Month: July 2025

Apologies to all who missed my Brontë blog post last Sunday, a combination of travelling and technical glitches meant that it somehow vanished into the ether never to return – although as it was about the Brontës’ French connections it may make a return next year on or around the date of Bastille Day.

I have now bid farewell (for now at least) to France, and my thoughts have turned to Anne Brontë’s poem “Farewell”, as it is one of Anne’s most enigmatic poems, as well as one of her most beautiful and seemingly heartfelt poems. I present it to you now:

“Farewell to thee! but not farewell
To all my fondest thoughts of thee:
Within my heart they still shall dwell;
And they shall cheer and comfort me.
O, beautiful, and full of grace!
If thou hadst never met mine eye,
I had not dreamed a living face
Could fancied charms so far outvie.
If I may ne’er behold again
That form and face so dear to me,
Nor hear thy voice, still would I fain
Preserve, for aye, their memory.
That voice, the magic of whose tone
Can wake an echo in my breast,
Creating feelings that, alone,
Can make my tranced spirit blest.
That laughing eye, whose sunny beam
My memory would not cherish less; —
And oh, that smile! whose joyous gleam
Nor mortal language can express.
Adieu, but let me cherish, still,
The hope with which I cannot part.
Contempt may wound, and coldness chill,
But still it lingers in my heart.
And who can tell but Heaven, at last,
May answer all my thousand prayers,
And bid the future pay the past
With joy for anguish, smiles for tears?”

It seems to me that this is one of Anne’s many poems about William Weightman, the handsome assistant curate of Haworth whom I and many others believe Anne Brontë loved. I think it likely that if Weightman had lived longer their love would have flourished and would likely have ended in marriage, after all what could be more natural at that time than for an assistant curate to marry the daughter of the experienced curate he served under? Alas it was not to be, for Weightman contracted cholera after visiting a sick parishioner and died on 6th September 1842.

This was a devastating blow for Anne and from that date she produced a succession of mourning poems about a lost love; she also produced her vision of an ideal man in her debut novel Agnes Grey: Edward Weston is an assistant curate who is kind, who loves animals, and who often visits and helps sick parishioners; in my mind there is no doubt that Weston is Anne’s portrait of Weightman.

So what is the enigma behind Anne Brontë’s poem “Farewell”, what is its puzzle? Surely, it belongs in the category of Weightman mourning poems? The difficulty is that we have no date to this poem, and Anne Brontë expert Mick Armitage and Anne Brontë biographer Edward Chitham have both suggested that it may have been written in late 1840 and predated the death of William Weightman.

If this is the case then it may have been written at a time of anguish for Anne when she was returning to work as a governess at Thorp Green Hall. In that reading of the poem the coldness may not be the coldness of the grave, but a coldness of attitude, a perceived indifference from Weightman about Anne’s departure? This is certainly a possibility, but it seems to me that the final two lines of the poem are a person talking about someone who has died. Their hope is a hope that heaven will remove their tears and replace them with joy; the hope which Anne often writes about, the hope that they will be reunited again in the next world. In my opinion, therefore, this is another poem written after the death of William Weightman.

Whatever its date, this is a fine poem full of the emotional power Anne generated so well in much of her verse. I hope you can join me next Sunday for another new Brontë blog post, farewell for now.

We are in the midst of another heatwave here in Yorkshire, but in 1848 it was this week which changed literary history forever – for better and worse. This was the week in which Charlotte and Anne Brontë travelled to London together to finally reveal their true identities and, in doing so, disprove theories that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were one person acting dishonestly. They arrived at Euston (that’s it at the head of this page) in the early hours of 8th July. It was on 11th July 1848 that they returned to Haworth, and in today’s new Brontë blog post we are going to look at what they brought back with them.

During their four day stay in the capital (which was to be Anne Brontë’s only journey outside of Yorkshire) Charlotte and Anne were shown the sites of London by publisher George Smith and W. S. Williams. It was a joyous but very tiring time, and when it was time for the sisters to return to Haworth they were given parcels of books to take with them – a welcome and valuable gift, as books at this time were an expensive commodity. Two days after arriving home, Charlotte wrote to Smith to thank him:

“My dear sir, I am not going to write an elaborate note of thanks, for the fact is, you have left me little to say on that head. I feel it is unavailing to multiply words, however benefits may be multiplied. We received the parcel, which was indeed a treasure to bring home with us.”

A month and a half later, however, Charlotte did elaborate in a lengthy account of the trip to London which she gave in a letter to her friend Mary Taylor, then resident in New Zealand. Charlotte’s letter of 4th September ends:

“On Tuesday morning we left London – laden with books Mr. Smith had given us – and got safely home. A more jaded wretch than I looked when I returned, it would be difficult to conceive – I was thin when I went but was meagre indeed when I returned, my face looked grey and very old – with strange deep lines ploughed in it. My eyes stared unnaturally – I was weak and yet restless.”

Twenty days after writing this letter, Charlotte’s brother Branwell Brontë was dead. He was an alcoholic and a heavy drug user who had been unwell for some time, but these weren’t the cause of his death. The death certificate records chronic marasmus – a wasting associated with consumption, what we know now as tuberculosis. Within a year of the visit to London, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë had all died of tuberculosis. Only Charlotte Brontë was left of the Brontë siblings.

Haworth was a sickly, infested village with death rates as high as the worst slums of London and where the Babbage report showed that over four in ten people died before the age of six, but by far the biggest killers were typhus and cholera. Tuberculosis was an infection carried from person to person, a killer of the crowded cities, and relatively rare in Haworth – so it is more than an anomaly that five of the six Brontë children should die of it.

The tragic reality is that tuberculosis was and is a disease of the big cities and crowded conditions. That week in July 1848 not only changed the course of literature forever, it also led directly to the death of Branwell Brontë and then to the deaths of Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, like dominoes falling long after the first domino had been pushed.

In 1972, eminent doctor Professor Philip Rhodes published a fascinating and detailed study called “A Medical Appraisal Of The Brontës” in which he gave the following assessment:

“She [Emily] might have collected an overwhelming dose of tubercle bacilli from Branwell. She seems to have been the practical one about the household and may well have been Branwell’s nurse and so liable to massive infection… It is of especial interest that Charlotte and Anne made a hurried journey to London in July, 1848… Could one or other of the sisters have picked up a further dose of tubercle bacilli which when they returned to Haworth they handed on to Branwell and to Emily? This seems a most likely supposition. Almost certainly one or other of them introduced a new pathogenic element into the closed community of Haworth Parsonage, which wreaked so much havoc so quickly… Anne perhaps was the most amiable and affable of all the Brontës, but it seems likely that it was the exposure to the pathogens of the big city that killed her, and it is probable that it was she who brought home the infection which killed Branwell and Emily before her.”

I have to agree that it seems likely that Charlotte or Anne brought the deadly infection back to Haworth Parsonage with them. It matters not which sister did it unintentionally and unknowingly, but it appears to me that evidence may indicate that it was Charlotte. Look at the description Charlotte gives of herself after her return from London to Mary Taylor. She is tired, she is restless, she has lines on her face and looks old, she is in a wretched state. All of these are common early symptoms of tuberculosis. Perhaps it is possible that Charlotte picked up a tubercular pathogen in the crowded environment of London, but she may already have built up some immunity to the disease through contact with it at Cowan Bridge School, the school that saw her sisters Maria and Elizabeth Brontë, and many others, succumb to the disease. If this is the case then Charlotte’s immunity protected her, but her siblings did not have the same protection.

It seems certain to me that tuberculosis as well as books were carried back from London to Haworth, and there is only one real culprit: Thomas Cautley Newby, the unscrupulous publisher whose lies had caused Charlotte and Anne to head to London with wicked speed to protect their name. Without that, the Brontë story could have been very different. I hope you can join me next Sunday for another new Brontë blog post.

Bruce Springsteen said you can’t start a fire without a spark; I believe that a spark is also essential to kickstart great works of art and creativity, and it was just such a spark that lit up Haworth Parsonage on this week in 1836.

There can be no other family which has produced such a gathering of geniuses than the Brontës, and this is all the more remarkable considering that the Brontë family were not wealthy and that the children had little formal education in their infancy. We will never be able to fully understand how three sisters produced such great works of genius in such a short space of time, theirs is a unique genius, but we can pinpoint a moment when the first catalyst for their creativity arrived: July 5th 1836.

Three years later Charlotte Brontë, 13 at the time but 10 in 1826, gave an account of that important moment:

“Papa bought Branwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds. When Papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke!’ when I had said this Emily likewise took one up and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part. Emily’s was a grave-looking fellow, and we called him ‘Gravey’. Anne’s was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him ‘Waiting-boy’. Branwell chose his, and called him Buonaparte.”

In 1841, Branwell Brontë, then 14 but 9 at the time of the event, also recalled what happened, but his recollection had a slightly different slant:

“When I first saw them [the 12 wooden soldiers] in the morning after they were bought, I carried them to Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They each took up a soldier, gave them names, which I consented to, and I gave Charlotte Twemy (i.e. Wellington), to Emily Pare (Parry), to Anne Trott (Ross) to take care of them, though they were to be mine and I to have the disposal of them as I would. Shortly after this I gave them to them as their own.”

We see, then, two acts of thoughtfulness. Patrick Brontë, returning from a trip to Leeds, decided to bring his son a gift of a set of soldiers. Branwell decided to share them with his sisters. Almost immediately the four Brontë siblings began to compose stories, ‘plays’ as they called them, around the 12 soldiers. The tap to their immense imaginations and creativity had been turned, and it would not be shut off again except by that final curtain which waits for us all.

It is worth noting as well that this gift came a year after the deaths of the oldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. The four remaining Brontë siblings became an incredibly close knit unit, but they still loved to play. We have an account of one occasion when the young Brontës played a trick on their old housekeeper Tabby Ackroyd. Left in the care of Tabby, the children began acting out one of their plays. They were so immersed in their characters, and carried their acting so far, that Tabby had to run screaming from the house to fetch help from her nephew William, saying:

 “William! William! Yah mun goa up to Mr Brontë’s for aw’m sure yon chiller’s all gooin mad, and I dar’nt stop ith house ony longer wi’em; and aw’ll stay here woll yah come back!”

Seeing how frightened his Aunt Tabitha was, William marched off to the Parsonage, only to be greeted by a ‘great cackling of laughter’ when he came in sight of the children. They were delighted at how effective their playing and acting had been.

This huge power of play, this great love of creativity, would soon be captured in tiny books small enough for the toy soldiers to read; it would soon be captured in stories told as the siblings walked round and round their dining table; it would soon be captured in poetry printed in a book attributed to Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; it would soon lead to some of the greatest novels ever written, books that will be read for as long as human life exists on this tiny, beautiful planet of ours. A tiny spark from the gift of twelve soldiers was all it took to change the course of literary history forever, even if they were just writing in the dark. I hope you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post.