Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak of it as bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream? Assuredly, pleasant enough: but whether healthy or not is another question.
That forest-dell, where Lowood lay was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded school-room and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital. (p. 66)
ith this passage, Charlotte Brontë intended to strike dread through the hearts of her readers. Now, after more than one hundred years, the full force of her words has been lost. Brontë's contemporaries, for instance, would have automatically foreseen suffering and death in this description. Bruce Haley in The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture proclaims that typhus, a leading killer in early Victorian England, had already gained infamy during two previous epidemics, one in the mid-1820s and another in 1836-42. At these times the scourge killed tens of thousands. The results of such outbreaks would have been fresh on the minds of Brontë's earliest readers.
The image of a countryside stream, of fog, or of about any other kind of pervasive moisture, would have resounded with ominous tones for Brontë's contemporary audience. As Haley points out, Victorians did not understand the dangers inherent in polluted water until about the 1830s or '40s, just prior to Jane Eyre, and before that time virtually all major water sources in England were polluted. While reading Brontë's book, Victorians, whom Haley insists thought foremost of health, would undoubtedly have looked upon the run-down and crowded Lowood school with revulsion and fear. To make matters worse, when the wave of typhus strikes Lowood, the school suddenly "transforms" into a hospital — an establishment even more dreaded than any poor seminary. As Edwin Chadwick explains, hospitals in the early 1800s acted as breeding grounds for infectious diseases. They increased the death rate instead of decreasing it. To Victorians, then, hospitals meant death.
Last modified 26 September 2002