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Open pages of 'Child's First Tales'.
Title — Childhood in Jane Eyre.
Professor John Bowen, University of York, sits in Bronte Parsonage.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
They're real pioneers, I think, in presenting childhood experience to the world. So, if you look at earlier novels, say Jane Austen, for example, children aren't very important to that at all, but suddenly in the mid-19th century there is a suddenly a whole string of important novels with children absolutely at their centre.
Title page of Oliver Twist.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Oliver Twist is one. Wuthering Heights is another — you think how important the early childhood years of Heathcliff and Cathy are. David Copperfield is another, then Great Expectations.
A handwritten letter.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
But really, Jane Eyre has the most important role of all of those, because it's really the first time you get someone narrating… not by a child but from a child's point of view, or from a child's perspective, and bringing you so close to what it feels like to be a child. And she immediately influences, say, Dickens, who then goes to write David Copperfield. So, it's enormously influential. It's like a whole terrain of human experience that comes through into the novel through Jane Eyre. So, earlier romantic writers like Wordsworth or Blake has written poetry, thinking about the child and valuing the child's experience, but Jane Eyre has a unique importance in bringing that to the novel.
Text — The Brontes' childhood.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Now, their own childhood was in some ways, you know, unique like no other childhood, really. And also very unhappy, because their mother dies when they're very young, their elder siblings die, and they then get sent to this terrible school, which is the basis for Jane's account of her childhood in Jane Eyre. And it must've been a very difficult time for both of them. The threat of death was imminent there, but also the whole understanding of childhood, of Carus Wilson, who's the head teacher, was so different from those romantic ideas of the child being someone who should be fostered and helped to grow. So that evangelical Christians in this period felt that children were intrinsically sinful and that it was important to break their will early on. And so Carus Wilson writes, for example, a set of little stories called Child's First Tales, and they're very scary, and they're meant to be scary — they're about children who are hanged, or sent to jail or who are punished, and there's a constant emphasis on suffering and on early death.
Ann Dinsdale, Collections Manager, The Bronte Parsonage Museum, sits in the Bronte Parsonage.
ANN DINSDALE:
This is actually a book that would've been in use at school at that time. It's written by Reverend Carus Wilson and it's dated 1836. And they're full of quite grim stories intending to frighten children into good behaviour. So, we get terrible accounts of the punishments that were inflicted on naughty children. And these are illustrated by sort of gruesome little woodcuts of children who are struck down dead for telling a lie, um, punishments for things that we would consider quite… well, not really terribly serious nowadays. So, the book ends with quite a distressing story called Mother Dead, with an illustration, and it's two poor girls whose mother has died.
Open pages of 'Child's First Tales'.
ANN DINSDALE:
'The big girl takes the sheet off the face to have one more look. The least girl cries at the foot of the bed. She can't look up. They have lost their best friend.' And the story goes on to say, 'My dear child, have you a mother? Thank God that he spares her to you. These poor girls did not know how dear their mother was till she was gone. They may have been bad girls, they may have made their poor mother's heart ache, and if so, they could say, "Oh, if she would but come again, I think I'd vex her soul no more." Mind, my dear child who reads this tale and do not vex your mother. If God takes her from you, it may be in his wrath.' So, this is the kind of distressing story that was being doled out to these very young children. Quite disturbing stuff. And whatever the situation at Cowan Bridge and whether it really was the basis for Lowood, I think these books tell you, really, all need to know.
Text — Tapping into childhood perceptions.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Her father, Patrick Bronte, goes away and comes back with some toy soldiers for them, and the children are very, very excited by this, and they write little accounts of them. And then those 12 soldiers, they give names to them, they start to create biographies for them. They then start to create a world in which they live. They create little magazines about them called The Twelves.
Open page from the magazine created by the Bronte children.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
And from these toy soldiers, they populate a world, really, they create a whole country in Africa.
A hand-drawn map.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
And then… It shows the way that play can mutate or changes into fiction for them, and the two are so closely bound together. And that, I think, is one of the reasons why they're such, um, uniquely creative authors, why they can make such a huge difference to what the novel is, because they seem to have this kind of taproot back into very early childhood experiences without inhibition. So they can tap all those quite primal emotions and feelings and fantasies, and at the same time give them adult control and discipline and shape.
Text — Filmed at the Bronte Parsonage.
Text — Directed by Anna Lobbenberg, Cinematography by Joseph Turp, Edited by Joseph Turp.
Text — With special thanks to Ann Dinsdale and John Bowen.
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