Review: The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

Trade paperback, 319 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1857)
Acquired December 2018
Read January 2019

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

I said to myself, [...] 'Look at the sooty smoke in that hollow, and know that there is your post! There you cannot dream, you cannot speculate and theorize – there you shall out and work!' (48)

I read this novel as part of my project to read all the remaining Victorian scientist novels. I actually wasn't sure if the eponymous professor actually was a scientist; the article I had read had been vague and a quick search didn't turn up any specific answers, so I just went and bought the book and read it to find out.

William Crimsworth is at first a clerk (that's when he utters the above) and later in fact a professor of English in Belgium, so no scientist. He only gets the gig because any vaguely educated English-speaking person could do it. But the book is filled with that other thing I am obsessed with in literature: observation. Crimsworth's friend Hunsden the tradesman, in particular, is always watching Crimsworth and drawing conclusions, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. At one point, Crimsworth observes Hunsden observing him, though he gets it wrong (255); Hunsden is not as perceptive as Crimsworth had perceived. And as a teacher Crimsworth must observe his class, which only gets harder once he picks up a job at a girls' school, full of hot young teenagers.

I didn't think there was much of a story here to be honest. Crimsworth falls in love with a would-be governess sitting in on his classes; they marry and live highly successful lives. A couple temptations are thrown in Crimsworth's way, but he overcomes them all with ease, so there's not much in the way of compelling struggle. He does kind of start from misery, but his ascent out of it is relatively unbroken.

I mostly think the book is an excuse for Brontë (as in Villette) to practice her most annoying writing tic: dialogue in untranslated French. Thank God for the end notes, but sometimes I got too tired to flip to the end and read them. I don't think I missed much.