Since Mrs. Gaskell’s time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell’s masterpiece.  A hundred little touches have been added to it.  First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte’s friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was “not so gloomy as the truth").  So first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got the values all wrong.  “If the truth must be told,” he says, “the life of the author of Jane Eyre was by no means so joyless as the world now believes it to have been.”  And he sets out to give us the truth.  But all that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how “one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is standing opposite the ‘Devonshire Arms’ at Bolton Bridge”.  In the handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte Bronte and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton Abbey.

“Presently,” says Sir Wemyss Reid, “on the steep road which stretches across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices.  Shall we go forward unseen,” he asks, “and study the approaching travellers whilst they are still upon the road?  Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard.  The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin.  His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged locks behind his ears, for Branwell Bronte esteems himself a genius and a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of the barber’s shears which genius is supposed to affect.  But the lad’s face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even brilliant.  How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the party with sudden terrors!  Beside him, in a dress of marvellous plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand “home-made” in characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters.  Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her brother’s society, and the expectation of that coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand.  Behind sits a pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features, whom the stranger would