Brontës (16 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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 preach for the first time, his sermon being on the parable of the Sower.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

Rev. Sir,

Should you judge the following to be a just representation of the views and feelings of an awakened sinner, before he has got proper notions of the all sufficiency of Christ; by giving it a place in your useful little work, you may benefit some, and will much oblige your obedient servant,

P.B.
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The first part of Patrick's story described the sufferings of the sinner who knows his own guilt:

'Tis true, I have not robbed, I have not murdered, I have not actually committed any enormous crime, but in thought, and inclination (and these speak aloud in the ears of God,) I have been guilty of robbery, and murder, a hundred times over. How often have I coveted that which was not my own! How often have I been angry at my brother, without a cause! What was it but fear that kept me from the most guilty deeds!
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In the second part, the sinner has now spent two months pondering his sins and, through the Scriptures and the Liturgy, has begun to find consolation; ‘The conflict may be long and severe; but I hope through Christ Jesus to obtain the victory and the prize.' Finally, the sinner has achieved conversion, not in a sudden and dramatic flash like St Paul, but gradually, with many stumblings along the way; he knows that he must still ‘watch and pray' but, through Christ, he has now the certainty of salvation and death no longer has any terror for him.
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Though the story is in the typical Evangelical mould, with the terrors of damnation and the flames of hell threatening the sinner, it is full of humanity too; the author, one feels, sympathizes with and understands the feelings of the sinner and tries to convert him through love rather than fear. Interestingly, too, the division of the story into three self-contained but interdependent chapters reflects a certain literary sophistication in Patrick, particularly at the end of the first episode where the reader is left with the sinner, trembling on the brink of damnation, with only a ‘glimmering ray of hope' breaking in on his ‘benighted soul'.
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At about the same time as he was writing his article ‘On Conversion', Patrick was also preparing for the press another story which, because it was longer and had four poems annexed to it, was to be published as a little book or pamphlet in its own right.
The Cottage in the Wood,
subtitled ‘Or
the art of becoming rich and happy', was very much in the same vein as
Cottage Poems
and was intended for the same class of readers. Possibly as a result of criticism of
Cottage Poems,
Patrick included a short disclaimer at the beginning of the book, pointing out that the blessings enjoyed by his cottagers were not the result of either their poverty or the rural beauties of their situation:

The truth is, that happiness and misery have their origin within, depending comparatively little on outward circumstances. The mind is its own place. Put a good man any where and he will not be miserable – put a bad man any where and he cannot be happy. The reason is obvious; the good man carries his mind with him, and thence he draws his remedies, his antidotes, his comforts: the bad man also carries his mind with him, but it is a source of unruly desires, vain expectation, heavy disappointment, and keen remorse.
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The Cottage in the Wood
told the story of Mary, the pious young daughter of an impoverished cottager, who attracted the attentions of a wealthy, drunken rake. Mary refused either to be his mistress, in return for financial assistance for her parents, or to marry him, because she could not bind herself to a man who was both immoral and, more importantly, an atheist. It was not Mary's piety, however, that persuaded her suitor to reform but his providential escape from almost certain death on two occasions. From that moment on he was a converted man and took up good works with alacrity. One day, while teaching poor children free of charge in the Sunday school, he again encountered Mary and renewed his suit; his conversion and reformation of character made him acceptable and the two were married, lived a long and happy life together, were blessed with good children and died, in an exemplary manner, within six months of each other.

The Cottage in the Wood
contains most of Patrick's favourite themes: the story was a peg on which to hang expositions on the Bible, Sunday schools and the evils of drink. The importance of the education offered by Sunday schools is stressed throughout; the cottagers had themselves been unconverted until their daughter went to Sunday school and, in consequence, began to read the Scriptures to them each day; Mary herself was so apt a pupil that she was appointed a teacher and therefore earned a small but valuable salary which enabled her to pay for lessons in writing and grammar at a day school; and the genuine nature of Bower's conversion is publicly displayed in his offering a free education to those too poor to be
able to afFord one. Education is the key to moral and social improvement in the story and, as we shall see, in life as well as in fiction, Patrick, his wife and his children were passionately committed to this belief.

The Cottage in the Wood
was the first of all the Brontë books to bear the name ‘Bronte', spelt with the diaeresis, on the title page – though this appears to have been the result of a printing error rather than a deliberate change on Patrick's part.
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It enjoyed quite a little local success. Priced fairly cheaply, at 1s. 6d., and having an illustrated frontispiece, it was regarded highly enough to be reprinted, without the poetry section, in
The Cottage Magazine
in June 1817, and as a whole in a second edition in 1818.
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Its success was no doubt attributable to its being used in Sunday schools, though it must have been helped by William Morgan's review of it in
The Pastoral Visitor
in August 1816:

This is a very amusing and instructive tale, written in a pure and plain style. Parents will learn in this little Book the Advantages of Sunday Schools, while their Children will have an example well worthy of their closest imitation. Young women may here especially obtain a knowledge that the path of virtue leads to happiness. We would therefore most cordially recommend this Book to all sorts of Readers.
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While Patrick was enjoying local literary celebrity, his wife had not been idle. Perhaps inspired by the example of her cousin, Jane Morgan, who had already had her work published in her husband's
The Pastoral Visitor
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Maria had taken up her own pen in support of Patrick's twin passions for conversion and education. Apart from her letters to Patrick before they were married, ‘The Advantages of Poverty, in Religious Concerns' is the only extant manuscript by Maria. As such, it was carefully preserved by Patrick who wrote upon it, ‘The above was written by my dear Wife, and sent for insertion in one of the periodical publications – Keep it, as a memorial of her –'.
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In the manuscript, which does not appear to have been published, Maria considered the question of poverty. She argued that it was not an absolute evil but, when combined with religion, was an actual benefit: salvation is easier for the poor man to attain as he does not have the opportunity or temptation to sin like the rich man. Though callous in its simplicity, the message was expressed with sympathy for the temporal sufferings of the poor.