Brontë Studies. Volume 50. Issue 4. October 202

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 50  Issue 4, October 2025) is available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts: 

Foreword
pp 349-350  Author: Chevalier, Tracy

Introduction: Charlotte Brontë's Little Book
pp 351-359  Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire 

Charlotte's Little Book

Second Series of the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’, Number Second for September 1830
pp  360-388 Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire 

Little Essays

Bidding on Charlotte Brontë
pp 389-391 Author: Dinsdale, Ann

What Are Those Words Worth? Forms of Upcycling, Downcycling and Salvage in the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Shirley
pp. 392-402 Author: Heritage, Barbara
Abstract: 
Despite their humble origins, the Brontës’ ‘little books’ have achieved an iconic status and now command astronomical sums. This article describes how one such manuscript, the September 1830 issue of the ‘Second Series of the Young Men’s Magazine’, provides new evidence for long patterns of recycling in the works of the Brontës. Starting with an examination of the physical materials salvaged for Charlotte Brontë’s miniature book, this study discusses another form of creative reuse: the interpolation of lines from Wordsworth’s ‘A Night-Piece’ in the story ‘A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’. Charlotte and her sister Anne continued to draw on ‘A Night-Piece’ in Shirley (1849) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Even as Wordsworth’s poem invests their writings with cultural capital, more intangible values become apparent, notably an ethics of care for nature and others that stands in contrast to harmful, extractive practices. Charlotte’s propensity for creative salvage illuminates a greater purpose at work in her writing: a desire to preserve a literary and environmental landscape both under threat.

‘That burning clime’: Charlotte Brontë’s Little Book and Jane Eyre
pp. 403-417  Author: O'Callaghan, Claire
Abstract:
This new and original essay takes a close look at the relationship between Charlotte Brontë’s ‘A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’, her first creative piece in the newly recovered September 1830 issue of the ‘Second Series of the Young Men’s Magazine’ and her beloved novel, Jane Eyre (1847). It argues that the portrayal of fire, bed burning and unexplained voices in Wellesley’s story provides an origin point for Brontë’s later representation of the same motifs in Jane Eyre. It therefore problematises the idea that Charlotte's portrayal of the burning bed in Jane Eyre was directly inspired by her brother’s drunken behaviour. By contextualising the intertextual connection between these fictions in relation to Charlotte's experiments with genre, this article provides the first analysis of this newly published manuscript and its relationship with her debut novel. The recovered piece of Brontë juvenilia, it argues, expands our understanding of Charlotte Brontë as an author.

A Gothic Apprenticeship
pp.  418-428 Author: Marsden, Simon
Abstract:
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).

Violence in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’: Influence, Representation, Resurrection
pp. 429-439 Author: Franklin, Sophie
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë was drawn to violence from an early age. Her unpublished, and later published, writings are full of bloody fights, blazing fires and emotional intensities. By paying close attention to the scenes of brutality in ‘A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’, one of the stories in the 1830 Little Book presented here, this essay traces the many returns of violence in Charlotte’s literary oeuvre through three central concerns: influence, representation and resurrection. The essay begins with a consideration of the impact of Thomas De Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827) on Charlotte’s aesthetics of violence, before moving on to a discussion of her numerous experimentations with graphic and implicit depictions of brutality in both her early and mature work. The essay concludes with an exploration of Charlotte’s fascination with raising characters from the dead and ultimately argues for the centrality of violence to her literary development.

Dreaming Exiles in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘The Midnight Song’
pp. 440-451 Author: Regis, Amber K.
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë’s poem ‘The Midnight Song’ appears in the second issue of the second series of the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. This Little Book, created in miniature to be a fitting object for the toy soldiers that inspired the siblings’ collaborative storytelling, was acquired by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2019. This article enjoys the privilege of being the first to offer a critical account of ‘The Midnight Song’ to celebrate its first publication. It considers Charlotte’s delineation of the exile, expatriate and dreamer, figures who represent different but related ways of knowing and perceiving the world. As the poem unfolds, Charlotte inhabits these subject positions simultaneously, identifying their privileges and testing their limits. In so doing, she hones her understanding of the writer’s craft and creative power, revealing at just fourteen years of age a remarkable self-assurance when wielding her pen. In turn, the poem proves prophetic, for here Charlotte plays with the tropes of un/belonging, dis/connection and mis/communication that recur throughout her oeuvre.

‘The Globe in Glass Town: Mobilities, Textual and Terrestrial
pp. 452-463 Author: Ross, Shawna
Abstract:
This article argues that the newly-transcribed September 1830 issue of the Brontës’ ‘Young Men’s Magazine’ reveals Charlotte Brontë’s incipient global consciousness as an adolescent writer. This consciousness emerges from Charlotte’s use of travel as a theme that unites the issue’s tonally and generically disparate contributions. Within and across the issue’s Gothic tale, Romantic poem, continental travelogue, notices and advertisements, Charlotte develops a series of intertextual bonds that connect the characters’ geographical mobility to the circulations of books, letters and magazines. To contextualise these intersecting images of textual and personal mobility, this article situates them alongside travel imagery in Charlotte’s earlier and later writings and visual artworks. Doing so illuminates not only the young author’s increasingly sophisticated ability to deploy travel as a trope to generate drama and convey character but also her authorial self-awareness that the circulation of a text is an integral part of the text itself.

The Dandy in the Pink Waistcoat: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Journal of a Frenchman’
pp. 307-320 Author: Wynne, Deborah
Abstract:
This essay considers Charlotte Brontë’s serialised ‘Journal of a Frenchman’ in the September 1830 issue of the second series of the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. It discusses the representation of Parisian life, demonstrating how this missing fragment fits into the series and the wider context of Charlotte’s engagement with the French language and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the latter providing the inspiration for many aspects of the Frenchman’s account of his life.