Life at Top Withens

Yorkshire Live has an article on the people who lived at Top Withens.

The titular home of Wuthering Heights in Emily Brontë's classic romance was a pretty miserable place.

Even its name describes the bleak, windswept location of the farm where there was much plotting, revenge and general cruelty. Brontë's description of Wuthering Heights doesn't match that of Top Withens, a former farmhouse at the top of Stanbury Moor, near Haworth.

But it has been suggested that Brontë was inspired by the location of this long-abandoned Tudor farm. It is almost certain Emily Brontë, living so close by, would have visited Top Withens and the setting certainly matches that of Wuthering Heights farm.

Whether Top Withens was a place of plotting and revenge we don't know but we do, however, have a pretty good idea of what life there was like – it was difficult. The farm was abandoned at least twice before it fell into ruins.

As you approach Top Withens, as many do from the Brontë Waterfall, you may wonder whose idea it was to build a farm in such a remote, unwelcoming and impractical location. It's next to a couple of streams that could have served as a water supply and there's plenty of rough grazing but other than that, it's far from ideal for even subsistence farming.

It was probably a case of managing with what you'd been given. George Bentley, a clothier, bought the estate in 1567 and he, or one of his relatives, built Top Withens (originally Top o' th' Withens) in the second half of the 16th century.

It was a fairly modest abode with a small porch, a large main room and a smaller room, both with stone fireplaces. There was a narrow, vaulted cellar connected to a large barn.

In 1591, farmer William Bentley divided his estate between his sons Martyn, John and Luke. This is probably when the three separate farms – Lower, Middle and Top Withens – were created.

Splitting the estate three ways meant less land for each son and their descendants to farm and subsequently, it led to poverty and hardship. For the residents of Top Withens, some of their income will have come from traditional sheep and dairy farming but it was not enough to live on.

The family will have supplemented their income by quarrying, evidenced by scars on the surrounding landscape. They, like other struggling farmers in the area, would have woven woollen garments and yomped over miles of inhospitable moorland to sell their wares at markets in Halifax and Bradford.

In short, it was a tough existence before you factor in the near-constant cold and lashing wind and rain. This wilderness, in the days before tourism and waterproof clothing, would have been considered dangerous and frightening.

Nevertheless, the farmhouse was occupied continuously until around 1891. The Keighley Corporation bought the former Withens estate around 1903, demolishing Lower and Middle Withens in 1930.

Jonas Sunderland, his wife Ann Crabtree, their son Jonas and Mary Feather lived at Top Withens during the time of the Brontës. Their descendants occupied the farm until the end of the 19th century. Ann Sunderland (later Sharpe) and her husband Samuel Sharpe and their daughter Mary were the second to last residents.

In May 1893, a lightning strike caused extensive damage to the farm. Life at Top Withens must have been too hard for Samuel after Ann died in 1895 and he left the farm in 1896.

Top Withens is thought to have remained empty until the early 1920s when Haworth eccentric Ernest Roddie moved in. By 1926 Roddie, who lived alone except for dogs and chickens, was defeated and moved back to Haworth.

The farm has been empty ever since and a roofless shell remains. (Dave Himelfield)

Grunge looks into 'The Surprising Origin Of Wedding Objections':

One of the problems facing Regency and Victorian England was bigamy. Since divorce was difficult and expensive, many men and women decided to run away and start a new life — and a new marriage. According to Reviews in History, the "Judicial Statistics of England and Wales" recorded 5,327 bigamy trials between 1857 and 1904. However, historian Ginger Frost has estimated that the true number was probably five times higher. 

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that judges were incredibly lenient on sentences for bigamists; by the 1890s, around 37% of those found guilty spent less than a month in jail. Moreover, the specter of bigamy loomed so large that it made its way into popular Victorian literature, such as "Lady Audley's Secret," "David Copperfield," and "Middlemarch." However, the most famous bigamy-centered story is generally regarded to be "Jane Eyre." In an iconic scene, Jane and her love interest, Mr. Rochester, are about to exchange their vows on the altar when a wedding objector stands up. "The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment," he shouts, in what is now one of the most famous lines in literature (via Victorian Web). (Anna Harnes)

Public Books interviews writer Dodie Bellamy.

That experience of slowing down while reading also happened for me with Villette, by Charlotte Brontë, which I had never come across in my younger days. With Villette, too, once you slow down and sense the expanse of time, it is just so beautiful. It made me feel a longing for a different life than the one I have now.

RF: Was that ability to slow down a function of just having more time to focus your attention on those loose baggy monsters, or was there something about Brontë’s writing?

DB: Part of it is her attention to detail and the space she creates to get inside a character’s psyche. I felt like I knew Lucy Snowe. At some point, she has a breakdown, and I felt right in the midst of it, as if I were swimming through the breakdown with her. Whereas, a lot of contemporary novels are written from the middle distance—you feel outside the character and you never really get into that deep empathy with them.

In teaching, I often talk about foreground and background: everything can’t be heightened. Some parts should be sketchier than others to allow the important bits to pop through. There are so many rules in teaching graduate writing programs, it just drives me crazy. I studied with people in New Narrative and the one thing they were very big on is the power of telling rather than showing. I see students doing these weird machinations to get ideas into their books because they have been told they have to show it through all these little hints. And I think, “Why?” (Rhoda Feng)

LitHub's Book Marks asks writer Kaitlyn Greenidge all sorts of bookish questions:

BM: Favorite re-read?

KG: Jane Eyre

The Spectrum quotes from actor Charles Heston's words about his mother:

According to Heston, he was born in unincorporated suburbs of Chicago called “No Man’s Land.” His parents divorced when he was 10 years old. “I think of my mother as a heroine from a Brontë novel —‘Wuthering Heights’ or ‘Jane Eyre’.” (Writer’s personal note: I associated mine with Jane Eyre.) (Patrick Ullmer)

Grapevine waits for the Wise Children performances of Wuthering Heights in Norwich.