Charlotte
Dawson
Brontë Parsonage Museum - Commission
In Charlotte’s recent commission for the Brontë Parsonage Museum, she has utilised the visual language of traditional letterpress printing, paired with the stories and characters of the Brontës’ Juvenilia and their childhood toys, to create a new sculptural piece.
Each figure within the artwork references a character within the Brontë Juvenilia, presented as toy soldiers. Each character featured, was at some point used by the Brontë children as an early pseudonym. They take direct influence from descriptions and drawings by each of the Brontës.
The piece investigates the importance of publishing in the Brontës’ early creative ventures, with the children producing their own publications for their toy soldiers. They would imitate the typefaces used in publications which arrived at the Parsonage and Charlotte Brontë jokily alluding to their works being ‘Sold by nobody and Printed by Herself’.
Pseudonyms were a vital tool for the adult Brontës in achieving publication, with the three sisters using the alternative names of Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell and Branwell Brontë using his childhood pseudonym Northangerland to have poetry published in his adulthood.
The piece itself compiles all the childhood pseudonyms that sparked the Brontës’ extensive worldbuilding, including the first 12 toy soldiers, along with sections of a map of Haworth from the period, presented in reverse as a printing block. It explores the use of maps and worldbuilding within the Brontë Juvenilia and the heavy influence of colonial expeditions on the Brontës’ imaginary worlds. The map focuses on a presentation of Haworth instead, as the lasting colonial efforts of the Brontës and their claim over ‘Brontë Country’.
Each piece of the artwork is individually cast using reclaimed printers’ type. Now used as a scrap metal, the type from old printing presses is a mix of 80% lead, tin and antimony. The choice to create these pieces out of metal rather than wood like the original twelve soldiers, arose from a desire to explore the rise of industry which features within the lived experiences and works of the Brontës, and the ties to the mass publication of their works. The potentially harmful quality of the metal also provides an extra context to the piece, considering the presence of loss and illness within the Brontës’ personal lives.
