The churchyard is, to a large extent, closely paved with tombstones dating back to the seventeenth century, laid flat, and on to this dismal piece of ground the chief windows of the Brontës’ house looked, as they continue to do to-day. It is exceedingly strange that such an unfortunate arrangement of the buildings on this breezy hill-top should have given a gloomy outlook to the parsonage. If the house had only been placed a little higher up the hill, and been built to face the south, it is conceivable that the Brontës would have enjoyed better health and a less melancholy and tragic outlook on life. An account of a visit to Haworth Parsonage by a neighbour, when Charlotte and her father were the only survivors of the family, gives a
HAWORTH CHURCH AND ‘PARSONAGE’
From this point of view the home of the Brontës is almost unaltered since the day when Charlotte, the last of Mr. Patrick Brontë’s family, died. The church has been rebuilt with the exception of the tower, but this and the other changes do not make themselves apparent from this side. Behind are the moors where Charlotte and her sisters, particularly Emily, loved to take lonely walks.
clear impression of how the house appeared to those who lived brighter lives:
‘Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own “Jane Eyre.” She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester called her, barring that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was first built; and yet, perhaps, when that old man married, and took home his bride, and children’s voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate crowded graveyard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope.’
Very soon after the family came to Haworth Mrs. Brontë died, when the eldest girl, Maria, was only six years old; and far from there having been any childish laughter about the house, we are told that the children were unusually solemn from their infancy. In their earliest walks, the five little girls with their one brother—all of them under seven years—directed their steps towards the wild moors above their home rather than into the village. Eighty-eight years have passed, and practically no change has come to the moorland side of the house, so that we can imagine the precocious toddling children going hand-in-hand over the grass-lands towards the moors beyond, as though we had travelled back over the intervening years.
The unnatural environment of the Brontës’ childhood gave that lurid colour to their imaginations so evident in the writings of Charlotte and Emily, and, when at Roe Head School, one of Charlotte’s friends, after describing in a letter her companion’s strange gift of ‘making out’ histories and inventing characters, writes: ‘I told her sometimes they were like growing potatoes in a cellar. She said sadly, “Yes, I know we are.”’