Charlotte Brontë’s Epidemic

We’ve entered a sudden new reality which will dictate our lives for a while. Certainly for weeks, maybe months. Maybe more. A switch flipped and we find ourselves in strange times, careful of how we move, touch, work, eat, and—well, just about everything. Many of us are self-quarantining. We think about what it all means. Many of us will express those thoughts in our fiction and poetry.

A classic novel of the 19th century provides one writer’s unflinching approach to such a reality, and teaches us that pain and grief may become stepping stones to improving our world.

In October of 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was published. An often-overlooked aspect of the novel is its early section about Jane’s childhood years in the fictional Lowood School. Brontë drew from her own experiences at the Clergy Daughters’ School in Lancashire, where her two older sisters died in pain of tuberculosis. Her father, Patrick, an Anglican priest, shocked, guilt-ridden, and grief-stricken, withdrew little Charlotte and her younger sister Emily from the school.

In Jane Eyre, Lowood’s appalling conditions—contaminated water and food, poor nutrition, hunger, inadequate clothing, unclean quarters, and little health care—feed a deadly outbreak of typhus that burns through the institution in heartbreaking fashion, laying waste to many of the girls (typhus and typhoid are two different diseases; in Charlotte’s day, the two were often mistaken, and it’s likely that the disease she describes was in fact typhoid and not typhus). Through fiction, Charlotte leveled a blistering critique of living conditions and the society that allowed such things to happen to its children.

Jane Eyre was an instant bestseller, adding major cache to the growing, angry chorus of voices of reformers demanding better public health and living conditions for the poor, and on August 31, 1848, England passed the Public Health Act. That legislation created the General Board of Health, which was empowered to create local health boards in the towns and villages of England and Wales, to address clean water supply, sewerage, drainage, and sanitation. Sounds incomplete and modest, and it was, but it packed a far-reaching punch and led to subsequent legislation over the next few decades with more and sharper teeth, and leaving in its wake a more just and equitable land.

“Think globally, act locally” is a mantra we can follow to effect change. Sometimes, the things we push for in society in a broad, general way have a way of paying big dividends locally. The groundswell that created the General Board of Health changed the landscape and later enabled Charlotte’s father to push for an investigation of living conditions in the village of Haworth, where Charlotte grew up. Haworth had an average life span of less than 26 years, and 41% of children died by age six. Its horrendous conditions—excrement running down street gutters, decomposing animal carcasses confined in open, fenced areas, and decomposing matter from the graveyard filtering into the water supply—were detailed in the Board report of 1850, and forcing swift improvements on the town.

Such is the power of fiction, and such is the cyclical nature of societal change, from the small and personal to the large and sweeping, and returning once again to the small and personal.

As we get through this, stay well, keep reading, and keep writing. Read whatever strikes your fancy, both the serious and the escapist, which we most certainly will need. The lighthearted and the somber, as suits you. And if you are so moved, let our new reality inspire your writing and make a difference.

The world needs you.