Campaigners in fight to save Bronte landmark from threat of cash cuts

 

EVOCATIVE: The ruins of Wycoller Hall in the village of Wycoller, said to be the setting of Ferndean Manor in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre

 

AN EAST Lancashire landmark which inspired Charlotte Bronte is under threat – and a petition to support it has already been signed by more than 700 people. Wycoller Hall, on the outskirts of Colne, was the model for ‘Ferndean Manor’ in Bronte’s Jane Eyre – and the historic venue is the starting point for the Bronte Way which leads to the Parsonage Museum in nearby Haworth.

 

But the countryside service offered by Lancashire County Council is under threat, as part of the £262m cuts required over the next five years, which has sparked a wave of protest.

 

Also under threat are the Queen Street Mill in Burnley and Helmshore Textile Mill near Haslingden.
The Friends of Wycoller is behind the petition on the change.org website, citing the hall’s links with one of Bronte’s most memorable characters, Mr Rochester.
The petition reads: “‘Ferndean Manor’ is the centrepiece of the gorgeously romantic Wycoller hamlet, clustered around a stream at the heart of Wycoller Country Park. Its moody scenery and residents inspired the Bronte sisters.

Read more: lancashiretelegraph/Campaigners_in_fight_to_save_Bronte_landmark_from_threat_of_cash_cuts

How the moors changed my mind about the Brontës

Read everything of this article on:  theguardian/moors-brontes-charlotte-emily-anne 

I’ve just got back from a week’s filming in Haworth and its environs – its bleak, freezing, inhospitable, endlessly compelling environs – for a documentary about … yes, you guessed it: the Brontës. There were three of us presenting, each going in to bat for a different member of the family.
The novelist Helen Oyeyemi was Emily’s champion, the BBC stalwart Martha Kearney was Charlotte’s, and I was there to represent Anne. She’s the only Brontë sister I can really cope with. The others, with their Wuthering Heights and their Jane Eyres, are just … too much. T’Sturm und t’Drang are not my way, in life or in reading. Give me the quiet, forensic scrutiny of Agnes Grey, the eponymous heroine of Anne’s first book, based on her miserable experiences as a governess for two rich families full of semi-feral children. Or the slow, pitiless anatomising of the effects of alcoholism on a Victorian family, so accurate that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall could have been written yesterday.

CHARLOTTE Brontë married her sweetheart

CHARLOTTE Brontë married her sweetheart – watched by a huge crowd of well-wishers in Haworth churchyard. The BBC today recreated the 1800s wedding of Charlotte, then the only surviving Brontë sister, to her clergyman father’s assistant Arthur Bell Nicholls. A crew filmed the ceremony inside Haworth Parish Church with a costumed wedding party made up of professional actors and Brontë Parsonage Museum staff. Brontë enthusiasts and local people, invited along by the museum, lined the churchyard to cheer the happy couple and throw confetti.

The event was filmed by BBC Bristol as part of a series due to be shown in 2016 to mark the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth. Living Like A Brontë will be part of a year-long BBC season focusing on classic literature in a bid to get more people in the UK reading. During today’s ceremony Rebecca Yorke, the parsonage museum’s marketing officer, played bridesmaid Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Brontë’s best friend. She said: “The ceremony was really moving. The two people playing Charlotte and Arthur were really well cast and it felt very real, being in the Brontë Chapel. “When we were in the church we could hear the rain hammering down, so it was amazing that so many people were outside to greet us.

“I’d had lots of inquiries so I knew a lot of people were interested in going. We had responses from people all over the world.” Ann Dinsdale, a Brontë historian and collections manager at the parsonage museum, said she was surprised how touching the event was. She said: “We spent a week with a film crew around Haworth to got used to them, but it was quite moving to see the actual ceremony. Mrs Dinsdale said the replica dress was created from descriptions of the actual dress and the design of the real wedding bonnet and veil from the museum’s collection. She added: “The real dress didn’t survive. Arthur Bell Nicholls kept it for many years but left instructions that it should be burned after his death. Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls after publication of her novel Jane Eyre and the death of sisters Anne and Emily. Filming is being carried out with support from staff at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Living Like a Brontë will be screened next spring as two 60-minute episodes.

Journalist and broadcaster, Martha Kearney; columnist and author, Lucy Mangan; and novelist, Helen Oyeyemi, are travelling to the parsonage, home of the Brontë sisters, to discover the stories behind their classic novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. A BBC spokesman said: “With help from a range of experts, each presenter will explore one of the Brontës in detail.
                                                                                           
“By re-living the sisters’ daily routines, visiting the key places in their world and immersing themselves in their letters and diaries, and through the sisters’ interactions with each other, they’ll discover what it was that served as their sources of inspiration.” The BBC Get Reading season will also include Brontës At The BBC, showcasing excerpts from the many TV adaptations of Brontë works, and To Walk Invisible, a new drama about the Brontë sisters written by Last Tango In Halifax and Happy Valley creator, Sally Wainwright. thetelegraphandargus

The wedding took place at eight o’clock in the morning, but one important man was not to be there. At the last moment Patrick said that he felt too ill to attend, although we’ll never know if this was true or if he was still harbouring some resentment at the marriage itself. Margaret Wooler stepped into the breach and it was she who gave Charlotte away, with Reverend Morgan, Patrick’s friend who had baptised Charlotte, conducting the ceremony.Also present at the church were Joseph Grant, a friend of Nicholls, and his wife, Sutcliffe Sowden, the vicar of Hebden Bridge, the sexton John Brown and his daughter Martha, Joseph Redman, the parish clerk, and John Robinson, a local boy and former pupil of Charlotte’s. We can also assume that the by now aged and infirm Tabby Aykroyd would also have been there if she was well enough on the day. It was a low key affair, as Charlotte wanted, and they held a reception afterwards at the Sunday school building that lay between the church and the Parsonage. annebronte/the-wedding-of-charlotte-bronte

the torchlight procession in Haworth

 

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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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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.