Dr William Wright’s book, published in 1893, was initially lauded but later received much opprobrium. In the twenty-first century, however, the type of oral history and first-generational recollection which are foundational to Wright’s work are recognised as valuable aids to our understanding of the past and this allows me to offer a new perspective on Wright’s story of the Irish Brontës.
Given the large volume of contemporary correspondence from the sisters and their father which is still available and Mrs Gaskell’s seminal 1857, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, it is little wonder that scholars and biographers quickly dispense with any meaningful research of the difficult and seemingly absent Irish part of the story and instead quickly arrive at Haworth, some via Cambridge and Patrick’s various curacies, to enjoy the rich pickings of Brontë past which are available in England.
As a rule, biographers tend to devote around twenty percent of research to the early life of their subject – searching for influences on their subject’s life mosaic. Oddly, this is absent in the vast majority of Brontë biographies and is perhaps best exemplified by Juliet Barker in her acclaimed book, The Brontës when she says of Patrick, ‘For him, life effectively only began when he shook off the dust of Ireland from his feet and was admitted to Cambridge. His first twenty-five years were an irrelevance, even though they must have been amongst the most formative of his life.’
Ms Barker’s book, since its publication in 1994, has been largely regarded as ‘the’ definitive Brontë biography – referred to by many as the ‘Brontë Bible’ – and seems to have become a ‘get out of jail’ card regarding any serious assessment of the Irish part of the Brontë story.
There have, of course, been others who have written on the Irish part of the Brontë story, notably Dr Haughton, The Brontës of Ballynaskeagh, 1978 and Professor John Cannon’s, The Road to Haworth: The Story of the Brontës’ Irish Ancestry,1980. Both authors freely acknowledge their dependence on Wright’s work.
The most detailed defence of Wright’s book was published by Dr. Edward Chitham in 1986, The Brontës’ Irish Background. Yet this was dismissed by Juliet Barker in a single footnote as, ‘a misguided and unconvincing attempt to rehabilitate Wright.’
This ‘rehabilitation’ was a throwback to, and endorsement of, the savage criticism launched at Wright’s book by Angus MacKay (with his sarcastic take on Wright’s title) in his, The Brontës: Fact and Fiction, published in 1897. He says, ‘Wright has no critical faculty and is guilty of unreasoned acceptance of every alleged fact.’ J. Ramsden had already weighed in with his book, The Brontë Homeland: or Misrepresentations Rectified published in 1896. He says, ‘It seems Wright had in his mind some great political and religious notions.’
Both McKay and Ramsden, as High Anglican Tories and supporters of Disraeli’s one-nation Conservatives, were fierce critics of Gladstone’s Irish Land Acts and saw Wright as largely an Irish upstart with an agenda to promote Home Rule for Ireland. Wright, a plain-speaking Ulster Presbyterian, certainly had personal experience of the injustices Gladstone sought to address in Ireland but these were not his motivations.
When I first began to research my great-great-uncle William Wright, I quickly realised that in Presbyterian circles he is known as ‘Wright of Damascus’. Whereas, in Brontë circles, his life-informing career in Syria and its influence on his Brontë work is never mentioned. Indeed, he is seen as this one-dimensional, maverick clergyman whose book is at best a distraction to serious research. To find the truth we need to understand who William Wright was.
Born on the 15th of January 1837 in Finnard townland, between Rathfriland and Newry, he was the youngest of seven children. A few years before William’s birth his father had helped set up the Presbyterian Congregation of Ryans which aligned itself with one of the more radical Presbyterian sects in Scotland. This dissenting Scottish nature is important to the understanding of Wright.
Wright joined Queen’s College Belfast in 1858 where he studied Latin and Greek Literature. His love of the classics brought Wright into contact with the Rev. David McKee, also a classicist, and minister of the First Annacone Presbyterian Church, whose privately owned manse was at Glascar – less than three miles from Wright’s home. McKee tutored Wright and in 1865 became his father-in-law.
McKee lived cheek by jowl with the Brontës throughout his ministry and knew Patrick Brontë’s nine siblings, both as neighbours and, at times, members of his congregation. Their eccentricities were well known to McKee and he passed such stories on to his pupil Wright with warmth and understanding. Wright himself had personal contact with the Brontës and encountered them in everyday life, especially around Glascar.
By the early 1850s the Brontës were world-famous through the sisters’ novels, and Wright, in his undergraduate years, spent about a month, dressed as a peasant, searching for Brontë Irish roots in the Boyne valley. He knew that to go as a well-dressed student was unlikely to elicit the level of empathy and information he sought.
In 1865, Wright was ordained as a Presbyterian Minister and left for Syria to a position in the Foreign and Jewish Mission of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. His archaeological work in Syria led to an honorary D.D. from Glasgow University in 1882 and, in 1896, a fellowship from the prestigious Royal Geographical Society.
A brilliant linguist and fluent speaker of several Arabic dialects, Wright, in an address to the Brontë society in 1897, said, ‘During a residency of nearly ten years among the Arabs I learned to set much value on the traditions of a bookless people. Stories that descend from father to son generally rest on substantial fact.’
Wright goes on, ‘They should be recorded as traditions, with an account of the narrator and the opportunities he may have had for knowing the truth of what he narrated – these simple canons I observed in my book, giving not only the source of the traditions but the channels through which they reached me.’
Wright was a century ahead of his time in the understanding of the important role oral history can play in our understanding of events. One of a plethora of local examples of how ‘ordinary’ folk, reticent to put pen to paper, have a vital story to tell, is the inclusion in the re-development of the former Bank of Ireland building in Royal Avenue, Belfast, of a section which will, from 2030, allow people to tell their experiences of the Troubles and other local events. The ‘Story Engine’ of this repository has already begun recording stories.
William Wright was no Brontë scholar, but for thirty years, from the early 1860s, he knew the importance of what he had heard and seen of the Brontë family in Ireland and that it must be recorded for posterity.
When his wife’s health collapsed, Wright returned to London to the post of Editorial Superintendent of The British and Foreign Bible Society. I contend that he wished his father-in-law, Rev. David McKee, who knew the Irish Brontës better than anyone, should record their story but McKee’s death in 1867 ended that dream.
Some insights from William Wright’s book about the Brontës in Ireland and their impact in Haworth
Patrick Brontë was not a severe Church of England vicar who disapproved of the marriage of his daughter Charlotte to his Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, but a lively story-teller: ‘Charlotte’s friend, Miss Ellen Nussey, has often told me of the marvellous fascination with which the girls would hang on their father’s lips as he depicted scene after scene of some tragic story in glowing words and with harrowing details.’
These stories found their way into his daughters’ novels. For example, Gallagher, a fraudulent friend of an early Hugh Brontë in Ireland ‘was the original from whom Emily Brontë drew her portrait of Joseph in Wuthering Heights.’
A line from a poem about the love between Alice and Hugh Brontë, which Patrick had edited, is given to Jane in Jane Eyre: ‘Rochester says, “Jane suits me: do I suit her?” Jane answers, “To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.”
In Shirley, Helstone throws an obnoxious bully into the ditch. Patrick, despite the remonstrance of his vicar, Tighe, seized a bully’s neck and leg and flung him down the hill into a ditch. Patrick’s first job as a schoolmaster in Glascar, County Down, was terminated due to his relationship with a mature red-headed pupil, daughter of a substantial farmer. In his youth Patrick was not the quiet vicar of Haworth repute.
A later Hugh Brontë, armed with a shillelagh, travelled from Ireland to Haworth and on to Charlotte’s publishers in London to attempt to give a beating to the adverse reviewer of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review. This pugnacity may have encouraged future Brontë biographers to avoid the Irish Brontës.
By the 1890s Wright knew his health was in decline. His experiences in the deserts of Syria and respect for a ‘bookless’ people had reinforced the need and urgency to record his first-hand experiences and those of others. He acknowledges this in an article for The Spectator in 1893 when he says, ‘I waited long for someone more skilled than I to undertake the story of this gigantesque family.’
There is one further influence which has never been named but which I think is important. Wright frequently wrote articles for The Bookman, as did a then-aspiring Irish writer called W.B. Yeats. I have no evidence that the two ever met but they certainly knew of each other through the journal. Yeats published The Celtic Twilight in 1893, the year Wright’s book was published. There was a resurgence of interest in a mythical, imaginative and poetic Celtic vision which the practical and materialistic Anglo-Saxons had lost. These traits were intrinsic to the Brontës Wright knew and are recognised and analysed by Edward Chitham. Wright also saw their importance but time and the nature of his book precluded detailed analysis.
It was inconceivable to Wright that the storytelling of old Hugh Brontë, (Patrick’s father) was not passed on by Patrick – himself a gifted storyteller and from1822 a single parent – during those family breakfasts in the windswept Haworth parsonage. There is much in Wuthering Heights to suggest that he did just that.
In 1893 William Wright penned and published The Brontës In Ireland, warts and all. His efforts have done much to keep the Irish part of that ‘gigantesque’ family story alive. With an increasing understanding that knowledge is not just the preserve of academia but that the voice of the common person has a contribution to make, we owe Wright a debt of gratitude not opprobrium.