Haworth parsonage and village will forever be linked inextricably
with one nineteenth-century literary family. For it was here, in
1821, that Patrick Bront, an Irish Anglican clergyman, came from
Thornton to be curate. He brought his three young daughters and son
to Haworth, and it was here that the sisters grew up to become
quite the most remarkable literary phenomenon of the century. As
children, they knew the streets and the houses, the moors and the
people. And, as Michael Baumber shows, many of the characters in
the Bront novels were based upon real Haworth folk - some of whom
recognised themselves in the women's novels and were not at all
happy with how they had been portrayed - while the moors above the
village figure prominently and famously as the haunt of the
brooding Heathcliff in Emily's greatest work "Wuthering Heights".
Patrick Bront the curate was himself a notable character in the
history of the village, and his role in the social, public and
religious life of the village is explored at several points.
Surprisingly, the Bront novels mention little about the textile
industry which by that time had become such a dominant force in the
district's economy. Indeed, the industrial development of the
region was such an important and all-consuming fact of life in
early Victorian Haworth that it forms a major subject of this new
book. The Bront's did, however, describe life in the district's
rural homes, schools and communities at a time of particularly
harsh living conditions and appalling death rates in the new
industrial community of Haworth. The village's public health record
was poor well into the twentieth century, and Patrick Bront endured
the deaths from tuberculosis (or other illnesses aggravated by it)
of all four of his children between 1848 and 1855. Yet, as Michael
Baumber's highly readable new book shows, the history of Haworth
actually stretches back millennia: his book tells the whole story
of the Haworth district from the early Mesolithic right up to the
popular tourist magnet that the village now becomes during the
summer months. The book also features the hamlets of Near and Far
Oxenhope and Stanbury, providing a clear and illuminating account
of how Haworth developed in the particular way that it did. Fully
illustrated, with many rare old photographs, this book offers many
new insights into the village and also its occasionally ambivalent
relationship with its most famous literary residents.
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