Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

In announcing to her parents that the itinerary of this revivalism was carrying them to Leeds, Mrs. Booth expresses an opinion which gives one an amusing view of her vigorous character:

I believe we are to have a very nice home, where there are no children, quite a recommendation, seeing how they are usually trained! I hope if I have not both sense and grace to train mine so that they shall not be a nuisance to everybody about them, that God will in mercy take them to Heaven in infancy.

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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 Roy Hattersley, who comments:

The image of the dying infant – about to rise to glory, untainted by vice and redeeming its parents by its spotless example – was a constant source of inspiration to Victorian Methodism. But that was not quite what Catherine Booth meant (Hattersley 2000).

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• Catherine Booth (2) W/G ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
• Methodism (38) W/G ·
• Pregnancy (9) W/G ·
• Roy Hattersley (1) W/G ·
• The Salvation Army (2) W/G ·
• William Booth (2) W/G ·

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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 Roy Hattersley, who comments:

The image of the dying infant – about to rise to glory, untainted by vice and redeeming its parents by its spotless example – was a constant source of inspiration to Victorian Methodism. But that was not quite what Catherine Booth meant (Hattersley 2000).

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Similar

16 April 1883: General Booth rebuts the Bishop of Oxford’s claim that the Salvation Army organises mixed darkroom sessions at York

3 September 1810: Mr Jackson, Dewsbury druggist, gets drunk while visiting a prisoner at Rothwell

24 July 1771: Actor-manager Tate Wilkinson opens Puritan Leeds’ first proper theatre with comic impressions of leading Methodists

20 June 1817: Lines spoken by the actor Alexander Cummins at the Leeds Theatre are enacted sooner than he might have wished

29 April 1969: Jimmy Savile sexually assaults a 15-year-old girl at Staincliffe Hospital (later Dewsbury and District Hospital), to the amusement of bystanders

17 July 1844: Tory Radical Joshua Hobson tells Leeds council that Liberal mayor Hamer Stansfield was wrong to prohibit public meetings on the semi-privatised Kirkgate market

19 October 1909: Opening a nurses’ home in Dewsbury, Clifford Allbutt describes their predecessors in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

22 September 1896: Clifford Allbutt on the threat to industry from anti-scientific manufacturers and workers, and colonialism

6 June 1817: A government agent-provocateur on his way to a meeting of pro-democracy radicals at Thornhill encounters Thomas Murray, weaver and reform activist

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

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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

Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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