A Gothic Apprenticeship

In Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia, we see a young writer learning by imitation and experimentation the conventions and themes of Gothic fiction. 'A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley', one of the stories in the newly-transcribed 'Young Men's Magazine' of September 1830, reveals Charlotte's enthusiasm for Gothic intrigue and mystery. Although her engagement with the Gothic became more subtle and nuanced in her mature fiction, these early stories give us insights into both the development of her understanding of the genre and of her early enjoyment of its excessiveness and sensationalism. Charlotte's juvenilia provides clear evidence that she already understood not only the Gothic's conventions but also something of its political aspects and investment in ideas of the sublime. This article examines 'A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley' alongside another of Charlotte's early Gothic tales, 'An Adventure in Ireland', and traces the legacies of these early genre explorations into the Gothic realism of Villette (1853).