Branwell Brontë

The person drinking isn't the only person [laughs] who suffers.

The whole family lives with the consequences, and that is where the connection between Arthur Huntingdon and Branwell Brontë becomes interesting, not because they were the same man, but because Anne knew from painful personal experience what happens when alcohol took hold of somebody's life.

And she knew that the damage didn't end with the person just holding the bottle.

It spreads throughout a whole family.

Oh, Charlotte and Anne.

Then they had a brother called Branwell, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anne, born in 1820, also sadly died of TB aged only 28.

Branwell, their brother, was an alcoholic and was addicted to opium too.

A complete wastrel.

Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

I was so fond of the man that I resent his rescue from oblivion by the fame of a woman.

His name was Branwell Brontë, and that is a portrait of my grandfather.

If Branwell had conducted hisself, said a heavy voice opposite, he'd have been the wonder of the family.

Many a time I've seen him come into the Lord Rodney Inn, his sharp little face as red as a scullery maid's hands, and rocking from one side of the aisle to the other, and sit down at the table and make a caricature of every man that come in.

I've been there as well and felt the same thing.

You can sort of walk into their old bedroom and their writing desk and particularly like Branwell, who was the brother, his, his bedroom was, has quite like a dark energy.

Yeah,

definitely.

But she didn't.

And you can actually see another very well-known picture of her and her sisters by her brother, Branwell.

Anyway, so the slightly physically unprepossessing Charlotte Bronte, she goes to Brussels in 1842 in her early 20s to study and teach at a school there, and it's there that she meets a man on whom it is widely suggested Jane's relationship with Rochester is certainly f- slightly based, and this is Constantine Heger, and he is the married English master of this school, and he was very supportive of Charlotte's writing.

He thought that she really had something, so he encouraged her in that.

So deep waters these, and why? Well, because Charlotte was infatuated with Heger, and we know this because we have surviving letters, but this passion was entirely unrequited.

So Claire Harman, who is Charlotte's biographer, has said that it's probably because, you know, Charlotte was very inexperienced.

As we said in our Wuthering Heights episode, she'd barely had any experience with men in the real world outside of her father and her brother, and she probably conflated Heger's support of her and her writing with romance.

I think it's so sad.