Charlotte Brontë At Home

Charlotte Brontë at Home, written by Marion Harland (1830 - 1922), and was published in 1899 in New York and London.. PREFATORY. THIS simple narrative of the domestic life of Charlotte Bronte is as careful and patient as conscience and affection could make it. When practicable, I verified by personal investigation what I had heard and read. When dependent upon information received from others, I consulted what seemed to me the ablest authorities upon a subject which has been treated by many, with more or less skill.. To no other published work upon the Bronte family am I so much indebted as to the most interesting volume lately issued by Professor Clement K. Shorter under the title of Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle. It is candid, scholarly, and comprehensive, and to it my final appeal was made when other biographers differed as to leading facts, or were confusing in details. It has taken its place—and will hold it—as a standard classic in whatever pertains to the life-story of a great woman.. My grateful acknowledgments are herewith offered to the Reverend J. Wade, late of Haworth Rectory; to Mr. Richard Hewitt of Bradford, England, and to Mrs. Mary N. Stull of Iowa City.Marion Harland.. EXCERPTS. Baby Charlotte was two months old when she was presented for baptism (June 29, 1816) at the font in the Thornton Church. The building, now a picturesque ruin, is more interesting to the thoughtful visitor than the shabby-genteel house in which Charlotte Bronte was born. The frame of one fine window is intact in the gable, which is all that remains of the sacred edifice beyond the foundations, a crumbling wall a few feet high, and some memorial slabs that once floored the chancel. Until very lately the font, which appears in our illustration, was left where it stood when the baby was baptized by her father's friend and her mother's cousin-in-law, the Rev. William Morgan of Bradford. Mr. Morgan and Jane Fennel! were married on the same day and hour with Mr. Bronte and Maria Branwell, Mr. Bronte performing the ceremony for Miss Fennell and Mr. Morgan, the latter clergyman returning the favor by uniting his wife's cousin to Patrick Bronte. We like to believe that the near neighborhood of her cousin—but four miles distant by the coach-road—tempered, in some degree, the asperities of life to the fragile little mistress of Thornton Parsonage. We choose to imagine, also, that Jane Fennell may have been in church on June 29,—perhaps in the capacity of godmother.. I have said that in Helen Burns Charlotte embodied tender and mournful recollections of the "little mother" who had guided her first tottering footsteps, and left the image of a saintly martyr in her heart and soul. Whether the fare at Cowan Bridge school were good, as the defenders of the institution assert, or bad, as Charlotte told Mrs. Gaskell it was, and made the worse "by the dirty carelessness of the cook, so that she and her sisters disliked their meals exceedingly,"—there is no doubt that Maria's sojourn there was a period of suffering, borne with angelic patience. She was "delicate, unusually clever and thoughtful for her age, gentle, and—untidy." Her mother had had no time to train her in habits of orderly neatness, with five other children racing upon the heels of the first-born, and since the child was able to run alone she had been too busy looking after the younger babies to think of herself.. The Publisher has copy-edited this book to improve the formatting, style, and accuracy of the text to make it readable. This did not involve changing the substance of the text. Some books, due to age and other factors may contain imperfections. Since there are many books such as this one that are important and beneficial to literary interests, we have made it digitally available and have brought it back into print for the preservation of printed works of the past. Making this copy very readable.