To walk invisible

[Dowser]

Really looked forward to this but am finding it all a bit. Meh!

Anyone else watching
It might just be me
I'm a bit tired tonight

Wow, so many knowledgeable people on this thread.

Have any of you written a dissertation/book?

Recorded this to watch tomorrow. I live in Haworth and watched them filming it in may/June time. They used the Main Street and rebuilt the parsonage and graveyard up in penistone hill just outside the village. The set was incredible and it was amazing watching it go up.

I'm ordering the poems. Have all the other books. There was a very old volume of the poems, that I read, at the library of my school, decades ago.

Patrick, the father, (his son, Patrick Branwell, was called Paddy by his friends, Branwell after his mother Maria - her surname), changed his name before he went to Cambridge. He got a full scholarship as well on application at 25 years old.

As I've said before, Patrick Bronte came from a place where I lived as a teenager. Hence my interest. I prefer Austen, but it's a thin line between her and the Brontes in terms of brilliance. And they all wrote the best novels in English Literature.

Oh and looby, I will be visiting Haworth in the spring. Can't wait!

Branwell died of TB aggravated by drug and alcohol abuse - 'consumption' is on his death certificate I think. Emily apocryphally started coughing the minute he was planted, and everybody knew it was consumption but she wouldn't be diagnosed or treated. Then once she was dead Anne also sickened but allowed herself to be diagnosed with pulmonary TB and treated with all the quack remedies available.

By the time all were dead, Charlotte realised that there was obviously some kind of tendency in the family which had always been lurking (as TB can) - and Papa always knew that the coughs and pains Emily and Anne exhibited were the same he had seen in Maria and Elizabeth years ago.

Then Charlotte became ill after becoming pregnant - threw up constantly and although 'pthisis' is on death cert, it's been mooted that she might have had Addison's disease. Or according to mad 20th century biographers, couldn't cope with being a mother so vomited herself Freudianly out of the equation. The myth story is that she caught a cold walking in the rain to a waterfall with Arthur Bell Nicholls - which I think she did do, but hardly likely to die as a result!

So yeah - they all had TB, probably to an extent caught it from one another as well as sharing dormant tendencies towards it in the first place.

Thanks for that seek

So Patrick was made of sterner stuff.

Yes, must have been! And yet probably spent the most time being coughed over by parishioners!

He and Charlotte were terrific hypochondriacs on their own and one another's behalves, too.

Did Branwell love the widow he was warned off by Jo Armstrong (I think) or was he after a cash cow to fund his lazy lifestyle?

I don't think we really know about that Woodhill - fascinating to speculate! I could imagine that he was in love with the idea of being in love with forbidden older lady: it's all very Gondal-ish!

One of the best and earliest debunkings of the Bronte myth is actually in Antonia Forest's 'Peter's Room' IMO. And one of her characters definitely thinks he was 'only really interested in her lolly'

I think Branwell's death cert said bronchitis and possibly 'marasmus' (which is now only used, I think, to indicate malnutrition in children), but it's hard to rule out anything in a self-neglecting alcoholic and drug addict!

Don't forget the other two Brontes, the eldest two, Maria and Elizabeth, who died in childhood after their stints at Cowan Bridge School, Maria (on whom Helen Burns in Jane Eyre is based, as Cowan Bridge became Lowood) of typhoid and Elizabeth only a few weeks later of TB. Ironically, if they hadn't become ill and died when they did, it's very possible Charlotte and Emily, who were also at the school would have died too - it was only the ill health of the older ones that alerted Patrick to how appalling the school regime was.

I think part of the reason their deaths seem so appalling to us - even given that all the Brontes but Maria and Elizabeth lived longer than the average lifespan in Haworth at the time, which was 19! - was how domestic and unmediated they were. Emily refused to see a doctor when it was obvious she was dying, refused to even have her health mentioned or take medicine, and until the day of her actual death, she got up and did her housework as usual. She only said she would see a doctor within an hour of dying, when it was useless, and then just died on the sofa in the parlour.

And five months later Anne was fulfilling a last wish to see the sea in Scarborough with Charlotte and their friend Ellen Nussey, and as they were actually closing her eyes in their boarding house room, a servant stuck her head around the door to announce dinner. You'd need a heart of stone not to weep for poor Charlotte, losing three siblings in a year.

Seek, yes, I thought at the end of the programme when they said Emily caught a chill which developed into TB was stretching it a tad. Just a bit!

TB was in my family on my father's side, but they lived in penury following the death of their father when my dad was a baby. Strangely my dad, his brother and his sister died from complications of pneumonia, following cancer.

Penury for them being a double fronted detached Victorian house with outhouses and substantial land surrounding. The house was damp with only one fire ever being lit. My nana, as a single widowed mother, did continue her work as a teacher, but being a woman, her pay just brought the household above the poverty line. Her husband, my granddad, left debts she had to pay. I'm in my mid fifties but I remember gorgeous Christmas Eve's with a lovely tree, and much awaited presents. So this wasn't all that long ago!

crikey.

Marasmus, that's the one!

BTW - absolutely - yes, Charlotte did hate Jane Austen's books. G.H. Lewes said she should read them to learn more about writing, and she said that she imagined JA and all 'her ladies' would turn their posh noses up at her; JA was only interested in polite doings in big houses with neat gardens, and there was no emotion in her books.

Which, frankly, I have a lot of sympathy with as a point of view.

I can't begin to imagine why the Bronte sisters would not have recognised a similarity between them and Jane Austen. Both had to write to make a living, and all did so under male names, even George Eliot copied it. Austen set the trend!

I can understand that the Brontes wanted a different approach, and that they did. I'm sure they had an understanding of the difficulties that Austen had. They may not have liked her books, which were not popular then, but they would have known Jane Austen's legacy.

Austen didn't write under a male name though did she?

I think when they read stuff from early c19 and late c18, they tended more toward Romantic poetry - Austen's classicism and coolly satirical voice is so different from anything which really got them fired up, I can see why they wouldn't really 'get into' her.

JA was only interested in polite doings in big houses with neat gardens, and there was no emotion in her books

Have to disagree with that view of Austen, I'm afraid. There's a lot of stuff going on beneath the surface of Austen that sometimes we, as modern readers, perhaps don't quite 'get'. Some of the references may not have been obvious in the Brontës time too (I'm just reading a book about it, it's fascinating ).

That's what CB thought though, and I personally have some sympathy with the view!

I imagine her being told she really ought to read - and learn from - Austen as a bit like telling Johnny Rotten he could learn a lot from the Monkees if he would just listen more carefully

seek Austen wrote under the name of (I think) Ashton Dennis for a while, at least. Or maybe approached a publisher under that name.

(Ps Hiphop I assume your own lyrics are bottomless, based on username )

Wow Absolutely I never knew that! Thanks!

How lovely @elendon. Haworth has gone much more 'upmarket' in the last couple of years. Shops, cafes and pubs/restaurants have really upped their game and it's a great place to spend the day. In fact, best get ready because we re off there in about an hour!

Thanks for such an interesting thread. I really enjoyed the drama and loved Wuthering Heights; less so Jane Eyre which was spoiled by GCSE, and I have never read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and should rectify that.

For anyone planning on ordering the books, you can get them as free ebooks as they are out of copyright.

I've put them on my Kindle, but had to get the books as well!
Books for home, Kindle for travelling

Must say what an excellent production overall can't comment on the minor in's and outs of those times etc but something that did strike home was just how short lived people were in those days. I've had my family tree done on my fathers side and for years ten to twelve children born and only two lived though to adulthood. And the poor sisters just barely made their names and their lives cut short by evil illness such as TB and even in the 50's i remember my parents and relatives talking in hushed tones about such killers as pneumonia.

Yes it came across as harsh and life would have been for a lot of people, they though were probably better off than most. One of the places Haworth and the museum i must visit this coming year. Especially if i should meet the love of my life interested in the arts and literature:-)

But what an excellent ending cutting across the years to the present day!