On 17 January 1820, the last of the Brontë children was born while her brother and sisters spent the day safely out of the way at Kipping House. The fifth of five daughters, the new baby was named Anne, after her maternal grandmother, and Elizabeth Firth called round the next day to see mother and baby.107
Anne’s birth seems to have precipitated a small crisis. The little house in Market Street must have been bursting at the seams with six children, their parents and two young servants all living under one roof. The promise of a larger house and greater income at Haworth had appeared as the answer to prayer, only to be taken away, and Patrick was left feeling decidedly hard done by. If he could not improve his family’s standard of living by relocating, then something would have to be done to supplement his income at Thornton. Ten days after Anne’s birth, he wrote miserably to the governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty, a charity which augmented the salaries of underpaid clergymen.
Thornton, has generally been returned for one hundred and forty pounds a year; but in this have been included, the dues, which average about five pounds, and a voluntary contribution, frequently made under exceedingly unpleasant circumstances – amounting for the most part to seven or eight pounds. Nothing arises from Pews, or from any other source. The Inhabitants, too, are so poor, in general, that presents, which in some situations are very considerable, are here, not worth mentioning. So that all things truly weighed, and the proper deductions being made, the regular and certain salary of the Living, is not more than one hundred and twenty seven pounds yearly.
Patrick pointed out the size of his chapelry and that it ‘swarms with disaffected people, who omit no opportunity that offers, to bring our excellent Establishment into contempt’. Though he had often felt inclined to give up the yearly voluntary contribution towards his salary, the respect due to his position had induced him to continue with it.
If I were a single man, I might find what I have sufficient, but as I have a wife, and six small children, with two maidservants, as well as myself to support, without I can obtain something more, in a just and honourable way, I greatly fear, that with the most rigorous economy, I shall be unable, any longer to uphold in appearance the due degree of Clerical respectability.108
A week later, he sent a copy of the letter to the Archbishop of York with a request that he would use his influence on Patrick’s behalf to secure a grant.109 Perhaps it was the receipt of this letter which stung the conscience of the archbishop and prompted him to a final resolution of the problem of Haworth. He had, too, just received a letter from Henry Heap suggesting that he, as vicar of Bradford, should hold Haworth himself, together with Bradford, in an attempt to bypass the problem of the appointment. The archbishop replied, pointing out the insuperable difficulties of this solution and suggesting that there should be a meeting between the vicar and trustees to settle the business.110 A meeting was arranged.
After many Altercations they have at last agreed to take Mr Brontè on my permitting them to join with me in a Nomination similar to what was done by Mr Kennett late Vicar of Bradford, when Mr Grimshaw was appointed to Haworth – I had offered to do this some time ago, but the Trustees positively refused then to have Mr Brontè –111
Just four days after Patrick had written to the archbishop, not suspecting the sudden change in his fortunes, he was offered the perpetual curacy of Haworth once more, this time with the assurance that his appointment would have the blessing of all the parties concerned. On 8 February, a new nomination was drawn up and witnessed by Richard Lambert, a Bradford attorney, and William Tetley, the parish clerk: Henry Heap, the vicar of Bradford, jointly with William Greenwood, John Beaver, James Greenwood, Stephen Taylor and Robert Heaton, the trustees of the church lands at Haworth, nominated Patrick to the cure of Haworth and requested the archbishop’s licence on his behalf. A codicil provided the necessary element of face-saving, establishing that the manner of this appointment did not set a precedent for future ones and did not prejudice the claims of either party.112 A rather more Christian spirit of reconciliation prevailed in Patrick’s letters testimonial, which were also drawn up on 8 February: Samuel Redhead, despite his own claim to Haworth, added his signature to those of Henry Heap and William Morgan.113
Though the vicar had been forced to back down in his claim, he ensured that Patrick, if not the trustees, was in no doubt of his subjection to Bradford: as at Thornton, he was required to pay half the dues he received for marriages, funerals, baptisms and churchings (the ritual purification of women after childbirth) to the vicar and, if required to do so by the vicar, had to preach a sermon in the parish church every Trinity Sunday ‘as a mark of Reverence to the Mother Church’.114
The day after the formalities had been completed, both Patrick and Heap wrote to the archbishop. Patrick’s letter was simply a prudent request that the archbishop would include the names of both vicar and trustees in his licence: ‘for if the Vicar’s name only, were to be inserted; on my reading myself in, it would in all probability give rise to very serious tumults in the Church, and might ultimately lead to the necessity of my resignation’.115
Heap’s letter was a report on the satisfactory resolution of a quarrel which had left the ministry of Haworth vacant for over eight months. Perhaps feeling his own share of guilt in the trouble caused to Patrick, he asked that the archbishop would allow Patrick to take his oath for his licence before him, in Bradford, instead of having to trail all the way to York: ‘some expense would be saved by this means, which to Mr Brontè with six small Children, is certainly an object’.116 The licence was finally granted on 25 February and Patrick was, in name at least, perpetual curate of Haworth once more.117 Whether or not the inhabitants would be prepared to accept him this time remained to be seen.
No doubt it was the uncertainty about Patrick’s welcome in Haworth that delayed the Brontës’ removal for nearly two months. It would be fruitless to uproot the whole family to a new home if Patrick was to face opposition and ultimately a second resignation. For the moment, therefore, Patrick alone made the journey of some five or six miles over the moorland hills to Haworth to take duty as and when required – a testament to the strength of his constitution as well as his commitment. Patrick took his last baptism in Thornton on Sunday, 13 February 1820, and performed his last burial there on 10 April; thereafter, the duties at Thornton were taken by officiating ministers, including William Bishop, Henry Heap’s curate, who was finally to be appointed in Patrick’s stead in July.118
On 29 January, an era had ended with the death of George III; the only king most of his subjects, including the Brontës, had ever known, he had been on the throne of Great Britain and Ireland since 1760. His successor, proclaimed on 5 February, was George IV who, as Prince Regent, had been a much despised byword for profligacy and immorality. His past did not augur well for his reign, nor did he show any signs, like Prince Hal, of turning over a new leaf on attaining the crown. Ash Wednesday, 16 February, was a day of national mourning, therefore, not just officially for the old king, who was buried on that day, but also unofficially for the new; all the shops and places of business were closed and special services were held in the churches and chapels throughout the land.119
The country was also in a period of deep depression, particularly in the late winter of 1820, when huge public subscriptions for the relief of the poor did little more than provide temporary alleviation to tide over the worst of the distress.120 Violent uprisings were daily expected: indeed, Elizabeth Firth’s diary records how on Good Friday, ‘We sat up expecting the Radicals.’ The fears were real enough, though no doubt exaggerated by Patrick’s frightening tales of the Luddites. Elizabeth Firth’s son later told how Patrick ‘used to come in to Kipping & frighten my mother & her step mother with tales of the outrages past or probable. But when they came there they only asked for bread, & that given, went off peaceably’.121
It was hardly an auspicious time to move to Haworth but this had now become a necessity; Patrick was clearly going to
be accepted in his new post and some permanent provision had to be made for his old one. On 5 March, the extended family and their friends gathered for the last time in the Old Bell Chapel at Thornton to witness the baptism of Anne Brontë. William Morgan officiated and Elizabeth Firth and her great friend Fanny Outhwaite, daughter and sister of two leading surgeons in Bradford, who had been present at the first dinner at Kipping House attended by the Brontës, stood as godmothers.122 On 5 April, Elizabeth Firth said her farewells as she was about to depart on a visit and would miss the Brontës’ departure. Finally, some time between 10 and 20 April, the contents of the parsonage on Market Street were packed on two flat wagons, sent over from Stanbury for the purpose by Stephen Taylor, and the Brontës set out for what was to be their final home.123
Chapter Four
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
In her Life of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell declared, quite correctly,
For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë, it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed …1
The Brontë novels have held such an honoured place in the corpus of English literature for so long that it is difficult today to conceive the shock and moral outrage that greeted their first publication. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in particular, flouted almost every convention. It was not simply the unprecedented passion with which they were written that dismayed the critics: the stories and characters, too, displayed all those qualities which polite Victorians most feared – a disregard for social niceties, an obsession (as it was seen then) with violence, cruelty and vice, and a complete lack of that satisfying morality which doled out rewards to the innocent and good and punished those who had done wrong. To quote a random selection of snippets from contemporary reviews: Jane Eyre combines ‘masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression‘, Mr Rochester possesses ‘the profanity, brutality, and slang of the misanthropic profligate’ and the whole book expresses ‘a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion’; Wuthering Heights is ‘coarse and loathsome’, showing the ‘brutalizing influence of unchecked passion’ and ‘there is such a general roughness and savageness … as never should be found in a work of art’; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall brings the reader ‘into the closest possible proximity with naked vice, and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English’.2 G. H. Lewes neatly summed up the reaction: ‘Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men –’.3
Charlotte was stung by the venom of the reviews into a defence of her sisters: in her preface to the reissue of their novels, published after both were dead, she portrayed them as quiet, naive and simple spinsters, living a dull, inoffensive life of feminine piety and duty in the isolation of ‘a remote district where education had made little progress, and where, consequently, there was no inducement to seek social intercourse beyond our own domestic circle …’4
Mrs Gaskell followed Charlotte’s cue and sought to explain the ‘coarseness’ of the Brontës’ writings as being the result of their own innocence and the peculiarities of their isolation in the primitive surroundings of the provinces. For Mrs Gaskell the Brontës’ Haworth is still the Haworth of the 1700s where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’.5 Village life is dominated by drunkenness and profligacy, with football matches and horse races on the Sabbath and drunken orgies at wedding and funeral feasts. There is much colourful quotation from the Life of William Grimshaw, a minister of Haworth in the middle of the eighteenth century, who was perhaps most famous for giving out a long psalm during his services so that he had time to go round the village public houses and horsewhip the sinners into church. Even the wealthier and more educated classes are no better: a local squire orders an arrangement of mirrors on his deathbed so that, though unable to move, he can still view his favourite cocks fighting in his bedchamber. The weirdness of the wild, rough men of Haworth, with their ‘repellent’ air of independence, dogged power of will and strange grim sense of humour, is accentuated by the incomprehensible dialect they speak. These eccentric characters, Mrs Gaskell does not fail to point out, are the raw material of Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.6
This view of Haworth was accepted unquestioningly at the time. ‘For practical purposes’, the Christian Remembrancer declared, ‘[Charlotte Brontë] lived in a less refined age than our own. Her early experience is drawn from a society a hundred years behindhand in these matters.’ This was hardly surprising, given that Mrs Gaskell’s main source was, as she herself admitted, the biography of a ‘clergyman 100 years ago at Haworth’.7 Yet the accuracy of her portrayal of Haworth has never been questioned. Her wonderfully evocative picture of a family of genius, growing up in physical and social isolation, excluded from all the normal preoccupations of ordinary life, let alone genteel society, has become the essence of Brontë mythology.
It comes as something of a shock to discover that historic Haworth was a dramatically different place from the one of popular legend. Mrs Gaskell’s description may be a fairly accurate picture of Haworth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it completely ignores the Industrial Revolution and the major impact it had had on life in the nineteenth-century township. ‘Isolated’, ‘solitary’, ‘lonely’ are the epithets on every page. But in reality, Haworth was a busy, industrial township, not some remote rural village of Brigadoon-style fantasy. What is more, the period of Patrick Brontës ministry there, from 1820 to 1861, saw some of the fastest growth and biggest changes that were to take place in Haworth and the surrounding area. The population of the chapelry had already risen by over seventeen per cent in the years 1811 to 1821. By 1821, there were 4668 inhabitants, a figure that was to increase by over thirty-three per cent in the next twenty years. The population increased by a quarter during Patrick’s first decade of residence alone.8
Haworth was equidistant from three major towns, lying about a dozen miles away from Bradford to the east, Halifax to the south and Burnley to the west, over the border in Lancashire. The nearest large town, Keighley, was only some three or four miles away down the Worth Valley, but, historically, Haworth’s affiliations were much stronger with Bradford, because it fell within that parish, and Halifax, because of the trading links. Though small by comparison with these places, Haworth was important for several reasons. First of all, it lay on one of the main routes between Yorkshire and Lancashire, so there was a substantial volume of traffic passing continually through the township. Most of the business was connected with the wool trade, raw wool going on to Bradford to be treated and then to Halifax or Huddersfield to be made into cloth; there was also a substantial border manufacture, based at Hebden Bridge, of needlecord and moleskin, which were made from a combination of wool and cotton.
Secondly, its position in the hills above Keighley and Bradford gave it an ample supply of water so it was an ideal place to site factories. The mills built along the River Worth were among the first in Yorkshire and, despite its rural reputation, there were already nineteen small textile mills in the township when the Brontës arrived. These increased rapidly in size during Patrick’s incumbency, due to the advent of mechanized combing and weaving, and by 1850 there were even three in Haworth itself: Mytholmes, employing thirty-nine hands, Sugden’s with one hundred and thirty-four employees and the newly built Butterfield’s which had between nine hundred and a thousand men, women and children on its books.9 Those inhabitants who were not directly employed in the mills were involved in various trades, most of them connected with wool. As at Thornton and Hartshead, there were large numbers of hand-loom weavers working in their own homes but there was also a very substantial cottage industry of wool-combing. This involved the creation of great amount
s of heat and steam in confined quarters and was a major contributor to ill health in the town. Haworth was therefore in the unusual position of being able to run its own worsted trade from start to finish. The staplers sorted and graded wool brought in from the outlying farms, wool-combers carded and combed it in their cottages, top manufacturers gathered the long fibres into coils of even length ready for the yarn spinners to turn it into thread, which, in turn, was passed on to the worsted manufacturers who turned it into cloth. The noils, or shorter fibres, which were of a lower grade than the tops used in worsted manufacturing, were sold on to woollen mills.10
Quarrying the sandstone of the surrounding hills provided further employment. There were also many small farms cultivating oats, the only crop that would grow eight hundred feet up in the acidic peat soil of the Pennines, and keeping livestock, principally cows, but also some sheep and the pigs for which the district was famous. In the village itself there were respectable numbers of professional people and tradesmen: Haworth boasted its own resident surgeon, Thomas Andrew, a wine and spirit merchant, William Thomas, and a clockmaker, James Barraclough. In addition there were five butchers, two confectioners, eleven grocers and three cabinetmakers; six public houses served the needs of the travellers passing through as well as providing rooms and dinners for the various meetings of inhabitants of the town.11
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