Brontës (17 page)

Perhaps, some, who are daily, & hourly sinking under the distresses & privations, which attend extreme poverty … may indignantly exclaim, ‘Is it not an evil to be deprived of the necessaries of life? Can there be any anguish equal to that occasioned by the sight of objects, dear as your own soul, famishing with cold & hunger? Is it no evil, to hear the heart-rending cries of your children, craving for that, which you have it not in your power to give them? And, as an aggravation of this distress to know, that some are surfeited by abundance, at the same time, that you, & yours are perishing for want?' Yes, these are evils indeed of peculiar bitterness; & he must be less than man, that can behold them without sympathy, & an active desire to relieve them.
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In such straits, Maria argued, Christian charity is always there to relieve the worldly needs of the poor and religion will bring solace and contentment. She ended with a pious exhortation:

It surely is the duty of all christians, to exert themselves, in every possible way, to promote the instruction, & conversion of the Poor; &, above all, to pray with all the ardor of christian faith, & love, that every poor man, may be a religious man.
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It is easy to mock the naivety of Maria's sentiments and to dismiss her arguments as ‘the usual Methodist palliative', but there is no question of her sincerity or her genuine piety. What is more, Maria was setting an example of female literary activity to her daughters which, together with Patrick's publications, was to be an inspiration to the future novelists. The article was probably intended for
The Pastoral Visitor,
or possibly for John Buckworth's
The Cottage Magazine;
it would have been equally appropriate for either publication.
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Literary activity aside, there was plenty to occupy the Brontës. On 6 September 1815, there was excitement in the township when Elizabeth Firth's father married Ann Greame of Exley, near Halifax, and brought her back to Kipping House to be introduced to the neighbours.
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A few weeks later, there were three evenings of concerts in Bradford, featuring Handel's oratorio
Messiah,
to celebrate the consecration on 12 October of a brand new church, Christ Church, at the top of Darley Street. It is more than likely that Patrick would have attended the consecration, not only as a mark of respect to the Archbishop of York, who performed the ceremony, but also to support William Morgan who, immediately afterwards, was nominated
minister of the new church by John Crosse. It was to be an important post, making Morgan a dominant influence (not always to the good) in church affairs in Bradford. Unusually, instead of renting out its pews to the congregation, who had to pay for the privilege of taking their place in them, Christ Church had 500 free places. This made it an ideal base from which to carry the Evangelical message to the poor though such altruism had its price: a year after its consecration, the church was still over £1000 in debt on its building costs.
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The day after the consecration, there was the satisfaction of attending the annual meeting of the Bradford Auxiliary of the Bible Society and hearing that it had gone from strength to strength in the town.
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In Bradford, too, Patrick joined the Library and Literary Society, though the annual subscription of a pound a year soon proved to be an expense he could ill afford and he only kept up his membership for a year.
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The year 1816 opened more hopefully than its predecessor. On Thursday, 18 January, there were national celebrations for the restoration of peace in Europe and Patrick, like ministers in churches and chapels throughout the land, held special services of public thanksgiving in the Old Bell Chapel.
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On the domestic front, too, there were significant changes in the Brontë household during the year. On 21 April, Maria gave birth to her third daughter who, as had now become established practice, was named after another Branwell, Maria's younger sister, Charlotte. Elizabeth Firth presented the new baby with a little cap which she had hand-worked herself, but this time it was her cousin, Frances Walker, who was asked to be a godmother. Charlotte Brontë was baptized by William Morgan in Thornton on Saturday, 29 June; her godfather was the former incumbent, Frances Walker's fiancé, Thomas Atkinson, and it seems likely that Charlotte Branwell, though absent in Penzance, was her other godmother.
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A little celebration dinner was held at Kipping House some two weeks later, to which all the Brontë family were invited and the new baby was shown off to the Misses Haigh and Glover and Mrs Outhwaite.
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Elizabeth Branwell, Maria's sister, had been living with the family for well over a year and now, having seen Maria safely through her latest confinement, she was anxious to return home to Penzance. On 25 July, the two sisters drank tea together at Kipping House for the last time and the following Sunday, after Patrick had preached on the text, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever', the two Elizabeths bade each other farewell. For once, Elizabeth Firth's diary was, for her, positively effusive: ‘I
took leave of Miss Branwell. She kissed me and was much affected. She left Thornton that evening.'
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Maria must have felt the loss of her sister particularly badly though Elizabeth Firth kindly called the next day, and two days later, and then invited the family to tea with the Misses Marshall and Ibbotson and John Outhwaite, the Bradford surgeon.
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Her assistance in running the household was especially missed now that Maria had three children, all under the age of three. The solution was to get either a housekeeper or a nursemaid – and preferably someone who could fill both roles. Perhaps on the advice of his church friends in Bradford, Patrick applied to the Bradford School of Industry for a girl to take the position of nursemaid at the parsonage. The School of Industry was a charity school, set up in rooms in Kirkgate in 1806, to ‘train … girls of poor parents in habits of industry'. Some sixty girls, attending either in the morning or the afternoon only, were taught to sew, knit and read (in that order); their clothes were provided for them out of the proceeds of their own work and if they attended the parish church regularly, learnt their collects and psalms, and always had their scissors and sheath, thimble and handkerchief to hand, they were rewarded with I'½id. a quarter. The obsessions of the school with cropping hair short, forbidding any sort of personal adornment and meting out (by today's standards) barbaric punishments for relatively minor offences, are strongly reminiscent of Lowood School in
Jane Eyre.
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The girl who was selected for the Brontës was Nancy Garrs, one of the twelve children of Richard Garrs of Westgate in Bradford, who was thirteen years old.
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The first of remarkably few servants employed by the Brontës, she, like her successors, was devoted to them and remained a loyal friend long after she had left their service. Into her capable hands the young Brontës could be safely entrusted while their parents were occupied in parish affairs.

Domestic upheaval was more than matched by events in the parish. On 17 June 1816, the Reverend John Crosse, vicar of Bradford, died. An immense loss to the parish which he had served for thirty-two years, his death was also a blow to Patrick and his family. Despite his blindness, he had been an exemplary parish priest and he represented all the beliefs that Patrick held most dear. An Evangelical, friend of the Fletchers of Madeley, he had actively promoted missionary activity at home and abroad: he had supported the Sunday school movement and initiated the building of Christ Church in Bradford; he had been involved in the formation of Bradford Auxiliaries of the Bible Society and the Society for Promoting Christianity
among the Jews.
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In each and every one of his causes he was backed to the hilt by the men he had taken care to appoint to the ministry in the Bradford area – men who, like himself, had come from the charmed circles of Cambridge and Madeley – men who included his curate, John Fennell, and his ministers, William Morgan and Patrick Brontë. Indeed, only two weeks before his death, Patrick had preached an excellent sermon on the appropriate text ‘for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea' at the parish church to the Bradford Female Auxiliary Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.
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Perhaps Patrick, like Morgan and Fennell, visited Crosse on his deathbed and was encouraged and inspired by the serenity with which he went to meet his Maker.

after having lived
an useful life,
he died, as might be expected,
a comfortable death:
his sun set with splendour, without the least appearance of a cloud to darken his mind, or to obscure his prospect of heaven. All was tranquil and serene as the summer's evening: and so complete was the conquest that he gained over the fears of death, that he said more than once, to his friends and attendants, ‘Dying is no more to me than the passing from one chamber to another. I have no fears of death. I had rather die than live. I long to depart and to be with Christ.'
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One of the few churchmen to be genuinely regretted by all classes of society, including the Dissenters with whom he had been on good terms, Crosse was held up as an example to all by both Fennell, in the funeral sermon which he preached on 23 June, and by Morgan who, after a stormy relationship with a later vicar of Bradford, looked back with nostalgia to the days of the blind vicar and wrote a eulogistic biography of him, significantly titled
The Parish Priest.
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It was a matter of some moment who would be appointed to replace John Crosse and it must necessarily have been some disappointment when the Reverend Henry Heap, from Todmorden in the Calder Valley, was appointed. A mild and affable man, his main claims to fame were that he had been noticed as a youth by John Crosse, when the latter was vicar of Todmorden and Cross Stone, and that he had trained for the ministry at his suggestion.
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Heap could not fill his predecessor's illustrious shoes. His equally long tenure of the vicarage of Bradford was to be marked by a sharp decline in the good relations previously enjoyed between churchmen and Dissenters and, indeed, between the parish and its daughter churches. It was
perhaps appropriate that the year should come to a close with the greatest eclipse of the sun for over fifty years: in Yorkshire, five-sixths of the sun was obscured for just over two hours between 8 a.m. and 10.15 a.m. on 19 November. Elizabeth Firth noted in her diary, ‘We observed a beautiful eclipse of the sun; the sky was very clear till it arrived at its greatest obscurity; it was thereafter enveloped in clouds [:] a great gloom.'
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There was indeed a great gloom over Thornton and the rest of the country throughout the winter of 1816 to 1817. The ending of the war had not brought economic revival, and the combination of a downturn in trade and a hard winter brought great distress amongst the poor. The pages of the
Leeds Mercury
for these months make grim reading: had it not been for the provision of soup kitchens and public subscriptions, all raised through the work of volunteers, there is no doubt that the mortality rates would have risen even higher than they did. Patrick, too, must have been active in trying to alleviate local distress; in his first year at Thornton he had initiated an annual collection for the poor in Ireland, so it is hardly likely that he would ignore the suffering on his own doorstep.
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As it was, the distress brought a repeat of the problems of 1812. The number of mechanized mills had increased rapidly since then and skilled workers like the croppers, to take only one example out of many, found that out of a total of 3378 men employed in the trade in 1817, a third were unemployed and a further third were only partly employed.
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It was no surprise when the Luddites began to meet again and there were fears of a general insurrection. In June, ten Dewsbury men were arrested for plotting rebellion, including the former keeper of the Yew Tree Inn at Roberttown and a card maker from Hightown, both of whom must have been known personally to Patrick. It turned out that the ‘plot' was simply the wild talk of desperate men and that the main ‘plotter' was actually a government
agent provocateur.
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Nevertheless, it was a time of deep concern for Patrick and he would have had to redouble his efforts to ensure that those who needed charity received it.

At the parsonage, the even tenor of life was undisturbed by the turmoil in the country. Maria was pregnant again, though this did not restrict her social activities as it might have done in the more prudish Victorian age. She continued to take tea with Elizabeth Firth each week and doubtless met the other ladies of the township on a regular basis too. In March, a new visitor came to stay with the Brontës. Miss Thomas, as Elizabeth Firth noted, came to stay on 18 March and remained for at least two
months.
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Her relationship to the household is not known. She cannot have been a servant or nurse to assist in Maria's latest confinement, as this did not occur till the end of June, by which time she appears to have left; nor would Miss Firth of Kipping House have admitted Miss Thomas to her tea drinkings, visits and rambles around Thornton unless, like Elizabeth Branwell, she was a lady of some social standing. It is unlikely that she was a governess, as the Brontës' eldest child, Maria, was only just three years old and not yet ready for schooling. The only alternatives left are that she was either a relative, most likely from Penzance, or a friend from either Penzance or the Hartshead area.

On 11 May, Patrick persuaded Miss Thomas, Elizabeth Firth and her guest, Miss Fanny Greame, who was a relative of her stepmother, to begin attending the Sunday school as teachers.
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Patrick was particularly anxious to nurture his Sunday school, which was still in its infancy. Despite his best efforts, it attracted only a hundred pupils, whereas the four Dissenting Sunday schools in his chapelry taught 770 children between them. The strength of the Dissenting interest meant that Patrick was hamstrung in his efforts to finance the school and had to rely on the voluntary contributions of his congregation. Nevertheless, he battled on, introducing the new method of instruction recommended by the National Society and persuading his better-educated parishioners to act as teachers.
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