A drunken reprobate dying at thirty-one from the result of his own excesses? Modern eyes can judge Branwell Brontë more gently than his own despairing family. We can recognize the epilepsy, the retreat behind laudanum or alcohol, the first shadows of schizophrenia; we can understand the eclipsing sense of failure in the precocious boy who'd grown to a man who couldn't get one couplet published, whose erratic behaviour couldn't hold the humblest job.
Excluded out of misguided kindness from his sisters' success, in the face of the world's censure and his own shame, Branwell returned to his own scribbled childhood world of wickedness and Gothic adventure -- 'the infernal world' where he truly belonged.