Chapter I: Front Matter

THE TWELVE ADVENTURERS
AND OTHER STORIES

Transcriber’s Note:

Every attempt has been made to preserve the original formatting, along with inconsistent spelling, hyphenation, and italicization. However, footnotes have been changed to endnotes or renumbered and moved closer to their anchor, and some obvious typographical errors have been corrected; see the Errata for a complete list.

New original cover art, which features a pencil drawing by Charlotte Brontë of an unknown woman, included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

_The Twelve Adventurers
and Other Stories ❦ ❦ ❦

By CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Hodder and Stoughton
Limited London_

Made and Printed in Great Britain
T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD., Printers, Edinburgh

NOTE

IT would be quite easy to maintain that these twelve fragments which come to us from the childhood of Charlotte Brontë should not be perpetuated for the public in the printed page. They were written between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, and it was certainly never for a moment contemplated by the author that they would ever see the light. They were handed to me in a little house in Banagher in Ireland, nearly thirty years ago, by the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, the husband of Charlotte Brontë, who in a letter before me explains that they would have been burnt had I not come upon the scene. The ever-increasing fame of Charlotte Brontë in the intervening years has gone on side by side with an immense literature devoted to child psychology. It is as a contribution to that science that I have been frequently exhorted to publish them. A natural indolence would have prevented this had not my friend, Mr. C. W. Hatfield, come to the rescue by diligently transcribing the minute handwriting and preparing the volume with certain useful notes for publication.

CLEMENT SHORTER.

_August_ 1925.

CONTENTS

*THE TWELVE ADVENTURERS . . . . . 1
AN ADVENTURE IN IRELAND . . . . . 19
*THE SEARCH AFTER HAPPINESS . . . . 25
THE ADVENTURES OF ERNEST ALEMBERT . . 45
ALBION AND MARINA . . . . . . . 75
*THE RIVALS . . . . . . . . . 95
THE FAIRY GIFT . . . . . . . . 105
*LOVE AND JEALOUSY . . . . . . . 121
*NAPOLEON AND THE SPECTRE . . . . 137
*THE TRAGEDY AND THE ESSAY . . . . 145
*A PEEP INTO A PICTURE BOOK . . . . 161
*MINA LAURY—I . . . . . . . . 181
*MINA LAURY—II . . . . . . . . 193

_The stories marked with an asterisk (*) are now published for the first time._

I AM alone; it is the dead of night;
I am not gone to rest, because my mind
Is too much raised for sleep. The silent light
Of the dim taper streams its unseen wind,
And quite as voiceless, on the hearth, burns bright
The ruddy ember: now no ear can find
A sound, however faint, to break the lull
Of which the shadowy realm of dreams is full.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË

THE TWELVE ADVENTURERS

‘THE Twelve Adventurers’ is the first of two stories in the earliest of Charlotte Brontë’s manuscripts, and was written by her when she was only twelve years of age.

Her early admiration for the hero of the story, the ‘Great Duke,’ was first noted by Mrs. Gaskell in _The Life of Charlotte Brontë_, 1857, vol. i. p. 94, where she says:

All that related to him (the Duke of Wellington) belonged to
the heroic age. Did Charlotte want a knight-errant, or a
devoted lover, the Marquis of Douro, or Lord Charles Wellesley,
came ready to her hand. There is hardly one of her prose
writings at this time in which…their ‘august father’ does
not appear as a sort of Jupiter Tonans, or Deus ex Machinâ.

The country ‘discovered’ by the twelve adventurers became the scene of nearly all the stories written by Charlotte Brontë during the following eleven years. Originally named ‘The Country of the Genii,’ the fairies deserted it after Charlotte’s school-days at Roe Head (1831-1832), and the country was re-named ‘The Kingdom of Angria.’ The ‘great city’ became ‘The Glass Town’ or ‘Verreopolis,’ which was afterwards changed to ‘Verdopolis,’ the chief city of Angria.

C. W. H.