Before I actually saw the Juvenilia of the Bronte children, I was tempted to write them off as merely the products of childish dreaming. While I still can’t deny that the stories are children’s fantasies, I cannot deny their value after seeing the manuscripts in person.
Of course the first thing that struck me is the minute scale of the script. The size of the poem “The Trumpet Swells” is so small that I couldn’t decipher a full sentence with my naked eye. I’m left wondering why all the children chose to record their stories in such a small size. Perhaps it was a shortage of paper, perhaps it came from a desire to hide their stories, but the one thing that is clear--recording these dreams took an immense amount of effort.
Now that I see the amount of work that the children put into their manuscripts, feel that I must take them seriously. One thing that I find intriguing about the Bronte family is that most all of them grew up to be writers. I think it is undeniable that the creativity and collaborative dreaming among the Bronte’s as children contributed to their ability to compose fiction as adults. I think this connection between childhood dreaming and adult creativity lays the groundwork for an argument that modern children should spend the formative early years of their lives actively thinking, not parked in front of a television.
I also think that its interesting that childhood Bronte poetry contains elements of Romanticism. Specifically, the Bronte children seem fascinated with faraway exotic lands. They dreamed up “Glass Town” in distant Africa and later created other worlds like Angria and Gondol, with fantastic Tolkienesque names. In the Green book of poems, this fascination with the exotic is seen in “Passions.” The poem tells of “distant alnds” … “where Serk and Briton meet in war on Indian Sutlej’s flow.”
In addition to this fascination with exotic lands, the Bronte juvenilia shows the typical Romantic quality of emotion intensity. Anne Bronte describes her “watchful agony” and lamets that “the friends that mustered round me have forsaken now.” I think its amazing as children living at a time when the Romantic movement had hardly formed, the Bronte’s exhibited several of the most typical Romantic elements in their poetry. With that knowledge it seems almost inevitable that Charlotte Bronte would later write such a successful Romantic novel as Jane Eyre.
If one looks only at the Bronte children as a model for a relationship between collaboration/competition and creativity, it sees that indeed increased collaboration and competition can provide the spark for increased creativity. It seems to me that this class is modeled with that relationship in mind. One of the main course goals is increased creativity. The class is structured so that writing is submitted to community forums for discussion. This allows for increased collaboration. In addition, the grading syste requires that one accumulate a certain number of points and is often called “a race.” This grading structure allows for competition to spur the students towards more creativity. I’m curious whether the Bronte family is indeed an influence on the structure of this course.