The tinkling rill, the floods astounding roar,
The river’s brink, and ocean’s frothy shore,
The feathered songster’s notes, and winter’s howl,
The sky serene, and frowning ether’s scowl,
The softest sound, the hoarsest thunder’s roll,
Have each, their sweetest pleasures for my soul.
As roves my mind, o’er nature’s works abroad,
It sees, reflected, their creative God,
The insects, dancing in the sunny beam, –
Whose filmy wings, like golden atoms gleam,
The finny tribe, that glance across the lake,
The timid hare, that rustles through the brake,
The squirrel blithe, that frisks on yonder spray,
The wily fox, that prowls about for prey,
Have each a useful lesson for my heart,
And sooth [e] my soul, and rural sweets impart.117
The beauties of the natural world were, to Patrick, the manifestation of God; it was a belief that he was to pass on to his children, who would all share the passion for nature which he first expressed in these verses. Interestingly, too, the influence of the poems in The Rural Minstrel can be traced through to their work, particularly the poetry of Branwell and Emily.118
The Brontës’ happiness at Hartshead was crowned with the arrival of their first child, a daughter, the exact date of whose birth is not known. On St George’s Day, 23 April 1814, seventeen days after the abdication of Napoleon and eight years to the day since Patrick had received his degree from Cambridge, the young Maria Brontë was baptized at Hartshead Church by William Morgan.119 Though there is no evidence one way or the other, it seems more than likely that the Morgans and Fennells stood as her godparents. Their ties of relationship and friendship made them the ideal candidates, more especially as John Fennell was preparing for ordination into the Church of England. The decision had not been taken lightly and seems to have been prompted by the resolution of the Methodist Conference to separate from the Established Church in 1812. Fennell had always been more Methodist than Evangelical in his leanings, but this was the final straw. In April 1813 he had given notice to the governors of Woodhouse Grove of his intention to seek ordination in the Established Church and, in consequence, was dismissed from his post. He remained at the school till the end of August, so that a replacement could be found, then he and his wife moved to Bradford, where he began the long process of preparing for ordination under the auspices of John Crosse.120
For Patrick, the clerical round continued. The abdication of Napoleon and the Peace of Paris, which followed shortly afterwards, heralded the end of decades of warfare. Combined with the improvements in trade, these events had brought new optimism to his parish, no less than to the rest of the country. In Dewsbury, the ceremony of proclaiming the peace on 7 July 1814 was turned into a huge celebration: at nine in the morning a procession of clergymen, gentry, members of friendly societies and Sunday school children made its way to the parish church. As over a thousand Sunday school children are said to have taken part, it seems certain that Patrick and his pupils too were involved. The celebration was marred by a dramatic incident: such was the press of people in the church that one of the galleries began to collapse under the sheer weight of the crowd. The congregation scattered, some making for the doors, others jumping out of the windows into the churchyard. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured but the service was postponed until the afternoon when John Buckworth preached to the assembled multitudes. While the inhabitants of the outlying districts, including Hartshead, returned home, Mr Brooke and John Halliley, junior, owners of the largest carpet mill in Dewsbury, entertained the 300 Sunday school children from the town and the workmen of their mills with roast beef and (inappropriately, one would have thought) strong ale.121
As 1813 progressed and, more often than not, John Buckworth was absent in a fruitless search to regain his health, Patrick found himself more and more drawn into the circle of John Crosse and the parish of Bradford. He was present, for instance, at the inaugural meeting of a new Church Missionary Association at Bradford, whose object was to fund the sending of bibles and missionaries to Africa and the East. Significantly, Patrick’s cofounders in the new association included, once again, that select band of Evangelicals, Crosse himself, William Morgan and Samuel Redhead, though its activities were to be nondenominational. As their circular grandly declaimed:
There is no need here for unholy rivalry. The wide world is before us. There is more than room for all the efforts, which the various denominations of Christians may be able to make for ages to come. The field of labour is most ample: the prospects of usefulness are great: and the call on Christians in general, and particularly on the members of the Church of England is now made with a confident expectation that it will be felt and answered.122
Out of the nineteen areas of Bradford where collectors had been appointed, only Patrick’s, at Hartshead, was outside the actual town; they were to meet with the officers once every three months and hold an annual general meeting on Easter Tuesday. Patrick himself took out a subscription of 10s. 6d. a year which entitled him to receive The Register, the association’s monthly journal. The following year he invited John Buckworth to give a sermon on behalf of the Church Missionary Society at Hartshead on 25 September, which resulted in a liberal collection for the society’s funds.123
The Bradford Bible Society was also thriving and Patrick again addressed its anniversary meeting on 15 October 1814. The society had redoubled its efforts to purchase bibles for free distribution after discovering that nearly half the families in the parish did not possess one. Sunday school children, too, were being encouraged to subscribe a penny a week towards the cost of purchasing their own bibles which the society made available to them at reduced rates.124 Though Hartshead is not mentioned in the reports of the society, there is no doubt that Patrick would have implemented these policies, so dear to his heart, in his own parish and, before he left, he had the satisfaction of helping to set up a Dewsbury Auxiliary of the Bible Society, based at the parish church.125
Through his friendship with Morgan and Fennell, and his involvement in church missionary activities, Patrick had become a familiar figure in the parish of Bradford. For this reason, when he was approached by the Reverend Thomas Atkinson, perpetual curate of Thornton, with the proposition that they should exchange livings, Patrick was not displeased. Though he loved the countryside around Hartshead and Clifton, and had done much to improve the spiritual lot of his parishioners, he was never unwilling to accept a challenge and Bradford, with John Crosse, the venerable and now nearly blind vicar, at its head, had been his ultimate aim since Wellington. Thornton offered him the prospect of deeper involvement in a much larger parish and a considerably increased income as the living was worth £140 a year.126 This was now more important to him because on 8 February 1815 Maria had given birth to a second daughter, who was named after Maria’s elder sister, Elizabeth.127
Thomas Atkinson was a nephew of Hammond Roberson, who may have suggested the exchange, and, like Patrick, a graduate of Cambridge. His sudden desire to move to Hartshead was apparently not inspired by spiritual but temporal motives. Through the Firth family of Thornton he had been introduced to one of their relatives, Frances Walker of Lascelles Hall, near Huddersfield, and was now anxious to court her seriously. The incumbency of Hartshead-cum-Clifton would bring him nearer to her and facilitate their courtship, or, as one of his parishioners later put it, ‘he had a bird to catch, near Hartshead’.128
By the middle of March 1815, the arrangements had been made and Patrick had been nominated and appointed by Crosse as the new perpetual curate of Thornton.129 Perhaps because Maria was in too delicate a state to move so rapidly after the birth of her daughter, the actual exchange was delayed for a couple of months. Patrick took his final services at Hartshead, a burial and three baptisms (there was evidently a last-minute rush to get babies baptized by the old minis
ter instead of the new one) on 18 May. The next day, a Saturday, Patrick and Maria and their two little daughters travelled the thirteen or so miles across Bradford to a new parish and a new home at Thornton.130
Chapter Three
GOOD NEIGHBOURS AND KIND FRIENDS
After what had seemed like the ending of decades of warfare with the abdication of Napoleon and the Peace of Paris, the whole of Europe was once again thrown into turmoil by news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba. Since March, he had been back in power and the whole machinery of war had had to be cranked up into action again. The Brontës had been at Thornton for just a month when, on 16 June 1815, Wellington fought an indecisive battle at Quatre-Bras against the French commanded by Marshal Ney; the engagement prevented him sending aid to the Prussians, who were therefore heavily defeated by Napoleon at Ligny, losing 20,000 men. Fortunately, before news of these disasters had reached Yorkshire, the reversals had been completely overthrown by the triumph at Waterloo. The victory of the allies, commanded by Wellington and Blücher, was such a uniquely important event that, for the rest of the Brontës’ lives, 18 June would be celebrated as ‘Waterloo Day’ throughout the kingdom. Napoleon had been crushed and, though his spectre was to continue to haunt Europe for another six years while he lived on in exile on St Helena, the long years of unremitting warfare had finally ended. One of Patrick’s first services at Thornton, on 23 July, was dedicated to a thanksgiving for the victory at Waterloo and the collections were taken in aid of the widows and orphans of those who fell.1 He had to wait another six months, however, before he could finally give thanks for the restoration of peace in Europe – the first peace in Patrick’s adult life.2
Against the background of these cataclysmic events in Europe, the Brontës arrived and settled in Thornton which, in 1815, was a small township less than four miles from the centre of Bradford. Like so many of the West Riding villages of the time, it was perched on a hillside, a vantage point from which Bradford could be seen in the valley bottom to the east. Within a radius of about two and a half miles, and also clinging independently to their own hill tops, the villages of Clayton to the south, Denholme to the west and Allerton to the north were all clearly visible from Thornton Heights; also to the north, but some three or four miles away and hidden in the lee of a hill, was Wilsden. All four villages, and the scattered hamlets between them, fell within Patrick’s ministry.3 Though Thornton itself was centrally placed, Patrick had considerable distances to cover – distances not made any easier by being all up hill and down dale and his not being able to afford a horse. Mrs Gaskell described the neighbourhood as ‘desolate and wild; great tracts of bleak land, enclosed by stone dykes’4 but then Mrs Gaskell, coming from the softer side of the Pennines, was never particularly attracted to the wilder countryside of Yorkshire.
The moorland was broken up not just by grey dry-stone walls but by grand, sturdy, square farmhouses, with gables and stone mullioned windows, built by wealthy yeomen farmers in the late Middle Ages. There were also quite a few stone quarries, particularly up on Thornton Heights above the town itself, where the concentration of names like ‘World’s End’, ‘Egypt’, ‘The Walls of Jericho’ and ‘Jerusalem Farm’ are indicative of the strong traditions of Nonconformity in the area. Thornton, after all, had been the stronghold of men like Accepted Lister and Oliver Heywood and even in Patrick’s time, the population divided into church and chapel, without the leavening of moderates like the Wesleyan Methodists.5
Like Hartshead-cum-Clifton, Thornton was a perpetual curacy and therefore subject to financial and administrative ties with, in this case, Bradford. In 1811 there were nearly 5,500 souls in the chapelry; by 1821, just after the Brontës had left, there were over 9,000.6 As in Hartshead, most were employed as agricultural labourers, in the stone quarries or as hand-loom weavers, working in their own cottages with the specially adapted long line of windows to the upper storey to give them maximum light. What has always seemed to make Thornton a much more pleasant and social place in the Brontës’ time than either Hartshead or Haworth is the fact that, uniquely, there is an extant diary, kept by Miss Elizabeth Firth of Kipping House at Thornton. As it is little more than a daily list of engagements, it is immensely frustrating to those hoping for insights into the Brontës as people, but it does provide a fascinating glimpse of the sort of life they led in Thornton.7
For the first time, the Brontës were to live in a proper parsonage, provided by the parish. Though Patrick complained of it being ‘very ill-constructed’, ‘inconvenient’ and requiring ‘annually, no small sum to keep it in repair’, at least it obviated the need for paying rent.8 Smaller than Clough House, with only three rooms on each of its two floors, the parsonage stood on Market Street, the main thoroughfare from Bradford; only a narrow strip of garden, surrounded by railings, separated it from the street. Built four square, with a large double window each side of the door and three above, it was low and unpretentious but marginally more substantial than the other twenty-two houses in the street. If the front was noisy and dirty with the daily passing of waggons and coaches, the back was quieter with a large yard and barns carved out of the hillside which rose up steeply behind the house. On all sides was a maze of narrow cobbled streets and ginnels bounded by higgledy-piggledy cottages and opening out at unexpected corners into flagged yards. The whole village was surrounded by fields with the open moorland, which Mrs Gaskell so disdained, crowning the hills.
The parsonage at Thornton was much more conveniently placed for the church than Clough House had been. The Old Bell Chapel, as it was known, lay at the Bradford end of Market Street, just above Thornton Hall and looking down over it to the pretty Pinchbeck Valley where the fields gave way to woods and Clayton Beck. Now a picturesque ruin, its squat bell tower humbled in the dust and its broken walls overgrown with weeds and shrubs, the chapel was in a dilapidated state even in 1815 when Patrick arrived. Built in 1620, it was a functional and unlovely building, with no pretensions to architectural beauty or merit. Small and narrow, on the north side it had two rows of square cottage windows and on the south, five Late Perpendicular pointed windows; inside it was gloomy and cramped. Francis Leyland, writing many years later – and after Patrick had ‘repaired and beautified’ the chapel – gives an evocative description:
The interior is blocked, on the ground floor, with high-backed, unpainted deal pews. Two galleries hide the windows almost from view, and cast a gloom over the interior of the edifice. The area under the pews, and in the aisles, is paved with gravestones, and a fetid, musty smell floats through the damp and mouldering interior.9
Despite the physical extent of his parish, Patrick was not hard pressed by official duties. The burials ran at similar levels to Hartshead but there were only about half the number of baptisms: widespread Nonconformity in the Thornton area meant many children were not baptized into the Church of England.10
Patrick had a great deal of freedom to utilize his time as he wished. Though most biographers would have us believe he spent his hours either in social chitchat with the Firths and their friends or wandering through the Pinchbeck Valley, pen in hand, indulging his literary muse,11 this was far from the case. In fact, most of the social visiting appears to have been between the ladies; Patrick only called in person at Kipping House approximately twice a month, sometimes more when business had to be conducted with Mr Firth or if the latter was ill. This was hardly excessive, given that the Firths were amongst his most important parishioners, though, inevitably, in a place so small, Patrick or his family sometimes met the Firths while visiting other neighbours.
When the Brontës moved to Thornton, Elizabeth Firth was actually away, staying at Lascelles Hall with her cousin, Frances Walker, for whose sake Thomas Atkinson had exchanged livings with Patrick. She returned to Thornton on 6 June, and the next day made it her first job to call on the new incumbent and his family. Two days later, she met them again while on a visit to the Kayes at Allerton Hall, and the following Sunday heard Patrick pr
each for the first time, his sermon being on the parable of the Sower.12 Thereafter, there appears to have been a growing intimacy between Elizabeth Firth and Maria Brontë. Elizabeth was very young, only eighteen, and it was just less than a year since she had lost her mother, killed when the gig she had been travelling in had overturned and she had been thrown into the road. Her father, John Scholefield Firth, was a doctor, like his father before him, but at fifty-seven years of age, he was a comparatively old man. Elizabeth was an only child, but she had compensated for this by having a wide circle of her own friends who, with various members of the family, were always exchanging visits with her.13
It was natural for Maria to be drawn into this circle which was so like the old days of Penzance. No doubt she was eased into the friendship by having her own sister, Elizabeth Branwell, staying with her; she is first mentioned in the diaries on 12 June, but it seems more than likely that she had come to the Brontës in time to help the family move to Thornton. Her presence would have made it more comfortable for the new parson’s wife to visit her neighbours, particularly when her husband was employed on other business. At least once a week, but occasionally more often, the ladies took tea together.14
The intimacy was evidently strong enough after two months for the Brontës to feel that they could ask Mr Firth and his daughter to be godparents to their second daughter, Elizabeth, who, nearly seven months after her birth, had not yet been christened. On Saturday, 26 August 1815, Elizabeth was baptized in her father’s church by John Fennell, who had just been admitted to the Anglican priesthood. No doubt his wife and the Morgans were there, as well as the Firths and Elizabeth Branwell who was the second godmother.15 Though she may not yet have known it Maria was already expecting another child when her second daughter was christened.
While Maria and her sister enjoyed taking tea and going for pleasant summer walks with Elizabeth Firth, Patrick was once more engaged in writing. Since February, William Morgan had been running a series of short pieces on the subject of conversion in the little magazine he edited called The Pastoral Visitor. This was a subject dear to Patrick’s heart. In a somewhat turgid style, peppered with biblical references, Morgan had listed the sins of the unconverted and taught how, through self-catechism, they could learn to know themselves and seek to be converted. Apart from an exemplary death-scene, quoted from Joshua Gilpin’s Monument of Parental Affection to a Dear and Only Son, the little articles made dry and impersonal reading. Patrick recognized this and in a short story, which Morgan published in three sections over the months of July, September and October, fleshed out the moral precepts with an emotive and personal account, written in the first person, of the conversion of a sinner. He prefixed it with a short letter, addressed to the editor, which echoed those words from St Paul which were so frequently on his lips:
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