Charlotte Bronte Anniversary

This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë on 21 April 1816, and you can read my feature on the birth of the Brontë family legend in Issue 5 of the Discover Your Ancestors bookazine. Lots of events are planned for the forthcoming bicentenaries of the births of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë, and you will be able to find out more on the Brontë200 website (currently under construction).  
The same issue of the magazine has another feature by me on secondary education and teacher training. University and college records can be a good way of researching your ancestors' schooldays, as well as finding information on other family members.  


Images:

Charlotte Brontë. Engraving for Clement Shorter, The Brontës And Their Circle, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, c.1914. Author’s collection.

Hotel de Ville, Brussels. Patrick Brontë visited Brussels with Charlotte and Emily in February 1842. The girls studied abroad so they would be better qualified as teachers and governesses. Cassell’s Encyclopaedia, a Storehouse of General Information, Vol. 2, c.1894.

Happy 50th issue, JARW!

Many congratulations to Jane Austen's Regency World on its 50th issue! As ever, it’s packed with informative articles on Austen and her times. My feature for JARW this month contrasts the lives of George Austen and Patrick Bronte, both fathers of famous novelists. Brontë (1777-1861) was a controversial figure during his own lifetime. His children’s literary talent brought him an unwelcome taste of fame… but to find out more, you’ll have to buy a copy!


Images: Jane Austen’s Regency World March 2011 cover.
Title page from Mrs Gaskell’s controversial Life of Charlotte Brontë (Smith, Elder & Co, 1906).

Mary Barton

This year is the 160th annniversary of a landmark novel by a woman writer: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Gaskell’s ‘Tale of Manchester Life,’ published in 1848, starkly depicted the mill-workers’ harsh living conditions. It was denounced as biased by mill-owners and Tory press. Mrs Gaskell herself insisted she wrote the truth. She had first-hand knowledge of the cotton workers' lives because of her husband William's work; he was a Unitarian minister whose work took him right into the mazy alleys and disgustingly filthy closed courts of central Manchester.
Gaskell also wrote the first major biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her first impressions of Howarth and Charlotte's father Patrick greatly coloured her descriptions of the Brontë household. At this time Charlotte and her father were at loggerheads over her courtship by Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she went on to marry. Gaskell's portrait of Patrick as a stern patriarch became part of the Brontë legend.

The importance of making a good first impression on an editor is the subject of my latest feature; you can read it in the March issue of the New Writer.

Image: Powerloom Room, 1844
Pictorial History of the County of Lancashire, 1844. Author's collection.