Correspondence

3298.  Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell to EBB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 17–18.

[?Manchester]

15 December 1853

Offered for sale in Browning Collections, part of lot 221. Mrs. Gaskell describes a visit to Haworth [1] and Charlotte Brontë’s existence there with her father and the 93-year-old cook: “On the left … is the sitting-room, where five Miss Brontës [2] were reared … She lives alone in this haunted room, looking on the grave-stones and the desolate moors beyond—while he, the all but blind old man, leads his solitary life in the room on the right hand side.”

1. Margaret Smith suggests that the dates of Mrs. Gaskell’s visit to Haworth Parsonage were probably 19 to 23 September 1853 (see The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Oxford, 1995–2004, 3, 201).

2. The Rev. Patrick Brontë (1779–1861) and his wife Maria (née Branwell, 1783–1821) had five daughters: Maria (1814–25), Elizabeth (1815–25), Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48), author of Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne (1820–49), author of Agnes Gray (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The “93-year-old cook,” Tabitha (“Tabby”) Ackroyd (1770–1855), was probably 83 when Mrs. Gaskell visited Haworth.

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