Why did Patrick change his name from Brunty to Brontë?

This is a slight revision of an article contributed in 1997 to The Transactions of the Brontë Society, Yorkshire, England pp 127-9

On reading this account of what happened when Patrick first arrived in Cambridge some readers may find themselves puzzled as to what exactly was the origin of the problem apparently experienced with Patrick’s Northern Irish accent by the person who took the name down. There seem to have been no contemporary comments that would suggest that Patrick’s speech during the time he practised as a member of the clergy was anything other than easily comprehensible and indeed perfectly acceptable to English congregations in a variety of locations. Of course, while at Cambridge and even later, he may well have made various adaptations in the direction of the kinds of accent which surrounded him. Although he had been the protégé of the Reverend Thomas Tighe, who had received an English education at Harrow and Cambridge, Patrick will certainly have possessed a quite marked Northern Irish accent. There is evidence that he passed on something of it to his children. Mary Taylor, when she became the new schoolfriend of the nearly seventeen-year-old Charlotte, was struck by the Irishness of her speech (see Barker p.172).

The registrar seems likely to have felt that, though he was hearing a very unusual name, there was a perfectly obvious way to spell it. Otherwise he would surely have asked how it was spelt. It is true that a spelling like “Brahnty” or “Braanty” or (for people in southeast England) “Brarnty” would have been unambiguous but any such spellings would have looked strange for words containing this equivalent of a southern “broad A” vowel in such a stressed syllable. They are normally spelt with a simple a: eg advantage, can’t, chant, grant, plant, slant etc. In southern England people usually have one vowel in eg ant, pant, rant etc but a different value in eg chant, grant, slant etc. Whereas people in the north of England generally assign the first of these two qualities to practically all such words, Ulster English widely shows the other,“broad”, value for all of them.

At Barker's page 6 it is mentioned that the story was current as early as 1855 that Patrick adopted the ‘Bronte’ spelling of his surname in response to pressure from Thomas Tighe, who disliked the "plebian" [sic] ‘Brunty’ and thought the Greek word for thunder a more appropriate and resonant version of the name. We must surely reject this suggestion, as clearly does Dr Barker herself, though not in her main text but only at number 24 of her Notes to Chapter One (see page 836). Patrick may well have received a related suggestion from his benefactor but, rather than involving any reference to Greek, it possibly arose from observing the reactions of English people to Patrick’s pronunciation of his surname.

It is only the pretty exceptional speaker with an Irish accent whose vowel sound in a word like brunt would be likely to strike people of southeastern England as just like their own value for such a word. See J. C. Wells’s Accents of English Volume 2 Chapter 5 especially page 442. They might well, therefore, not perceive Patrick’s utterance of his name as containing the same vowel sound as they would use saying Brunty but would be quite likely to identify it as containing their vowel of a name such as Monty.

A suggestion that Tighe possibly did make may well have been couched something like this. “You’ve noticed that, when people from England hear you say 'Brunty' they immediately connect it with Nelson’s new title. So, now you’re going to Cambridge, why don’t you in future spell your name like the Duke of Bronte? It might save trouble and sounds much less clumsy than 'Brunty'.” It seems very likely that this is just what Patrick decided to do. However, presumably contrary to Tighe’s expectations, Patrick then proceeded unfortunately and probably unconsciously, despite the original reason for the new spelling, to alter the way he spoke his name to how he, like most Irishmen (and incidentally most Americans) would pronounce Bronte, namely with an ah-type first vowel. Little wonder then that, at his registration in Cambridge, when he uttered his name, the registrar wrote an a instead of an o. Note 2 at Barker's page 835 remarks that James Wood, Patrick’s tutor, made a similar mistake and had to alter the name in his list of pupils from Brante to Bronte. It is presumably uncertain whether the tutor’s original written form of Patrick’s name was based on aural perception of Patrick’s speech or faithful copying of either the registrar’s or the bursar’s version.

The illustrious British national hero of the hour, Horatio Nelson, had been honoured by the King of Naples and the Sicilies with the title of Duke of Bronte (in making him a gift of a Sicilian estate of that name) only a year or so before Patrick had arrived in England. A letter of Charlotte’s is quoted at the same Note 2 to Chapter One in support of a comment that the Brontës’ contemporaries ... thought there was a link with Nelson. Patrick’s assumption in England of the Bronte spelling could well have been motivated at least in part by the idea of solving the problem of having continually to be supplying tiresome unwelcome corrections: a decision to himself use the spelling he thought people around him would expect to have to use to represent the sound they heard from him. We can also hardly doubt that Patrick would have found the presumption of a Nelson association to quite some degree flattering even though it should have been based upon a misapprehension. If these two factors were both operative in his deliberations, which bulked the larger in his decision making we are unlikely ever to know. Perhaps he never knew, or at least never managed to acknowledge to himself, which of them it might have been.

The completely un-Italian diacritical accent which Patrick took to using over his final e had, it seems, most often initially the form of a macron or tilde ( viz ̄ or ̃ ). See Barker's page 840 Note 127. Only later does he seem to have made regular use of a diaeresis (see ibid. p. xvi). and then possibly only as a direct result of a printing error (ibid. p. 69) by which it appeared on the title page of his first book. The reason that he took to using such a device was presumably to draw attention to the fact that the name was not meant to be pronounced as a single syllable, as it should have been had it been of French or Portuguese origin. Because no accent is ever used in Italy in the spelling of the Italian word Bronte, an accent is inappropriate in spelling either the name of the Sicilian village or in quoting the title “Duke of Bronte” as Dr Barker does at her Note 2, page 835. Nelson himself used no sort of accent over the final e of his name when writing his signature.