Amongst other things, Irene is an author, writer, storyteller, playwright, actor, director, dramaturg and creative consultant, and she kept her audience on its toes by switching effortlessly between the various dialects that the Brontë children would have been exposed to throughout their lives.
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| credit: wikicommons |
Irene herself being a Bradford girl with an Irish mother and a father from Yorkshire with Irish ancestry, she had grown up listening to them too. During her talk she also expertly outlined some of the many folklore influences and local stories the Brontë children would have heard in their childhood.
Nancy de Garrs (also known as Nancy Garrs), whose name indicates French antecedents, was a servant for the Brontës between 1816 and 1824 in Thornton and Haworth. She was joined by her younger sister Sarah in 1818. We don’t know very much about Nancy, but she outlived the entire Brontë family.
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| Irene Lofthouse as Nancy de Garrs credit: Thorton Brontë Birthplace |
Thornton and Haworth were populated by migrants looking for a new place to live. Patrick and Maria were migrants with first-generation children, while Nancy was from Bradford. Each area of Yorkshire had different dialects, and grammar and cadences were very different between Irish brogue, as spoken by Patrick, and the local Yorkshire dialects. Patrick had a hard Northern Irish accent while Maria and Elizabeth Branwell’s Celt (Cornish) accent would have been much softer.
Nancy and Sarah de Garrs had a different accent yet again, and would also have spoken the Yorkshire dialect, which was how village people spoke, and the children would have heard variations of this in Thornton, Haworth, Keighley and Bradford.
Later, the household servants Tabby and Martha were both from Haworth. The Brontë children therefore had the opportunity to listen to and pick up the dialects as they heard stories told in different accents. In 1815, the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia affected the weather and crops worldwide for three years. There was a whole year without sun, so we can well imagine the children being kept indoors and told stories to keep them amused.
Some of the folklore influences cited by Irene were Boggarts and Brownies, which are always male. Big Ears (Enid Blyton's Noddy) is a Brownie. These figures are universal to cultural folklore, albeit going by different names. Commonly, they will clean your house and do all the household chores if you leave them honey and milk and never ask their name. However, if you anger them, they can turn nasty, such as Rumpelstiltskin for example. Typically found in houses, rivers and crossroads.
Irish tales, which Patrick would have told his children, are always tragic and gloomy, and tend to go on and on. According to Butler Wood, a librarian at Bradford for 50 years (1884-1934), “much of the tragic and gloomy he regaled his children with was utilised by Emily in the story of Wuthering Heights…” (Influence of Moorland, Classics of Brontë Scholarship, ed. Charles Lemon, 1999) Then there is of course the story of Hugh Prunty, Patrick’s father, which was obviously embellished over numerous re-tellings.
Aunt Branwell, on the other hand, would have shared a lot of Cornwall tales – about mermaids and sirens, very similar to the Irish wailing women and banshees. Her stories were closely linked to the sea and told of bygone days.
Nancy and Sarah, being Yorkshire girls, would have told stories about all the local legends, such as Padfoot, Barguest, Trollers Gyhll, Gytrash (featured in Jane Eyre); and Black Dog (featured in Wuthering Heights). The Ravaging Boar was a Bradford legend, as was the Legend of Fair Becca, who haunted her murderous lover at the erstwhile Robin Hood Pub.
Tabby, a Haworth woman, would have told tales of “fairies in the beck,” where we get the expression “she/he’s away with the fairies!” Penistone Crag/Ponden Kirk in Wuthering Heights actually held “Fairy Caves.” According to local folklore, “couples who crawl through the hole in the base must marry within a year, or they’ll either die or commit suicide.” Cathy and Heathcliff went through the hole but didn’t marry – and Cathy afterwards died.
Although there is no history of witch hunts in Yorkshire, there was a belief in witches, attested by the charms, witching stones and scrying balls found in the area. In Wuthering Heights, young Cathy claims she is a witch and Ellen Dean is also accused of being one.
Irene went on to regale the audience with an expert reading in dialect of two passages from the Brontës, one from Shirley (Joe Scott, brogue) and the other from Wuthering Heights (Joseph, Yorkshire). According to Irene, dialect was used to show social differences but also humour, and to lighten the atmosphere. Charlotte and Emily were able to use dialect in their novels because they had grown up listening to it. Charlotte herself was said to have spoken with a strong Irish accent, and this is possibly reflected in her youthful writing, much of which could be read with an Irish cadence. See, for example, An Adventure in Ireland, written in 1829 when she was 13 years old.
Nancy de Garrs eventually got married, leaving the family, and was widowed and remarried. She was in touch with Charlotte until Charlotte’s death, exchanging letters over the years. Her sister Sarah moved to America.
To wrap up, Irene reminded us that the influence of folklore, the natural and the supernatural world, can be found clearly in the novels of Emily and Charlotte, as well as in their early works, and in the Brontës’ poems, including Anne’s.
Georgette Cutajar
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