At the moment I'm reading Jane Eyre, and I'm a little confused because every time her address at Lowood school is referred to, they call the county '-shire'. I was hoping one of you could tell me why this is. Am I just being stupid and missing something obvious?
Thank you.
Charlotte Bronte used a fictional landscape when writing Jane Eyre. Places like Lowood School, Gateshead, and Thornfield Hall don't actually exist. You could say it allows the reader to pick their own respective location in place of Bronte's "--shire", further adding to that personal connection the autobiographical novel cultivates between reader and narrator.
Victorian writers sometimes seemed reluctant to identify places by their real names (Thomas Hardy springs to mind). In addition, Bronte based Lowood School on the school she went to, Cowan Bridge School in Lancashire. I suppose that because the conditions described at that school were so terrible, and yet somewhat fictionalised, she did not want to identify it with a real place, and thus, real people. As it happened, Bronte's first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, did identify Lowood School with Cowan Bridge, which led to the identification of Rev Carus Wilson as the model for Mr Brocklehurst. It caused a huge stink. Both Rev Carus Wilson, and is nephew, Rev H Shepheard published books defending the school and the staff.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
What the other two have said, plus it was more general than Victorian thing. In France too, and I think in the Germn language area as well, they did this routinely. Although it seems to have concerned mainly places that are small enough to be a nuissance if identified. Paris, London and Marseilles, for example, feature as Paris, London and Marseilles, but bishop Myriel, aka Bienvenue, in Les Misérables was identified in a not-really-identified town, later restored to its real name of Dygne. Wickham was of the -shire regiment; Darcy admittedly came from Derbyshire, but to be honest, that's so big that you couldn't possibly know where Pemberley actually was, could you.
The point is that these writers worked with a certain backdrop which wasn't always consitent (is Rochester's Thornfield really in Yorkshire? And if so, does it really have a hamlet?), but was inspired by places they visited and things.
Maybe, and this is only a consideration of my own here (tinking aloud), as Romanticists à la Wordsworth, they were too close to nature and its landscapes to be able to detach themselves from a real landscape and thus create a non-descript, anonymous one like we see in modern lit, where things can be set in non-decript cities for example with features of Paris, London and Rome combined.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
Another related possibility that I'm having trouble fully articulating: it seems as though you can set a scene in London or Paris because those places are large enough that people nobody's ever heard of could certainly live there, and most things that happen fit in within the setting because so much is possible in London or Paris.Originally Posted by kiki1982
But if you set a notable event/person in a very small real setting, where there aren't that many people, then there's that weird acknowledgement of the artifice. Is there a Mr. Rochester in London? Sure, there's a thousand Mr. Rochesters in London. Is there one in Tiny Town in the Middle of Nowhere? I mean, if there were, I'd've heard of him, wouldn't I? Obviously she's making this up...
Hope that makes sense.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote