Bradford & District | Archive | 2000 | February | 26
From the Telegraph & Argus, first published Saturday 26th Feb 2000.
Three letters by members of the Bronte family and a rare item of jewellery belonging to sisters Emily and Charlotte have fetched more than £10,000 at auction.
And two of the letters and bracelet links, which bear the scratched signatures of Charlotte and Emily, were bought for display at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth.
The two pieces, each measuring nearly two inches long, were sold for £575 against an estimated value of between £600 and £800.
Delighted curator Rachel Terry said she hoped to include the jewellery and a letter from Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons, who found the links in a London junk shop during the war in the exhibition 'A Passionate Response' which has just opened.
She said: "As a museum we are always looking to collect but we have to balance that with the market cost of buying things in the market."
Two of the letters, one from Patrick Bronte and the other from the Reverend AB Nicholls, Charlotte Bronte's husband, fetched more than double their estimated value at the auction held by Sotheby's in London.
The most expensive piece in the auction was a letter from the Reverend Patrick Bronte, the father of the famed Haworth novelists. The letter, dated February 29, 1844, to George Taylor at Stanbury, shows the concern for a member of his congregation who was suffering after a bereavement.
The three page letter was estimated to sell for between £2,000 and £2,500, but eventually went under the hammer for £5,174.
The museum did buy Patrick Bronte's second letter in the auction, dated April 15, 1851, when he was 75, is an appeal to the Church Pastoral Aid Society for more help.
In it he says that "Having lost something of the elasticity of youth" he needs more help to carry out his duties.
The letter was estimated at £2,800 to £3,200 but made £2,990.
And it bought a letter from Charlotte Bronte's widowed husband, written on November 5, 1860, which reports that vandals damaged monuments in the churchyard at Haworth.
The letter made £1,380, treble the estimated £400 to £500.
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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