Charlotte's wedding

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December 1847 at the Parsonage.

The beginning of December 1847 was a time of great excitement in the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, but it was nothing to do with the impending arrival of Christmas; it was the month that saw the joint publication of Agnes Grey, by Acton Bell, and Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell, and the gestation of these great novels had been anything but smooth. Read more of this wonderful post on the weblog of Nick Holland:  annebronte/the-birth-of-agnes-grey-and-wuthering-heights/

A Victorian Christmas

 

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The Bronte Trail is one of a series of ‘Ure Walks Through Time’

Passing a large field of deer, we reached a farm, and entered a grassy path, with thick vegetation on either side, and opened up to open countryside. In Anne’s day this footpath was known as Bowsers Lane. It emerges at Thorp Head, close to the River Ouse. Branwell Bronte’s poem ‘Lydia Gisborne’ begins:

‘On Ouse’s grassy banks – last Whitsuntide, I sat, with fears and pleasures, in my soul commingled, as it ‘roamed without control’.’
Read all: thetelegraphandargus

At the entrance toThorpe Grange Farm the ‘ridge and furrow’ strips can be seen in the field that gave it’s name to the Stripe Houses. Demolished in 1883 they housed the poor families of the area and were the influence for the cottages visited by Agnes and the Murray girls.

 

 

Passing HolyTrinity Church and crossing over the picturesque little bridge, you’ll come to the spot from which Anne sketched the church. In those days,Ouse Gill Beck was much wider, forming a lake on both sides of the bridge. boroughbridgewalks

 

 

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yorkshirewalks

This weekend in Haworth!

 SATURDAY
*Fairy Parade 2pm - Fairies of all ages welcome to dress up and join in! (meet bottom of Main St)
*Haworth Craft Fairs in the Old School Rooms...
*Haworth Church Winter Fair

SUNDAY
*Scroggling the Holly 2pm (meet bottom of Main St). A lovely way to welcome in the spirit of Christmas!
*Haworth Craft Fairs in the Old School Rooms
*Oakworth Morris Men 1.00pm Main Street.

Music and bands on Main Street.
Photo of Main Street by facebook/photo.markdavis   Mark Davis Photography

And:

Our beautiful Christmas cards for this year are now available in selected shops on Main Street including Rose & Co. Firth's Boutique, Hawksbys, Fleece Inn Haworth, Simple Inspiration, Mrs Beightons and Apothecary Tea Rooms. £2 each or 3 for £5.
A lovely memory of your Christmas in Haworth!
Huge thanks to Mark Davis Photography for these stunning images.

George Richmond' s portrait de Charlotte Brontë et ""le-vrai-visage-de-Charlotte".

Louise Sanfaçon made the portrait in the right.

 

Lorsque le portrait de Charlotte Brontë, réalisé par l’artiste George Richmond, fut publié en frontispice de sa biographie en 1857, soit deux ans après sa mort à l’âge de trente-huit ans, il a attiré quelques commentaires acrimonieux de son ancienne amie Mary Taylor : «Je ne suis pas du tout favorable à l’idée de publier un portrait qui embellisse ses traits.» a-t-elle répliqué à la biographe Elizabeth Gaskell.  «J’aurais de loin préféré voir le vrai visage de Charlotte, avec les yeux et la bouche plus rapprochés, de même que son menton carré et son grand nez disproportionné.» soeursbronte/le-vrai-visage-de-charlotte/

When the portrait of Charlotte Brontë, directed by George Richmond, was published as the frontispiece of his biography in 1857, two years after his death at the age of thirty-eight years, he drew some of his former acrimonious comments friend Mary Taylor: "I am not at all favorable to the idea of publishing a portrait that embellish his features." she replied to the biographer Elizabeth Gaskell.

I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together

and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose'

 

Gaskell herself had written of her subject’s “plain, large and ill-set features”, “crooked mouth and large nose”, and in private had been even more specific about “a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad and rather overhanging”.

 

George Smith was so impressed by the prominence of Miss Brontë’s brow that he took her to a phrenologist in 1851 to have it analysed, but thought little of her personal charms, recalling that her head “seemed too large for her body” and that “her face was marred by the shape of the mouth and by the complexion”.  

Steampunk in Haworth

facebook./photo/Simon Waldren
Thanks to Simon Waldren, the photographer.

Day one of our first ever Steampunk experience and we were impressed by how many dressed up and how amazing the costumes were!

 haworth-village.co.uk/steampunk/photos

The Brontë Death Jewellery

Take a look at the beautiful bracelet at the top of our latest Brontë blog; it’s one that was especially precious to Charlotte Brontë, and she wore it wherever she went, but what is it made of? At the centre is a sparkling amethyst but the strap around it is made of the intertwined hair of her dead sisters, Emily and Anne Brontë.

Read all of it: annebronte Nick Holland is talking about the color of the hair of the Brontes, about hairworkers, the people who crafted these objects and more very interesting things.

Charlotte Bronte and a case of mistaken identity

CLAIRE HARMAN

Published: 30 September 2015

Chalk drawing by George Richmond, 1850, left © National Portrait Gallery, London; photograph, right, date unknown, © Brontë Society

A s the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth approaches (April 21, 2016), many picture editors, exhibition organizers and publishers will be looking round for a suitable image of the author and perhaps feeling a little disappointed with the available choices. Only two pictures of Brontë survive that were made from life: the first, crudely painted by her brother Branwell when she was a teenager (in the group portrait known as “The Brontë Sisters”), makes the subject look doughy and dull; the second, a chalk drawing commissioned by the publisher George Smith in 1850 and executed by the fashionable artist George Richmond, veers the other way towards flattery. When Richmond’s portrait was published as the frontispiece to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, two years after Brontë’s death at the age of thirty-eight, it drew some blunt comments from the subject’s old friend Mary Taylor. “I do not altogether like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness”, she told the biographer; “I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose.”

Taylor was by no means the only person to remark on Brontë’s un-beautiful appearance. Gaskell herself had written of her subject’s “plain, large and ill-set features”, “crooked mouth and large nose”, and in private had been even more specific about “a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad and rather overhanging”. George Smith was so impressed by the prominence of Miss Brontë’s brow that he took her to a phrenologist in 1851 to have it analysed, but thought little of her personal charms, recalling that her head “seemed too large for her body” and that “her face was marred by the shape of the mouth and by the complexion”. William Thackeray described Brontë as “homely-faced”, “without a pennyworth of good looks”, while his daughter Anne recalled their famous visitor’s defensive and unpleasant demeanour: “I remember how she frowned at me whenever I looked at her, but perhaps it was specially at me – at least so I imagined. There was a general impression of chin about her face”. These plain-speaking judges did all grant Brontë one outstanding feature; large, shining eyes “of extraordinary brilliance and penetration”. From their descriptions, it seems safe to conclude that Charlotte Brontë had an unusually large brow, large expressive eyes, a wide mouth collapsing over missing teeth and a big nose (like her father, whom she was said to resemble). Richmond’s portrait, for all its prettification, does actually indicate those characteristics in a veiled form. Read all: http://www.the-tls/The Times Literary Supplement

 

A wedding invitation from the BBC

 

Haworth and the Parsonage are great locations for film and tv and with Charlotte’s bicentenary year just around the corner, we are receiving even more media enquiries than usual.     We are very excited to be working with BBC Bristol on their one hour Brontë documentary and are looking forward to welcoming the crew to the Parsonage next month.  'Living Like a Brontë'  will be presented by Martha Kearney, Lucy Mangan and Helen Oyeyemi and will air on BBC2 in the spring.

The week of filming will culminate in a re-enactment of Charlotte’s marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls and everyone is invited!  The BBC would like Brontë fans and local residents to line Church Street and celebrate as Charlotte enters the church on her wedding day. We think this will be a lovely way in which to end the year and hope that many of you will join us.  Filming will take place outside the museum on Friday 11 December and anyone interested should contact rebecca.yorke@bronte.org.uk in order to receive further information as details become available. 

Charlotte Bronte, did she use opium? Or do we see the creation of a new Bronte Myth?

Charlotte Brontë kept this journal while working as a teacher at Roe Head school in West Yorkshire. The pages shown here were written in August 1836. In the journal she records both imaginary happenings in Angria and the banalities of her everyday life as a teacher:

What I imagined grew morbidly vivid,...All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable and half ecstatic: miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly; ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. ...Then came on me, rushing impetuously, all the mighty phantasm that we had conjured from nothing to a system strong as some religious creed. I felt as if I could have written gloriously - I longed to write. The spirit of all Verdopolis, of all the mountainous North, of all the woodland West, of all the river-watered East came crowding into my mind. If I had had time to indulge it, I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than any thing I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.

- See more at:bl.uk/collection-items/charlotte-brontes-journal

Claire Harman in her new biography is suggesting Charlotte Bronte was using laudanum/ opium during the time she was a teacher at Roe Head. What does her suggest this:

• Branwell and Charlotte were both reading Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. The young Brontes were fascinated by the book. 
• Branwell later told a friend that he had experimented with opium eating after reading de Quincy. Claire Harman thinks it is unlikely, given the opportunity, Charlotte would not have joined him in some testing of the magical drug.
• Phantasms as Charlotte discribes in her Roe Head diary are like the phantoms that was commonly used to describe opium -induced reveries.
• Claire Harman uses a foot-note: Christina Alexander brought readers' attention to something Charlotte wrote 3 years after the priod in Roe Head "Now Thownshend, so suffering, how far did I err when I had recourse to the sovereign specific which a siple narcotic drug offered me"
• Opiates, laudanum drops were a common tranquilliser in the Brontes time, easily available over de druggist counter. 

There is one person who ever asked Charlotte Bronte if she was using opium during the time she was writing Vilette and that is Elizabeth Gaskell.

“I asked whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, – vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, &c.  She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which she had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling asleep, – wondering what it was like or how it would be, – till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened.”.

 

One of the things why I love Charlotte Bronte is because of this answer. It is giving such a good expression of creativity. I love: Specially she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened.”. I am interested in the process of creativity, I am a painter myself. And I found many testimonies of creative people like painters, writers who are telling exactly the same. And I have experienced it myself.

Elizabeth Gaskell is ending with: I cannot account for this psychologically: I only am sure that it was so, because she said so. Claire Harman is asking: Maybe Charlotte being evasive, making a rather specious distinction about the size of a dose and if so, why?

To my surprise in a review in  the theguardian  the question mark is gone. When Gaskell had asked Brontë about fact and fiction in the novels, she got some unexpected answers. Brontë was evasive about whether she had based the opium trance in Villette on personal experience (in an age when opium was readily available and often used.

It starts to become a truth. Is this the way in the past Bronte myths were created? I wonder is it enough for a biographer to use a question mark, without having a real prove? What is the real prove Claire Harman has? Did she forget that the Brontes from their childhood on were full of imagination?
Is it so incredible to think that Charlotte made her work on her own power of creating? Charlotte was a teenage girl when she was working as a teacher at Roe Head. Is it so strange she had strong visions and feelings? I had them when I was a teenager and I certainly did not use opium.

Beautiful pictures of the Haworth moors in autumn.

 

Autumn on the Haworth Moor heart-emoticon
Thanks to Vesna Armstrong © 2015

 Over on the blog: vesnaarmstrong.blogspot.co.uk

 

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Both Charlotte and Emily returned to school after the midsummer holidays in this fatal year. Is this true?



 

I can tell you I am the proud owner of a copy of Claire Harman's ""Charlotte Bronte"".  Thanks to Anne, who sent it to me. I really am happy with it. And off course I am reading in it since I received it.

 

 

I own the Bronte biographies of Juliet Barker, Rebecca Fraser and Elizabeth Gaskell. I love the biography of Elizabeth Gaskell because I find it interesting that a lady, a woman of the world like Elizabeth Gaskell became so close to Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte who was so shy and insecure, but the same time so brave, so trusted her. I think Elizabeth Gaskell did the best she could with the knowledge she had at that time. And she showed courage to mention all the difficulties like Cowan Bridge and the love affair between Branwell and Mrs. Robinson. Afterwards she came in trouble because of her writing. She called it ""a hornet's nest"".

Later Juliet Barker wrote a fabulous biography in wich she proved when and why Elizabeth was wrong, for instance about Patrick Bronte. There is so much information in her book and she is giving so many details, so many notes to back it up.

In the biography of Rebecca Fraser I like the part she, like a detective, is searching for the truth behind the poststamps on the loveletters Charlotte Bronte sent to Mr. Heger.

The new biography

 

I started to be surprised from the beginning when I was reading the new biography of Claire Harman.  I get the feeling the days of Elisabeth Gaskell returned. Patrick Bronte as a selfish, excentrike man, only focused on himselve. And Haworth, a remote village, far away of civilisation. As if Juliet Barker never proved the opposite.

But I started to be shocked reading Patrick Bronte sent Charlotte and Emily back to Cowan Bridge, after their sisters Maria and Elizabeth died. Reason,  as Claire Harman is writing, because he had paid for it already. Did Patrick Bronte really did such a thing????? I didn't remember reading this before. So I started to search. I could not find this story in Juliet Barker, nor in Rebecca Fraser but then, yes, I found it in  Elizabeth Gaskell's book. So it is true. I am shocked. Elizabeth wrote: Both Charlotte and Emily returned to school after the midsummer holidays in this fatal year. But why didn't the other biographers mention it, I ask myself? Some hours later I thought, maybe there are notes in the book of Elizabeth Gaskell? And yes, I found it. The note: As Miss Gérin has shown (op.cit.p.16) this statement is inaccurate: the surviving Bronte sisters left the school for good on 1 June 1825.

I was trying to find out what Winifred Gérin was writing

Read here:

 

So, really I am confused. How is it possible that in the newest biography something is told

what is refuted in other biographies?

 

And.... Patrick Bronte got his money refunded? This really is a different story.

November and december in Haworth

The following list includes events (many of which are held on a regular annual basis) which take place in or near to Haworth village (appearing in approximate forthcoming order):

• November Christmas Market
• The Haworth Steampunk Weekend
• Scroggling the Holly
• The Christmas Torchlight Procession
• The Christmas Nativity Pilgrimage
• Christmas and New Year in Haworth
• The Haworth Beer Festival
• The Bronte Vintage Gathering
The Haworth 1940s Weekend The Haworth Festival The Oxenhope Straw Race Yorkshire Day in Haworth

• The Worth Valley Beer and Music Festival
• Halloween in Haworth

The big tree is up in #Haworth! Just in time for the @BradfordMarkets Christmas market in Central Park this w/e.

Events which are held on a more regular basis include the following:

• Arts Markets (held regularly in Haworth and Ilkley)
• Haworth Family Treasure Hunts in Haworth Park from CluesGo Treasure Hunts

 

“Mary thou dids’t not know that I was nigh / Thou dids’t not know my gaze was fixed on thee. Brontë Society discovers manuscripts in ‘much-treasured’ book owned by the writer’s mother

 

Maria Brontë died when her six children – the authors Emily, Charlotte and Anne among them – were very young. Among the few possessions she left behind was a copy of Robert Southey’s The Remains of Henry Kirke White, which was “much-treasured” by the family, according to the Brontë Society. Stuffed with annotations, sketches, and markings by various members of the household, the volume just acquired by the society also contains unpublished manuscripts by the teenage Charlotte, stuck in among the pages. “We knew the book existed but we didn’t know it had these papers in it,” said spokesperson Rebecca Yorke. “They’ve never been published or come to light before.”

The family sold the book after the death of Charlotte’s father Patrick in 1861. It travelled from the family home in Haworth to the US, where it eventually ended up in the hands of an American book collector. The circle will be completed in the new year, with the volume due to go on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The society received £170,000 for the purchase from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, in addition to contributions from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries.

Collections manager at the museum Ann Dinsdale called the book “one of the most significant Brontë items to come to light in many years”. She described the finds as “hugely important”. The book “was clearly well-used and of great sentimental value to the Brontë children, who lost their mother while they were very young. In addition, the unpublished writings by Charlotte offer new opportunities for research, which is really exciting.”

Both pieces of work relate to the fantasy world of Angria imagined by Charlotte and her brother Branwell in a series of tiny books. “It played a huge part in their lives,” said Dinsdale. “Everything they read and everyone they met in Haworth fed into their imaginary world.”

The short story features a public flogging, embezzling from the Wesleyan chapel, and a “vicious” caricature of the Reverend John Winterbottom – a religious opponent of the children’s father. Winterbottom is “in the middle of the night dragged from his bed” and then “by the heels from one end of the village to the other”, writes Charlotte in the story.

The poem features Mary Percy, the lovesick wife of the king of Angria Zamorna, and “one of the leading Angria characters”, said Dinsdale. “It’s quite an ambitious poem for a young girl, full of thees and thous,” she added.

Mary thou dids’t not know that I was nigh / Thou dids’t not know my gaze was fixed on thee,” the poem opens. “I stood apart and watched thee passing by / In all thy calm unconscious majesty.”
The pieces have been dated to 1833, when Charlotte would have been around 17. The story runs to 74 lines, and the poem is 77 lines. Dinsdale predicted that it would be of interest to general readers as well as scholars. “It’s of interest to anyone interested in Charlotte’s life, and because of the tragic story of the Brontës, their lives are particularly appealing to a wide range of people,” she said

Historian Juliet Barker, author of the biography The Brontës, said that “the book alone is a valuable acquisition because of its rare associations with Mrs Brontë before her marriage to Patrick, but its importance is immeasurably increased by the unpublished manuscripts tipped into it”.
According to the Brontë Society, the Southey title is one of Maria’s “rare surviving possessions”, after a box containing all her property was shipwrecked off the Devon coast shortly before she married Patrick Brontë in 1812. It also features Patrick’s Latin inscription, reading that it was “the book of my dearest wife and it was saved from the waves. So then it will always be preserved.”
theguardian