HAWORTH
THE HOME OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
=How to get there.=—Train from St. Pancras. Change at Keighley.
Midland Railway.
=Nearest Station.=—Haworth.
=Distance from London.=—216 miles.
=Average Time.=—Varies between 5-1/2 to 6-1/2 hours.
1st 2nd 3rd
=Fares.=—Single 28s. 7d. … 16s. 6-1/2d.
Return 57s. 2d. … 33s. 1d.
=Accommodation Obtainable.=—At Keighley—"Devonshire Hotel."
Haworth is a long straggling village 4 miles from Keighley, a large manufacturing town in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The road is very steep to the village—"four tough, scrambling miles." It consists of one street, so steep that the flagstones with which it is paved are placed end-ways that the horses may not stumble. Past the church and the lonely parsonage are the wide moors, high, wild, and desolate, up above the world, solitary and silent. This gray, sad-looking parsonage, so close to the still sadder churchyard, is a spot of more than ordinary interest, for it was the home of the Brontës—that wonderfully gifted and extraordinary family! Charlotte Brontë shared with her sisters their intense love for the wild, black, purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church which is built at the summit of the one long narrow street. All round the horizon are wave-like hills. Jane Eyre, published in 1847, written with extraordinary power and wonderful genius, astonished the entire reading world. Little did any one imagine that the authoress lived far away from the busy haunts of men in a quiet northern parsonage, leading a gentle, sad life; for her two sisters, whom Charlotte loved as her own life, were very delicate, and their one brother, in whom they had placed great hopes, had given way to drink. Charlotte was known to the literary world as Currer Bell, her sisters as Acton and Ellis Bell. After Jane Eyre came Shirley, written in a period of great sorrow, for her two loved sisters died within a short space of each other, not long after the death of their unhappy brother, and Charlotte was left alone in the quiet, sad parsonage with only her aged father. Villette was well received. It was her last work. Charlotte Brontë married, in 1854, the Rev. Arthur Nichols, and after a few brief months of happiness passed away on March 31, 1855, at the early age of thirty-nine.
Haworth has been much influenced by the growth of Keighley.
[Illustration: W.T. Stead, Heckmondwike.
THE PARSONAGE AT HAWORTH, FROM THE CHURCHYARD.
Where Charlotte Brontë and her family lived.]