Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  The parsonage the Brontës moved to in April 1820 was considerably bigger than the one they had left but stood at a remove, separated from the village by the church and from the church by the graveyard. The view that greeted them from their new front windows was of a small piece of scrubby garden, a low wall with a gate, then graves. At the back there were fewer windows, with mullions instead of wooden sashes, looking out on to the parson’s field and beyond it to the moor.

  The house itself had been built in the 1780s and had four main rooms on each of two floors and a small vaulted cellar. The front door opened into a wide hall with a dining room on the left, which became the family’s chief reception room, and a parlour on the right, used by Patrick Brontë as his study. Behind that room was the main kitchen, the heart of the house, with a fire always burning in the range and a large table around which the children often gathered; and along a passageway was the back-kitchen, where the laundry was done in a copper and where tradesmen and parishioners who came on business were shown. There might also have been a scullery and peat store in this back part of the house, but it was demolished in the 1870s without any records being kept. The footprint of Haworth Parsonage can be seen in maps of the 1840s and 1850s, though, and it shows quite a large extension, connected to the house by a passage and forming a U-shape in the small backyard, in the south-west corner of which was a stone outbuilding housing a two-seater privy and in the north-west corner of which was a well.

  Upstairs there were three main bedrooms and, over the front door, a small dressing-room that was used by the children as a playroom and occasional bedroom. How the family dispersed themselves upstairs is not entirely clear. Mrs. Brontë occupied the bedroom to the left at the front, which had a fireplace in it, and the room on the other side of the landing later became Patrick Brontë’s room. The girls—except for the baby, Anne—probably shared the bedroom at the back; Branwell slept on his own, presumably in the playroom; and the servants shared a room above the peat store that was accessible only by an external staircase. It must have made a chilly start to Nancy’s and Sarah’s day, dressing and descending to the kitchen via the yard.

  Leaving the house on the short path down to the church, the Brontës passed the yard where the stonemason stored and worked his gravestones, the sexton’s house on the left and then the backs of the houses and shops that clustered at the top of the steep Main Street. In front of the Black Bull and the steps leading up to St. Michael’s was an open area where hustings and meetings took place and that served as a sort of village square. In the Brontës’ day, the view down into the valley from this spot was dominated by chimneys; the water power of the becks running off the moor into the River Worth had spawned no fewer than nineteen mills and most of the townspeople were employed in the textile industry, either in the mills themselves or doing piece-work at home, carding and weaving. The population was high, and sanitation and standards of housing were low but a handful of businessmen had made astonishing new wealth in the area, “hundreds of thousands of pounds” by Mrs. Gaskell’s reckoning.

  The church itself was entirely different in the 1820s, the current building having been erected by Patrick Brontë’s successor, John Wade, fifty years later. The Brontës’ St. Michael’s looked much more like a Low Church chapel, with plain windows, a modest altar, a gallery and a large triple-decker pulpit on the south aisle. Memories were still strong there of William Grimshaw, who was said to have rounded up malingerers at the pub with his horse-whip, nipping out of the church during the longer psalms to herd them in before the sermon. Grimshaw, a close friend of John Wesley and a pivotal figure in the Evangelical Revival, was revered in Haworth and beyond,*1 but his legacy proved troubling to Patrick Brontë, as Grimshaw had encouraged the local Methodists so effectively that they now had two chapels of their own. Though he had been nurtured by Simeonites and Wesleyans himself, Patrick Brontë saw the gradual detachment of Methodism from mainstream Anglicanism as a distinct threat, giving comfort to other Low Church and Nonconformist congregations—Baptists, Unitarians, Socinians, Ranters, Dissenters—and countenancing a rabble of doctrines that imperilled the very survival of the Established Church.

  “A strange uncivilized little place” was how Charlotte apologised for her home town in the 1840s and how it struck many visitors. She did not blame readers of Wuthering Heights who expressed disbelief at the details of hill-farm life in Emily’s book: “the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts, must be to [genteel] readers in a great measure unintelligible, and—where intelligible—repulsive…[They] will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by mentors as harsh as themselves.” In the 1820s the scattered homesteads on the moor—typically farms of between ten and twenty acres each, growing some oats or hay to feed a few cows—were places almost beyond the sight and reach of law. “Brutal tendencies” characterised the life of the town, where bull-baiting, horse-racing, dog- and cock-fighting, and fist-fights between men were common sports.*2

  The moors around Haworth—stretching out for almost eight miles to the west, where they touch the Lancashire border near the Forest of Trawden, and five miles to the south, to Hebden Bridge—were not quite the semi-wildernesses of today, carefully preserved for walkers, shooting parties and the water industry; they were places of work for quarrymen and peat-cutters, hill farmers and smallholders. The route to what are now the isolated ruins of Top Withins Farm (popularly believed to occupy the position of Heathcliff’s fictional home) passed by at least seven small homesteads in the Brontës’ day, and walking on the moor would have had to take into account the dangers of trespassing, as well as large areas of permanently boggy and impassable terrain. Patrick Brontë was an exceptionally vigorous walker, and covered all his parish business on foot. He must often have been seen out in all weathers, with his staff in his hand and high top hat on his head. The children too became hardened walkers, as the nearest place to buy books, newspapers, stationery, dress or fine goods or to consult a lawyer or doctor was Keighley, four miles away. The Brontës never owned either horse or carriage.

  The “gentry” neighbours here were spread out, like everything in the chapelry: the Taylors at Stanbury Manor House; the Greenwoods at Spring Head (both Stephen Taylor and Joseph Greenwood were trustees of the church); the Heatons at Ponden Hall, a compact seventeenth-century house with a fine library.*3 In later years, the younger Brontës sometimes walked the two miles over Penistone Hill to borrow books from the Heatons but generally it was not a very sociable parish. The prevalence of “the old hill spirit” struck Mrs. Gaskell forcibly, coming as she did from a genteel Cheshire country town (immortalised in Cranford) and living as a minister’s wife on the outskirts of Manchester in suburban comfort. “I believe many of the Yorkshiremen would object to the system of parochial visiting,” she said; “their surly independence would revolt from the idea of any one having a right, from his office, to inquire into their condition, to counsel, or to admonish them.” Patrick Brontë’s habit as a minister was not to interfere with his parishioners’ lives at all, unless they were sick, or came to him for help. Brontë made his views perfectly clear every Sunday in robust sermons, but otherwise the family “kept themselves very close” from the first.

  What kind of a man was Patrick Brontë, and what was he like to be married to, or to be the child of? Though he had plenty of natural wit, he was far from light-hearted. His public manner was ponderous, “Grandisonian,” as one visitor remarked. He qualified everything he said, “indeed he was cautious to the last degree,” and his many letters to newspapers over the years—on subjects as diverse as parliamentary reform, duelling and fire hazards—show a habit of making arguments needlessly complicated. Perhaps this was to demonstrate his learning—to himself as much as to ot
hers. Brontë’s outstanding achievement in getting from the cot in Emdale to St. John’s College had left him, in many ways, a very anxious man.

  Patrick had strategies for getting his own way that Maria had noticed during their engagement (when the question of their future married quarters arose): “you have such a method of considering and digesting a plan before you make it known to your friends,” she had written to him, “that you run very little risk of incurring their disapprobations, or of having your schemes frustrated. I greatly admire your talents this way—may they never be perverted by being used in a bad cause!”

  When Elizabeth Gaskell met Patrick Brontë in 1853, she found him a model of old-fashioned manners and hostliness, but with a steely edge that chilled her. “I caught a glare of his stern eyes over his spectacles at Miss Brontë once or twice which made me know my man,” she said, alert to the fact that a truly domineering character might take pains to hide it; “he talked at her sometimes.” Mrs. Gaskell was intrigued by her new friend’s circumstances and had already heard all sorts of stories about the incumbent of Haworth, which predisposed her to think of him as a half-crazed domestic tyrant. Her main informant was a notorious gossip, Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, who had got her information from a nurse who had looked after Maria Brontë, a woman who certainly had plenty of opportunity to observe the Brontë family in the months she lived with them in 1821, but whose dismissal (on unspecified grounds) wasn’t likely to have made her think or speak very well of them afterwards.

  Some picturesque stories about life at the Parsonage subsequently emerged in Mrs. Gaskell’s book, which Patrick Brontë strenuously refuted on publication and which had to be suppressed or modified in later editions (though privately Mrs. Gaskell still clung to many of them). According to these, Patrick Brontë’s quirks included denying his children meat—as part of a regime designed to discourage them from becoming comfort-loving—and having a “volcanic” temper that he sometimes relieved by firing his pistols out of the back door “in rapid succession.” There were several anecdotes about his burning things, which is odd, given Patrick’s often-expressed fear of fire (he did not allow curtains or carpets in the Parsonage for years on account of the fire risk, and recommended only silk or wool clothes for his children, believing cotton to be more flammable). On one occasion he is said to have stuffed a hearthrug into the grate and watched, stifling, until it was all consumed; another time it was a set of coloured boots that met the flames, deemed too frivolous for his children’s use. In a fit of sheer rage, Mrs. Gaskell reported, he had once taken a saw to the chairs; and, most oddly of all, was said to have cut up one of his wife’s dresses because “either the make, the colour, or the material, was not according to his notions of consistent propriety.”

  Patrick Brontë denied these stories when the Life was published, and Nancy Garrs, his servant for six years, backed him up, testifying to the exaggeration, or downright untruth, of Mrs. Gaskell’s portrait—with one exception, the dress incident. It is certainly a strange and persistent anecdote, with interesting variations. Elizabeth Gaskell said that Mrs. Brontë never wore the offending article, but neither did she get rid of it, keeping it “treasured up in her drawers, which were generally locked”: “One day, however, while in the kitchen, she remembered that she had left the key in her drawer, and, hearing Mr. Brontë up-stairs, she augured some ill to her dress, and, running up in haste, she found it cut into shreds.” Nancy disagreed with the details of this account, though, what really happened, she said, was as follows: Mr. Brontë noticed one morning that “his Mrs” had put on a cotton print gown,

  in the fashion of that day, with a long waist and what he considered absurd-looking sleeves. In a pleasant humour he bantered her about the dress, and she went upstairs and laid it aside. Some time after, Mr. Brontë entered her room, and cut off the sleeves. In the course of the day, Mrs. Brontë found the sleeveless gown, and showed it me in the kitchen, laughing heartily. Next day, however, he went to Keighley, and bought the material for a silk gown, which was made to suit Mr. Brontë’s taste.

  This version is every bit as suggestive as the one it displaces but sounds more like a marital stand-off than a joke. Mrs. Gaskell said that Charlotte herself was one of her sources for the dress-shredding story, though she was only five when her mother died. Perhaps her elder sisters’ or the servants’ memories of it augmented her own. Charlotte certainly passed it on to her friend Ellen Nussey as an illustration of her father’s iron will, specifically in relation to “feminine temptations” to vanity; Ellen herself added the detail that “the obnoxious dress” had been a present to Maria Brontë (not from her husband) and that by destroying it he had put her out of vanity’s way. “There is not the slightest doubt that he would have gained his object quite as surely by kinder and wiser methods of action,” Ellen concluded reasonably, “but it was not his nature to woo obedience.” That said, Ellen testified that this quick-tempered man “did understand his own idiosyncracy” and was “always perfectly under control and quiescent” in company.

  The dress incident, for all its difficulty to pin down, gives a glimpse into the Brontës’ marriage that perhaps tells us more about the wife than about the husband. In one light, it shows Maria as a model manmanager, enacting Thomas Greene’s advice to wives that Patrick sent, in a misremembered form, to Sarah Garrs on the eve of her wedding in 1829:

  They have their humors and their faults—

  So mutable is man—

  Excuse his failings in your thought,

  And hide them if you can.

  ’Tis not the way to scold at large,

  To clamor, rage and boast,

  For wives their duties best discharge

  Who condescend the most.

  The absorption of male failings was a necessary skill in a society that allowed little autonomy to women and in a culture that fetishised their quietness. Maria Brontë loved her husband, had a philosophical temperament and an intelligence that rose above petty irritations; the last thing she was going to do was scold him, however childishly or irrationally he behaved. Her daughters were brought up to placate him also, and to hide their opinion of his actions. Privately they would “condescend,” as their mother did, but in their writing they returned obsessively to just such scenes of questionable authority and exposed every nuance of injustice in them mercilessly.

  —

  MARIA HAD BEEN WEAK ever since the move to Haworth but developed sudden and serious new symptoms just a few months later and took to her bed at the end of January 1821. His wife’s illness terrified Patrick: in the months that followed, he struggled to keep the household going, with the servants monitoring the children and a paid nurse to attend Maria, but he longed for the sort of friendly help and guidance that he would have got in Thornton from the generous Firths, or in Dewsbury from John Buckworth, to whom he lamented that he felt like “a stranger in a strange land…left nearly quite alone, unless you suppose my six little children and the nurse and servants to have been company.” Doctors were called in, but Maria’s painful ailment (which the nurse later described as “an internal cancer”) got steadily worse, and Patrick gave himself over to the gloomiest forebodings, expecting her to die “almost every day” of that spring and summer. When all six children went down with scarlet fever at the same time and Maria’s condition worsened too, he was virtually incapacitated with grief: “an affectionate, agonising something sickened my whole frame, and which is I think of such a nature as cannot be described, and must be felt in order to be understood.” This insistence on his own suffering and sensibility cannot have been any comfort to the invalid, whose emotional withdrawal as she deteriorated was a further cause of distress to her husband: “She was cold and silent and hardly seemed to notice what was passing around her.”

  “The mother was not very anxious to see much of her children,” the nurse later told Elizabeth Gaskell; “so the little things clung quietly together, for their father was busy in his study and in his parish, or with t
heir mother.” It is striking that Maria kept her children at arm’s length in these months; apart from trying to recruit her strength, this was not to be a season of tender advice-giving and farewell. Perhaps she thought she had a chance of getting better, or decided to behave as if she did. But these were lonely, painful and depressing months for Maria. A story survives from the sickbed of her asking to be raised up in bed so that she could see the grate of the fireplace being cleaned “as it was done in Cornwall,” a strange detail to fix on. Though much has changed at Haworth Parsonage since 1821, the same grate is still there, and it is sad to look at it today and feel Maria Brontë’s private yearning for a touch of home.

  For their part, the little Brontës crept round the house, keeping their voices to a whisper and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. To the nurse, they seemed extremely well behaved but “spiritless”; “they were so different to any…I had ever seen.” Young Maria was in charge and read to her siblings or took them out on the moors in a straggling group of “toddling wee things,” as the nurse remembered them. It is possible they were rather strangely turned out: Maria herself, always described as an untidy child, was only seven years old that summer and the others were six, five, four and three respectively, with year-old baby Anne having to be carried and tended all day long.

  With hope of a recovery dwindling, Elizabeth Branwell was called from Penzance to help run the household and support her ailing sister, and the two eldest girls were taken to Kipping House for a month by concerned Elizabeth Firth. Maria was in agonising pain, which could not be alleviated by any medicines: “her constitution was enfeebled, and her frame wasted daily,” as Patrick wrote. The household was braced for death, and the nurse heard her patient crying “oh God my poor children!” over and over.