The magnificent hall lies near Padiham in Lancashire, just off the present A671. The visit was a surrender to a sort of war of attrition waged by Sir James in an effort to get to know ‘Currer Bell’. He was a remarkable man, a great social reformer; in his younger days, as a doctor in Manchester, he had battled against problems of hygiene among the poor and was instrumental in opening schools in workhouses. He lobbied tirelessly for free libraries and free education, and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns throughout his life due to overwork He also had an artistic streak, which drew him to the company of writers. His interest had been aroused by the radical nature of Charlotte’s novel Shirley.
The publicity-shy Charlotte found Sir James uncomfortably overpowering, but the romantic in her was captivated by the monumental Jacobean hall with its reminiscences of her beloved Walter Scott, ‘gray, antique, castellated and stately’. She failed to warm to his wife, whom she found graceless and without dignity. Whether or not she felt that lady Kay-Shuttleworth’s 200-year-old ancestry and her family’s stately home (Sir James had taken her name, Shuttleworth, as the price of the inheritance) should have lent her aristocratic aloofness and condescension is not clear, but Charlotte found her hostess’s kind attempts to be friendly ‘painful and trying’. Their pressing invitation to stay with them in London over the season she described as a ‘menace hanging over my head’. The truth was that, apart from her appalling nervousness in strange company, Charlotte had a deep dread of being patronized. Though never completely at ease, she was to thaw somewhat in her attitude to the Kay-Shuttleworths in later years. grimshaw origin Gawt
The Kay-Shuttleworths also came to hear about Charlotte Brontë who was becoming a well known author by this time and lived only 12 miles away in Haworth. They invited her to come and stay, which she eventually did in 1850 and then again in 1855. She also stayed with the Kay-Shuttleworths at their home in Windermere where she met Mrs Gaskell who became her great friend and wrote the first biography of Charlotte after her death. During Charlotte’s second visit to Gawthorpe in January 1855 it is said that she insisted walking out in the grounds and caught a chill from which she never managed to recover, she died two months later on 31st March the same year.
bbc/lancashire/history gawthorpe
wiki/Gawthorpe_Hall wiki/Sir_James_Kay-Shuttleworth
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