It was sometime in the summer of the year AD 1824 when I being desirous to possess a box of toy soldiers asked papa to buy me one which shortly afterwards he procured me from Bradford They were 12 in number price 1 s 6d and were the best I ever have had Soon after this I got from Keighly another set of the same number These soldiers I kept for about a year until either maimed lost burnt or destroyed by various casualties they "departed and left not a wreck behind!" (Works, Vol. 1, 138)

We find Branwell Bronte leading us into our exploration of the important effects of a group of toy soldiers on the literary careers of the Bronte siblings with his opening words in The History of the Young Men written in 1831. The passage gives us a good idea of how energetically the boy played with his soldiers - "maimed, lost, burnt or destroyed," indeed! But it wasn't until his sisters came home from school and a new box appeared one morning after his father returned from a short trip in June, 1826, that the " Twelves" at the heart of our story appeared. Young Charlotte Bronte describes the event:

papa brought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds when papa came home it was night and we where in Bed so next morning Branwell came to our Door with a Box of soldiers Emily and I jumped out of Bed and I snat[c]hed up one and exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! when I said this Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole and perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave Looking fellow we called him Gravey Anne's was a queer little thing very much like herself. He was called waiting Boy Branwell chose Bonaparte" (Barker, 154)

"The Twelves"' adventures were the center of much play and the focus of a tremendous literary output by Branwell and Charlotte. Beginning not too long after their mother and two sisters had died, "In real life, death had intruded as an arbitrary force. In play, they could take control when, as four gigantic Genii, they held the power of life and death over the diminutive wooden ones." (Miller, 3) Their sisters were involved in the early games and writing, but, after a year and a half interlude, while Charlotte went off to Roe Head to school, the other girls became involved in their own stories and no longer participated significantly in these tales of the Young Men. 

The children began enthusiastically chronicling the trials, tribulations and journeys of the soldiers a few years after their arrival. They wrote in tiny books appropriate to the size of the adventurers, both because paper was a scare commodity and to help keep their youthful imaginings a secret among the children. In fact, the existence of the stories wasn't widely shared with anyone outside the Bronte children's immediate group until years after they were all adults, and, even then their extent and importance to the overall development of the Brontes adult work was minimized.

Charlotte and Branwell created their own world for the Young Men's adventures. Inspired by the toy soldiers, they were also quick to use the literature available to them to enhance the environment in which their plays and stories took place. They used Blackwood's Magazine for part of their inspiration, in particular a review of T. Edward Bowditch's Mission from Cape coast Castle to Ashantee; with a statistical account of that kingdom, and geographical notices of the other parts of the interior of Africa

As the illustration shows, they even used this favorite periodical as a physical model.

Branwell's Blackwoods Magazine, June 1829. Actual size: 1.5x2"

Their home for the Young Men was in a semi imaginary group of countries on the west coast of Africa in the kingdom of the Ashantee and they adopted not only its capital, Coomassie, but also at least two of its Ashantee kings, Sai TooToo and Sai Quamina, as their enemies." (Barker, 155) They called their capitals Glasstowns, and the first cycle of stories took that name. Here the various members of The Twelves conspired, fought wars, loved and lived in a collection of books with more written words than in their adult publications.

Branwell's works dealt much with wars and battles, the martial elements of history and his toys showing their influence, along with the natural inclination of boys of the period towards an interest in things military. And his father's attraction to things military encouraged this inclination. Charlotte's interests dealt more with political intrigue and romance and reflect her reading of Byron and her hero-worship for the Duke of Wellington. Other living people showed up in their tales and real life sometimes played a role as when "[t]he king of the Young Men, Frederick Guelph, Duke of York, was allowed to be killed in battle because `at the time we let this battle take place (ie in the beginning of AD 1827) The real Duke of York died of a mortification."' (Barker, 156) Since much of their work took on a periodical nature they used the format to take jabs at each other, much as Robert Louis Stevenson did half a century later in his miniature wars with his stepson.

It is Branwell in whom we find the most direct adult influences of this early explosion of writing. One of his best known published pieces is a patriotic poem inspired by the retreat from Kabul in the first Afghan War, first published in the Leeds Intelligencer. Here are the last three stanzas:

Breasts and banners crushed and gory,
That seemed once invincible; England's children-England's glory,
Moslem sabers smite and quell. Far away their bones are wasting,
But I hear their spirits callIs our Mighty Mother hasting,
To avenge her children's fall?

England rise! Thine ancient thunder
Humbled mightier foes than these; Broke a whole world's bonds asunder;
Gave thee empire o'er the seas. And while yet one rose may blossom,
Emblem of thy former bloom, Let not age invade thy bosom;
Brightest shine in darkest gloom.

While one oak thy homes shall shadow, Stand like it as thou has stood;
While a spring greets grove and meadow, Let not winter freeze thy blood.
`Till this hour St George's standard Led the advancing march of time.
England! Keep it streaming vanward; Conqueror over age and lime.

-- (Works. Vol. 3. 368)

Charlotte found it difficult to leave her juvenile creations behind, but finally, and consciously, set them aside after her first book was rejected. Taking the advice of editor Hartley Coleridge she gave up the complex political intrigues of her fantasy worlds and began writing about the stuff of life as she could actually see it and on a much smaller canvas. Nonetheless, it was in the tens of thousands of words of the Glasstown tales and those of her later, related, Angrian world that we see the earliest indications of her passions, her need for expression, and the roots of Jane Eyre.

Note: Those interested in the continuing adventures of The Twelves may find Pauline Clarke's The Return of the Twelves entertaining. Written for young people, her story relates the discovery of the soldiers by eight year-old Max under the floorboards of an attic in a house near the Brontes home at Haworth. Their return to Haworth forms the background of the tale of these, as it turns out, living toy soldiers.

Sources:

Alexander, Christine. The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte. Buffalo: Prometheus,1983.
Banks, Lynne Reid. Dark Quartet. Baltimore: Penguin, 1986.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontes. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.
Bronte, Charlotte, Fannie E. Ratchford, compiler. Legends of Angria. New Haven: Yale UP, 1933.
Bronte, Patrick Branwell, Victor A. Neufeldt, ed. Works. (3 vols.) New York: Garland, 1997.
Clarke, Pauline. The Return of the Twelves. New York: Yearling, 1962.
Fraser, Rebecca. The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family. New York: Crown,1988.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Baltimore: Penguin, 1975. 117.
Miller, Lucasta. The Bronte Myth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.
Ratchford, Fannie Elizabeth. The Brontes' Web of Childhood. New York: Columbia UP, 1941.