Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

the Parsonage was built in 1779, and was first occupied by John Richardson, the then incumbent. The building as seen by the visitor today, and as reproduced in countless photographs and on souvenirs, is unhistorically substantial: the Wade Wing, built to accommodate Patrick’s successor’s large family, makes the house much more dominant of its vicinity and more commodious. The Parsonage the Brontës knew and lived in, as seen in early photographs and even in Mrs Gaskell’s rather inaccurate sketch, is quite a small, unpretentious house, where everyone must have lived on top of each other and a variety of different activities would have been going on simultaneously. Emily could “see around me tombstones grey” (on two sides of the house, anyway) but she must also have been conscious of Sally Mosley “in the back Kitchin,” and doubtless of the double privy out at the back as well. Anyone who valued privacy could well, as Patrick did, prefer to take his meals on his own. The principal rooms of the house were Patrick’s study, to the right of the front door, and the dining room, to the left (though both these rooms, at one time or another, seem to have been known as the parlor). Charlotte enlarged the dining room in 1850 by taking the wall shared with the hallway 18 inches toward the front door – thus disturbing the eighteenth-century symmetry of the hall. The room where the young Brontës ... log in or subscribe to read full text