‘at length a bright light appeared moving among the pillars’. It leads her hero to a fabulous room with three coffins, ‘each of which held a shrouded corpse’. He is reassured: ‘Charles, don’t be frightened they were only our enchantments’ (Juvenilia, p. 53). (Grammatical and spelling irregularities in the juvenilia are Charlotte Bront?’s own.) Although the adult Jane can deduce that the terrifying ray of light is of natural origin, the child cannot. The horror induced is psychological rather than supernatural.
11. I uttered … cry: This clause, which occurs in the manuscript, was omitted in the first and subsequent editions, doubtless in error, for it accounts for Abbot’s and Bessie’s alarm at the ‘dreadful noise’. Margaret Smith also restores this reading in her Oxford World Classics edition (Oxford, 1998): see her Textual Note, p. xxix.
CHAPTER III
1. apothecary … physician: The apothecary, licensed to prepare and dispense drugs, was the poor man’s general practitioner; whereas the physician, with the prestige of a university degree, ministered expensively to the elite.
2. you knew not what you did: The elder Jane echoes Christ’s words on the Cross (Luke 23:34).
3. propensities: Innate inclinations, dispositions. Charlotte Bront? was fascinated by the science of ‘phrenology’, developed in Britain by George Combe (1788–1858) in A System of Phrenology (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1828). The brain was held to be divided into thirty-five organs, each the location for a ‘propensity’. Phrenology claimed to present a scientific and incontrovertible means of ‘reading’ character from the shape of the skull. See Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Bront? and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ch. 4, and Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 39–48.
4. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) published Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver in 1726. Edited versions of the first two Books became a children’s classic.
5. regions: First instance of the word analysed by Karen Chase in Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Bront?, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot (New York and London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 52–65 as designating the spatial design of Jane Eyre, so that architectural domestic space and external topography depict the mind’s complications, passages, labyrinths, hiding places. Here, ‘region’ as designating inner space suggests Milton’s usage in PL, where Satan views ‘regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/And rest can never dwell’ (Bk I, ll. 66–7); ‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime’, he says, opening the speech in which he goes on to claim that ‘The mind is its own place’ (Bk I, ll. 242, 254).
6. ‘In the days … ago’: A popular ballad of 1837 by Edwin Ransford (1805–76).
7. ‘My feet … poor orphan child’: The ballad appears to be of Charlotte Bront?’s own composition. ‘The Orphan Child’ anticipates Jane’s moorland wanderings in Ch. XXVIII, especially her experience of Providential care, the hard-heartedness of the local people, and her beguilement by marsh lights.
8. degradation: The term unites a complex of economic, social and ethical implications, expressing Charlotte Bront?’s fear of falling out of the social net, common to women raised in genteel poverty, as well as the proximity of loss of rank to ‘degeneration’, loss of standing based on birth, a fear elicited in Mrs Reed’s stigmatization of her ‘poor, low relations called Eyre’.
9. sat in the stocks, wore backboards: The stocks were instruments for straightening the fingers, the backboards to correct the posture of pupils.
10. Guy Fawkes: Guy Fawkes (1570–1606) was one of the rebels responsible for the Catholic ‘Gunpowder Plot’ detected on 5 November 1605, associated with incendiarism (a running theme in Jane Eyre) and the ‘enemy within’.
CHAPTER IV
1. line of separation: This phrase recalls Christ’s parable of the separation of the sheep from the goats on the Day of Judgement (Matthew 25:31–46). In separating Jane from her own children, Mrs Reed commits the sin for which Christ judges the damned to ‘everlasting fire’ (25:41): ‘I was a stranger, and ye took me not in … Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me’ (25:43, 45). The fit Jane endures recalls Luke, where Christ casts out an ‘unclean spirit’ from a child, which ‘taketh him, and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him that he foameth again’ (9: 42, 39). Mrs Reed regards Jane as possessed by an unclean spirit.
2. stirred my corruption: Theological term for ‘aroused my rage’, stirring the ‘old Adam’ (that is, the