Chitham Western Winds

The Brontës' Irish Heritage
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6462-3
Verlag: THP Ireland
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The Irish heritage of the Brontë family has long been overlooked, partly because both Charlotte and her father Patrick did their very best to ensure that this was the case and partly because there was a strong understanding at the end of the nineteenth century that the Brontës were Yorkshire regional novelists. Yet their ideas and attitudes, and perhaps even their storylines, can be traced to Ireland. This book, which develops ideas originally published in The Brontës' Irish Heritage in 1986, sets the record straight. By re-evaluating the sources available, it traces Patrick's Irish ancestry and shows how it prevented him from achieving his ambitions; it shows how that heritage influenced his children's writings, particularly Emily; and it sheds further light on the genesis of Wuthering Heights.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chitham, Edward

Leseproben

2

WILLIAM WRIGHT, PRESBYTERIAN

As has been said, we would know little about the Irish background of the Brontës if it had not been for William Wright’s The Brontës in Ireland. Wright was born and lived his early life in the ‘Brontë Homeland’. He knew some of the Brontë family personally and had seen others; for example, he mentions seeing a later generation mending roads, with ‘Brontë’ painted on their carts. He was close to the Presbyterians in whose school Patrick taught and he talked with some of Patrick’s pupils. However, Wright was a romanticiser, and embroidered his story with imaginative detail which cannot be substantiated, as he had been taught by his tutor, William McAllister. This does not invalidate his main very precious evidence about the life of Patrick’s father Hugh and the Prunty brothers and sisters. Elsie Harrison is most misleading when she writes, ‘One Brontë enthusiast, named Wright, did indeed go to Ireland to rake over the ashes of the Brontë legend, but he turned up so confused a medley that, to the historian, his work seemed worthless’.1 Wright had no need to go to Ireland; he lived there for many years in the same area as the Brontës. Clement Shorter also suggested that Wright’s information came from his ‘many visits’ to County Down, and adds that Wright ‘probably’ made his researches with the Brontë novels in mind.2 It is hard to understand why Harrison and other commentators such as Angus MacKay and J.D. Ramsden who attacked Wright did not check out his background. There are indeed problems with Wright’s work, but these attacks strike one as being biased and ill-informed.

William Wright was born on 15 January 1837 at Finard or Finnards, about 3½ miles (two intervening townlands) from Patrick Brontë’s birthplace. His later relative, Uel Wright, gives details of his descent and life in his 1986 lecture to the Presbyterian Historical Society.3 The Wrights were emigrants from Scotland in the seventeenth century, among others who settled in the neighbourhood of Finard. Uel Wright quotes William as saying ‘No people on earth slaved so hard as the Irish tenant farmers. They worked early and late. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun and laboured the live-long day’. Wright was still a child when the Irish famine broke out and did not forget it; we shall see later that it affected even the relatively well positioned Brontës. Wright started school at Ballykeel local school in the next townland and parish of Drumgath, and was a quick and voracious reader. It is thought that he attended the Belfast Royal Academical Institution, though so far no record has surfaced. Before this he was tutored by Revd William McAllister and Revd William McCracken, both of whom are important in providing evidence about the Brontë background. Wright went on to Queen’s College and, after obtaining his BA, to Belfast Presbyterian College. Licensed by the Belfast Presbytery, he was directed to Damascus and spent ten years as a missionary in the Middle East. One thing he learned there was that oral evidence of past times is not necessarily invalid. His surviving letters show a forceful, perhaps authoritarian, character. His hand was firm and his phrasing polite but determined. As has been said, he did embroider his material, but not misrepresent it. Of course he did not employ modern historical methods to check his facts, but he did not invent.

Wright was involved in translating some Hittite inscriptions, and in 1882 he was suggested for an honorary Doctorate of Divinity at Glasgow University. His sponsor was James Robertson, Professor of Oriental Languages there. Robertson quoted Professor E.H. Palmer of Cambridge regarding Wright’s quick mastery of Arabic, and his facility in preaching. He had constantly been cited for his aid by the Palestine Exploration Fund. Samuel Davidson had written, ‘If I was asked to recommend any English scholar to the attention of the Senators of your University, I should at once mention Mr Wright as one on whom the degree of D.D. might worthily be conferred.’ He is also said to have used ‘ingenious arguments’ and to have been ‘fearless and searching’ in the cause of Bible publication.4 Early in his book, Wright said, ‘When I was a child I came into contact with the Irish Brontës, and even then I was startled by their genius, before any literary work had made their name famous in England’. Could this be true?

My insistence on probing the character and antecedents of Wright might seem fussy, if it were not for the fact that in 2015 there are still sceptics about his information. It needs to be stressed that he provides much detail that is simply unavailable elsewhere, some of which can be confirmed from documents but a good deal of which cannot. Andrew MacKay accused Wright of partisanship, referring to the prominence given to the theory of Tenant Right in his book. Wright did present Hugh Prunty as a reformer but not a revolutionary. We shall discuss whether this could be accurate in view of the attitudes and actions of some of the family and Hugh’s known associates. Missionary zeal is part of the make-up of nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, and this shows itself in Wright’s determination to inform the world about Brontë origins, and to gain for Ulster and Ireland credit for nurturing the Brontë genius.

The next stage in our hunt for Brontë antecedents is to try to trace those who informed Wright and interested him in the Brontës in the first place. Wright’s father was a farmer in the townland of Finnards, part of the large parish of Newry. It is likely, but not certain, that the family worshipped at Ryans Presbyterian Church, a record of which existed from 1826, but which was rebuilt in 1840. Wright’s father seems to have been prosperous enough to employ a nurse, whom Wright describes as ‘a close relative of Kaly Nesbit’; she had lived ‘within a quarter of a mile’ of the Pruntys (Wright anachronistically called them ‘Brontës’ throughout). We can suppose this nurse looked after William when he was 3 or 4. ‘Kaly Nesbit’ can be identified as Caleb Nesbit, who married a woman named Jane McKee on 13 July 1802 at Rathfriland. The Nesbits had a large holding in Imdel townland, their farm being in the same lane as the corn kiln where Patrick was born. It stretched to a point almost opposite the kiln. A girl, Margaret Nesbit, was born to Caleb and baptised at Glascar Presbyterian church on 22 May 1803; she is surely Wright’s nurse. Wright had substantiated his point: his nurse was brought up across the fields from the old Prunty home, though they had moved a small distance away by the time she was born. Miss Nesbit gave Wright ‘much Brontë lore’, but he does not specify what she told him. For a small child, she will perhaps have tempered Hugh Prunty’s stories. The point is, however, that Hugh and his exploits are shown to be well known in the locality and worth telling.5

Another of Wright’s acquaintances while he still lived at Finnards was the Revd William McAllister (various spellings of the surname). He was the minister at Ryans from 1851. This was McAllister’s second appointment after twenty-four years at Clarkesbridge, but he was coming home, since he had been born at Derrydrummuck, the next townland to Glascar, and baptised at Glascar Presbyterian church on 5 July 1801. When Wright was fourteen his parents appointed McAllister as his tutor. It is especially important to examine the McAllister family, since they provide some of the most detailed accounts of Hugh Prunty’s stories. Fortunately, a study of the family in the Glascar area was carried out by Mr Henry McMaster of Holywood, County Down, one of William’s descendants, who kindly sent me details of his genealogical research.6

William was the second son and third child of Samuel McAllister who died in 1849, his will being proved by William and his older brother, Samuel, who was of ‘Derrydrummuck’ and had presumably inherited the mill. According to McMaster’s evidence, the elder Samuel (died 1849) mentioned here, had a brother Joseph, who had eight known children, the youngest of whom was John, baptised at Glascar in 1798. However, Glascar registers seem to give a Samuel as his father. Joseph’s eldest son, Hugh, was ordained and became minister at Loughbrickland in 1804. Both John and Joseph would therefore have been cousins of William, Wright’s teacher at Finnards. I am glad to update the information given in my earlier book. Tracing the McAllisters is, however, fraught with difficulties because of the constant recurrence of Christian names.

William McAllister gained a splendid reputation. He was said to be ‘a little dark man of indomitable energy and a tender heart … original and good humoured and jovial … pious without being straight-laced or sanctimonious’. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, obtaining the Institution’s General Certificate in 1824. At Ryans he was a lively controversialist, being greatly opposed to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. He had a lively wit; on one occasion he was seen filling a tobacco pipe by a brother minister who said, ‘Mr McAllister, that tobacco is the devil’s weed’. ‘Then the sooner we set fire to it the better’ was the reply, and William lit the pipe. One feels he would have been a lively and interesting teacher for William Wright, whom he clearly inspired with enthusiasm. His birth in 1801 may have been too late for him to hear Hugh Prunty first hand, but his father, Samuel, was an accurate source of information.

Wright mentioned as one of his sources the brothers Todd; James and John. The Todd family...