Celebrate the 200th Wedding Anniversary of Maria and Patrick Brontë

 

 

Today, December 29th, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

December 29, 2012 is the 200th anniversary of the day that Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell - parents of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne - married at Guiseley Church, West Yorkshire.

To mark the occasion the Brontë Parsonage Museum is offering a day of free activities – and a piece of wedding cake! – to all visitors.

• Meet ‘Mrs Brontë’ as she tours the Museum in her wedding dress

• Listen to a short talk about Maria and Patrick’s courtship and wedding at intervals throughout the day

• Handle real period costume items

• Enjoy children’s activities in the foyer

• And partake of a free slice of commemorative wedding cake!

Mrs Brontë will be at the Museum between 11am and 4pm, and is available for pictures outside the church, in the Museum and in the Museum garden.

Mrs Brontë herself discuss what she will wear for the occasion on Hathaways of Haworth.

Picture Source: Hathaways of Haworth. More information in Keighley News.
bronteblog

A double wedding anniversary celebration

 

A double wedding anniversary celebration will be held at Haworth Parish Church tomorrow.
It will be 200 years since the Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of the famous sisters, married his wife Maria. He was vicar at Haworth from 1820 to 1861. It will also be 39 years since the current Priest-in-Charge, the Reverend Peter Mayo-Smith and his wife Eileen, were married.
To mark Patrick Brontë’s double-centenary the bell-ringers at the parish church will carry out a two-and-three-quarter- hour full peal.
Simon Burnett, the Haworth Church bell captain, said: “A full peal of bell involves 5,040 changes in various methods.”
Earlier in the day, the bell-ringers at Guiseley Parish Church, where Patrick and Maria were married, will also be attempting a full peal.The moors, my mistress
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When her parents died, Maria had to look for a job. In 1812 her aunt Jane Fennell, who was housekeeper at the Woodhouse Grove School at Rawdon in Yorkshire, invited Maria to assist her. Maria accepted and left Penzance to start a new life. John Fennell, Jane's husband and Maria's uncle, was a methodist minister and the headmaster of the school. In 1812 he invited his former colleague Patrick Bronte to visit the school. Here, he met Maria and after a short courtship the couple were married on 29th December 1812. It was a double ceremony as John and Jane's daughter, Jane Branwell Fennell, also got married to the Reverend William Morgan. On that same day, but in Penzance, Joseph and Charlotte Branwell, two cousins of the brides, got married as well.
history and other thoughts
 

Charlotte Brontë letters to her bff return to Haworth

A set of six rare and significant letters written at various stages in her life by Charlotte Brontë to her best friend Ellen Nussey are headed back to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth on the Yorkshire moors, which was for many years the family’s home. The museum had to bid for them at Sotheby’s English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations sale on December 12th, and since the letters are highly desirable, the bidding was fierce. Thankfully they had a grant to get them over the hump.

The reason these six letters (and a first edition of the two-volume 1857 biography of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell which was also part of the lot, but that was a negligible part of the value) are so dear is that Charlotte’s letters to Ellen are the basis for much of the Brontë scholarship that exists today.

Ellen kept all of the letters Charlotte wrote her, more than 500 in the final tally. Charlotte’s husband, her father’s curate Rev. Arthur Bell Nichols, wanted the letters destroyed after Charlotte’s death, fearing that they would somehow tarnish her reputation. Nussey refused, bless her forever for that. For the rest of her life — she died at the age of 80 in 1897 — Ellen considered herself a custodian of Charlotte’s personal and literary legacy, and biographers from Elizabeth Gaskell onward sought Ellen out for her recollections and correspondence.

After her death, the letters were sold, many of them ending up in the Haworth museum collection. These particular six were lent to Elizabeth Gaskell who apparently put them between the covers of the first edition of her biography of Charlotte and forgot about them. They were only recently rediscovered when the volumes, then in a private collection, were opened and the letters found out. They’ve only been known from poorly made transcripts until now, all of them inaccurate, so having the originals is an important addition to Brontë scholarship.
The letters cover the entire span of their friendship.
Read all: thehistoryblog