Haworth , Bronte' s and dolls today.

I put on a carefully picked white outfit, packed a bag of dolls. Today I took along a variety with no particular theme in mind. I had along Ever after dolls , Monster high and some 1960s vintage girls too. As I say no theme I just picked those who have not been out for a bit and who would look good in Haworth. I charged up my camera battery and commandeered Lees phone.(mine is no more).

I had already been out early and captured the moon and sunrise reflected in windows at the Yeadon Tarn so I was well tuned for a photo fest some where I have not been for a while. 

Yeadon Tarn. Moon and sunrise on May first 2018.

I also Packed into the bag with my dolls...a guide to the Bronte parsonage that I acquired the other week from the twenty pence junk shop in Otley (this was a real bargain!!!) and a copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. So the scene was set.

Going across Bingley moor towards Keigley I regaled Lee with the story of Wuthering heights. I told him the  story of how Heathcliffe was found as an orphan in Liverpool and adopted by Mr Earnshaw and brought to live at Wuthering heights with his own children Catherine and Hindley.

And yes! Lee does not know the story and No! he has no interest in the Brontes or their books or lives. There are no mechanical travesties to be investigated and in fact no cars of any kind and certainly no stories or scripts that Bruce Willis would agree to act in so therefore of no interest ......

So we got to the part where the new tenant of  Thrushcross grange visits Heathcliffe at Wuthering heights and gets stuck because  of the weather and has to stay in Caty's old room.......where he encounters Cathy trying to get in at the window and gets well spooked.

We went first to The parsonage after parking up and paying with all the change left in my purse in 20p bits. There was only enough change for an hour........on the steep street past the old pub where Branwell Bronte was brought back in a barrow drunk as a skunk........Lee realised he "had left his wallet at home".  irritating? oh yes. So when we got to the Parsonage we went to the front door to take photos. There were plenty of other people who had remembered their wallets and they were all going inside. Just as we arrive a coach load of pensioners arrived so I abandoned all hope of a photo and we went to the grave yard.
There was no way we were paying to go inside even if we had remembered money.

So grave yard and Charlotte's school.......This is where the school was that Charlotte went to Oakwell hall...where we went the other week ....to get some ideas for this venture.     Here it is just next to the grave yard,

The Bronte family moved here when Charlotte was five years old. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskill is now taken as the main source of their lives. She published The life of Charlotte Bronte in 1857 after Charlotte's death. All about Charlotte's tragedy and self sacrifice it is........myth and legend it has become .
As we walked I regaled Lee with as many juicy little gems as I could remember. We climbed in amongst the graves. I picked my way around trying not to stand on the flat stones.

bear in mind that I was also holding various of my doll collection. Lee had no such squeems...he just used the old stones as steps

This parsonage next to this grave yard is where the Brontes lived and grew up. Here they created their own worlds of Angeria and Gondal and where they drew inspiration for their novels from the people and landscape around them.What I see today is not as it would have been. I see today a museum with coach loads of pensioners and Japanese tourists intellectualising and milling over every possession...a staged tourist trap.

The parsonage is one of the larger houses in Haworth. It is tiny. I have been inside though not this day. I went with friends a couple of years ago. Today I made do with my Parsonage guide as we walked.

This parsonage is small. Patrick Brontes salary would have been £200 a year  which was not a lot compared to local landowners whos income would run into thousands or a servant whos salary was pennys. So they were poor by the standards of the day, but there were others much worse off.

I wanted to head up the path to the moors....but we only had an hour.....no money and Lee has not started his new medication for arthritis yet so we went in to the open door of the church.

This too I found to be staged.

We stepped through the door to find music playing (the type of music suppsed to evoke literary imagination...piano of course) and a fella seated in the front of the pews delivering a lecture and poetry reading to two tourists......his voice echoed through the piano music.
Poems of Anne Bronte he was reading.......

" That wind is from the North, I know it well,
No other breeze could have so wild a swell................"

" I know its language: thus it speaks to me..
I have passed over thy own mountains dear,
Thy northern mountains- and they are still are free,
Still lonely, wild, majestic, bleak and dear,
And stearn and lovely as they used to be
When thou , a young enthusiast,
As wild and free as they,
O'er rocks and glens and snowy heights
Didst often love to stay."

" I 've blown the wild untrodden snows
In whirling eddies from their brows,
.................No voice but mine can reach thine ear,
And heaven has kindly sent me here,
To mourne and sigh with thee........."

"Hot tears are streaming from my eyes,
But these are better far
Than that dull gnawing tearless (time)
The stupor of dispair....."

As I reached the cabinet containing the family bible and Charlotte's wedding certifcate ....The guide was regaling about how Charlotte died from the same   "hyperemesis gravidarum" as the Duchess of Cambridge suffers from .....Severe morning sickness......and how the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskill were written to sell books and were therefore "novels" not historical facts.......

So here is Charlotte's wedding certificate. She was married in this church and then a matter of months and days her funeral was then held here by the same vicar who was a family friend. The reverend Sutcliffe Sowell

All of the family are here except Anne. Who is at Scarborough. I visited her grave on the way to the castle in September.

" I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may arise.......

Revealing to my charmed sight....

What may not bless my waking eyes"     Anne Bronte  Dreams.

From this church we popped out into the bright sun and headed down the road to the pub that Branwell Bronte frequented. Not far.
The rest is a different blog as I have to take out Monza dog who has no interest in the Brontes either.

“Smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.” 
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall