The Brontë Parsonage

Brontë pilgrims still wind their way from Haworth's church up the cobbled lane to the Parsonage. I imagine it looks not dissimilar to the street the Brontës would have walked. 

The building on the right (above) is the old schoolroom, built in 1832 by Patrick Brontë, a passionate social reformer who strongly believed in the power of education to transform lives. All of his children - Charlotte, Anne, Emily and Branwell - taught there at some stage and it was extended in later years. When Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854, they held their wedding reception there, attended by 500 guests!  

I have cropped the photo above to make the Parsonage look like it did when the Brontës lived there. The gable wing on the right was added by a later resident. 

On the staircase inside, there is a copy of the famous painting of Anne, Emily and Charlotte by their brother Branwell, who subsequently painted over his own likeness in the centre. The original is in the National Portrait Gallery, having been discovered folded up on top of a wardrobe by the second wife of Charlotte's widower. 

The rooms in the Parsonage are still filled with furniture and effects, many of which actually belonged to the Brontës. The wallpapers are copies of fragments found in the rooms. The parlour, below, is where the sisters gathered in the evenings and wrote many of their poems and novels. 

Patrick Brontë's bedroom was where his son Branwell died, perhaps of TB but sadly exacerbated by the drink and opiates to which he was addicted. 

There's a rather lovely grandfather clock on the staircase landing. It is said that Patrick stopped every night on his way to bed and wound it up. 

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has a link to Saltaire, in that Sir James Roberts, managing director at Salts Mill after the Salts sold the mill, bought the Haworth house in 1928. He gave it to the Brontë Society, which had been set up to collect and preserve memorabilia related to the Brontës, after their deaths. It is still owned and managed by the Society to this day.