Branwell Brontë
Encyclopedia
Brontë
The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family associated with Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte , Emily , and Anne , are well-known as poets and novelists...
family, and the brother of the writers Charlotte
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...
, Emily
Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother...
, and Anne
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë was a British novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.The daughter of a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England, Anne Brontë lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. For a couple of years she went to a...
.
Youth
Branwell Brontë was the fourth of six children and the only son of Patrick BrontëPatrick Brontë
The Reverend Patrick Brontë was an Irish Anglican curate and writer, who spent most of his adult life in England and was the father of the writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, and of Branwell Brontë, his only son....
and his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë
Maria Branwell
Maria Branwell was the mother of English writers Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë and Charlotte Brontë, and their brother, the poet and painter Branwell Brontë.-Early life:...
. He was born in Thornton, near Bradford
Bradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...
, Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
, and moved with his family to Haworth
Haworth
Haworth is a rural village in the City of Bradford metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, England. It is located amongst the Pennines, southwest of Keighley and west of Bradford. The surrounding areas include Oakworth and Oxenhope...
when his father was appointed to the perpetual curacy in 1821.
Of the four Brontë siblings who survived into adulthood, Branwell Brontë seems to have been regarded within the family as the most talented, at least during his childhood and youth. While four of his five sisters were sent to Cowan Bridge
Cowan Bridge
Cowan Bridge is a village in the English county of Lancashire.It is south-east of the town of Kirkby Lonsdale where the main A65 road crosses the Leck Beck...
boarding school (resulting in the death of his two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, from tuberculosis), Branwell was kept at home to be privately educated by his father, who gave him a classical education suitable for admission to Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
or Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
. Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson , often referred to simply as Mrs Gaskell, was a British novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era...
, biographer of his sister, Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...
, says this of Branwell's schooling:
Mr. Brontë's friends advised him to send his son to school; but, remembering both the strength of will of his own youth and his mode of employing it, he believed that Patrick was better at home, and that he himself could teach him well, as he had told others before.
Brontë collaborated as a writer with his sisters in childhood and adolescence, creating fictional worlds. His surviving juvenilia shows that he collaborated most closely with Charlotte on their imaginary world Angria.
Adulthood
In 1840, Brontë became a tutor to a family of young boys in Broughton-in-Furness
Broughton-in-Furness
Broughton in Furness is a small town on the southern boundary of England's Lake District National Park. It is located in the Furness region of Cumbria, which was part of Lancashire before 1974...
but was dismissed within six months. During this time he did a translation of Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
. He was then employed at Luddendenfoot
Luddendenfoot
Luddendenfoot or Luddenden Foot is a community in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England. It lies along the Upper Calder Valley below the village of Luddenden, between Sowerby Bridge and Hebden Bridge.-Cultural reference and notable people:...
railway station
Luddendenfoot railway station
Luddendenfoot railway station served the village of Luddendenfoot in West Yorkshire, England, from 1840 until closure in September 1962. Two fatal accidents occurred close to the station before its closure - the first in 1925 and the second thirty years later in 1955.Branwell Brontë was employed as...
in 1841 but was dismissed in 1842 due to a deficit of eleven pounds in the accounts attributed to incompetence rather than theft. During his period of employment both as a tutor and on the railways he harboured literary ambitions and published poetry under various pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
s in the Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
press.
In 1843 Brontë took up another tutoring position in Thorp Green, appointed as the tutor to the Reverend Edmund Robinson's young son. He gained this position through his sister Anne, who was the governess to the Robinsons' two older daughters. During this time he corresponded with a number of old friends about his increasing infatuation
Limerence
Limerence is a term coined c. 1977 by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov to describe an involuntary state of mind which seems to result from a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one's feelings reciprocated...
with Robinson's wife Lydia, who was the daughter of Rev. Thomas Gisborne. He was dismissed on unspecified charges in 1845. It is thought, according to his account to his own family, the Robinson family's silence on the reason for his dismissal, and subsequent gifts of money from Mrs. Robinson through her servants, that he had an affair
Affair
Affair may refer to professional, personal, or public business matters or to a particular business or private activity of a temporary duration, as in family affair, a private affair, or a romantic affair.-Political affair:...
with Mrs. Robinson and that the affair had been discovered by her husband.
Elizabeth Gaskell refers to a letter received after his dismissal
sternly dismissing him, intimating that his proceedings were discovered, characterising them as bad beyond expression, and charging him, on pain of exposure, to break off immediately, and for ever, all communication with every member of the family.
Brontë returned home to his family at the Haworth parsonage
Brontë Parsonage Museum
The Brontë Parsonage Museum is maintained by the Brontë Society in honour of the famed Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë – in their old home located in Haworth, West Yorkshire, an area of England covered in much open, expansive moorland...
, but he was devastated by Mrs. Robinson's abandonment and the increasing unlikelihood of a reunion and turned to alcohol. He became an alcoholic
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...
and was thought to be addicted
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...
to laudanum
Laudanum
Laudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
. His behaviour became irrational and dangerous as he developed delirium tremens
Delirium tremens
Delirium tremens is an acute episode of delirium that is usually caused by withdrawal from alcohol, first described in 1813...
. Charlotte's letters from this time demonstrate that she was angered by his behaviour, but that her father was patient with his broken son. Although it was at this time that his sisters' first novels were being accepted for publication, it is not known whether he was even informed.
Brontë's severe addictions masked the onset of tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
, and his family did not realise that he was seriously ill until he collapsed outside the house and a local doctor identified him as being in the disease's terminal stages. He died shortly thereafter.
Emily Brontë died of the disease in December of that year and Anne Brontë the following May.
Cultural references
In Stella Gibbons
Stella Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer.Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933...
' novel Cold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb...
(1932), the character Mr. Mybug is introduced as writing a psychological study of Branwell Brontë intended to show that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847. It was her only novel and written between December 1845 and July 1846. It remained unpublished until July 1847 and was not printed until December after the success of her sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre...
.
Branwell and his sisters are the central figures in the play The Gales of March written by Lee Bollinger
Lee Bollinger
Lee Carroll Bollinger is an American lawyer and educator who is currently serving as the 19th president of Columbia University. Formerly the president of the University of Michigan, he is a noted legal scholar of the First Amendment and freedom of speech...
in 1987.
In June 2009 the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth hosted an exhibition entitled Sex, Drugs and Literature - The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë focusing on Branwell's life.
In 2011 Blake Morrison
Blake Morrison
Philip Blake Morrison is a British poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a...
wrote We are Three Sisters, a re-working of Chekhov
Chekhov
- People :* Alexander Chekhov, older brother of Anton Chekhov* Anton Chekhov , Russian writer** Chekhov Gymnasium, school, and now museum in Taganrog** Chekhov Library, public library in Taganrog** Anton Chekhov class motorship...
's Three Sisters
Three Sisters (play)
Three Sisters is a play by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov, perhaps partially inspired by the situation of the three Brontë sisters, but most probably by the three Zimmermann sisters in Perm...
based on the lives of the Brontë sisters and featuring Branwell and Mrs Robinson, which premiered in Halifax on 9 September before touring.
Further reading
- Branwell Brontë: a biography by Winifred GérinWinifred GérinWinifred Eveleen Gérin, OBE was an English biographer born in Hamburg. She is best known as a biographer of the Brontë sisters and their brother Branwell, whose lives she researched extensively...
(Toronto/NY: T. Nelson & Sons, 1961, Hutchinson 1972) - The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë by Daphne du MaurierDaphne du MaurierDame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning DBE was a British author and playwright.Many of her works have been adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca and Jamaica Inn and the short stories "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now". The first three were directed by Alfred Hitchcock.Her elder sister was...
(Victor Gollancz 1960, Penguin Books 1972) - The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. by Tom Winnifrith (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd, 1983)
- The Life of Patrick Branwell Brontë by Tom Winnifrith
- The Brontës and their Background by Tom Winnifrith (1973 Macmillan, 1988 Palgrave Macmillan)
- The Brontës by Juliet BarkerJuliet BarkerJuliet R. V. Barker FRSL is a British historian, specialising in the Middle Ages and literary biography. She is the author of a number of well-regarded works on the Brontës, William Wordsworth, and medieval tournaments...
(London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994) - A Brontë Family Chronology by Edward Chitham (2003 Palgrave Macmillan)
- Branwell, A Novel of the Brontë Brother (ISBN 1-933368-00-4), by Douglas A. Martin
- A Chainless Soul, a biography of Emily Brontë, by Katherine Frank