From Parlour Games to Pocket Screens: How the Brontes Might Have Spent a Rainy Haworth Evening

There is a certain kind of Haworth evening that has not changed one bit in nearly two hundred years. The light goes early. The rain comes sideways off the moor and rattles the windows. The village empties, the cobbles shine, and you find yourself indoors with a long stretch of dark hours ahead and no telly to fall back on.

I was sat in exactly that sort of evening last week, fire going, listening to the wind do its thing, and I got to wondering how the Brontes themselves filled those very same nights up at the Parsonage, just a few hundred yards from where I was sitting.

It is the question I get asked more than almost any other on my walks, funnily enough. People stand outside the Parsonage and they can picture the writing well enough, the three sisters scribbling away by candlelight. What they cannot quite picture is the rest of it. The ordinary evening. What on earth did people do with themselves before screens, before radio, before any of it?

The long Victorian evening

The honest answer is that they did a great deal, and most of it we have rather forgotten how to do. If you visit the Bronte Parsonage Museum today, which I would urge anyone coming to Haworth to do, you get a real feel for how the family actually lived in those rooms. The dining room was the heart of it. After supper the sisters had a habit of walking round and round the table together, talking through thier stories out loud, working out plots by pacing in circles in the candlelight. Imagine that. The whole of Wuthering Heights, more or less, walked into being round a dining table on wet Yorkshire nights.

There was reading aloud, of course, hours of it, the family passing books and newspapers between them. There was music, Emily at the little cabinet piano. There was the endless letter writing. And there were the made up worlds, the tiny hand stitched books about Angria and Gondal that the children wrote in writing so small you genuinely need a magnifying glass to read it.

They were, when you think about it, building entire imaginary universes for thier own amusement, which is not so different from how a lot of us pass our downtime now, only they did it with ink and paper instead of a glowing rectangle.

But it was not all high minded literary toil, and this is the bit people tend to leave out. The Victorians knew how to play.

A flutter by candlelight

Parlour games were a massive part of nineteenth century life, far more than we remember. Charades, of the proper acted out variety. Forfeits. Word games and riddles and guessing games. Card games above all, and here is where it gets interesting, because a good number of those card games carried a little wager, a few coins on the outcome, a bit of friendly risk to sharpen the fun. The game of whist in particular was an absolute fixture of the Victorian evening, played in parlours and pubs all over the country, and it was very often played for small stakes.

And lest we put the Brontes on too high a pedestal, the family knew the pull of a flutter close to home. Branwell, the brother, the one history is hardest on, did a fair bit of his drinking and his betting just down the lane at the Black Bull inn, running up debts he could ill afford. It is a sad thread in the family story, truly, but it is also a deeply human one, and it tells you something.

The urge to take a small chance, to feel that little flicker of will it or won’t it, is not some modern invention dreamed up by phone apps. It is old. It is woven right through the history of this very village. The Victorians felt it by candlelight exactly as we feel it by the blue glow of a screen.

The same itch, a different pocket

Which brings me, in a roundabout Yorkshire sort of way, to now. Because that exact same itch, the wanting of a small bit of play and chance in the dead hours, has simply changed its address. It used to live in a deck of cards in a parlour drawer. Now, for an awful lot of people, it lives in the phone in thier pocket.

The whole world of casino play moved onto mobile in the last decade or so, and you can find a proper mobile casino that does on a phone screen what the card table once did in the parlour, the cards, the wheel, the slot games, all of it built to run on the little device you already carry everywhere. A site like Swift Casino is made for exactly that rainy Haworth evening, the games loading quick and playing fine even when you are tucked up in a cottage with one bar of signal, which up here is often all you get. Swift Casino is one of the ones built sensibly for the phone, so it does not need a fancy connection or a big screen to work.

I will say the same thing about it that I would say about a Victorian card game played for pennies, mind. Keep it small, keep it fun, set yourself a firm limit before you start and treat it as an evening’s entertainment with a budget rather than a way to make money, because it is not that and never was. A flutter is a fine thing in its place. The trouble only ever starts when it stops being a flutter. Branwell, poor soul, is the cautionary tale carved right into the bricks of this village, and it is worth remembering him before you tap that screen. Set a cap, enjoy the play, then put it away and stick the kettle on.

If you are actually here on a wet evening

Now, if you are reading this because you have a Haworth trip booked and the forecast is doing its usual grim thing, let me be useful for a moment, because a wet evening up here is not a problem to be solved so much as a pleasure to be settled into.

Main Street is the obvious place to start. That steep cobbled climb looks properly atmospheric in the rain, all glistening stone and gas-lamp glow, and it is lined with pubs and little places to eat that have been warming up soggy walkers for generations. The Black Bull, the very one poor Branwell knew far too well, is still there at the top by the church and still pours a decent pint.

The Old White Lion and the Fleece are both grand spots to dry out in front of a fire with a plate of something hearty. Honestly, a wet night on Main Street with a good ale in hand is one of the quiet joys of the place, and alot of visitors tell me afterwards it was thier favourite bit of the whole trip.

If the rain eases even a little, and you have got the boots for it, the walk up onto the moor towards Top Withens is a different thing altogether in damp, brooding weather. That is the ruined farmhouse long linked with Wuthering Heights, and let me tell you, it makes far more sense in driving drizzle than it ever does under blue sky. Emily’s moor was never a gentle place and it does not pretend to be. Wrap up, take a map, and do not go up there in the dark, mind. The weather can turn on you in minutes and people underestimate it every single year.

And for the day that is just a total write off, weather wise, there is the Keighley and Worth Valley steam railway puffing away down the hill, which is a grand way to spend a few hours staying dry while still feeling like you have done something. The whole branch line is a little time machine and the kids, if you have got them with you, tend to lose thier minds over it in the best possible way.

The point of all this being, the long Yorkshire evening is not something to dread or to merely endure. It is half the reason to come. The Brontes built whole imaginary worlds out of exactly these dark wet hours, and you can build a really lovely evening out of them too, wether that is a pub fire, a steam train, a good book, or yes, a quiet hour on the phone when the weather has well and truly beaten you indoors.

What we gained and what we lost

Sat there by my fire, I found myself turning over what has actually changed between thier long evenings and ours, and it is not as simple as good old days versus bad new ones.

We have gained convenience, no question. Endless choice, in the palm of the hand, any hour of the day. The Brontes had a piano, a pack of cards and whatever books were in the house. We have, quite literally, more entertainment than a person could get through in a hundred lifetimes, sitting in a device lighter than a paperback. That is genuinely a marvel and I will not pretend otherwise.

But I think we have lost a little of the togetherness, if I am honest. The thing that strikes you about a Victorian evening is that it was shared. The walking round the table, the reading aloud, the card game with stakes, all of it happened between people in the same room, faces lit by the same fire. Our screens are mostly solitary affairs. We sit in the same room these days and each disappear into our own separate glowing worlds, and something quiet and good gets lost in that, I reckon.

So here is the small thought I came away with, and I offer it to anyone planning thier own wet evening up here in Bronte country. By all means bring the phone, load it with whatever passes your dead hours, a book, a film, a game, a flutter. The moors will be there in the morning and the evenings up here are long and dark and there is no shame at all in filling them.

But every now and then, maybe, do as the Brontes did. Put the screen down for an hour. Read a bit aloud to whoever is with you. Walk a slow circle round the table and talk some nonsense into being. Play an actual game of cards with an actual person across an actual table.

The itch to play is the same itch it always was, in Haworth or anywhere else, and there is nothing wrong with scratching it. The Brontes did, debts and all. I just have a sneaking feeling they would tell us, from thier circle round that dining table, that the very best evenings were always the ones spent with somebody else in the room. Rain on the windows optional, though up here it is more or less guaranteed.

18+. Please gamble responsibly. BeGambleAware.org.