Episode 15 - This is the Story of Three Girls - the Brontës, part 1

Transcript

Speaker: Hello, everyone, and welcome again to another episode of The Wonder Camera. This is your podcast in which three dilettantes get together every few weeks to tell each other a cool story, pretty much. I'm Jen Rumpel, and I'm here with... Dave Powell.

Speaker: And Tracy Anderson Powell. And we are your dilettantes. It's my turn to talk today or my, to I mean, I'll talk anytime, but it's actually my turn to tell the story.

Speaker: So should i just jump right into it? Yeah, absolutely. yeah Okay, go for it. And again, these ones, you guys have no idea what I'm talking about. Usually you're coming in totally blind. So yeah hopefully.

Speaker: Jen comes in blind to what either Tracy and I are doing and Tracy and I come in blind to whatever trace ah Jen is doing. Mm-hmm. Okay, so come in blind. Our story begins on St. Patrick's Day, March 17th, 1777. We just had St. Patrick's Day. This is a total coincidence.

Speaker: Again. o So he, a sorry, our story begins in the village of Imdall, in the parish of Drumballyroni, County Down, Ireland.

Speaker: Eleanor Alice and Hugh Brunty welcome a baby boy into the world on this day. Guess what he's called? Patrick. Patrick. Heck yes. Oh, he's going to make Ireland right for the pagan. Sorry, right for the Lord, isn't he?

Speaker: We'll see. Yeah. He's born in 1777. So he's the the first of 10 children born. Oh, my goodness. Eleanor, Alice and Hugh Brungey. Can you imagine that being pregnant for an entire decade? Almost an entire decade.

Speaker: no No, i I literally can't. I can't even be imagine being pregnant for nine months, to be honest. yeah so I mean, I guess I kind of can, but... You two lack imagination. i'm thinking about i'm I'm thinking about me being pregnant for nine months right now.

Speaker: out Oh, yeah. I'm just joking. Wasn't there an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie about that? Yes. Twins? No. That's what Danny DeVito. Yeah, I think it was like dad mom anyway i can't remember mr mom maybe yeah something like that it's not i refuse to look it up we'll just call it mr mom all right mr dad yeah mr mom yeah mr dad mom that's right So we have 10 kids born to this couple.

Speaker: um We're in Ireland. Remember? Ireland. And I'm not making fun of the Irish. I actually love their accent, but I'm trying to pronounce it correctly. I'm not going to get into the history of England's evil colonial relationship with Ireland. We all know potato famine, potato famine you know, we only have be lucky once. The whole story. Humphrey Gilbert.

Speaker: We all know that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So what we need to know for this story only is that Eleanor Alice McClory, that's her maiden name, and Hugh Brunty were both Protestants. So they're living in what's now Northern Ireland, Sodrom Ballyroni. So not much is known about but the background of either parent, but they were Anglo-Irish.

Speaker: So this means that they're not Catholic, probably descended from English colonizers. So the Brunties were farmers, but they're more in the landowning sense of the word, right? they're not really Because they're descended from the English colonizers. They're the landowners.

Speaker: Yes, exactly. Yes. We even talk about the roots of that in the Comfrey Gilbert episode. I like callbacks. Anyways, continue. Oh, i think we do. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, i because Gilbert's family were some of the first ah in the north of Ireland to start trying to colonize the place.

Speaker: yep Yeah, I started of reading into it for this episode and I'm like, I gotta just stop reading because it's not the story we're telling today. Yeah. So yeah, it's sort of part of it. So yeah, the Brontids are farmers, but landowners. And in fact, you know, they lived in relatively, they moved into a relatively large two-story home in Balinaski. This is near Drumbelironi. By the time their last daughter was born in 1796. So they're moving up in the world slightly, but they're they're not wealthy, wealthy, but theyre they're landowners. So they're doing better.

Speaker: So Balinaski's rural area, not far from Imdall. So this is about 40 kilometers south of Belfast, Ireland. And their kids aren't necessarily going to be expected to work as laborers, right? And this is important because later on, Patrick, his they exaggerate how poor he was in Ireland.

Speaker: But... Not really, as you'll see. So Patrick is, uh, proves to be intelligent and capable. He's allowed to stay in school longer than normal. So instead of, you know, working the land or helping his father run the farm or getting an apprenticeship in the trades, because 10 kids, you can't have all of them being the landowner, right? so they have to do something else. Um, his brothers would go on to be educated, but they would become farmers and take over the farm, getting to trades, right? By the time Patrick was 16 years old, he'd actually founded his own school, apparently.

Speaker: so That's just precocious. Yeah. Then again, we talked about little the other Little House, have you if you've read the Little House and the Prairie books, um basically anyone could be a teacher. If you were a child who got through school and were like 15 or 16, you would be teaching other kids.

Speaker: Oh, and it's ah again, prior to modern era credentialism, where if you claim to be a doctor, you are a doctor. if You claim to be a teacher, you are a teacher. It's just the first person to set up and not kill your kids and you're fine.

Speaker: Yeah, basically, yes. Yep. So public education for all is actually quite modern idea and it's still a threat. But you didn't have so state daycares and schools in Ireland in the 1700s, right? Education is largely private, as we mentioned. So very young people, both boys and girls, could be given responsibility of teaching the basics to younger kids.

Speaker: So we don't know where his school was, but it was probably just him at home, like taking in day pupils for a fee. So there's oh records of people paying him for teaching their child children. ah He may have perhaps remained in Ireland as a tutor, but for the attention of one Reverend Thomas Ty. It's pronounced, or sorry, it's spelled T-I-G-H-E, but it's Thomas Ty. Ty, yeah. He's the parish priest of Drumguland, which sounds, it's so Irish.

Speaker: Most Irish names do. Sorry. Well, that's the thing I know. Drumguland, however, sounds like if someone was trying to make up Irish sounding gibberish, they would come up with Drumguland. Tom Gooland. Yeah, that's right. Sounds like an alcoholic beverage. Yeah.

Speaker: Some sort of spirit. Sure it does. I am also make a pledge to not spend the entire episode trying to do Irish accents. Oh, thank God. claiming that because I am... ah a quarter Irish, probably. I'm i'm Canadian. and I'm sort of British Isles blend ah that I somehow claim that.

Speaker: that's ive No. Oh, people again like what would love to claim, North Americans love to claim they're Irish. Oh, Irish and Scottish in particular. it's so This is my personality now. And there's this this whole thing about kind of a new age of plastic patties who are, frankly, kind of share politics. never that.

Speaker: You've never heard Plastic Patty? No. i haven't either. Oh, wow. That is a, ah yeah, it's a term for sort of wannabe Irish who ah usually might come from the colonizer ah side of things and then want to claim the affectations of ah being Irish and being Irish.

Speaker: Often like pro and like again, pro Republican Irish style to the point of it being cartoonish and sort of mindlessly cheering the IRA in a way that would make many Irish uncomfortable, because although there's a lot of Republicans and a lot who, you know, might have said a lot of nice things about resistance against the British, they also don't want like they also don't want the troubles to come back. So it's complicated. Without that complexity, you're kind of walking in blind and making stuff up to sound cool.

Speaker: Yep, pretty much. That's why I didn't even touch it, really, in this, because I'm like, you know what? don't the expertise. I mean, it's not complicated. I'll still say up the raw, but it doesn't mean that I... But I also appreciate complexity of a struggle that is not mine.

Speaker: Yes, exactly so. It's not really my place to say exactly so. ah Yeah, so Ty, the Reverend Thomas Ty, noticed that Patrick was really intelligent, really ambitious. So he thought he'd... And I didn't get into this either. ah Thomas Ty apparently was into an evangelicalism. So this is sort of... an offshoot of Church of England at this time, not really formal, but he wants a smart young man to get into the church to kind of share these ideas. So he is going to, he so Ty is like, oh, this young man should have a career in the church.

Speaker: So if you want to be ordained into the Church of England, though, you have to learn Greek and Latin and get a university education. Which does go to show, you know, how ah elite the church even is, too.

Speaker: Right. Like, you have to have no Greek and Latin and go to university. So, you know, it's it's a good job. It's professional. But luckily for Patrick, Ty himself had graduated from St. and John's College, Cambridge. So Patrick did learn Greek and Latin. And his patron was able to get him into the university basically by writing some good letters.

Speaker: Like, this he's a smart kid. Let him in. Because it's very, very elite at the time. And basically to get into Cambridge, he had to have a patron. Yeah, I mean, you you have to come from the right blood, basically. yeah And it is not for everybody. And the fact that it's getting evangelical and we're getting into offshoots, like I don't know how this worked in the north of Ireland, but ah in England, this is sort of a precursor to the, if we're talking period of time, to the Methodist ah sort of revivalists and the street preachers.

Speaker: or the field preachers, and then the ah sort of advent of high church Anglicanism. My mother was just talking to me about all of this last week ah because I was wondering where a high church Anglicanism came from. Because at this point, Anglicanism was not something that was really associated with fervent religious belief and more just a bureaucracy where everybody still had to go to church.

Speaker: But the actual... yeah religiosity of it, which I swear is a word, ah was not quite as present. Hence the evangelical movement of people who wanted some God back in their life, probably with some economic background. I don't understand.

Speaker: Yep. That's good. Thank you. That actually is clarifying for me and very interesting information for our listeners. Because yeah, that's that sounds about right. Yes. um So this time, Cambridge actually did provide excuse me scholarships to worthy students or students in need. So Patrick was able to spend all of his time there and it was paid for.

Speaker: So his patron got him into Cambridge and he had a scholarship, went the whole way through. Now, at some point, just before, probably just before or just after he arrived in Cambridge, Patrick changed his last name.

Speaker: So he's Patrick Bronte. Now he decides to go with Patrick Bronte. So B-R-O-N-T-E with an umlaut over the E. Oh, so a Saxon sounding name.

Speaker: Yeah. So yeah, you're right. It's assumed that Thai encouraged this change. So Bronte maybe sound too plubby and for Cambridge. No, I'm using scare quotes. I don't think that, but that's... The attitude of the time. And Bronte... It probably sounded too Irish. And name that sounded ah more British ah would, again, probably help his career chances.

Speaker: Exactly. And Bronte is indeed the ancient Greek word for thunder. so it sounds cool. It's Patrick Thunder. Huh. So does this name ring any bells for you?

Speaker: Yes, I was ah reading... ah God, what book? ah But either way, a Bronte book a few months ago. Hell yeah.

Speaker: All right. And then again, when I ask this question, like I'm not like, I am glad if you know nothing or everything either way, because this is a very famous literary family. I might string you along a little bit or string our listeners along a bit longer in case they don't know who it is. So Patrick Bronte graduates with a BA from Cambridge in 1886. I do see where this is going, though. And so this is exciting for me.

Speaker: Yay! Okay, I'm glad it is. And yeah there's and I'll get into it more because this is a large topic. So, Patrick Barante graduates with a BA from Cambridge in 1806. He's ordained deacon in the Church of England soon thereafter. I don't know what a deacon is exactly. Some church job.

Speaker: Whatever. Okay. So, upon graduation, however, Patrick gets his first position as a curate. in Wethersfield in Essex, England. So he's staying in England, he's near Cambridge. So a curate is basically a parish priest or an assistant to the parish priest. So in this case, he's the latter. So he's doing tasks like marriages, baptisms, burials, and the like.

Speaker: He's like a TA to a priest who's a priest who's a professor. Yeah. So during his time at Wetherfield, typhus outbreak killed about 10 of the 40 people who contracted the disease.

Speaker: So this is going to be part of my story as well. We have irregular outbreaks of disease that will kind of randomly sweep through a village, and kill a bunch of its inhabitants. That's just the 19th century, man.

Speaker: yeah Everybody starts congregating in very large numbers, and turns out that all of these diseases, ah were which people had always dealt with, suddenly show up in greater amounts. Everybody in the 19th century died of tuberculosis or typhus or syphilis or what what have you, right? There's an la carte list of ways to you know die terribly.

Speaker: Yep. Do you guys know about typhus exactly? I know the story of Typhoid Mary. Yeah, that's I've got And was Typhoid Jerry on the internet for a little while because Tracy thought that was funny. That is funny, Typhoid Jerry. kind of know a bit about typhus, but most of it's pretty stale knowledge. I don't recall.

Speaker: Yeah, I didn't know too much about it. But just just as a background information, it's also known as jail fever. so great. So typhus is not one illness, but a group of closely related related diseases. They're caused by different species of Rickettsia bacteria. They're transmitted by lice, fleas, mice, and ticks.

Speaker: So again, it's called jail fever or war fever, all these names, because people get it, as you said, Dave, from being cramped close together. So symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, malaise, apparently, itchy rash. Yeah, I get depressed when you're sick. Painful rectal itch. What was that?

Speaker: Painful rectal itch. Oh, no. That's the worst ever. Probably part of it. ah Typhus usually these days isn't too deadly. But again, with any bacterial disease or infection, complications can ensue. Again, in this case, we had fibrosis.

Speaker: a quarter of the people who caught it died. This just in our background. This is happening in the background. with Right. When you said 10 out of 40, I was like, do you mean one out of four in a population sense or exactly 40 people caught it?

Speaker: The source I had said 40 people caught it and 10 died. Oh, fair enough. So I'm like, they're probably, just what they said. But nonetheless, we'll say 25% survival rate and like bubonic plague, to ah it is a bacterial disease born by tiny little parasitic critters.

Speaker: That's right. Also why it's not a present fear because we just aren't plagued with fleas like we used to be. So thankfully, yes. So look at Patrick. So Patrick does have ambitions to move up in church and in life.

Speaker: So his next step is to get married. So again, Church of England clergy clergy are permitted to do this. So it's totally fine. And he decides to settle upon a local girl named Mary Mildred Davie Berder.

Speaker: Wow. Names were better back then. They kind of were Patrick Thunder. Yeah. Mildred Davy murder. So this the year is 1807, 1808. ah Patrick's 30 years old and Mary is 18.

Speaker: Well, not as gross as it could be. I know. I've heard worse. Back in the olden times, I assumed all the men were 50 and all the women were 13. So this is ah probably the wokest marriage you could possibly have at the time.

Speaker: Funnily enough, it is, I remember doing a history course, social history in Europe, and early marriages weren't that, early marriages for women were way more common among upper classes. So lower class, middle class, I mean, surf from there way they are actually waiting until they can inherit their family's homes. So typically women and men are marrying in their 20s and 30s, in general, in the population at large it's oh that's interesting so that's a myth yeah but because all of the records and stories we have are about rich people yes and the point of rich people is to marry for the purposes of uh binding families and stuff like that the moment you've the moment you've got a son and uh this dude's got a daughter we're pairing them together it doesn't matter if the son is 50 and the daughter's 12 we just got to get these estates united

Speaker: Yep, unfortunately. It is. Oftentimes, if if the man was decent, he actually they wouldn't consummate the marriage until the girl was That is something I know, yes. but Oh, I didn't know that. yeah so i mean Ideally, they're not, you know. it but It was still considered weird back then, I think is the big thing, to ah suddenly find, you know, tweens and early teenagers attractive.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. and Again, she's 18. He's 30. It's not great. But again, wasn't super uncommon, unfortunately. um But Mary's the daughter of a local farmer. And again, farmer in the more modern sense of a wealthy landowner yeah who uses hired labor for the actual agricultural production.

Speaker: So mary's family is Mary's family is wealthier than Patrick's, of course. He's not very well off and he's staying in England. So although Mary and Patrick apparently did share a mutual attraction, like they were apparently very much in love, though, um their engagement gets broken off.

Speaker: hu No one's exactly sure why, but it pretty so obvious that Patrick ended the relationship because Mary's family objected. So during their courtship and is just what see see during their courtship, Mary was not of age to marry without parental consent.

Speaker: Yeah. So 18 is underage, right? Yeah. So put yourself into the scenario. this' is a 30 year old man who wants to marry an 18 year old and her family is like, no way. They object to his background, his religion, probably his Irish accent, let's be honest. And they they are very determined. Oh, right. Because he's also this fancy new strain of Protestant. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. Got it. So he's from away, he's got the wrong beliefs, and he doesn't have enough money. Even though he's a feller who might have promise, all the rest of the stuff ah eradicates him as a suitable suitor for their daughter.

Speaker: Yeah. And there are even more new strain, which we'll get to you later. it's All these religions are very complicated. Yeah. So in this case, I i might have sided with the family here, but honestly, it's up to them. But Mary herself would later on write to Patrick,

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker: during their courtship that providence watched over me for good and withheld me from forming in very early life and in an indissoluble engagement with one whom i cannot think was altogether clear of duplicity the union with you under the existing circumstances must have embittered my future days wow her Wow. So, yeah you know, in retrospect, she saw nothing but red flags and is happy to have got out of there. But she was young and silly then.

Speaker: Yes. So it's pretty harsh. But yes, in terms of religion, Dave, Mary Berger was a nonconformist. So that, as far as I understand, is an even further offshoot of Protestantism. also So Patrick is a Church of England deacon. And there is some discussion in the sources I read about how, yeah, you could be a Church of England deacon and, your you know, your internal beliefs, you know you maybe you're more sympathetic with nonconformity or whatever. they're I'm not an expert in any of these sects. No, we don't know anything about this because we are dilettantes, but we do understand that ah British and ah if we call Northern Ireland, North of Ireland British at that point in time, I'm not even sure how it worked.

Speaker: ah Protestantism was going through a time at that point and everything got weird and very complex. Yeah. Yes. But either the way, it was like a a, you know, when you have all these tiny little schisms, if he's a church, if he's a C of v ah deacon and he has his political stance, he's a part of this camp and they're not even C of and probably and maybe on a stamp further opposite of that, that just makes him even more incompatible. May as well be a Catholic.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he's somewhat he had concerns that, oh, well, it looks bad for me to marry a nonconformist. And the idea, well, maybe she'll convert. Right. But, you know, that's who knows. Maybe she actually believed in her own faith and wanted to stick with it.

Speaker: But for this reason, basically, her family moves her away. he writes to her a couple times, doesn't hear back. So he decides to move on. he actually leaves Wethersfield. He leaves his job there. He gets another curacy in Shropshire in 1809. And at this time, he starts writing poetry.

Speaker: so I'm going to quote Wikipedia here. In 1811, he published a collection of moral verses, cottage poems intended for ordinary people. Claire Harmon recounts that one of the cottage poems had been written to Mary Berder and praised her sparkling blue eyes.

Speaker: Patrick later gave a copy of the book with an annotated version of the poem to another young lady changing the line to sparkling hazel eye. i mean, but i it's kind of a fuck boy thing to do.

Speaker: It's such a fuck boy thing to do. It's very funny, though. And you get like, you know, those guys that they'd make sparkling squints, crosses out, writes Hazel, haze of the poem and if he annotated it, like clearly he's literally doing that, scratching it out, writing it Hazel. I. Yeah.

Speaker: Well, it's kind of funny. Maybe he's, he probably saw the humor in that too. It's like guys who'd make mixtapes for women and then give the exact same mixtape to different women, you know, back in the day. Oh yeah. The date glorious days of mixtapes. Yeah. love me Not to date us.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just a little bit old. That's okay. So anyway, yeah Patrick would go on to publish a few more volumes of poetry and a novel, but they weren't really successful. So in December, 1809, Patrick moves to the West riding of Yorkshire and he's curate at all saints Jewsbury.

Speaker: um actually want to send you a picture. I have some slides. So I'm going to send you my slide document and slide one. You can see a picture of Patrick. Okay. child Hopefully you can see the slides.

Speaker: Access denied. Really? Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah, you needed the ah link created with the appropriate permissions. Sorry about that. yeah i always Everyone with the link can view. Yeah. i You know, I always think I've done that.

Speaker: and Everybody does. The entire generator link is its own document. And then there we go. Hopefully that works. There we go. Yay. So that picture is Patrick. That's what he looks like.

Speaker: Okay. And you can tell us a very old picture because of how pixelated it is. but That's right. yeah i it's I think it's literally the paint on the image. I think it's just a a degraded painting. Oh, yes. Yeah. Oh, it just looks pixelated.

Speaker: Promise that was a joke. I know a paint works. Okay, good. Okay. Okay. But there's me. I'm very serious. Like, you know, I i saw a picture of that. and I saw a painting of a dinosaur and thought it was a photograph. Okay. So, you know. i was already funny That name ah was I don't know when people are joking or not, and when things are real or not.

Speaker: Okay. The entire point of that episode is it wasn't a dinosaur. I know. I mean... i mean They came like 70 million years later.

Speaker: dure i know, but look, if it's before apes, they're dinos, okay? Yep. i've I've accomplished nothing in my time here. Continue. Look, no, it's not you, it's me. My brain...

Speaker: I had a history teacher. He said, oh yeah, most people have a mind. A lot of politicians have a mind like a steel trap. Ronald Reagan had a mind like a steel sieve. And I have a mind like a steel sieve, okay? oh You have a mind like a steel trap. It just snaps and it's like everything before this point is a dinosaur and I'm trying to pry it open. Yeah, okay. i'm talking about And talk about synapsids and you're like, yeah, dinosaurs. Like, no! Well, it was a fish-like creature, looked like a dinosaur. What do you want? I'm no paleontologist.

Speaker: I know you're trying, but I'm just It's all right, Jen. I'm just teasing you. Please continue. I know, I Look, got lot going on in my brain, okay? Can't blame me. All right. So Dewsbury, 1809. So Dewsbury is in the West riding of Yorkshire.

Speaker: Here he meets Maria Branwell. So she's this is more reasonable. She's 29 and Patrick is 35. So that's fine. That's reasonable. And there's a picture of at slide two. Looks pretty friendly. So Maria was born in Penzance, Cornwall. So she's the daughter. Penzance is very famous for being sort of the coast. Where the pirates come from. Yeah, I know. was going to say the pirates. Yeah, Gilbert and Sullivan. That's the only thing I know about it.

Speaker: I know, some here. It's on the coast. It's nice. the The weather's a bit nicer. They have nicer plants there. Things like this. like It's a very different than Yorkshire. It's a lot you know more temperate and stuff. So anyway, she, Maria Branwell, had moved to Yorkshire from Cornwall to help her aunt run a boys' boarding school.

Speaker: And there she met Patrick, who was working for the school as a classics examiner. So he's teaching still. So he's doing his he's doing his priestly work, but he's in a school helping kids learn Greek and Latin. because he knows Greek and Latin has been a teacher, so...

Speaker: Exactly. Maria Branwell has been described as an independent woman, something of a blue stocking. Again, that's a whole other episode I'll probably do one day. But the term blue stocking was sort of meant as a shorthand for a person who's interested in intellectual pursuits in the arts.

Speaker: Later on, it took on a derogatory meaning as applied to women specifically, because women weren't supposed to be interested in manly things. like poetry and, you know, knowing stuff.

Speaker: Yes. Poetry, knowing things, that's for men. Sorry. Get out of here. But she's worldly, smart, intellectual. She has a very apparently bright, cheerful, and witty disposition. So they're a great match. Sounds like a delightful person. Yeah. They're a good match.

Speaker: She would refer to pat Patrick as my dear saucy Pat, which is cute. So apparently they fell in love at first sight and they were married on the 29th of December, 1812. they moved into a house in Livesey, Yorkshire, then called Lousy Farm or Lousy Farm.

Speaker: Either way. What a great name. Lousy or Lousy. so Well, either way, there's not going to be any typhus here. That's true. Not at all. Those Lousy. Yeah.

Speaker: Those English place names, to tell you quick funny story. I traveled to the UK with my grandmother in like 2011, going back to some of the, or no, 2001, sorry. Looking back at some of our family places we lived in, in like ah Kent in England.

Speaker: And one of the places a relative of mine had lived in was called Sluts Hole. but a house was called Sluts Hole. It's impossible not to become a 13 year old the moment you hear that. like said No, no, no. It was probably around Sloots.

Speaker: It's not Slut's grandma. It's Slut's hole. And again, hole, they sort of meant like a, didn't mean like, you know, what orifice, right? And Slut was like just somebody who was little dirty and messy. Yeah, slovenly. So, but yeah, it's still not great. It's a louse farm. It's a name that was not as, ah did not mean that when it was named, but someone should have changed it at some point.

Speaker: Yes. Yes. However, all of the streets in England called grope cunt lane. They what that meant. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Prostitutes were sex workers. Mm hmm. Grop cunt lane.

Speaker: They've changed that now. Mostly you can still find some cock lanes, things like this. Anyway, like we're really immature. I like the ah consonants of those words, ah grope cunt lane. It's got a good ah sort of... Sounds pretty good. It's got a good meter to it. It's got a ring to it. Yeah, exactly. You could write some poems or spit some bars around that place name.

Speaker: we've got to keep that in mind. Yep. and When you write to another theme song for us, perhaps. All right, so they moved to lousy farm Lousy Farm. They have two daughters there. So Maria was born in 1814, Elizabeth 1815.

Speaker: In 1816, Patrick, Maria, and their children once again move. This time they go to Thornton in Yorkshire. They'll be here for five years. So their four other kids are born. Charlotte in 1816, Patrick 1817, Emily is born in and Anne in I had no idea they were they had Irish roots.

Speaker: So we all know who we're talking about. Yeah, we're talking about the Bronte family. okay Yeah, I figured as much, but I kind of like to keep things a little bit suspenseful. Yeah. So, yeah, the Brontes. And I'm sure now we all know who we're talking about, as we said. um Sorry. Yes. So we're talking about the Brontes, of course. Have you read any of their novels, seen in the movies? Dave, you just said you're reading one recently.

Speaker: um Yes, but I only read a bit because I got pulled on to other things. Oh, fair enough. How about you, Tracy? I have not. Okay. They were really fashionable to read in the late 90s, and I just somehow missed that that fad.

Speaker: That's so interesting. I because i i kind of remember that too. Cause I, that's when I was, I got into them as well. Late nineties, of when I was getting into university and stuff. Yeah. yeah So Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte, with famous novelists. So, um, total coincidence that the movie Wuthering Heights just came out by Emerald Fennell. If I was planning better, I actually would have planned this episode to coincide with the release to kind of coast on that to podcast fame.

Speaker: But we're a bit late. so we'd have to launch we'd We'd have to release the episode. And ah viewers, you do not want to know how far in advance we ah record these. No, you don't. I just said, oh, it was St. Patrick's Day last week. So you can tell. Yeah. Pretty far away. As they listen to this one in 2028. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah But yeah I did see the Wuthering Heights movie, the new one. I thought it was... fine I like heard that fans of the book found that the movie was an okay movie to watch, but certainly not the movie they would hope for as an adaptation.

Speaker: I mean, it's taking a sliver of the tail, basically, and doing a lot of weird stuff with it. i thought it was fine. Moira Donegan and Adrian Doeb have a podcast called In Bed with the Right, and they really look at the pretty shitty sexual politics of that movie, and I'm like, yeah.

Speaker: Yeah, they're right. it's ah It was an enjoyable because I like, you know, like I said, weird, gross, interesting movies. It was enjoyable. But yeah, anyway. Yes. So they're extremely, extremely famous. Tons of material on them, as I know. this taken me a long time. and This is only part one. So ton of scholarly and popular material on the Bronte family, too. And now with the movie coming out, there's kind of ah new articles coming out as well. They have their own academic journal.

Speaker: and society. so you could do a podcast episode on so many things. Yeah. It's the journal of Bronte studies, I think. And then there's the Bronte society. Like it's huge. Like they are massively, massively huge.

Speaker: so many documentaries and biographies and so much stuff. So I'm going to keep this as focused as possible. And what I'm going to do here, because it's a story that people have told before. And unfortunately, I Googled like, didn't Google. I searched for other podcasts about the Brontes and I didn't listen to them because I'm like, oh no, like everyone's doing. So I want to look at this from, like, I've loved the Brontes for a long time.

Speaker: Yes. And I want to look at this through a certain lenses that I find interesting. So I'm going to keep it as focused as possible. I'm going to discuss each individual and their personality in more detail as it's relevant to sort of a chronological telling.

Speaker: And i'm going to tell this tale through the lenses or angles that I find more interesting or fascinating. So as I tell you about the Brontes and their lives, I'm going to be considering things like gender, addiction, public health and education.

Speaker: Because it's fun. Our favorite things. Interesting. Yes. That's right. Pretty much. I mean, we do talk about all of these a lot. Oh, yeah. But I mean, it's interesting. And that's what we're what we care about. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So some good sources here I'll just quickly mention and they will be in our notes, too. um There's the Brontes in context. It's a scholarly volume of essays edited by Mariana Tormallan.

Speaker: Juliet Barker's Wild Genius on the Moors is a very good book. It's a doorstopper, though. It's like 1,200 pages, and it's very, very detailed. It took a long time to read that. when I read it like years ago, and I had to kind of refer back to it a lot. um Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. I drew on that, but as it we'll get to later...

Speaker: you take it with a grain of salt because that was the first biography written by a friend of hers. Daphne du Maurier, the novelist, wrote a very interesting book, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte. And I recently discovered actually Elizabeth Hardwick had a 1972 essay, Working Girls, on the Brontes. And that's really great, actually. And there's a link to a podcast where I believe, I don't i don't think it's Elizabeth Hardwick, but somebody reads that essay. So it's very good. Winifed Guerin had a couple of biographies of Anne and I believe Branwell Bronte as well.

Speaker: Okay. Okay. resources Back to the story. So we have Patrick and Maria and they had they have six kids. Six little kids. So many Brontes. I know, there's a lot of Brontes.

Speaker: And unfortunately, they will drop in numbers, but we'll see that. ah Okay, so they take up residence at Hayworth or Howarth. I think Howarth Parsonage in the village of Howarth in West Yorkshire.

Speaker: Slide four, slide three, sorry, he has a map. of where they are located. So you can see it's north of England, sort of central.

Speaker: It's pretty central pretty central in terms of the country, right? Yeah. It's pretty isolated when you're thinking of London, just quite far south, especially in the day where travel was...

Speaker: Kind of. The train, the railway system there is just being built up. Travel is really, really by foot and by horse is how they're traveling around here too. So they're moving around a lot. Picture, sorry, slide four is a picture of the parsonage as it looked in the late 1800s. So this is well after the Brontes lived there.

Speaker: were Sort of. And you can see it looks kind of bleak. And it's surrounded by a grave. Yeah.

Speaker: so yeah But actually, when you go there, it's quite pretty. I did not know the Brontes were, as a shout to the wrestling fans, the Von Ericks of the ah literary world.

Speaker: ah Why did they live? ah The Von Eriks did not. ah They are a legendary wrestling family where almost everybody dies. There was a um movie, The Iron Claw, that came out recently.

Speaker: But the Von Eriks are a spectacular tragedy as a wrestling family. Really? talk about that because you know what? i had heard about Iron Claw. I haven't seen it yet. But somebody was saying that they had to even cut out some of the deaths because it would have been too depressing. Yeah. oh No, the Von Eriks story. There's one surviving, I think.

Speaker: Interesting. Okay. Very curious to hear what that one. That'd be good episode. Yeah, it would. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, you know. I'm not going to talk about the Von Eriks, but spoilers. Ooh, interesting. Curious.

Speaker: Okay, so Hayworth Parsonage becomes, as per cliche, basically another character in the story, right? um The lives of the Brontes are inextricably connected with this house and with this village, especially now, right? This is a two-story stone building. there they add at At some point later on, a second wing was added, which you can see in the modern pictures.

Speaker: But it's two-story building, sitting on a very top of a hill. And the rest of the village is very, very steep. Extremely steep village. Oh, so it like looms over the village yeah kind of deal. Yeah, it's at the top of the hill. yeah Everything kind of flows down from that. And there's a church across from it. The cemetery is in the middle. And then on the other side is a school. it's kind of an open square with parsonage, school, church, open area. And then the cemetery is in the middle.

Speaker: So now that photo was from the 1850s. And actually I was there at Howarth. Finally, one of my dreams. Got to go to Howarth last year. It's actually prettier now. oh There's more trees. There's way more trees in the courtyard or the church. are Yeah, they've because I mean, we can get into the English landscape and how actually it should all be forest us and the moors.

Speaker: or Oh, yeah, and moors are just deforested land. Yeah, yes that's right. Yeah, yeah so it actually looks pretty, and it's quite nice. um Yeah, so again, went to Howarth last summer. my As I discussed in the episode on psychogeography, I won't get into psychogeography so much, but again, this is why I like to go to these places, because it really helps you, I think, sort of understand more fully fully the individual and their life and their creative outputs stuff. And it's just interesting. I just like going to...

Speaker: cool little towns and it's cute howarth is cute um again out of the way though it's very even now it's quite out of the way most people you know the' traveling the uk they're go maybe going to be in london they're going to go to the big cities so to get there i was in leeds took the train from leeds from there you go to keithley it's kind of spelled keely but it's keithley and then from keithley you take a bronte bus like right up to the museum amazing oh wow Unfortunately, Keith Lee, I saw of those vandalized roundabouts there.

Speaker: you know it would be The right-wingers have been painting them with the red George cross. It's like, oh, great. Very, very nice to be here. So that's unfortunate. Hopefully that's not the attitude that prevails. but Haworth is in the West Yorkshire moors. So again, weid know, it's surrounded by hills and dales and valleys. It's very pretty.

Speaker: At this time, though, West Yorkshire is industrializing. So have woolen mills and textile manufacturing. They're the main source of industry when the Brontes live there. So Elizabeth Gaskell would sort of characterize life there as like really nasty. And she kind of paraphrased Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, nasty, bru British and short. So she plays up. Elizabeth Gaskell is Charlotte Bronte's first biography. She really plays up how isolated it is, which it is.

Speaker: But, you know, it's also the of industrialization. Yeah, it's it is myth making for sure, because industrialization is ramping up. But they're right by Keithley, Bradford, Halifax, Leeds. Like there's big cities all around and they're well served by like newspapers and stuff.

Speaker: So they are engaged with the culture, larger British culture, like in London and things through newspapers and novels and books, all this stuff. hmm. Lots of wild landscape right outside the parsonage. At the time, even more so. It's very pretty. ah The village was nice. and Again, it's if you Google images of Haworth Village, it's very steep, very cute. It's sort of a stereotypical, what you think of as an English you know a Yorkshire village. But at the time...

Speaker: You have to imagine that village with like just shit flowing down the hills. Shit, lots of animal and household waste flowing down the gutters. They did not get sewers in Haworth until, I believe, the end of the 19th century.

Speaker: the Where the poop goes is one of the most defining things about a city if you don't have a full-functioning sewer system. Or, again, Haworth isn't a full city, but you know what I mean. is that yeah ye And if there's a everything's on a hill... then there's just poop river ahead and down south or wherever, wherever down is.

Speaker: yeah Think about this, which we'll get to later in more detail. The cemetery is at the top of that hill too. o and So our large happy family is settled in Howarth Parsonage.

Speaker: So we'll talk about a bit about them more as individuals. It's hard with the kids because don't have much detail, but a lot of characters in our story. going to try and give them their due. Okay. So we know about Patrick already. He's a clergyman, educated. values education for his children. Gaskell, Elizabeth Gaskell, portrays him as somewhat harsh. he's always carrying a pistol because he's afraid of Luddites. And when he's mad, he'll shoot the pistol out the front door. He's like, no, I would take pistol sometimes because didn't want to get attacked. And the only way to discharge my pistol is actually to shoot the bullet.

Speaker: So I would shoot it before I brought it into the house so it wouldn't be loaded in the house. That makes perfect sense. He's a crazy guy. Just to be clear, and he's not running a factory or anything like that. Why are the Luddites coming after him?

Speaker: um Because he wasn't really on their side. I didn't look into the Luddite question specifically because you literally, there's a whole... Like scholarship on the Luddites. Oh, I know i know there is. yeah I don't know anything about the Luddites aside from their general vibe.

Speaker: ah But fair enough. So regardless, he was a moneyed man in the area and therefore that made him a target. Well, he's not so much moneyed as ah power. He represents the... Got it He's part of the ah he is part of the establishment, ah what is doing the bad things. Understood.

Speaker: Yeah. And Gaskell talks about other parish priests in Haworth before that. who If they didn't like you, the people would just kick you out. Fair. Like, they would literally lock people out of their own churches if they didn't like them. So, yeah.

Speaker: So, yeah, he's carrying a pistol, apparently, because he's afraid of being attacked. But it was more like, no, when there's violent riots going on in the area, just in case. Because he's, well i would say he's a conservative guy. he's Church of England, but not in the sense we think of now, right? Like, meaning he's not a bugfuck racist, basically. he's well you can't frame modern politics onto this period and place. No, not at the The concepts are just entirely different.

Speaker: But understood. He represented ah nonetheless a certain force in society, what the folks who were rioting did not like. yeah He was on the other side from them, even if he wasn't like, you know, a factory owner, of ah for example. Doesn't matter. It was he's one of them.

Speaker: Mm hmm. Got it. Yeah. So he's a like, he's a compassionate guy. He generally speaking was a good man. He cared about his parishioners and he did his best to make their lives easier. Again, Maria, we know his wife. She's smart, lively, intelligent. um We know that she wrote at least one article for publication, but it never was published. So we have a draft of that. um Honestly, a relatively new biography came out of her recently, too. I'm like, i i can't.

Speaker: I got to have to learn myself at some point. You know, because again, every single person in this family could be a podcast episode of themselves. Yes. So 1820, the Brontes moved to Hayworth or Howarth, sorry. The eldest, Maria Jr. She's six.

Speaker: Elizabeth is five, Charlotte's four, Brian Well is three, Emily's two, and Anne is just a little baby. Winifred Guerin, Bronte biographer, describes them as these children as undersized and peaky with perfect manners. And she says they enjoy sketching, storytelling, and reading. So they're pretty quiet kids. They sound like adorable woodland creatures.

Speaker: They They Perfect manners. Yes, they love sketching and reading and storytelling. Yeah, they eventually joined by a servant. So her name is Tabitha Tabby Aykroyd. She'd be with the family basically the rest of their lives. And Maria's sister, Maria Senior's sister. So the children's aunt, Elizabeth Branwell.

Speaker: Lots of Elizabeths and Marias. She came from Penzance to help out for a while. So just to kind of establish sort of a cozy routine, Anne Dinsdale describes life at the Parsonage in this way.

Speaker: So, I'm quoting Anne Dinsdale. Sarah Gars, a young servant in the Bronte household who accompanied the family from Thornton, has provided a picture of the family's daily routine at the Parsonage during their first year there. After the children have been washed and dressed, they went to their father's study for prayers.

Speaker: Prayers being over, Patrick would join his children for breakfast in the dining room. ah Meal is described as being plain but abundant. It's porridge, milk, bread, and butter. Like this does sound like almost like a token.

Speaker: Uh, it. Porridge, milk, bread, and butter. Yes. And with the exception of Anne the baby, they would go to their father's study for lessons. So he's teaching the girls and the boy. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: The girls would spend the interval between morning lessons and lunch hour with Sarah, who taught them the rudiments of sewing. Lunch is a simple meal of roast, boiled meat, potatoes, followed by sweets such as bread and rice puddings, custards, and other preparations of eggs and milk, slightly sweetened. So you get the sense of this family. I think this is helpful to get a sense of their daily life and what life was like at this time. It sounds positively idyllic. Honestly, yeah. It very much conjures up a place and time the sort of early 19th century equivalent to like

Speaker: the nuclear family of the in England in the 1950s, that kind of thing, where there is this family unit operating in a certain way, eating certain kinds of foods in a certain with a house that looks this way and manners of a certain way. And we're just going sort of 100, whatever, 120, 130 years prior to that and doing the ah British sort of like, i don't know, almost kind of a middle class kind of lifestyle.

Speaker: Yeah. So, yeah, they would go, they'd do their lessons, their father's teaching them in the afternoons while their father was working. He would walk, they would walk on the moors and get an exercise, right? On their return, they would take tea in the kitchen, Mr. Bronte taking his meal in the study. And then after tea, he gave his children lessons in history, biography and travel.

Speaker: While the girls worked out their sewing. So while their mother was still alive, the children would say their evening prayers at her bedside before seeking their own warm, clean beds. Yeah, it sounds like a nice life.

Speaker: Yeah, it does. Yeah. But then. Yes. Their happiness was going to be. Who dies? Yeah. Winifred Guerin is a Bronte biography. She writes that Maria Bronte fell seriously ill. going to quote here on the 29th of January, 1821. And she's not expected to survive the day.

Speaker: Oh, and this is Maria Senior, the ah mother. The mother, yes. Maria Senior, the mother. Yeah. So, yes, she's, I believe, something like 35 or 6. Oh, wow. ah Unhappily for her, she rallied and lived for yet another eight months of intolerable suffering.

Speaker: Oh. It was internal cancer, as the doctor hurriedly fetched, told the distracted husband. Mr. Bronte sent for more than one specialist during his wife's illness, refusing to accept the hopeless verdict. But, of course, nothing could be done to save her or even to alleviate her suffering.

Speaker: Oh, wow.

Speaker: for eight long months their mother lay dying in the new house which had not yet had time to become their home h the gracious presence which gracious presence which should have pervaded all its rooms and ordered its daily life never had the time to be imprinted on its air So they're young. So of the surviving children, I quote again, Charlotte alone in later life was to remember her mother playing the twilight with her only son.

Speaker: Neither that son himself, nor Emily, nor Anne would preserve any memory of their mother. So they're so young. So maybe that's a blessing in a way. It's very, very sad. Yeah. Yeah. So at the time it was believed that she had uterine cancer. found another source saying it might have been chronic maternal sepsis. But I don't know. Maternal sepsis is pretty quick acting. I was about to say, if you've got sepsis, ah you're gone pretty quickly. But some kind of, you know, fast but not genuinely fast enough acting cancer and uterine cancer or something like that sounds like the...

Speaker: Yeah. God, what a crappy way to go. Yes. Yeah. So regardless of the exact cause, Maria shows she's in terrible pain. And there were descriptions about how she would just lie in bed saying, oh, my children, my children, who will take care of them?

Speaker: That's the main thing she cared about. But Patrick is nursing her at night and taking care of her, right? So... It was, of course, a sad time for the kids as she's basically wasting away in the bedroom upstairs and they don't really see her too much. Yeah. um During the months of their mother's illness, the children all contracted scarlet fever. Oh, my God. At the same time, which meant that all the family except Patrick was deathly ill.

Speaker: Right. So I'm going to go to another little disease aside because this is a theme. What's scarlet fever? Your head's strep throat. Yes. Imagine that like times a thousand or to the max.

Speaker: Strep throat that kills you. Yes. Yeah. It's streptococcus bacteria. Yeah. So you get high fever, sore throat, and a red sandpaper-like rash. It's from the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker: So while scarlet fever is now a relatively mild condition that can be treated with antibiotics, historically scarlet fever had a high complication rate and significant mortality among children. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: Yeah. the Mayo Clinic notes that it has a high risk of complications as well as the bacteria may spread to other parts of the body, including the blood. and There's no vaccine available to this day. So it's bad. You don't want to get strep back in the day. It's actually amazing that all the children survived infancy, actually, because they all survived. It's genuinely incredible. Yeah. Because scarlet fever kills kids. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. Mm hmm. No, there wouldn't be a vaccine. It's bacterial. ah There's just antibiotics. Yeah. Which, of course, will work forever. yeah Yeah, I know. We'll get into viruses and bacteria too later. um Oh, good.

Speaker: Not in detail, but we'll talk about it. Aunt Elizabeth Branwell. So that's Maria, the mother, her sister, their children's aunt. She comes back up to Cornwall to help nurse her sister and to care for her niece and nieces and nephew.

Speaker: So Elizabeth Branwell is described by Juliet Barker as a godsend to the Bronte family, which, yes, she was a kind and compassionate woman, described as a competent and efficient manager. So Aunt Branwell, she was called, was able to run the household. So this is a time, think about this, there's no indoor plumbing.

Speaker: yeah Water had be carted in from pumps and wells. So cooking, washing yourself, laundry... would take up most of a woman's, usually a woman, and other household servants, take up your whole day. Right, and they have one servant during all of this for a very large family.

Speaker: Yeah. With this kind of like, you know, basically a little estate. So the logistics of running that are insane. It's a huge amount of work.

Speaker: Yes, indeed. So the household had to be run, had to be orderly and run efficiently so that you can take care of the bare necessities of life. This is going be a challenge for a large household. So you have, I think, four adults in the house and six small kids.

Speaker: the house isn't big. You know, it's relative. It's okay, but it's not huge. i you know, they're sharing bedrooms and stuff. And Branwell and Tabby Aykroyd and a few other women servants helped Patrick care for the kids. So he was able to continue his parochial duties and he did nurse his wife by himself every night. He's with by her side. It's very sad.

Speaker: But Maria Branwell Bronte died on September 1821.

Speaker: devastating for the family. so she and and she gets buried in the inside the church under the flagstones, I believe, in the Church of St. Michael and all angels across the parsonage. You can see slide five. I took that picture. This is a view looking from the parsonage lawn, basically the foot of the lawn down to the church.

Speaker: OK, and I have other pictures I can took that I can share next time. But yeah, that's very cool. What it looks like. Yeah, not the best picture I've taken, but, you know, you can get the idea. Yeah. So, yeah, back to... Oh, sorry, I lost my page.

Speaker: I have so many tabs open, I'm skipping around. Okay, back to my script. Okay, ah Juliet Barker again notes that Patrick was prostrate with grief for weeks.

Speaker: But why would... Of course he would be. Your wife died. That's a very reasonable response. People think, though. I think some people get the idea, oh, well, they didn't care because people were dying all the time. No, it's horrible to think about.

Speaker: Everyone you know, just dying all the time. Yeah. Yeah. but Yeah. That's what it was back then. So, but he has to rally, right? He has six kids. Got to raise him by himself. His annual, and this will get into where what his class is because his annual salary 170 pounds. this is So CPI inflation calculator says that pounds in is equivalent purchasing power to about pounds today.

Speaker: Okay. Canadian terms. This is about 45,000 Canadian dollars a year. Yeah. This helps you get a good idea of where he's at, right? Lower middle class. You can't raise a family. Lower, lower. But yeah, yeah. Yes, that's right. Yes. Like supporting a family on that single income is almost impossible nowadays.

Speaker: Yeah. And I'm not translating. will not translate to American dollars because... No, go to hell. You invaded Iran. It's close enough. The point is, is that he had the sort of salary that could nominally support a family, but only nominally. Yeah, it's not that great. Yeah. average annual salary in the UK 2026 is £31,000 before deductions. So he's making, yeah, not, it's hard to to get by, this according to Forbes. So um yeah, they're relatively comfortable, but of course they're not wealthy. Finances are constrained on his options. Housing is i so provided by the parish. He's living in the parsonage. That's the where the guy lives, right?

Speaker: Of course, Aunt Branwell, she might have wanted to go back to Penzance either. Maybe she wants to get married, right? not Not fair to rely on her for support either. Yes. And you might have had a thought, why didn't he just marry her? We'll get to that.

Speaker: Patrick's best option was to marry again, right? Yeah. So within three months of his wife's death, Patrick went to visit with some old friends in Bradford, including one Elizabeth Firth.

Speaker: So she's a friend of the family from when they lived in Thornton, Yorkshire. That was where they were before Haworth. They were there for five years. I glossed over that time, but they made a lot of friends, had lot connections there. Elizabeth Firth is godmother to the Bronte children.

Speaker: In 1821, though, she's a 24-year-old woman. She's very much a lady, so she's well-educated, and she's independently wealthy because she inherited her father's fortune as well. okay Patrick at this time is 45 years old, on a clergyman's salary, and has six little kids.

Speaker: So Patrick hangs out with her and her mother in Bradford, comes back to Hauerth and wrote a letter. And then he wrote a letter to Elizabeth asking her to marry him. Juliet Barker says this.

Speaker: yeah Elizabeth received his letter on the 12th of December and was appalled. Oh no. I know. Yeah. Maria had been dead for scarcely three months. And here was her widower, a penniless clergyman with six small children, asking her to throw herself away on him.

Speaker: Her anger was probably compounded by the fact that she was in the time being courted by an eminently more eligible clergyman, James Clark Franks. So two days later, she wrote a decided entry in her diary. I wrote my last better story i wrote my last letter to Mr. Bronte.

Speaker: So she kept her word for nearly two years, refusing to have anything more to do with the Brontes. So by this disastrous proposal, Patrick had succeeded only in alienating one of his few female friends and thereby lost his daughter the chance of being taken under their godmother's wing.

Speaker: Because she's wealthy, right? alienated her and now she's like, get away from you, creep. Right. Which might not be fair. That was an error, Yes. So yeah here's the thing, too. he could not. This is Barker again. He could not even take the obvious step of proposing to Elizabeth Branwell, despite the fact that she did decide to stay on at Howarth until the children were old enough to go to school because marriage to a wife's a deceased wife's sister was then against the law.

Speaker: Oh, right. So any idea is considered incest. Any idea of a second marriage would have have to be abandoned for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And eventually Elizabeth Firth, they patch it up later on. They're not great friends, but they they they make amends later on. Yeah.

Speaker: That sucks for him. She was appalled. Okay. So life in the parsonage now, isn't that, you know, they're getting better. The kids, the mothers died, but the children were curious. They're creative. They're smart. Patrick was invested in all of their intellectual development, girls and boy. They play games and read. They're inventing stories at this time. They're starting to come up with sort of imaginary worlds to amuse themselves. They're very close siblings. Of course, they're all close to each other in age too. Okay.

Speaker: isolated in this sort of parsonage somewhat. um They had Aunt Elizabeth to help care for them, and Tabby Aykroyd, beloved sort of housekeeper, was there for them, and several other servants who come and go. 1822, Patrick proposes to and was again rejected by one Isabella Durie, another gentlewoman of independent means.

Speaker: So he's really going after wealthy women. Which... I mean, I mean, I understand it. And also because he is an educated man and ah probably, you know, a good hang. and Oh, we hit it off fantastically. That's it. Time to shoot my shot. And he's like, you are too poor for me, sir. Yeah. I'm not going to just step in and take over your family of a million kids.

Speaker: Well, if you're... Think about this. If you're a young 24-year-old woman with independent wealth, oh, yeah, I'm going to go in there. Like, of course, she'd be a... pop Because she's like, well, she probably wants her own kids. Yeah, exactly. So yeah go in there and go, what? We'll have 12 kids. You know what i mean? Like, how would that even work? Like, I understand. Like, he obviously needs the money and needs so so security. What's going on makes perfect sense. yeah It's just... ah Yeah. Nobody. It's just not working out for you.

Speaker: No. It's getting desperate. So his thoughts turn back. And this is so... Again, kind of fuckboy. patrick thought Patrick's thoughts turned back to his old paramour, Mary Burder. The woman he'd intended to marry 15 years prior.

Speaker: this who basically called him a dodged bullet. She does eventually. Yeah, how do you think this goes? So what had happened was Mary had been kept from Patrick by the actions of her family and separating them.

Speaker: So Patrick had continued to write. It seems like there's a misunderstanding because I think Patrick continued to write to her, but he never heard back. ah So she'd apparently not replied. So Patrick's like, okay, well, I guess I got to move on and marry somebody else.

Speaker: But Mary apparently had felt that she had been jilted by Patrick for another woman. Right. Or that she'd be rejected due to her family's faith. So when she receives this marriage proposal 15 years later at this point, she's very angry.

Speaker: So ah this is again, and this is from ah Mary, a piece of her letter to Patrick. Happily for me, i have not been the ascribed cause of hindering your promotion, of preventing any brilliant alliance, nor have those great and affluent friends that used to write and speak of withheld their patronage on my account, young, inexperienced, unsuspecting, and ignorant as I then was of what I had a right to look forward to.

Speaker: So and she's saying very sarcastically, oh, well, I thought i thought your amazing friends were to help you out. Yeah. I get the sense that Patrick talks big.

Speaker: Yeah. You know, and fair enough. He's accomplished. He's smart, but it sounds kind of talked to Maybe bit a bloviator. Yeah. Yes. And he, when we get into talking about Branwell...

Speaker: Yeah, maybe he yeah does a genetic thing going on there, but we'll talk about that later. So, Juliet Barker says that Patrick recoiled in dismay from the spirit of hatred, scorn, and revenge, which bristled off the pages of her letters when he tried to renew the friendship.

Speaker: Clearly, he did not see the injury she felt he had done to her. So, is what Patrick replies. "'However you may hate me now, I am sure you once loved me, and perhaps, as you may yet find, better than you will ever love another.'" you Pretty presumptuous. Patrick, buddy. You seem like a good dad, but you are a terrible suitor. Did I ever in any one instance take advantage of this, of your youth or inexperience? You know I did not.

Speaker: So I think the implication there is I didn't have sex with you. Yeah. I didn't do anything inappropriate. Yeah. i in all things, as far as it was then in my power, behaved most honorably and uprightly.

Speaker: So I think there's a misunderstanding from his point of view. That's the case. Like he did his best, but then unfortunately he also comes back and says, like well, cause Mary tells him that, Oh no, I'm still single. And i'm'm I'm happy being single. And he's like, are you though?

Speaker: oh So it doesn't end well. Mary's pissed off. But that's the end of that chapter. Patrick resigned himself the single life and he would remain unmarried for the rest of his days.

Speaker: He's 47. He gives up. So not a good suitor, probably for the best. So in the meantime, the kids have to get an education. Again, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's first biographer, notes that, I'm not to that every time, I'll try not to, but repetition sometimes helps. ah charlot sorry Elizabeth Gaskell did not know whether Miss Branwell taught her nieces anything besides sewing and the household arts, in which Charlotte was afterwards such an an adept.

Speaker: So Charlotte's good at sewing and household things. Mm-hmm. 1824, the four eldest girls, this is Maria is 10, Elizabeth is nine, Charlotte is eight, Emily, I believe is five or maybe six, were sent off to boarding school. It was called the, it was a clergy daughter's school in Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. if you look at that map again that I sent, e slide three, you can see Cowan Bridge is kind of far away, actually. It's up in Westmoreland.

Speaker: Oh, yeah, that's a bit of a hop in 1820s logic. It's about, I believe it's about 50 kilometers. So it's far away. Like, they're not going home on the weekends, right? That's exactly it. It is a healthy distance by horse and buggy.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, these types of boarding schools were set up well in order to provide provide education for daughters of the clergy, because this is a common thing. Like clergymen. Again, i was reading something else about France before the revolution and how seeing religious clergy on the streets, how common that was, because we don't see it now. But you're thinking of England at the time, the clergy. This is sort of part of an apparatus of the state as well.

Speaker: So lots and lots of clergymen. lots Well, and everybody has to go to church. Yeah. And then no, there's going to be an out there's going to be a gigantic clergy. And it starts to make his salary make a little bit like make a little bit more sense because he is going to be taking care of of the church in certain ways, like his house and also like the boarding school for his kids, which means the salary goes a little further than it would have. And that all...

Speaker: clicks together a little bit more for me. But yeah, he's he's part of a network and also a kind of a church slash ah slash state, ah um you know, basically support system for the clergy. Because there's a lot of them.

Speaker: The school was not paid for. had to pay for that himself. Oh, never mind. Yeah. Yeah, the school is... Because that's what they're... Yeah, they have... He could have maybe kept them at home and taught them kind of maybe...

Speaker: But I mean, as they as they become teenagers, this becomes a much, much, much more intense ordeal because he's teaching a small classroom while also he has a job to do. I understand. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah. And it was so they had organizations that would set up these schools because it was not a government thing. They recognize themselves. We need these options. So he was able to. Excuse me. I'm going to cut that out.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: okay We actually won't leave that one in, I promise. but you Honestly, when I'm at home in this house, the belching goes up by like 100% because it's the soda pop and coffee all day. I'm like Barney Gumbel, but for pop. Okay.

Speaker: So again, so we we have the clergy who recognize our daughters need education. How can we make it more affordable for us? Right. So why? And you might wonder why do.

Speaker: I mean, you wouldn't wonder now i women need an education, but back then somewhat... It wasn't um what necessarily common. yeah Yes. It was optional. Yeah, basically, yes. so these types of boarding schools, again, had to provide...

Speaker: The skills they would need to fulfill the very few career options they would have in England at this time. And in most of the world, women had very few options. Well-educated daughters of the sort sort of middle classes could expect to get married. But what if they didn't want to? Or what if they can't?

Speaker: Then what do you do? Well, you got to get a job. what do it And it sucks. Like, what kind of job do you get? Juliet Barker, again, provides this context. There were not many options open to the daughters of imp impoverished clergymen.

Speaker: The most likely course was a suitable marriage, but, as Patrick had found to his own cost, without money behind them, they were unlikely to attract hubb's husbands of substance. If they moved in the right circles, however, the chances of a good marriage were improved.

Speaker: The correct sort of education with girls of similar social standing, but greater fortune would be an important step in the right direction. So you're going go to school. It's like networking. Yeah. kind of like you think of the finishing schools or women's education in like the mid century. It was the same idea. Right. You go there to network and meet people and, and you know, snag a wealthy husband if you're lucky. Right.

Speaker: Yeah. They're trying to move in a higher social class than they are. This is, you know, just how it works. Yeah. That's what Patrick did. But women can't go to university. hmm. So good luck there. ah Also, it was unlikely that all five girls would marry. There's five of them, right? would It's not likely that they're all going to marry or marry well even.

Speaker: So if the option of marriage is not open to them, a career had to be considered. There was, of course, no question of them entering a profession as this was simply unheard of in the early 19th century. Yes. So dressmaking. And here's the thing too, what drives me crazy. People say women didn't enter the workhouse. People will say women didn't enter the workforce until like the 1950s. That is not true. Women always worked.

Speaker: Women have always worked. Oh, it's just the jobs they were allowed to work have changed. So back to Juliet Barker, dressmaking, shopkeeping, nursing and going into service were all working class occupations that could not be considered.

Speaker: Right. Because they're not professional level occupations. Yeah. All that remained was teaching, either in a private school or in a private household, or becoming the companion of a wealthy lady. In either case, the right education was essential. So it was not simply that the girls would have to be able to read and write, you'd have to walk, talk, and behave correctly in society which condemned any deviation from the accepted standards of conduct.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. We'd have to have the right sort of feminine attainments, too, including an ability to draw, play the piano and do needlework. So smattering a smattering of French, Italian and if the girl was bookish German was an advantage. But the classical languages ah or mathematics were the prerogative of the male sex.

Speaker: Got it. So you need to learn Italian, not Latin. Yeah, that's right. And basically, oh yeah, you can you know learn how to read and write and stuff like this and teach, but you cannot you also have to do sewing and take care of kids. And it's as somebody who has been a teacher to children.

Speaker: I hate it. I hate teaching kids. I hate babysitting kids. I appreciate children as valuable human beings, but i don't want to teach them.

Speaker: They're fine. I don't hate kids, but keep them away from me because they're not they're boring and annoying to me. So, sorry. I have a niece and nephew that I love, but I'm not going to be their governess. what I'm saying? governess basically lives at home with a family and does all the work. So it takes care of the kids and you know puts them to bed, all that stuff.

Speaker: It sucks. Your options are, or you can be a companion to a wealthy lady, which is like hang around with a little lady. Like a lady in waiting kind of deal. Yeah, whatever. I mean, that might be okay, but it's still pretty annoying, right? Yeah. Also, there was an idea sort of it kind of comes from Russo as well, who pisses me off, that, oh, women can be educated, but it's really so that they're a better wife.

Speaker: You can talk to them, right? this is This is exactly the entire thing, is that you are, um the word education Doesn't quite capture what we understand this to be, which is training gain a kind of cultural capital and exist in a certain space and perform in the way that you need to perform because you need a variety of skills. And they always have to be the standard skills within the setup.

Speaker: and a And, you know, to be a witty companion and to have the ability to talk about the things that the richer people than you want to talk about. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: yeah and be a good hang. Well, weren't they called finishing schools? And I believe finishing schools still exist. Yes, they do. So this is not a totally dead idea. Like women are not equal yet. Sorry, guys.

Speaker: You mean this extremely feminist podcast is only coming to this conclusion? Yeah, we know. I know, I know Get me off my soapbox. Never! Okay. I'll repeat myself about that forever, okay? So the Four Sisters head off. it's a feminist podcast, Jen. It's fine. Okay.

Speaker: I don't gotta specify anymore. We know. You're among friends. i they yeah That's good to know. The Four Sisters head off to Cowan Bridge School. This is, again, I misspoke earlier. It's 70 kilometers from Howarth.

Speaker: They do not have a good time there, unfortunately. If you've read Jane Eyre, which I love that novel. that Jane Eyre is the book I have not finished. ah I've read some of Jane Eyre.

Speaker: I love it. um She's going to talk about... So Jane Eyre is essentially ah semi-autobiographical novel. The experiences there that Jane has at her school called Lowood in the novel, they're horrible, right?

Speaker: She might have been exaggerating, but nevertheless, the four girls were homesick and there is a horrible food. The weather in the winter is cold. They don't have adequate clothing because they have to be walking miles. Like literally the story of, oh, we had to walk five miles in the snow.

Speaker: with no with no warm clothes. That's kind of what they had to do. And they're sitting in cold clothing. They're having a miserable time at the school. um There's going to be controversy later on because when Jane Eyre was published, basically everyone in the area who read the book was like, oh yeah, that's that school. That's that guy. Yep.

Speaker: Everyone knew who she was talking about. So it's probably not... So there's scandal that ah that arises from effectively publicly shit-talking a local institution. Yep. Got it. So, yeah. And when I get into next episode, I'll talk a bit more about the novels. It's hard to get into it because, again, the whole episode. But I'll talk about about that more. But, yes, everyone is like, oh, yeah, that's that guy So other girls who attended school with Charlotte confirmed her characterization of William Karis Wilson. He's sort of an evil.

Speaker: William Karis Wilson ran the school, and he's portrayed as an evil headmaster in the form ah the character of Mr. Brocklehurst in the novel. Hard to say, again, if you read J. Nair, what's real or exaggerated, but it's bad enough, honestly. Pretty miserable. Bad food, very harsh discipline.

Speaker: you know and they're away from home. And these girls had never really left home before. and At least they're together, the four of them. But they're very homesick. And we we'll get into what is going on with them in relation to Howarth. Because it's interesting. Particularly Emily's relationship to home. And we'll talk about that a bit more. But yes, they have a hard time being away from home. They really, really suffer.

Speaker: Miserable experience. And then again, there's no reason to treat kids that way. Exaggerated or no. They were not treated well. Things like having being forced to wear dunce caps. We'll get into it. Meanwhile, so Branwell, the boy and little Anne, they stay at home with Patrick and Aunt Branwell. So it's not known exactly why Branwell Bronte was the only boy, why he wasn't sent away to school himself.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. ah So Daphne du Maurier. Daphne du Maurier herself is a famous novelist. She wrote Rebecca. she i believe she wrote the novel The Birds that the Hitchcock film is based on. Oh, yeah.

Speaker: So Daphne du Maurier is an interesting. Inferno World Bramble Bronte is very interesting because nobody has heard of him, really. Yes. I mean, people have, but they haven't. You know what I mean? he is the sibling of the Bronte sisters. Yes, that's right. Or the brother, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah, and she we'll get into him. He's interesting, actually. We'll get into him next time. um But Daphne de Mortier, yeah, she devotes a biography to him kind of to see what was going on more detail. She wrote that Branwell, the boy, was a very delicate, and he might have had epilepsy.

Speaker: So he's very, very small. Patrick probably wanted to spare him the bullying and harsh lifestyle of a boar's, sorry, of a boar's school, a boys boarding school. Think what the girls are going through. No, they just eat this kid alive.

Speaker: And if it's a bunch of boys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's wouldn't be a good scene. And i will talk about Branwell later. he Yeah. I'll leave that for now. However, Elizabeth Hardwick notes might twig something you're already thinking. There were five daughters and one son in the Bronte family.

Speaker: And the father unluckily placed his hopes in his son Branwell. Oh. So we'll return to him in good time. You know he's not famous, right? So tragedy tragedy strikes the Brontes yet again.

Speaker: Now it's coming in for the children. So Maria and Elizabeth, Bronte, they are 10 and 9 when they go to boarding school. When they were admitted to to boarding school, they had only just recovered from measles and whooping cough.

Speaker: Oh my God. They had just recovered. So again, i want to pause for medical context because we don't think about this in this day and age so much. So we know typhus is, right? Highly contagious. Measles, we know what measles is in general.

Speaker: ah It results in a high fever, itchy rash, cough, runny nose, all those things you associate with illness. But with measles, you can very easily get dehydrated. It can infect your ears and you can become deaf.

Speaker: You can develop chronic bronchitis or laryngitis. You can get pneumonia. You might get encephalitis. Get this. About one in a thousand people with measles can get irritation and swelling of the brain, which causes lasting brain damage. One in a thousand people with measles.

Speaker: Okay. oof Getting measles while pregnant can put the pregnant person's life in danger, can also lead to pregnancy loss, fetal death, or problems with how the baby forms.

Speaker: Oh, boy. Measles is one of those illnesses that can and or a may cause some kind of secondary effect, which is far worse than the measles, frankly, like COVID.

Speaker: And it's making a comeback. I know because dipshits like Joe Rogan, Oh, I had measles when I was a kid. who No, you fucking chicken pox, you dumbass. People do not know what this illness is. Now now get this. This is terrifying.

Speaker: Listen to this. This is from the Mayo Clinic. It's rare, but measles can cause brain or nervous system illness years after infection. Oh, wow. People who have a weakened immune system can get a disease called measles inclusion body encephalitis. I don't know exactly what that is. It's basically measles infection chronically in your brain. Yeah, that sounds horrible. It impacts people with HIV and AIDS. So you to have a very low immune system. But this, measles can also lead to a disease called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, SSPE.

Speaker: This is horrifying. This disease most often shows up 7 to 11 years after a measles infection. So SSPE is fatal.

Speaker: So children who caught measles before age two, where they might not be vaccinated, seem to be a higher risk than average. This Wikipedia on SSPE. This condition primarily affects children, teens and young adults.

Speaker: It's estimated that about two in 10,000 people who get measles will eventually develop SSPE. So you get measles and 10 years later, you're fucking dead, right? Wow. Of a horrible degenerative disease that's similar to rabies. and and Right. It's just put this like ticking bomb in you. Yep. Yeah.

Speaker: Get this. A 2016 study estimated that the rate of SSPE for unvaccinated infants under 15 months was as high as one in 609.

Speaker: Oh, wow. So oh god some babies cannot get vaccinated yet. And if you give a baby that ah measles, you might kill them in 10 years, if not now. Yeah. so Yeah. and to survive the initial And I'm emphasizing this because people forget.

Speaker: Right. Like you're constantly sick in this time. OK. So again, SSP is history of primary infection followed by normal recovery. So you get you you get it you get measles and you recover and you so you seem fine. But then, you know, you start having um behavioral change, intellectual problems, seizures, loss of control of limbs, blindness and death.

Speaker: Wow. This is not treatable. Right. So think about this. Can you imagine a one in 609 chance of getting this, condemning your child to this. i mean I'm on soapbox here, but vaccinate your fucking kids. Oh my God. Yes, please. Genuinely, ah yeah people forget and they also just treat these illnesses as, oh, it's just like having a cold or something, except you get a rash. I'm like, no, there's a reason why this was a disease we were working on eradicating. there is, i wasn't actually aware that measles Lee or that measles creates that sort of, you know, you play the measles lottery and if you lose, you end up with any number of chronic conditions or it could just die. Yeah. death Yeah. yeah

Speaker: But also like who wants to get fucking measles anyway? I don't. Yeah. I don't like being sick. lot people like being sick. Honestly, I think, I think anti-vaxxers like it. I think they like it when people die. I think they like it when people get sick and suffer. But anyway,

Speaker: it is more to the point that It depends on the anti-vaxxer too. They vary wildly, but it is more the notion of this illness. I don't understand.

Speaker: And I've never had, and nobody I know has ever had. Yes. It's just not a risk to me. Meanwhile, you're stabbing me, stabbing me with something that I've been told will cause some sort of terrible, a consequence to me.

Speaker: And even if they see, you know, a bazillion people get vaccinated, uh, They'll hear about the bad things that the vaccines caused. And it's just this sort of rewarding ah these sort of latent fears and distrust of the medical system, which, frankly, the medical system has not done a very good job of ah sort of, you know, undoing that distrust. So, um again, everyone comes to these wrong ideas, often from a place of good faith.

Speaker: Some people just generally become ghouls. But the problem, again, is that, ah you know, you've been lied to, you're being manipulated for money, and you think that you're actually beating someone manipulating you for money when you're actually going further into a and into a much more serious con artist. Contact at thewondercamera.ca. come at me. No, come at us because I don't care. No, it is. It's really, oh, you don't want to get vaccines. Use my special homemade bathtub brewed whatever concoction and you'll be fine. It's all about scamming. That's also very true. Yeah, but yeah i got Big Pharma's lying to you. Meanwhile, you are being lied to far more maliciously because Big Pharma are not good, but the medicine works.

Speaker: Yes. That's the nuance is, yes, big pharma are evil, but the medicine still works. yeah These two things can be true at the same time. People need to accept that. Anyways, up this is a gigantic digression. ah How are the Brontes doing, Jen?

Speaker: But it's okay. We'll get back to the Brontes, but I still want to digress because I just want to say, don't fuck with viruses, especially when they are in your body. They are there forever. Yeah. Bacteria, you treat with but typhus, bacterial infections, you treat those antibiotics. Viruses are not bacteria. They are like basically alien robots that take over your cells.

Speaker: Right. So what's scary is we don't know what complications are down the road. So HIV becomes AIDS. Likely that Epstein-Barr, Epstein-Barr virus that causes mono, that probably becomes multiple sclerosis.

Speaker: COVID-19. Who knows what that's going to become? I was about to say, and COVID, right I know multiple people with serious long COVID complications.

Speaker: Multiple people. And that is absolutely wild to me. And this includes people who got the milder, more ah newer variants of COVID over the past couple of years, as opposed to the much higher death rate ah variants of COVID that were the first to flood everywhere. Yeah. ah Yeah. It's, it's bad folks.

Speaker: It is. You want to avoid viruses if you can. Okay. um One more, one more thing about measles. ah It can wipe out your immune system. I didn't know that actually.

Speaker: A measles infection in children may wipe out the immune system's memory of germs. This means after infection with a measles virus, children may be more likely to get sick from germs they were recovered from before.

Speaker: You may need to get all your vaccines again. Oh, wow. Now, so they had measles. Both girls had that. And then they had whooping cough. Whooping cough is a bacterial infection, treatable with antibiotics.

Speaker: Again, seems like a normal cold. But you can cough so hard it results in vomiting, a red or blue face, extreme tiredness, a high-pitched whoop sound during the next breath of air. Some babies with whooping cough don't even cough because they gag or struggle to breathe.

Speaker: They have skin, lips, or nails that turn blue or purple. And they get pauses in breathing called apnea. Can you imagine watching your baby struggle to breathe because of a pain cough? You what saying, right? These girls had both of these right before they went to boarding school. So again, i don't have kids myself, but if I did, there is no way I am not vaccinating them.

Speaker: The risk of a vaccine is nowhere near. The horror of endemic viral and bacterial diseases. Okay. Now, now we'll go back to the Brontes.

Speaker: So Maria and Elizabeth have both recently suffered whipping cough and measles. They're barely recovered. So they go to Cowan Bridge and there's a typhus outbreak. of Jail fever.

Speaker: Jail fever at the school. So again, not a good indication of the sanitary conditions at Cowan Bridge. Remember, that's spread by lice, and yeah people being close together.

Speaker: So but here's the thing. So Maria gets increasingly ill during her year at Cowan Bridge. And it was thought that the typhus outbreak actually deceived her caregivers into thinking that that was what she had.

Speaker: Because guess what? She didn't have typhus. She was suffering from tuberculosis. Yet another. Can you imagine? This is what I'm saying.

Speaker: Measles, whooping cough, typhus, tuberculosis. This is very sad. So we're getting towards the here, but we'll wrap up with this. ah Maria became so rapidly worse in her health condition that Mr. Bronte was actually sent for. So they were supposed to be at school for a whole year. They're going to come back in the summer, but they were going there. No visits, right? So...

Speaker: Aww. Aww.

Speaker: nobody told him and the condition in which he found her was a terrible shock to him oh he took her home by the les coach the girls the sisters and the other students crowding out into the road to follow her with their eyes over the bridge past the cottages and then out of sight forever she died a few days after her arrival at home So perhaps the news of her death falling suddenly into the life of which her patient existence had formed a part only a little week or so before made those who remained at Cowan Bridge look with more anxiety on Elizabeth's symptoms. because She's also sick.

Speaker: And she also turned out to be consumptive. So Elizabeth is sent home in charge of a confidential servant of the establishment, and she too died in the early summer of that year. oh so wow. So within a year of leaving home, two of the Bronte children had died of tuberculosis.

Speaker: Again, now, medical health These are the two eldest, right? Tuberculosis. Yes, the two eldest girls. yeah Again, tuberculosis or consumption. We probably are aware this. Also, bacterial infection.

Speaker: we are, I'm sure, aware of the stereotypes. right Coughing, chest pain, weak fatigue, weight loss, fever, coughing up blood. You are consumed by the illness. yeah Yes, you're consumed. You waste away. Yes, because tuberculosis also infects your other vital organs like lungs, liver, kidneys.

Speaker: And you get like tubercules, like little... i don't know what they are. They're like round blobs of like pus and stuff. Horrible. so yes, it's called consumption because you would gradually be consumed by the disease and like disease and really like waste away. Yeah. Right.

Speaker: So again, like many diseases that killed people all the time in the 19th century, as Dave alluded to before, TB can now be treated with antibiotics. I was shocked by this, though. Every year, 10 million people fall ill with TB.

Speaker: Despite being a preventable and curable disease, 1.5 million people die from TB each year, making the world's top infectious killer. TB is still a major problem in some parts of the world.

Speaker: Yeah. If you want to get a job overseas, you typically will have to do a TB test if you are from a certain list of nations. Very dangerous. If you read 19th century fiction, it's all over the place. Right. Yeah.

Speaker: Very common. Crime and Punishment is a very famous character, Katerina Ivanovna, and she's always like coughing her up blood into a handkerchief and showing it to people. Yeah. That's that's a very typical scene of this Victorian. This is pre-Victorian era, but you know what 19th century. Yeah.

Speaker: So the two eldest girls have passed away. They're only 10 and 11.

Speaker: They are buried with their mother in the Parsonage Church under the flags, st michaels and all St. Michael and All Angels under the church flagstones. Charlotte and Emily are sent home.

Speaker: ah When Elizabeth had had been sent home ill, Patrick immediately had Charlotte and Emily brought back home as well. They were very, very scared. No one knew if the girls had caught TB at the school.

Speaker: It was thought prudent to bring the other girls back too. yeah i would get them the hell out of that place immediately. yes. Yeah. But it's interesting because they had that. it is known by her records that Charlotte had been vaccinated before her arrival because they had vaccines back then. They were fairly primitive. I think they're typically like ah this first cowpox vaccine was literally take some pus from a cowpox from a cow and then put it in your skin. yeah You'll get a little bit sick, but then you'll be you'll be ah ah immune to smallpox later on. So they did have vaccines back at the time. But I'm not sure which illness it was for.

Speaker: So I would like to talk about vaccines in another episode, actually, because it's very interesting. But yes, Elizabeth are sorry yeah elizabeth and Maria pass away. Charlotte and Emily are back home. So the household now is Patrick and his four children, Tabby Aykroyd and Aunt Branwell, who again decided to stay on and help raise the kids, even though she very much missed Cornwall. Like she had her own life there. yeah Cornwall is, Penzance especially too, it's ah it's a port and market town.

Speaker: So it's kind of where, you know, it's more exciting. There's more things to do. There's more people. So she's up in Howarth raising her sister's kids, which honestly, bless her. No, that is a tremendous sacrifice on her part. That's pretty, that's pretty wonderful.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so i feel like the story is a bit of a slow rolling horror movie. I mean, again, this is people's lifetime. so all these things aren't happening at once. But if you think about the people you know in your own life, I couldn't imagine that. I couldn't imagine going through half this stuff. Oh, oh God, it's horrible. Constant illness and death. Like, man.

Speaker: So that's where we're going to pause for this week. It's a long run up. Again, as usual, I think the second half is going to be more interesting. But, you know, you have to do a lot of scene setting. And I want to talk about Patrick as well, because I think he's an important figure in the story of the Brontes.

Speaker: So have context of the parents, where they are, how earth, how earth is very important in context, too. So, yeah. What'd you guys think? That was a ton. That was really interesting. It was super interesting. Yeah, didn't know any of that. And and i only knew tiny, tiny bits. And the fact that thematically we're really talking about disease as a killer is, ah you know, good way to map this onto our onto our modern struggles. So I appreciate that ah that lens. No, I'm super excited for part two. Yay. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah And I got to finish writing my parody song. oh Should I just sing it out and blast it? And then you can add some guitar work in the back and be, I'm kind of, I think it's pretty funny. so If you want to go like that, absolutely. We just will not be able to do vocals and guitar live because. Oh no, I know.

Speaker: we'll We'll see how that goes. Absolutely. You sing it out and blast it and we'll go from there. Okay, sounds good. Awesome. All right, well, should we say goodbye and we'll be back next week with more Brontes? Hopefully just a two-parter.

Speaker: but you never know. Absolutely. That's right. Oh, we know eventually, unfortunately, but I'm just kidding. that's true. All right, well, bye for now, folks.

Speaker: Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to The Wonder Camera. Find us under The Wonder Camera on Blue Sky, YouTube, and Instagram. The Wonder Camera.