Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

It was on Whit Tuesday, 1810, the children of the parish church Sunday school, according to what was an annual custom, walked in procession to Earlsheaton, there to have, what was locally known as “The Sing,” which among church people, at all events, was a great event in the village. As the scholars were marching up, a tall and lusty man, seeing them approach, deliberately planted himself in their path and would not move an inch. Mr Brontë seeing this, walked quickly up, and, without a word, seized the fellow by the collar, and by one effort flung him across the road, and then walked by the procession to the town’s green as if nothing unusual had happened, leaving the obstructionist agape with surprise. Such an occurrence, as may be expected, caused quite a stir in the district, and the Irish curate was the hero of the hour. This incident has been made use of by Charlotte in her Shirley, where Parson Helstone precipitates an obstructing dissenter into the ditch. Helstone is Brontë in nearly all the traits of his character, but the ideal presentation is our old friend Hammond Roberson.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Comment

There is a longer account, under copyright, from p.63 in Man of Sorrow (Lock 1965). Margaret Watson on the Whit Walks in Dewsbury.

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Original

It was on Whit-Tuesday, 1810, the children of the Parish Church Sunday School, according to what was an annual custom, walked in procession to Earlsheaton, there to have, what was locally known as “The Sing,” which among church people, at all events, was a great event in the village. As the scholars were marching up, a tall and lusty man, seeing them approach, deliberately planted himself in their path and would not move an inch. Mr. Brontë seeing this, walked quickly up, and, without a word, seized the fellow by the collar, and by one effort flung him across the road, and then walked by the procession to the Town’s Green as if nothing unusual had happened, leaving the obstructionist agape with surprise.” Such an occurrence, as may be expected, caused quite a stir in the district, and the Irish curate was the hero of the hour. This incident has been made use of by Charlotte in her “Shirley,” where Parson Helstone precipitates an obstructing dissenter into the ditch. Helstone is Brontë in nearly all the traits of his character, but the ideal presentation is our old friend Hammond Roberson.

192 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855) (12), novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters to survive into adulthood ·
• Brontë, Patrick (1777-1861) (4), Irish Anglican minister and author, curate at Dewsbury, Hartshead, Thornton, Haworth, father of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë ·
• Church of England (93) ·
• Dewsbury Minster (2) ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) ·
• Earlsheaton (1) ·
• Muscular Christianity (1) ·
• Nonconformism (47) ·
• Pentecost (1) ·
• Procession (3) ·
• Shirley (4), social novel by Charlotte Brontë, published in 1849, set in Yorkshire in 1811-12 during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 and against the backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the textile industry ·
• Sunday school (4) ·
• Walking (18) ·
• Whit Tuesday (1) ·
• Whit walk (2) ·
• Whitsun (4) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë
• 24 August 1832: The Rev Henry Nussey – St John Rivers in Jane Eyre – attends his church’s Sunday School festival at Birstall
• 18 July 1784: Wesley finds children “restrained from open sin” at one of the first Sunday schools, at Bingley
• 7 November 1920: In a guest sermon in the parish church where his father had officiated, Clifford Allbutt evokes the village of Dewsbury in the 1840s
• 22 November 1839: Bradford rejects its new vicar William Scoresby’s proposal for a church rate by a huge majority, inspiring a curious letter
• 28 December 1872: The tower of St Peter’s, Earlsheaton (Dewsbury) rings a true peal of Kent treble bob major – 16,608 changes in 9 hours 50 minutes – setting a new national record
• 26 July 1858: Walter White samples the nascent Brontë tourist industry at Haworth, but declines to buy photographs or visit the father
• 27 April 1924: In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Clifford Allbutt recalls the Brontës
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• 6 May 1744: John Nelson, one of the first Methodist preachers, finds the welcome from gaoler James Barber at Leeds prison superior to the accommodation