The Mighty Phantasm
The Mighty Phantasm
In 1829, at the age of twelve, Charlotte Brontë began to write a ‘history’. The document still survives at Haworth Parsonage — a blotted scrawl on scrap paper, erratically punctuated and spelled. The story whose beginnings are here ‘sketched out’ is now well known. To the motherless children in that Yorkshire parsonage, the soldiers became the original dramatis personae of an imaginary world that was to allure and preoccupy each of the four throughout adolescence and beyond. Seven years later, in uncongenial employment as a teacher of young ladies, ‘sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy’, Brontë was to testify to the continuing power of that ‘mighty phantasm’ — ‘conjured from nothing to a system strong as some religious creed’. For the ‘mighty phantasm’ in which those ‘plays’ were elaborated was by no means ‘conjured from nothing’. It was made possible, shaped, and constrained by the specificities of a quite particular culture, one that is a potent presence in ‘The History of the Year’.
Keywords: Charlotte Brontë, history, Haworth Parsonage, mighty phantasm, plays
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