Yet the aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not picturesqueness. In fact, nothing can be more opposed than the state of society, the modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion, in such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the north, and any stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south. In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is there of any dwellings of the professional middle-class, such as abound in our old cathedral towns. Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce. The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass. It is evident to the stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture. Keighley is in process of transformation from a populous, old-fashioned village, into a still more populous and flourishing town. The number of inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been very greatly increased during the last twenty years, owing to the rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a branch of industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part of Yorkshire, which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis. Keighley station is on this line of railway, about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name. The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire a slow and sluggish stream, compared to the neighbouring river of Wharfe. The biography is clear and often very telling, yet Gaskell suppressed details of Brontë’s love for Constantin Héger, a married man, due to contemporary morals and in fear of distressing Brontë’s still-living friends, father and husband. One of the major sources was the hundreds of letters sent by Brontë to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey, which Gaskell spent many months sifting through. This posthumous biography was published in 1857.
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