Bronte Wedding Preparations

I hope you all had a very Happy Christmas, and thanks to you all for joining me over my 12 days of Brontë Christmas countdown – I had so many lovely comments about the posts, and that makes it all worthwhile. This period between Christmas and New Year can be a time to relax and recharge the batteries, but this week in 1812 was anything but relaxing for the founding figures of the Brontë family: for Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell it was a time of excited anticipation, a time of joy and a time of wedding preparation.

Patrick and Maria were married in Guiseley’s St. Oswald’s church on 29th December 1812, less than six months after their first meeting (although it has been conjectured that there may have been an earlier meeting between the two). It was a happy and unique event, for in fact it was a triple wedding spread across four hundred miles involving two sisters, two best friends, and four cousins. Phew, I will leave it to Charlotte Branwell, daughter of one of the participants (and cousin of the Brontë sisters), to explain it in a letter printed in a Cornish newspaper on Christmas Day 1884:

On this day in 1812 bride and groom-to-be were on the eve of their wedding – I can well imagine how they must have been feeling as I had my own wedding day earlier this year, making me the happiest man in the world. Patrick and Maria must have been feeling just as happy, and their married life was a happy one which produced six children.

In a letter of 5th December, Maria wrote of their wedding preparations: ‘We intend to set about making the cakes here next week, but as fifteen or twenty persons whom you mention live probably in your neighbourhood, I think it will be most convenient for Mrs Bedford to make a small one for the purpose of distributing there, which will save us the difficulty of sending so far.’

Mr and Mrs Bedford were Patrick’s landlords at his rented home of Lousy Thorn Farm near Hartshead-cum-Clifton in the West Riding of Yorkshire, although shortly after the wedding the new Mr and Mrs Brontë made their first home at Clough House in nearby Hightown.

Whatever your plans are for the New Year I hope they can go smoothly, and I hope you can join me on Sunday for our first Brontë blog post of 2026 – and I have big plans for this website, and for celebrations of all things Brontë, in the year to come.