CHAPTER I
1 (p. 14) A.D. sexcentissimo: This inscription suggests that a monastic community was established in Haworth in 600. Were this accurate, the community would have predated the arrival of Christianity in the region in the generally accepted year of 627, when the Roman missionary Paulinus, later archbishop of York, converted the Anglo-Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria.
2 (p. 15) curate at Haworth: Thomas Dunham Whitaker (1759-1821), vicar of Blackburn and local antiquarian, casts doubt on the antiquity of the Haworth chapel by suggesting that a stone mason mis-read the original inscription. This debate is important to Gaskell because it allows her to establish the independent character of the locals and to explain the grounds for their unusual right of refusal of curates.
CHAPTER II
1 (p. 20) religious dictations of such men as Laud: William Laud (1573-1645), archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, tried to impose a uniform standard of worship throughout England in an effort to deter religious dissent. Dissenters were members of sects that worshiped outside of the Church of England. These sects were historically well established in the northern manufacturing districts, Yorkshire among them. Gaskell, a Unitarian, was herself a dissenter.
2 (p. 20) Commonwealth men: Gaskell turns social historian and explains the religious and economic forces that induced Yorkshire to support the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell, which deposed and executed Charles I in 1649, and set about overturning the religious and trading restrictions the Stuarts had imposed.
3 (p. 21) persecuting days of Charles II: Upon his restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles II attempted to rein in religious dissent with the Act of Uniformity (1662), which required all clergy to take an oath that they would adhere to Anglican doctrine as established in The Book of Common Prayer.
4 (p. 21) “Life of Oliver Heywood”: Joseph Hunter wrote The Rise of the Old Dissent, Exemplified in the Life of Oliver Heywood, One of the Founders of the Presbyterian Congregations in the County of York (1842).
5 (p. 26) scene of the ministrations of the Rev. William Grimshaw: The Reverend William Grimshaw (1708-1763), perpetual curate of Haworth from 1742 until his death and a major Evangelical figure, is credited with revitalizing the spiritual life of the town by introducing the Evangelical Revival. The Evangelical party comprised reform-minded clergy within the Church of England who believed in a religion based on personal revelation and social responsibility.
6 (p. 26) Newton, Cowper’s friend: John Newton (1725-1807), a slave-ship captain who underwent a conversion and became an Evangelical clergyman, wrote Memoirs of the Life of the LateWilliam Grimshaw (1825). Newton and the poet William Cowper (1731-1800) collaborated on the Olney Hymns (1779). Cowper, a proto-Romantic, is best known for the expressive style of his poetry and its theme of religious doubt.
7 (p. 27) fervour of a Wesley... fanaticism of a Whitefield: John Wesley (1703-1791) and George Whitefield (1714-1770) led Methodism, a religious movement that valued personal spiritualism over ritualistic devotion, from within the Anglican Church. Methodists adopted open-air preaching in order to reach marginalized members of the community. Doctrinal differences ultimately led to the severing of the relationship between Whitefield, a strict Calvinist who believed in predestination, and Wesley, a follower of Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, who maintained that individuals could effect their own salvation. Methodism’s formal break with the established church occurred in 1795.
8 (p. 30) Dr. Scoresby: William Scoresby (1789-1857) was an Arctic explorer before he entered the Anglican ministry and later became the vicar of Bradford (1839-1847); he was a source of local history and local color for Gaskell.
9 (p. 32) circumstances which I have described: Samuel Redhead’s son-in-law disputed Gaskell’s version of events. Gaskell responded in the third edition by appending testimony from two eyewitnesses supporting her account.
CHAPTER III
1 (p. 34) Patrick Brontë... County Down in Ireland: For Patrick Brontë’s biography, see John Lock and W T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, 1777-1861 (London: Nelson, 1965), and Barker, The Brontës; see “For Further Reading.”
2 (p. 35) military duties which they had to perform: During the period 1803-1805 Napoleon was gathering forces at Boulogne with the intention of invading England, a threat that ended with Nelson’s victory off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. One of Patrick Brontë’s Cambridge classmates, Lord Palmerston (1784—1865), later became prime minister (1855-1858, 1859-1865).
3 (p. 39) of Mr. Brontë’s composing: Patrick Brontë was a published author at the time of his marriage. He had published two collections of moral poems, Cottage Poems (1811) and the Rural Minstrel (1813), as well as the didactic romances Cottage in the Wood (1815) and The Maid of Killarney (1818). He also weighed in on religious and social issues of the day by contributing to regional newspapers throughout his career.
4 (p. 39) “Advice to a Lady”: George, Baron Lyttelton’s Advice to a Lady (1733) was typical of eighteenth-century conduct literature for girls. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) summarized and lampooned it: “Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet; / In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.”
5 (p. 43) “potatoes for their dinner”: The false claim that Patrick Brontë enforced a vegetarian diet and the charge of wastefulness, to which servants Nancy and Sarah Garrs objected, were retracted in the third edition. Gaskell wanted only to show that “no stingy motive” induced Patrick to deny his children meat (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 368). This and much other disputed information about life at the parsonage came from the nurse who attended Mrs. Brontë in her final illness.
6 (p. 44) the ideas of Rousseau and Mr. Day: Political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was also an educational theorist. In Émile (1762) he advocated educating boys to exercise the independence accorded them by nature rather than making them conform to their social station; girls, however, were to be molded with the exclusive purpose of pleasing their future partners. Rousseau influenced Thomas Day (1748-1789), whose History of Sandford and Merton (1783-1789) was one of the first novels written for children.
7 (p. 45) reduced to the condition of stools: The catalogue of Patrick’s “volcanic wrath,” which included burning his children’s boots, shredding his wife’s silk dresses, burning a hearthrug, and sawing the backs off chairs was omitted, at Patrick’s request, in the third edition.
8 (p. 45) days of the Luddites: The Luddite riots (1811-1816) were staged by organized gangs of cloth workers who roamed the manufacturing districts destroying the machinery they felt was displacing them from their jobs. Brontë would set Shirley (1849) amid this uprising.
CHAPTER IV
1 (p. 53) William Carus Wilson: The Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791-1859), a Calvinist Evangelical who was the model for Jane Eyre’s Reverend Brocklehurst, established the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Like his fictional counterpart, Carus Wilson wrote devotional tracts full of fire and brimstone for children. He was a polarizing figure. A vitriolic public debate erupted with the publication of the Life about the degree of culpability he had, if any, in his management of Cowan Bridge (see Wise and Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, vol. 4, appendix 1).