It seems this fandangle dongle thingy will let me write words but draws the line at pictures, or doesn't draw the line................
I am sitting a cough and a spit from where young Charlotte wrote her words and she didn't complain. The cottage here has the obligatory three pictures of her, all neatly framed, available from the Bronte museum up the hill.
The cottage was built in the 1850s - thick walls and surprisingly large rooms so I guess she was scribbling away at about the same time when one of the mill workers moved his family and range in to here.
Being as it has a double, stone framed window at the front, I would think he was a supervisor or some such. I don't know if Jane Eyre was available in the village, I suppose there would have been a Board School but maybe young governesses falling in love with their employers would not have been deemed appropriate for young minds. One or some of the sisters may have helped out at the school, but adolescent females would already be working in the mill, having babies, finding out about real life in some ways that perhaps Charlotte could not.
Walking Hattie the dog up past the church onto the moor is one kind of sensation, the churchyard is dark and forbidding, crammed with tall gravestones that look like a funeral is permanently attended by stony mourners, blackened with age and disapproval.
Being here in the cottage is different. It has been gutted and refurbished in a very New Labour manner. All stripped and mahogany stained wood floors and fake beams, the kitchen walls artexed but painted dark red. A great big dark green leather couch and a fake fireplace under the granite lintel. Very comfortable tho!
