Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

[Letter to Ellen Nussey] I hope you are not frozen up; the cold here is dreadful. I do not remember such a series of North-Pole days. England might really have taken a slide up into the Arctic Zone; the sky looks like ice; the earth is frozen; the wind is as keen as a two-edged blade. We have all had severe colds and coughs in consequence of the weather. Poor Anne has suffered greatly from asthma, but is now, we are glad to say, rather better. She had two nights last week when her cough and difficulty of breathing were painful indeed to hear and witness, and must have been most distressing to suffer; she bore it, as she bears all affliction, without one complaint, only sighing now and then when nearly worn out. She has an extraordinary heroism of endurance. I admire, but I certainly could not imitate her… You say, I am to “tell you plenty.” What would you have me say? Nothing happens at Haworth; nothing, at least, of a pleasant kind. One little incident occurred about a week ago, to sting us to life; but if it gives no more pleasure for you to hear, than it did for us to witness, you will scarcely thank me for adverting to it. It was merely the arrival of a Sheriff’s officer on a visit to B., inviting him either to pay his debts or take a trip to York. Of course his debts had to be paid. It is not agreeable to lose money, time after time, in this way; but where is the use of dwelling on such subjects? It will make him no better.

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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.

Comment

Comment

Via John Bibby (Bibby 2022). The picture Gaskell’s quotations paint is quite gloomy, but Humphry Rolleston writes of Clifford Allbutt, who knew Charlotte:

In later life Allbutt often insisted that Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) had been misled by someone’s account of the West Riding as a semi-savage region in which these clever girls were marooned, and so gave an exaggerated impression of the isolation of the Brontës, who in reality were much in touch with cultivated neighbours (Rolleston 1929)

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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, Anne (1820-49) (3), novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family W/G ·
• Brontë, Branwell (1817-48) (3), wastrel brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne W/G ·
• Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855) (12), novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters to survive into adulthood W/G ·
• Debt (4) W/G ·
• Debtors’ prison (1) W/G ·
• Ellen Nussey (2) W/G ·
• 📌Haworth (7), village 10 miles west of Bradford, known for the Brontës and the Keighley and Worth Valley heritage railway W/G ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (150) W/G ·
• 📌York Castle (37) W/G ·
• 📌York Debtor’s Prison (1), inside the former York Castle bailey, originally built as the county gaol 1701-05 W/G ·
• 📌York (165) W/G ·

All tags.

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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.

Comment

Comment

Via John Bibby (Bibby 2022). The picture Gaskell’s quotations paint is quite gloomy, but Humphry Rolleston writes of Clifford Allbutt, who knew Charlotte:

In later life Allbutt often insisted that Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) had been misled by someone’s account of the West Riding as a semi-savage region in which these clever girls were marooned, and so gave an exaggerated impression of the isolation of the Brontës, who in reality were much in touch with cultivated neighbours (Rolleston 1929)

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Similar

27 May 1849: Scarborough on the last evening of Anne Brontë’s life, as told by Ellen Nussey

27 July 1612: Jennet Preston, the only Yorkshirewoman among the Pendle witches, is found guilty at York of the murder of Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, Gisburn (Ribble Valley)

23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

5 August 1605: Debauched and ruined, Walter Calverley is crushed to death today at York for the murder of two sons at Calverley Hall (Bradford), but is revived by 1830s schoolboy ghost-raisers as the Rev. Samuel Redhead (age ca. 55)

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

2 September 1824: Following a summer drought, Patrick Brontë witnesses a peat bog collapse and flood four miles away at Crow Hill

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

2 May 1844: The Bradford Observer reports a 10% increase in the borough’s population in two years

28 April 1812: Luddites fatally wound the Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market

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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.

Comment

Comment

That all four were Methodists is from Sydney Smith (Holland 1855): “Conceive the horror of fourteen men hung yesterday! And yet it is difficult to blame the Judges for it, though it would be some relief to be able to blame them.”

Modern accounts generally follow the colourful but substantially fabricated version by (George) Walter Thornbury, first published by Dickens (Thornbury 1867/05/11) and then under his own name (Thornbury 1870). First among them was local lad Frank Peel – frequently given as a source for Thornbury’s attribution to Horsfall of a probably fictitious “desire to ride up to the saddle girths in Luddite blood” (Peel 1888) – but see also e.g. Georgina Hutchinson’s Under the Canopy of Heaven, Geoffrey Bindman in The New Law Journal, and Wessyman. (Susanna Berger is good on Thornbury’s ground-breaking but misleading biography of J.M.W. Turner (Berger 2013).)

Kevin Binfield quotes from a letter to Huddersfield magistrate Joseph Radcliffe from Colonel Thomas Norton describing the behaviour of Luddites hanged at York Castle during the first
two weeks of 1812:

You know how the three Murderers died, and the five Men for Rawfold’s Mill died precisely the same. The Chaplain told them it was his Duty to entreat them to confess. They were silent. He then told them he should take their Silence as confessions. They were still Silent on that Subject, but spoke Generally of their Sins. Thus in Fact tacitly allowing their Guilt as to the Offence they died for, but not doing so in Words…. Nor was one Word said by their People. (Binfield 2004)

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