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February 17, 2018 - June 7, 2019
he also observed that though the third edition was more truthful, vulgar readers would always prefer the first’.
but God has given you grace, and strength sufficient unto your day – My trials you have heard of – I feard often, that I should sink under them; but the Lord remembered mercy in judgement, and I am still living.’17
William Morgan, if not Patrick’s oldest then certainly his closest friend, had died on 30 March 1858, while on a visit to Bath.
The simple and elegant new tablet, sculpted by Mr Greaves of Halifax, was made of Carrara marble and plainly ornamented.
‘He struck me as being naturally a very social man,’ Hoppin later observed, ‘with a mind fond of discussion, and feeding
eagerly on new ideas, in spite of his reserve.’21
A Haworth Gas Company was established in 1857 which made and stored gas to supply lighting for the streets and those who could afford to light their houses.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin, who had regarded Charlotte’s provincialism with varying degrees of scorn, were now frequent visitors to Halifax and Bradford, where they lectured and read to the assembled Yorkshire masses.
On 30 October 1859, he preached his final sermon from the pulpit of Haworth Church.
About six o’clock on the morning of 7 June 1861, Patrick was seized with convulsions: before Arthur could get to him he was unconscious.
Whether he intended his flight to Ireland to be temporary or permanent is not known, but in this quiet rural backwater, far from Haworth and everything to do with the Brontës, Arthur soon settled into the peaceful obscurity which he had always craved.
The only manifestation of his bitterness at his treatment by the Haworth church trustees was that he never again sought or obtained a clerical appointment: in his new life he would be a farmer.
Of Charlotte’s friends from school, Miss Wooler
Mary Taylor, on the other hand, remained serenely indifferent to the lure of fame as Charlotte Brontës friend.
Like Ellen, she never married, but unlike her former friend, lived a practical, useful and happy life, unburdened by regrets.
It was Ellen Nussey, however, who was universally recognized as the fount of all knowledge where the Brontës were concerned.
Ellen had expected nothing but praise and gratification for this role and was genuinely shocked and appalled when she incurred considerable censure for supplying Mrs Gaskell with information which, it was suggested, should never have been published.
It was Charlotte’s husband who bore the brunt of her increasingly hysterical accusations.
87 Judging Arthur’s behaviour by her own, she was unable to believe that he had not kept her own letters to Charlotte and frequently denounced him to anyone prepared to listen.
Ellen made several attempts to circumvent Arthur and publish her letters from Charlotte but met with little success.
her bossiness against which her sisters rebelled, her flirtations with William Weightman and George Smith and her traumatic love for Monsieur Heger.
Emily, too, reduced to a series of vignettes illustrating her unusual strength of character, betrays nothing of the obsession with Gondal which made her almost incapable of leading a life outside the sanctuary of her home
