Branwell Brontë

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Map of Angria (c. 1830–1831).jpg|thumb|right|Branwell Brontë, Map of Angria, ca. 1830–1831

Patrick Branwell Brontë (26 June 1817 – 24 September 1848) was a painter, and writer and poet, the only son of the Brontë family, and the brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.

1 Youth
2 Adulthood
3 Death
4 Cultural references
5 Branwell Brontë poems
- 5.1 Juvenilia
6 Further reading

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Youth

Branwell Brontë was the fourth of six children and the only son of Patrick Brontë (1777–1861) and his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë (1783–1821). He was born in Thornton, near Bradford, Yorkshire, and moved with his family to Haworth when his father was appointed to the perpetual curacy in 1821.

Of the four Brontë siblings who survived into adulthood, Branwell Brontë seems to have been regarded within the family as the most talented, at least during his childhood and youth. While four of his five sisters were sent to Cowan Bridge boarding school (resulting in the death of his two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, from tuberculosis), Branwell was educated at home by his father, who gave him a classical education suitable for admission to Oxford or Cambridge. Elizabeth Gaskell, biographer of his sister, Charlotte Bronte, says this of Branwell's schooling:

Mr. Brontë's friends advised him to send his son to school; but, remembering both the strength of will of his own youth and his mode of employing it, he believed that Patrick was better at home, and that he himself could teach him well, as he had told others before.

Even as a young boy Brontë read extensively, and was especially fond of the "Noctes Ambrosianae", literary dialogues published in Blackwood's Magazine He took leadership role with Charlotte in a series of fantasy role-playing games which the siblings wrote and performed about the "Young Men", characters based on a set of wooden soldiers. The plays evolved into an intricate saga based in West Africa about the fictitious Glasstown confederacy. From 1834, he both collaborated and competed with his sister Charlotte to describe another imaginary world, Angria. Branwell's particular interest in these paracosms were their politics and wars, including the destructive rivalry between their heroes, Charlotte's Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Zamorna, and his Alexander Percy, earl of Northangerland. At aged 11 in January 1829 he began producing a magazine, later named "Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine" which included his poems, plays, criticisms, histories and dialogues. On the death of James Hogg, a Blackwood's writer, the 18 year old Bronte wrote to the magazine suggesting himself as a replacement. Between 1835 and 1842 Brontë wrote a total of six times to the magazine, sending poems and offering his services.

As a youth, Branwell Brontë received instruction from the portrait painter William Robinson. In 1834 he painted a portrait of his three sisters. He included his own image but became dissatisfied with it and painted it out. This portrait is now one of the most famous and treasured images of the sisters and hangs in the National Gallery.

In 1835 he wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Arts seeking to be admitted. Earlier biographers reported a move to London to study painting, which quickly ended following Bronte's dissolute spending on drink. Other biographers speculated that he was too intimidated to present himself at the Academy. More recent scholarship suggests that the Bronte did not send the letter or even make the trip to London.

Branwell Brontë worked as a portrait painter in Bradford in 1838 and 1839.

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Adulthood

With his father, Bronte reviewed the classics with a view to future employment as a tutor. At the beginning of January 1840, he started his employment with the family of Robert Postlethwaite f in Broughton-in-Furness. During this employment he continued his literary work, including sending poems and translations to Thomas De Quincey and Hartley Coleridge who both lived in the Lake District. At Coleridge's invitation, he visited the poet at his cottage who encouraged him to pursue his translations of Horace's Odes. In June 1840 he sent the translations to Coleridge, despite being fired by the Postlethwaites. Coleridge began an encouraging letter about the quality of the translations in November–December 1840 but never finished it.

From October 1840, Bronte was employed by the Manchester and Leeds Railway, initially as 'assistant clerk in charge' at their Sowerby Bridge station, being appointed to that post, his salary being £75 per annum paid quarterly; Brontë was promoted to 'clerk in charge' at Luddendenfoot railway station on 1 April 1841, and his salary was increased to £130. He was dismissed in 1842 due to a deficit of eleven pounds, one shilling and sevenpence in the accounts, probably stolen by Watson, the porter, who was left in charge when Brontë went drinking. This was attributed to incompetence rather than theft and the missing sum was deducted from his salary.

In January 1843 Brontë took up another tutoring position in Thorp Green, appointed as the tutor to the Reverend Edmund Robinson's young son. He gained this position through his sister Anne, who was the governess to the two older daughters. During his 30 months service he corresponded with a number of old friends about his increasing infatuation with Robinson's wife Lydia, who was the daughter of Revd Thomas Gisborne. In July 1845 he was dismissed for an affair with Mrs Robinson. Afterward he received a letter, according to Gaskell,

sternly dismissing him, intimating that his proceedings were discovered, characterising them as bad beyond expression, and charging him, on pain of exposure, to break off immediately, and for ever, all communication with every member of the family.

Brontë returned home to his family at the Haworth parsonage. Soon he was deeply influenced by Mrs Robinson's actions, upon the death of her husband, which made clear that she was not going to marry him; he "declined into chronic alcoholism, opiates, and debt" (Oxford). His behaviour became irrational and dangerous as he developed delirium tremens. Charlotte's letters from this time demonstrate that she was angered by his behaviour, but that her father was patient with his broken son. It is not known whether he was even informed of the 1847 debut novels of his three sisters.

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Death

Contrary to urban legend, he did not die "standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done"; this well-circulated myth is actually part of an intentionally-absurd Douglas Adams quote. Brontë's severe addictions masked the onset of tuberculosis, and his family did not realise that he was seriously ill until he collapsed outside the house and a local doctor identified him as being in the disease's terminal stages.

The source of this story seems to have been the Rev. Patrick Bronte, the only witness to his son's demise. Charlotte wrote in a letter to her friend Ellen Nussey that at the very end Branwell struggled to sit up and died on his feet. The story was repeated by Elizabeth Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte.

On 24 September 1848 Bronte died at Haworth parsonage, most likely due to tuberculosis aggravated by delirium tremens, despite the fact that his death certificate notes "chronic bronchitis-marasmus" as the cause. On 28 September 1848 he was interred in the family vault. Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in December of that year and Anne Brontë the following May.

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Cultural references

In Stella Gibbons' novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), the character Mr. Mybug is introduced as writing a psychological study of Branwell Brontë intended to show that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights.

In Pauline Clarke's novel The Twelve and the Genii (called The Return of the Twelves in the US), a child finds some magical toy soldiers which once belonged to the Brontës, and are alleged to have been the sources of some of their stories.

Branwell and his sisters are the central figures in the play The Gales of March written by Lee Bollinger in 1987.

In June 2009 the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth hosted an exhibition entitled Sex, Drugs and Literature – The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë focusing on Branwell's life.

In 2011 Blake Morrison wrote We are Three Sisters, a re-working of Chekhov's Three Sisters based on the lives of the Brontë sisters and featuring Branwell and Mrs Robinson, which premiered in Halifax on 9 September before touring.

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