Black Tom was one of the Brontë family’s many pets. According to Ellen Nussey, lifelong friend of Charlotte Brontë and a frequent visitor to Haworth Parsonage, the Brontë home, Tom was “everybody’s favourite”.
She wrote that he “received such gentle treatment he seemed to have lost cat’s nature, and subsided into luxurious amiability and contentment”.
So here he is, sprawling luxuriously, as only a cat can, over the sisters’ manuscripts and correspondence on the dining table where they wrote their novels…
