Self-portrait, 1840. Retrieved from Wikipedia, public domain (accessed: January 7, 2022).
Patrick Branwell Brontë
, 1817 - 1848
Patrick Branwell Brontë, known as Branwell, was educated at home by his clergyman father, Patrick Brontë, learning classical languages and reading freely from the books and periodicals in his home. From an early age, Branwell and his sisters wrote stories based around the imaginary lives of a set of toy soldiers, known to them as 'The Young Men'. Branwell became a regular collaborator with his elder sister, Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855). They developed a complex society around 'The Young Men', located in a fictional colonial version of West Africa. Branwell had hopes of becoming a professional writer or painter. After receiving too few painting commissions, Branwell became a live-in tutor to a family. He was asked to leave; drunkenness and a fathering an illegitimate child (who died) have been suggested as the likely causes of his dismissal. He continued to try to forge a career as a writer, without success. He worked briefly for the railways, but was dismissed. He worked as a tutor in a second household. Another dismissal followed, this time in relation to a probable affair with the mother of his pupils. Branwell never ceased writing poems and stories and translating classical texts, but he died at his family home in 1848 of tuberculosis exacerbated by alcohol and opium abuse.
The History of the Young Men was never published in the Brontës' lifetime. It was edited by William Baker et al. for The Juvenilia Press, non-profit international initiative hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales dedicated to the juvenilia of significant writers.
Sources:
C. Alexander & M. Smith, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 73–79;
sam2.arts.unsw.edu.au (accessed: March 24, 2020).
Bio prepared by Sonya Nevin, University of Roehampton, sonya.nevin@roehampton.ac.uk
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