The Heaton family of Ponden Hall

Ponden Hall in the 1920s

Haworth

Emily and her family were regular visitors to Ponden Hall and would walk across the moor to the Heaton family home. Branwell Brontë’s short story The Thurstons of Darkwell is based on it. The Heatons, who owned nearby Ponden Mill, also had what was reputed to be “the best library in the West Riding” and Emily certainly used it.

yorkshirepost/yorkshire-living

An influential though far from prosperous family in the Haworth area during the Brontës’ time. The large family included the elder Robert and his wife Alice, née Midgley and among their children the younger Robert (b. 1822), William, and John. The younger Robert has been linked romantically with Emily through a tenuous family tradition, and it has been noted that Hareton is an anagram of R. Heaton. The elder Robert was a church trustee at the time of the row over Patrick’s appointment to Haworth. Gerin (1971, p. 32) claims that the younger Brontës had access to the library at Ponden, but this has not been proved. During Ellen’s visit to Haworth in July 1844 she seems to record in her diary “fun and fatigue” with the Heaton family, but the entry is ambiguous. The Heatons’ fortune and position declined steadily in the later nineteenth century. blackwell reference

We know that Emily visited and read here, and scholarly studies have been made of the catalogue, working out what she might have read that could have influenced her work. It's highly likely that Anne, Charlotte and Branwell visited too, as the Heatons (together with the Taylors at the Manor House in Stanbury) were one of the foremost families in the area: for generations they acted as JPs and churchwardens at Haworth Church.

In the back garden are the withered remains of a now-dead pear tree, supposedly the gift of a lovesick teenage Heaton to an older, uninterested Emily.

There is another, important link between Wuthering Heights and Ponden Hall. In an account by William Davies (published in 1896) after a visit he made to Haworth in 1858, he tells how, after meeting Patrick Brontë ("a dignified gentleman of the old school"), he was taken on a tour of the area:
"On leaving the house we were taken across the moors to visit a waterfall which was a favourite haunt of the sisters… We then went on to an old manorial farm called 'Heaton's of Ponden', which we were told was the original model of Wuthering Heights, which indeed corresponded in some measure to the description given in Emily Brontë's romance."
wuthering-heights/locations/ponden-hal

everydaylife 

A lot of photograph's Ponden Hall

The former house of Cranford author Elizabeth Gaskell in Manchester is to be opened to the public after being awarded almost £2m for a restoration.

Gaskell moved to the villa on Plymouth Grove in 1850, three years before her novel Cranford was published. Visitors will be able to see the house as it would have looked during her time there, restored with the £1.85m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It was damaged last year when metal thieves ripped off most of the roof. 
 

Gaskell's work enjoyed renewed popularity after Cranford was adapted for a BBC drama starring Dame Judi Dench, Dame Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon in 2007.Other novels written by Gaskell while living at the house included North and South and Wives and Daughters.

Gaskell was visited in the house by great literary figures including Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, and the author lived there until her death in 1865. 

 

Sara Hillton, head of Heritage Lottery Fund North West, said: "This building is hugely important to Manchester - both because of its association with Elizabeth Gaskell and as a rare remaining example of a Victorian suburban villa.

The all-star TV adaptation of Cranford was a ratings hit

"Alongside the preservation of the house itself, the creation of displays and exhibitions will enhance people's understanding of the Gaskells within the context of the local area and Manchester at the time."

The Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded the grant to Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, which owns the building.

Rooms on the ground floor, including her husband William's study, the morning room and the drawing and dining rooms, still have some original fittings and are expected to be opened to the public. There will also be education and community facilities.bbc.co.uk/news

The first room we saw was the study of Elizabeth Gaskell's husband, William. This room is currently a used bookshop that helps raise money for the restoration of the house.

cuppa sunshine.blog/elizabeth-gaskell-house

Elizabeth+Gaskell

 

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1834 Poor Law Amendment Act

When Patrick Brontë opposed the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act little could he imagine that more than 170 years later his words would be so adequate for the current economical situation of his native Ireland. He wrote in 1837 to the Leeds Intelligencer.

Liberty or Bondage
To the Labourers, Mechanics, and Paupers or Slaves of England

(...) A law has lately been passed called the Poor Law Amendment Bill - a great misnomer I never read nor heard. It is a monster if iniquity, a horrid and cruel deformity, even in regard to what before was no very shapely or symmetrical representation. I know a comittee is sitting to amend the bill - but let me tell you, my dear friends, that it cannot be amended; it must be repealed altogether. (...)

We are told in the five books of Moses that the poor shall never cease from the land, and are exhorted to open our hands wide to relieve them. And the eternal God says multiply and replenish the earth. The blessed Saviour, also, follows up these injunctions with still more forcible admonitions. But a set of unfeeling, antiscriptural men, have lately arisen, who, being themselves only paupers on a larger scale, (as they are, in mnay instances supported by the country, and in a great measure, by the very men whom they wish to oppress) - who, nevertheless, teach doctrines in direct opposition to the law and to the gospel. What, then, my friends, are we to do under these circumstances? Why, verily, I see no plan better for us than that adopted by the Apostles, namely, to obey God, rather than man. (...) Then let me request you to do your duty - petition, remonstrate, and resist powerfully but legally, and God, the father and friend of the poor, will crown all your efforts with success. (Patrick Brontë to the Editor of the Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837)

http://bronteblog.blogspot.com/

Patrick Bronte and Wethersfield, Hartshead and Woodhouse Grove School,

 

St Mary's, Wethersfield

 

Patrick Bronte served his first curacy in Wethersfield from 1806 to 1808. He lived in St George’s House, which still stands opposite the Church. He moved to Yorkshire where Branwell, Emily Aime and Charlotte were born.  stepneyrobarts/wethersfield-essex

The register of the parish church of St Mary Magdelene records his stay.  history detail 

Reverend Patrick Bronte (1777-1861)  was appointed curate at Wethersfield, Essex, where he was ordained a deacon of the Church of England, and ordained into the priesthood in 1807. In 1809 he became assistant curate at Wellington in Shropshire and in 1810 he published his first poem Winter Evening Thoughts in a local newspaper, followed in 1811 by a collection of moral verse, Cottage Poems. 

Woodhouse Grove School

The following year (1812) he was appointed a school examiner at a Wesleyan academy, Woodhouse Grove School, near Guiseley. At Guisely Brontë met Maria Branwell (1783–1821), whom he married on 29 December 1812. wiki/John_Wesley

The first inspector at the Woodhouse Grove School was the Rev. Patrick Bronte, who examined the pupils at the end of the summer term. It is probable that the Rev. William Morgan knew that Patrick Bronte had been a successful teacher in County Down. His report on the school has never been quoted and research has failed to find it.  The Woodhouse Grove Academy, or school as it is now called, is on the north bank of the Aire, just below the bridge ; it is delightfully situated in its own grounds, and the governor's house adjoins the school. Whether Patrick Bronte had been to Woodhouse Grove Academy before he went as an examiner we are not told, but before August, 1812, was out, he was sending love letters to the Headmaster's niece, Maria Branwell daughter of Mr. Fennell's wife's brother. Evidently Mr. Bronte's warm-hearted Irish temperament would not allow him to remain a woman-hater for long. The engagement appears to have taken place in July, and the nine letters which have been published point to times of happiness and pleasure, referring to country walks to the historic spots around Apperley, to Calverley and to Kirkstall Abbey; the latter place inspired Patrick Bronte to write a poem on the old abbey. editor/target=post;post

Patrick Brontë and Mary Burder

St George's House, where Patrick Brontë met Mary Burder in 1807 A CHANCE encounter in a Wethersfield kitchen in 1807 almost changed the face of English literature. When Patrick Brontë, the poorly paid and poorly respected curate of St Mary Magdalene walked into the room in St George’s House where his landlady’s eligible young niece Mary Burder was preparing dinner he was instantly smitten. Had the course of true love run smooth perhaps the world would never have had “Jane Eyre”, “Wuthering Heights” or “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” for Patrick might never have become the father of novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. As it was, the romance between the impecunious red-haired Irishman, already aged 30, who had gained his BA at St. John’s College Cambridge through hard graft and the help of some well-placed friends and the 18-year-old daughter of a prosperous local farming family, never ended in marriage. No-one is quite sure why. Not even perhaps the enamoured couple themselves.  The Congregational Chapel where Mary Burder worshipped   The Congregational Chapel on the other side of Wethersfield village green to the church could have had a lot to do with it. Mary Burder’s father had died just before Patrick’s arrival in Wethersfield and the responsibility for her widowed mother and the four children in the family had been taken by her uncle who lived not some miles away in Great Yeldham. Mary’s father had been a churchman, though he shelled out a hundred pounds to help the case of the Congregational minister when he was arraigned, wrongly it transpired, for unmentionable crimes. Her uncle’s family were, however, non-conformists and didn’t look kindly on a match with an Anglican curate. That he was an Irishman didn’t help either. Mary, was whisked off to Great Yeldham.

St Mary's, Wethersfield where Patrick was curate

In fact a marriage to Mary Burder wouldn’t have been too great for Patrick Brontë either. Preferment in the Church of England for a man with a wife who did not share his beliefs would have been difficult to obtain. At any rate Patrick decided that nursing a broken heart in Wethersfield was less attractive than a busy life at a new church in Wellington in Shropshire. He continued to write to Mary for a couple of years but by the time she was 21 and therefore free to wed without her family’s permission, Mary became embittered as the prospect of marriage faded. Somehow Patrick’s letters, and his failure to return to Wethersfield to claim her hand, had turned her love to hatred and she saw herself as a jilted woman. Patrick for his part was coping with a far greater workload than ever the tiny parish of Wethersfield had imposed upon him, and, furthermore, no letters were forthcoming from Mary or her family. He began expressing his admiration of those ministers who could serve God without the distraction of unrequited earthly love. He admitted it was not easy for him but he doesn’t seem to have realised that Mary, too, might have found it hard to understand the situation. Eventually the matter was resolved by Patrick’s meeting, in his new Yorkshire parish of Hartshead, 29-year-old Maria Branwell the petite, though not particularly pretty, daughter of a prosperous Penzance grocer who had gone north to help in her aunt and uncle’s boarding school. Patrick and Maria were married in 1812 and over the next few years five girls and one boy were born to the couple. It was not to be a long marriage. Less than 10 years after the wedding Maria was found to have cancer; her death at 38 after a few months illness left Patrick with six small children aged between two and seven. 

He was in a sad predicament. Although he was now in a permanent benefice at Haworth on the Yorkshire moors he was not well off and no catch for a genteel woman of that period. He proposed to the godmother of some of his children but was brusquely turned down. His wife’s sister had been a tower of strength during his wife’s illness but there was no hope there – in those days marriage to the sister of a deceased wife was not permitted. A further proposal to a

friend’s sister was also rejected.

In desperation Patrick remembered Mary Burder. Was she married? Was there hope of a reconciliation? He wrote to Mary’s mother and received a reply from Mary herself. Yes, she was still single but she wanted nothing to do with a 47-year-old with a family of six to look after. She declined his suggestion of a meeting in Wethersfield.
Patrick, still hopeful, wrote again but there was no reply.

The Manse at Wethersfield where Mary went to live.
 

And Mary? A year or two later she married the minister at Wethersfield Congregational Church, Rev Peter Sibree who declared that in marrying her “he had found that blessing of which I can never sufficiently appreciate the importance – a prudent wife, which is from the Lord.”  They lived in the Manse by the chapel. Wethersfield/lovepages