Recollections, childhood, books and music

Halifax Today includes a letter from Ian and Catherine Emberson, reminding us of the connections the Brontës ahd with Calderdale and the Sowden brothers.

We read with interest Virginia Mason's article headlined "A bond of love and friendship" (Courier, December 15).
The main purpose was, of course, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death in December 1906 of Charlotte Bronte's husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls. However, Virginia also mentions the strong links which the Bronte story has with Calderdale, particularly through their friendships with the Sowden brothers, Sutcliffe (1816-1861) and George (1822-1899), who were consecutively vicars of Hebden Bridge. Readers wishing to pursue the theme further might like to know that in his old age George Sowden wrote his Recollections of the Brontes.This piece of writing lay virtually forgotten for over a hundred years but is now available from the Bronte
Parsonage Museum bookshop and other local outlets. It contains anecdotes about the Bronte family which appear in none of the standard biographies.
Ian and Catherine Emberson

More can be read about this connection in this previous post of ours. And, of course, in the Recollections of the Brontës by George Sowden, now that it had become available again.

For a more concise and better known history of the Brontës, Spanish readers may turn to Antonia Romero's blog, where she manages to sum up the main facts of the Brontës' lives. A great opportunity for those who have recently discovered Jane Eyre through the Spanish broadcast of the latest Jane Eyre.

A. N. Wilson, the well-known historian of the Victorian period, writes in the Telegraph about visiting Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. Because the beginning of Jane Eyre - if not read metaphorically or looking for hidden meanings - depicts well the fears of childhood, and thus Mr Wilson mentions the novel as well as Beatrix Potter's rabbits and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield.

I came home from Bethnal Green and began to read Jane Eyre again, with its account of a hysterical child being locked in the Red Room until she had calmed down, followed by the tortures of Mr Brocklehurst's school, Lowood. That is the truth of life and the Miffy-Blair version will not satisfy anyone for long. Far from being reassuring, Miffy [a rabbit devised and drawn by the Dutch artist Dick Bruna is deeply sinister. It is Miffy, not Peter Rabbit, who would become a Nazi. [...]

David Copperfield and Jane Eyre and Peter Rabbit are read by each generation as true depictions of childhood, with all its fears and horrors. They are art, that is true. Miffy, by contrast, is a pill offered patients to stop them beating their heads against the glass. Miffy is poison.

Perhaps that's a little too much to say, though. Children don't need to have miserable childhoods in order to grow up to be strong mean and women. Children need things they care about, be it Jane's ragged doll or a 20th/21st-century child's sunny, colourful Miffy.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel publishes a review of The Things That Matter by Edward Mendelson, a book recently reviewed for BrontëBlog by Patricia R. Payette.

Calling "Middlemarch" by George Eliot the greatest English novel of all time, Mendelson uses that novel to explore Western ideas about marriage, just as he uses "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte to explore childhood and "Frankenstein" to explore birth. (Chris Watson)

If you are interested in finding about this and the rest of the Brontë references in The Things That Matter, we suggest you read Patricia's review.

And to conclude on a musical note. Remember The Sweptaway's version of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights? Now you can see the video here.

Categories: Biography, Books, In the News, Jane Eyre, Music, Wuthering Heights