Appearing Before the Public : Charlotte Brontë and the Author Portrait in the 1830s.

This essay reassesses Charlotte Brontë’s attitude to the pub-lic visibility of the author by looking at her early art work and writings. The fo-cus is on two pencil drawings she made of characters from the juvenilia: Alex-ander Soult, a poet, and one of Branwell’s pseudonyms, and Zenobia Marchioness Ellrington, known as ‘the Madame De Staël of Verdopolis’. The essay situates Charlotte’s visual and verbal portraits of Soult and Zenobia within a broader culture of the author portrait in the literary albums and magazines of the 1830s. It identifies, for the first time, her sources for the image of Zenobia, and links her fantasy author portraits to Branwell’s ‘Pillar’ portrait.

My focus in this essay is on a little-known group of portrait sketches Charlotte made as a teenager, all dated 15 October 1833. These small but highly detailed pencil drawings are of three Glass Town characters: Arthur, Marquis of Douro, a poet; In what follows I want to look first at this culture and then, in more detail, at the iconography and sources of the portraits of Soult and Zenobia, in order to reassess Charlotte's thinking on authorship and public visibility. As I will suggest in my conclusion, the sketches also provide a new context within which to understand Branwell's painting of his sisters -the so-called 'Pillar' portrait.
There was, of course, a long and rich tradition before the nineteenth century of portraits of literary men and women, visualising their genius, inspiration and fame, and, in some cases, the activity of writing itself. 5 But the phenomenon of the author The author portrait in early nineteenth-century print culture portrait that I describe is historically specific: a product of the industrialisation of publishing and the emergence of the professionalised author from the 1830s. 6 From the later eighteenth century portraits had been increasingly available to view. This was partly a result of the growing culture of public galleries and exhibitions, but the major means of public access to portraiture was through the reproduction and circulation of engraved portrait images in print media. 7 The expansion of publishing in the 1820s and 30s, combined with technological developments such as steel plate engraving, made these portrait images more widely available in a variety of contexts, including as frontispieces, in literary albums, and in the periodical press. In an increasingly crowded and competitive literary marketplace, public visibility became an essential survival strategy for writers, not merely as a means to accrue status, but to be recognised, differentiated from others, and identified as the origin and owner of their work. The battles over copyright, that were so integral a part of the Victorian professionalization of authorship, were waged, in part, through author portraits, most obviously in the form of frontispieces, claiming intellectual property. 8 Print 'galleries' of literary portraits also flourished, including the 'Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters' which ran in Fraser's Magazine from 1830-38, with speciallycommissioned portraits of living male and female authors by Daniel Maclise, each accompanied with a jocular, one-page biographical commentary. 9 It was a literary marketplace in which authors and their audiences engaged in a new fantasy of physical proximity, even as they became, in practice, more distant from each other than ever before. Andrew Elfenbein and Tom Mole have written of the public's relationship with Byron in terms of 'a simulacrum' or 'hermeneutic' of 'intimacy', and Eric Eisner, citing such phenomena as stalking of authors, literary tourism and literary lionism, has argued that '[n]ineteenth-century writers and readers […] found themselves paradoxically growing closer, disturbingly present to one another physically as well as psychologically', as the reader-writer relationship became characterised by a 'poetics of presence [...] an impossible intimacy'. 10 Victorian authors and publishers increasingly saw portraiture as a necessary means of creating these illusions of intimacy between writers and their audiences. 11 For an aspiring female writer such as Charlotte Brontë, in the 1830s, the author portrait offered some obvious dangers. As Judith Fisher has shown in relation to the Fraser's 'Gallery', both men and women suffered from assumptions relating to the gendering of the writer's body. 12 But these collections of portraits displayed the particular disadvantages of public visibility for the female author in furthering the attitude of the literary reviews that a woman's writing originated in and was identical with her body. The underlying expectation was that beauty would accompany female genius. Thus an engraved portrait of Madame De Staël in Finden's Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (1834) was followed by quotations from Byron's letters in which he praised her as a supreme 'authoress' but coupled this with a more ambiguous inventory of her physical charms: Her figure was not bad, her legs tolerable; her arms good. Altogether, I can conceive her having been a desirable woman, allowing a little imagination for her soul, and so forth. She would have made a great man. 13 In Fraser's 'Gallery', too, female writers could be reduced to their appearance. Referring to Maclise's portrait of a smiling, fashionably-dressed Letitia Landon, William Maginn's essay dropped hints about her sexual availability, praised her feminine, 'unbluestockingish' looks, and remarked that women who choose 'unfeminine' subjects such as 'politics, or political economy, or pugilism, or punch [...] should immediately hoist a mustache'. 14 Yet, despite such comments, author portraits offered aspiring female writers fame, status and a closer connection to the public. Collections of portraits were also important in providing a variety of models of authorship to choose from, variously positioned in relation to the emerging movement towards professionalization. Engraved portraits of Byron or Madame De Staël, in publications such as Moore's Life and Letters of Lord Byron (1830) or Finden's Illustrations, depicted seductive, patrician images of writers of the previous generation. Alternatively, as Linda Peterson has argued, Fraser's 'Gallery' displayed portraits in which signs of a new breed of professional men and women of letters mingled with more familiar iconographies of pre-professional and domestic authorship, representing multiple potential models, in which the relationships between gender and the authorial body were by no means homogenous or stable. 15 In this respect the Fraser's 'Gallery' was representative of the broader culture of the author portrait in the 1830s, which presented the public -and aspiring writers amongst them -with a complex visual pattern book of authorship, suggesting the possibility of authorial self-fashioning for both male and female writers.
The sketches of Soult and Zenobia, of 15 October 1833, belong to this emergent culture of the author portrait. As Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars have shown, despite the Brontë children's contacts with the art world, they had few opportunities to see exhibitions and found their primary visual influences in print sources. 16 Most of Charlotte's portrait sketches, including the two under discussion, consisted of minutely detailed copies and adaptations of contemporary engravings, taken from the illustrated literary albums: publications such as Finden's Illustrations of Lord Byron, The Souvenir and The Keepsake. 17 Although the family subscribed to Fraser's Magazine from 1832, Charlotte's surviving art work shows no such close copying from Maclise's portraits. However, Carol Bock has argued convincingly that the young Brontës, as aspiring authors, followed the advice offered by Fraser's in putting themselves forward in the literary marketplace, and it seems likely that the 'Gallery' would have interested Charlotte, given the awareness she shows in her writing from the late 1820s onwards, of shifting models of authorship, especially the move from Byronic to professionalised conceptions of the poet. 18 Visually, she was clearly, at this stage, more attracted to the images of aristocratic 'beauties', including Byron and his circle than she was to the more socially diverse and mundanely-attired figures depicted by Maclise. The grounds of her attraction to the illustrated, literary albums are made clear in one of her stories: 'A Peep into a Picture Book' (1834). Here she writes as Charles Wellesley who describes poring over Tree's Portrait Gallery of the Aristocracy of Africa (EEW 2. II: 85), a publication which includes Byronic images of Northangerland and Zamorna (Douro) and a portrait of Zenobia posed to resemble Madame De Staël. 19 The experience of looking at these portraits is represented as one of enchantment and seductive intimacy between the viewer and the sitter, as Wellesley, tempted by the 'green watered-silk quarto covers and gilt backs' of the volumes, lifts the tissue paper and feels 'the pleasure of hanging over forms that speak without sound, of gazing into motionless eyes that search your very heart' II: 8-6). Such descriptions display Charlotte's sympathy with the consumer's desire for an eroticised, visual connection with aristocratic celebrities, and her appreciation of the power over the readership exerted by visualised literary celebrity. Her three drawings of Douro, Soult and Zenobia, completed a few months before this, were not bound into the tiny manuscript magazines in which her stories appeared, but they may be regarded, nevertheless, as illustrations, closely related to the Glass Town narratives and forming a gallery of portraits akin to the one described in 'A Peep'. 20

Portrait of Alexander Soult
As Christine Alexander has established, Charlotte Brontë's portrait sketch of Alexander Soult was copied from an image of Byron, in an engraving of Richard Westall's 'Childe Harold and Ianthe' published in The Literary Souvenir (1830) ( Figure 3). 21 In adapting the image, Charlotte made some significant changes. She removed Byron from the picturesque landscape setting of the engraving and placed him at a table with his hand resting on a book, under which is a manuscript. An inkwell and quill are depicted next to his elbow. Byron's authorised portraits never included these signs of the writer's profession, although unauthorised portraits began to do so in the early Victorian period. 22 By adding them, Charlotte constructed Soult's identity as a conflation of noble, Romantic genius and modern, professional author. This hybrid identity reflects the depiction of Soult (also known as Henry Rhymer) in the Glass Town narratives, in which he strives to define his role as a poet in a changing literary world. Captain Tree, a writer and publisher, and one of Charlotte's narrative personae, articulates these changes. Although Tree believes in literature as a 'noble profession' for the chosen few, he reluctantly predicts a future democratisation of authorship when 'these eyes will see, through the mists of age, every child that walks along the streets, bearing its manuscripts in its hand, going to the printers for publication' (EEW 1: 193). 23 The humble Soult persists, anachronistically, in honing a Byronic image for himself and trying to find aristocratic patrons efforts which are met with sympathy, but also ridicule from the narrators. While he is still struggling to establish himself, he features in Tree's 'Characters of the Celebrated Men of the Present Time' (1829), where he is described as a ragged parody of Byronic genius, with a 'large and expressive' eye and a wild and haggard demeanour, his dark hair frizzy as if 'he had lately come out of a furze bush' (EEW 1: 127). As this suggests, Soult's status as an author is represented as closely dependent upon how he appears, both to his public and his patrons. In a manuscript from 1830, his delusion is that his personal beauty will be a passport to patronage 'I am a good-looking young man. The fire of genius lights up my eye and my whole appearance will, I think, tend to interest them in my favour' (EEW 1: 182). In fact, he is despised as 'a little man, very thin and pale' by Douro's aristocratic household (EEW 1: 186). By the manuscripts of October -November 1833, Soult has fallen 'under the Marquis's surveillance' and has become a wealthy and 'glorious poet […]. From a crazy, disowned and houseless --(EEW 2. ballad singer, he is transmogrified into a handsome young chevalier' (EEW 2. I: 258). In being perceived by his patron as beautiful, Soult becomes so, and, by the same token, rises socially and becomes a successful author. Within this context, the sketch of Soult as Byron, drawn by Charlotte in October 1833, marks his literary triumph. It is an author portrait: a public visualisation of the writer of the 1830s, hovering between a Byronic past and a professsionalised future.
Soult's series of physical and social transmogrifications are typical of the constantly mutating world of Charlotte and Branwell's early writings, in which characters, names and motives as well as scenes and genres are in a perpetual state of dream-like metamorphosis, suggesting the instability and facticity of identity. But the composite nature of her portrait of Soult, and her narrative of his struggle to find a public image, are also in keeping with the wider sense of uncertainty, in the print culture of the 1830s, about the role of the author, and the diverse spectrum of authorial identities visualised in the illustrated literary albums and magazines of the period. Within this context, the visual and verbal portraits of Soult may be understood as part of the siblings' ongoing role-play with their own, individual and intertwined authorial identities -Charlotte occasionally even seems to have shared 'Soult', as a pseudonym. 24 Both her drawing of Soult and her narratives of his emergent literary career, express Charlotte's internalisation of the necessity for herself and Branwell, as indeed for any author, to engage in a continual process of visual self-fashioning in order to progress in the contemporary world of publishing.

Portrait of Zenobia Marchioness Ellrington
In Charlotte Brontë's portrait of 'Zenobia Marchioness of Ellrington', she adapts a different set of authorial identities, associated with the aristocratic, female public intellectual and, in conjunction with her stories, addresses some of the difficulties and opportunities of female authorship and public visibility in the 1830s. The pencil sketch shows Zenobia, unlike Soult or Douro, facing boldly forward, holding an unfurled scroll, her elbow resting on a classical column, with books in the background. The image alludes to Zenobia's reputation in Charlotte's Glass Town narratives as a woman of classical learning in the mould of Madame De Staël (EEW I: 293), a dashing bluestocking who proudly displays her erudition and herself in public. But Charlotte's drawing does not resemble any of the published engravings of De Staël, at least one of which she certainly saw. 25 Christine Alexander postulates that it is based on portraits of Lady Blessington, but no portrait of her has been identified that either pre-dates or closely resembles the Zenobia sketch. 26 In fact, I would argue, the portrait adapts two engravings, neither of which is of an author. The head and hat appear to be modelled on Charles Heath's line engraving of Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Lady Julia Peel, published as the frontispiece to The Keepsake (1829) (Figure 4). 27 From the neck down, the Zenobia sketch is certainly adapted from Charles Rolls's engraving of G. H. Harlowe's painting of 'Mrs Siddons in the Character of Lady Macbeth', published in The Literary Souvenir (1830) (Figure 5). Charlotte has closely copied Siddons's necklace, dark bodice, with a white under garment, the drapery across both shoulders and the pose with the left arm across the body holding a letter (which becomes a scroll), and the right arm by the side.
These sources give further insight into Charlotte Brontë's techniques of copying and adaptation from contemporary magazine engravings to form her portraits through a series of composite identities. The particular identities she borrowed here, from the portraits of Lady Peel and Mrs Siddons, also give a new slant to her representation of Zenobia as an author in the stories. There she is seen exclusively through the eyes of male narrators who both admire her for her dark, aristocratic beauty and her intellectual powers and continually ridicule and criticise her in terms that imitate the satirical representations of women writers in contemporary magazine culture. Her appearance is used by her male peers as a means to circumscribe her achievement Douro, for instance, describes her eyes as 'not so darkly or beautifully blue as her stockings' (EEW I: 300) and Charles Wellesley comments on her portrait: 'A mere blue ought not to be so handsome' (EEW 2. II: 88). There is also a wariness of her underlying imaginative energy in the association of her dark beauty with racial otherness and 'maniacal' tendencies that sometimes erupt in bouts of physical violence (EEW I: 343). Her writing is jokily disassociated from the unfeminine activity of 'pugilism', as Laetitia Landon's had been, by Maginn, in the Fraser's 'Gallery'. 28 Charlotte's choice of sources for her pencil sketch of Zenobia show her adapting images of female aristocratic beauty, nobility and power to create a less vulnerable public persona.
Charlotte Brontë's early art work is dominated by portraits based on the engravings of real and imaginary aristocratic female beauties which filled the albums in the 1820s and 30s.The engraving of Lawrence's portrait of Lady Peel was a superior, and much praised, example of this genre, from an original painting commissioned by Robert Peel, and said to be based on another picture in his collection: Reubens's portrait of Susanna Fourment, known as the 'Chapeau de paille'. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1827 where it was described as one of the 'highest achievements of modern art'. 29 Charlotte's use of this source, is therefore fully appropriate to Zenobia's social status. The image is consistent with and may even have inspired the descriptions of her character's statuesque, aristocratic beauty, and details of her dress, such as her velvet gown, ostrich feather plumes and large gold bracelets (replaced by a frilly cuff in the drawing). One of Charlotte's characters in a story of 1839 comments that Lawrence is 'a flattering villain', but neither her portrait of Zenobia nor her other art work at this period show that she objected to flattered portraits. 30 The portrait of Lady Peel is an image of social power, as, in a very different way, is Charlotte's second source, the engraving of Mrs Siddons as Lady Macbeth. 31 The scene depicted here also displays aristocratic beauty but this time in the form of an emasculating and violent female ambition, appropriate to Zenobia's story and to her 'masculine soul in a feminine casket'. 32 However, the evidence suggests that Charlotte's interest in using this engraving derived at least as much from its depiction of Mrs Siddons's performance of Lady Macbeth, as from the character herself. In the Glass Town story written on 6 October, nine days before Charlotte drew her three portraits, Zenobia attends a theatrical production of 'Petus and Aria', to see Mrs Siddons playing the tragic heroine, 'a strapping virago' (EEW 2. I: 236), who stabs herself and then offers the knife to her husband (EEW 2. I: 237-9). Zenobia's murderous responses to her own, tragic disappointments in love underline the association between herself and Siddons's roles, but, more significantly, so does the theatrical display she creates in her public appearances -for instance as Wellesley sees her at a party, framed by ' a lofty arched portal' and 'crimson silk curtains […] gathered into large festoons' (EEW 2. I: 253) . As Judith Pascoe has argued, Siddons, especially in her most famous role as Lady Macbeth, offered women writers, from the 1790s, a model of performative identity that was in many ways enabling to their negotiation of public and private life. In Siddons's wake, authors such as Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Madame De Staël and Letitia Landon, fashioned public personae from 'a dramatic version' of their private selves, becoming 'the English Sappho', 'the sorrowful Charlotte', 'Corinne' and the 'Improvisatrice'. 33 These personae were enhanced in all these cases by portraits in public circulation. Charlotte Brontë's stories expose Zenobia's disempowerment as a consequence of being subjected to the male gaze, but her portrait, with its theatrical costume, pose and its multi-layered, composite personae (Lady Peel, Siddons, Lady Macbeth, De Staël and Corinne are all present in the picture), manifests her belief in the possibility for the female author of a strategic self-dramatisation through the adaptation of available visual models. 34 Through her portraits and descriptions of Soult and Zenobia Charlotte Brontë modelled, commented on and inhabited different kinds of publicly visible authorship. Although it has not usually been seen in this light, Branwell's now famous painting of The 'Pillar' portrait (c.1834) himself and his three sisters is also a group author portrait. Before Branwell's image was obscured by a column, the portrait showed the four siblings standing around a table with books resting on it. 35 Charlotte's hand, the only one visible, appears to touch one of these books, indicating, perhaps, literary ambition, although this is still very much an image of collaborative authorship. Jane Sellars has recently argued that the composition was influenced by Reynolds's 'The Ladies of Waldegrove' (1780) and by the social ambitions that underlie George Romney's 'The Leigh Family' (1768). Branwell's intention was to present his own and his family's social and intellectual aspirations: [...] with his choice of poses, the dramatic dark background, the matching costumes, the book on the table, the serious expressions, Branwell aims to convey the impression of a distinguished and learned family. This is the role he has chosen for the Brontë family. It signifies his ambition not only for himself but also for his siblings, creating a formal visual extension of the roles they played out in childhood. 36 I would agree with this analysis of the painting's functions, but would also suggest that Charlotte's interest in author portraits in the period between late 1833 and 1834, the time when Branwell is conjectured to have painted his group, is another context, especially in view of her close collaboration with Branwell at this phase of their lives. 37 As well as being a practice piece in preparation for his career as a portraitist, the 'Pillar' portrait was Branwell's experiment in the visual representation of authorship, just as Charlotte's pictures of Soult and Zenobia were hers, although in a markedly different style. Where her small, unassuming pencil sketches were fantasy portraits, his large oil was painted from life, presenting the actual faces of four budding authors to the world. Both, however, belong to the siblings' creation, in their early manuscripts and art work, of an imaginative universe that was a semi-playful imitation of the material and commercial forms of literary and visual culture as they existed in the world beyond Haworth. 38 Branwell's 'Pillar' portrait and Charlotte's sketches of Soult and Zenobia should both be understood in this context as private experiments in public self-presentation, fantasies of visible authorship, preparing the way for future literary careers.  , 1996), p. 107, for the argument that her 'female characters' fears of self-exposure, which indeed increase as Charlotte Brontë's fame grows and her career progresses, express her concerns that writing, as a form of outward self-articulation, becomes hence a de-sexing public activity, a thrusting aside of the veils which should conceal the inner secrets of femininity'. In Shuttleworth's view, for Charlotte Brontë as an author, as well as for her characters, power resides in being able to scrutinise others' faces whilst acquiring 'an impervious external demeanour' (p. 36), reading 'the inner state of the other' (p. 125) whilst resisting the interpretative gaze. See also Sharon Marcus, 'The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre', PMLA, 10: 2 (March 1995), pp. 206-19, for another influential account of Charlotte Brontë's self-conception as a female author in terms of her resistance to the public gaze, this time within the context of a model of professional authorship that exploited the 'abstraction' of the early Victorian literary market: 'The name Currer Bell enabled Brontë to materialize her professional self in abstract form, to put herself forward while simultaneously receding from view, a paradoxical strategy of selfpromotion through self-effacement' (p. 215). Peel's marriage to Sir Robert Peel is a moot point. The Brontës regarded Robert Peel as an opportunistic turncoat on the Irish question, and one of their fictional characters, Lord Pellham, based on Peel, is also shown to be deceitful and hollow. Zenobia is unhappily married, but we cannot draw any conclusions from this. Charlotte Brontë never writes in a simplistic roman à clef manner. 32