In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scienti?c books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

The Brontë Family

Following in the footsteps of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, were the next generation of female writers. Unlike Austen, they were northerners, born and raised in West Yorkshire, England. There were also two other sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who sadly died at the ages of 10 and 11 from tuberculosis, and a brother, Branwell, who became an artist and poet, fuelled by his opium and alcohol addiction.

Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) had three novels published in her lifetime, but it is for Jane Eyre (1847) that she is most celebrated. Her sister, Emily Brontë (1818–48), is lauded for her only novel Wuthering Heights (1847) – a complex tragedy, spanning two generations, that expresses the mess that people can make of their lives when needs and desires are allowed to control their actions and reactions, as opposed to common sense and restraint.

Anne Brontë (1820–49) is the lesser known of the sisters. She published two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Unlike her sisters, Anne’s style was one of realism rather than romanticism, making her the more contemporary writer at the time.

All three sisters used pen names (Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell respectively), as it was common at that time for female novelists to adopt male pseudonyms in an effort to be taken more seriously. Indeed, another well-known female author, George Eliot (1818–80), had the real name of Mary Ann Evans. The reputation of the female novelist at the time was uncertain, and it seems that Jane Austen herself may have prompted this practice.

The surname Brontë wasn’t wholly genuine, either. Their father, Patrick, had originally been known as ‘Brunty’, a name he is believed to have claimed for reasons of insecurity and vanity, as an unusual name gave the illusion of continental sophistication and heritage.

Sadly, the Brontë sisters all had short lives, and fragile health characterized the entire family. Two years after the death of Charlotte, her friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography of the elder Brontë that created the impression of a family beset by misfortune.

Charlotte Brontë

As a focused woman with a great deal of determination, Charlotte originally wrote in order to secure financial independence for herself and her siblings. She spent periods of time away from her family home, at boarding school in her youth and later as a governess, giving her invaluable experiences to draw upon. Following the death of Anne from pulmonary tuberculosis, Charlotte’s success with the publication of Jane Eyre prompted her to reveal her true identity and name. She frequently travelled to London and became acquainted with a number of prominent figures of the age. Her book was seen as a seminal work, introducing the idea that women could achieve their desires by demonstrating strength of character. In 1854, Charlotte was married to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She became pregnant, but fell ill and died with child.

The Professor

These days the word ‘professor’ tends to conjure the image of a white-haired, unkempt and eccentric university academic. However, the professor in Charlotte’s novel is young, dashing and a bit of a ladies’ man. The story is loosely based on the author’s experience as a teacher in Brussels, Belgium, and she imagines herself falling in love with her perfect man: a professor at the same school. Charlotte wrote The Professor before Jane Eyre, but failed to publish it in her own lifetime, as it wasn’t deemed good enough. It was eventually published in 1857, two years after her death.

The Brontë family was Protestant and had an innate mistrust of the Catholic Church, and, as such, The Professor deals with Christian division and class prejudice. In effect, Charlotte wrote her good characters as Protestants and her baddies as Catholics, which suited the general mindset of Victorian England. The Brontë family was poor, and Charlotte had a chip on her shoulder about the lack of social standing and esteem that resulted through lack of wealth and connections. In The Professor, her central characters find themselves in that same position. The novel is fundamentally a treatise on the plight of good, honest and modest Protestants in a world dominated by untrustworthy, duplicitous and empowered Catholics.

Many critics have intimated that The Professor should have remained unpublished because it was only a prototype that she herself had consigned to the old projects’ drawer. Its purpose was more an exercise in learning the art of writing a successful novel, rather than actually being that itself. After the magnificent Jane Eyre, The Professor was always viewed as an inferior effort. However, today the story is regarded as part of the Brontë anthology. Just as there is a trend for releasing demonstration recordings of songs for completists, so The Professor is thought of as a kind of demo novel – a point of access into the mind of a novelist who was yet perfect her craft.

Common Themes

Today, the novels of the Brontë sisters are a large part of English literary history. Their styles were quite individual, but all three were able to use prose to communicate with the world beyond the sanctuary of home and there is a thread of commonality in their world view that speaks volumes about the relative isolation they experienced during their upbringing. Their father was a bookish man who seemed not to worry about the effects of solitude on his children. The result was that they grew up to be quite introverted, which was probably why they found company in each other and in their imaginations. They were well-educated individuals, though with relatively little by way of fiscal wealth and reserved in nature. It was considered highly unusual then, as it would be now, for three sisters to all devote their lives to writing novels.

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Шарлотта Бронте – The Professor (страница 1)

THE PROFESSOR Charlotte Brontë

History of Collins

Life & Times

THE PROFESSOR

Charlotte Brontë