Branwell

When we were over in the USA earlier this year visiting our friends Greg and Deb they let us have a look at some of the travel guides to England they had kicking around the house. Rather predictably the books were pretty London centric. That was fine; I was expecting nothing more. Virtually the entirety of the British media is London centric so it would be unreasonable to ask an American tourist guidebook to buck the trend.

What did irritate me however was that the only entry for West Yorkshire (an area encompassing two of England’s biggest cities and home to a population of 2.1 million) was for Haworth - a small village near Keighley.

Now I’ve been to Haworth and trust me, it’s not worth it. The reason it is internationally famous however is that it was the home to Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë; authors of Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and Wuthering Heights respectively. There is a museum dedicated to their lives and legacy in the Parsonage where they used to live. I’ve been there too and it has won my coveted Worlds Most Boring Museum Award for several years in a row (even beating Holmfirth’s Postcard Museum). Not everything about the Brontës is boring however. Less well known than the Brontë sisters is the Brontë brother.

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Branwell Brontë was the only male sibling in the Brontës, and was regarded by the family as the most talented of the bunch. After providing him with a classical education at home, his father sent him to London to attend the Royal Academy, but he never actually turned up for enrollment - choosing to roam the streets of the capital spending all his money on booze.

Between the ages of 21 and 25 Branwell had a variety of jobs, ranging from portrait painter through private tutor to railway stationmaster. However he appears to have performed pretty abysmally in all of them. He was sacked from his tutoring job for fathering a child by one of the maidservants, and dismissed from his stationmaster’s position for financial incompetence.

At the age of 26 Branwell went on to take up yet another tutoring position, but was again sacked. This time for having an affair with the mother of his pupil, a lady called Mrs Robinson. You would have thought her name would have given him a bit of a clue really. Branwell maintained an infatuation with Mrs Robinson throughout the rest of his life. When her husband later died he was hopeful that their relationship could be rekindled, but he was spurned by the newly widowed lady who had no desire to marry a penniless tutor.

A broken man, Branwell returned to the family home and sunk into alcoholism and addiction to opiates. In the years that followed he descended ever deeper into mental illness, causing his family to despair of him. He became erratic, dangerous, and delusional; at one point even setting fire to his own bed.

Finally, aged just 31, he succumbed to tuberculosis, the same disease that would eventually wipe out the entire of the Brontës aside from the father. Throughout his life Branwell had stated that “as long as there was life there was strength of will to do what it chose”*. And so to prove this he insisted on dying standing up, propped on the mantelpiece for support; his pockets filled with old letters from his beloved Mrs Robinson.

His last words are reported to be “All my life I have done nothing either great or good”. To be fair it must be pretty tough to grow up in a family full of literary giants.