Bronte`s first attempts in writing


  Charlotte Brontë's juvenile tales revolve around the imagined adventures of the Duke of Wellington's two sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley, and the social elite of "Glass Town," later transformed into the kingdom of "Angria." Arthur, soon elevated to the "Duke of Zamorna," is a recognizably Byronic hero who engages in romantic intrigues as well as in political treachery; his younger brother Charles is a less powerful, often humorous figure, who spies and reports on the scandalous doings of his Angrian compatriots--particularly his brother and his many paramours. Both Wellesleys are authors, and it is significant that Brontë's attractive but morally reprehensible Duke of Zamorna develops into the poet of the family while Charles emerges as a storyteller and her favorite narrator. 



These early tales not only reveal the themes that preoccupied Brontë as a young writer and which reemerge in her adult writing--themes of romantic passion and sexual politics, desire, betrayal, loyalty, and revenge--but also reflect her early awareness of an issue central to early Victorian literary culture: the concern that poetry writing was a self-indulgent and even morally questionable activity. Romantically alluring but destructively egotistical, Brontë's "self-concentered" poet-duke is one of the means by which she represents her own early ambivalence about being a poet. This ambivalence--also experienced by male Victorian poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold--was surely later intensified by social proscriptions against feminine subjectivity. 
                                                                                   
                                                                   

While the juvenile writings of the Brontës have been justly compared to fantasies, they were not merely uninformed imaginings. For example, early stories such as "A Romantic Tale," dated 15 April 1829, reflect the young writers' familiarity with articles on British colonizing in Africa published by Blackwood's Magazine in 1826 as well as more expected sources such as the Bible (especially the Book of Revelations), standard educational texts such as J. Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography (1825), the works of Bunyan, the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and Tales of the Genii (1820) by Sir Charles Morell (pseudonym of James Ridley). 

Characters in the children's stories debate contemporary issues such as the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, indulge in political gossip about prominent figures such as the Duke of Wellington, and conduct military campaigns informed by the children's knowledge of actual military engagements such as the Peninsular War, 1808-1814. The fictitious setting for the tales, supposedly on the coast of West Africa, owes much to the popular oriental cityscape paintings of John Martin, and the Angrians are based on contemporary engravings that Charlotte patiently copied from such books as Finden's Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (1833-1834) and popular annuals such as The Literary Souvenir. 

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