A History of Haworth from Earliest Times

Book excerpt: Haworth village and its parsonage will forever be linked inextricably with one nineteenth-century literary family. For it was here, in 1821, that Patrick Brontë, an Irish Anglican clergyman, came from Thornton to be curate. He brought his three young daughters and son, and the sisters grew up to become quite the most remarkable literary phenomenon of the century. As children in Haworth they knew the streets and the houses, the moors and the people. Indeed, as this excellent book reveals, many of the characters in the Brontë novels were based upon real Haworth folk - some of whom recognized themselves in the women's novels and were not at all happy with how they had been portrayed - while the moors above the village figure prominently and famously as the haunt of the brooding Heathcliff in Emily's greatest work Wuthering Heights. Yet, as Michael Baumber's highly readable A History of Haworth from Earliest Times shows, there is so much more to the story of Haworth. From the arrival to the area of the first settlers 15,000 years ago, the author narrates a long and fascinating history, through the Norman and medieval periods, on to the Civil Wars and the Industrial Revolution. The book is particularly strong on the textile industry, which became such a dominant force in the district's economy, and was such an important and all-consuming fact of life in early Victorian Haworth. From exactly this period, of course, Haworth's history is dominated by that of the Brontës, and the author skillfully weaves the two together, throwing important new light on both. Also covering the hamlets of Oxenhope and Stanbury, the book is fully illustrated, with many rare old photographs, and offers many insights into the village and also into its occasionally ambivalent relationship with its most famous literary residents.