War at t’ Parsonage: The Brontës and Military Conflict

In 2015, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth curated an important exhibition to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo and the Brontë family’s engagement with its politics and legacies. Bringing together military-orientated books that were owned by the family (such as Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon), drawings and watercolour paintings by the children (such as Branwell’s disturbing depiction of conflict simply entitled Terror), and intriguing artefacts from the Museum’s collection (including a bust of Wellington and a fragment of Napoleon’s original coffin which was given to Charlotte by Monsieur Heger), the exhibition beautifully depicted the multiple ways in which Haworth’s most famous family were fascinated by, and responded to, ideas of war and conflict throughout their lives and careers. The exhibition was housed in a smallish room separated from the main exhibition area, which created both an intense viewing experience – the walls and cases were full of objects and information – and suggested that, after our immersion in the domestic and literary lives of the Brontës in the key exhibition rooms, we also need to bear in mind how engaged the family were in the wider world and in debates about history and socio-political transformation. For as Terry Eagleton neatly phrased it in Myths of Power, his ground-breaking Marxist study of the sisters’ mature writings, ‘the Brontës lived through an era of disruptive social change, and lived that disruption at a particularly vulnerable point’.1 The instigator of this exhibition was Emma Butcher, whose important research on the Brontë family’s understanding and manipulation of military conflict is the subject of her first monograph, The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Youthful Writings. Taking as its key focus the Glass Town and Angria sagas which were developed by Charlotte and Branwell across the 1820s and 1830s, Butcher’s engaging analysis builds upon the work of critics like Christine Alexander, Heather Glen, and Victor Neufeldt, who have established the centrality of the siblings’ early writings to their literary careers.2 By focusing on a specific topic running throughout these writings, Butcher demonstrates again how fertile the material is for serious critical consideration. For in addition to providing some of the foundations for the siblings’ mature writings, this youthful work effectively reveals the