Blackwell Reference Online

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Charlotte visited it five times in June, usually with a degree of skepticism or exhaustion. Her most enjoyable visit was in the company of Sir David Brewster, and her most vivid and positive account of it is in a letter to Patrick (7 June 1851) when she describes it as “vast – strange new and impossible to describe” and evokes the “living tide” of silent people going through it. Her comment to Mrs Gaskell (14 June 1851?) that it was “not much in my way,” and that to Margaret Wooler (14 July 1851) that she “never was able to get up any raptures on the subject” probably sum up her reactions most honestly. Donald Hopewell noted in that other Exhibition year of 1951 that “Four or five times she went to the House of Glass (did she remember that ‘Glasstown’ was the capital of the Angrian kingdom of her girlhood’s romantic writings?)” ( The Enduring Brontës , Brontë Society, p. 8) – a pertinent question, but there is no evidence that she made any connection. Her main reaction was boredom, and her principal objection, apart from the exhaustion its vast size induced in her, was that “its wonders appeal too exclusively to the eye and rarely touch the heart or head” (to MW, 14 July 1851). See also Brewster, Sir David ... log in or subscribe to read full text