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After retiring from the itinerancy in 1756, Charles Wesley exercised a localized preaching and pastoral ministry in Bristol, and then from 1771, in London. He also established himself as the foremost member of an unofficial pro‐Anglican Church‐Methodist party that included some of the wealthiest and most influential lay people in the movement. The strength of this pro‐Anglican feeling, which has often been ignored by Methodist scholarship, can be seen to best effect by close examination of local reactions in London and Yorkshire to the Norwich sacramental dispute of 1760.

In 1829, at the age of twelve, Charlotte Brontë began to write a ‘history’. The document still survives at Haworth Parsonage — a blotted scrawl on scrap paper, erratically punctuated and spelled. The story whose beginnings are here ‘sketched out’ is now well known. To the motherless children in that Yorkshire parsonage, the soldiers became the original dramatis personae of an imaginary world that was to allure and preoccupy each of the four throughout adolescence and beyond. Seven years later, in uncongenial employment as a teacher of young ladies, ‘sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy’, Brontë was to testify to the continuing power of that ‘mighty phantasm’ — ‘conjured from nothing to a system strong as some religious creed’. For the ‘mighty phantasm’ in which those ‘plays’ were elaborated was by no means ‘conjured from nothing’. It was made possible, shaped, and constrained by the specificities of a quite particular culture, one that is a potent presence in ‘The History of the Year’.

Presenting a quick overview of their careers, this chapter reveals how the main performers came to be cast in the show. It begins with Lotte Lenya (Fräulein Schneider), the émigré actress most identified with Brecht and Weill (she and Weill were married at the time of his death in 1950), whose songs in the show were said to be accurate stencils of her life. Jack Gilford (Herr Schultz) came to the show out of American vaudeville and nightclubs. Joel Grey (Emcee), who had made his stage debut at nine, received fifth billing but quickly turned his role into a star attraction. Harold Prince had trouble finding his Cliff and Sally but settled on singer Bert Convy and English nonsinger Jill Haworth. The chapter indicates how these performers' varied personalities, talents, and experiences made for an interesting distribution of roles, with Prince's interest being more in the atmosphere of the show than in any single character.

This chapter explores the reasons for the Brontës’ longstanding connection with haunting and the supernatural, and how this has been intertwined with processes of fictionalisation. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë in particular, it traces her connection with the supernatural back to Elizabeth Gaskell’s seminal biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Within Gaskell’s biography are embedded a series of macabre ghost stories that have the effect of supernaturalising and semi-fictionalising the life of its subject. This chapter demonstrates that Gaskell’s influence can be seen both in the commemorative ghost poetry of the nineteenth century, which we might think of as proto-fictional biography, and in the works of fictional biography that featured the Brontës as ghosts throughout the inter-war period. It follows the trajectory of Brontë’s fictionalisation by charting nineteenth-century commemorative poetry’s gradual approach to fictional biography in terms of its ghosts’ increasing communicativeness and vocalisation.

Chapter 3 investigates ways of figuring the author’s doubled body, physical and textual, through clothing. It contrasts the ways that male and female authorial clothing has been imagined and displayed within the writer’s house museum to animate ideas of the author. It discusses, inter alia, Dorothy Wordsworth’s shoes, William Cowper’s nightcap, Henrik Ibsen’s top-hat, Elizabeth Gaskell’s shawl, Charlotte Brontë’s wedding-bonnet, and Emily Dickinson’s white dress. It argues that the display of clothing within the writer’s museum converts writing into biography. In this common museum trope, clothing is seen to take and preserve the most intimate and truthful form of its wearer, and to survive as witness to it. Clothing displaces the intimacy and truth of writing; text is converted into textile.