The Brontë sisters Charlotte Emily and Anne, and their brother Branwell brought excitement to their childhood and teens in a remote Yorkshire parsonage by writing stories, creating complex imaginary worlds. Branwell and his elder sister Charlotte wrote of the kingdom of Angria, Emily and Anne of their alternative Gondal. This manuscript story is an example of Branwell’s Angrian writing, consisting of 34 pages densely-written in the barely-legible script that he and his sisters typically used, probably to protect the privacy of their story-telling. Intriguing echoes of Angria and Gondal are to be found in the sisters’ mature work – but for Branwell there was virtually no mature work, for his early promise as a writer and artist was destroyed by alcohol, opiates and unrequited love.
![Branwell Brontë's "The life of Field Marshal the Right Honourable Alexan[d]er Percy"](images/bronte3.jpg)
The Brontës’ manuscript juvenilia owe their survival to the
initiative of Clement Shorter, a critic and journalist, who traced Charlotte’s
elderly widower A.B. Nicholls to a small town in Ireland in 1895, some 40
years after her death. Bundles of Brontë manuscripts, scattered round
Nicholls’s house were handed over to Shorter; some, Nicholls said
“I found in the bottom of a cupboard tied up in newspaper, where they
had lain for nearly 30 years, and where had it not been for your visit,
they must have remained during my lifetime, and most likely afterwards have
been destroyed”. However, having saved the manuscripts from oblivion,
Shorter and his associate T.J. Wise proceeded to split them up and sell
them off in batches, leaving later scholars with the bewildering task of
trying to reconstruct the stories from fragments distributed in collections
worldwide, sometimes page by page. Two ‘volumes’ of Branwell’s
story illustrated here remained intact, but it was lost to sight until 1980
when it was acquired for the Brotherton Collection.
Lord Brotherton's collection of manuscripts by members of the Brontë family was strongest in those of the ill-fated Branwell. They include his Letters from an Englishman in six miniature volumes, Caractacus. A Dramatic Poem, his translation of Horace's Odes, numerous Angrian prose fragments and his extraordinary illustrated letters to J. B. Leyland. The Brontës' father Patrick is represented by scarce printed works, their mother by a letter to her fiancé beginning 'My dear saucy Pat', 18 November 1812, and her autograph essay The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns. A manuscript dialogue attributed to Anne Brontë is in the same notebook as transcriptions of many of Charlotte's poems made by her husband. There are also two of Charlotte’s manuscript French devoirs and several of her letters. Rarest of the many printed Brontë works present is the original Aylott and Jones issue of the sisters' Poems, 1846, of which only two copies were sold, and 37 were given away by the disappointed authors, before it was successfully re-issued by another publisher with a new title-page.
