In the days of the Brontës, the clock at Haworth Church was inscribed with the words “Time how short – eternity how long!”, but this cannot have been the experience of Patrick Brontë, forty years the incumbent of the parish. Tithonus-like, he survived his young wife and all six of his children, living on and on at the quiet limit of the world, a white-haired shadow worn down by loss, and waiting open-armed for the end. When he reached eighty, his immortality on earth was sealed by Elizabeth Gaskell who described him in her newly published Life of Charlotte Brontë, as a child-hating “strange half mad husband” who let off steam by sawing the legs of chairs, shredding silk dresses, burning his hearthrug and his childrens’ boots, and firing a loaded gun from the kitchen door.

Aware of being “somewhat exccentrick”, the Revd Patrick Brontë objected less to Mrs Gaskell’s descriptions of his “passionate explosions”, for these had, he said, no basis in truth, than to what he called her “false statements respecting my denying my children the use of animal food”. The story, picked up from a disgruntled former servant, that his children were fed only potatoes suggested that the death from consumption, at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, of his two oldest children, Maria, aged ten, and Elizabeth, aged nine, were the result of constitutions weakened by a poor diet. As to the picture of himself, Gaskell was, Patrick Brontë explained, a novelist and therefore saw things with a storyteller’s eye, but in doing so she had ironically missed the character he felt he most resembled, “the father of Margaret in North and South, peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful – and generally well-meaning”.

Nothing anyone ever said about Patrick Brontë was as strange or surprising as what he said about himself. The oddest of the stories he told Mrs Gaskell, repeated here by Dudley Green, is the one describing how “in order to make them speak with less timidity”, he questioned his children under the cover of a mask. “I began with the youngest [Anne, aged around three] – I asked her what a child like her most wanted – She answered, age and experience – I asked the next [Emily, aged around four] what I had best do with her brother Bramwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy. She answered, reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason whip him.” And so it continued, each child wearing the mask to reveal their true self.

So busy was Mrs Gaskell constructing the masquerade of the Brontë myth that she missed the unmasked man staring right at her. Similarly, Patrick Brontë was unaware, until he was shown his daughters’ published books, that behind another set of masks his tiny house was pulsating with what Mrs Gaskell called, when she read the Brontë juvenilia, a “creative power carried to the verge of insanity”.

Green, who previously edited a fine edition of Patrick Brontë’s letters, is primarily interested in revealing Brontë the clergyman (the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written a foreword), who rose from an impoverished childhood in County Down to take up a scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he befriended Lord Palmerston and William Wilberforce, was in favour of Catholic Emancipation and against capital punishment, who campaigned for a proper water supply, and established a Sunday school. Green also gives attention to Brontë’s published poetry, which contains something of the family grimness. “Verses sent to a lady on her birth-day” begins, “But, hark, fair maid! Whate’er they say, / You’re but a breathing mass of clay, / Fast ripening for the grave”. Overwhelmed by his burden as a penniless widower, he frantically sought to replace his children’s mother, but had his proposals firmly turned down. Resigned to being alone, he emerges as a concerned father who, as Branwell told a family friend, “watched over his little flock with truly paternal solicitude and affection . . . their constant guardian and instructor”.

If he was bad-tempered and took his supper alone it was because of the sheer weight of parish duties. In 1834, he presided over 135 funerals; 301 baptisms took place in Haworth Church in 1835. Sometimes he performed twenty baptisms a day. Green describes a life of graft and grief. When Charlotte told her father a few years after the deaths, one after another, of Branwell, Emily and Anne, that she was being courted by his curate, Arthur Nichols, his rage was surely understandable. Patrick Brontë “was no domestic demon”, as a friend said of Branwell, “he was just a man moving in the mist who lost his way”, and as soon as he had found his way again he gave his consent to the marriage.

Green is the first biographer in forty years to attempt to repair the damage caused by Mrs Gaskell. “I thought I carefully preserved the reader’s respect for Mr Brontë”, Gaskell said, but “the desire of doing justice to [Charlotte] compelled me to state the domestic peculiarities of her childhood which . . . contributed so much to make her what she was”. It follows that the peculiarities of the children must have contributed to the man Patrick Brontë became, but there is no sense in these pages that his children were peculiar at all. This is in many ways the book’s strength; rather than rehearse the nature of the “genius” Patrick “fathered”, Dudley Green describes the nuts and bolts of the working life that allowed such talent to flourish.

Dudley Green
PATRICK BRONTË
Father of genius
384pp. History Press. £20.
978 1 84588 625 7

Frances Wilson’s book The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth was published earlier this year.

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