Pens, sex and potatoes

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this.

It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed, was borrowed by Patrick Brunty, the Irish blacksmith’s apprentice who educated himself and came to England to father a literary dynasty by mistake. Patrick was a skilled public relations man and curate; he added a stylish umlaut. The Brontës, of course, have their own homage restaurant in Haworth. It is called the Bronte Balti House, and it features in the Daily Telegraph’s Ten of the Worst Days out in Britain. I thought the Bronte Balti House was OK when I covered the Brontë Death Cult for the Guardian, but I was keen to escape the Parsonage of Passive Aggression and Death, and nowhere else was open. The Brontë Death Cult, which was founded by Mrs Gaskell in an oblivious act of jealousy, is very passive-aggressive, and its shrine is the parsonage, a house that looks like a dead body. What do you call a woman of humble origins who just happens to be a genius when you are not? A sickly moor hag, or witch. I cannot blame Mrs Gaskell for the Bronte Balti; but she would like it. She would love to imprison Charlotte’s memory inside a crap curry house near Bradford, with naan bread: I’ve got you now, corpse!