In 1960 Daphne du Maurier published The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, a
biography in which she sought to bring “some measure of understanding for a
figure long maligned, neglected and despised”. She was referring to the
notoriously reprobate brother of the Brontë family, yet her words might
equally be applied to the man to whom she dedicated her book: “To J. Alex
Symington, compiler and editor of The Shakespeare Head Brontë, whose
life-long interest in Patrick Branwell Brontë stimulated my own, and
encouraged me to undertake the present study.”
At the time, few of du Maurier's readers would have recognised Symington's
name, yet 45 years later, when I was asked to write an introduction to a new
edition of her Branwell biography, I was intrigued by the dedication, and
longed to know what her connection might be with him.
It was one of those odd, chiming moments of coincidence that spurred me on
during the lengthy research for what was to become my own book, for I was
already on the trail of Symington, a former librarian and curator at the
Brontë Parsonage Museum, who left his job there in 1930, and slipped into
obscurity and obsolescence. Yet his story - and the way it threaded together
with du Maurier's - seemed to me to be worth telling, for in the close-knit
world of Brontë scholarship there were whispers about murky scandals of
forgery and theft involving the shadowy Mr Symington, and his co-editor on
The Shakespeare Head Brontë, a president of the Brontë Society named
T.J.Wise.
The latter had died in 1937, leaving instructions that his extensive
collection of rare books and manuscripts should be sold at a reduced price
to the British Library, where it still resides; an act of generosity
somewhat marred by the discovery that Wise's treasure trove contained more
than 50 forgeries of Victorian authors, including the Brownings and
Tennyson, and rumours that Wise had surreptitiously torn out pages of
antique books on his visits to the Reading Room of the British Museum in
order to sell them to private collectors.
No doubt was cast on the authenticity of his Brontë collection, however, or at
least not publicly; and Symington remained apparently loyal to Wise, as did
many in the Brontë Society, revering him as a dedicated bibliophile who
tracked down a cache of original manuscripts after tracing Charlotte
Brontë's widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls, to a farm in Ireland, and saving the
precious contents of a brown-paper parcel from oblivion.
When Daphne du Maurier decided to write her biography of Branwell Brontë -
hoping to rescue him from being forever consigned to a footnote in history
as the drunken failure of the family - she, too, turned literary detective,
by seeking out Symington, who owned a large number of Branwell's
manuscripts. And once she found Symington - by then living a reclusive
existence on the outskirts of Leeds, in a house filled with hundreds of
boxes and overflowing files of Brontë papers and relics - he gave her a
series of enticing clues to follow, suggesting in letters to her that
Charlotte's signature had been forged on many of Branwell's youthful
manuscripts, and that some of Branwell's most accomplished poems had been
wilfully misattributed to Emily, so that they could be sold for a far higher
price to collectors who were interested only in the famous sisters rather
than their disappointing brother.
Like du Maurier, I became obsessed by these clues, and embarked on a paper
chase to discover the rest of her correspondence with Symington, and a
quantity of his extensive papers and manuscripts, squirreled away in various
archives, scattered from West Yorkshire to New Jersey. Most tantalising of
all the discoveries was a file of documents at the Brontë Parsonage that had
been hidden there for years, which reveals, among other things, that
Symington was the last person to handle an astonishingly rare notebook of
Emily Brontë's handwritten poems - a Holy Grail among Brontë relics - that
subsequently disappeared.
I have chosen to tell this quest as a novel, in part inspired by du Maurier's
own writing, for her fiction contains elements of truth, and her non-fiction
- including the Branwell Brontë biography - reads like a novel. But the true
story - if one can disentangle the truth from the tangled web of deceits
spun by Symington and Wise - is as thrilling as any of du Maurier's
fictional plots.
Symington never openly accused Wise of being the forger of Charlotte Brontë's
signature, though he did give du Maurier specific references about where to
find the suspicious signatures (references that I have also included in my
novel, should anyone wish to take this further and prove his allegations to
be true). The closest he came to an explicit accusation was to describe Wise
in a letter to du Maurier as being “in the fog and mist surrounding the
exposure of his forgeries in other fields” during the period when they were
collaborating as editors. In the same letter he named Wise as being
“responsible for the break-up of the minutely written stories”; by which he
meant the beautifully illustrated little books written by the Brontë
children, chronicling their imaginary landscapes of Angria and Gondal.
Some of these survive - at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the British Library
- yet others were separated and sold as fragments by Wise to wealthy amateur
enthusiasts in this country and America, for whom Branwell had no appeal,
which would also explain why Wise might have applied his skills as a forger
to writing Charlotte's signature on her brother's manuscripts. Symington,
however, was a dogged champion of Branwell's talent, driven in part by a
belief that if only he might disinter the forgotten Brontë brother from
obscurity he would also finally prove himself to the world as an eminent
scholar.
It was this intense desire to rehabilitate Branwell that was to be the
catalyst of Symington's downfall and disgrace, for in 1930 he was accused of
stealing various manuscripts from the Brontë Parsonage Museum, along with a
set of keys for the library, while he was still working there as curator. He
lost his job, yet did not return the manuscripts, nor the keys; curiously,
the threat of legal action against him was eventually dropped by his
employers at the parsonage. It remains unclear whether they wished to avoid
unwelcome publicity, or if he was protected by virtue of his Freemasonry,
which he shared with a number of other leading members of the Brontë Society
at the time.
Symington's enforced exile from the parsonage did not rid him of his obsession
and he devoted himself to the lifelong task of attempting to prove that
several of Branwell's manuscripts that he had taken into his own possession
had been deliberately misattributed by Wise to Charlotte or Emily. Although
he was hampered in his endeavours by the fact that he was (literally)
handling stolen goods, he was also right in his suspicions of wrongdoing,
for there is no doubt that at least one of Branwell's poems (The Heart Which
Cannot Know Another) was passed off as Emily's, before being sold by Wise to
a private collector.
By the time Daphne du Maurier sought him out, nearly three decades later, the
scandal surrounding Symington had been shrouded from view, and she had no
reason to be suspicious of him, or the origins of his collection of Brontë
manuscripts. She therefore wrote to him in his capacity as an authority on
Branwell, asking for his help in her research; and he was flattered by her
attention, after spending so many years in obscurity. Clearly, she was also
rich and famous, the bestselling author of Rebecca, unlike Symington, who
was by then living in penury. Before long he offered to sell her various
manuscripts from his collection, including several poems by Branwell. He
also paid a discreet return visit to the parsonage to gather some more
material for her research.
The poems vary in quality - from a melancholy dirge called Morley Hall to a
far more accomplished sonnet, Peaceful Death and Happy Life, which was du
Maurier's favourite, and, to her mind, just as good as Charlotte Brontë's
poetry. As to the provenance of these manuscripts - or Symington's right to
sell them - well, I don't want to spoil the ending of my book, which is
itself something of a detective story.
But what is clear is this: du Maurier bought a number of rare manuscripts from
Symington, without knowing of their dubious origins, and after her Branwell
biography was published in 1960 she donated several, but not all, to the
Brontë Parsonage Museum. The whereabouts of others remain a mystery, but I
am certain they are still waiting to be found, locked away in an attic or
the dark corners of a cupboard; and they may well include some of the most
priceless Brontë manuscripts that vanished from the archives at the very
same time as the elusive Mr Symington...
Justine Picardie will discuss the mystery of the Brontë manuscripts with
Rebecca Fraser at 6.30pm on April 14 at the British Library, London NW1
Daphne by Justine Picardie is published by Bloomsbury on March 3, at
£14.99.
