Expressions // ‘God’s Own Lambs’: The Evangelical Child in Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to W.S. Williams that Jane Eyre ‘has no learning, no research’, and ‘discusses no subject of public interest.’[1] Although it is true that Charlotte did not set out to write Jane Eyre with the same didactic impulses which compelled her sister to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in her representation of the evangelical institution of Lowood – a thinly disguised Cowan Bridge School as Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell later confirmed – and in the ensuing debate in the press as to the extent of its accuracy, there can be, as Glen states, no doubting the ‘public interest’ of her chosen subject matter.[2]
The harsh, rigorous discipline to which children were subjected at such ‘evangelical, charitable establishments’[3] as Lowood has at its core a firmly-held belief in man’s inherently sinful nature, and the absolute authority of the parent and the teacher to ‘subdue the desires of the flesh’, ‘instil humility and obedience’ and, perhaps most significantly, prepare the child for salvation.[4] To evangelical Christians like Reverend Carus Wilson, upon whom Mr Brocklehurst is purportedly based, the child, however inexperienced, is no less sinful than any adult.
