Isabel Stirk writes:
Quite a few years ago I
purchased a replica set of toy soldiers from the museum shop at the Parsonage
for my godson. He enjoyed many hours of imaginative play with them - there were
make believe battles, disasters and a few wore a set of badly made uniforms
made by yours truly!
Nearly two hundred years
earlier Branwell Brontë’s original toy soldiers were having adventures of their
own, written about in books the Brontë children made themselves which were less
than thirteen centimetres square. The hand writing was proportionately small
which created no difficulty for the children as they were all- Charlotte the
most- short sighted. These little books
have always fascinated visitors to the museum and have played a big part in
this year’s exhibition, curated by Tracy Chevalier, Charlotte Great and Small.
On Saturday evening (10 September), in
Haworth, an appreciative audience heard Tracy Chevalier talking to two writers
who have both written about miniatures.
Jessie Burton spoke about her
debut novel, The Miniaturist, which
is set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, and how she was inspired by a
visit to the Rijksmuseum. Her novel is based on a doll’s house she saw there
which had belonged to the wife of a silk merchant- Petronella Oortman - who had
furnished it lavishly. It was interesting to learn that Burton herself had been
given a miniature writing desk by a friend on which was placed a tiny replica
book with the title Jane Eyre to be
joined later by another tiny book Burton’s own The Miniaturist.
Grace McCleen, who is
writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for 2016, said she had
always been interested in miniaturisation, and making miniatures, sometimes up
to fourteen hours at a time, had helped her through a period of illness. She
too spoke about, and read from, her own award winning debut novel The Land of Decoration. The narrator is
a ten year old girl who, with her father, is a member of a fundamentalist sect
who lives in a small town. To escape from the bullying she has to endure she
recreates the town as an elaborate model in her bedroom.
The usual questions and
answers followed and there were differing theories put forward as to why people
create miniatures and why the Brontë children created their own miniature
books. In the case of the Brontës I
feel it may have been an escape and as they followed their heroes in their
adventures they had found for a short time their own sanctuary. For a brief period they were free from the
harsh realities of their lives. Lives where they had no mother, they had lost
two sisters and lived within sight of a crowded graveyard. They would hear
frequently the tolling of the church bell heralding that their father would
soon be conducting the funeral of yet another Haworth resident who had
succumbed to the ignorance, disease and privation which abounded in the hill
top village at that time.
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