Branwell Brontë: The Brilliant, Doomed Brother

Every visitor to Haworth meets the sisters. The sharpest visitors also meet the brother – because the story of Patrick Branwell Brontë, the family's adored only son, is the dark thread running through everything. Raised as the genius of the household, groomed for greatness while his sisters were groomed for governessing, Branwell died at 31 having published almost nothing, unemployable, addicted to drink and opium – mere weeks before Emily and months before Anne followed him to the family vault. Yet without Branwell there is no Brontë story as we know it: he was co-architect of the childhood imaginary worlds, the model for fiction's most memorable ruined men, and the family's great cautionary presence. Here is his story – including a Lake District chapter that surprises nearly everyone.

The chosen one

Born in 1817 between Charlotte and Emily, Branwell was quick, funny, red-haired and precociously talented at everything – drawing, music, verse, Latin, talk. In a family and an age that invested hope in sons, all the ambition of the parsonage settled on him. He never went to school; Patrick tutored him at home in the classics, and the boy repaid it with dazzling facility. It was to Branwell that Patrick gave the box of twelve toy soldiers in June 1826 that ignited the children's imaginary worlds, and it was Charlotte-and-Branwell, a fierce creative partnership, who built the sprawling saga of Angria across hundreds of miniature manuscript pages, trading characters and plot twists for years. As a teenager he wrote to the editors of Blackwood's Magazine demanding, with sublime confidence, to be taken on as a contributor; in January 1837 he wrote similarly to William Wordsworth, enclosing verses. Neither replied. The pattern of magnificent aspiration and mortifying silence was set early.

Failure by instalments

Branwell's adult career is a heartbreaking list of almosts. Painting first: he had real ability – his portrait of his three sisters, awkward and haunting, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, famously with a painted-out pillar where he removed his own figure – and a plan was made for him to study at the Royal Academy in London. The trip came to nothing; what exactly happened remains murky, but he returned home having apparently never enrolled. A portrait studio in Bradford failed. A post as tutor in the Lake District (of which more below) ended in dismissal within six months. He worked on the new railway as a clerk-in-charge at Luddenden Foot station – poetry in the ledger margins – and was dismissed when the accounts came up short. Finally, in 1843, he joined Anne at Thorp Green Hall near York, as tutor to the Robinson family's son. It ended in 1845 in the catastrophe of his life: dismissed in disgrace over his relationship with his employer's wife, Mrs. Lydia Robinson – a married woman seventeen years his senior. Branwell returned to Haworth shattered, convinced she loved him and would marry him when widowed; when her husband died in 1846 and she did not send for him, he came apart entirely.

The last years: the parsonage's captive tragedy

From 1845 to 1848, while his sisters secretly wrote and published the novels that would make the family immortal, Branwell disintegrated in the same small rooms – drinking at the Black Bull on Haworth's Main Street, dosing himself with opium from the village apothecary, running up debts that brought threatening letters to the parsonage door, setting his own bed accidentally alight. The sisters wrote around him, and of him: scholars trace his shadow in the drunken Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights and, most directly, in Arthur Huntingdon, the charming alcoholic husband of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne had watched the Robinson disaster at close range, and her novel's unsparing portrait of addiction is drawn from home. Poignantly, the sisters never told Branwell of their publications; the one-time co-author of their childhood worlds died, it seems, unaware his sisters were the famous "Bells". He died on 24 September 1848, probably of tuberculosis aggravated by everything else, aged 31. Standing up to die, according to family legend, out of a last flash of defiance. Emily caught cold at his funeral and was dead by December; Anne followed in May.

Branwell in the Lake District

Now the chapter close to our home ground. In January 1840 Branwell took a post as tutor to the sons of the Postlethwaite family at Broughton House in Broughton-in-Furness, on the south-western edge of the Lake District – his one Lakeland residence. He lasted barely six months before dismissal, but the stay produced something remarkable: Branwell sought out Hartley Coleridge – poet son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – at Nab Cottage on Rydal Water, between Ambleside and Grasmere, and spent a day with him discussing poetry and his translations of the Roman poet Horace. Hartley was encouraging; it was perhaps the only moment a member of the literary establishment took Branwell seriously, and he treasured it. Guests on our Lake District tours pass Nab Cottage's whitewashed front regularly – few realise the saddest Brontë once sat inside, briefly believing his future might come right. The Brontë Parsonage Museum keeps Branwell's paintings, manuscripts and possessions, and displays them with the seriousness he craved in life; the National Portrait Gallery in London holds the famous group portrait of his sisters.

Why Branwell matters to your visit

It is tempting to treat Branwell as the Brontë footnote – the brother who failed. Resist it. He is the hinge of the story: the co-creator whose childhood partnership trained Charlotte's imagination; the family hope whose collapse freed, and forced, the sisters to try their own talents; the living study in ruin from whom Anne and Emily drew fiction's most unflinching portraits of addiction. And his ghost is surprisingly widespread – from the Black Bull's fireside in Haworth to a poet's cottage on Rydal Water. Our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside, with a maximum of six guests, tell the whole family's story, Branwell's included – because the light of the sisters' achievement shines brightest against his darkness. Spare the brother a thought at the top of Main Street. Everyone in the family did, every day.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.