The Parsonage, Henry Houston Bonnell

One room, the dining room or parlour, has a particular fascination. It is where Charlotte, Emily and Anne did most of their writing. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – they all came from this room. And one of their remarkable routines, perhaps done to gain inspiration, was to walk round and round the dining room table reading and discussing their writings and the plans they had. This could go on late into the night. After both Emily and Anne had died Charlotte continued to pace around the table on her own, unable to go to sleep until she had carried out this nightly ritual.

There is also a black horse hair sofa made by the local carpenter in Haworth (he also made the original dining table and other furniture in the house). It is on this sofa that Emily is thought to have died, having refused to see a doctor until it was too late.

In 1927 the parsonage was bought for £3,000 from the Church by Sir James Roberts, a local man who had made a great deal of money in the textile industry. He donated the house to the Brontë Society, formed in 1893, which had always hoped to get hold of the house but with only fifty pounds in the bank could never have afforded it! Sir James gave them another £1500 towards the cost of setting up the museum and in the autumn of 1928 thousands of people flocked to Haworth for the official opening.

Once the parsonage became a museum, all sorts of Brontë pieces, which had been sold off over the years, were returned and donated, including furniture and the superb collection of manuscripts, drawings and books which were sent to the museum as a bequest from the collection of Henry Houston Bonnell in America.

Look at this website: The Bonnell Collection, with beautiful photo's)

http://brontesisterslinks.tripod.com/Bonnell.pdf

Thanks to the hard work and foresight of the Brontë Society the long climb up the main street of Haworth to visit the Brontë Parsonage is an unforgettable experience. Once there you glimpse what seems to us now a simple but contented way of life. But when you remember that this house produced the most famous literary family in the world and that more than 150 years later their novels continue to fascinate and intrigue millions of readers it makes it all the more remarkable. Our advice is simple. Go there if you possibly can and soak it all up.