Charlotte Brontë and the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls married on Thursday 29 June 1854 in her hometown of Haworth, Yorkshire. The newlyweds’ honeymoon, the itinerary of which was shared by Charlotte in a letter to a friend, was spent in Ireland after a stop-over in Wales.
This book is a celebration of their wedding trip and Irish Odyssey.
The Nicholls’ grand tour entailed a long journey from Haworth to the town of Banagher, home to Arthur’s relatives. The tiresome trek, along with Charlotte’s “bad cold” restrained sight-seeing in Wales and Dublin and hindered Charlotte’s initial enjoyment of the holiday to some extent. The honeymoon only truly began when kindly ministrations in Banagher enabled her to feel “greatly better” and in fine fettle for pleasurable leisure trips.
Although Charlotte was a regular letter writer, she recorded little of the people she met, or of the scenery and sojourns along the Irish way. However, it was possible to create a honeymoon travel record based on the writings of friends and literary acquaintances who toured many of the same trails and sites before the Nicholls, such as the authors Harriet Martineau, Sir John Forbes, William Thackeray, her much-loved Sir Walter Scott, Percy Shelley, and others, including their clerical friends the Reverend Sowdens.
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