Patrick and
Maria Brontë married at the very end of 1812 and had children in January 1814
(13 months later), February 1815 (13 months), April 1816 (14 months), June 1817
(14 months), July 1818 (13 months) and January 1820 (17 months). Maria, who died in September 1821, would have
spent more than half her married life pregnant.
That seems a
startling enough fact to note for its own sake, but it is also the explanation
for the series of year-long celebrations being marked by our neighbours at the
Brontë Society. The oldest two children
died as schoolgirls, but the remaining four reached adulthood, fame and, now, bicentenaries
between 2016 and 2020.
There is one
lacuna in what would otherwise be a five year programme (no child was born in
1819) so this year they are filling the gap by having a year-long celebrating
of Patrick himself, to which St Michael’s, Haworth is to make very modest
contribution of its own, something about which I have been having to think.
A recent
item in the Keighley News praised me
highly (and embarrassingly incorrectly – most of the social initiatives
involved have been the work of a valued neighbouring Baptist Minister and by
the Social Prescriber at the local Medical Centre): ‘Haworth’s Anglican Rector
has been compared to his illustrious predecessor... (who) had schools built in
Haworth and campaigned for new sewage systems which saved literally thousands
of lives’. The only points to note here
are what local people know and value about Patrick Brontë (improvements to
local education and sanitation in particular) and that local media regards it
as self-evidently an ‘accolade’ to be compared to him.
Leave aside
education and sanitation for a moment. Imagine,
if you can, a Government wishing to reform poverty relief or social
security. It fears that the costs
involved have got out of control. It
thinks that anything more than a grudging basic system encourages people to
live on benefits rather than seek work.
But the practical working out of its new system produces inhumane
conditions, felt particularly in the industrial centres at great distance from
where Parliament meets, which even drive some people to take their own
lives. This is the story of the 1830s –
the reform of the Poor Law and the introduction of Workhouses.
What is the
parson of an industrial village to do, even one who describes himself as a ‘conscientious
Conservative’ in the process? Would
protest, public meetings and letters to the press sound like bits of the trendy
modern liberal post-1960s Church of England?
In February 1836 London media reported his attempts to drum up support
for a petition to oppose what the Government was doing – a meeting he called
for what was then the new School Room had been so crowded that it had to relocate
in the neighbouring churchyard.
The
following year he wrote to the Leeds media:
The Poor Law
Amendement Bill ... is a monster of iniquity, a horrid and cruel deformity... It
must be repealed... A set of unfeeling, antiscriptural men have lately arisen
[he means the Whig Government]...
supported... in a great measure by the very men whom they wish to
oppress... What are we to do...? We will
not submit to go their bastiles. We will
not live on their water gruel, on their two ounces of cheese, and their fourteen
ounces of bread per day... We never will
endure the idea of men rolling in affluence and luxury, prescribing to us the
most extreme line which can keep soul and body together. We have religion, reason, justice and
humanity on our side... Petition, remonstrate
and resist powerfully and legally and God, the father and friend of the poor,
will crown all your efforts with success.
And this
week, 182 years later, the Work and Pension Secretary finally said of the latest
social security reforms ‘maybe things that were proposed previously weren't
effective or weren't compassionate in the way that I want them to be’. The genuine successors of Patrick Brontë
would, on this evidence, be obliged to use a word stronger than ‘maybe’.
The picture
is another sculpture from Trafalgar Square taken just after Christmas. The 'fourth plinth' now has a recreation
of a sculpture of a lamass (a winged bull and protective deity) that stood
at the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh from
700 B.C, destroyed in 2015. It is made of empty Iraqi date syrup cans reflecting the destruction of the country's date industry.
