ANNOUNCEMENT.
ROMANTIC STORIES FROM THE FAMILY HISTORY OF THE BRONTËS.
The August and succeeding issues of McClure’s Magazine will contain a series of papers giving the dramatic and hitherto unknown history of the Brontës in Ireland. They will throw a vivid light upon the origin of the Brontë novels, and upon the ancestors of the Brontës. As Doctor Wright says:
“Hugh Brontë, the father of Patrick, and grandfather of the famous novelists, first makes his appearance as if he had stepped out of a Brontë novel. His early experiences qualified him to take a permanent place beside the child ‘Jane Eyre’ at Mrs. Reed’s. The treatment that embittered his childhood is never referred to by the grand-daughters in their correspondence, but it is quite evident that the knowledge of his hardships dominated their minds, and gave a bent to their imaginations, when depicting the misery of young lives dependent on charity.”
All the existing biographies of the Brontë sisters are confined to the Brontës in England. There were but two people competent to give the story of the Brontë ancestors: one, Captain Mayne Reid; and the other, Doctor William Wright, who has spent many years preparing this history.
Doctor Wright had exceptional advantages for his labor of love. In his childhood his nurse told him the traditions of the Brontës; his tutor was full of recollections of the father, uncles, and grandfather of the novelists. As a student he wrote screeds of the Brontë novels in place of essays, having first been told the incidents and events by his tutor. His recollections, extending back to the early part of this century, have been strengthened by years of patient investigation. During different years Doctor Wright has spent several months at a time in Ireland, following up obscure traces of the family, hunting down traditions connected with the Brontës, or carefully verifying minute points derived from his own recollections or the reports of others. The result of these painstaking researches, which have extended over a lifetime, is an authentic narrative of great human interest.
The unadorned history of the family reads like a Brontë novel. The adventures, the hairbreadth escapes, the struggles, the kidnapping, the abuse, which figure in these chapters are stranger than fiction. The courtship, elopement, and marriage of Hugh Brontë with Alice McGlory form one of the most extraordinary narratives of love and adventure that has ever been penned.
The half-humorous, half-pathetic, but always intensely interesting, descriptions of the ancestors of the Brontë sisters, their peculiarities, the superstition with which some of them were regarded as masters of the black art, the respect that they commanded as fighters and singers and workmen, the side-lights thrown upon the early and bitter contest over tenant rights, the exposition of strange religious beliefs—all of this, and more that cannot here even be hinted at, serve to present a curious and vivid picture of everyday life in a corner of Ireland one hundred years ago.
These articles bring out the hereditary and surrounding influences which helped to shape the genius of Charlotte Brontë. Aside from the value which they have because they furnish a remarkable commentary on the work of the great novelist, they are pages of real life of fascination and remarkable interest.
The first article will give a glimpse of the early Brontës and the singular weird story of that dark foundling who brought ruin to his benefactors, and whose machinations resulted in the absolute separation of Hugh Brontë, the grandfather of the novelists, from his parents—a separation so complete that he was never able to learn in what part of Ireland his father’s family lived. Hugh Brontë was kidnapped when he was six years old. The strange narrative of his abduction will be given in the August number of McClure’s Magazine.