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They provided the name for The Brownies and their books were favourites of their day. Stephen McClarence reports on reviving interest in the tales of the Victorian Gatty family.
People can get very passionate about the Gatty family. Some years ago, at a talk about these once-world-famous West Riding writers, the speaker called them "the other Yorkshire Brontes".
A woman in the third row was indignant. "The Brontes?" she scoffed. "They only wrote novels!"
Well, that puts the also-rans from Haworth in their place. But the parallels are there. Both families lived in village vicarages. Both endured poor health. Both published their own family magazines. And both wrote copiously.
The difference, of course, is that the Brontes are still celebrated and the Gattys of Ecclesfield, a sturdy stone village between Sheffield and Barnsley, aren't. Though they will be if Mel and Joan Jones, a husband-and-wife team of Gatty enthusiasts, have their way.
Over the past decade, the Joneses, from Thorpe Hesley near Rotherham, have delved into the Gattys' lives and produced a seemingly inexhaustible series of articles and books about them.
The latest of the books, The Story of a Nomadic Wife, is based on the letters (695 sheets of them) and diaries written by Juliana, arguably the most talented member of this multi-talented Victorian family, while she was separated from her soldier-husband during his foreign postings in the early 1880s.
So what's the appeal of the Gattys? "The multiplicity of their endeavours," says Mel, visiting professor in landscape history at Sheffield Hallam University, rather splendidly.
Consider the evidence. Juliana Gatty (1841-85), who wrote under her husband's surname, Ewing, was one of the most widely-read children's authors of her day and was often compared to Robert Louis Stevenson. Admired and entertained to tea by John Ruskin (no pushover as a critic), she wrote 140 stories, including The Brownies, about a band of Little People whose purpose was to help adults. Baden-Powell borrowed the name when he set up the junior Girl Guide movement.
Juliana's mother, Margaret (1809-73), was the daughter of Alexander Scott, vicar of Catterick, Royal Chaplain and, most interestingly, Nelson's chaplain and intelligence agent at Trafalgar; he's pictured in familiar Death of Nelson tableaux cradling the dying admiral in his arms. Margaret...