Welcome to Brontëworld!

December 21, 2018

WE FIND ourselves in Haworth, a beautiful warren of old buildings and cobbled streets that is at the heart of Brontë country. Our crooked two-storey flat looks out onto a perfectly northern view, perched in a house on a hill next to the famous Parsonage and the school where Charlotte and Emily worked as tutors, wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and contracted deadly diseases from the infected water supplies.

The sisters were all dead before they were 40. But in the towelly warmth of this apartment, the wet, grey skies and soggy green pastures arouse a lovely feeling of comfort and belonging. There is something reassuring about the terraces and farmhouses stacked on the uneven slopes opposite. 

We take a stroll through the cluttered, overpopulated old cemetery next to the parsonage, trying to read the archaic, moss-encrusted inscriptions to beloved fathers and devoted wives on the dozens of irregular and uneven tombs and gravestones. We go to a Christmas craft fair in the old Brontë school and buy a wooden clock made by hand by some wiry, whiskery old-timer who looks as if he should be shooting varmints with a blunderbuss. 

On the BBC iPlayer, I stumble across a 1977 documentary about the Brontës. The presenter, Joan Bakewell, is full of disdain about “the Brontë business” in Haworth, a remote hill village now “as busy as Blackpool’s Golden Mile,” as one curmudgeonly resident describes it. 

An elderly functionary with the local Brontë Society then brushes off Bakewell’s complaint that there aren’t enough local members by saying Haworth itself has been “Brontëd to death”. We are then treated to various images of the delightful Heathcliff Coffee House, a cellophane packet of handmade Brontë shortcake biscuits, a colourful hand-painted shop sign offering Brontë ice creams, and - my favourite - the Brontë garage, with high-quality used cars for sale. 

Naturally, Bakewell bristles at all this, and the way it misrepresents the Brontë experience:

Haworth was no rustic idyll: it was a slum as bad as London’s worst. No sewers, just open drains. The churchyard itself, overcrowded and ill-drained, was a source of infection. Two in five babies die before the age of six. The average age of death was 25 years.  

Most of the places Bakewell finds so irksome have now gone, replaced by artisan eateries, alternative health product stores and vintage boutiques. One shouldn’t forget the continuities: the splendidly unsilenceable old steam train; the steeply sloping cobbles, greasy with mud and rain; the mismatched masonry of the graveyard; and above all, the bulging, sagging gloom of the glorious Yorkshire skies. Bakewell understands this, and wants us to remember this, at least, about the Brontës:  

It was their isolation here, in this harsh uncompromising part of Yorkshire, that nurtured their genius, fostered their writing, and in the end, killed them. Haworth, for all its coach loads and souvenirs, is a place hallowed by genius and tragedy.