Patrick Bronte

Patrick Bronte was born in a two-room cabin in County Down, took a degree at Cambridge, and outlived his wife and all six of his children. He was the eldest of ten children of a farm labourer, taught himself enough to become a schoolmaster at sixteen, and was sent to St John's College, Cambridge, on the recommendation of a clergyman who noticed him; he changed the family name from Brunty on arrival. He was ordained, served curacies in Essex and Yorkshire, and in 1820 became perpetual curate of Haworth, where he stayed forty-one years. His wife Maria died of cancer in 1821, and the two eldest daughters died in 1825 of illness contracted at the Clergy Daughters' School he had sent them to. He educated the remaining children largely at home, let them read what they liked including his newspapers and Byron, and gave Branwell a set of toy soldiers that started the Angrian saga. He published verse and prose himself. He campaigned for years for a clean water supply for Haworth, where average life expectancy was in the twenties. He buried Branwell, Emily and Anne within nine months in 1848-49, and Charlotte in 1855. He gave Elizabeth Gaskell access for the biography and then had to live with what it said. Going nearly blind, he was taken to Manchester in 1846 for a cataract operation performed without anaesthetic, and Charlotte sat with him through the recovery and began writing Jane Eyre in the lodgings. He published Cottage Poems in 1811 and two prose tales, so his children grew up in a house where a parent was in print. He kept a pistol and discharged it out of his window most mornings, a habit dating from the Luddite years. He opposed Charlotte's marriage to his curate Arthur Bell Nicholls and gave way only after months, and it was Nicholls who nursed him for the last six years.

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