Books and a Box of Toy Wooden Soldiers: Reflections on the Brontë Sisters

by Amber Poole

No one would argue that the Brontë Sisters penned some of the greatest novels in English literature. The questions remain the same today as they were a century ago: how did such a phenomenon occur in one family to produce such memorable works of art?

The Yorkshire Moors, A Parsonage, Four Children, an Uncensored Library, and a Box of Wooden Toy Soldiers equal imagination? Let’s say that it certainly can’t harm. The surviving Brontë children—Branwell, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily—were raised by their father, Patrick Brontë, the vicar at Haworth Parish Church. The house was modest in every way, with eight rooms, including a kitchen. The girls shared a bedroom, while Branwell had his own. There was Patrick Brontë’s study, the dining room, and the children’s study; the other two were designated for two servants and Aunt Elizabeth.

The Brontë children were allowed to read anything, including Lord Byron and his contemporaries, who were considered by the greater society as scandalous and certainly not appropriate for young ones. So even before the box of toy wooden soldiers appeared, there was access to an uncensored library. While their father retired to his study after dinner, the children would gather upstairs and make up stories of their own.

According to Winifred Gerin (Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius), “…current periodicals, Blackwood’s, The Edinburgh, The Examiner, The European Magazine, etc., as well as in the ‘Annuals’; to these the Bronte children had access at the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute of which their father was a member and from where they regularly borrowed books. Whether seen or described Martin’s (John Martin, contemporary artist closely related to the ‘Annuals’) pictures established a dominion over their childish imaginations and supplied a permanently splendid backcloth to their voluminous early writings.”

But then one day, the toy soldiers appeared as a gift from Patrick Brontë to his son, Branwell. This addition to their already fertile and expansive imaginations created the childhood stories of the Glass Town, the countries of Angria and Gondal, which were written down on pieces of scrapped wall paper, made into small booklets hardly legible by the human eye without a magnifier and told in the small dining room of the Haworth Parsonage as the children often nightly would march around the table making them up.

The story of the Brontë Family intrigues me as a study of understanding imagination. What does one need to activate a strong imagination?

Not just an imagination in literature, but in the arts and in science. Perhaps one might argue that we are abundant in imaginative minds; for example, those who have crafted Artificial Intelligence and various other aspects of technology. Yes, I would agree that there are creative minds at work in the world.

It is not easy to distill my thoughts into a straight line. While we are rich in technology, I feel we suffer from a shortage of stories; storytelling, to be sure. My observation is that most children and adults are somehow over-connected to social media, Netflix, or YouTube to a degree that they have either dismissed or lost their own personal voices in exchange for attention and celebrity. That somehow, our own personal voice is eclipsed by the need to ‘be known’ by something big indeed, but without any substance. Social media stretches into vast corners of the world, but is it important? Is it the truth, and is it valuable? I do think in some cases it’s certainly helpful to spread information that’s coherent and relevant, but to be obsessed with the darker side of social media, such as 
with celebrityhood and desiring fame for oneself, is rather a vapid place to be.

This phenomenon is partnered with the speed at which a child must travel today, from starting school at the age of five, and then to music, swimming, dancing, karate, chess, and whatever other extra activities they must participate in after school, hardly allowing much time for anything other than competition and success as society has defined it.

Likely, a child by the time they’re grown will simply burn out. The human wick is too short for such a lifestyle. And before one knows it, one is no longer a child.

The beauty of the Brontë Sisters, despite their tremendous tragedies, was rarely imposed upon by anything beyond their boundaries. It is true that Charlotte Brontë, and for very practical reasons to bring some income into the household, wanted to sell her and her sisters' writing, but there was not attached to this a burning desire for fame. A woman’s choices in their day were marriage, teaching, and performing the duties of a governess.

The biography of the Brontë Sisters is nuanced and rife with complications and tragedy, as mentioned.

But they told their stories in a small room during the night after the household chores of mending and making bread were done. They wrote them together and apart after a walk on the moors. And they had not but 12 wooden toy soldiers to activate their imaginations. Or was it so simple?

As an over culture, we cannot return to the 1800s. But have we left something behind that we can reclaim for ourselves, for our children, and for the future? What is it that animated our imagination, giving rise to that sweet sound of story?

Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius by Winifred Gerin | Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1967