Gothic literature romanticises the tragic, but nearly an entire family wiped out through illness and poor living conditions inherent to the time might be taking it too far. Add contaminated water into the mix, well…
An expected niche I found myself in a few years ago was a paper that linked the tragic early death of Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë, and the theory of poisoning due to the water from the well they were drinking. Horrific to think about, but perfectly in-line with a family known for the gothic and tragedy instilled within their family. But how can something so simple as the families’ water source be a direct contributor to their death? Let me introduce you to the concept of ground-water leaching, and ground-water run off.
The water cycle
Remember back to learning about the water cycle in school: rain falls, it runs down the hills, collects in places but either arrives in bodies of water, or evaporates. Groundwater is where water infiltrates its way into the soil. Run-off is where it travels on the surface.
Think of a hill that leads to a stream. Some water will merely travel along the surface of the hill, and down into the stream, because the water travels faster then it can enter the soil. Some water will seep into the soil at the top of the hill, and over time work its way through, but will still reach the water over time. They are interconnected, which allows for cross contamination to occur, and both are capable of carrying suspended or dissolved substances as they move. Where these substances permeate through the soil, that is called groundwater leaching.
Stay with me here. A lot of science for an article about family known for their literature – so lets put it into context.
The Babbage Report
In 1848, the Public Health Act was passed, to ensure that communities had local hygiene measures, as reports drew the conclusion that insanitary conditions were the reason for ‘social as well as biological disease’, and that good sanitation might lead to ‘happy, healthy, and docile’ communities.
Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of the novelist sisters, petitioned for a health inspector to visit the town not long after the death of his daughters. The report is known amongst scholars simply as ‘The Babbage Report’.
Decomposition of all sorts seemed to be happened on the Brontë doorstep.
One issue with sanitation in Haworth was sewage disposal. Toilets drained directly into streets, often overflowing, and there weren’t enough for one per household. Rotting offal from slaughter houses was kept in piles, along with whatever much came from the pig-sties, on street corners.
Another issue was graves, and the abundance of them. When the Brontës lived in Haworth, the graveyard had grown full to bursting, and the practise in the village was to cover each grave with a flat stone. Meaning, the full to capacity graveyard was looking like ‘one entire surface of flat stones’. Tons of poorly buried bodies.
And all the water that passed through the graveyard would collect in a drainage ditch. Which led directly into the family’s garden.
Water, already contaminated by sewage, was then passing through corpses, and leaching directly in the Brontë’s garden. Fluids from sewage piles, draining through corpses, and into the local water supply. Corpse water in the family well. It all starts to paint a picture.
Ever-present death
Haworth was an already cursed village. Its average life-span was twenty-six-years. Half of the children in the village died before they reached the age of six. Death loomed behind the Brontë family like a shadow. And it picked the Brontës off one by one: Emily, and Branwell (their brother) in 1848, and Anne in 1849. The belief that the grief and pain of mourning back-to-back for their siblings is what contributed to their deaths is an idea often romanticised. A tragic family, overwhelmed with death.
Officially, it was tuberculosis, but the state that they lived in certainly didn’t help. Their melancholy fates weren’t the result of some Romantic notion that only came to writers, poor drainage and rotting refuse made them horrifically unhealthy.
It seems inescapable. Water passed through corpses, decomposing piles of waste just sat on street corners, and many of those who lived in the village were already battling tuberculosis and their family were still living in the same house as them – it wasn’t just the Brontës surrounded by illness.
The living were in in constant close contact with decay, and death.
In such gothic imagery typically evoked by the Brontës, the well that was supposed to sustain their family is what contributed to their death. Drinking contaminated water, living each day in proximity to those were ill, and dealing with the loss of family at such awfully young ages: Emily was 30, Branwell was 31, and Anne was 29. It feels like an impossible battle imposed on the family.
Such lifestyles undoubtedly had influences on their literature.
Brontë masterpieces
With The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë demonstrates her belief that human connection is so intense, with those who are alive, or dead. It’s so similar with Wuthering Heights and how Emily Brontë writes about the ghosts and the guilt of those who are dead haunt the living, and the Yorkshire Moors itself is its own character, heightening that connection between those alive and nature, like the water in Brontë well, effects people. When Bertha sets the hangings on fire in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë shows that fire consumes without the consideration for prejudice, and it can be little else than its simplest form of raw, and violent- much like the water that can do little else then flow down the hill, and arrive in the Brontë well.
Regardless of circumstance, human kind is so connected with the natural world, and humans with the dead, that it can do nothing else then continue its path. People will contract TB (tuberculosis), people will die, they will be buried in the graveyard, and as they decompose that water run-off will contaminate the village’s water supply. And then the living will drink it.
Truth or tragedy?
Am I saying that corpse-water absolutely killed the Brontës? No – after all, their deaths were officially ruled as caused by tuberculosis.
However, there’s no doubt that drinking contaminated water for years on end did anything other than weaken their immune systems, and that the constant death of those in your village, and your loved ones can only ruin you. It’s tragedy of circumstance, improper hygiene practises, but made for bloody good literature. Could you argue that the Brontës wouldn’t have written such impactful, famous pieces of work if not for the situation they lived in? Definitely.
You shouldn’t have to worry about drinking corpse-water, just to note. Governments have a lot of mandatory permits and inspections for cemeteries to ensure ground-water leeching doesn’t happen. So we are in the clear. Just don’t go contracting TB and fancy yourself an aspiring gothic writer. Historically, that doesn’t seem to go well.