Dan Snow's History Hit - The Brontës and War

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

In this podcast I was joined by Emma Butcher, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English Literature at the University of Leicester. Emma took me on a fascinating journey through the Brontë siblings' reactions and interactions with the tumult of the early 19th century. We discussed the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from Napoleonic wars, contemporary ideas surrounding British Imperial ambitions, the rise of the military memoir as a literary genre, the landscape of Yorkshire as a source of inspiration and the siblings' own fantasy worlds of Angria and Gondal. It was a melting pot of ideas which would inspire some of the most popular literature in British history. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits, another week of lockdown here in the UK. Hope you're keeping well, whatever you are. I've got a big load of podcasts for you this week, don't worry, you won't be getting bored. We're going to start off with the fantastic Emma Butcher. She's a historian at the University of Leicester. She's written a really interesting book about the Brontes. Now, I know we've got a lot of Brontes fans out there, so I thought we'd talk about the Brontes, but this is their juvenilia. This is what the Bronte girls were writing when they were young. It's kind of cool. They wrote these amazing adventure stories.

They built fantasy worlds because it was based on their own experience. It tells us quite a lot about what young people made of the world back in the early 19th century. It turns out it was pretty wild. So enjoy this podcast about how people in the early 19th century remembered the war, the great war that had just gone by, the Napoleonic Wars, but also how they saw issues, how they saw things like empire, militarism and masculinity. It's good fun. You can hear Emma Butcher when she came on the podcast from before. You can watch documentaries about all sorts of things. You can join our live Zoom podcast records. If you become a subscriber of History Hit.

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So do go and check that out the zoom pods are good fun you can join those if you're a subscriber to history you can join in on the zoom pods we started off with peter frankopan then we got rutka bregman last week on this week we are talking to caleb mcdaniel who just won the pullet surprise for history in the us and we got kate lister coming back on to talk about the history of sex next week that is going to have an adult rating on that one I'm afraid kids no under uh 16s let's say because you're old enough at 16 so yeah no under 16s are allowed to listen to that podcast only listen and watch age-appropriate content kids and so it's good fun I'm really enjoying those zooms it's

good to have you guys on there and sometimes I even operate zoom correctly so that's good fun. I'm really enjoying those Zooms. It's good to have you guys on there. And sometimes I even operate Zoom correctly. So that's been a really good thing. So head over there to History at TV. Use the code POD1. In the meantime, here is Emma Butcher. Enjoy. Emma Butcher, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. You've been on before talking about children and war. Now, while you're talking about the Brontes and war, when people talk about Jane Austen and the Pelagic War, everyone's really sort of surprised that she never seems to mention the

war particularly, and the war doesn't loom very large. Are the Brontes more engaged with militarism? Well, that's the thing. So we all know the three famous Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. We all know Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. And there really isn't any mention of war in these kind of well-known works. And the Napoleonic Wars provides the backdrop of Charlotte's novel Shirley. But again, it's just a backdrop. But what I was interested in is a lot of the men in the Bronte novels are particularly violent, and quite kind of violent, authoritative men. And, you know, very dominating, not the typical Victorian gent. So I was thinking, you know, where does this come from? And this is why I was interested in what the Brontes wrote

as children. So even though, like Austen, the presence isn't in their later works, in their younger writings, in their childhood writings, they're just talking about war. It's like the tip of the iceberg. We know the later novels. But beneath that, there's about 10 years' worth of fantasy worlds and fantasy writing where all they talk about is war. And then they stop.

How fascinating. So what are the dates here? Let's get the dates sorted. Okay, so Charlotte, who was the eldest surviving Bronte sibling, was born in 1816, so a year after the Battle of Waterloo. So all the siblings grew up in a post-war nation, effectively. They started writing their fantasy worlds in about 1826. The first official manuscript is 1829 and they go on to write these till around 1839 and then Charlotte makes this break away and says you know I need to write for money now because this was a personal world that they wrote together and they didn't have any intention of sharing this with the public you know this was their own private kingdom and then Charlotte then goes on to work on

later fiction so Jane Eyre's published in 1847 so a bit later on but all of this is kind of when they were young early teenage to kind of late teenage writers. And so you think that the Napoleonic war which I think was known as the Great War at that time, it loomed really large for those young women and for communities all across the UK. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the Yorkshire landscape where they grew up, what was really interesting to begin my research, so I didn't actually find any documentation, any evidence, that any of the girls actually talked to soldiers or had any communication with soldiers

growing up in the village. But there was definitely a militia presence because if you look in the gravestones in the churchyard, if you look at the baptism registers, you know that there were soldiers kind of living around the village and their father was the curate of the village. So he would have interacted with these for sure. Also around the Yorkshire landscape, that's where all the Luddite riots and the Chartist rebellions loomed large. So very much local conflicts. And these were primarily made up of militiamen as well. So you can see that even though the Napoleonic Wars had happened, the rumblings of it, the rumblings and the aftershocks of it were present in their landscape. And in terms of their reading, because after the

Napoleonic Wars, everything was a bit dull, a bit boring. A lot of the periodical press just kept regurgitating information about the wars. So they're growing up on a diet of war, even though the wars had ended. So it was very much in their kind of consciousness as they were growing up even though they didn't live through it you know i'm laughing at that but if i look back to my own childish scribblings in the 1980s and 90s you know we grew up in the shadow of the second world war and actually it was a lot further than they were with the war movies and our culture and we all like my earliest books are all about you know landing on d-day and stuff like that so in the same way you think the brontes were that was the kind oeuvre, that was the zeitgeist at the time.

Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, post-war literature as such, this massive genre. And that sense of the cultural and societal after-effects of war, the aftershocks can be felt for decades and decades after, which is exactly what they're inspired by. What's the writing like? Is war the big adventure? Is it glamorous? Is it escapism for these poor girls trapped in a Yorkshire curate's cottage? Like, what's the backdrop? But what are they doing in front of that backdrop? So it takes the form of all things. I kind of call it a mosaic or like a collage because they never stay with one kind of strand of war. It's patriotic sometimes, you know, there's lots of glamour and glitz, but there's also moments of kind of real poignance in there as well. And basically, as kids' writings go, it's this fantasy world. So it begins when all four

siblings, so the three sisters and the brother Branwellwell receive a box of toy soldiers from their father. And that inspires the whole saga. And from this box of toy soldiers, the main toy soldier is the Duke of Wellington. And there's another soldier called Napoleon Bonaparte. So the two adversaries of the generation. And from there, they create this fantastical concept that the Duke of Wellington, along with 12 other eminent men of the present day, sail to the west coast of Africa and colonise it. And from then on, this military world is formed. So it's basically an England on the west coast of Africa. Across the sea is something called

Frenchies land, which is their version of France. So you can imagine that they recreate the Napoleonic Wars in that kind of way. There's also kind of little colonial outbreaks so the Ashanti tribes live in the west coast of Africa as is true and they were inspired by the Anglo-Ashanti wars as well which was a big thing in the periodicals as well of the present day and you've also got little kind of civil conflicts as well going on so you've got sometimes the french revolution happens just casually in the saga as well so you can see that it's kind of a mishmash of everything it's just basically whatever they can get their hands on reading they recreate

but it's fascinating isn't it that these young british women think it's very natural that europeans should go out like the rest of the world is this big blank canvas that you can then play your kind of strategic games like a game of risk in real people's lands. And they have the backdrop for it as well because you know their parsonage fed out onto the Yorkshire Moors and their earliest writings are them actually war gaming on the Moors so you have these kind of really inventive, so they're not just writing it, they're acting it out as well. They're creating plays and poems and they're using this kind of tiny microcosm of their own private land to just imagine going out and colonising and exploring and travelling the world, which I think is quite incredible, especially as they had no

experience of that. You know, I'm just thinking how strange these girls are. And then I'm remembering that yesterday, my daughter dressed up as Boudicca and started attacking her younger brother and sister who were Romans. So, you know, we've all, we're all a bit eccentric. Let's come back to this idea of violent men. Would they have been aware that there was a whole generation of men who were changed, often for the worst, by conflict? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's cre Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Absolutely. So what I find really interesting about the Brontes' writings, and what I think is probably a key

point to take from their writings, because often it can be dismissed as kind of childhood ramblings and imitation, is that basically during the Napoleonic Wars, for the first time, military men started to be seen as individuals. And this grew up in the context of romanticism the idea of the kind of suffering emotional soldier but also because soldiers when they came back from war needed to survive and they were often on half pay which wasn't enough to feed themselves and their families so they realized that publishing was a route to go down and they used to write their adventures of war in various forms and publish it. And it became known as a genre called the military memoir. And for the first time,

the kind of British reading public could get a sense of the red coat or the man behind the red coat. And these memoirs were published as standalone forms, but also in the periodical press as well. So widely distributed. This is what the Brontes were reading. Now within these military memoirs, there were some quite traumatic memoirs. And I have to be careful about my use of the word trauma because at that period of history, war trauma didn't exist. There was no discourse to describe PTSD, trauma. So it was commonly known as nostalgia or cannonball wins, like the idea that a cannonball rushed past you and you just got a fright. But what these memoirs showed was soldiers really grappling mentally with the effects of war. So you had soldiers who

had degenerated to idiocy and there were fears that they'd never recover. There was one instance of a soldier going down to the catacombs of Paris after the Battle of Waterloo, not being able to cope with the death and the skulls and the human remains underneath there and fainting and falling into a state of kind of hysteria because of it. So you had all of these soldiers writing these traumatic entries and then you had the Brontes writing soldiers in their own fantasy world. So there's great soldiers like John Flower, Henry Hastings, who are the average military soldier in their writings you know there's a variety of them you've got Wellington Napoleon all the big generals then you've got these smaller

soldier figures who are also writers and poets and who are writing and documenting their experiences of war and their effects and a lot of these soldiers after they've experienced battle are suffering greatly. You know, some turn to alcoholism, others are opium addicts, others are never the same again, others have nightmares and hallucinations. So you can see how it's kind of vicariously picked up in the kind of social landscape, this idea that soldiers are not just this group en masse. They have every single individual has thoughts and feelings and emotions. And the amazing thing is even reaching to the wilds of Yorkshire, like you'd expect maybe for there to be soldiers in the big cities or former soldiers begging. But if these young ladies are quite remote from those big urban centres, aren't they? Not so much in the sense that Howarth was a commercial bustling town.

There's quite a myth that Howarth is this solitary, grim, Yorkshire, isolated landscape, whereas actually it was a kind of commercial centre. There were a lot of mills there. There was a lot of arts and culture going around in Howarth and the neighbouring towns of Keithley and Bradford. But you're right in the sense that there was definitely not that same exposure than, say, the big cities and, say, London. But it's generally what they're reading and reimagining. But also, you know, there are reports, like I said, there was never any sense that the Brontes ever recorded this, but there were often reports of the ghostly soldier

walking the countryside, you know, trying to find food. Wordsworth wrote poetry about it, James Gilray, the caricaturist. It became this kind of problematic figure of, you know, often deformed, gaunt-looking gentleman kind of roaming the countryside, because that's the big fear. You had so many returning soldiers that had been altered by what they'd experienced. It's such an interesting way of accessing what might otherwise be a so forgotten, overlooked, anonymous generation of huge number of soldiers and sailors that were coming back to the UK, and with almost no provision being made for them at all. No, and there's not a lot of research, actually.

I found it very difficult writing this book to actually find historical sources of the landscape of Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. There's a lot of content about the Napoleonic Wars. Plenty of that. Yeah, but the 1820s and 30s are like these forgotten decades. And that's why I think the Brontes writings are so important because they provide this, as I said, these were private kingdoms. So the Brontes were exploring everything to their rawest limits. And you have these documentation here, this kind of vast swathes of it, which talks about not only factual matters of what was going on in the period, but the emotions and how people were digesting that information. And yeah, I think it's a really important historical source.

So it's an important historical source. What about the light it sheds on their later writing? Do you think now that if you reread some of their well-known books that you can see the echoes of these earlier works? Absolutely, especially with the men. In Charlotte's Villette, Paul Emmanuel, who is the main protagonist in that, is described as being very Napoleon-like. In Shirley, like I said, the backdrop of that is the Napoleonic Wars, and there's talks about Wellington and Charlotte's hero worship of the Duke of Wellington, but more specifically in the personalities of the men and their presence. I

mean, the front cover of my book is the dominating figure of the Angrian saga called Zamorna and he's very much seen as this preface to Mr Rochester in terms of his bearing, his physical kind of strong or quite byronic, dangerous even, bearing. So I think if you read the Juvenile you get a sense of why the masculinity is so violent. Well I made a programme on shell shock a few years ago for the BBC and it made me realise that there was this giant unreported problem of mental health and then of the associated like alcoholism and domestic violence and stuff in the 40s and 50s and 60s from first world war veterans that we just weren't and no one was documenting at all at the time and it makes you think that

the Brontes are a way into talking about that in the middle of the 19th century as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the problem with the military memoir genre is that if you read military memoirs, although they are a cathartic outlet, I'm sure for many soldiers coming back, they are being used to make money, because that's what the soldiers need. They're very melodramatic a lot of it I mean I know war in itself is a very you know there's nothing dramatic or melodramatic about war but the way that they're writing they kind of ramp up these memoirs to sound like travelogues or great romances or things like this so that there's partly an authentic experience filtering through there

but also they're trying to make money so the brontes not only are getting some kind of authentic retelling here they're also being kind of given a ready-made storyboard to feed off effectively yeah i mean i find those memoirs hugely frustrating partly when you're researching them because the seven years war ones that i'm very familiar with but also they're putting it they just hate giving any personal responses to anything it's all just written like the kind of protagonist as a sort of hero going through these battles and then the minute you get an interesting ground like how they felt when they saw a field full of dead bodies they just go anyway next and you're like come on that's the bit the modern audience are all interested in pretty much but there's other kind of things which i think are really

interesting about them and also this is what walter scott's doing as well i mean the forgotten great 19th century novelist who no one wants to read anymore so walter scott's also writing in this kind of post-war period and pre-war and post-war napoleonic period and him along with the military memoirs, are doing something really interesting in terms of the way they're writing about war. And it's been coined as this term called fog of war, where basically in the middle of a battle scene, in the middle of a memoir, you're plunged into the centre of the action. So the soldiers in a battlefield and things are whizzing past them and things are happening.

And you can't really keep up with everything on the battlefield. And it was meant to be this great kind of armchair read. And I guess where we get this sense of being involved and immersed in film or a kind of, you know, a good book that brings us right into the centre of the battlefield. Now, this is where it began. The sense that the armchair reader can immerse themselves in a battle that they've never experienced. And maybe where the more poignant elements of war are lost and war becomes not this game, but this kind of great adventure, almost. All of it just makes you think, like, what do young people play? So like, what would a previous generation of Bronte girls been imagining?

Like these incredibly brilliant young women imagining, playful. Would they have played, I don't know, papal politics in the 16th century? Fascinating, isn't it? It's great. And also this myth that's perpetuated that Branwell the brother was the one that was interested in war. But you know, the more you read the content

of the girls' writings, the more you realise how interested they are in war. I mean, another interesting thing about it is Emily and Anne. So Charlotte and Branwell ended up towards early 1830s. They started branching off and doing their own little thing. And Emily and Anne broke away from them because they said that they were too bossy. They formed their own imaginary world called Gondal. And at the head of that was a kind of Amazonian warrior queen called Augusta Geraldine Almeida, who was the queen of about four different kingdoms. She'd go through men like anything, you know, put them in dungeons and prisons and drive them to

suicide because their hearts were broken, and be this kind of proto-feminist figure, almost. Which I think is really interesting that they've taken the kind of proto-feminist figure almost which I think is really interesting that they've taken the kind of general idea of a soldier being a man and then thought no we're going to create this very very strong empowered woman as a soldier. I love it and of course Almeida the name of the siege in 1810 by Wellington so he's lurking there as well interesting. Exactly he's lurking there as well. Interesting. Exactly. He's lurking everywhere. I like the Amazonian Queen. That's cool. Listen, the book is very cool. What's it called? It's called The Brontes in War. That's what it says on the tin. That's what it says on the tin.

It's The Brontes in War. And it's out now by Palgrave. Congratulations on another wonderful book and see you soon on the podcast, hope thanks very much dan i hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that.

It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there. And I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.