page_title: Brontë family
section_title: Patrick Brontë
hierarchical_section_title: Brontë family / Members of the Brontë family / Patrick Brontë
caption_attribution_description: Photo by Bob Tubbs of the rear of Second Court, St John's College, Cambridge, Third Court and New Court (at back). The Backs are behind.
context_page_description: The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family, born in the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, are well known as poets and novelists. Like many contemporary female writers, they originally published their poems and novels under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Their stories immediately attracted attention for their passion and originality. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works were later to be accepted as masterpieces of literature.
  The three sisters and their brother, Branwell, were very close and during childhood developed their imaginations first through oral storytelling and play set in an intricate imaginary world, and then through the collaborative writing of increasingly complex stories set therein. The deaths of first their mother, and then of their two older sisters marked them profoundly and influenced their writing, as did the relative isolation in which they were raised.
context_section_description: Patrick Brontë (17 March 1777 – 7 June 1861), the Brontë sisters’ father, was born in Loughbrickland, County Down, Ireland, of a family of farm workers of moderate means. His birth name was Patrick Prunty or Brunty. His mother, Alice McClory, was of the Roman Catholic faith, whilst his father Hugh was a Protestant, and Patrick was brought up in his father's faith.
  He was a bright young man and, after being taught by the Rev. Thomas Tighe, he won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied divinity and ancient and modern history. Attending Cambridge may have made him think his name was too Irish, and he changed its spelling to Brontë, perhaps in honour of Horatio Nelson, whom Patrick admired. However, a more likely reason may have been that his brother, William, was 'on the run' from the authorities for his involvement with the radical United Irishmen, and he wanted to distance himself from the name Prunty. Having obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, he was ordained on 10 August 1806. He is the author of Cottage Poems (1811), The Rural Minstrel (1814), numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles, and various rural poems.
  In 1812, he met and married 29-year-old Maria Branwell and by 1820 they had moved into the parsonage at Haworth where he took up the post of Perpetual Curate (Haworth was an ancient chapelry in the large parish of Bradford, so he could not be rector or vicar.) They had six children. On the death of his wife in 1821, his sister in law, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Penzance, Cornwall to help him bring up the children. Open, intelligent, generous, and personally taking care of their education, he bought all the books and toys the children asked for and accorded them great freedom and unconditional love, but nevertheless embittered their lives due to his eccentric habits and peculiar theories of education.
  After several unlucky attempts to seek a new spouse, Patrick came to terms with widowerhood at the age of 47, and spent his time visiting the sick and the poor, giving sermons and administering communion, leaving the three sisters Emily, Charlotte, Anne, and their brother Branwell alone with their aunt and a maid, Tabitha Aykroyd (Tabby), who tirelessly recounted local legends in her Yorkshire dialect while preparing the meals. He survived his entire family, and six years after Charlotte's death he died in 1861 at the age of 84. At the end he was helped by his son-in-law, the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls.
caption: View of St John's College, Cambridge where Patrick Brontë was a student.
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