Brontës (32 page)

At the end of November 1825, under orders from the vicar of Bradford, every minister in the parish had to present to his congregation for signature a requisition to Mr Fontayne Wilson, requesting him to stand as a candidate for Parliament in the next election because he was opposed to Roman Catholic Emancipation. Most ministers made the requisition available for signature in the vestry after the service but some of the more zealous, including William Morgan, introduced and read it during divine service.
⁵
As Patrick was in favour of partial reform by 1829, he is unlikely to have adopted such a provocative stance.

Politics were also intruding into the working life of his parishioners. At the end of September, fifty-six mill owners and manufacturers in Keighley followed Bradford's example and declared that they would dismiss any combers or weavers who joined or supported trade unions. The effect of this, combined with poor trade and the collapse of a number of banks throughout the country, was to increase unemployment dramatically. At the end of December the failure of a private bank in Keighley, Butterworths, had such a terrible knock-on effect that many small businesses in the area also collapsed. A committee for the relief of the suffering poor was set up, but a public subscription in the district failed because the distress was too general, among masters as well as the men.
⁶
By May, out of 6691 factory operatives surveyed in Keighley, 4524 were completely unemployed and the remainder were only working a three-day week. Two months later, six mills were shut altogether, and the poor rates had risen to sixteen shillings in the pound. The situation in Haworth, though unrecorded, must have been similar.
⁷

The poverty and unemployment were to continue throughout the year, adding considerably to Patrick's workload because, as the incumbent, he was partly responsible for organizing the raising of poor rates and their distribution. In addition, he did what he could to help individuals. In a judgement of Solomon, for instance, and ‘owing to the hardness of the times, and very nearly an equality of merit', he appointed not one but two parish clerks who were to officiate in alternate months and share the dues and Easter collection between them. Both men could therefore look forward to a certain, if reduced income for the forthcoming year. This was a highly unorthodox settlement of what had obviously been a long-running and acrimonious dispute. With quiet humour, Patrick observed, ‘I think I see Mr Taylor
smile
whilst he reads it.'
⁸
Patrick's charities were, of necessity, small-scale and unobtrusive. He did not have the financial status to enable
him to perform grand gestures, like Theodore Dury who annually treated 500 Sunday-school children and their teachers to a fete and tea at the vicarage at Keighley.
⁹
The two men were friends, however, and committed to the same ends. Later in the year Dury preached a sermon at Haworth on behalf of the Sunday school and Patrick reciprocated by addressing the Keighley Auxiliary Bible Society. On the latter occasion Patrick had the dubious honour of sharing the platform with William Carus Wilson, the first time he had met the man since the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. One can only guess at his thoughts, particularly as by this time he must have been made aware of Charlotte's views on the Clergy Daughters' School. It may perhaps be significant that he does not appear to have attended the following year, when Wilson was once again one of the principal speakers.
¹⁰

Distress in the manufacturing districts continued unabated. Violent electrical storms throughout the summer, which had set fire to many of the surrounding moorlands, gave way to a harsh winter. On 9 December, Patrick buried Timothy Feather, the schoolmaster at Heptonstall, who had got lost on the moors returning from a visit to his father; his body had been discovered in trackless snow seven miles out of his way.
¹¹
Typhus fever was virulent in the neighbourhood: one of Patrick's parishioners, Benjamin Burwin of Far Oxenhope, lost his wife, four daughters, three sons and a grandson in under three months. Conditions were so bad that Haworth merited its own separate grant of £100 for the relief of the poor in February 1827.
¹²
It was to be three full months after that before the woollen trade began to revive.

On 12 July 1827, William Wilberforce arrived in Keighley for a four-day visit to Theodore Dury. The presence of ‘The African's Friend' was marked by a pink flag flying from the church tower and peals of bells.
¹³
Given his friendship with Dury and his own connections with Wilberforce, it seems more than likely that Patrick was one of those fortunate enough to be invited to Keighley vicarage to meet the great man. The Sunday after Wilberforce's departure, the vicar of Bradford came to Haworth and preached on behalf of the Sunday school to an overflowing church. In scenes reminiscent of Grimshaw's days, several hundred people were said to have crowded the churchyard in an attempt to hear his sermon.
¹⁴
The Brontë children were doubtless prominent in the congregation. A great deal more exciting for them was the balloon flight from Keighley to Colne of Mr Green, ‘the celebrated aeronaut'. Huge crowds gathered in Keighley to watch his ascent, but the Brontës would have enjoyed a perfect view of the
intrepid balloonist from their own home or the moors behind it. The event clearly made an impression on them, as balloon flights feature frequently in the juvenilia.
¹⁵

Throughout the terrible years of distress and the reprieve that followed, life at Haworth Parsonage continued in its daily routine of lessons, walks and play. From the books that we know the Brontës possessed, it is possible to deduce something of the education Patrick offered his children. Standard educational texts of the day which they owned included Thomas Salmon's
New Geographical and Historical Grammar
, Oliver Goldsmith's four-volume
History of England
condensed into one volume, Rollins'
History
and J. Goldsmith's
A Grammar of General Geography
.
¹⁶
The last is heavily annotated throughout by all the Brontë children and obviously provided inspiration for the maps and place names of the fictional kingdoms they were soon to invent. There was also a copy of Hannah More's
Moral Sketches
, purchased by Patrick while he was at Thornton, which was required reading in all literate households at the time.
¹⁷
Three other favourite books of the period were in their little library: a 1743 edition of John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
, a 1791 edition of the hymn writer Isaac Watts'
Doctrine of the Passions
and a 1797 edition of John Milton's
Paradise Lost
. All three were to be seminal influences on the young Brontës and a constant source of quotation, just as they had been for their father.
¹⁸

The fact that so many of the Brontës' books were second-hand reflects not only the high price of books at the time but also their own lack of funds to spend on such extravagances. Patrick still had his classical texts from Cambridge – his Homer, Horace, Lemprière's
Bibliotheca Classica
– and his copy of Walter Scott's
Lay of the Last Minstrel
. Maria had a small collection of books from Penzance, which had survived the shipwreck of her box just before her marriage. Among these were her copy of Thomas à Kempis'
Extract of the Christian's Pattern
, a well-thumbed edition of
The Seasons
by the poet James Thomson, and
The Union Dictionary
, a compilation of the dictionaries of Johnson, Sheridan and Walker.
¹⁹

Rather less worthy, but infinitely more exciting, as the twenty-four-year-old Charlotte later wistfully recalled, were Maria's copies of the
Lady's Magazine
.

I read them before I knew how to criticize or object – they were old books belonging to my mother or my Aunt; they had crossed the Sea, had suffered ship-wreck and were discoloured with brine – I read them as a treat on holiday
afternoons or by stealth when I should have been minding my lessons – I shall never see anything which will interest me so much again – One black day my father burnt them because they contained foolish love stories. With all my heart I wish I had been born in time to contribute to the Lady's Magazine.

Interestingly, Aunt Branwell did not share Patrick's opinion: ‘she thinks the tales of the Lady's Magazine infinitely superior to any trash of Modern literature. So do I for I read them in childhood and childhood has a very strong faculty of admiration but a very weak one of Criticism'.
²⁰

It is likely that Maria or Aunt Branwell also brought copies of
The Methodist Magazine
from Penzance: the 1799 edition, for example, contained a memoir of the life of John Kingston who had married their own sister, Jane, in 1800. Charlotte had clearly read these too, describing them as ‘mad … full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism'.
²¹

In addition to the wilder side of religion, there were any number of the basic religious texts. In all his teaching and writing Patrick had emphasized the importance of reading the Bible and his children knew their Bibles inside out. In addition to their father's copies, the children each had their own Bible and Prayer Book. 13 February 1827 must have been a day worth commemorating, for Emily was given a Bible ‘by her affectionate Father' and Anne a Book of Common Prayer by her godmother, Fanny Outhwaite. Anne had already been given a Bible by her other godmother, Elizabeth Firth, in October 1823, when Elizabeth and her father ‘renewed their acquaintance' after Patrick's disastrous proposal. Charlotte's New Testament was a gift from the Morgans. Jane Morgan, Maria's cousin, died in the last week of September 1827 and was buried in her father's churchyard at Cross Stone. Patrick was too busy in Haworth to stay with the bereaved family, but he must have attended the funeral at Cross Stone and visited again two days later, when Morgan presented him with his wife's copy of the Prayer Book in Greek as a memorial of her.
²²

Patrick was to use the various copies of the Bible and Prayer Books as a tool for instructing his children in the classics. Their familiarity would make it easier to learn the new language in which they were written. In his vernacular copy of the New Testament, for instance, Branwell marked his progress in translating to and from the Latin text.
²³
Though it is generally supposed that only Branwell received instruction in the classics from his father, there is evidence to suggest that his sisters shared at least some of his
lessons. When William Makepeace Thackeray read
Jane Eyre
in 1847, he commented, ‘Who the author can be I can't guess; if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a classical education.'
²⁴

While it was commonplace for ladies to speak and write the modern languages, it was rare to find one who was familiar with Latin, Greek and Ancient History. Unlike Branwell, Charlotte never quotes from the Greek and only rarely uses Latin tags, but her work is littered with classical references, which suggest more than a passing acquaintance with the writings of the ancient world. At the very least she was thoroughly familiar with the translations from the classics, like John Dryden's English verse version of the works of Virgil, which was already at the parsonage at this time.
²⁵
Emily and Anne, too, were familiar with classical language as well as literature. Emily was adept enough at Latin to be able to translate and make notes on Virgil's
Aeneid
and Anne bought a copy of a Latin text book in November 1843, presumably as an aid to teaching her pupil, Edmund Robinson.
²⁶

The books available to the young Brontës at home were to be the core of their reading and were to shape their ideas for the future. In addition, they had access to books outside the parsonage, as their astonishingly wide range of reading makes clear. Much weight has been given to two particular sources, the library of the Keighley Mechanics' Institute and the private library at Ponden Hall, near Stanbury, which belonged to the Heaton family who were among the trustees of Haworth Church lands.
²⁷
It is often suggested that the young Brontës spent hours browsing through these libraries and that this was where they saw the periodicals, biographies, travel books and works of fiction which had such an impact on their intellectual development.

The role of both libraries has been greatly over-emphasized; indeed, it has not been proven in either case that the Brontës ever used them at all, let alone on a regular basis. The Keighley Mechanics' Institute was founded in 1825, setting up a programme of fortnightly lectures, which included practical demonstrations of chemistry and talks on subjects as diverse as physical astronomy and the wheel and axle. Though primarily intended for the working classes, the lectures were open to ladies and gentlemen, so Patrick and his children had the opportunity to improve their scientific knowledge cheaply and conveniently. This was not the case with the library, however, which would not have been available to them until Patrick became a member in 1833. Though he kept up his membership for ten years, his children clearly had access to books beyond those in their own home for
many years long before this. The rules of the Institute, too, were not calculated to encourage family usage; only two books could be borrowed at one time if the member lived more than a mile from Keighley and only sons (not daughters) could accompany their father to the library.
²⁸
The collection was in any case heavily biased towards the sciences and though it contained many books which the Brontës read and enjoyed, their interests were not particularly served by it.