Ebook: Patrick Brontë: father of genius

Patrick Bronte (1777-1861) was the father of the famous Bronte Sisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily, three of Victorian England's greatest novelists, but he was also a fascinating man in his own right, and not nearly as unsympathetic a character as Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte would have us believe. Born into poverty in Ireland, he won a scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, and was ordained into the Church of England. He was perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire for forty-one years, bringing up four children, founding a school and campaigning for a proper water supply. Although often portrayed as a somewhat forbidding figure, he was an opponent of capital punishment and the Poor Law Amendment Act, a supporter of limited Catholic emancipation and a writer of poetry.