne Thormählen argues that ‘[a]ll the Brontë novels might be called “historical” in the sense that the action does not take place in the writers’ own present but a generation earlier, or more’ (‘The Brontë Novels as Historical Fiction’, Brontë Studies, 40 (2015), 276–282 (p. 276)).

9. C. Brontë, ‘To Emily J. Brontë, 8 June 1839’, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Margaret Smith, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–2004), I, pp. 191–193 (p. 192).

10. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 21.

11. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. by Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Joel J. Brattin, and D.J. Trela (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 142.

12. [James Mill], ‘Art. I. Aristocracy,’ The Westminster Review, 2 (January 1836), 283–306 (p. 295).

13. [James Finlay Weir Johnston], ‘Scientific and Practical Agriculture’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 65 (March 1849), [258]-274 (p. 262). The Brontë children had access to issues of Blackwood’s from a young age, and the family were later subscribers.

14. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 162.

15. Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. by Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 10–11.

16. (A. Brontë, p. 11)

17. See Patrick Brontë, ‘29 July 1843, To the Editor of the Halifax Guardian’, The Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, ed. by Dudley Green (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005), pp. 144–145; P. Brontë, ‘20 November 1843, to Mr Hugh Brontë’, PB Letters, pp. 155–156; C. Brontë, ‘To Margaret Wooler, 31 March 1848’, Letters, II, pp. 47–49.

18. [John Fisher Murray], ‘The World of London. Part VII’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 50 (December 1841), 767–778 (pp. 769–770).

19. [John D. Brady], ‘Ireland. – The Landlord and Tenant Question’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 55 (May 1844), 638–664 (p. 640).

20. [Brady], p. 649.

21. [Brady], p. 652. This defense of the landlords and blame of the Irish tenantry is also present in Brady’s later article ‘Ireland – Its Condition – The Life and Property Bill – The Debate, And the Famine’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 59 (May 1846), 572–603.

22. ‘Ireland’, The Leeds Mercury, 2 May 1846, n.p.

23. Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 225. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, in writing about maternal absence in the Gothic novel, includes both Wuthering Heights and Castle Rackrent in the genre, despite the comedic aspects of the latter, because ‘the central action within Rackrent follows the dissolution of degenerate dynasty and the final loss of the estate’. However, Anolik does not directly connect the two novels (‘The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode’, Modern Language Studies, 33.1/2 (Spring-Autumn, 2003), 24–43 (p. 37)). Notably, although Terry Eagleton discusses both Wuthering Heights and Castle Rackrent in his monograph Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, he does not compare or connect the two novels in any way (London: Verso, 1995).

24. Kathleen Constable, A Stranger Within the Gates: Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Irishness (Lanham: University Press of America, 2000), p. 112.

25. Clifford Whone’s listing of books in the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute library includes four volumes of Edgeworth’s Tales (the title is unspecific), while Bob Duckett’s revised catalogue for the private library at Ponden Hall includes Edgeworth’s Poetry explained for the use of young people (1802) (Whone, ‘Where the Brontës Borrowed Books: The Keighley Mechanics’ Institute,’ Brontë Society Transactions, 9 (1950), 344–358, p. 355; Duckett, ‘The Library at Ponden Hall,’ Brontë Studies, 40 (2015), 104–149 (p. 128)). Duckett notes that the Ponden Hall library did not include much recent fiction, but that the Brontës clearly had access to a circulating library and quite likely the six booksellers known to be operating in Keighley in 1847 (p. 125).

26. Eagleton notes that, strictly speaking, Heathcliff could not be a famine orphan because the chronology for the beginning of the famine and Branwell’s visit to Liverpool do not mesh. When Eagleton writes of Heathcliff, he boldly states that in his essay ‘Heathcliff is Irish, and the chronology is not awry’ (p. 11).

27. Thormählen, p. 276.

28. Thormählen, p. 277.

29. In the case of Emily Brontë and Maria Edgeworth, this Gothic thematic tends to critique the damaging aspects of landowning masculinity. For a different interpretation, with reference to Jane Eyre, see Daniela Garofalo’s chapter ‘Dependent Masters and Independent Servants: The Gothic Pleasures of British Homes in Charlotte’s Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in Manly Leaders in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Albany State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 137–153. Garofalo suggests that the Gothic, rather than disrupting the state of things at Thornfield Hall, in fact is ‘necessary for the “normal” state of things to continue, (p. 144). In this case, Rochester’s mastery of Jane and his inferiors as a British landholder is authorized by his status as a romanticized, Gothic master.

30. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, ed. by George Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 62. Thanks are due to Sarah Hanks for suggesting this novel to me.

31. C.P. Sanger, The Structure of Wuthering Heights (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926).

32. Edgeworth, p. 79.

33. P. Brontë, The Maid of Killarney; or, Albion and Flora: A Modern Tale; In which are interwoven some cursory remarks on Religion and Politics (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1818).

34. For more on White Boys and Irish Levellers see J.S. Donnelly’s ‘Irish Agrarian Rebellion: The Whiteboys of 1769-76’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, 83C (1983), 293–331.

35. Castle Rackrent also parallels some of the other romances and marriages found in Wuthering Heights. Sir Condy originally falls in love with Judy, a young relation of Honest Thady, but marries Jane, the daughter of a wealthy neighbour instead (after her own father locks her up to keep them separate). This incident recalls Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar, rather than Heathcliff, and Edgar’s confinement of his daughter, Cathy. Additionally, Sir Kit Stopgap leaves Ireland for Bath (leaving his affairs in the hands of a cruel middle man) and brings his wife back from there, recalling Hindley’s introduction of the outsider Frances into the household at Wuthering Heights.

36. Neville F. Newman takes a vastly different view of Emily’s commentary on class in Wuthering Heights, arguing that novel posits a vision of an ideal Britain based on feudalism: ‘she implicitly argues for a re-instatement of social relations based on inherited wealth’ (‘Workers, Gentlemen and Landowners: Identifying Social Class in The Professor and Wuthering Heights’, Brontë Studies, 38 (November 2013), 313–319 (p. 318)). I would argue that this reading of nostalgia and land ownership would apply better to the endings of Charlotte’s The Professor and Shirley, as discussed below; however, even these novels end on a critical and ironic note.

37. Gwen Hyman, ‘‘‘An Infernal Fire in My Veins’”: Drink and Be Merry | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,’ in Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 54–87 (p. 64).

38. Hyman, p. 67.

39. Lisa Surridge, Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), p. 8.

40. A. Brontë, p. 390.

41. C. Bronte, Shirley, ed. by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 172.

42. Sara Lodge, ‘Masculinity, Power and Play in the Work of the Brontës,’ in The Victorian Novel and Masculinity, ed. by Phillip Mallett (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 1–30 (p. 4).

43. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 48.

44. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 114–115.

45. C. Brontë, The Professor, ed. by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 215.

46. Bodenheimer, p. 39.