Typhus and “Common Brotherhood”: Jane Eyre (1847), Contagion, Community, and Leadership

This chapter argues that the typhus epidemic described in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) shows Brontë engaging with, and offering answers to, questions about contagion, community, leadership, heroism, and martyrdom which were also in contention during the typhus epidemics in England and Scotland in the spring and summer of 1847. These epidemics generated significant coverage in local and regional newspapers, ranging from articles blaming the Irish poor for spreading contagion to reflective pieces on the responsibility of the better-off in society toward the poor, or on the dangers of assuming immunity from contagion. This chapter traces those arguments and highlights typhus’s uses in the literary text - including Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853)—to suggest the interconnectedness of communities. The chapter then turns to Jane Eyre to argue that in this novel, Brontë dramatizes the ethical and moral implications of contagion, ultimately affirming the benefits of connectivity and community over individual heroics, or the contagionist impulse to quarantinism.