Brontes: A Family History

Society.

INTRODUCTION

A neat Irish cabin, snow proof,

Well thatched, had a good earthen floor,

One chimney in midst of the roof,

One window, and one latched door.

The above is one verse from a poem written by the Reverend Patrick Brontë. The poem, entitled ‘The Irish Cabin’ was written when he was a young man, long before his own children were born; the word ‘cabin’ is used instead of ‘house’ because the home he was born into was extremely small. There were but two rooms. Little of the building has survived but today the foundations remain and the ruins are marked by a commemorative plaque stating that the father of the Brontë sisters was born there on 17th March 1777, St Patrick’s Day. No doubt that day was well celebrated.

The ruins are one stop on a tour of what the Northern Ireland Tourist Board has labelled ‘The Brontë Homeland’, and if you had previously thought that the Brontë homeland was in Yorkshire, England, on the windswept moors which surround Haworth village, then you would be making the same mistake as the many thousands of others who have an interest in the Brontë novels and the Brontë family background.

All Patrick Brontë’s children were born in Yorkshire. They lived, died and are buried there. Therefore the county of Yorkshire has always claimed with pride that the story of the family, and the novels written by Charlotte, Emily and Anne, are truly Yorkshire in spirit and in feeling. The father was an Irish man and the mother was Cornish but their children lived the whole of their lives in Yorkshire, therefore say the Yorkists, it is to that county we must look for an understanding of their genius.

By its nature genius is very rare. It is more than one hundred and fifty years since the first Brontë novels were published. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë were all first published in the year 1847. Although very few people at the time knew it, here were three novels written by three sisters living together in the parsonage of Haworth, but each writing independently of the others. Charlotte described this in the following words:

The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition; formerly we used to show each other what we wrote, but of late years this habit of communication and consultation had been discontinued . . .

Charlotte was writing an introduction to a later edition of her sister Emily’s work, Wuthering Heights. She went on to say . . . ‘We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors.’

Their father, Patrick, had cherished the same dream. The first work he ever had published was a little collection of his poems. The first work his daughters had published was also a little collection of poems. Their father’s poems, like their own, were published at the author’s expense and very few copies were sold. Charlotte tells us her reaction:

As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted; but for this we had been prepared at the outset; though inexperienced ourselves, we had read the experience of others.

No doubt the experience of their father had applied the necessary caution to their hopes.

The lack of public interest in their poems was not too discouraging for his daughters Charlotte, Emily and Anne. They went on with their writing but they did not tell their father that they had each decided to write a novel. At that time their father was having a lot of trouble with his eyes; cateracts were developing and partly because of this and partly because his daughters wanted to spare him the anxiety they wrote novels in secret and hopefully sent them out to publishers.

Patrick was greatly surprised when the news came that the novels had been accepted. He had long since given up the cherished hope of becoming a successful author; it must have seemed to him that there was little hope for his daughters to succeed where he had failed. After all there were very few female authors and with this in mind, Charlotte, always the practical one, came up with the idea of submitting their work under pen names which belied the sex of the authors. Their publishers were not aware of subterfuge. As far as they knew, the novel Jane Eyre which was at first by far the most successful of the three, had been written by someone called Currer Bell. Wuthering Heights was by Ellis Bell and Agnes Grey was by Acton Bell. Charlotte explains why they had decided not to use their own names.

Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are likely to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes used for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.

Clearly it was not a device calculated to create publicity, yet it did just that. Jane Eyre was a success, and more, it was a novel which aroused considerable controversy. Soon everyone in the literary world wanted to know exactly who had written the book, but the secret was kept for quite a long time and was only broken when one critic declared that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were in fact one and the same person. This, Charlotte could not accept and so she set out for London with her sister Anne and, for the first time in person at her publisher’s offices, she revealed the truth. From that moment there began an interest in the Brontë family as people. The lives they led in the parsonage in a remote Yorkshire village became as interesting to the reading public as the books they had written. Indeed it is safe to say that there are many today who know something of the Brontë family and have not read a single Brontë novel. Scores of books have been written about the family. The first was by Elizabeth Gaskell who was invited by the Reverend Patrick Brontë to write the biography of his daughter, Charlotte, after she had died. That book appeared in 1857. It was of course primarily concerned with Charlotte, but it was from telling her life story that the literary world first heard something about the rest of her family.

Patrick Brontë came from an impoverished background in Ireland. At the age of twenty-five he went to Cambridge University and became a Minister of the Church of England. At the age of thirty-five he married a Cornish woman aged thirty, and the union produced a six children in as many years. The first child, Maria, was born early in 1814; the last child, Anne was born in 1820. Patrick’s wife, Maria, died in the following year, 1821. Thus the children were reared without much knowledge of their mother; their father was the great dominating influence in their lives. In his younger years Patrick was a charming and handsome man but after the death of his wife he withdrew into himself and became rather eccentric. His two oldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, died in tragic circumstances when they were eleven and ten-years-old. His only son, Branwell, took to drink and opium and died at the age of thirty-one. Charlotte, Emily and Anne were left. Within eighteen months of the publication of their books, Emily and Anne were also dead and so Patrick was left alone with Charlotte. She was the only member of the family to know the pleasure of literary success. For a few years she developed her career, at the same time caring for her father who was going blind. In 1854, at the age of thirty-eight, Charlotte married. She was pregnant when she died in the following year. Patrick lived on until 1861 when he died aged eighty-four.

The above, in the briefest detail, is the story of the Brontë family who lived at Haworth. At a glance it can be seen that theirs is no ordinary story and it comes as no surprise to find that the interest taken in them, beginning with the biography by Elizabeth Gaskell, has continued to the present day. The parsonage at Haworth has become a tourist attraction and a museum to their memory, administered by The Brontë Society which was founded in 1893 and has today a world wide membership, including the United States of America where members can be found in every state of the union. At this point I feel I should tell how this book came to be written. As is the case with many books, the story behind the writing of it is often as interesting as the story itself.

I began my own literary career as a playwright, writing for BBC Radio after winning a writing competition, and that led to an offer coming from the theatre. All writers hope for a slice of good luck and when the Artistic Director of Crewe Theatre, Charles Savage, told me that he wanted Jane Eyre adapted for the stage I was intrigued. He gave his opinion that he saw the story of Jane Eyre as one of the greatest love stories ever told. I knew the story, but only from a film I had seen and Charles suggested I should visit the Brontë museum and parsonage, and the surrounding moors. I jumped at the chance even though he told me I was the second choice of playwright, the first being unable to commit himself to the task. In my research for the play I learned that Charlotte’s father, Patrick, was an Irishman. What interested me far more was the fact that Patrick was the first born of a family of ten children, in impoverished circumstances, and I wondered how on earth he had managed to go to Cambridge University and become a Church of England Minister. It seemed to me that there was a great story there. Everything I saw in Haworth, the moors, the parsonage, the village, coloured my dramatisation of Charlotte’s novel. I came to the conclusion that Patrick carried something with him when he left Ireland and made his way to Cambridge. Perhaps it was not genius but he obviously had talent, and what is just as important he was prepared to work very hard against all odds. Call it courage and tenacity. I respected that.

But his children were talented and some of them had genius. They all had Patrick’s ambition to make a name in the artistic and literary world. Charlotte had genius and also immense resolution; of all the children she was the prime mover, the entrepreneur. The final result of all this was that the three novels were written and offered to publishers, and have stood the fierce test of time. The Brontë novels stand today on the booksellers shelves, along with scores of books about the authors and the life they led in that Haworth parsonage. I wanted to find out as much as I could about the man who had had such an influence on the minds of the writers. I knew that as soon as my adaptation of Jane Eyre was finished I had another task waiting for my attention; I intended to find to my own satisfaction how a poor Irish boy dreamed of literary success and became a Cambridge graduate. How his talent and determination were in his children. I knew that much had been written about the family after the point when they arrived in Haworth and took up residency in the parsonage, but my own interest, to some extent, ceased there. I was drawn to look further back into history, to go to Ireland to research the early life of Patrick.

But there were some dangers to consider. The country of Patrick’s birth was plagued with sectarian troubles. A few days before I set out for Ireland there had been an ambush on British soldiers at Warrenpoint, the town I was heading for, the harbour where Patrick as a young man left to sail to England. Soldiers had been killed. When I arrived in Warrenpoint all the talk was about the ambush and the extra presence of policemen and soldiers on the streets. In 1947 I had been one of those soldiers in Ireland so I was well aware of what might happen at any time. A stranger in town asking lots of questions was bound to attract attention.

My history of the Brontë family is more than the life story of Patrick Brontë. It is about his family in Ireland and in particular about his father, Hugh. Hugh had a kind of genius which has largely disappeared. He was a highly respected storyteller. He was the man who, a Protestant, eloped with his Catholic bride and set up home in that tiny cottage where now there is a plaque to commemorate the birth of their first child, Patrick.

I also wanted to know much more about Patrick’s nine brothers and sisters who lived their entire life in the area. Hugh and his wife, Alice, had moved to a larger home when their family grew too large for comfort. The Brontë sisters in Yorkshire never met their Irish relatives and more is the pity for it would have been illuminating indeed to have heard what they thought of them. When Elizabeth Gaskell met Patrick Brontë he told her very little about the