September 1853 Elisabeth Gaskell visits the Parsonage and stayed for four days.

It was a dull, drizzly Indian-inky day, all the way on the railroad to Keighley, which is a rising wool-manufacturing town, lying in a hollow between hills - not a pretty hollow, but more what the Yorkshire people call a 'bottom,' or 'botham.' I left Keighley in a car for Haworth, four miles off - four tough, steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. 

The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it, - grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to poor, hungry-looking fields; - stone fences everywhere, and trees nowhere. 
Haworth is a long, straggling village one steep narrow street - so steep that the flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, that the horses' feet may have something to cling to, and not slip down backwards; which if they did, they would soon reach Keighley.

But if the horses had cats' feet and claws, they would do all the better. Well, we (the man, horse, car; and I) clambered up this street, and reached the church dedicated to St. Autest (who was he?); then we turned off into a lane on the left, past the curate's lodging at the Sexton's, past the school-house, up to the Parsonage yard-door. I went round the house to the front door, looking to the church; - moors everywhere beyond and above. The crowded grave-yard surrounds the house and small grass enclosure for drying clothes.