The Dandy in the pink waistcoat: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Journal of a Frenchman’

Abstract

This essay considers Charlotte Brontë’s serialised ‘Journal of a Frenchman’ in her ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. It discusses the representation of Parisian life, showing how this missing fragment fits into the series and the wider context of Charlotte’s engagement with the French language and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the latter providing the inspiration for many aspects of the Frenchman’s account of his life.