The Brontës: Wild Genius On The Moor: The Story Of A Literary Family -- Juliet Barker, c. 2010.
It is amazing how many books on the Brontës I've had in my library over the year! Most of them were given away to Arianna's high school literature teacher when I was forced to cull my library due to space limitations. I'm not sad I don't have those books any more but they do bring back wonderful memories. Especially some rare books found at the museum in Haworth. Now, everything is available on the internet.
Incredibly good book. Perhaps "the book" on the Brontës -- 979 pages with many "appendices."
Incredibly detailed.
Chapter One.
An Ambitious Man
Sizar;
"burning the candle at both ends" -- rush candles -- see YouTube on rush candles.
St Johns's at Cambridge.
1804: Napoleon. I think I need to read the bio of Napoleon -- though I've never been interested in Napoleon, for some reason.
Trafalgar.
Cambridge.
Breaks off engagement; Juliet Barker sorts this out in great detail.
Wellington, Shropshire, West Midlands, River Severn. At 220 miles, River Severn is the longest river in Great Britain.
p. 33: finally Yorkshire! Bradford. Sister cities, Bradford / Leeds -- I know the area well, having flown into Leeds when on temporary duty (TDY) to RAF Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, England.
p. 33: Martinique in the West Indies. Nice succinct history of the West Indies, passing from French to British control. Still a war zone. Abolition of slavery -- huge Evangelical issue. A huge issue for Patrick Brontë.
Martinique vs Yorkshire.
Chooses Yorkshire.
Chapter Two: The Promised Land (Yorkshire -- the Evangelicals considered Yorkshire "the Promised Land")
It's interesting: Haworth is only 57 minutes by car from Pateley Bridge and yet I only visited Haworth once as far I can recall. One of the most "amazing" and rewarding days I had in England during the latter years of my time. in the USAF.
All the references to personal looms at home -- this is an important observation -- 1808 (early 1800s) -- think of Silas Marner by George Eliot, originally published, 1861, set in the "early years of the 19th century."
p. 38: "preach in the kitchen" like the Methodists, founder John Wesley (1703. 1791); tried to reform the Church of England from inside but ended up breaking away completely.
p. 41: missionary work in India.
p. 43: assizes: county courts
p. 43: "sentenced to transportation" for seven years -- exile for seven years -- less severe than a death penalty.
p. 44: box tombs -- google chest tombs -- Mrs Gaskell -- Haworth
p. 45: Robin Hood's grave in this area; Kirklees Priory, near Clifton / Hartshead villages southwest of Leeds, Haworth was 16 miles to the northwest, and northwest of Leeds
p. 46:
Shirley, A Tale is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë. It was Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre (originally published under Brontë's pseudonym Currer Bell). The novel is set in Yorkshire in 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. The novel is set against the backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.
The novel's popularity led to the surname Shirley becoming popular as a first name for women. Brontë tells the reader it was a tradition in the family to only give this surname as a first name to male children. It wasn't commonly used as a first name in England before the book. It is now regarded as a female first name.
Much, much more at the wiki entry.
Again, a comparison of the Evangelicals (Brontë) with the Methodists.
Many of the following pages are long passages regarding Patrick's religion and early writings.
The Luddites: p. 51. In response to the severe depression around 1812 -- machines taking jobs away from weavers.
Remember, Silar Marner probably set in about 1805.
First Luddite attacks in West Riding began in February, 1812, in the Huddersfield are, about six miles south of Hartshead.
p. 54 -- Patrick now 35 y/o and ready to get married; story of Maria Branwell begins. Penzance, sea port. Wesleyan Conference split from Church of England in 1812.
Interesting: Penzance -- Chapel Street and Market Jew Street. "Jew Street"? -- p. 57.In fact the street name Market Jew Street derives from the Cornish 'Marghas Yow', which means Thursday Market. See this post: http://www.patrickcomerford.com/2019/10/cornwalls-jews-today-and-myths-about.html. Jane Austen writing mentioned p. 57, the social life in Penzance.
Then the letters from Maria Branwell, the mother of the Brontë sisters -- p. 59, they begin.
p. 63. Patrick and Maria get married -- 1812 -- quite a momentous year geo-politics.
First child, first daughter, Maria Brontë born April 1814.
Second child, second daughter, Elizabeth Brontë born February 8, 1815.
Patrick becomes curate of Thornton, a larger parish, that same year. Thornton, northwest of Hartshead, and midway between Hartshead and Haworth; directly west of Leeds.
Exact distance: "thirteen or so miles across Bradford" to their new home in Thornton.
Chapter Three
Good Neighbors and Kind Friends
Waterloo Day: June 18th.
Barker describes the desolation of the wild moors of Thornton in first pages of chapter three.
Strong tradition of "Nonconformity" in the area. p. 73.
Third daughter, third child, Charlotte -- p. 81.
Fourth child, first son, Patrick, born, June 26, 1817, p. 85.
Fifth child, fourth daughter, July 30, 1818, born Emily Jane Brontë.
1819: Patrick, elder, offered position at Haworth. Long, long story.
17 January 1820: last child, a sixth child, a fifth daughter, born, Anne.
Chapter Four
A Stranger in a Strange Land
Much taken from Live of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell.
Gaskell considered Charlotte "her dear friend."
Opens with reception of three classic novels: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. -- p 103.
Uses those texts to understand / describe Haworth at the time.
See middle paragraph p. 105.
Five miles from Thornton to Haworth.
I think had I known all this it would have been exciting to re-trace those steps from Hartshead to Thornton to Haworth over a period of five or six days, staying in pensions or inns or BnB's along the way with Pat.
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Now that I've read this much, and have gotten a flavor of the book and having read much about the Brontës, I think I will now skip around and read the chapters that most interest me at the moment.
I will start now with the last chapters of the book, specifically, Chapter Twenty-Eight, The End of All, 1857 - 1861 & after -- the last chapter of the book, and then go back and read the chapters that might interest me.
Already, I get melancholy, almost tearful, to think that the entirety of a most amazing family is held in these 979 pages, and that's it ... the life of two parents, and six children, in the cold, miserable moors of Yorkshire.
The very first paragraph of the very first chapter of the book, begins:
"On the first day of October 1802 a twenty-five-year-old Irishman walked through the imposing gateway of St John's College, Cambridge. Tall and thin, with sandy red hair, his aristocratic features and bearing marked him out as one of the gentlemen of the university."
I picture Silas Marner and/or Rip Van Winkle looking much the same.
"His appearance was deceptive, however, for this young man had only recently arrived in England and had not yet embarked on a university career. Indeed, his purpose in coming to St Johns that day was to register as an undergraduate of the college."
And that's where it all began, although technically it would have begun twenty-five years earlier with his birth in Ireland.
But from his perspective think about it. He led a most challenging life in Yorkshire. All the challenges he would have faced.
From wiki:
Patrick Brontë born Patrick Brunty; 17 March 1777 – 7 June 1861) was an Irish Anglican minister and author who spent most of his adult life in England. He was the father of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, and of Branwell Brontë, his only son. Patrick outlived his wife, the former Maria Branwell, by forty years, by which time all of their six children had died as well.
Not mentioned in that paragraph, the second of five daughters, Elizabeth, 1815 - 1825, who died of tuberculsis at age of ten.
- 1776: American Revolution
- 1812: War of 1812; era of Napoleon
- 1800s: Industrial Revolution
- 1800s: abolitionist movement
- 1861: US Civil War
Chapter Twenty-Eight, The End of All, 1857 - 1861 & after
Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë: created a huge furor (I'll have to read about this later -- pp. 922 - 950).
Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, published after Gaskell's Life and Charlotte's novel almost overlooked.
A two-volume set released June, 1857.
Sales figures -- p. 955.
The Life put Haworth on the map, and not necessarily in a good way.
Martha Brown: at the parsonage in those years.
Sidgwicks of Stonegappe where Charlotte had once been a governess. p. 957.
Carrara marble, p. 959. Link here.
Re-read the pages, 960 - 961 -- famous writers that went to Haworth after Gaskell's book came out after Charlotte died.
Traduced: p. 965.
What is so much fun, the British words I've learned over the years. For example, p. 965, "When they arrived, having taken a fly from Keighley station .... " A fly: a fast carriage designed for a single driver / passenger and a single horse.
Patrick died June 7, 1861.
Ellen Nussey -- source of most information for Ms Gaskell. Ellen Nussey and Charlotte, classmates at Roe Head School. Lifelong friends, possibly lovers. Hundreds of letters exchanged.
Charlotte's husband bore the brunt of increasingly hysterical accusations.
Ellen Nussey, died at age 80, 1897.
It's really hard to sort this out ... Mrs Gaskell wrote a book of fiction ... that the myth has survived is a tribute to the emotive power of Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, which surely lives up to Patrick's expectation that it "will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time."
So, I guess this is it. The Brontës would have been as famous as George Eliot or Jane Austen -- in other words, hardly known at all -- had Gaskell's fiction not been written. So, in the end, Gaskell did the family a favor but probably put many through hell while they were living. And there it ended. Until people like Juliet Barker wrote an accurate biography of the family, but hardly as interesting.
I am sure that I probably never would have been as interested in the Brontës had it not been for Gaskell and her biography. And now it's hard to erase that book from my memory even after reading Barker's account.
One needs to read wiki's account of Elizabeth Gaskell -- a well-known author for a short period -- knew a lot of writers, including Charles Dickens. But the wiki entry hardly mentions the Life of Charlotte. Patrick had asked Gaskell to write a biography of Charlotte, but knew she wouldn't be able to write a particularly accurate account. Too many stories and half-truths from those she interviewed. Many with their own agendas. On top of that, Ms Gaskell was a lifelong friend -- possibly a lover -- of Charlotte.
The good news, by reading Juliet Barker, I was able to connect some dots, perhaps come to closure with regard to the whole story.
I think I would enjoy exploring Haworth one more time with Pat. It would be a bittersweet trip back to something that was beyond understanding.
