Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Charlotte Brontë was born on April 21, 1816 in Thornton, England to the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë. Charlotte’s life was marked by tragedy, losing her mother when she was five, the aunt that raised her, and all five of her siblings. Yet despite these sorrows, she was able to use the experiences from her life to become one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era. Her passionate, honest, and rebellious stories continue to inspire authors and readers alike.

Front cover of the Thompson Brother’s Fireside Library edition of Jane Eyre: an Autobiography
with an illustration of Charlotte Brontë, [Nov. 1891?]. Special Collections, Spencer Research Library.
Call Number: O’Hegarty C2307. Click image to enlarge.

Jane Eyre, her most popular work, has bewitched audiences for more than 150 years with its poignant tale of an orphan girl who became a governess and dared to overcome societal constraints by finding true love and gaining financial independence. Although the story in itself is exciting, one of the main reasons for Jane Eyre’s continued popularity is the perfect blend of romance with realism. By pulling from her own life, Charlotte Brontë infuses her novel with verisimilitude. When Jane grieves over the death of Helen Burns, rages against the stifling life of a governess, and despairs over the impossibility of her love, Charlotte is letting us into her personal thoughts, emotions, and experiences. The images I have selected from one of our editions of Jane Eyre highlight these fictionalized autobiographical moments.

Lithograph by Ethel Gabain from Imprimerie Nationale’s 1923 edition of Jane Eyre.
This illustration depicts Jane Eyre at the puritanical Lowood School visiting her dying friend, Helen Burns.
As a child Charlotte lost two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, to pulmonary tuberculosis due to the terrible conditions
at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Lowood was modeled off of the Clergy Daughters’ School
and the character of Helen Burns was inspired by her oldest sister, Maria, who had been like a mother to Charlotte.
Special Collections, Spencer Research Library. Call Number: G64. Click image to enlarge.

Lithograph by Ethel Gabain from Imprimerie Nationale’s 1923 edition of Jane Eyre.
This illustration depicts Jane, as a governess, sitting ignored by her employer, Mr. Rochester,
and his upper class visitors. Charlotte Brontë served as a governess for a school and for private families
and found it degrading, as she explains in this quote from her letters cited in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
“I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence,
is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill.”
Special Collections, Spencer Research Library. Call Number: G64. Click image to enlarge.

Lithograph by Ethel Gabain from Imprimerie Nationale’s 1923 edition of Jane Eyre.
This illustration depicts Jane weeping over her wedding dress after discovering that her groom, Mr. Rochester,
was already married. While teaching in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her French tutor, Constantin Heger,
a married man, but her love was not returned. She sent many letters to him with no response,
sending her into depression that would often manifest itself in headaches.
Special Collections, Spencer Research Library. Call Number: G64. Click image to enlarge.

If you’re interested in learning more about Charlotte Brontë or her other works, come visit us at Spencer Research library and check out these resources:

• Brontë, Charlotte. Napoleon and the Spectre: a Ghost Story. London: C. Shorter, 1919. Call Number: D916
• Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor: to Which are Added the Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, Now First Collected. London : Smith, Elder and Co., 1860. Call Number: Yeats Y290. [William Butler Yeats personal copy].
• Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley: a Tale. London : Smith, Elder and Co., 65, Cornhill, 1849. Call Number: C217. [First Edition].
• Brontë, Anne, Brontë, Charlotte, and Brontë, Emily. Poems. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1846 [i.e. 1848]. Call Number: B2118. [Fist Edition, Second Issue].
• Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: Smith, Elder, 1857. Call Number: C4771.

Mindy Babarskis
Library Assistant
Public Services

One of the wonderful things about class visits is that they often send you hunting through the far reaches of the library’s collections in search of interesting and relevant holdings.  A recent visit from ENGL 572: Women and Literature: Women in Victorian England led me to happen upon two very rare Victorian fashion periodicals among Spencer’s collections. These British weeklies offered up the latest styles (hint: full skirts are in) alongside commentaries and entertainments that the editors thought might interest their nineteenth-century female readership.

The Ladies’ Penny Gazette (published 1832-1834) dates from the period just before Queen Victoria’s  ascent to the throne in 1837. Subtitled the Mirror of Fashion, and Miscellany of Instruction and Amusement, this weekly combined fashion with articles on subjects of interest to women, theater reviews, sheet music, and literary pieces. Subscribers were treated each month to a bonus sheet of “Coloured Fashions of the Lady’s Penny Gazette,” in which the dresses were hand-colored, even if somewhat hastily so.  For those interested in literature, the Gazette offers some finds as well.  Next to a discussion of lace and caps on one side and an article on “Bengal Marriages” on the other is “A Fragment”  by the poet L. E. L.  (Letitia Elizabeth Landon).

Top and middle:  the “Coloured Fashions” supplements and first pages of issues No. 16 (1833 February 9) and No. 33 (1833 June 8) of The Ladies’ Penny Gazette; or, Mirror of Fashion, and Miscellany of Instruction and Amusement. Call #: D4551.  Bottom: an opening from issue No. 15 (1833 February 2) featuring L.E.L’s poem “A Fragment.”  Click images to enlarge.

Though brief by modern standards–at a lean eight pages an issue–The Ladies’ Penny Gazette made the most of its allotted space, presenting pithy, sometimes biting, commentary between its longer pieces.  One such quip, titled “Small Talk,” gives a sense of how the magazine’s conceptions of womanhood are more complicated than a label like “Victorian fashion magazine” might immediately suggest:

Small Talk — Small talk is administered to women as porridge and potatoes are to peasants–not because they can’t discuss better food, but because no better is allowed them to discuss. (No. 42,  August 10,  1833, page 30)

Young Ladies of Great Britain (also known by the longer title, Illustrated Treasury for Young Ladies of Great Britain) ran between 1869 and 1871 before continuing on until 1874 under slightly different titles and formats.  Though each issue touched on the newest fashions (in England and in Paris), the first page of the weekly was usually reserved for one of the pieces of fiction serialized in its sixteen pages, accompanied by an attention-grabbing  (and often melodramatic) illustration.  Priced also at a penny, the magazine targeted a  younger readership than The Ladies’ Penny Gazette, and in its mission to divert and educate, lacks the edge at times found in the earlier magazine.  A piece simply titled “Characters; A Wife”  (see the middle image below) offers a discussion of three “types” of wives: the tawdry, careless wife; the domineering matron; and “the good wife,” whose character “cannot be delineated, she possesses so many minute, undeniable excellencies.”  Men aren’t entirely spared from this typology; the husband who is drawn to the “domineering matron” is described as an “easy-tempered simpleton, who lets her rule as she lists.”

Fashion for Victorian Brits: Illustrated Treasury for Young Ladies of Great Britain. 1.4 (1869 March 13) and 1.5 (1869 March 20). Call Number: O’Hegarty D390. Click Images to enlarge.

Whatever their circulation might have been in their day, these magazines are now quite scarce.  KU appears to hold the only library copy of The Ladies’ Penny Gazette in North America, (with copies also recorded at the British Library, Oxford, and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands), and KU, New York Public Library and the British Library are the only places listed in WorldCat as holding physical copies of Young Ladies of Great Britain.  These weeklies are “rare birds” indeed, but the fascinating cultural texts they offer make them worth seeking out.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Librarian