The Haworth the Brontës Knew

Abstract

Welcome to Haworth. You are 70 of the 700,000 to 1,000,000 people who visit Haworth every year.1 Bradford Council welcomes you to Haworth too. Since the demise of the wool textile industry in the 1960s, the local council has been extremely solicitous of visitors — tourism is now the largest employer in Haworth, and the council’s marketing department wishes to persuade many more millions to visit in the years to come. ‘Immerse yourself in the cultural heritage of Haworth,’ reads their promotional leaflet, ‘step back in time and [. . .] discover what Haworth was like at the time when the Bronte sisters lived there.’2 The council’s leaflet is misleading, of course. The Haworth that we see today is very different from the Haworth that the Bronte sisters knew; it is the product of 150 years of selective development. Tourism has been of economic importance to Haworth since the time when Mr Bronte and Mr Nicholls still occupied the parsonage, and the village has changed continuously since then in response to visitor expectations — ‘The Bronte Tea Rooms’, ‘The Old Apothecary’ and now, filling every shop window each spring, the 1940s overlay as well. So, what created the visitor expectations that drove the generations of canny Haworth entrepreneurs — and the planners — to produce the tourist village that is Haworth today? I do not think there is much doubt about the answer to that question: it was Elizabeth Gaskell. From its publication in 1857 until quite recently, Gaskell’s description of Haworth in The Life of Charlotte Bronte had been accepted as unquestioningly as had her portraits of the Brontes, and her account of their lives. The blurb on the back of my 1968 reprint of her hagiography describes the book as ‘[. . .] the greatest and most accurately written account of the life of Charlotte Bronte’. In her book, Mrs Gaskell lays great emphasis on the importance of the village in the development of her heroine’s character — her opening chapter is devoted to this — and yet her description of Haworth is no more accurate than the leaflet put out by the council’s marketing department: ‘Haworth village [. . .] is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a background of dun and purple moors [. . .] grand from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest’.3 Picturesque;