Shirley Seriality Project

Source Notes

Letter to W.S. Williams

Margaret Smith, ed. Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Oxford: OUP, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 17 February 2017.

59. To W. S. Williams, 14 December 1847 (pp. 93-4)

Dear Sir

I have just received your kind and welcome letter of the 11th. I shall proceed at once to discuss the principal subject of it.

Of course a second work has occupied my thoughts much. I think it would be premature in me to undertake a serial now; I am not yet qualified for the task: I have neither gained a sufficiently firm footing with the public, nor do I possess sufficient confidence in myself, nor can I boast those unflagging animal spirits, that even command of the faculty of composition, which, as you say and I am persuaded, most justly, is an indispensable requisite to success in serial literature. I decidedly feel that ere I change my ground, I had better make another venture in the 3 vol. novel form.

Respecting the plan of such a work, I have pondered it, but as yet with very unsatisfactory results. Three commencements have I essayed, but all three displease me. A few days since I looked over ‘‘the Professor.’’ I found the beginning very feeble, the whole narrative deficient in incident and in general attractiveness; yet the middle and latter portion of the work, all that relates to Brussels, the Belgian school &c. is as good as I can write; it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of ‘‘Jane Eyre’’. It gives, I think, a new view of a grade, an occupation, and a class of characters— all very common-place, very insignificant in themselves, but not more so than the materials composing that portion of ‘‘Jane Eyre’’ which seems to please most generally—.

My wish is to recast ‘‘the Professor’’, add as well as I can, what is deficient, retrench some parts, develop others— and make of it a work; no easy task, I know, yet I trust not an impracticable one.

I have not forgotten that ‘‘the Professor’’ was set aside in my agreement with Messrs. Smith & Elder— therefore before I take any step to execute the plan I have sketched, I should wish to have your judgment on its wisdom. You read or looked over the M.S.—what impression have you now respecting its worth? And what confidence have you that I can make it better than it is?

Feeling certain that from business reasons as well as from natural integrity you will be quite candid with me, I esteem it a privilege to be able thus to consult you.

Believe me, dear Sir,

Yours respectfully

C. Bell—

‘‘Wuthering Heights’’ is, I suppose, at length published— at least Mr. Newby has sent the authors their six copies— I wonder how it will be received. I should say it merits the epithets of ‘‘vigorous’’ and ‘‘original’’ much more decidedly than ‘‘Jane Eyre’’ did. ‘‘Agnes Grey’’ should please such critics as Mr. Lewes— for it is ‘‘true’’ and ‘‘unexaggerated’’ enough. The books are not well got up— they abound in errors of the press. 2 On a former occasion I expressed myself with perhaps too little reserve regarding Mr. Newby— yet I cannot but feel, and feel painfully that Ellis and Acton have not had the justice at his hands that I have had at those of Messrs. Smith & Elder.

Notes: MS Taylor Collection, Princeton.

1. A single-page draft of a preface, written before Shirley was begun, explains that the narrator has cut out the first seven chapters of The Professor (BPM MS Bonnell 109; Clarendon edition of The Professor, Appendix III). A longer draft of 18 leaves (Princeton University Library, Clarendon Shirley, Appendix D) renames the Crimsworth brothers John Henry and William Moore, and begins to develop the character of John Henry’s wife Julia. Fragmentary paragraphs and calculations of the extra material needed to expand The Professor also survive (Pierpont Morgan Library, Clarendon Professor App. II).

2. Newby both printed and published the three carelessly produced volumes.

Shirley Composition

Marin 2011

Marin, Ileana. "Charlotte Brontë’s Heron Scissors: Cancellations and Excisions in the Manuscript of Shirley." Brontë Studies 38.1 (2013): 19-29.

Collier 1999

Collier, Patrick. "The Lawless by Force... the Peaceable by Kindness": Strategies of Social Control in Charlotte Brontë's" Shirley" and the" Leeds Mercury." Victorian periodicals review 32.4 (1999): 279-298.

WS Williams

CB's ODNB entry

Alexander, Christine. “Brontë , Charlotte (1816–1855).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. David Cannadine. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Web. 18 Feb. 2017.

• They were given a warm welcome by George Smith and his reader William Smith Williams, and taken to the opera, the Royal Academy, and the National Gallery.
• One bonus of success, however, was an increase in correspondence and contact with a variety of new people once Charlotte had returned to Haworth. W. S. Williams at Smith, Elder had been her literary and personal confidant for a number of years, and she now corresponded with writers and critics like G. H. Lewes, Sydney Dobell, and Julia Kavanagh.

Smith 2011

Smith, Margaret: "George Smith, Prince of Publishers, and William Smith Williams" Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society , (36:1), 2011, 75-84.