tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20896212.post581043972648138578..comments2024-02-19T06:19:51.517+00:00Comments on The Brontë Parsonage Blog: The Roots of Arthur Bell NichollsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20896212.post-43489859992723799322013-09-08T11:34:35.389+01:002013-09-08T11:34:35.389+01:00After reading Marina Saegerman's interesting ...After reading Marina Saegerman's interesting article on ''The Roots of Arthur Bell Nicholls'' and his time in Ireland, I was reminded of a passage from a book written by Juliet Nicolson, the grand daughter of the Bloomsbury group of artists Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, of her grandfather's travels in France. The collapsing of time through anecdotal recollection is indeed an exhilarating game !! reader please note.........<br />I will quote Juliet Nicolson, '' When my grandfather was a child he went on holiday to France and was introduced to a very old man with a long white beard who, as a child himself, had been the personal standard - bearer for Napoleon Bonaparte, stepping out at the front of the emperor's procession as it made its way to the battlefield of Waterloo........... On another occasion the same grandfather had been holidaying in the Alps, walking through the summer mountain flowers with a couple of undergraduate friends. Taking shelter in a log cabin from a sudden cold wind, the young men fell to discussing the author of the novel they were all reading. Had Charlotte Bronte really loved Mr Nicholls, they wondered, or had her father pressed his bachelor curate on an unwilling daughter ?<br />An old man who had been sitting unobtrusively in the corner by the fire suddenly stirred. '' I can assure you all that Charlotte certainly married Mr Nicholls out of feelings of true love, '' he told them sternly. '' And I should know the truth, because I am Mr Nicholls. '' <br />So, Let us be in no doubt that Charlotte's famous lines "Reader, I married him." applied to her husband as well as Mr Rochester, and were meant with true love. <br /><br />geoff harrisAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20896212.post-59433172819086773182013-09-07T11:09:07.057+01:002013-09-07T11:09:07.057+01:00What an interesting article and it was good to see...What an interesting article and it was good to see photographs of, what to me, are places I have only read about.I have always liked Arthur Nicholls because I feel he loved Charlotte for herself- not for her achievements as a writer. Mrs Gaskell wrote in her biography of Charlotte- 'He was not a man to be attracted by any kind of literary fame.'Later she wrote,' In silence he had watched her and loved her long.'<br />I hope that Arthur Nicholls knew, as he sat with Charlotte's father desolate and alone in the Parsonnage, after she had died, that he had been to her ' the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best earthly comfort that ever woman had' and realised from her last words-'we have been so happy'- that she returned that love he had for her.Boris Skiletnoreply@blogger.com