I've embarked on this extremely long biography by Julie Barker. It is going to take me a lot of time to finish, so I may end up making posts on other topics intermittently. The book is thorough and extremely well-written. It covers more people than the other biographies I've read, and also references historical events such as the Napoleonic Wars, particularly the Battle of Waterloo, because the family patriarch, Patrick Brontë, admired the Duke of Wellington. There is also a fair amount of social history. Brontë was a contemporary of Robert Owen and Jane Austen. In the north of England, the mills were dominating the economy, the Luddites were rebelling, and there was a lot of pollution. In the south of England, there was an epidemic of social climbing, as chronicled by Jane Austen, who lived in Chawton, Hampshire (at the same time as some of my ancestors). The Brontës ended up in Haworth, West Riding, Yorkshire (I also had ancestors in Spofforth, nearby, at about that time). Though I am looking forward to reading the book, I have some trepidations. That is because, although Patrick Brontë lived to the ripe old age of 84, everyone else died young, including five daughters, one son and his wife. The entire Yorkshire branch of the Brontës became extinct then, since he had no grandchildren. Furthermore, he was an Anglican cleric, which may have appealed to George Eliot when she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, published in 1858, at the beginning of her career. If you've read much of this blog, you will have noticed that I'm not a religious zealot.
Patrick was the first of ten children born to Hugh Brunty in 1777. Hugh was a poor, illiterate Protestant farmhand who had moved from southern Ireland to Northern Ireland. Patrick was mostly self-educated, and decided that he wanted to attend college and become an Evangelical Anglican preacher. He had been a tutor for Reverend Thomas Tighe's children, and Tighe agreed to sponsor him for admission to St. John's College, Cambridge, which he had attended. In those days, a recommendation from Tighe was all that was required for entry. Though he had little money, Patrick left for Cambridge in 1802, when he was 25. He had a sizar scholarship, which was not generous and required him to perform various jobs. He graduated in 1806. It isn't entirely clear to me why he changed the spelling of his name, but I think that he didn't want be identified as Irish. Furthermore, the Irish probably faced a social stigma in England at the time. Patrick had little contact with his family after he left for college.
This book does have the years at the top of each odd-numbered page, but it is still a little difficult to grasp the chronology of events by date, particularly the timing of the sequence of events from Patrick's departure from Cambridge in 1806 to his arrival in Haworth in 1820. During that period he became an ordained preacher and worked in several parishes, seeking his own. The first was in Wethersfield, Essex, in 1806, where he was the curate for two years. While there, he had a whirlwind romance with Mary Burder, and they planned to marry. She came from a wealthier family, and, when they rejected Patrick, he became assistant curate in Wellington, Somerset. In less than a year, he moved to Yorkshire in 1809 and became curate in Dewsbury, West Riding. He subsequently held positions in nearby Hartshead and Thornton, and finally Haworth in 1820, where he was offered the position of perpetual curate.
I suspect that Patrick was sensitive to English snobbery and recognized that there would be less of it in Yorkshire. So far he seems to be fairly extroverted and could read people easily and make friends when he wanted to. I sort of noticed the same thing on my first long trip to Oxford in 1993. After a few days in Oxford, I immediately noticed what I think of as the crudity of the people in York when I visited there. More recently, when reading about Charles Darwin, I was struck by the fact that his brother, Erasmus, who studied medicine in Edinburgh after graduating from Cambridge, disliked Edinburgh to the extent that he didn't socialize at all and returned to England as soon as he could. In his later life, he was sort of a social butterfly in London. In those days, people in Oxford and Cambridge were highly sensitive to accents and judged others accordingly.
Patrick seems to have been fairly busy once he arrived in Yorkshire, but was still interested in a spouse. In early 1812, while living in Hartshead, he visited John Fennell, a friend from Wellington, in nearby Rawdon. There he met Maria Branwell, who was a niece of Fennell's wife and had moved in with them from Penzance after the deaths of her parents:
Maria was twenty-nine years old, petite and elegant though not pretty; pious and something of a bluestocking but also of a bright, cheerful disposition. She was the daughter of a successful, property-owning grocer and tea merchant of Penzance, Thomas Branwell, who had died in 1808; her mother, Anne Carne, the daughter of a silversmith in the town, had died a year after her husband. Maria had grown up in a totally different world from Patrick. The eighth of eleven children, at least three of whom had survived infancy, Maria had enjoyed all the benefits of belonging to a prosperous family in a small town.
After an enthusiastic courtship, Patrick and Maria were married on December 29, 1812 in Guiseley. Patrick had been living in Hightown while working in Thornton, and moved to a different house in Hightown with Maria after the marriage until 1815, when they moved to Thornton. Their first child, Maria, was born in Hightown in 1814, their second child, Elizabeth, was born in Hightown in 1815. The family moved to Thornton in 1815, with Patrick's new position there. The remaining children were also born in Thornton, but at a different house: Charlotte in 1816, Patrick in 1817, Emily in 1818, and Anne in 1820. In April of that year, the entire family moved to Haworth Parsonage.
Though there has so far in the book not been much discussion of writing, I should mention that in 1815 Patrick published The Cottage in the Wood, or the Art of Becoming Rich and Happy. He also anonymously published the novella The Maid of Killarney: or, Albion and Flora: a Modern Tale in Which Are Interwoven Some Cursory Remarks on Religion and Politics in 1818. In addition there were two books of poems: Cottage Poems (1811) and The Rural Minstrel (1813).