From the novel:
‘Jane, what are you doing?’
‘Learning German.’
‘I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee.’
‘You are not in earnest?"
‘In such earnest that I must have it so: and I will tell you why.’
He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he was himself at present studying; that, as he advanced, he was apt to forget the commencement; that it would assist him greatly to have a pupil with whom he might again and again go over the elements, and so fix them thoroughly in his mind; that his choice had hovered for some time between me and his sisters; but that he had fixed on me because he saw I could sit at a task the longest of the three. Would I do him this favour? I should not, perhaps, have to make the sacrifice long, as it wanted now barely three months to his departure.
St John was not a man to be lightly refused: you felt that every impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was deep-graved and permanent. I consented. (ch XXIX)
Footnote:
I. gentleman… St John: St John (pronounced ‘Sinjohn’) Rivers is popularly supposed to have been based on the evangelical Revd Henry Nussey, who proposed to Charlotte Brontë in 1839 and was rejected. She disclaimed the qualities he sought in a wife, having neither the requisite seriousness nor “personal attractions” sufficient to please your eye’. He had also proposed that she set up as teacher of a ‘school near Donnington’, a project similar to the one St John institutes for Jane (Letter of 5 March 1839, Letters, Vol. 1, p. 185). However, St John’s missionary zeal may have been suggested by the missionary, Henry Martyn, a friend and benefactor of Patrick Brontë at Cambridge and his spiritual hero. Martyn translated the Bible into Urdu (called in Jane Eyre ‘Hindostanee’) and Persian and supervised its translation into Arabic; he evangelized India, at the cost of his personal happiness, for the woman he loved refused to accompany him, a situation paralleled in Jane Eyre. The name ‘St John’ recalls the St John who was the author of the visionary Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
