| Honorific Prefix: | The Reverend |
| Patrick Brontë | |
| Birth Name: | Patrick Brunty |
| Birth Date: | 17 March 1777 |
| Birth Place: | Imdel, near Rathfriland, County Down, Ireland |
| Death Place: | Haworth, West Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Occupation: | Teacher, clergyman |
| Nationality: | Irish |
Patrick Brontë (commonly ;[1] born Patrick Brunty; 17 March 1777 – 7 June 1861) was an Irish Anglican minister and author who spent most of his adult life in England. He was the father of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, and of Branwell Brontë, his only son. Patrick outlived his wife, the former Maria Branwell, by forty years, by which time all of their six children had died as well.
Brontë was born at Imdel (or Emdale) in the parish of Drumballyroney, County Down,[2] the eldest of the ten children of Hugh Brunty, an Anglican, and Elinor Alice (née McClory), an Irish Catholic.[3] [4] His father was a "farmhand, fence-fixer, and road-builder".[5] The family was "large and very poor", owning four books (including two copies of the Bible) and subsisting on "porridge, potatoes, buttermilk and bread" which "gave Patrick a lifetime of indigestion".[5]
He had several apprenticeships (to a blacksmith, a linen draper, and a weaver) until he became a teacher in 1798. He moved to England in 1802, having won a scholarship[6] to study theology as a sizar[7] [8] at St John's College, Cambridge, first registered as "Branty" or "Brunty", then "Brontë",[9] [10] [11] receiving his AB degree in 1806.
In adult life, Patrick Brunty formally changed the spelling of his name to Brontë;[12] while the reason for this change remains unclear, there are a number of prominent theories to explain it.[13] [14]
He was appointed curate at Wethersfield, near Braintree in Essex, where he was ordained a deacon of the Church of England in 1806, and then a parson in 1807.
Brontë's first post as curate was at St Mary Magdalene Church, Wethersfield, Essex with the vicar being Joseph Jowett, Regius Professor of Law at Cambridge. Here in 1807 he met and fell in love with Mary Burder. After a disagreement and an undisclosed insult, with Burder's father's brother, her legal guardian, Mary was shipped out of town and Patrick decided it was best to take a new curacy.[15] It was shortly after this period his first poetry was published.
In 1809, he became assistant curate at Wellington, Shropshire, and in 1810 his first published poem, the 256 line Winter Evening Thoughts, appeared in a local newspaper, followed in 1811 by a collection of moral verses, Cottage Poems. He moved to the West Riding of Yorkshire as a curate at All Saints, Dewsbury (now Dewsbury Minster) in December 1809. The area was undergoing an evangelical revival under the incumbent vicar John Buckworth. Brontë taught reading and writing at Dewsbury's Sunday School and was deputised by Buckworth to attend twice weekly meetings of the Church Mission Society on his behalf. A memorial plaque to Brontë can be found on the South Aisle of Dewsbury Minster.[16]
Buckworth appointed Brontë as an assistant curate to the Church of St Peter, Hartshead, a daughter church of Dewsbury in 1811. He served at Hartshead until 1815. In the meantime (1812) he was appointed a school examiner at a Wesleyan academy, Woodhouse Grove School, near Guiseley. In 1815 he moved again on becoming perpetual curate of Thornton.
At Guiseley, Brontë met Maria Branwell (1783–1821), whom he married on 29 December 1812 in the Church of St. Oswald. They moved into a house on Halifax Road, Liversedge, where their first two children, Maria (1814–1825[17]) and Elizabeth (1815–1825) were born. Their remaining children Charlotte (1816–1855), Patrick Branwell (1817–1848), Emily (1818–1848) and Anne (1820–1849) were born after they moved to Thornton.
Brontë was offered the perpetual curacy of St Michael and All Angels' Church, Haworth in June 1819, and he took the family there in April 1820. His sister-in-law Elizabeth Branwell (1776–1842), who had lived with the family at Thornton in 1815, joined the household in 1821 to help to look after the children and to care for Maria Brontë, who was ill, possibly suffering the final stages of what may have been uterine cancer or ovarian cancer. Elizabeth decided to move permanently to Haworth to act as housekeeper.
Patrick Brontë sought out Mary Burder, his first love, and inquired after her hand in marriage; Burder declined. After several attempts to seek a new spouse, Patrick came to terms with widowhood at the age of 47, and spent his time visiting the sick and the poor, giving sermons and communion,[18] leaving the three sisters Emily, Charlotte, Anne, and their brother Branwell alone with their aunt and a maid, Tabitha Aykroyd (Tabby), who tirelessly recounted local legends in her Yorkshire dialect while preparing the meals.[19]
Brontë was responsible for the building of a Sunday school in Haworth, which he opened in 1832. He remained active in local causes into his old age, and between 1849 and 1850 organised action to procure a clean water supply for the village, which was eventually achieved in 1856.
In August 1846 Brontë, with Charlotte as a companion, travelled to Manchester to undergo surgery on his eyes. On 28 August he was operated upon, without anaesthetic, to remove cataracts. Eye surgery was then in its infancy and surgeons did not understand how stitches could be used to hold together the necessary incision in the eye. Their solution was to have the patient undergo a long period of recuperation in a dark room. Charlotte used this interval to begin the writing of Jane Eyre.[20]
After the death of his last surviving child, Charlotte, nine months after her marriage, he co-operated with Elizabeth Gaskell on the biography of his daughter. He was also responsible for the posthumous publication of Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, in 1857. Charlotte's husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls (1819–1906), who had been Brontë's curate, stayed in the household until he returned to Ireland after Patrick Brontë's death, at the age of 84, in 1861. Brontë outlived not only his wife (by 40 years) but all six of his children.