Jane Eyre - Psalms are not interesting

A while ago, I used Jane Eyre as an example of a book where somehow, without reading it, I already knew the story. Now I’ve read it. All week: what I didn’t know.

Today, the books.

“I returned to my book – Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of the sea-fowl...” (Ch 1, p. 6).

What? History of British Birds? The letterpress thereof? An entire page of Jane Eyre, the second page, is spent describing the ten year-old Jane’s reaction to Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’, 1797 edition:

“The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea I believed to be marine phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black, horned thing sitting aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.” (Ch 1., p. 6)

On the next page, our narrator Jane (not the ten year-old Jane) mentions Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and John Wesley’s Henry, Earl of Moreland (1781), as well as “old fairy tales and older ballads”. A page later, there’s Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Rome. In Chapter 3, we have a long passage about Gulliver’s Travels.

This is all in addition to more general references to the Bible and The Arabian Nights. A fine passage, where Mr. Brocklehurst asks Jane if she likes the Bible:

“’I like Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel, and a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job and Jonah’,” but not the Pslams, because “’Psalms are not interesting,’ I remarked.” (Ch, 4, p. 28) Spot on, Jane! Almost all of these books of the Bible, by the way, have some relation to later events in the story.

Jane meets the key figure of Helen Burns (more on her later) while Helen is reading Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). Jane thinks it “looked dull to my trifling taste: I saw nothing about fairies, nothing about genii; no bright variety seemed spread over the closely printed pages.” (Ch 5, p. 43) Jane scores again!

Note that not a single book is from the 19th century. It turns out this is a clue, and in fact the single appearance of a 19th century book, late in the novel, snaps the whole chronology into place. But there’s something else going on here.

One thing books are made of is other books. The plot and incidents of Jane Eyre contain specific parallels to The Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby, and, most obviously, Oliver Twist. There is also a strong strain of anti-Gothic parody, invoking Northanger Abbey, and the long party scene has more than a little Austen in it.

But Jane Eyre isn’t really closely related or influenced by any of these books or writers (maybe by Austen, a bit). The intellectual background of the story, of the character, lies completely in the 18th century. The Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and many others, the preyed-upon but ultimately triumphant maid of Pamela, the telepathy scene, directly borrowed from Defoe’s Moll Flanders. None of this makes Jane Eyre unoriginal; quite the contrary. Books are made of other books. It’s all ingeniously blended together in Charlotte Brontë’s own unique mind to make something entirely new.

What does she make? More on Jane Eyre, all week.

All references to the Norton Critical Edition.