In Search of Anne Bronte

1

IN THE BEGINNING

My father was a clergyman of the north of England; deservedly respected by all who knew him.

Agnes Grey

The month of January 1820 was an exceptionally cold one in the north of England, and conditions were very hard for the workers of Yorkshire's West Riding. Crops of wheat and corn had failed, peat farmers were left with nothing, and the moors and fields lay covered by a thick blanket of snow. Rivers and canals were frozen, and supplies of food and fuel were brought to a standstill.

The harvest of 1819 had been the poorest in memory, and the harsh January weather promised little respite in the year to come. People with little means and little hope were starving and freezing to death. Bodies were found in the streets, with nobody to mourn them. Families were left without breadwinners or broken up as men left the countryside and headed into the burgeoning new urban centres that offered jobs and at least a little hope for the future.

England was entering an age of increased automation, the Industrial Revolution was reaching its height and machines made by one were doing the work of many. It was a period of civil unrest, and discord hung in the air. Groups of people gathered together and plotted acts against the machines and the mill owners who used them. These men became known as Luddites, and the West Riding was a hotbed for them. They would break into factories at night, smashing machines before vanishing into the darkness, or they would intimidate mill owners and workers with threats that were sometimes bloodily carried out.

Others were taking an interest in the political sphere and agitated for suffrage for men of all social classes. Just five months previously, 80,000 people had gathered in St Peter's Field, across the Pennines in Manchester. They had come to see Henry Hunt, a famous orator who was calling for political and social reform. Unrest grew in the crowd as the day progressed, and soon the local militia were called. These militia, not caring who was in the way, drew sabres and charged into the crowd, cutting down men, women and children. In an ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo that had taken place four years before, this infamous event became known as the Peterloo Massacre; it is in this world of change and unrest that Anne Brontë's story begins.

Her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, was a priest in the Church of England. He had been born into very inauspicious circumstances in Emdale, near the village of Drumballyroney, in County Down, Ireland. Despite spending the majority of his life in England, his Irish accent remained undimmed. Due to their very particular circumstances, most of Anne's formative days were spent in his company, so it is little surprise that contemporary accounts state that both she and her sisters spoke with an Irish accent,1 although Charlotte was the only one who would ever see the country of her forebears.2

Through determination and the kindness of benefactors such as local landowner Reverend Thomas Tighe, Patrick secured an education at Cambridge University and was then ordained into the Anglican priesthood. Patrick saw entering Cambridge as the start of a new life, and a new life required a new name. In Ireland, his family was known by the name Brunty, but from the time of his arrival in England, he called himself Brontë. A Latin scholar, he knew that Brontë translates as thunder, and he was also aware of the castle that Lord Nelson, a hero of his,3 had near the town of Brontë in the foothills of Sicily. These factors influenced his adoption of the name that was to become so famous. It is worth noting that neither he nor his children used the familiar diaeresis, the two dots above the letter 'e', from the beginning.4 Patrick often used a plain 'e', and in their early years the sisters frequently used the French accented 'é' in their surname. Only later in their lives was the 'Brontë' we know today uniformly adopted.

After positions as an assistant curate in the south of England, Patrick was offered the role of chaplain to the Governor of Martinique. He was a very inquisitive man, whose mind thrilled at the thought of new ideas and new places. A situation in the West Indies must have seemed highly appealing to him, but it was then that fate took a hand.

The vicar of Dewsbury, John Buckworth, was looking for an enthusiastic and evangelical cleric to help him in his parish. Dewsbury, like many parishes across the West Riding of Yorkshire, was growing rapidly, and priests were in short supply. Patrick recognised this calling, and in December 1809 he headed north to a new life.

By 1810 Patrick was curate at a village parish called Hartshead, near Dewsbury. On the moor near Hartshead is a marker point known as the Dumb Steeple. It was here, on 11 April 1812, that a bloody and terrible event had its beginning. A large crowd of Luddites from the region gathered at the steeple. Their target was to be Rawfolds Mill in nearby Cleckheaton.

The mill owner was a Mr William Cartwright, a man who saw progress only in terms of the revenue that entered his coffers, and who had replaced many of his men with cropping machines that worked tirelessly day and night. Cartwright had been targeted before, and as a consequence of this he slept in his mill along with five soldiers and four armed guards.

On this particular night a crowd of over 200 Luddites headed across the moor towards the mill. Patrick watched them march past his rented home at Lousy Thorn Farm, and, guessing their intentions, made his way to Hartshead church to pray for their souls. When the men reached Cartwright's mill they tried to gain access but were met by a hail of rifle fire from within. A group of Luddites approaching from Leeds turned and fled at this sound, and soon the fields around Rawsfold turned red with blood and were scattered with the bodies of groaning men. Two were left dead and seventeen more were later executed after the York assizes.

That same night, Patrick heard a scraping and shovelling noise. Looking out of the church window, he saw by moonlight men digging at the earth. Having heard the shots carrying across the night-time stillness, Patrick realised that they were burying others who'd been injured at the mill and had succumbed to their injuries. He left them in peace to bury the dead, and later said a prayer over the unmarked graves.5 Patrick Brontë knew what it was like to struggle with poverty.

Later that year another event took place, and it was to have the most direct impact upon Anne's story. One of Patrick's earliest curacies had been at Wellington in Shropshire. It was there that he made friends with a schoolmaster called John Fennell. By 1812, Mr Fennell was also in Yorkshire, and he was running a boys' school in Rawdon, near the growing city of Leeds. Knowing his friend's skill at Greek and Latin, John asked if he would inspect the boys in the classics. Patrick had always taken a special interest in education - he had already served as a teacher while a teenage boy in County Down - so he readily agreed to his friend's request, and in July he commenced his role.

Patrick spent a lot of time at Woodhouse School, but the pupils weren't his only interest. It was there that he met, and fell quickly in love with, a woman, then 29 years old, by the name of Maria Branwell. Maria was the niece of John Fennell and had come to the school from Penzance, leaving behind her sisters Elizabeth and Charlotte, to assist her cousin Jane with the domestic duties of the establishment.

Eros cast his spell upon them both. It was a whirlwind romance, such as that which can rapidly consume two lonely souls a long way from home and family. They sent each other frank and loving letters, in which Maria playfully referred to Mr Brontë as her 'saucy Pat'. On 29 December of that year they were married in the parish church of Guiseley. On the same day, and at the same ceremony, Maria's cousin Jane Fennell married William Morgan, a curate who was an established friend of Patrick Brontë. The two friends performed the ceremonies for each other, sealing bonds that would last a lifetime.

Anne would later lament that she was unable to remember anything of her mother, but she was left in no doubt that she had been a very pious and intelligent woman, and indeed she had written an essay entitled 'The Advantages of Poverty, in Religious Concerns'.6

The Branwells were a well-established family in Cornwall society and were staunch supporters of the Methodist cause, which was at the time having a revolutionary impact on the Church of England, from which it hadn't as yet split. Her father, Thomas, was a wealthy merchant with a keen love of music, but both he and his wife, Anne, had died before Maria came to Yorkshire. As the title of Maria's essay shows, she was predisposed to love a poor clergyman like Patrick Brontë, despite her own more exalted background.

It may seem strange that her wealthy relatives did nothing to help her transition into married life, but it is likely that they disapproved of the match and so cut her out of any inheritance or financial help that she could otherwise have expected. Years later Anne Brontë was to hint at this on the very first page of her novel Agnes Grey, where Agnes reveals a family background very much like that of the author. After revealing that her father was a northern clergyman, she continues:

My mother, who married him against the wishes of her friends, was a squire's daughter, and a woman of spirit. In vain it was represented to her, that if she became the poor parson's wife, she must...