Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (564 page)

His will, which was proved at Wakefield, left the bulk of his property, as was natural, to the son-in-law who had faithfully served and tended him for the six years which succeeded Charlotte Brontë’s death.

 
Extracted from the Principal Registry of the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice.

Being of sound mind and judgment
,
in the name of God the Father
,
Son
,
and Holy Ghost
,
I
, Patrick Brontë, B.A.,
Incumbent of Haworth
,
in the Parish of Bradford and county of York
,
make this my last Will and Testament
:
I leave forty pounds to be equally divided amongst all my brothers and sisters to whom I gave considerable sums in times past
;
And I direct the same sum of forty pounds to be sent for distribution to Mr. Hugh Brontë
,
Ballinasceaugh
,
near Loughbrickland
,
Ireland
;
I leave thirty pounds to my servant
,
Martha Brown
,
as a token of regard for long and faithful services to me and my children
;
To my beloved and esteemed son-in-law
,
the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls
, B.A.,
I leave and bequeath the residue of my personal estate of every description which I shall be possessed of at my death for his own absolute benefit
;
And I make him my sole executor
;
And I revoke all former and other Wills
,
in witness whereof I
,
the said
Patrick Brontë,
have to this my last Will
,
contained in this sheet of paper
,
set my hand this twentieth day of June
,
one thousand eight hundred and fifty-five
.

Patrick Brontë. —
Signed and acknowledged by the said
Patrick Brontë
as his Will in the presence of us present at the same time
,
and who in his presence and in the presence of each other have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses
: Joseph Redman, Eliza Brown.

The Irish relatives are not forgotten, and indeed this will gives the most direct evidence of the fact that for the sixty years that he had been absent from his native land he had always kept his own country, or at least his relatives in County Down, sufficiently in mind.

CHAPTER II: CHILDHOOD

Eighty years have passed over Thornton since that village had the honour of becoming the birthplace of Charlotte Brontë.  The visitor of to-day will find the Bell Chapel, in which Mr. Brontë officiated, a mere ruin, and the font in which his children were baptized ruthlessly exposed to the winds of heaven.
 
  The house in which Patrick Brontë resided is now a butcher’s shop, and indeed little, one imagines, remains the same.  But within the new church one may still overhaul the registers, and find, with but little trouble, a record of the baptism of the Brontë children.  There, amid the names of the rough and rude peasantry of the neighbourhood, we find the accompanying entries,
  
differing from their neighbours only by the fact that Mr. Morgan or Mr. Fennell came to the help of their relatives and officiated in place of Mr. Brontë.  Mr. Brontë, it will be observed, had already received his appointment to Haworth when Anne was baptized.

There were, it is well known, two elder children, Maria and Elizabeth, born at Hartshead, and doomed to die speedily at Haworth.  A vague memory of Maria lives in the Helen Burns of
Jane Eyre
, but the only tangible records of the pair, as far as I am able to ascertain, are a couple of samplers, of the kind which Mrs. Brontë and her sisters had worked at Penzance a generation earlier.

 
Maria Brontë finished this Sampler on the 16th of May at the age of eight years

one of them tells us, and the other:

Elizabeth Brontë finished this Sampler the 27th of July at the age of seven years
.

Maria died at the age of twelve in May 1825, and Elizabeth in June of the same year, at the age of eleven.  It is, however, with their three sisters that we have most concern, although all the six children accompanied their parents to Haworth in 1820.

 
Haworth, we are told, has been over-described; and yet it may not be amiss to discover from the easily available directories what manner of place it was during the Brontë residence there.  Pigot’s Yorkshire Directory of 1828 gives the census during the first year of Mr. Brontë’s incumbency thus: —

Haworth,
a populous manufacturing village
,
in the honour of Pontefract
,
Morley wapentake
,
and in the parish of Bradford
,
is four miles south of Keighley
,
containing
,
by the census of
1821, 4668
inhabitants
.

Gentry and Clergy
:
Brontë
,
Rev. Patrick
,
Haworth
;
Heaton
,
Robert
,
gent.
,
Ponden Hall
;
Miles
,
Rev. Oddy
,
Haworth
;
Saunders
,
Rev. Moses
,
Haworth
.

From the same source twenty years later we obtain more explicit detail, which is not without interest to-day.

Haworth
is a chapelry
,
comprising the hamlets of Haworth
,
Stanbury
,
and Near and Far Oxenhope
,
in the parish of Bradford
,
and wapentake of Morley
,
West Riding
—
Haworth being ten miles from Bradford
,
about the same distance from Halifax
,
Colne
,
and Skipton
,
three and a half miles S. from Keighley
,
and eight from Hebden Bridge
,
at which latter place is a station on the Leeds and Manchester railway
. 
Haworth is situated on the side of a hill
,
and consists of one irregularly built street
—
the habitations in that part called Oxenhope being yet more scattered
,
and Stanbury still farther distant
;
the entire chapelry occupying a wide space
. 
The spinning of worsted
,
and the manufacture of stuffs
,
are branches which here prevail extensively
.

The Church or rather chapel
(
subject to Bradford
),
dedicated to St. Michael
,
was rebuilt in
1757:
the living is a perpetual curacy
,
in the presentation of the vicar of Bradford and certain trustees
;
the present curate is the Rev. Patrick
 
Brontë
. 
The other places of worship are two chapels for baptists
,
one each for primitive and Wesleyan methodists
,
and another at Oxenhope for the latter denomination
. 
There are two excellent free schools
—
one at Stanbury
,
the other
,
called the Free Grammar School
,
near Oxenhope
;
besides which there are several neat edifices erected for Sunday teaching
. 
There are three annual fairs
:
they are held on Easter-Monday
,
the second Monday after St. Peter’s day
(
old style
),
and the first Monday after Old Michaelmas day
. 
The chapelry of Haworth
,
and its dependent hamlets
,
contained by the returns for
1831, 5835
inhabitants
;
and by the census taken in June
, 1841,
the population amounted to
6301.

Haworth needs even to-day no further description, but the house in which Mr. Brontë resided, from 1820 till his death in 1861, has not been over-described, perhaps because Mr. Brontë’s successor has not been too well disposed to receive the casual visitor to Haworth under his roof.

Many changes have been made since Mr. Brontë died, but the house still retains its essentially interesting features.  In the time of the Brontës, it is true, the front outlook was as desolate as to-day it is attractive.  Then there was a little piece of barren ground running down to the walls of the churchyard, with here and there a currant-bush as the sole adornment.  Now we see an abundance of trees and a well-kept lawn.  Miss Ellen Nussey well remembers seeing Emily and Anne, on a fine summer afternoon, sitting on stools in this bit of garden plucking currants from the poor insignificant bushes.  There was no premonition of the time, not so far distant, when the rough doorway separating the churchyard from the garden, which was opened for their mother when they were little children, should be opened again time after time in rapid succession for their own biers to be carried through.  This gateway is now effectively bricked up.  In the days of the Brontës it was reserved for the
 
passage of the dead — a grim arrangement, which, strange to say, finds no place in any one of the sisters’ stories.  We enter the house, and the door on the right leads into Mr. Brontë’s study, always called the parlour; that on the left into the dining-room, where the children spent a great portion of their lives.  From childhood to womanhood, indeed, the three girls regularly breakfasted with their father in his study.  In the dining-room — a square and simple room of a kind common enough in the houses of the poorer middle-classes — they ate their mid-day dinner, their tea and supper.  Mr. Brontë joined them at tea, although he always dined alone in his study.  The children’s dinner-table has been described to me by a visitor to the house.  At one end sat Miss Branwell, at the other, Charlotte, with Emily and Anne on either side.  Branwell was then absent.  The living was of the simplest.  A single joint, followed invariably by one kind or another of milk-pudding.  Pastry was unknown in the Brontë household.  Milk-puddings, or food composed of milk and rice, would seem to have made the principal diet of Emily and Anne Brontë, and to this they added a breakfast of Scotch porridge, which they shared with their dogs.  It is more interesting, perhaps, to think of all the daydreams in that room, of the mass of writing which was achieved there, of the conversations and speculation as to the future.  Miss Nussey has given a pleasant picture of twilight when Charlotte and she walked with arms encircling one another round and round the table, and Emily and Anne followed in similar fashion.  There was no lack of cheerfulness and of hope at that period.  Behind Mr. Brontë’s studio was the kitchen; and there we may easily picture the Brontë children telling stories to Tabby or Martha, or to whatever servant reigned at the time, and learning, as all of them did, to become thoroughly domesticated — Emily most of all.  Behind the dining-room was a
 
peat-room, which, when Charlotte was married in 1854, was cleared out and converted into a little study for Mr. Nicholls.  The staircase with its solid banister remains as it did half a century ago; and at its foot one is still shown the corner which tradition assigns as the scene of Emily’s conflict with her dog Keeper.  On the right, at the back, as you mount the staircase, was a small room allotted to Branwell as a studio.  On the other side of this staircase, also at the back, was the servants’ room.  In the front of the house, immediately over the dining-room, was Miss Branwell’s room, afterwards the spare bedroom until Charlotte Brontë married.  In that room she died.  On the left, over Mr. Brontë’s study, was Mr. Brontë’s bedroom.  It was the room which, for many years, he shared with Branwell, and it was in that room that Branwell and his father died at an interval of twenty years.  On the staircase, half-way up, was a grandfather’s clock, which Mr. Brontë used to wind up every night on his way to bed.  He always went to bed at nine o’clock, and Miss Nussey well remembers his stentorian tones as he called out as he left his study and passed the dining-room door — ‘Don’t be up late, children’ — which they usually were.  Between these two front rooms upstairs, and immediately over the passage, with a door facing the staircase, was a box room; but this was the children’s nursery, where for many years the children slept, where the bulk of their little books were compiled, and where, it is more than probable,
The Professor
and
Jane Eyre
were composed.

Of the work of the Brontë children in these early years, a great deal might be written.  Mrs. Gaskell gives a list of some eighteen booklets, but at least eighteen more from the pen of Charlotte are in existence.  Branwell was equally prolific; and of him, also, there remains an immense mass of childish effort.  That Emily and Anne were industrious in a like measure there is abundant reason to
 
believe; but scarcely one of their juvenile efforts remains to us, nor even the unpublished fragments of later years, to which reference will be made a little later.  Whether Emily and Anne on the eve of their death deliberately destroyed all their treasures, or whether they were destroyed by Charlotte in the days of her mourning, will never be known.  Meanwhile one turns with interest to the efforts of Charlotte and Branwell.  Charlotte’s little stories commence in her thirteenth year, and go on until she is twenty-three.  From thirteen to eighteen she would seem to have had one absorbing hero.  It was the Duke of Wellington; and her hero-worship extended to the children of the Duke, who, indeed, would seem even more than their father to have absorbed her childish affections.  Whether the stories are fairy tales or dramas of modern life, they all alike introduce the Marquis of Douro, who afterwards became the second Duke of Wellington, and Lord Charles Wellesley, whose son is now the third Duke of Wellington.  The length of some of these fragments is indeed incredible.  They fill but a few sheets of notepaper in that tiny handwriting; but when copied by zealous admirers, it is seen that more than one of them is twenty thousand words in length.

The Foundling
, by Captain Tree, written in 1833, is a story of thirty-five thousand words, though the manuscript has only eighteen pages. 
The Green Dwarf
, written in the same year, is even longer, and indeed after her return from Roe Head in 1833, Charlotte must have devoted herself to continuous writing. 
The Adventures of Ernest Alembert
is a booklet of this date, and
Arthuriana
,
or Odds and Ends
:
being a Miscellaneous Collection of Pieces in Prose and Verse
, by Lord Charles Wellesley, is yet another.

The son of the Iron Duke is made to talk, in these little books, in a way which would have gladdened the heart of a modern interviewer:

‘Lord Charles,’ said Mr. Rundle to me one afternoon lately,
 
‘I have an engagement to drink tea with an old college chum this evening, so I shall give you sixty lines of the
Æneid
to get ready during my absence.  If it is not ready by the time I come back you know the consequences.’  ‘Very well, Sir,’ said I, bringing out the books with a prodigious bustle, and making a show as if I intended to learn a whole book instead of sixty lines of the
Æneid
.  This appearance of industry, however, lasted no longer than until the old gentleman’s back was turned.  No sooner had he fairly quitted the room than I flung aside the musty tomes, took my cap, and speeding through chamber, hall, and gallery, was soon outside the gates of Waterloo Palace.’