‘A Just and Liberal Landlord’: Manliness, Work, and the Landed Gentleman in the Brontës’ Novels

When Jane Eyre asks Mrs Fairfax for an account of Mr Rochester’s character, she learns that he is ‘considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants’, despite the fact that he is seldom at Thornfield.¹ Conceptions of the landed gentleman’s masculinity that obscure his social functions are encapsulated in Blanche Ingram’s proclamation that ‘as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be: – Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip’ (p. 179). These older models of elite masculinity were becoming distasteful in the Victorian period, with their focus on violence, excess, sexuality, and unproductive leisure. The Brontës’ many striking depictions of landowners are rife with ambiguities, particularly as these men are seldom presented at work in their traditional roles as landlord and magistrate.

The landed gentleman’s status was partially predicated on not having to work for money. However, both the new Victorian professional ideal and traditional conceptions of paternalist care affected the range of duties associated with the landed gentleman and the ways this class was viewed by middle-class commentators. This was particularly true after the passage of the 1832 Reform Act, during the inequalities of the Hungry Forties, and with the growing public awareness of the Irish tenant and landlord problem. During the Victorian period, the old professions of the Church, law and medicine were joined by occupations such as teaching, engineering and journalism. Professional associations were established to examine and licence members and thus, by creating a scarcity, maintain social prestige. As this new working man engaged in service-oriented, intellectual labour, the professional man differentiated himself from the traditional paternalist landed gentleman or working-class labourer. Late in the century, Alfred Marshal of Cambridge famously defined professionalism as requiring ‘cool heads and warm hearts’, a mix, Susan Colón argues, of materialist elements drawn from Benthamism, economic rationality, material reward, and the processes of meritocracy, as well as idealist components concerning character, moral agency, vocation and ‘the service ethic’.² Colón suggests that Benjamin Disraeli argues for the restoration of ‘genuinely paternalistic relations between rich and poor’ in his defence of the aristocracy in his Young England trilogy, arguing that this ‘feudal sensibility ... actually resembles the professional ideal more than anything’.³ The Brontës’ interest in professional masculinity is evident even in the earliest Glass Town stories, which are peopled with military men, journalists, doctors and politicians. Professional masculinity continued to be significant in the Brontës’ published novels, and the sisters also depict the influence of professionalizing discourse on mill owners and, as I will discuss in this article, the landed gentleman.

Despite this deep interest in the professions and their relationship to the construction of masculinity which is manifest throughout the Brontës’ works, only Charlotte’s The Professor (1857) and Shirley (1849) have received much critical attention in recent studies of professionalization and Victorian literature.⁴ Colón argues that though the professional class is present in the Brontës, the professional ideal is not examined in a self-critical way.⁵ The Brontës’ depictions of professional masculinity have perhaps been neglected by critics until now because their methods of representation are, for the most part, less obvious than Trollope’s dramatization of Church politics in the Chronicles of Barsetshire, or indeed Disraeli’s examination of the landed classes in the Young England novels. The Brontës’ analysis of professional masculinity considers the intensely personal factors that influence professional and gender performance: self-control; sexuality; and fear of failure and emasculation. In this article, I will examine the Brontës’ representations of professional masculinity, paternalism and the landed gentleman by exploring the complex interconnections between larger social structures and gender performance. This reading will form a significant turn away from the usual method of reading the Brontës’ male characters through their domestic or erotic roles or through the ‘domestication’ of their professional lives. In the Brontës’ novels, traditional paternalist roles and responsibilities often fuse with aspects of the professional ideal in depictions of reformed landed gentlemen, but even this new, ideal figure is represented as unsatisfactory.

Any distinction between the home and the world of work within Victorian domestic ideology must be qualified, especially with regard to the construction of masculinity. Though home was identified as the woman’s sphere, men were also closely identified with domesticity, especially in the first half of Queen Victoria’s reign. As John Tosh argues, a man’s status as householder, husband and father confirmed his manhood, while home was the place where a man’s ‘deepest needs were met’, a refuge from the competitive, alienating world of work.⁶ Tosh writes that it was in fact a man’s privilege to ‘pass at will between public and private’, as women could not.⁷ Although the worlds of home and work were gradually prised apart during the early nineteenth century, they still co-existed for many professional men, such as clergyman and doctors, who consulted with parishioners and patients in the home, and mill owners, who lived in mill houses. For the landed gentleman, the manor house was a sign of status and patrilineal descent, sometimes a place of work or symbol of neglect.

In this article, I will examine the Brontës’ complicated depictions of the landed gentleman in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I will consider how this figure was written about in contemporary periodicals and how the Brontës engage with expectations for both the figure’s traditional roles and responsibilities and new, professionalized models of land owning, which were more acceptable to the increasingly powerful middle class. The Irish tenant and landlord problem, covered extensively in the periodical press, shaped Emily’s Wuthering Heights in a profound way: the novel forms (in part), I will argue, an as yet unacknowledged reworking of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. Set in the late eighteenth century and narrated retrospectively, Wuthering Heights presents older forms of elite masculinity, while critiquing both past and present abuses of power. This retrospective pattern is true of all the novels under discussion, with the possible exception of The Professor.⁸Shirley and Tenant are obviously historical narratives, set during the Luddite revolts and the Regency respectively. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is set in the recent past, as suggested by young Jane’s traveling by stagecoach, rather than by train. This frequent use of retrospective narration allows the Brontës to partially displace, and therefore make more palatable, their criticisms of mid-century landed masculinity.

This article will consider a number of male character types across novels by all three sisters. I will examine narratives of individual reformation, such as Mr Rochester’s transition from absentee landlord to domesticated husband and father; or Mr Hattersley’s shift from abusive husband to ideal ‘country gentleman’ in Tenant. I will also consider pairs of characters who together enact this symbolic reformation. In Tenant, Gilbert Markham is positioned as morally sound gentleman farmer, as opposed to Helen’s debauched and useless first husband, Huntingdon. I will also consider professional men who turn to land-holding after retirement or marriage: William Crimsworth in The Professor and Louis Moore in Shirley. I will additionally examine the case of Shirley Keeldar, the proto-feminist who nonetheless acts in accordance with philanthropic paternalism. Finally, I will consider the Brontës’ repeated depictions of landowners who retreat into the domestic sphere at novel’s end. These unexpected withdrawals form an implicit narrative challenge to the landed gentleman’s social authority at mid-century and the possibilities for either his moralized paternalism or professionalization.

I. A ‘hereditary profession’

Of the three sisters, Charlotte was the one most likely to praise the landed gentleman and his traditional paternalism, as this 1839 description of her employer Mr Sidgwick shows:

One of the pleasantest afternoons I have spent here … was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I had orders to follow a little behind. As he strolled on through his fields with his magnificent Newfoundland dog at his side, he looked very like what a frank, wealthy, Conservative gentleman ought to be. He spoke freely and unaffectedly to the people he met, and though he indulged his children and allowed them to tease himself far too much, he would not suffer them grossly to insult others.⁹

Mr Sidgwick forms an ideal of landed gentlemanliness for Charlotte, which is based partly on image – he looks like a gentleman – and partly on the social and domestic relationships he fosters through his ‘unaffected’ conversations with his neighbours (presumably his tenants) and his friendly ‘indulgence’ of his children. He walks through his fields, maybe purely for pleasure, but perhaps also as a means of checking the crops or the condition of walls, drainage, tenants’ cottages and so on. It is worth noting that Charlotte gave both the Angrian Duke of Zamorna and Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester Newfoundland dogs, a potent sign for her of gentlemanly status.

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have argued that the landed classes were largely seen as idle, licentious, avaricious and irresponsible by middle-class commentators in the mid-Victorian era.¹⁰ Thomas Carlyle’s call for an ‘aristocracy of merit’ in Past and Present (1843) is a prime example of this criticism, as he lambastes the current state of the English aristocracy: ‘Aristocracy has become Phantom-Aristocracy, no longer able to do its work, not in the least conscious that it has any work longer to do.’¹¹ In Carlyle’s vision, this work is that of the baronial ideal, whereby loyalty and protection are mutually assured in the relationship between master and vassal. Elsewhere, in the radical Westminster Review of 1836, the philosopher James Mill offered this judgement of aristocratic political power: ‘to set up a class or order of men, by giving them powers which they may use for their own advantage, at the expense of the rest of the community, is to set up a body of enemies to that rest of the community.’¹² Landed privilege is here seen as the initiating factor in class conflict.

Elsewhere, the Brontës would have come across more moderate responses to the perceived indolence of the landed classes. Agricultural writers, for instance, saw a landowner’s improvement of his land and his tenants’ conditions as central to his role as a landlord. Calls for landowners to take up more responsibility and to deal more justly with their tenants are intermixed with the new rhetoric of professionalism. For instance, in an 1849 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine review of Henry Stephens’s Book of the Farm (1844), John Finlay Weir Johnston quoted at length from a section calling for the reconfiguration of the landowner as a professional role and vocation:

Is it not strange that [a country gentleman] should require inducements to learn his hereditary profession, – to become familiar with the only business which can enable him to enhance the value of his estate, and increase his income? Does it not infer infatuation to neglect becoming well acquainted with the condition of his tenants, by whose exertions his income is raised, and by which knowledge he might confer happiness on many families …? It is in this way too many country gentlemen neglect their moral obligations.¹³

In reproducing this passage, Johnston, an agricultural chemist and scientific lecturer, makes clear that he sees the landed male’s duty to his land as his ‘hereditary profession’, an interesting mixture of inherited privilege and the middle-class, Carlylean Gospel of Work. Both the materialist and service aspects of the professional ideal are present in Stephens’s description. The landowner is urged to take an interest in his land and tenants, first for the sake of increasing his income and the value of his land. The writer further encourages landowners to improve conditions for their tenants as part of the ‘moral obligation’ of landlords, reflecting their traditional duties of care and responsibility.

Few critics of Jane Eyre have considered Mr Rochester’s original status as a second son or the influence his brother had in determining his character by manoeuvring him into his disastrous marriage with Bertha. In his family pride, the elder Mr Rochester decided to keep the entire estate intact and settled his wealth on his elder son Rowland, making no provision for the younger, Edward Fairfax Rochester. Rowland, as his brother’s adversary, plotted with his father to make a mercenary marriage for Edward, as the family credit would not be served by having an impoverished younger son. The Rochesters exchanged his ‘good race’ for Bertha Mason’s thirty thousand pounds of West Indies wealth, and the Mason taint of hereditary madness was concealed by both father and brother. Within the patriarchal structure of primogeniture, the younger son Edward Fairfax is as much a feminized token of financial exchange as Blanche Ingram is when she later attempts to gain his attentions. Rochester’s later fate as rake careering through Europe is presented as, at least in part, a result of his brother’s betrayal and his father’s failure to provide him with the necessary training in his ‘hereditary profession’. Rochester avoids Thornfield because he has secreted Bertha there, but his frequent travels also position him as an absentee landlord who keeps mistresses and travels on the Continent rather than learning how to actively manage the estate he has inherited.

One traditional role a landowner like Rochester might have played was that of the magistrate, a legal and administrative position. The only magistrate clearly identified in the Brontës’ novels is Edgar Linton, who gives up his traditional obligations after Catherine’s death. Nelly tells Lockwood that ‘[g]rief … transformed him into a complete hermit: he threw up his office of magistrate, ceased even to attend church, avoided the village on all occasions, and spent a life of entire seclusion within the limits of his park and grounds’.¹⁴ Edgar withdraws from his social responsibilities for the remainder of his life, and cuts himself off from communication with his tenants and neighbours. The strangeness of this neglect is not readily apparent in the novel, as its focus is so circumscribed throughout.

Through Helen’s socialization of her second husband, Gilbert Markham, Anne Brontë’s Tenant demonstrates how the landed male of the Regency era might become a successful Victorian husband and landowner, who fulfils both his domestic and professional obligations, unlike the bereaved Edgar or untrained Rochester. Gilbert identifies himself as a gentleman farmer and actively manages his own land and workers. The twenty-four-year-old Gilbert of the early part of the narrative chafes at this role and its responsibilities, which tells the reader a great deal about his initial immaturity:

I, by [my father’s] express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel … He … exhorted me, with his dying breath, to continue in the good old way, to follow his steps, and those of his father before him, and let my highest ambition be, … to transmit the paternal acres to my children in, at least, as flourishing a condition as he left them to me.¹⁵

Clearly, the Markham family holds some status in the neighbourhood as landowners, yet Gilbert longs for a more exciting career, and he uses biblical references which underpinned the doctrine of self-improvement to support his personal ambitions. His father, on the other hand, holds the view that family reputation and traditional, ‘paternal’ land ownership are key aspects of manliness and even fatherhood. Gilbert goes on to rationalize the value of his ‘hereditary profession’:

Well! – an honest and industrious farmer is one of the most useful members of society; and if I devote my talents to the cultivation of my farm, and the improvement of agriculture in general, I shall thereby benefit, not only my own immediate connections and dependants, but in some degree, mankind at large.¹⁶

Gilbert’s subsequent justifications of the worth of his work reflect the view he should take of farming, as this work gives a man a chance to be useful, to cultivate the land and his own faculties, and to improve his neighbours’ lot. This reflects the views of the agricultural writers cited above in their encouragement of moral and active land management, a marriage of traditional paternalist ideals and new doctrines of professionalization.

Gilbert thinks more highly of the value of working on the farm by the time he is a mature father and husband, and comments on the good effects farming had on his younger brother, whose love for his future wife ‘had roused his latent virtues and stimulated him to the most surprising exertions, … to render himself worthy of her, in his own eyes, as well as in those of her parents’ (pp. 416–417). Gilbert’s commentary forms an interesting contrast to his comments on his own later life, which say nothing of superintending the estate which was held in trust for Helen’s son by her first marriage or managing the estate inherited by Helen through her uncle. His final words consider only his domestic happiness, not his new duties as a great landowner.

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen’s brother Frederick Lawrence is presented as an ideal landlord, though his personality and moral qualities do more to convey this image than any sense of his actual labour. The only context in which the reader sees Lawrence enacting his traditional duties is in his role as Helen’s landlord, as she hides from her abusive husband in the titular Wildfell Hall. In this role, just as Wildfell Hall exists as Wuthering Heights’ opposite (a place of shelter and female domesticity, rather than a violent, patriarchal space), Lawrence acts as Heathcliff’s opposite: a landlord who is fraternal and sheltering, rather than misanthropic and vengeful.

II. Wuthering Heights, the Irish tenant and landlord problem, and Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent

Criticism of the landowning classes was most often present in discussions of the Irish tenant and landlord problem during the 1840s, which was widely covered in the periodical press. Ireland figured largely in the Brontës’ lives, in part because the Reverend Patrick Brontë hailed from County Down and kept up a degree of correspondence with his family there, and in part because there was traffic between Yorkshire and Ireland among people they knew. Charlotte lost a chance to be a governess in Ireland; Mr Brontë’s curate, Mr Grant, went on from Haworth to Ireland; and, of course, Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte’s future husband, came to Haworth from Ireland. The risk of violence in Ireland was particularly high after the 1845 famine and the revolutions of 1848. Both Charlotte and Patrick Brontë spoke out against violent insurrection and calls for independence there in their 1848 letters.¹⁷

The Brontës would have read articles favourable to both sides of the tenant and landlord question in Blackwood’s. For instance, the Blackwood’s writer, John Fisher Murray, an Irishman, disparaged Irish absentee landlords in London:

[T]hey complain as bitterly of the state of their country as if its pre-eminently wretched condition is not in a great measure attributable to their desertion and neglect … [The English landowner] does not consider that the whole duty of the tenant consists in making the rent, and the sole obligation of the landlord in spending it as soon as he gets it.¹⁸

This passage reflects a trend in criticism of Irish landowners, in that it compares their failings against the better conduct of their British counterparts. The absentees have abandoned their country and tenants, like so many army deserters. These Irish landlords care only for how much money they can make, with no regard for their old moral obligations to their tenants.

Perhaps surprisingly to a modern reader, Blackwood’s also printed a number of defences of Irish landlords. John D. Brady argued that the Irish landlords of 40 or 50 years before had deserved British scorn: ‘Then, unquestionably, the landlord could do almost any thing; then, no doubt, he could with impunity set the law at defiance.’¹⁹ It is worth noting that this is just the period when Wuthering Heights is set. Like other writers, Brady compared Irish and British landowners, but he did so for the sake of illustrating why Irish landlords were not to blame for their neglect due to differences in Irish and English laws:

[T]he English landlord can do much which the Irish one durst not attempt: … he may prevent his land from being damaged by bad husbandry, or a succession of the same crops being taken from it until it is rendered useless; – all this he may do by enforcing his covenants, and no one blames him.²⁰

Because Brady argues that Irish landlords must not be blamed, the improvidence of the Irish peasants becomes the real problem, not the landlord’s absenteeism or neglect. Because the Irish landlords were vulnerable to attack by the ‘‘Thugs’ of Tipperary’, Brady asked: ‘How can we be surprised at Irish absenteeism?’ ²¹ Such a position was opposed by other Blackwood’s writers and those of more radical publications.

The Brontës would have been exposed to more critical assessment of the Irish situation in the Leeds Mercury, a liberal paper the Brontës subscribed to alongside its more conservative rival, the Leeds Intelligencer. An 1846 article on Ireland quotes from a report made by the special correspondent for the Morning Chronicle:

[T]he landowners fulfil their loudly-vaunted promise to take care of the peasantry on their own estates in a mere mockery … On one estate of a landlord of princely fortune, the tenantry are compelled to go up to the Great House every morning, with a collection of pots and pans, to receive as a dole a quart or so of hot water in which turnips have been boiled. This is called soup.²²

The mocking author of this report is strongly critical of the neglect and outright abuse of tenants by their Irish landlords. Emily Brontë may have absorbed the criticisms directed against the Irish landlords and reflected this sense of unease with landed power and masculinity in Wuthering Heights, in which the Irish context is especially crucial to consideration of Heathcliff, as a possible Irish orphan.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë reworks aspects of Maria Edgeworth’s novel Castle Rackrent (1800), which details the generations of the Irish Rackrent family, their servants, and their tenants. Unlike Edgeworth, Emily does not provide a larger social picture of the world around the Earnshaws and Lintons, but rather constructs a tightly focused family romance through which Edgeworth’s themes of legitimacy and usurpation, manliness, and legal process play out. Emily distorts and rearranges the linear chronology of Edgeworth’s novel and partially shifts the focus onto women’s lives through her decision to foreground Nelly, as the primary narrator of the family’s history, a figure quite different from the Rackrents’ male steward, and narrator of the novel, Honest Thady.

Critics have rarely connected Edgeworth’s novel with Brontë’s. In her biography of Emily Brontë, Winifred Gérin compares Edgeworth’s and Brontë’s similar narratorial strategies, but does not discuss the similarities between the novels in any more depth.²³ Kathleen Constable cites Castle Rackrent in her post-colonial discussion of Charlotte Brontë’s Irishness, setting Jane Eyre within the context of the Anglo-Irish Big House genre. Constable sees Charlotte as the sibling most influenced by the family’s Irish heritage. Constable, however, does not seem acknowledge that Wuthering Heights, with its ‘isolated and decaying house’, its ‘blurring of social distinctions’, and its decline into ‘lawlessness; drunkenness; imprisonment of wives who were married for their money; … and, of course, madness’ is a much better candidate for influence by Castle Rackrent and the aforementioned Big House genre.²⁴

While there is no direct evidence that Emily Brontë read Edgeworth’s novel, the Brontës’ connection to Ireland and their love of Scott (who praised Edgeworth’s Irish novels) suggest that Emily Brontë could have done so.²⁵ Specific details from the narrative, too, suggest this very strongly. The action of Castle Rackrent takes place in Ireland during the mid-to-late eighteenth century, which lines up closely with the dates for Wuthering Heights. Castle Rackrent was published in 1800, one year before Lockwood arrives at Wuthering Heights, 1801, which is also the year the Acts of Union between Ireland and Great Britain came into force. Terry Eagleton, among others, has posited that Heathcliff might be an Irish orphan of the famine, but the famine began in 1845 and so of course cannot be a chronologically accurate factor in the plot of Emily’s novel.²⁶ Instead Wuthering Heights functions as a historical novel in similar fashion to Charlotte’s Shirley, which was partially inspired by the Chartist upheaval and the Woman Question in the 1840s but interrogates these issues within the historical setting of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts. As Marianne Thormählen argues, ‘the Brontës’ fiction is both “historical” and involved in the problems of early Victorian Britain, displaying stereoscopic properties as past and present coalesce’.²⁷ However, Thormählen argues, unlike in Shirley, ‘there is no sense that the action is unfolding alongside recognizable historical events and processes’ in Wuthering Heights.²⁸ While the focus of the novel is limited to the isolated neighbourhood of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, I argue that Emily’s novel reflects the gender and class conflicts of the late 1840s by setting them in ‘stereoscopic’ relation with political and class upheavals taking place in Ireland, imaginatively transplanted from her father’s homeland into Yorkshire. Wuthering Heights thus reflects the specific regionalism of Edgeworth’s and Scott’s novels but uses the tradition to create a literature of Yorkshire, which could explain why so many southern reviewers (as well as Elizabeth Gaskell) could not appreciate the novel when it was first published.

Wuthering Heights and Castle Rackrent share a Gothic thematic deeply concerned with the masculinity of the landed classes.²⁹ In both novels, a social upstart seeks revenge on and disinherits a drunken, spendthrift landlord. In Castle Rackrent, this revolutionary role is played by Jason Quirk, the son of the narrator, the Rackrents’ ageing steward Thady. Jason is a lawyer and becomes land agent to the Rackrents. He first purchases a house on Rackrent land for a pittance because Sir Condy requires ready money. Later, to his father’s apparent dismay, Jason enters into partnership with a wine merchant who has purchased all of Sir Condy’s debt. Between the two of them, they demand Sir Condy’s holdings, including Castle Rackrent. In Wuthering Heights, this plot plays out through the outsider Heathcliff, who dispossesses Hindley of Wuthering Heights by taking on the mortgage and exploiting Hindley’s grief-stricken alcoholism and gambling. Heathcliff, like Jason Quirk, makes use of his own money (mysteriously acquired in Heathcliff’s case) and the legal system to dispossess his old master. As Honest Thady comments: ‘I could not but grieve for my poor master’s estate, all torn by these vultures of the law.’³⁰ Critics such as Charles Sanger have commented on Emily’s detailed knowledge of Victorian law surrounding inheritance, marriage and property, and her use of these mechanisms in Wuthering Heights.³¹ Edgeworth also makes clear the revolutionary upheaval embedded in Jason becoming the owner of Castle Rackrent, as Old Thady notes that the tenantry are affrighted by this turn of events: ‘the people one and all gathered in great anger against my son Jason, and terror at the notion of his coming to be landlord over them’.³² Heathcliff, as a possible Irish peasant and absolute outsider, represents an even greater threat to the social hierarchy when he becomes the owner of Wuthering Heights.

Interestingly, Mr Brontë’s own version of the ‘big house’ novel, his 1818 novella The Maid of Killarney, plays out rather differently.³³ Much of the action takes place at the home of Captain Loughlean and his daughter Flora, who are exceedingly generous landowners. The Loughleans are unfairly attacked by ‘Whiteboys’ or Irish Levellers, an eighteenth-century agrarian secret society which attacked landlords for unfairly high rents and tithes, as well as evictions.³⁴ The assault recalls the attack on Robert Moore’s mill in Shirley but ends with little violence when Flora rings an old watchman’s rattle. Patrick Brontë upholds the rights and morals of these particular Irish landlords, making his examination of landowning much more idealized than Emily’s.

Both Brontë’s and Edgeworth’s novels depict the problems caused by close and miserly landlords. In Castle Rackrent, the stingy Sir Murtagh takes the estate over from Sir Patrick who had been famously generous and given to entertaining the neighbourhood. Murtagh’s successor, Sir Kit, deals with the lack of funds by marrying a rich heiress at Bath, but locks his wife in her room for seven years because she refuses to give him her diamonds, in a parody of Gothic confinement. Wuthering Heights repeats this in Heathcliff’s miserliness as a landlord, as Nelly comments that: ‘[t]he villagers affirmed Mr. Heathcliff was near, and a cruel hard landlord to his tenants’ (p. 174). Heathcliff keeps Isabella as a virtual prisoner, in a bid to make Edgar suffer, and keeps young Cathy locked up at Wuthering Heights until she agrees to marry his son Linton.³⁵ He does not use women for their money, but he certainly manipulates them as holders of property for his own gain. The reader learns of his cruelty to his tenants at third hand and never sees his relations with this mass of people, who have no individual identity in the novel. The wider public world and the tenants have become a faceless chorus casting judgement on Heathcliff. We are left to infer Heathcliff’s cruelty and hard-heartedness to his tenants from his abuse of Isabella, Cathy, Hareton and Linton. The wider public has been erased by Emily because the focus of her novel is on the specifics of the households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. These are the small arenas she uses to act out the drama of landed masculinity. She has rewritten Edgeworth’s more public consequences and relationships at the level of the domestic sphere.

Emily’s changes also include the structure of the narration, with the reader’s first contact with the inhabitants of the two households coming from the point-of-view of a fallible, male outsider, the southern gentleman Mr Lockwood. Unlike Nelly Dean, he lacks understanding of the families at the centre of the novel, and as such, acts partly as a surrogate for the reader. Rather than one family, Wuthering Heights circles around two, as members marry from one into the other and property passes from father to son and wife to husband. Emily’s novel thus has a greater sense of conflict than Edgeworth’s. What Emily also emphasizes in her close focus on the members of these families is masculine inheritance of, and education in, patriarchal control and authority. This power is transmitted through the generations, alternately challenged, subverted, or upheld through abuse and revenge. Emily provides a radical rewriting of Edgeworth’s material, and uses it to create a Gothic, pointed criticism of the excesses and violence of landowning masculinity, both challenged by and reproduced in Heathcliff.³⁶

III. ‘Playing the country gentleman’: performance and legibility

The ability to read the markers of landed gentlemanliness is challenged in Emily’s Wuthering Heights by the ambiguities present in Lockwood’s and Heathcliff’s class status and origins. The reader is never privy to Lockwood’s family lineage, source of wealth, or place of regular abode. We do know, however, that he has time for leisure, as he has recently been to the seaside, and that he has access to funds, as he plans to spend six months in London after his short stay at Thrushcross Grange, only returning to the neighbourhood later on a hunting trip with friends. His status as tenant makes it difficult for the reader to determine where to place him in Victorian society. This pattern of social illegibility is complicated by Lockwood’s own failed attempts to read the social relations at Wuthering Heights. The ‘house’ at Wuthering Heights suggests its owner is ‘a homely, northern farmer’, but Heathcliff’s home does not accord with his status as a country gentleman, as signalled by his ‘dress and manners’, which themselves are in discord with his physical appearance as ‘a dark-skinned gypsy’ (p. 3). Lockwood’s confusion as to Heathcliff’s class status is representative of more pressing issues regarding the legibility of status, the social origins of landowners in this period, and the performance of landed masculinity.

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen wishes her husband Huntingdon would take on a masculine role that did not glory in its social uselessness. Gwen Hyman argues that Huntingdon has realized that his role as an untitled landed gentleman is in decline: ‘The image of the productive man of inherited wealth faded as the traditional activities of the English gentleman were slowly usurped by the professional classes.’³⁷ Because traditional class signifiers were becoming attainable by the upper-middle classes, Huntingdon instead determines to embody fully the ‘vision of parasitic gentlemanliness’ embraced by many middle-class commentators, to gorge himself on leisure and dissipation, food and wine, to become absolutely useless as a means of self-definition.³⁸ Helen, meanwhile, wishes ‘he had something to do, some useful trade, or profession, or employment … If he would play the country gentleman, and attend to the farm … or if he would take up some literary study, or learn to draw or to play’ (p. 191). The notion of ‘playing the country gentleman’ suggests this role might in fact not require any real work, but is rather a version of leisured work, or mere artificial performance. In Helen’s case, she wishes her husband would realize his role as landowner comes with moral and social responsibilities. At the very least, she wishes he could engage in an artistic or intellectual pursuit, which suggests that any activity at all – even in the traditional feminine accomplishments – would make Huntingdon a better husband and father. In her desire that he take up a ‘trade’ or ‘profession’, Helen really wishes away her husband’s landed status and the destructive, misogynistic style of masculinity it embraces. If her husband did have a profession, he would by definition be a middle-class gentleman, presumably with a middle-class man’s accompanying values and morality. Helen’s criticism of the Regency landowner’s indolence, excess and lack of social responsibility mirrors the mid-century critiques to which the Brontës were exposed. The novel’s focus on the acts of domestic violence conducted by these same upper-class men was, however, deeply shocking when Tenant was published, as domestic abuse was still associated primarily with working-class men.³⁹

Huntingdon’s friend Hattersley is the most violent man in the novel and has the most excessive appetite for drink. As the son of a banker, he is over-acting the part of the landed gentleman, to make it clear to his friends that he belongs to their class. Out of all the elite males in the novel, only he successfully ‘plays’ the country gentleman after his reformation as a husband:

[H]e continued to pass his life in the country immersed in the usual pursuits of a hearty, active country gentleman; his occupations being those of farming, and breeding horses and cattle, diversified with a little hunting and shooting, and influenced by the occasional companionship of his friends … and the society of his happy little wife … and his fine family of stalwart sons and blooming daughters.⁴⁰

Hattersley fuses his gentlemanly sports with active labour as a farmer and horse and cattle breeder, and Gilbert Markham recounts the tale of his reformation with praise and a jovial tone. This reformed and professionalized model of landowning masculinity is the role Anne believes the landowning classes must fill if they are to survive the post-Reform century. Huntingdon and his similarly debauched friend Grimsby do not change their useless styles of masculinity and are both destroyed by their excesses, with their deaths attributed to alcohol abuse and cheating at cards respectively.

In Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s depiction of ‘Captain’ Shirley Keeldar suggests that playing the country gentleman might be a gendered performance facilitated in large part by titles and offices normally only accessible to men. Shirley proclaims grandiloquently:

I am an esquire: Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position: it is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood … really I feel quite gentlemanlike. You must choose me for your churchwarden, Mr. Helstone, the next time you elect new ones: they ought to make me magistrate and a captain of yeomanry.⁴¹

Shirley identifies herself as possessing a number of symbolic male signifiers: her name; her role as major landowner in the parish (and mill owner, by extension). Additionally she feels ‘quite gentlemanlike’, suggesting a kind of gender fluidity not seen elsewhere in the Brontës’ published works, though, as Sara Lodge argues, Charlotte had previously played with this in her depiction of Jane Moore’s self-presentation as gentleman in the late Angrian novelette The Duke of Zamorna (1838).⁴² Because Shirley bears a number of signs of landed masculinity, she appeals to the rector to be given more of the traditional roles (churchwarden, magistrate, captain of yeomanry) and their accompanying authority. This is a challenge to the gendered divisions of labour within the landed classes. Shirley’s grand assertions of her own masculinity and authority suggest in turn that Charlotte may be mocking the pretensions to power by men of this class, suggesting that their titles and offices are only husks, devoid of real work towards ameliorating the lives of the working classes. In any case, Shirley succeeds in her performance as landlord only because other men are willing to deal with her on businesslike terms when she initiates a programme of relief for Robert Moore’s unemployed mill workers and their families, which Bodenheimer sees as an act of female paternalism.⁴³ Shirley does not desire a professional status, but a traditionally philanthropic, paternalist one.

IV. Post-work masculinities: retirement and romantic withdrawal

While the Brontës were fascinated by the professions and the professionalizing role of the landowner, the sisters returned again and again to the concepts of retirement and domestic withdrawal, which strongly suggests they saw domesticity as a key factor in a unified masculinity. These choices reflect the thematic and structural limitations of the Victorian novel, as no available genre or structure could successfully reconcile an industrial plot or a narrative of professional development without reference to the harmonizing sphere of domesticity. Thus, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), the titular protagonist gains professional success as a writer and makes a happy second marriage, while Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) only partly reconciles masters and men and focuses on Margaret Hale’s marriage to John Thornton, an alliance of landed and industrial interests.

The Brontës dramatize many of their male characters setting aside their professional identities and taking on landed forms of masculinity, as many successful commercial men did at this time. These withdrawals from work and society act out the twinned operations of domestic ideology and social paternalism identified by Catherine Gallagher, who writes that in social novels ‘the family must be isolated and protected from the larger social world. The family in these novels is often presented as society’s primary reforming institution’.⁴⁴ These domestic retreats are most notable in Charlotte’s industrial novels, but this pattern is also present in almost all the other Brontë novels, as professionals give up their work and landlords retreat from their traditional duties, so that the endings of the novels represent a varied intertwining of social paternalism and apparently unworldly domesticity.

Two of Charlotte’s male teachers make this move into the landed classes: Louis Moore in Shirley and William Crimsworth in The Professor. Both men relinquish their teaching careers and retire to rural settings which recreate the nostalgia for the paternalist social structures seen in Thomas Carlyle’s critiques of Victorian industrial society. After 10 years of hard work and judicious investment, William and his wife retire from teaching in Brussels and leave Belgium for England, having decided that ‘Mammon was not our Master’.⁴⁵ After conforming to bourgeois ideals of self-improvement and dutiful working (for both husband and wife), the Crimsworths return to a non-industrialized patch of England and live, it would seem, as landed gentry, not working, but still with enough capital to send their boy to Eton.

In The Professor and Shirley, Charlotte Brontë creates domestic units and parishes symbolically withdrawn from larger social structures or industrial reality, with the former middle-class professional playing the role of benevolent liege lord. For instance, having given up paid work, William Crimsworth notes that he and his wife still have the funds ‘on hand which properly managed by right sympathy and unselfish activity might help Philanthropy in her enterprises and put solace into the hand of Charity’ (p. 215). The charitable exercise of these funds is described in purely emotional terms, rather than financial ones. They use their professional earnings to meet their new paternalist responsibilities as small landowners.

At the end of Shirley, Robert Moore forecasts that his brother Louis will be made a magistrate after his marriage to Shirley and that he will work for the benefit of the parish, as he ‘will not bury his talents’, using the same biblical and self-improving rhetoric Gilbert Markham deploys in Tenant. Louis is ‘a benevolent fellow’, with ‘an intellect … of no trifling calibre’, qualities which were inadequately used in his role as tutor, but will come forth in his role as magistrate and landowner (p. 539). Robert suggests that ‘all will feel [Louis’s] quiet influence, and acknowledge his unassuming superiority’ and he will be ‘universally esteemed, considered, consulted, depended on’ (p. 539). Robert describes Louis’s future role not in terms of the tasks he will accomplish or the duties he will assume, but in terms of the emotional perceptions of his personality and authority that will apparently be felt by all those in the district. This is curious, because Robert explains his own future plans in great detail – tearing down trees, building cottages, expanding the mill – but Robert does remain in paid work as mill-owner, running the family concern. The two brothers will serve as dual rulers of the parish, supported by their wives, Shirley and Caroline, who will oversee their own charitable activities in managing, not teaching in, the Sunday school and future day school. Robert ends by noting that ‘the Squire and Clothier’, that is, Louis and he, in medieval terminology, ‘shall give a treat once a quarter’, the height of masterful benevolence and paternalism (p. 540).

Though both Louis Moore and William Crimsworth find themselves in land-owning positions, their early professional training has different significance for each man. Louis is considered by Robert to have the qualities necessary for the role of magistrate because he developed those talents through his professional service. Any service Louis enacts for his community after becoming a landlord is that of a professionalized landowner (just as his brother Robert has become a professionalized ‘Captain of Industry’). However, this service is in many ways divorced from his wage (derived from rents he will gain no matter whether he is a good landlord or not) and from larger social movements and structures, since his energies will be directed towards his home parish and set within a feudal, paternalistic frame of reference. The value of such professionalized landed-industrialist rule of Briarfield is ultimately subverted by Charlotte’s ending to Shirley. As Bodenheimer argues, this ending represents Charlotte’s ‘stubborn refusal to accede to any of the romantic fantasies that emerge in the narrative as potential havens of harmony, as stories of resolution’.⁴⁶ In the end, the two brothers’ careful labour leads to environmental blight and ruin. The narrator, presumably speaking from the present-day 1840s, notes that the Moore brothers are no longer in the neighbourhood, nor do they seem to have left behind any descendants, suggesting a domestic barrenness to mirror the environmental damage their works have caused. These powerful men have harmed their land and society as much as the Brontës suggest idle and neglectful landowners do. Male indolence and professional efficiency can both have unwanted consequences for those who are disempowered. William Crimsworth, for his part, has come full circle, in a way, as the son of a manufacturer father and aristocratic mother. Having endured taunts from his friend and rival Hunsden about his resemblance to the soft, indolent aristocracy, Crimsworth ends the novel as a new breed of gentleman: owner of land purchased with the wages of professional labour and surprisingly profitable investments.

While landowners are seldom seen at work in their traditional or professionalized roles in the Brontës’ works, each sister also plays with the concept of the complete social withdrawal of the landowner into the domestic sphere. This occurs as part of the fulfilment of the romance plots at the end of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a curious pattern which draws all three sisters together in terms of their presentation of landowning masculinity.

At the end of Wuthering Heights, the combined fortunes and land holdings of the Earnshaws and Lintons fall to Hareton Earnshaw, who moves his housekeeping to the more genteel Thrushcross Grange. There is no word of his taking up the old Linton role of the magistracy, or of his new role as landlord or his intercourse with his tenants. Rather, the novel’s focus remains solely on Cathy and Hareton as a harmonizing force, ‘who would brave Satan and all his legions’ (p. 300). In this way, the reader never learns if Hareton becomes a close, hard-hearted landlord like Heathcliff or if his new gentility and domesticity spills over into his social role. However, the novel challenges the notion that the passions and vengeance of the first generation will be reconciled in the marriage of Cathy and Hareton, by suggesting Catherine and Heathcliff are unquiet in death.

Similarly, Gilbert Markham becomes the caretaker for Arthur Huntingdon’s former estate, as well as the owner of Helen’s uncle’s land and wealth, yet the matter of the frame letter that bookends the novel is focused purely on domestic relations: his children with Helen, her son Arthur Jr’s marriage to Milicent and Hattersley’s daughter, the expected visit from Gilbert’s brother-in-law Halford and his sister Rose. As in Wuthering Heights, the same hint of ambiguity imbues Helen and Gilbert’s marriage, as Helen’s views are unspoken, and Gilbert, like Edward Rochester and Hareton Earnshaw, retains all the legal powers Arthur Huntingdon had abused as a husband.

While all three Brontë sisters depict landed gentlemen, Emily’s and Anne’s critiques are sharper than Charlotte’s, with Emily dramatizing the cycle by which damaging landed ideals of power, control and inheritance are replicated in Wuthering Heights and Anne illustrating the ways in which landed entitlement makes men dangerous husbands and fathers in Tenant. Nonetheless, Charlotte’s Mr Rochester is a very different figure from the unironic portrait she had painted of Mr Sidgwick in her days as a governess. At the end of Jane Eyre, Jane and Rochester live out their married life at Ferndean, with few servants, and their only outside relationships are those with the Rivers siblings. Their withdrawal from society not only creates a closed domestic sphere, but also signals a complete retreat from landowning masculinity and responsibility. At the end of Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester is no longer defined as a gentleman or landlord, but is presented by Jane’s narrating voice more positively as a rejuvenated and redeemed husband and father.

The Brontës’ novels suggest their authors were fascinated by the controversial figure of the landowner, alternately repelled by the figure’s neglect and his damaging style of masculinity and intrigued by the possibilities for social authority and power these men embodied. The sisters critique and reform the landed gentlemen in their novels, but these narrative reformations are often incomplete and ambiguous, obscuring the landowner’s traditional responsibilities and questioning the ideal of professionalization for this group of men. Through these ambivalent representations, the Brontës engaged with critiques of the landed gentlemen found in contemporary periodical literature and, as I have argued with reference to Emily’s nuanced adaptation of material from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, other nineteenth-century literature. The Brontës’ repeated depictions of men who withdraw from the world of work suggest that they are challenging the identification of men with their ‘hereditary professions’, perhaps as a privileging of a man’s domestic identity.

Further research into the Brontës’ depictions of professionalism and masculinity is needed, as their male characters are seldom considered beyond their roles as romantic heroes. It would be productive to consider the Brontës’ working men in relation to contemporary debates regarding class relations and professionalization. Furthermore, more study into Victorian expectations for landowners’ work, encompassing both their traditional, paternalist duties and newer conceptions of professional working and vocation, would be fruitful.

Disclosure statement

The author has no potential conflicts of interest to report.