From their home in Haworth Parsonage, Emily Brontë and her sisters could look up to the wide open spaces of the moors - the inspiration for the dramatic landscape of Wuthering Heights - or they could look down, to see the churchyard full of slanting gravestones, marking the resting places of the dead, and the church itself, St Michael and All Angels. Their mother Maria, was buried there, in the family vault, as were the two elder Brontë sisters, Maria (named for her mother) and Elizabeth, who had died aged just 11 and ten respectively. Further down, below the church, lay the close streets of Haworth, where residents, like so many in the Victorian period, grappled with the daily realities of infection, dirt, disease, and death.
The Brontës' mother had died from cancer before her younger children had time to form real memories of her. While growing up without a mother was less unusual in the early 19th century than it is today, the Brontë children would nonetheless have felt their loss. Four years after Mrs Brontë's death, the young Maria and Elizabeth had been sent home from Cowan Bridge, the boarding school they attended with Charlotte and Emily, to die from consumption (tuberculosis).
Emily and Charlotte's first real and memorable experience of the close and constant menace of death and disease was at the school which Charlotte, in particular, held responsible for her elder sisters' deaths. She later remembered the school as a place where typhus fever 'decimated' the population regularly, and 'consumption and scrofula in every form bad air and insufficient diet can generate, preyed on the ill-fated pupils'.
All of the sisters experienced deaths of those close to them, and all were affected by these experiences. Charlotte, in particular, spent much of her adult life anxious about her own health and that of her loved ones. She worried at various points that Emily and Anne were showing early signs of consumption and panicked, fearing Emily's 'rapid decline' in 1835, and Anne's in 1837. When her friend Mary Taylor was unwell in 1838, Charlotte was again reminded of Maria and Elizabeth 'my two sisters whom no power of medicine could save' - speculating on whether Mary's lungs were 'ulcerated yet', and on what her 'hectic fever' might indicate. She worried for herself, too: her letters, especially those to another friend, Ellen Nussey, are also full of references to the wind and weather, and the ways in which it depressed her in body and mind. By the time Branwell and Emily died in 1848, Charlotte felt as though a threat that had lingered for years had finally become real: 'unused any of us to the possession of robust health, we have not noticed the gradual approaches of decay', she wrote.
Against the constant fear of consumption and the knowledge of the diseases which periodically struck the town below, the Brontës did have certain tools. Cleanliness was very much emphasised in the battle against disease in the early Victorian period, when the role of bacteria in contagion was decades away from being understood. The focus, especially in periods of epidemic disease, was placed on 'filthy' vapours and stagnant air-and Haworth Parsonage was kept scrupulously, immaculately clean.
From a very early age, the Brontë children were taken on regular walks on the moors above the parsonage, and exposed to the fresh and wholesome open air that was considered essential to the maintenance of good health. They also had two medical texts on their shelves which Patrick Brontë regularly consulted when members of the family were ill: Thomas Graham's Modern Domestic Medicine and William Buchan's Domestic Medicine. Buchan's work, in particular, argued that exposure to the elements was crucial to a healthy constitution, and that nothing could be more damaging to health than to stay indoors without ventilation. Patrick's annotations can still be seen in the margins of both the copies the family owned.
As Haworth's curate, Patrick Brontë baptised the babies of Haworth and held funerals for the town's dead, but he was concerned with their bodily health as well as their spiritual purity, and his sense of responsibility for the regulation of good health applied to his parishioners as much as it did to his own family. In 1849, two months after Anne's death, Patrick petitioned for an inspector to assess the village's high mortality and poor sanitation.
The Babbage Report of 1850 which followed this petition revealed shocking facts about the town. Multiple households shared single privies, and the overflowing excrement ran down the streets, combining with offal from the slaughter-houses on the way. At the top of the hill on which the town lies, the graveyard with its sloping and over-crowded gravestones gave a visible clue to the contents of the ground beneath it, which was full to bursting with Haworth's corpses. Decomposing matter trickled invisibly down from the churchyard and into the town's water supply. Perhaps not surprisingly, life expectancy in Haworth was a mere 25.8 years compared to an average of around 42 years across England and Wales. In the light of all this, the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne at 31, 30, and 29 seem less exceptional, if not less tragic, than they otherwise might.
For her part, Emily herself seems to have felt it important to manage and control her health alone. Charlotte later told her friend, the writer Elizabeth Gaskell, how Emily had once been bitten on the streets of Haworth by a dog who seemed as though it might be rabid. Rather than telling her family about the bite or any fears she had about contracting the rabies virus, Emily returned home and cauterised the wound by burning it with an iron in the parsonage Kitchen, in secret. She told nobody what had happened until the risk of rabies was past. Charlotte transformed the act into fiction in her novel Shirley, where the heroine (whom she told Gaskell was a version of Emily as she might have been if she'd enjoyed better health and finances) brands her own wound in the same way and also keeps her anxieties to herself. Later, and to the great distress of her family, Emily refused to see a doctor even though she was palpably dying from consumption. Whether this was because she was in denial, sceptical about doctors, or constitutionally averse to fuss, we will never know. Having grown up in the parsonage, always close to death and disease, Emily must have known the nature of the illness that was killing her.
It is perhaps unsurprising that characters in Wuthering Heights fall ill with measles, colds and consumptions, and death lurks everywhere, as it did in Haworth and in the parsonage itself. Yet for good or ill, death is not final in this novel: characters leave their ghostly echoes, and their love and attachments persist long after their deaths. 'Emily is nowhere here now', Charlotte wrote after her sister's burial. Her statement came from the depths of misery and mourning for the absence of Emily from this world. Perhaps, though, it also holds out the hope that although Emily is 'nowhere here now', some essence of her might still live on, in the memories of her Charlotte kept, and in her work.