Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, when talking of Tate Modern, remarked that the way we look at things in museums is informed by religion: “We go to special buildings to stare at significant and precious things. We feel it is good for us.”
If Tate is a cathedral, then the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth is a shrine, and for quite a lot of people the family and the novels of Charlotte and Emily inspire an almost religious devotion. The parsonage is not only a tourist attraction but a place of pilgrimage.
Outreach programme
The museum is doing very well these days, with an active education department and a creative and popular arts programme that engages with contemporary writers. It recently scored a coup with a benefit performance by American singer-songwriter Patti Smith, who, as a Brontë fan, offered to support the museum.
The Brontës’ books are still read, films are still being made and the sisters are still big in Japan. As if on cue, a party of Japanese tourists arrived ahead of me on the glorious sunny morning I travelled to inspect the refurbished interiors.
Underneath this media success the place is still a serious museum. It continues to collect, promote research and its displays have to cut it both intellectually and aesthetically.
Since the museum began to furnish the house in the 1960s, visitors arrive expecting to see the place as it was when the three sisters and their brother lived there. They expect the shrine to be authentic.
In 2010 the museum acknowledged that, after 25 years, the interior needed redecoration.
It used a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to research the interiors and take advantage of fresh knowledge and techniques. It engaged the University of Lincoln and design consultant Allyson McDermott to analyse what was available through images, written descriptions and contemporary comparisons. The results were revealed this year.
Personal objects
Patrick Brontë and his family moved to the parsonage in 1820 when he became the curate of Haworth and he lived there until his death in 1861, having outlived all of his children. The house was built in 1778-9 though, so the first challenge for the museum was to set the period.
Clearly the one people want is the 1840s when the sisters were living and writing there and this is followed through in most of the rooms, apart from the dining room, which has pieces bought by Charlotte in the 1850s from the proceeds of her work.
The museum is greatly assisted by the fact that the majority of the pieces are provenanced to the house and were there in the 1840s.
Downstairs, the dining room and Brontë senior’s study display the simple and straightforward tastes of people of modest means. At present only the dining room has a fitted red carpet.
The study has bare painted boards and a ragrug (a carpet is being woven for the floor). No evidence was found that the room was papered so the walls are now a white distemper.
The study and the dining room are brought alive with personal possessions such as the father’s huge magnifying glass. Both rooms feature candles but neither has a chandelier.
No mention is made of these and the rule has been, “if there is no evidence then leave it out”. Brontë senior had a fear of fires so it is possible that he did not want chandeliers.
The kitchen is now re-installed to its 1840s position and a contemporary range installed. A common mistake with Victorian kitchens is to display almost every gadget you can lay your hands on but thankfully this had been avoided.
The only problem is that the ceramics are shown in museum-style case set in the wall, somewhat distracting from the authenticity. It would be better to display them within a cupboard, as they are really nothing special.
Wallpaper detective
Mr Nicholl’s (Charlotte’s husband) study is not really a period-room but a backdrop to displays about Haworth in the 19th century (and a filthy place it was, too).
The reprinted wallpaper is based on a fragment that is now in the New York Public Library and authenticated by Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist who wrote a biography of Charlotte.
Branwell’s studio houses his paintings but is not a re-creation either. It does, however, have a paper based on a scrap found in this room. Research has found an identical piece in a housemaid’s cupboard in Kensington Palace in London, illustrating that the Brontës bought inexpensive machine-printed papers.
Likewise, Charlotte’s bedroom is a museum display although the blue-green colour on the walls matches that of the 1850s.
The father’s bedroom has also been re-papered. Evidence of green paper has resulted in a patterned 1840s-style paper being used. The half-tester bed is not original to the house but acquired based on Branwell’s last surviving sketch before the booze took him away. (It’s fitting as he died in this very room.)
The room illustrates a simplicity of taste and the natural mixing of styles and periods, with a bow-fronted Georgian cupboard, the early Victorian bed and two rush-seated ladder-back chairs displaying a modest Chinese influence. Next door the children’s study is little changed.
“Nothing really wanting”
The redecoration has largely been successful. It would have been better to have gone for a more complete philosophy of turning the whole of the house over to the 1840s and 1850s and moving the more didactic displays elsewhere but I can understand why it did not happen – there is a lack of space elsewhere and there is also a need to furnish the shrine with personal items that would be lost in a period room.
Overall, the work has been done well, although I would lose the mirror plates in the dining room and change that case in the kitchen.
Period rooms can never be exactly as they were and are influenced by contemporary taste, as any history of National Trust properties will reveal.
Nevertheless, the study of historic interiors and the techniques to discover earlier schemes continues to improve.
The simplicity of the decorative scheme chimes with modern taste (thank you Farrow & Ball and Ben Pentreath) in a way that later Victorian excess of the type denigrated by Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times does not. However, that’s the baggage we bring to it, not the other way round.
Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey wrote about the clean simplicity, which appeared “scant and bare indeed” but in reality left “nothing really wanting”. That still sums up the place; a few changes and nothing really will be wanting.
Mark Suggitt is the director of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site
If Tate is a cathedral, then the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth is a shrine, and for quite a lot of people the family and the novels of Charlotte and Emily inspire an almost religious devotion. The parsonage is not only a tourist attraction but a place of pilgrimage.
Outreach programme
The museum is doing very well these days, with an active education department and a creative and popular arts programme that engages with contemporary writers. It recently scored a coup with a benefit performance by American singer-songwriter Patti Smith, who, as a Brontë fan, offered to support the museum.
The Brontës’ books are still read, films are still being made and the sisters are still big in Japan. As if on cue, a party of Japanese tourists arrived ahead of me on the glorious sunny morning I travelled to inspect the refurbished interiors.
Underneath this media success the place is still a serious museum. It continues to collect, promote research and its displays have to cut it both intellectually and aesthetically.
Since the museum began to furnish the house in the 1960s, visitors arrive expecting to see the place as it was when the three sisters and their brother lived there. They expect the shrine to be authentic.
In 2010 the museum acknowledged that, after 25 years, the interior needed redecoration.
It used a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to research the interiors and take advantage of fresh knowledge and techniques. It engaged the University of Lincoln and design consultant Allyson McDermott to analyse what was available through images, written descriptions and contemporary comparisons. The results were revealed this year.
Personal objects
Patrick Brontë and his family moved to the parsonage in 1820 when he became the curate of Haworth and he lived there until his death in 1861, having outlived all of his children. The house was built in 1778-9 though, so the first challenge for the museum was to set the period.
Clearly the one people want is the 1840s when the sisters were living and writing there and this is followed through in most of the rooms, apart from the dining room, which has pieces bought by Charlotte in the 1850s from the proceeds of her work.
The museum is greatly assisted by the fact that the majority of the pieces are provenanced to the house and were there in the 1840s.
Downstairs, the dining room and Brontë senior’s study display the simple and straightforward tastes of people of modest means. At present only the dining room has a fitted red carpet.
The study has bare painted boards and a ragrug (a carpet is being woven for the floor). No evidence was found that the room was papered so the walls are now a white distemper.
The study and the dining room are brought alive with personal possessions such as the father’s huge magnifying glass. Both rooms feature candles but neither has a chandelier.
No mention is made of these and the rule has been, “if there is no evidence then leave it out”. Brontë senior had a fear of fires so it is possible that he did not want chandeliers.
The kitchen is now re-installed to its 1840s position and a contemporary range installed. A common mistake with Victorian kitchens is to display almost every gadget you can lay your hands on but thankfully this had been avoided.
The only problem is that the ceramics are shown in museum-style case set in the wall, somewhat distracting from the authenticity. It would be better to display them within a cupboard, as they are really nothing special.
Wallpaper detective
Mr Nicholl’s (Charlotte’s husband) study is not really a period-room but a backdrop to displays about Haworth in the 19th century (and a filthy place it was, too).
The reprinted wallpaper is based on a fragment that is now in the New York Public Library and authenticated by Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist who wrote a biography of Charlotte.
Branwell’s studio houses his paintings but is not a re-creation either. It does, however, have a paper based on a scrap found in this room. Research has found an identical piece in a housemaid’s cupboard in Kensington Palace in London, illustrating that the Brontës bought inexpensive machine-printed papers.
Likewise, Charlotte’s bedroom is a museum display although the blue-green colour on the walls matches that of the 1850s.
The father’s bedroom has also been re-papered. Evidence of green paper has resulted in a patterned 1840s-style paper being used. The half-tester bed is not original to the house but acquired based on Branwell’s last surviving sketch before the booze took him away. (It’s fitting as he died in this very room.)
The room illustrates a simplicity of taste and the natural mixing of styles and periods, with a bow-fronted Georgian cupboard, the early Victorian bed and two rush-seated ladder-back chairs displaying a modest Chinese influence. Next door the children’s study is little changed.
“Nothing really wanting”
The redecoration has largely been successful. It would have been better to have gone for a more complete philosophy of turning the whole of the house over to the 1840s and 1850s and moving the more didactic displays elsewhere but I can understand why it did not happen – there is a lack of space elsewhere and there is also a need to furnish the shrine with personal items that would be lost in a period room.
Overall, the work has been done well, although I would lose the mirror plates in the dining room and change that case in the kitchen.
Period rooms can never be exactly as they were and are influenced by contemporary taste, as any history of National Trust properties will reveal.
Nevertheless, the study of historic interiors and the techniques to discover earlier schemes continues to improve.
The simplicity of the decorative scheme chimes with modern taste (thank you Farrow & Ball and Ben Pentreath) in a way that later Victorian excess of the type denigrated by Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times does not. However, that’s the baggage we bring to it, not the other way round.
Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey wrote about the clean simplicity, which appeared “scant and bare indeed” but in reality left “nothing really wanting”. That still sums up the place; a few changes and nothing really will be wanting.
Mark Suggitt is the director of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site
Project data
- Cost £60,000
- Main funder Brontë Society
- Decorative historian Allyson McDermott
- Project curator Ann Dinsdale
- Research University of Lincoln
