"Where did you get this?" said he.

On this day in 1848 Charlotte and Anne Bronte visited London to meet their publisher and revealed their true identity. The Bronte sisters had been using the pseudonyms Acton Currer and Bell.

Read what happened on this day kleurrijkbrontesisters/-charlotte-and-anne
kleurrijkbrontesisters/blog-post

In George’s account of the meeting he said:

“That Saturday morning I was at work in my room, when a clerk reported that two ladies wished to see me. I was very busy and sent out to ask their names. The clerk returned to say that the ladies declined to give their names, but wished to see me on a private matter… Two rather quaintly dressed little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking… one of them came forward and presented me with a letter addressed in my own handwriting to ‘Currer Bell, Esq.’ I noticed that the letter had been opened, and said, with some sharpness, ‘Where did you get this?’

‘From the post-office,’ was the reply; ‘it was addressed to me. We have both come that you might have ocular proof that there are at least two of us. This then was `Currer Bell' in person. I need hardly say that I was at once keenly interested, not to say excited. Mr. Williams was called down and introduced, and I began to plan all sorts of attentions to our visitors. I tried to persuade them to come and stay at our house.
ourcivilisation/anecdtes/bronte

paperspast

Steampunk

A two-day festival in Haworth celebrating the increasingly popular Steampunk movement could attract hundreds of aficionados from across the country. Scheduled to take place in November, the event would be the first of its kind in the district, and organisers hope it eventually becomes as successful as a similar gathering in Whitby.

The Steampunk movement is based around the idea of science fiction set in the past, specifically the Victorian era – a world that incorporates steam power and other Victorian technology, rather than electricity and computers.

She added: “The outfits are exquisite, so much time money and effort goes into them. They would look so good wandering down our main street. We’ve got the old buildings and the steam railway – Haworth is the perfect surrounding to do something like this. It’s different from what it’s seen before, something exciting and different, but it still complements the normal Victorian Christmas celebrations. Read all: thetelegraphandargus

The Nussey Family

Ellen Nussey was a friend of Charlotte Bronte. She was born in 1817. She was the daughter of John Nussey and Ellen Wade. Ellen Nussey attended Roe Head School where Margaret Wooler was headmistress, and where she met Charlotte Bronte. Ellen Nussey died in 1897.

Nussey was the twelfth child of John Nussey, a cloth merchant of Birstall Smithies, near Gomersal in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and his wife Ellen, née Wade. Nussey first attended a small local school before progressing to the Gomersal Moravian Ladies Academy. Nussey and Brontë first met in January 1831, when they were both pupils at Roe Head School, near Dewsbury in Yorkshire. They corresponded with each other regularly over the next 24 years, each writing hundreds of letters to the other.

Richard Nussey was born in 1803. He was the son of John Nussey and Ellen Wade. Richard Nussey married Elizabeth Charnock. Richard Nussey Inherited uncle Richard Nussey's interest in the family's mills at Birstall: also leased New Mill, Holbeck. Later inherited father-in-law's two mills at Meadows lane, Leeds. He was; said to have built Brookroyd House.¹ He died in 1872.

Joshua Nussey was born circa 1799. He was the son of John Nussey and Ellen Wade. Joshua Nussey died in 1871.

Sarah Walker Nussey was born in 1809. She was the daughter of John Nussey and Ellen Wade. Sarah Walker Nussey died in 1843.

George Nussey was born in 1814. He was the son of John Nussey and Ellen Wade. George Nussey died in 1885. vivientomlinson

Children of John Nussey and Ellen Wade

• John Nussey b. 26 Dec 1793, d. 14 Apr 1862
• Ann Nussey b. 10 Sep 1795, d. 1878
• Joseph Nussey b. 7 Jun 1797, d. 1846
• Joshua Nussey b. c 1799, d. 1871
• Mercy Mary Nussey b. 14 Apr 1801, d. 1886
• Richard Nussey b. 1803, d. 1872
• William Nussey b. 1807, d. 1838
• Sarah Walker Nussey b. 1809, d. 1843
• Henry Nussey b. c 1812
• George Nussey b. 1814, d. 1885
• Ellen Nussey b. 1817, d. 1897 vivientomlinson

The Rydings (Birstall)  
Ellen Nussey`s first home

Ann Nussey  Later Clapham (1795–1878), eldest sister of Ellen Nussey; a capable housekeeper for Revd Henry Nussey, and later for the family at Brookroyd. Charlotte Brontë appreciated her sympathy at times of ... oxfordreference/Nussey

When Ellen Nussey died (26 Nov 1897 aged 80) it is said that people were surprised at how liitle she had to leave. William Carr had invested her (and her sisters) money (left to them by her brother Richard) in Pennsylvanian Railway Bonds - these were left to her nephew John Thomas Hartley Nussey in Australia.
It shows Ellen Nussey (1817-1897) and two of her brothers (John 1794-1862) and William (1807-1862) who were both apothecaries archiver.rootsweb.ancestry

--------------------
Nussey, John (1793–1862):
Eldest brother of Ellen, and London general practitioner and apothecary. He was early successful under the aegis of his cousin (and eventual father-in-law) Richard Walker, and he was apothecary to George IV and his two successors, being in attendance (in the next room) during some of Queen Victoria’s numerous confinements. Ellen made two long visits to him in 1834 and 1837, probably to help with the family rather than to sample the pleasures of London. The picture that emerges of him through Charlotte’s letters (and we must remember that we have no documents in which the lesser Nusseys speak for themselves) is of a selfish, grasping man who fails to honor his family obligations and is especially neglectful of his mother and sisters. She sees him as of "the world" and "cold-blooded" (to EN, 10 and 17 Sep 1851), and she included his wife Mary in this judgment: "Madame herself thought fitting to call, very stately in her carriage" she wrote to Ellen (28 Jan 1853) during her last visit to London, indicating confidence in a shared opinion. There is much comment on John in letters of mid-1849 when he proposed a financial arrangement whereby his sisters would will their property to him or his heirs and in return he would cancel debts they owed him ("offers to relinquish a present claim in your sisters’ favour" is the phrase of Charlotte’s that suggests this arrangement, rather than a compensating

Nussey, Mary (Mercy) (1801–86):
Sister of Ellen. She was for a time a member of the Moravian Single Sisters’ House at Fairfield, where she was given the name Mercy. See Margaret Connor, "Clerical Connections" (BS, v. 28, p. 1, March 2003) for the Moravian sisterhood. Charlotte’s early references to her are more affectionate than most of her references to the Nusseys, and at one point she seems to have aroused Ellen’s jealousy by trying to start an independent correspondence with her. Later, however, the mentions of her conform to the norm by being tinged with exasperation: she distrusts her judgment, regrets that she rather than Ellen has most to do with George in his time of mental breakdown, and concludes that the trouble she causes others springs from "the wilfulness of a weak person" (to EN, 11 May 1850). This irritation leads her to her most extreme judgment: "I suppose that is her use – to test and try others like a fiery furnace" (to EN, 10 May 1851). She was the family fowl-keeper, taught in a small school, and was frequently ill. Juliet Barker presents as fact that the "forty-one years old" Mercy (she was actually 48) was "so jealous of her elder sister’s good fortune that she threatened the happiness of the whole household" (Barker, 1994, p. 602). This is unfair, resting only on a conjecture of Charlotte that she had "some little sense of bitterness" that Ann rather than she was to be married

Nussey, Richard (1803–72):
Brother of Ellen, he helped to run the family firm, moving to Leeds when he married Elizabeth Charnock (1846) to live in her family home in Woodhouse Lane. Charlotte, who had met him on the Bolton Abbey excursion of 1833, describes him and his wife as " very vulgar in their mode of shewing their feelings" (to EN, 20 Sep 1851?). He inherited his father-in-law’s mills in Leeds and, since the marriage was childless and his wife predeceased him, his sisters Ann, Mercy and Ellen benefited from his death

Nussey, Joseph (1797–1846):
Second-eldest brother of Ellen, who for a time was engaged in the woolen industry. By the mid-1840s he was described by Charlotte (to EN, 31 July 1845) as a "burthen" on his mother – one that his brothers, particularly John, should have her relieved of. By the time of his death she talks openly of his sufferings being "taken as sufficient expiation for his errors" (to EN, soon after 3 June 1846). The deduction that he was dissolute seems correct, but whether this consisted simply of alcoholism or included other sins is unknown. Clearly Joseph was the Nusseys’ Branwell – one more bond between Ellen and Charlotte

Nussey, George (1814–85):
Brother of Ellen. He seems to have been the dearest to her of all her brothers – partly from closeness in age, partly perhaps from his willingness to engage in her interests and her friendships. He is mentioned often in Charlotte’s letters from Roe Head, and he was one of the Nussey party who explored Bolton Abbey and its environs with the Brontës. The onset of his mental illness in the early 1840s was particularly distressing to Ellen, and the fact that he had at this time a fiancée, Amelia Ringrose, cemented a friendship between these two. One element that added to the traumatic nature of this crisis was that George, in his delusions, turned against his family (as his aged mother was later to do when she was ill). This fact was often commented upon by Charlotte: "[h]is delusion is of the most painful kind for his relations – how strange that in his eye affection should be transformed into hatred – it is as if the mental vision were inverted" (to EN, 17 Nov 1846). He never regained his sanity, the engagement was abandoned, and he had to be cared for by outsiders for the rest of his life

Nussey, Joshua (1798–1871):
Third-eldest of the Nussey sons, who went into the Church and married in 1832 Anne Alexander, 10 years his senior. Though Ellen stayed with them several times, and took refuge at their Oundle vicarage after leaving the Upjohns, with whom she had contemplated going to live as a companion, she seems to have disliked both of them, and her best friends Mary Taylor and Charlotte joined her in disparaging them. "Is she a frog or a fish –?" asked Charlotte (to EN, 19 Jan 1847?), "She is certainly a specimen of some kind of cold-blooded animal." She returns to her (and Ellen’s) distaste for the pair a week later, for it seems to be them she is talking about when she describes "the coldness, dreariness, and barrenness of these respected individuals’ minds and hearts" (to EN, 28 Jan 1847?). Joshua’s attainments and judgment were similarly disparaged by Mary Taylor
 

Brookroyd (Birstall)  

After the death of Ellen`s father, the family had to give up The Rydings. They relocated to Brookroyd.

The Black Bull

 

Not looking markedly different from nowadays, this was the Black Bull Inn as photographed very shortly after the Brontes’ time in Haworth, with W Sugden dispensing his “wines &c”.
The Sugden family – first John, then William and then Mrs Rebecca – ran the Black Bull for more than 30 years, with William as publican during the 1860s.
The photograph has been supplied by Mrs Muriel Crook, of Ryecroft, Harden, who as Muriel Waller spent her younger days at the Black Bull till her family left it in 1954. As she puts it, she “was raised, grew up and married here”.

She regrets its subsequent modernisation: “Gone forever is the ‘Bronte Room’, with Branwell’s chair (a replica, I admit) and the bell pull above it.”

She still has a visitors’ book from her family’s tenure, “though this began in 1909 at the Old Hall in Leeds, the first of many of my family’s hotels until we sold the last one in 1954 and I broke the chain”.  keighleynews/The_Black_Bull

Jane Eyre - The Book Club - July 2013

Jane Eyre

 

Critical study of Charlotte Brontë

Patsy Stoneman has just published her critical study of Charlotte Brontë in the Writers & Their Work collection of Northcote House Publishers:

Charlotte Brontë
Patsy Stoneman
Northcote House Publishers. Writers & Their Work series
ISBN: 9780746311950

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of the most famous novels in the world; its heroine’s spirited response to hardship and temptation has engaged an eager readership since its publication in 1847. Jane Eyre, however, was not Charlotte Brontë’s only novel, and Patsy Stoneman’s book traces the development of her work from her exuberant early writing to her disturbing last work, Villette. A final chapter considers Charlotte Brontë’s shifting popular and academic reputation and the various adaptations and imitations of her work. Reading the novels in the context of Charlotte Brontë’s life and times, Stoneman emphasises her persistent engagement with power relations – within families, between classes and between men and women – and the changing narrative strategies with which she explores them. While keeping close to the words of the page, the book is informed by the critical perspectives of feminism, cultural materialism and postcolonialism. bronteblog

‘De Meester’

Interview with Jolien Janzing (Dutch) jolien-janzing-de-meester-bronte-in-brussel/
jolien-janzing

On this day in 1847

The manuscripts of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were sent to the publishers; T.C. Newby. They were published in December 1847.  

In early August 1847, Charlotte submitted three novels to the firm of Thomas Cautley Newby: The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. Newby rejected the first of these but agreed to publish the second and third. He agreed to print 300 copies but demanded his usual harsh terms for first time novelists: £50. This sum he promised to return to the authors once 250 of the 300 copies were sold.

 

Having obtained the money and set the book in type and sent proof sheets to the Bells, Newby then did nothing. The Bells (Brontës) wrote. Newby did not respond. He had his money. What further income could he expect from the venture?

 
Meanwhile, Charlotte pressed on. After Newby rejected The Professor, she sent the manuscript to Smith, Elder and Company. Like Newby they refused but in a thoughtful and courteous letter. The consequence was that later that same month the furiously writing Charlotte sent another manuscript, Jane Eyre. Its first reader, W. S. Williams, immediately saw its quality and passed it on to George Smith, who spent a Sunday ( ! ) reading it. This was late August 1847, as Charlotte’s cover letter is dated 24 August. By October, Smith, Elder and Company had published it. By December it was the talk of literary London.

Newby in October 1847 was still dilly dallying on Wuthering Heights, hesitating at a dubious commercial undertaking. He did not so neglect all his authors. In the same year as Wuthering Heights appeared, Newby published Anthony Trollope’s first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, obligingly sent him by Trollope’s mother, Frances, a successful novelist. Judging shrewdly that the Trollope name was worth something, he brought out Trollope’s book at his own expense, suggesting when he could that it was the work of the then more famous mother. It was only when Jane Eyre proved that the Bell name might also be worth something that Newby resumed production on Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Even then he rushed the job, ignoring corrections Ellis and Acton Bell had made on the proofs he had supplied.

The three volume novel was, in mid-Victorian England, a standard format—Jane Eyre was so presented. Newby had no qualms about stretching what were really at most two volumes, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, into three by heavily leading the text—putting more white space between the lines. Volume I is 348 pages, Volume II 416—extended by today’s standards but not obviously fattened. Like the First Folio of Shakespeare, his three volumes from two Brontës are superficially well produced. There were two bindings, a ribbed deep claret for private purchasers and a plain cloth with paper labels for circulating libraries such as Mudie’s. Also like the First Folio, the text abounds in typographical errors, some obvious, some not. Charlotte noted to her publishers, “The books are not well got up—they abound in errors of the press.” There is no record, however, of any such point’s being mentioned in reviews, and such public as the book immediately had was too small to make much of an objection. Read more: englishmatters

  

Titles published by T. C. Newby in the year 1847:

1. Julia Addison.  The Curate of Wildmere.  3 vol.
2. Anonymous.  Cromwell in Ireland.  3 vol.
3. Emily Jane Brontë.  Wuthering Heights.  2 vol.
4. Anne Brontë.  Agnes Grey.  1 vol.
5. Hannah D. Burdon.  All Classes.  3 vol.
6. Elizabeth Daniel.  Jeremiah Parkes.  3 vol.
7. Elizabeth Daniel.  The Cardinal's Daughter.  3 vol.
8. John Ross Dix.  Jack Ariel.  3 vol.
9. Catherine Maria Grey.  Daughters.  3 vol.
10. Charles Frederick Henningsen.  Sixty Years Hence.  3 vol.
11. Burrows Willcocks Arthur Sleigh.  The Outcast Prophet.  3 vol.
12. Harriet Maria Smythies.  A Warning to Wives.  3 vol.
13. Anthony Trollope.  The Macdermots of Ballycloran.  3 vol.

show_publisher_titles

Time stands still in Bronte village after health and safety rules mean 1871 church clock can no longer be wound

Retired policeman Jens Hislop has climbed the steps of the church several times a week for 23 years to set the clock - which has been ticking since 1863 and is older than most of the church.
But an insurance inspection declared that Mr Hislop’s stepladder and winding platform - which have been at the church for decades - were unsafe, and the clock has been stuck at 5:20 since February.

The lower part of the church tower dates back four centuries to when Patrick Bronte, father of the famous Bronte sisters, had his living in Haworth.
The upper tower - where the clock is - and the rest of the church were rebuilt in 1871, but still contain Bronte relics and are popular with Bronte fans all over the world. Read more:dailymail

 Haworth vicar, the Reverend Peter Mayo-Smith, is pictured outside St Michael and All Angels Church, where a health and safety ban has been imposed on winding the Victorian clock

Testament of Charlotte Bronte Bell Williams

Arthur Bell Nichols married Charlotte Bronte in 1854. Charlotte Bronte died  in 1855. 
Mary Anna Bell Nichols born 1841 had a brother James Adamson Bell.  James Adamson Bell born 1826 died 1891. Married Elizabeth Gertrude Tyrell  around 1850. James and Elizabeth had 3 children: One of them: Charlotte Bronte Bell Born June 2 1864. Married Glover Williams  (She died in 1946 and left some Charlotte Bronte Jewelry).

This is what was in the Last Will and Testament of Charlotte Bronte Williams, Dated September 20, 1934

......the Turqoise and Pearl Ring which belonged to Charlotte Bronte (if she wishes to sell this Ring I desire  that the same shall be sold to the 'Bronte Museum' at Haworth Yorkshire)....

.....the Cameo Brooch which  belonged to Charlotte Bronte and if he shoud wish to sell same I desire that  is shall be sold to the 'Bronte' Museum Haworth Yorkshire. archiver/BELL

 archive/catalogue MUSEUM OF BRONTE RELICS

Drawing Charlotte Bronte

 

This delicate study of a single blue convolvulus stem with trailing tendrils was drawn around December 1832 by Charlotte Brontë. Now we've reproduced it  on a fridge magnet, so that you can enjoy it every single day. the-charlotte-bronte-botanical-collection
Fridge magnet measures 5.3cm x 7.9cm

Ring belonged to Charlotte Bronte

Object number	E.2007.9.2
Title	ring belonged to Charlotte Bronte
Description	tarnished gold band, slightly mis-shapen, set with with a central garnet and a small diamond to left and right of the garnet

More rings in the bronte archive (click)
 

On this day in 1854 Charlotte Bronte and Arthur Bell Nicholls were married at Haworth Church at 8.00am in the morning.

When Charlotte was married on 29 June 1854 to Arthur Bell Nicholls, she wore a very simple, delicate white muslin gown and a green silk and lace bonnet. The bonnet has survived, but the gown was destroyed at the request of Nichols after his death in 1906 (Charlotte, of course, had died in 1855, only 9 months after their marriage). A replica was made reportedly by memory and it is currently in the collection of the BPM, as is the wedding bonnet.

What happened that day? Read:  she-looked-like-snowdrop
 It could have looked like this: haworth-village

A happy birthday to Branwell Brontë, born on a day like today in 1817.

 

Branwell Bronte selfportrait