Brontës
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Another subject close to his heart was national education. He was swift to condemn the Dissenters whose opposition to and defeat of a parliamentary bill had deprived the manufacturing districts of a centralized and standardized education system. Their arguments, he complained to the Leeds Intelligencer, were all
utterly inconclusive, and … dictated by party spirit, or sectarian prejudice. Divested of all the rhetorical flourishes and sophistry … the naked truth only amounted to this, – the Church of England must be thwarted64
Even if national education could not be achieved, Patrick fought hard to improve schooling in his locality. He was a founder member of the Bradford Church Institution which was set up in July 1843 to encourage the building of Anglican schools.65 On 4 August, he wrote an impassioned letter to the National Society, seeking a grant towards a new school in Haworth and painting a grim picture of the state of education in the township.
I have resided in Yorkshire, above 30 years, and have preached, and visited in different parishes – I have also been in Lancashire, and from my reading, personal observation, and experience, I do not hesitate to say, that the populace in general, are either ignorant or wicked, and in most cases, where they have a little learning, it is either of a skismatical, vainly philosophical, or treacherously political nature. Some exceptions, no doubt, there are, but they are few, and far between. – I live in the midst of these delusions, and though Mr Smith, my able and faithful Clerical Coadjutor, in Godly zeal, and the genuine spirit of Christianity heartily joins with me, in all our Apostolical labours of love, we have more, far more, than enough to do.66
Patrick also enlisted the support of the vicar of Bradford in his campaign. Towards the end of October, Dr Scoresby, himself an enthusiastic promoter of education, visited Haworth to view potential sites for building as speedily ‘as possible’ a new church day schoolroom and schoolhouse.67
On 2 January 1844, a new National School was officially opened in Haworth under the auspices of the church. The master was Ebenezer Rand, who had been trained at the National Society’s Central School in London; the problem of providing a mistress for the girls was later solved by the appointment of his wife. For a nominal fee of two pence per week, irrespective of age or proficiency, the pupils were taught everything from the three ‘Rs’ to singing and had their books, slates and pencils provided free of charge. Special evening classes were also held for the factory children who could not attend school during the day. The benefits of the scheme were recognized immediately and, within a month of opening, the school already had 170 pupils.68 Its continued success was not assured, however, as the National Society only donated fifty pounds towards the first year’s salary of Mr Rand and the fees were not enough to cover the shortfall. At the end of January Patrick was compelled to write round to all the principal inhabitants of Haworth, urging them to make a liberal donation to ensure the school’s survival.69 Later in the year he was able to report with satisfaction to the National Society that the school had brought immediate benefits to the local children.
The little creatures also find that the way to
The establishing of the National School obviously owed at least something to the vicar of Bradford’s interest in education and his earlier visit to Haworth. His intervention on another educational matter caused Patrick some personal anguish and great controversy in the township. For more than six years, the Free Grammar School near Oxenhope had been run by a Mr Ramsbottom, a local Wesleyan Methodist preacher, though the seventeenth-century foundation required that the master should be a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge – a condition which effectively excluded all Dissenters. On 4 January, Dr Scoresby wrote to Patrick pointing out this irregularity and suggesting that he should call a meeting of the trustees to dismiss Ramsbottom and appoint ‘a proper master’ with his assistance. The letter was offensively phrased, implying that Patrick, as the supervising clergyman, and the trustees had been culpably negligent in their duties, lecturing them on ‘the course which is plainly their duty to pursue’ and threatening them with an application to the Lord Chancellor if they failed to carry out his ‘suggestions’. The trustees had little option but to give the present master notice to quit at midsummer,71 but the Dissenters responded by attacking Patrick. The Bradford Observer carried a sarcastic little report that Patrick had announced in his sermon that he would no longer perform the burial service over anyone not baptized into the Church of England. This was a malicious distortion of the truth, as Patrick was quick to point out in a letter the following week. His refusal to bury the unbaptized was not aimed at Dissenters but at his own parishioners who fulfilled their secular duty in registering their children’s births with the district registrar but failed in their divine duty to have the religious rite performed.72
As if he had not enough to do, Patrick also wrote to the papers on a matter which had always been a personal obsession of his – the dangers of fire. Prompted by the recent condemnation of the Hindu practice of suttee, or widow-burning, he wrote to point out that parental negligence frequently led to children being burnt to death. In particular, he drew attention to the fact that linen and cotton clothing was especially inflammable and recommended that children and women (who, with their long skirts, were also vulnerable) should be encouraged to wear silk or woollen clothing. As a graphic illustration of his argument he explained that in his twenty years at Haworth he had buried between ninety and a hundred children who were burnt to death after their clothes caught fire.73
Charlotte was shocked on her return to Haworth at the beginning of 1844 to discover that, despite his activity, her father’s health had deteriorated rapidly in her absence. He was now sixty-six years of age: his eyesight was failing rapidly and he had to face the prospect that he might soon go blind. Various schemes to reduce his duties to a more manageable level by dividing his chapelry into two or even three separate districts had all come to nothing and he was increasingly obliged to rely on his curate, James Smith, and old friends, such as Thomas Brooksbank Charnock and Thomas Crowther, for assistance.74 Ill-natured gossip in the village did nothing to improve his plight: the lotion he was using on his eyes seems to have been alcohol-based, giving rise to more rumours that the parson had taken to drink. Patrick was so distressed by the slander that he even considered prosecuting those responsible.75 The fact that Charlotte had been unaware of her father’s difficulties was an additional burden of guilt to shoulder with those of her raw emotions concerning Monsieur Heger and her sense of failure. Writing at the end of January to Ellen Nussey, who was on a visit to her brother Henry at Earnley, she was full of gloom.
I do not know whether you feel as I do Ellen – but there are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings except a few friendships and affections are changed from what they used to be – something in me which used to be enthusiasm is tamed down and broken – I have fewer illusions – what I wish for now is active exertion – a stake in life – Haworth seems such a lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world – I no longer regard myself as young, indeed, I shall soon be 28 – and it seems as if I ought to be working and braving the rough realities of the world as other people do – It is however my duty to restrain this feeling at present and I will endeavour to do so.76
Charlotte claimed that it was her wish to commence a school, as indeed everyone now expected her to do. She had sufficient money and qualifications for the undertaking but, she asserted, there was now an insuperable barrier to her attaining the objective for which she had striven so long: her father’s health.
I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him – and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave him (at least so long as Branwell and Anne are absent) in order to pursue selfish interests of my own –77
Though this argument has been universally accepted by Charlotte’s friends and biographers, it was disingenuous. It would obviously have been a greater comfort to Patrick to know that his children were all well placed to earn their livings for the foreseeable future than to have them unemployed at home and dependent on his own inadequate salary. The parsonage was comfortably run with the assistance of two loyal and reliable servants, Tabby Aykroyd and Martha Brown; more importantly, he had Emily to act as his housekeeper and, when necessary, as his amanuensis. There was no need for Charlotte to remain at home. Her father’s ill health was simply a convenient excuse for her own depression of spirits and resultant lethargy which were the real reasons for her reluctance to make a new start.
There was then a tinge of envy in Charlotte’s remark that Branwell and Anne, who had just returned to Thorp Green after the Christmas holidays, were both ‘wondrously valued’ in their situations.78 In both cases, this had been achieved by hard work and at considerable personal cost. Branwell had found it extremely difficult to adapt to being a tutor again after the comparative independence of his post on the railway. On 30 March 1843, a few months into his new job, he had written a poem into his old Luddenden Foot notebook.
I sit this evening far away
From all I used to know
And nought reminds my soul to/ day
Unwelcome/ cares unthought of/ fears
Around my room arise
I seek for suns of former years,
But clouds oercast my skies
Yes – Memory wherefore/ does thy voice
Bring old times back to view
As Thou wouldst bid me not rejoice
In
Branwell’s uncertainties and unhappiness were probably compounded by the fact that he was in a new and strange place, cut off from all his old friends in Halifax. He was not even living under the same roof as his sister, having taken lodgings at the Old Hall, a seventeenth-century red brick house with a Dutch-style roof which seems to have been part of a working farm. The building was attractive enough for Branwell to draw it in pen and ink later that year.80 Initially, at least, Branwell was so miserable that he became ill. Patrick was deeply concerned and took the extraordinary step of visiting his son in March, when he had to be in York himself to give evidence at the Assizes in a notorious forgery case.81 Gradually, however, Branwell seems to have settled, helped, no doubt, by the Robinsons’ obvious appreciation of his talents.
Anne, too, had had her difficulties which Branwell’s proximity seems, in some measure, to have allayed. At the end of May she wrote a confident poem which forcefully rejected Calvinist dogma as uncharitable and irreligious and asserted her own belief in the then unfashionable idea of universal salvation.
You may rejoice to think yourselves secure
You may be grateful for the gift divine
That grace unsought which made your black hearts pure
And fits your earthborn souls in Heaven to shine
But is it sweet to look around and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness
Which they deserve at least as much as you
Their faults not greater nor their virtues less?82
Anne spent her holiday at home in June preparing a book of her favourite music to take back with her to Thorp Green. Significantly, her choice was dominated by religious pieces which she seems to have chosen as much for their sentiments as their tunes. Anne copied out words and music to thirty-two items, eight of them ballads, mostly of the ‘Ye banks and braes’ variety, but seventeen were hymns and a further seven were sacred songs.83 The month of July she again spent in Scarborough with the Robinsons, lodging this time at No. 14, The Cliff, while her employer’s mother lodged at No. 4.84
Returning to Thorp Green at the beginning of August she seems to have been afflicted with religious uncertainty and loneliness once more. On 10 September 1843 she wrote an impassioned plea for stronger faith and the removal of the doubts which plagued her.85 This was followed by several poems reflecting her own homesickness. In ‘The Captive Dove’, echoing a subject Emily had already treated, she took a totally different stance from her sister, begging not for freedom but for companionship in captivity. Though the poem almost certainly belongs to the Gondal cycle, it is interesting because it undoubtedly reflects Anne’s own character: unlike Emily, who was selfish and single-minded in the pursuit of her liberty, Anne was prepared to accept her duty, however uncongenial, though she too longed for freedom.86 In November, as the Christmas holidays gradually came within sight, Anne was overwhelmed with homesickness. Well aware of the physical beauties and comforts of her residence, Anne still rejected them in favour of
my barren hills
Where colder breezes rise;
Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
Can yield an answering swell,
But where a wilderness of heath
Returns the sound as well…
Restore to me that little spot,
With grey walls compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.
Though all around this mansion high
Invites the foot to roam,
And though its halls are fair within –
Oh, give me back my HOME!87
The Christmas holidays were a brief but welcome break in the now well-established routine of teaching at Thorp Green and there was the added pleasure of seeing Charlotte for the first time for over a year, though her depressed state of mind cannot have passed unnoticed. Anne wrote a joyful poem on Christmas morning, celebrating the birth of Christ and the sound of bells floating on the breeze which heralded it.88 Returning to Thorp Green at the end of January, she again took up the Gondal story which seems to have preoccupied her during the previous autumn and inspired the poems of that period. She was also expanding her own academic horizons, apparently beginning to teach both German and elementary Latin to her pupils.89
Emily, too, was mentally absorbed in Gondal. In February 1844, she began to collect her poems together, extracting them from their prose tales going as far back as March 1837 and copying them out into one notebook which she entitled ‘Gondal Poems’ and another which she left untitled. In fact, there was no hard and fast distinction between the two, for Emily does not appear to have stuck to her intention to include only personal poems in the second notebook.90 She would continue to copy her poems into the volumes until May 1848, suggesting that her obsession with Gondal continued right through the publication of Poems with her sisters in 1846 and Wuthering Heights in 1847.
Throughout 1844 she continued to produce a steady stream of poems following the fortunes of her imaginary heroes and heroines. The same characters continued to entrance her, from the unloved and embittered ‘foster-child of sore distress’ who had featured in her earlier poems, to the wilful but greatly loved Augusta. Even the same subjects provided inspiration, particularly the parting of loved ones either by death or by finding themselves on opposing sides in war.91 Though she may have been stuck in a rut, it was a fruitful one, inspiring some of her most lyrical poetry. The elegy by ‘E.W.’ at the grave of Augusta is a typical example.
The linnet in the rocky dells,
The moor-lark in the air,
The bee among the heather bells
That hide my lady fair –
The wilddeer browse above her breast;
The wildbirds raise their brood,
And they, her smiles of love carest,
Have left her solitude!
I ween, that when the graves dark wall
Did first her form retain
They thought their hearts could ne’er recall
The light of joy again —
They thought the tide of greif would flow
&nbs
p; Unchecked through future years
But where is all their anguish now,
And where are all their tears?
Well, let them fight for Honour’s breath
Or Pleasure’s shade pursue –
The Dweller in the land of Death
And if their eyes should watch and weep
Till sorrows’ source were dry
She would not in her tranquil sleep
Return a single sigh –
Blow, west wind, by the lonely mound
And murmer, summer streams,
There is no need of other sounds
To soothe my Lady’s dreams —92
Emily’s dependence on Gondal had never faltered and even now, when there was nothing to disturb the equilibrium of her existence, when she was secure in her home and free to control her own destiny, she retreated into her imagination. Unlike Charlotte or Anne, for whom there was a certain desperation in clinging to Angrian and Gondal fantasy, for Emily it was neither a relief from, nor a frustration of, the daily routine: it was a necessary part of life. Emily’s hymn to the imagination was an eloquent exposition of her own thoughts and feelings.
thou art ever there to bring
The hovering visions back and breathe
New glories o’er the blighted spring
And call a lov[e]lier life from death
And whisper with a voice divine
Of
I trust not to thy phantom bliss
Yet still in evenings quiet hour
With Never
I welcome thee benignant power
Sure solacer of human cares
And sweeten hope when hope dispairs —93
Though Emily lived in a world of her own there was, as usual, plenty going on in the township, with public performances of Haydn’s Creation and Handel’s Samson and Judas Maccabeus by the Haworth Quarterly Choral Society and lectures on every subject from medical botany to Chartism. One misfortune which must have affected the Brontës was the closing of Haworth subscription library, the sale of which was advertised by placard to take place on Easter Monday, 184494. July was a particularly busy month. On Friday, 19 July, before breaking up for the summer holidays, the pupils of the new Church National School were publicly examined in the Scriptures, history, geography, English grammar and arithmetic to the credit of their teachers and the general satisfaction of their patrons and parents. The Rands and some of the church trustees were invited to a celebratory tea at the parsonage afterwards.95 It was also announced that a new headmaster had been appointed for the Free Grammar School near Oxenhope: the Reverend Joseph Brett Grant, BA, an Oxford graduate, would replace the unfortunate Wesleyan, Mr Ramsbottom.96 An added benefit of the appointment as far as Patrick was concerned was that he would then have another clergyman in the township to call on when he needed assistance.