Church of England - Patrick Brontë: father of genius

I should like to express my thanks to Dr Rowan Williams for the honour he has done me by writing the Foreword to this work. In the midst of the very busy schedule of a Lambeth Conference year it was an act of kindness which I deeply appreciate. I think his action would have brought great pleasure to Patrick Bront. For much of Patricks time at Haworth his diocesan was Dr Charles Longley, the first Bishop of Ripon, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury and founded the Lambeth Conference. Among the new items in my book is a moving letter from Patrick Bront thanking Dr Longley for his expression of sympathy at the time of Charlottes death. This letter has only recently been discovered among the Longley Papers in Lambeth Palace Library. I am very grateful to the Right Revd George Cassidy, Bishop of Southwell & Nottingham, for putting me in touch with Dr Williams, and for the kind assistance given to me by members of the Lambeth Palace staff, especially by Jana Edmunds.

In my edition of The Letters of Patrick Bront I expressed my gratitude to those who had assisted me in my research during the previous ten years. I should again like to thank Robert and Louise Barnard for their continued support and encouragement and for making available information from their Bront Encyclopaedia prior to its publication last year. Robert also read my MS in draft form and made many helpful suggestions. A great debt is also due to my brother Stephen who has once again proved to be a mine of information on ecclesiastical matters and, although not an inveterate Bront lover, read my draft MS through on two occasions and gave much useful advice. I am grateful to Wendy Smith for kindly reading through my proofs. My thanks are due to Ann Dinsdale for her expert help and advice and for the warm welcome which I received on my visits to the library at the Bront Parsonage Museum. I am also grateful to Sarah Laycock for her work on the illustrations.

Once again I acknowledge my great debt to Juliet Barkers The Bronts, a monumental work which, with its detailed notes of reference, is an indispensable aid to all those who engage in research on the Bront family. I have also made frequent use of Margaret Smiths meticulous three-volume edition of The Letters of Charlotte Bronte and I have gained much information from A Man of Sorrow by John Lock and W.T. Dixon, who had access to some details about the life of Patrick which sadly have since been lost.

I am grateful to my friends in the Irish Section of the Bront Society for their help over the details of Patricks childhood and youth: to Margaret Livingston for arranging my visits to Northern Ireland, to Ivan and Roberta McAulay for kindly providing hospitality and to Finny OSullivan for reading my Irish chapter and giving me historical advice. I should like to thank Malcolm Underwood, the Archivist of St Johns College, Cambridge, for his assistance over the details of Patricks scholarships at the college. I am grateful to Richard Middleton, the Archivist of the Minster Church of All Saints, Dewsbury, for supplying me with his history of the church, to Robin Greenwood for once again allowing me to profit from his detailed knowledge of the nineteenth-century history of Haworth and to Ruth Battye for her kind hospitality on my visits there. I am indebted to Mr W. R. Mitchell for his permission to use the photograph of Dr William Cartman, his great-great-grandfather and Patricks life-long friend. I am grateful to the late Geoffrey Sharps for his assistance over the date of the third edition of Mrs Gaskells