In the register of his birth his name is
entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as 'Brunty' and
'Bruntee'; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as Dr. Douglas Hyde has
pointed out, the original name was O'Prunty. {29} The Irish, at the
beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as
were the English of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see
variations in the spelling of the Bronte name--it being in the case of
his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt 'Brontee.' To me it is
perfectly clear that for the change of name Lord Nelson was responsible,
and that the dukedom of Bronte, which was conferred upon the great sailor
in 1799, suggested the more ornamental surname. There were no Irish
Brontes in existence before Nelson became Duke of Bronte; but all
Patrick's brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was
on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true
Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more
attractive surname. For this theory there is, of course, not one scrap
of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick's native parish
gives us Brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies
is Bronte.
From Cambridge, after taking orders in 1806, Mr. Bronte moved to a curacy
at Weatherfield in Essex; and Mr.
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