Brontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in
this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five
little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the
seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their
mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study
(you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed
together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used
again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared
by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.

The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church,
not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came
up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small,
middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine
of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold
and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took
possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room
in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her
for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early
Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of
their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and
originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before
Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the
day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in
taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them
alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six
years old each little Brontë had its view of the political situation;
and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out