BrontesCharlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were sisters and writers whose novels have become classics.

Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, c.1834  ©

Charlotte was born on 21 April 1816, Emily on 30 July 1818 and Anne on 17 January 1820 all in Thornton, Yorkshire. They had two sisters, both of whom died in childhood and a brother, Branwell. Their father, Patrick, was an Anglican clergyman who was appointed as the rector of the village of Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors. After the death of their mother in 1821, their Aunt Elizabeth came to look after the family.

All three sisters attended different schools at various times as well as being taught at home. The Brontë children were often left alone together in their isolated home and all began to write stories at an early age.

All three sisters were employed at various times as teachers and governesses. In 1842, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to improve their French, but had to return home early after the death of their aunt Elizabeth. Charlotte returned to Brussels an English teacher in 1843-1844. By 1845, the family were back together at Haworth. By this stage, Branwell was addicted to drink and drugs.

In May 1846, the sisters published at their own expense a volume of poetry. This was the first use of their pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. They all went on to publish novels, with differing levels of success.

Anne's 'Agnes Grey' and Charlotte's 'Jane Eyre' were published in 1847. 'Jane Eyre' was one of the year's best sellers. Anne's second novel, 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' and Emily's 'Wuthering Heights' were both published in 1848. 'The Tenant' sold well, but 'Wuthering Heights' did not.

Branwell died of tuberculosis in September 1848. Emily died of the same disease on 19 December 1848 and Anne on 28 May 1849.

Left alone with her father, Charlotte continued to write. She was by now a well-known author and visited London a number of times. 'Shirley' was published in 1849 and 'Villette' in 1853. In 1854, Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Nicholls. She died of tuberculosis on 31 March 1855.

Overlooked No More: Charlotte Brontë, Novelist Known for ‘Jane Eyre’She was fearless — so fearless that she paid to have a volume of poems by her and her younger sisters published under pseudonyms, an unusually ambitious act for a woman of her era.

Charlotte Brontë, depicted in 1850 by the eminent portraitist George Richmond.

CreditNational Portrait Gallery, London

By Susan Dominus

Charlotte Brontë was a 20-year-old schoolteacher — impatient, dreamy, long-suffering, unpublished — when, in 1836, she sent a sample of her writing to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate at the time. Although her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell would eventually write of Brontë’s “constitutional absence of hope,” the young teacher clearly already had a firm sense of her own worth — an enterprising spirit and ambition, and a longing for her own genius to find its way into the world.

In his reply, Southey acknowledged that Brontë showed talent, but he nonetheless discouraged her from pursuing her craft, and warned her off ambition itself. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” he wrote, “and it ought not to be.”

Brontë wrote back conceding the wisdom of his advice, then devoted much of her life to ignoring it. When she later decided to send a sample of her work to the poet Hartley Coleridge, she made no mention of her gender. Coleridge offered no great praise, but even his unbiased diffidence failed to sap Brontë’s will to write, to publish, to be, in a sense, heard. It was a will that would ultimately produce some of the most revolutionary novels of the 19th century.Charlotte Brontë, born April 21, 1816, was one of six siblings whose mother died when they were all still small; her father, Patrick Brontë, a brilliant clergyman on a modest salary, brought the children up in Haworth, England, by the desolate moors of Yorkshire, in a stone house surrounded by a graveyard on all sides but one, Gaskell wrote.

As a child, and even as an adult, Brontë was small and frail, so shy among strangers that one host recalled her twisting herself around in her chair so that she could converse without making eye contact. Yet in her elaborate imaginary life, one she created with her siblings, in plays and stories and with maps, she could imagine herself as bold and swashbuckling, a magician or soldier or politician — her personal hero was the Duke of Wellington. In her imagination, and in the way she valued the product of her imagination, she was fearless — so fearless that she eventually paid to have a volume of poems by her and her younger sisters published under pseudonyms, an unusually ambitious act for a woman of her era.

When the poems did not earn the family fame, Brontë persisted, sending to publishers her and her sisters’ novels (also under assumed, gender-ambiguous names): Emily’s “Wuthering Heights,” Anne’s “Agnes Grey” and, a bit later, her own “Jane Eyre.” The daring contrivance played out like a plucky scheme, a plot point in some future novel: “Jane Eyre” became a runaway hit, fueling interest in the other two novels, but readers also clamored to know the authors’ true identities, with the attempt at anonymity only stoking curiosity.

By the time Brontë wrote “Jane Eyre,” she had already lost her two older sisters, who suffered in much the way Jane Eyre’s beloved Helen Burns suffered, from ill health and poor care at a boarding school that Brontë attended alongside those sisters. Less than a year after “Jane Eyre” was published, her brother, Branwell, died of tuberculosis, possibly complicated by his alcoholism; soon after, Brontë bore the burden of caring for her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, both of whom also died of tuberculosis and both of whom she watched suffer in considerable agony.

The first American edition of “Jane Eyre.” First published in 1847 in London, the novel was an immediate literary sensation for the passionate immediacy of its first-person narrator.CreditThe Morgan Library & Museum

In “Villette,” a novel that Brontë wrote after the loss of her siblings, she suggested that such pain could engender fearlessness. “I might suffer; I was inured to suffering: death itself had not, I thought, those terrors for me which it has for the softly reared,” says Lucy Snowe, the heroine of the novel thought to be Brontë’s most autobiographical. “I had, ere this, looked on the thought of death with a quiet eye. Prepared then, for any consequences, I formed a project.”

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A survivor whose life had been shaped by grief, Brontë was perhaps emboldened to write as few, if any, women had before: tales of resistance and insistence on trusting one’s own sense of true morality, however unconventional. In “Jane Eyre,” she wrote from the first-person perspective of a child, an innovation that gave voice and power even to the very young; she created, too, a heroine who was, like Brontë herself, plain, pale, small, and yet frankly desirous, as well as worthy of desire.

Brontë once wrote to a friend that she considered the marital ambitions of women of no means or beauty “an imbecility which I reject with contempt,” a practical response to the frank injustices of class and a kind of sexism. In her novels, however, those same plain women are entitled to not just any marriages, but to passionate, loving ones. The interior lives of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are shared in such detail that the characters’ unfair burdens are plainly manifest; Brontë could make great sweeping plotlines of the small moments and humiliations in an unmarried woman’s life. Lucy Snowe’s struggle to find a private place to read a long-awaited letter reads, over several pages, with the suspense and drama of a Spenserian quest.

A miniaturist of the soul, Brontë captured shades of emotion with a psychological subtlety that still feels exquisitely modern. When Lucy Snowe, battling depression, is advised to cultivate her own happiness, her strong response will feel familiar to many a 21st-century person who has the

condition: “No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness,” she wrote. “Happiness is not a potato to be planted in mould and tilled with manure.”

She had a mordant wit, which could protect her only so much from the series of losses that left her so fragile. “It is useless to tell you how I live,” she wrote to a friend in 1851. “I endure life — but whether I enjoy it or not is another question.” She startled readily, and wrote to friends complaining of crushing insomnia, a poor appetite, grief and flashbacks; she put off writing letters for fear of how dejected she would feel if the replies came too slowly. Her two most intense romantic passions — one, involving a married Belgian school master, was meticulously memorialized in “Villette”; the other, for her publisher, George Smith (also captured in the characteristics of a doctor in “Villette”) — were both unrequited.

But reader, she married, eventually, at the age of 38, choosing Arthur Bell Nicholls, a pastor who worked for Brontë’s father. Although she acknowledged frankly that he was not her intellectual equal, he pursued her persistently, and against her father’s wishes, possibly imbuing a late-in-life courtship with a jolt of romance.

Did Brontë ultimately find the kind of happiness that she described as “a glory shining far down upon us out of heaven”? In “Villette,” Lucy Snowe describes her own feelings about happiness: “The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives — the life of thought, and that of reality. And provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of strange and necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work and a roof of shelter.” Once Brontë married, however, her life of thought suffered. “My own life is more occupied than it used to be,” she wrote to a friend. “I have not so much time for thinking.”

Literature would no longer be the business of her life; whether the pleasures of marriage could offset that loss remains unclear. To one friend, she wrote, “It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife.” But several months later, she wrote, “I have a good, kind attached husband, and every day makes my own attachment to him stronger.”

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In “Jane Eyre,” Brontë imagines what a perfect union might be like: “I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms,” she writes of Jane’s marriage to Mr. Rochester. As for what marriage would come to mean in her own life, Brontë had little time to find out: She died on March 31, 1855, only nine months after her wedding. She

was pregnant, and unable to survive morning sickness so severe that complications from malnutrition and dehydration were the likely cause of death. Given the trials of her life, an obituary in The Leeds Mercury Saturday noted, her early demise seemed preordained — “but not the less deep will be the grief of society that her genius will yield us nothing more.”

While Brontë did not get an obituary in The New York Times, her husband, who died 51 years later, did. The article was just five lines long, and the headline said it all: “Charlotte Bronte's Husband Dead.”

Daily Life

DAILY LIFEAlthough the Victorian era was a period of extreme social inequality, industrialisation brought about rapid changes in everyday life that affected all classes. Family life, epitomised by the young Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their nine children, was enthusiastically idealised.

The billiard room at Down House, Kent, the home of Charles Darwin

MIDDLE CLASSESThe tremendous expansion of the middle classes, in both numbers and wealth, created a huge demand for goods and services. The pound was strong and labour was cheap.

Keen to display their affluence, and with the leisure to enjoy it, the newly rich required a never-ending supply of novelties from the country’s factories and workshops: new colours for ladies’ clothes (such as mauve), new toys for their children, fine cutlery from Sheffield, silverware from factories like JW Evans in Birmingham, dinner and tea services from the Staffordshire Potteries, and plate glass from Liverpool.

What in the 18th century would have been available only to aristocrats was now on show in every smart middle-class home.

The middle classes needed servants too, and in 1900 almost a third of British women aged between 15 and 20 were in service. Domestic servants

represented the largest class of workers in the country, and country houses like Audley End, Essex, had large service wings to accommodate them.

One of the maids’ bedrooms at Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire. Domestic service was one of the largest employers in Victorian England; Brodsworth

had about 15 indoor domestic servants.

POVERTYLuxuries were not available to the millions of working poor, who toiled for long hours in mills (like Stott Park Bobbin Mill, Cumbria), mines, factories and docks. The dreadful working and living conditions of the early 19th century persisted in many areas until the end of the Victorian age. The dark shadow of the workhouse loomed over the unemployed and destitute.

By the 1880s and 1890s, however, most people were benefiting from cheaper imported food and other goods. New terraces of houses for the more prosperous working classes were increasingly connected to clean water, drains and even gas.

A series of Factory Acts from the 1830s onwards progressively limited the number of hours that women and children could be expected to work. Any attempts to organize labor, however, were banned by law until late in the century.

One of the many rows in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, photographed in the 1860s. The town developed into a popular seaside resort in the 19th century,

but most of its inhabitants continued to work in the town’s prosperous herring industry into the 20th century© Historic England Archive

DIVERSIONS FOR ALLBy 1900 there were many diversions and entertainments for rich and poor alike.

Theatres, music halls, libraries, museums and art galleries were built in every major town and many minor ones, often founded by a new breed of

philanthropist. Seaside towns were no longer the preserve of the rich, and places like Great Yarmouth and Blackpool developed as popular resorts for the working classes.

There were many new sports, such as lawn tennis and croquet, and old sports with newly defined rules, such as rugby, football and cricket. Games were an essential ingredient of the education provided by the public schools that multiplied during this period, designed to make gentlemen out of boys from the new middle classes.

EDUCATION AND CHILDHOODEducation came to be regarded as a universal need, and eventually a universal right. It was made compulsory up to the age of ten in 1880. To achieve education for all, many new state or ‘board’ schools were established, together with church schools. By 1900 there was near-universal literacy, a colossal achievement considering how appalling the situation of poor children had been in the 1830s.

The Victorian age was the first in which childhood was recognized as a distinct and precious phase in life. Family life, embodied by the young queen, her beloved Albert and their nine children, was idealized.

As in so much else, the Victorians proved to be richly imaginative when it came to entertaining children. The moral tales of the start of the period were supplemented by animal stories (such as Black Beauty), stirring adventures (like Treasure Island), and the eccentric brilliance of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, all of which would inspire children’s literature in the 20th century.

This 19th-century door panel on display in Row 111 House, Great Yarmouth, depicts children at play. Such idyllic images of childhood were common in

Victorian art, but did not reflect the lives of working-class, often impoverished children growing up in the Victorian era

Primary Sources: Evaluate

Victorian Era Women’s Rights

Women’s Rights: Not Up for Discussion

For people living in the western world in the 21st century, it is hard to imagine the lack of women’s rights in the Victorian Era. Due to their reproductive system, women were seen (by men) as emotional and unstable to the point where they were incapable of making rational decisions. Once they were married, many were treated little better than slaves.

In the eyes of the law (prior to 1882), once a woman married she basically ceased to exist. On her wedding day, she became one person with her husband and thereafter everything she did was under his direction.

Once married she was under the complete and total supervision of her husband. Not only did he have control of all her possessions, he also had control over her body. Refusal of sex was grounds for annulment of the marriage. A husband was allowed to beat his wife, and even rape her, without fear of prosecution. It wasn’t until 1891 that a High Court ruling prevented a husband from imprisoning his wife in order to pursue his conjugal rights. Unbelievably it was not until a hundred years later, in 1991, that a similar ruling denied him the right to rape her.

The law (and opinion) was driven by the fact that in the Victorian era men and women were categorised into different roles or spheres. As they possessed the capability for reason, action, aggression, independence and self-interest, men believed they should operate in the public sphere. Women, on the other hand, were restricted to a private sphere where their feminine qualities such as emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness were more suited.

As men believed they were driven by their mind or intellectual strength, they felt they were equipped to be the governing sex. As women were defined by their sexuality, they were perceived to be irrational, sensitive and dutiful. As such were expected to fit into the social mould crafted by men.

Marriage Stole the Identity of Women

Single women or widows were allowed to own their own property and possessions. As soon as they married, however, their property and any money they owned transferred to their husband. Children were also his property and in the event of divorce, the man could expect custody of his children. From 1839, if it was proven that the wife was innocent she was allowed custody of children under the age of seven. This was raised to sixteen in 1873, but even then the father remained the sole legal guardian.

Given the limitations placed on married women, it may be asked why single women with property or significant possessions would choose to give everything up. For some, it was possible to stay single and live by their own means. For many, however, marriage was a necessity to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table.

This was particularly true for middle and upper-class women. For these women, not only was marriage an expected duty but society prevented them from earning their own living. This meant they were condemned to a life inescapably dependent on a man’s income.

Their Reason for Being

Bearing children was expected of all women. Like marriage, it was an institution that aimed to limit women’s role in society. In theory, it was a sacred and honored position, “the crowning achievement of a woman’s life.” As with marriage, however, there were unjust requirements and unfair expectations.

In order to bring children up properly, mothers were expected to be sinless, both in thought and deeds. Men only perceived them as virtuous if they shunned sex and were seen to be meek, submissive, and conforming. Sex for any reason other than creating children was viewed as dirty and scandalous. Mothers were expected to be religious, as this supported the view that women were free of sexual passion and gratification.

No Right to Her Own Possessions  

Once a woman married control of any property she owned, as well as any income she received from it, passed to her husband. Although he could not dispose of it without her consent, her personal property, such as money from earnings or investments, and personal belongings such as jewellery, passed absolutely into his control. She could not part with them without his consent.

Some progress was made in 1870 when the Married Woman’s Property Act came into effect. This allowed women to keep earnings or property acquired after marriage. It wasn’t until a further Act in 1882 that they were allowed to retain what they owned at the time of marriage.

Intelligence and Menstruation are Mutually Exclusive

When Queen Victoria came to the throne, education was mainly the preserve of the rich. While boys could go to school, a governess would teach girls at home. The academic content of their lessons, however, was generally low.

For children from poor families often the only official form of education was through Sunday school. These were open to all children although there were typically fewer girls educated than boys. In 1851, for example, female literacy rates were 55% compared to nearly 70% for males.

In 1870 a law was passed which made it mandatory for all children aged between 5-10 to attend school. Although all were taught basic reading and writing, the curriculum for girls evolved to focus on subjects such as domestic science, cooking, laundry and needlework.

The struggle for women’s higher education started in the 17th century. It was only from the mid-late 19th century, however, that progress began to be made. As early as the 1840s, Queen’s and Bedford Colleges at London University offered women higher education. It wasn’t until the late 1860s and 1870s, however, that colleges for women were founded at Oxford and Cambridge. At this time, women were not allowed to study for degree courses. It was 1878 when London became the first university in the UK to allow women to attain degrees.

Oxford and Cambridge lagged behind London’s lead in this regard. Girton was the first Cambridge college set up for women in 1869. This was followed by Newnham College in 1872, but at the time they were not recognised by the university authorities. It was 1882 before the first women students were allowed to sit examinations and it wasn’t until 1920 (Oxford) and 1948 (Cambridge) that they gained access to degree examinations.

Resistance to the education for girls principally came from the medical profession. They argued that the physical demands of menstruation and the intellectual demands of studying were incompatible. They believed that educating women would lead to mothers of puny, weakened and sickly children.

The Inequality of Divorce

From 1857 divorce was made easier than it had been in preceding years. Moderately wealthy men could divorce their wives on the simple grounds of her adultery. This was based on the idea that it

threatened his ability to pass his property to his male heirs. He could also claim damages against the adulterous third party.

A woman who wanted to divorce her husband, however, had to prove adultery and show it had been aggravated by desertion (for two years). Alternatively, she needed to prove her husband’s cruelty, rape, sodomy, incest or bigamy. She was not allowed to claim damages from the third party. This difference was not rectified until 1923.

On the positive side, however, the 1857 Act denied the husband any right to the earnings of the wife he had deserted. This meant a divorced woman was returned to the same property rights as a single woman.

Work is Not for Ladies

Although it is widely held that during the 19th century a woman’s place was in the home, women did, in fact, work in a wide range of occupations. Attitudes to work were, however, driven by class. Upper-class women were not expected to work. For working-class women, however, it was often necessary for them to earn a wage and contribute to the running of the household. The type of work they were eligible for was restricted, and they would generally undertake manual work such as domestic service, laundry, needlework, factory work or agriculture. Needless to say, they could expect to receive less money than men, even if they were doing the same job.

Paid work for middle-class women was frowned upon. If they did work for a wage, they would do skilled, non-manual work, often supervisory or professional in nature. They employed others to do the manual tasks.  Middle-class women were also discouraged from doing housework. This was left to an array of servants such as housemaids, nursemaids and cooks. Even lower-middle-class women, the wives of clerks and schoolteachers, would have a General Servant. They would be expected to do the dirtiest tasks like scrubbing the steps and peeling potatoes.

Put on a Pedestal…and Left There

Despite the apparent esteem afforded to wives and mothers in the 19th century, in reality, they lived in a world that discriminated heavily against them. Due to their superior physical strength, men considered themselves the dominant sex and sought to keep women subdued for as long as they could.

It was during the late 19h century that Women’s Rights became a social issue. The next article focuses on the early suffrage movement   that eventually lead to women gaining the vote.

Victorian Era Society and Social Class Structure (1837-1901)What was the change in the Victorian society in England after the Industrial Revolution?How was Victorian society structured?The Victorian society was divided into nobility Upper Class, Middle Class, and the Working Class. The Victorian Upper Class consisted of the Aristocrats, Nobles, Dukes, other wealthy families working in the Victorian courts.The Upper Class was in a powerful position giving them authority, better living conditions, and other facilities.

The hereditary aristocratic families by the early 19th century had taken a keen interest in the industrial sector. Due to the changing nature of the basic standard of living of the people, the traditional families were now slowing disappearing and instead, a new combination of nobles and the steadily growing wealthy class comprised of the Upper Section of the society.

Life of Victorian Upper ClassThe Upper Class was by inheritance a Royal Class. Many Aristocrats did not work as for centuries together their families had been gathering enough money for each generation to live a luxurious life. However, there were a number of aristocrats who managed large industries like mining or shipping, etc.

In terms of education   also those belonging to the rich families got the best tutors to provide education. The fact that they represented the royal class gave these people an advantage at everything. They could buy expensive clothes imported from Europe, or afford other riches of life that was beyond the scope of others.

Victorian society middle class children

Victorians Middle-class lifeThe Middle class was the next in social ranking. The Victorian period was very prosperous for the middle class. Middle-class people also owned and managed vast business empires. The middle-class population at the very start of the Victorian era was limited to a few.

The Industrial Revolution in the mid-century of the era brought about drastic changes in the standard of living of the Victorian Middle-Class people. These revolutions opened the doors for more job opportunities and earn a decent living. This, in turn, had a positive impact on the education of children.

Victorian Working classThe lowest among the social hierarchy were the working class. This class remained aloof to the political progress of the country and was hostile to the other two classes. This working class was further categorised as the skilled workers and the unskilled workers.Due to the revolution, the industrial workers got jobs thus improving their  living conditions. However, the unskilled workers who were placed below the skilled one remained unemployed and were vulnerable to the exploitation.

The working class was the worst affected class in the Victorian times. Lack of money resulted in a negligible food supply. For some working families, the living conditions were so pathetic that they required their children to work in order to bring home some extra income to survive.

The death of their father meant that there is no income to the family and they eventually were forced to live on streets or some public housing. There were some families which would reside in a single room just to have a shelter over their head. The conditions were so brutal for the working class that at times children were forced to work away from their parents.

Status of the Women in Victorian societyIndustrial Revolution attributed to the change in the  status of women . According to the traditional family pattern, the women were supposed to look after the household chores and take care of children while the men would earn money. There was a strong presence of male dominance in the society. Women were to obey what men told them to do.

The revolution gave women an opportunity to work and earn money, thus changing the old beliefs. Working women not only shared the burden of earning money but it also gave them a sense of security. Their lives were no longer restricted to the house and children. The segregation of large families into nuclear ones also added to the change in the women’s lives.

Child Labor in Victorian society

Victorian society had child labor

Child labor was rampant throughout the Victorian period. A major reason attributing to it was the fact that the families did not earn much and the food prices had increased for certain duration. This made it difficult for the earning members to earn enough to buy food and satisfy the requirements of the family.

Also, the family structure comprised of grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles etc. The number of family members living together was burdensome. Thus, parents were forced to send their children to work and bring some more money. However, despite working for long hours, the children were underpaid and as such their living conditions hardly improved.

Victorian era society: Politics

The English government under the rule of Queen Victoria was a monarchy which also comprised of a Parliament. The Parliament was a Bicameral legislature which consisted of The House of Lords and The House of Commons. The said houses would meet separately and passed a bill as law by majority votes.

However, for the bill to passed, it was necessary that both the houses accent to it. The members of the House of Lords not elected by public voting and Lord Chancellor was appointed to supervise its activities. On the other hand, the members of the House of Commons were elected by public voting.

In the initial years of the Victorian period, there were two strong political parties, The Whigs and the Tories (Conservatives). These were the first political parties in England who dominated the political field throughout the Victorian reign.

The Whigs were in favor of growth of the Parliament and wanted to restrict the royal power. Towards the end of 1850, the Whigs became Liberals. They were of the opinion that Parliament should all the decisions and all men should have a right to vote and elect members.

In 1858, Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister of England resigned from his post after the Orsini plot against Napolean III, the French emperor fell out. Tories, the other dominant party was in favor of monarchy. Many rich officials belonging to high posts were members of this party. Their view about voting was exactly opposite to that of the Whigs. Tories believed that only those men who were rich and owned large plots of land should have the right to vote.