While in Sheffield, I had a chance to travel out to Haworth with Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey. What a great time that was! We sped along in Alan’s new car while Geraldine passed sweets around from the back seat. The sky was–appropriately enough–overcast. Later in the day a fine cold drizzle began to fall. Just the right setting, and–tourists being a bit like midgies–the rain kept their numbers low. Haworth itself is preserved close to what it was like when Branwell got his laudanum at the apothecary’s just opposite his favorite stew pit The Black Bull. Of course we had to have a drink at the B.B., but first a trip to the Parsonage Museum was in order. I thought at first the the house was made for midgets and their children, the furniture was so small! The three sisters must have averaged out at 5 feet tall, or maybe 5 foot five for Emily, who (if I recall) was the tallest lady of the family. Branwell, too, must have been a runt. I saw the couch where Emily died, the bedroom/playroom of the children–no bigger than a closet–Patrick and Branwell’s bedroom. It all comes home when you walk the rooms and see the tiny hand-made, hand written books they created and the homelier artifacts: the gloves, the bonnets, Charlotte’s wedding dress, and the baby clothes for the child that would never be born. I felt gloom and sorrow in that house, but Geraldine said she could feel some happiness as well–the joy of the children in each other’s company, jokes and games and precocious opinions lisped at the dining room table to infant applause. Maybe so. I saw Keeper’s collar, too.

In the bookstore/gift shop where one could glance out at the moors while shopping I picked up a copy of Stancliffe’s Hotel, one of the tiny books created by Charlotte Bronte when she was just sixteen. It’s an amazingly well-written piece set in the imaginary kingdom of Angria. One wonders how the pioneer editors and transcribers of this material could have even begun to read the near-microscopic handwriting of the children with any accuracy. The minute particulars of the tiny books reminds me of Blake’s illuminated books with the smallest details lavishly included. (This also brings up another thought: Did Emily Dickinson get the idea of stitching together her fascicles from reading the description of the Bronte childrens’ productions in Gaskell’s Life in the late 1850’s?)

Stancliffe’s Hotel owes much to Dickens, I think. Her description of the hustle and bustle of the hotel, with muddy floors, smoke, newspapers, curses and cries, convinces me that she must have beheld such scenes at the White Lion in Haworth or other of the hotels and way stations.

I also couldn’t resist picking up Ghosts & Gravestones of Haworth by Philip Lister, and this led me to one of the high points of my stay in the U.K. I’d always wondered about a strange story concerning Branwell’s encounter with a bed-shaking poltergeist in a second-floor bedroom of a house in Haworth, and now there was a picture of the house, its address and a complete version of the story! Alan and Geraldine were game to trek out to see the house (which sports a weird stone head with a gingerbread man’s face, why it’s there no one knows, though Lister avers that it could be a charm against witchcraft or a memorial to someone who died on the site while erecting the building), and one of my treasures is a picture of me standing in front of said dwelling while holding an umbrella against the rain and pointing up to the unusual stone head.

I loved Haworth and have already returned several times in my dreams with Alan and Geraldine. Since returning to Japan I’ve begun to re-read Emily’s poems and Wuthering Heights to boot.

What we like best about trips to Britain (besides romping with old friends in and around Sheffield) is the opportunity to buy some great books. Here’s what I’ve picked up:

Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (Vintage, 1999)–An interesting read: I’d never heard of the Conjuror’s Magazine, or of Blake’s connection with James Gillray (they both attended the Royal Academy at the same time); nor did I know of Richard Cosway’s practice of sex magic and his friendship with the Blakes at about the same time. Finally–and call me naive–it took Peter Ackroyd to waken me enough from “Newton’s Sleep” to realize that Blake included engravings of two honest to god blowjobs in progress in his great poem Milton. The mystery is, why?

Four Restoration Libertine Plays, edited by Deborah Payne Fisk. Reading The Libertine by Thomas Shadwell right now.

Witchfinders; A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, by Malcolm Gaskill. The real story of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Grim stuff.

The First Psychic by Peter Lamont. A generous take on D.D. Home–I think too generous.

The Herbalist; Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Reform by Benjamin Woolley (Harper, 2005)– By the same author who wrote so well about John Dee, this was a must-have and so far the reading is wonderful.

The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse–New names and new tropes aplenty.

Atila the Hun and Genghis Khan (Bantam)–both from John Mann–for my nomadic, pillaging moods.

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy–One of his least satisfying books. Some of the language is still there, but the plot reduces all of McCarthy’s epic themes to comic book proportions. McCarthy Lite, I guess you’d call this one, though the basic tenet is as dark as ever.