Victorian Paper Worlds: Reading Brontë Fragments Seminar

The Brontë siblings’ childhood creativity originated in play and was also meticulously recorded in writing. Most of the Brontë juvenilia was by necessity produced on discarded pieces of paper, such as cast-off advertisements and empty flour bags, paper being an expensive commodity for much of the nineteenth century. Finding blank spaces in books or on loose pieces of paper irresistible, the children swiftly repurposed them for their own writing. Each sibling also ‘scribbled’ in the margins of published books, producing there miniature texts and drawings, a practice described in Wuthering Heights when Lockwood encounters Cathy’s diary written in the margins of books. This talk will examine the Brontës’ early writing in the context of paper production in the Victorian period, whereby until the 1870s paper was manufactured on an industrial scale from recycled rags. It will then focus on how the recycling activities of the Brontës, their salvaging of small scraps of paper, stimulated an aesthetics of miniaturisation which can be seen in Charlotte’s production of her ‘little books’ and the ‘Diary Papers’ created by Emily and Anne.

 

Biography

Deborah Wynne is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Chester. Her current research focuses on Victorian writers, textiles and paper. Her publications include The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (2001); Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (2010); Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (2016), co-edited with Amber Regis; and Victorian Manufactured Objects (forthcoming), co-edited with Louisa Yates. Her latest publication is an article on Charlotte Brontë’s experimental gothic fragment, ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’, which was published in Victoriographies in 2021. In 2020 she appeared on BBC One’s The Great British Sewing Bee to talk about rags recycling in the Victorian period.