Brontë weekend in Haworth

Return to Haworth I

After the outstanding AGM of 2010 (a first for me), I felt happily excited when the bus dropped me off in Haworth in the afternoon of 3 June.

Less focused on lectures this time, we had nevertheless a highly enjoyable weekend full of variety again and also extremely amusing in different ways: a great evening of light entertainment provided by Haworth’s Gilbert and Sullivan group (among others a funny and very special version of “Cinderella”), but above anything else the Brontë spoof Withering Looks by Britain’s most famous literary lunatics Maggie Fox and Sue Riding – extremely inventive and utterly hilarious!

We also had lots of fun around the usual dinner at the “Old White Lion” on Sunday evening - pitting our Brontë brains against everyone else while trying to find the correct answers to Judith Bland’s 60 questions out of the Brontë books and lives.

But the real highlight for me was our walk on Sunday morning to Ponden Hall, often cited as the model for the Lintons’ home Thrushcross Grange– although none of the sisters left evidence of making such a link themselves. In part this opinion is due to its location, on the way up to the moors, in part to the fact that there were so few larger houses in this area.

Actually, Ponden Hall corresponds in some measure to the description of Wuthering Heights given by Emily and seems thus far more identifiable with Heathcliff’s home - being less grand and more humble than Thrushcross Grange as described in the novel. The date plaque above the main entrance, by the way, identifies the rebuilt house as dating from 1801 - the date that begins the story in Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë’s association with the Heaton family at Ponden is well documented: one of the Heatons served as a churchwarden to Patrick and it is known that she used the library which was reputedly the finest in West Yorkshire. Branwell Brontë was also a frequent visitor to Ponden where he attended pre-hunting gatherings.

As soon as I entered the large hall - realising that this was Wuthering Heights as I had imagined it – I had a kind of vision, i.e. Heathcliff standing by the fireplace when Mr Lockwood came in and asked for shelter from the snow-storm outside … And a second one in the master bedroom overlooking the valley beyond, where a tiny single-paned window in the east gable - underneath which a box bed, as in Wuthering Heights, was once standing but has sadly disappeared - is said to be the one where Cathy’s ghost knocked at the glass. I closed my eyes one second and could nearly hear her voice pleading: “Let me in, let me in”….

I didn’t take photos – unfortunately for those who read these lines, but not for me because for me the best souvenirs are those that you keep in your heart. And this I will – forever !

Now that I am back home again I feel like Emily when she was away from Haworth – nostalgic and missing the Moors already, their stillness, their grandeur and beauty and I can’t wait to go back to them!

Renate Hurtmanns

Return to Haworth II

There are many delights to sample over the annual Brontë Society weekend in Haworth apart from the hearty Yorkshire fare in its pubs.

There is the opportunity to meet other members. They come from all over the world but the Society’s heart is in Haworth and the Parsonage Museum. Members include local people with a stock of anecdotes from their years in one of Britain’s oldest literary societies as well as encyclopaedic knowledge of every place in Yorkshire ever visited by a Brontë or used in one of their novels (over the weekend we had a private viewing of Ponden Hall, supposedly the model for Wuthering Heights, and a visit to Gawthorpe Hall whose owner introduced Charlotte Brontë to Mrs Gaskell). Some of these Yorkshire members even have links to families who were associated with the Brontës. Thus they form a living link stretching right back to the Brontës themselves.

There are the local researchers like Keighley archivist Ian Dewhirst who spoke about the grimness of working-class life in Haworth in the 1840s with wit and passion, conveying to us the immediacy with which the period can be experienced through the mis-spelt letters of farmers and mill workers of the time. Again, a local enthusiast acting as a living link between us and the past.

There is traditional entertainment such as that provided by the Haworth light opera group, which included one of the monologues performed in 1930s music halls by the comedian Stanley Holloway, recited in a broad Lancashire accent challenging for members from outside the British Isles!

There are the traditional, time-honoured rites of the Brontë Society, such as the annual service for its members in the church where Patrick Brontë preached for over 40 years and the cream tea always partaken of outdoors unless it’s raining too hard.

But the Society isn’t just about the past and tradition. The Museum runs an arts programme with talks and exhibitions by contemporary writers and artists. This year we listened to novelist Sally Vickers (Miss Garnet’s Angel) talking about her work and how the Brontës have influenced it. At the prize-giving for the Society’s literary competition, the winners included many young writers. The winner of the poetry section has just published her first book of poems.

And from this year the Society has a new President. The writer Bonnie Greer is from Chicago, although she has lived in Britain for decades. This was her first AGM and she was delighted to be invited to lead the Society, mingled affably with members and gave us a stirring speech about the need to work to preserve literary societies and museums for future generations.

Helen MacEwan

Photos:
Ponden Hall
Withering Looks
Gawthorpe Hall
Bonnie Greer, the new President of the Brontë Society

Eric in New York

Eric Ruijssenaars, who’s done so much research on the Brontës in Brussels, is spending a year in the USA doing research of a different kind (though he hopes to find time for Brontë investigations too). He has sent this account of his first month there.

On Tuesday April 19th I left the Low Countries to go to the United States. For a year I will be doing research at the New Netherland Institute in Albany, the capital of New York State. It is therefore here that the archives of NYS are housed and thus also the papers of the periodwhen the Dutch ‘owned’ quite a large part of what is now the US (1609-1664, 1673-4). Even after the latter year places like Albany remained overwhelmingly Dutch-speaking for a long time, and up to this day one finds many Dutch names, of places and persons.

It is a great adventure for me of course, and what makes it even better is that I have the opportunity to do Brussels Brontë research here.Many Brontë manuscripts have ended up here in a number of collections all over the country. I hope to find things about the Brontës and their stay in Brussels. It is known many Americans visited the Pensionnat Heger when it was still there, and that Villette was much more popular here than in England.

On Saturday April 23th I had the great pleasure to meet Sue Lonoff again in Manhattan,.after meeting her half a year ago in Brussels where she gave a splendid lecture. It has just been confirmed that she will come to Belgium again in October. In Leuven (Louvain) she will give a talk about the Heger family, at the occasion of the Louise Heger exhibition in the Museum.

In New York I spent five days. It’s a great city. Had the great pleasure to see four paintings of Johannes Vermeer, my favourite painter, at the Metropolitan Museum, as well as a marvellous collection of Egyptian antiquities and a golden drum given to Ringo Starr in 1964. Earlier I had already visited the place where John Lennon was shot, and close by, Strawberry Fields in the quite wonderful and huge Central Park. I hope to revisit NY regularly, there’s much I haven’t yet seen, nor have I yet been able to do BB research at the New York Public Library.

After spending several days in New York my friends took me to their second house in Old Chatham, which is pretty close to Albany. The house was the village’s Parsonage and still bears that name.

At present Jane Eyre is a big hit in the cinemas in the US. The people I spoke with who saw the movie were all enthusiastic about it. The picture is from a cinema in Albany.

On June 18th I will be giving a lecture in New York to the Brontë Society members of this part of the US. I’m going to do a guided virtual walk through the Quartier Isabelle. It seems like I’m going to do several more lectures this year about my New Netherland research. But there may be more Brontë lectures as well.

In the summer I hope to visit Syracuse (also in NYS), where they have some correspondence between Frederika Macdonald and Marion Spielmann, two of the great early BB historians. The weekend of 6-8 Maysaw the annual Tulip festival in Albany, a sort of Dutch feast, as you can see on the picture. Photos: Eric Ruijssenaars with Sue Lonoff; The Parsonage; Jane Eyre at an Albany cinema; Dutch Settlers Society in Albany

Eric Ruijssenaars

Report on annual weekend 1-3 April

Brussels and UK Brontë Society members with speaker Valerie Sanders

This April in Belgium the Brussels Brontë Group organised its fifth annual Brontë weekend. As always, the three-day programme was scheduled for the month of Charlotte’s birth.

Members of the Brussels Shakespeare Society started events on April Fools’ Day. Deborah Griffith, Ignace de Volder, Stephen Sadler and Nicole Freund gave dramatic readings of exchanges between Cathy and Heathcliff and Jane and Rochester, selected by their sometime-director and fellow Brussels resident Tracie Ryan. The Brontë Group audience hopes there will be opportunities for further collaboration between the two literary societies in the future.

The following day, Saturday 2 April, two academic lectures formed the centrepiece of the weekend’s events. The first of these, by Professor Valerie Sanders, looked at Fatherhood and the Brontës.

Professor Sanders opened with an examination of the Brontë sisters’ father. Towards the end of his life, Patrick Brontë started to analyse his influence on the children he had outlived. Had he been a “calm, sedate, concentric” man, said Patrick in 1857, “I should not in all probability have had such children as mine have been.”

Patrick himself has been the subject of much study and speculation since his famous daughters’ deaths. The father as a type, Professor Sanders pointed out, is however generally a vague figure in Victorian novels. But in the Brontë novels the father is a more pervasive presence than the mother.

Professor Sanders went on to look at the different ways in which the three sisters portray fathers. For Charlotte, fathers from Mr Rochester to Mr Yorke tend to be stern, older men. With the notable exception of Shirley’s terrifying father, they are usually rational men. Emily’s father figures in Wuthering Heights meanwhile are young and flawed, whilst the daughters’ feelings for them – “I care for nothing in comparison with papa... I love him better than myself” (Cathy Linton) – are morelike those of a wife. Anne’s Agnes Grey portrays a succession of bad fathers, until Mr Weston emerges as the ideal pastor/husband/father.

Professor Sanders is Professor of English of the University of Hull and author of The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood. She was visiting Brussels and its Brontë connections for the first time.

Her presentation was followed by Professor Philip Riley, with his talk Not just a pretty face: physiognomy, phrenology and the novels of the Brontë sisters.

He gave his audience an overview of physiognomy and phrenology, which he described as primitive precursors of modern psychology. Physiognomy is referred to in every Brontë novel. There are seven references to this pseudoscience of judging character through facial appearance in Jane Eyre alone. The less widely known practice of phrenology – a belief that the size and shape of the skull give a clear indication of personality type –also occurs. Rochester, for instance, pushes back his hair and is seen to have “a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have arisen.”

Professor Riley explained how seriously these twin pseudo-sciences were taken in the 19th century. Servants were rejected by potential employers, and Darwin was almost refused passage on the Beagle, because something was thought to be wrong with their faces.

To tell her sisters they were “wrong, even morally wrong, to make their heroes beautiful” and give her first major novel an ugly hero and heroine, Charlotte was upsetting firmly established social beliefs in a link between physical beauty and moral goodness.

Professor Riley is Emeritus Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Nancy and the editor of books including Language, Culture and Identity. He spoke at the 2009 Brussels Brontë weekend on The Brontë sisters' "strong language".

On Saturday night after the talks about 20 members met in one of the taverns on Brussels’ Grand Place, where they heard songs performed by some of the group. Two guided walks around remaining sites of Brontë interest ran in parallel on Sunday, to cater for ever growing interest from members. These were led separately by MyriamCampinaire and Jones Hayden and were followed by lunch and the informal AGM.

Report by Emily Waterfield
Photo: Ioan Danubiu

Photos of annual weekend

Deborah Griffith, Ignace de Volder, Nicole Freund and Stephen Sadler of the Brussels Shakespeare Society reading passages from Brontë novels

Valerie Sanders talking about fathers in the Brontës’ novels

Philip Riley explaining physiognomy and phrenology

By the Brontë Society plaque outside Bozar

By the unofficial plaque commemorating the Brontës’ stay in the Isabelle quarter
Photos by Helen MacEwan and Ioan Danubiu

Review of Dudley Green's biography of Patrick Brontë

One of the most fascinating things about the Brontës is the myths and legends surrounding them and whether there is any basis at all for some of them. Patrick Brontë appears in Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte as a remote, eccentric and forbidding figure. Many biographies of the children end with their deaths as though Patrick was just a faint figure in the background. Mrs. Gaskell’s picture of him was taken from anecdotes from the nurse who was so incompetent in nursing Mrs Brontë in her last illness that Patrick dismissed her and nursed his wife at night himself.

Dudley Green’s book, which is very well documented, gives a very different picture. Patrick was a good family man and very concerned as to how his children would manage when he was dead. He gave them lessons every day after breakfast. As a lover of music himself he took them to performances of the Haworth Philarmonic Orchestra. He bought a piano for them and other instruments and paid for lessons for them, although money was always tight. It is obvious that he discussed politics and affairs of the country with them and they all shared in the hopes and disappointments of their outcomes. When Branwell was drinking so heavily his father insisted on sharing his bedroom with him so he would not harm himself in the night, although Patrick had a full load of clerical duties to carry out in the daytime. Escorting Charlotte and Emily to Brussels, he reassured himself that his daughters would be in good hands, studying a few phrases in French on the way.

Although his writings were not of the highest literary merit, he was the first of the family to have published works (poems and a story). He wrote many tracts and was a tireless writer of letters to newspapers and organizations to support good causes. So the children were exposed to an atmosphere of the written word, both reading and writing, from early days.

For many reasons Haworth was a difficult parish. It was a daughter parish to Bradford and also had a separate Board of Trustees who did not always agree with the Bradford Vicar. Patrick was one of the few Tories in Haworth, a great believer in the established (Church of England) church among a majority of Dissenters. In Haworth he was a founder member, as was Branwell, of the Haworth Temperance Society and was so concerned when the doctor advised him to take a little wine for his digestion that he asked to have it in writing. He was a great believer in education and fought hard to raise money for, first of all a Sunday School and later a day school. He raised money for the poor when there was little work. He raised a subscription to replace the three bells of the church by six new ones so the bell ringers could take part in competitions. He preached once or twice every Sunday until he became too ill in his 82nd year. Even when he was blind he would be led to the pulpit to give his sermon which was said to be easily understood by the simplest and least educated member and to be delivered extempore.

Although a strong Tory he was sympathetic to many Whig ideas. He supported Roman Catholic Emancipation, was against the death penalty for minor crimes, like stealing a loaf of bread, against the workhouse system where families were separated, a man from his wife and parents from their children, and against rotten boroughs where the few voters were bribed to vote for particular members of Parliament.

He was a tenacious campaigner. Because of dirty water the mortality rate in Haworth equalled that of some of the worst districts in the country. He campaigned for 14 years to get clean water for the poor. The rich had their own good sources and were not willing to pay a water rate for others. The reason why he insisted his children wore only silk and wool was because these were less combustible than other materials and as minister he had had to take the funeral service for so many children who had been burned to death.

He always wanted to be intellectually stimulated and joined first the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute and later the Haworth branch. He not only attended lectures but also gave them. The children sometimes accompanied him. When Charlotte died the Haworth branch paid tribute to ‘the Institute’s most distinguished member and patroness,’ Currer Bell’. She must have become an active member.

The chapter on how Mrs. Gaskell went about writing the biography reveals how much she falsified the family situation, particularly with regard to Patrick’s character. Under the circumstances, he responded with great restraint.

This biography of Patrick is the first for forty years and for me it was special because it was about Patrick as a person in his own right and not just as a background to the girls. It is very easy to read and I do recommend it strongly.

Sheila Richardson