Brontës (23 page)

The main part of the parsonage is little changed from when the Brontës lived there. A low, grey-stone, rather elegant house, built in 1779, it has simplicity and symmetry: its frontage, facing the church, has a central doorway with pilasters and pediment, two long Georgian sashed windows with glazing bars on each side and five on the floor above. At the rear of the house there were stone-mullioned windows, now gone, and a large arched window on the stairs which still remains.
³⁴
At some stage, though when is not
known, Patrick had a large wash kitchen built on the back of the house on the side nearest Church Lane; in the back yard was the privy, a two-seater with large and small seats for adults and children, and a well, fed by spring water running off the moor.
³⁵

The entrance from Church Lane was a gate, set in the wall which ran round the perimeter of the yard and the square garden plot at the front which occupied an area slightly larger than the house.
³⁶
The Brontës were not enthusiastic gardeners and the constant war against the elements did not encourage growth in anything except the green moss which thrives on the damp stone and soil. There were a few fruit bushes, some straggling lilacs, thorns and elders and a semicircular gravel walk; in the narrow flowerbed under the windows of the house Emily, prompted by Ellen Nussey, attempted to grow cornflowers and Sicilian peas, but there was no sign of life there when Mrs Gaskell visited in 1853.
³⁷

Though the garden was neglected, the house was not. Mrs Gaskell commented that

Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness. The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes glitter like looking-glass. Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity.
³⁸

By the time Mrs Gaskell visited, Charlotte, her father and their servants, Tabitha Aykroyd and Martha Brown, were the only inhabitants of the parsonage and substantial changes had been made to its fabric and decoration. Ellen Nussey, visiting Haworth for the first time some twenty years earlier, also found the parsonage scrupulously clean but considerably more austere. There were no curtains at the windows because, she said, of Patrick's fear of fire
³⁹
though internal wooden shutters more than adequately supplied their place.

There was not much carpet any where except in the Sitting room, & and [sic] on the centre of the Study floor. The hall floor and stairs were done with sand stone, always beautifully clean as everything about the house was, the walls were not papered but coloured in a pretty dove-coloured tint, hair-seated chairs and mahogany tables, book-shelves in the Study but not many of these elsewhere. Scant and bare indeed many will say, yet it was not a scantness that made itself felt—
⁴⁰

No doubt the austerity was more evident because of the stone-flagged floors, which extended beyond the kitchen to all the downstairs rooms. The two larger rooms at the front of the house were the main living rooms; the one on the left of the hall became the family dining room, or parlour, as Mrs Gaskell called it, and the one on the right became Patrick's study. Behind the dining room was a small storeroom, also used as a pantry, and behind the study was the kitchen with a large cooking range built into the chimney. A passageway, giving access through the back door to the yard, eventually separated this kitchen from the wash kitchen added by Patrick. Upstairs, the basic room layout was the same, with two larger bedrooms at the front and two smaller ones at the back: over the hall was the little room which the Brontë servants called ‘the children's study'. There were no attic rooms but there was a double-vaulted cellar beneath the house, reached from the hall by a flight of stone stairs.

To this house, provided free of rent by the trustees of the church lands, Patrick brought his wife, six small children and two servants in April 1820. Though Mrs Gaskell and probably every visitor after her wondered where on earth they all slept,
⁴¹
the house was larger and better proportioned than the parsonage at Thornton: it also had the all-important addition of a comparatively large garden where the children could play safely, well away from a busy main thoroughfare. While the children settled happily into their new home, Patrick and, to a lesser extent, Maria had to face an uncertain reception. As Patrick later told his friend and former vicar, John Buckworth: ‘When I first came to this place, though the angry winds which had been previously excited, were hushed, the troubled sea was still agitated, and the vessel required a cautious and steady hand at the helm.'
⁴²

Patrick launched into his new duties with his customary conscientious fervour, performing burials on 20, 21 and 22 April, followed by four baptisms and two marriages on the 23rd and two more marriages on the 24th, which, as the official birthday of the new king, was celebrated by ringing the church bells. Thereafter, he settled into a steady routine of duty. Over the first ten years of his ministry he had to take an average of 290 baptisms a year, the equivalent of more than five a week. There were so many baptisms that he was unable to perform them all during the Sunday services and a large proportion of his time, week in and week out, was taken up with christenings. The high numbers owed something to his own missionary zeal, as well as the birth rate in the chapelry: the registers show that multiple baptisms were commonplace and that baptisms of between fifteen and
thirty children a day were not uncommon. As many of these were older brothers and sisters being baptized at the same time as the infant, it would seem that Patrick made a point of visiting parents at the time of birth and persuading them to have all their children christened. The high number of bastard children he baptized also suggests that, while condemning the immorality that had begotten them, he did not extend his condemnation to the children themselves.
⁴³

The high birth rate in the chapelry was matched by a high mortality rate: in the same period, 1820 to 1830, Patrick conducted, on average, 111 burials a year, rising in 1824 and 1830 to 140. Even the marriages ran at the comparatively high rate of about twenty-eight a year, with a surprising number of minors being married with their parents' consent. No doubt many of these took place because a baby was on the way but, with life expectancy so low, marriages did take place at an earlier age than today.
⁴⁴

Patrick faced an immense task in Haworth, especially compared with his previous ministry. Though the population was only one eighth as big again as that of Thornton, Patrick had to perform – singlehandedly – more than double the number of burials and marriages and nearly seven times as many baptisms as he had had to carry out in Thornton. Faced with such a relentless round of official duty, it was remarkable that Patrick found any time for visiting the sick, dying and bereaved in the far-flung corners of his chapelry.

Nevertheless, Patrick made it clear, right from the start of his ministry at Haworth, that he cared deeply about the plight of his parishioners and that he would be active on their behalf. It was not simply their spiritual welfare that concerned him but also their physical needs and he was to prove an indefatigable campaigner on their behalf. On 6 June 1820, for instance, he assisted the overseer of the poor in drawing up a petition addressed to the committee of the charity at Harrogate responsible for enabling ‘the Afflicted and Distressed Poor' to receive the spa waters there. The petition, which Patrick was the first to sign, stated that James Parker, a wool-comber of Haworth, had been unable to provide for his family because of unemployment and a severe scorbutic complaint and requested financial assistance to enable him to take the waters at Harrogate in the hope of either relieving or curing his condition.
⁴⁵

On the same day that he signed the petition, Patrick travelled over to Thornton, where he stayed the night at
Kipping House so that early the next morning he could go into Bradford for the annual visitation of the diocese. He was to break his journey into Bradford by staying overnight at Kipping House several times over the next few months, but it was not until 8 September that Elizabeth Firth and her father braved the journey to Haworth to dine with the Brontës in their new home.
⁴⁶
This was to be the first and last time that the two families would meet at Haworth for, at the beginning of December, Mr Firth fell ill. Patrick visited him on the 13th and again on the 21st, when it became clear that his friend was dying. He was in deep depression of spirits, but Patrick comforted him and ‘By God's blessing and Mr Brontë's conversation [he] became more happy', spending all the following day in ‘holy ecstacies'. On 27 December, he died.
⁴⁷

The new year of 1821 began sorrowfully enough as Patrick returned to Thornton on 2 January 1821 to officiate at the burial, but this was as nothing compared with the grief that was to come.
⁴⁸
Shortly after his return home, on 29 January, Maria, his wife, was suddenly taken dangerously ill. It was obvious from the start that her illness was mortal and Patrick was at his wits' end, expecting her imminent demise ‘During every week and almost every day' of the seven and a half months it took her to die. Patrick called in Thomas Andrew, the local surgeon, and consulted several other medical men ‘but all their skill was in vain'. She had cancer, probably of the uterus, and there was little anyone could do to help her.
⁴⁹
Nevertheless, Patrick bought the medicines and tried every remedy available, noting in his copy of Graham's
Modern Domestic Medicine,
purchased a few years later, in the margin of the pages on cancer that ‘Drinking a table spoonful of brandy, & water \and salt,/ four times a day, and bathing with this mixture; the parts affected, is said to be good for a cancer'. Beneath this he added the grim postscript: ‘This remains to be proved – B.' He may even have called in a surgeon in a vain effort to save his wife for, having noted that excision was the surest method of removing cancer in its earliest stages, he went on to write, ‘As I have read, and seen, sometimes but not always – when a cancer, is radically cut out in one part, it breaks out in another – B.'
⁵⁰

As Maria gradually grew weaker and needed more care than Patrick's duties would permit him to give her, he was forced to employ a nurse. She bathed and tended the invalid during the day but it was Patrick, and Patrick alone, who nursed his ‘beloved sufferer' during the long, lonely hours of the night.
⁵¹
Though his heart cannot have been in his work and he must have been exhausted, mentally and physically, by the strain of Maria's illness, Patrick was meticulous in performing his ministerial duties. Throughout the long, terrible months, until Maria died, he missed only one burial out of sixty-three and two baptisms out of 192, performing all twenty-one marriages.
⁵²

Torn between the relentless round of his duties and the long hours spent nursing his wife, Patrick felt the loneliness of his situation for the first time. ‘Had I been at D[ewsbury] I should not have wanted kind friends;' he told John Buckworth, ‘had I been at H[artshead], I should have seen them, and others, occasionally; or had I been at T[hornton], a family there, who were ever truly kind, would have soothed my sorrows; but I was at [Haworth], a stranger in a strange land.'
⁵³

This was a pardonable exaggeration. Though it was not the same as having her just down the road in Thornton, Elizabeth Firth came over several times to visit the stricken household. On 9 February she found Maria ‘very poorly' so she came again on 21 February and in March. When she could not visit in person, she wrote. Even more kindly, and demonstrating the practical consideration that Patrick needed so much, she arrived in Haworth on 26 May in a post chaise with her friend and fellow godmother to the Brontë children, Fanny Outhwaite. The two ladies carried off the young Maria and Elizabeth, taking them back to Kipping House for a month.
⁵⁴

If Elizabeth Firth did so much to help, it is inconceivable that Maria's relatives, the Morgans and the Fennells, did not offer some assistance.
⁵⁵
Though both William Morgan and John Fennell were heavily committed in their own parishes and could offer Patrick no assistance in his ministerial duties, they must have visited the family in their plight. The sheer distances involved, however, meant that those to whom the Brontës were closest were unable to be in constant attendance. After only eight months in Haworth, and those spent in difficult circumstances trying to heal the differences that had arisen over Patrick's appointment, the Brontës were not yet on intimate terms with anyone in the town. The situation was not improved by the fact that Patrick was too proud to admit that he was in trouble and that he needed help.
⁵⁶
Despite this, the family was still shown kindness by, for example, the Greenwoods of Bridge House, who were ‘remarkably attentive and kind to Mrs Brontë in her illness, and … paid the children the attention of asking them occasionally to tea'.
⁵⁷
If the Greenwoods, who were Particular Baptists and had no obligation to the family, responded in the crisis, it seems unlikely that members of Patrick's own congregation and his supporters among the trustees would not have assisted their minister.

For Patrick the lowest point came on ‘a gloomy day, a day of clouds and darkness', when Maria seemed at death's door, lying cold and silent, hardly
seeming to notice what was happening around her. That day, three of the children were taken ill with scarlet fever. As if Patrick had not already enough to bear, the next day, the other three were also taken ill with the same infection. Scarlet fever was then a mortal sickness, so death threatened not only his wife but all six of his children. His faith severely tested by the trials he was forced to endure, Patrick nearly broke under the weight of ‘the greatest load of sorrows that ever pressed on me' and prayed for relief. It came. All the children recovered, Maria's condition improved slightly and a few weeks later, her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, arrived from Penzance to help.
⁵⁸