Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements, and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions. They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine came they starved.
The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant and precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land.
The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm, and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of prosperity and independence.
The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife, were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the rainy day.
For such slaves there was little recreation except a half holiday on Christmas Day, with a party display on the Twelfth of July or the Seventeenth of March. No toil, however, could crush out of them the desire to better their lot, but their moiling and saving seldom resulted in anything more brilliant than a five-pound note to pay a son’s passage to America, or a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.
The industry of the Brontës was not in vain. They lived under the best landlords that Ireland has ever produced. “The Sharman estate,” now known as “the Sharman-Crawford property,” has been blessed by a succession of Christian landlords, who recognized that landed property had duties as well as privileges, and who have made it their life work to propagate their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.
On the Sharman estate the Brontës had a fair field for their industries. They worked in absolute harmony, as far as appeared to the outside world. They were a loving family in their way, but without the shows of love. Their home was all the world to them, and they clung to it, in early life, with something of the affectionate attachment that Emily Brontë and her sisters afterwards manifested towards the sombre parsonage at Haworth. They were healthful, hopeful and happy in their farm, with the growing signs of plenty around them.
At this juncture the potato blight, which cracked the framework of Ireland’s economic arrangements, blasted the Brontë paradise. The affection of the farmer towards his growing crops is in proportion to the solicitude with which he has watched over them; but the Brontës only learned fully what a treasure the potato crop had been to them when it was taken away. Never had their farm seemed so beautiful, or the potatoes appeared so bountiful, but, in a night, the fields were smitten black, and the stench of rotting leaves filled the air. The tubers became rotten and repulsive, instead of being white and floury.
Many theories were advanced to account for the calamity. Pamphlets were published and sermons preached, to show that national disaster had followed on the heels of national wrongdoing. Seasons for humiliation and fasting and prayer were set apart, to supplicate Almighty God to take away the awful judgment.
The Brontë mind never ran smoothly with the common current. To them the evil appeared to be simply the work of the devil. The Brontës held the simple old Zoroastrian creed that everything beneficent was the work of God, and everything maleficent the work of the Evil One.