Brontës (21 page)

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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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'.
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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 –'.
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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 …'
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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'.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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 amounts 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.
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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.
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As at Thornton, Patrick had to minister to the needs of a large and rapidly increasing population spread out over many miles of open countryside. Stanbury, to the west, and Oxenhope to the south, were both less than three miles from Haworth but the church registers show that places as far away as Trawden, eight miles away to the west on the Lancashire side of the border, not to mention Cullingworth to the east and Oakworth to the north, occasionally fell within his ambit. The chapelry of Haworth, bordering the parishes of Bradford and Halifax, effectively covered the whole sweep of moorland between Heptonstall, Keighley and his old chapelry of Thornton.

As the Brontës travelled the five miles from Thornton to Haworth in April 1820 they would have observed that the moorland grew wilder, with less land under cultivation, and that the hills grew steeper. Whether they travelled by Denholme and Oxenhope and then along the river valley into Haworth or by Wilsden and Cullingworth over Brow Moor,
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they would have had the opportunity to pause on the crest of a hill to see the whole of the chapelry spread out before them. To those who love bleak and dramatic scenery there is something almost heart-wrenching in the beauty of the sweep of moorlands round Haworth. The great hills rise, one after another, horizon beyond horizon: as Mrs Gaskell described it to a friend after her first visit to Haworth, ‘the sinuous hills seemed to girdle the world like the great Norse serpent, and for my part I don't know if they don't stretch up to the North Pole'.
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Apart from a few short weeks in September, when the moors are covered with the purple bloom of the heather and the air is heavy with its scent, the predominant colours of the landscape are an infinite variety of subtle shades of brown, green and grey. There are no hedgerows and the few trees which brave the elements on the skyline are stunted and grow aslant, bent under the power of the prevailing wind. The whole landscape is in thrall to the sky, which is rarely cloudless and constantly changing; each season it absorbs a peculiar and different quality of light and the wind sends cloud-shadows dancing or creeping over the hills, according to mood. Whether the sun shines or there is snow or rain, there is always a wind at Haworth; the days in the year when it is still are so exceptional as to cause comment. Even the field walls, which stake man's claim to earn a living from a hostile and acquisitive landscape, are of dry-stone construction so
as to offer less resistance to the wind which passes safely through the gaps. The buildings, too, are made of stone to withstand the wind: stone walls, stone-flagged roofs and stone-mullioned windows. Built low and solid, the scattered farmsteads and cottages, which huddle together as if seeking protection from the onslaught of the elements, seem to be a part of the natural landscape.