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Abstract
This paper presents an interview discussion of race and slavery in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in relation to Adam Low’s documentary, A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights (2010) and Michael Stewart’s novel, Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (2018). Our discussion originally took place after a screening of Low’s documentary on the first day of the conference, ‘Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music’, held in September 2018 in York to mark Emily’s bicentenary. The material presented here is based on a recording of our evening event, but we continued our discussion afterwards in person and via email. Where possible we have nuanced our original talk and developed aspects of the discussion.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Diane Fare and the conference organizers at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for inviting us to host the after-dinner discussion on which this material is based. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of Liverpool Record Office at Liverpool Libraries, particularly Roger Hull, for giving us permission to reproduce Edmund Sill and David Kenyon’s 1758 advertisement.
Notes
Notes
1 Caryl Philips, A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights, dir. by Adam Low (Lone Star Productions, 2010), 03.15 minutes.
2 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights [1847] (London: Penguin English Library, 2012), p. 39. Hereafter in-text as WH.
3 Philips, A Regular Black, 05.14 minutes.
4 The suggestion that Heathcliff was treated favourably by Mr Earnshaw is established, as Nelly says, ‘from the beginning’ on the night that Earnshaw brings him home (WH, p. 40). Brontë writes that Mr Earnshaw ‘took to Heathcliff strangely [,] petting him up far above Cathy’, and that this ‘bred bad feeling in the house’ (WH, p. 40).
5 William Howitt’s The Rural Life of England was published in 1838. In it, Howitt presents a view of the English countryside and the changes brought about by industrialisation. In his discussion of Brontë’s novel, Christopher Heywood has drawn on Howitt’s text to contextualize Heathcliff’s identity as a black slave, arguing that the author reveals an astute awareness of the ways in which the slave business was in existence in north-west Yorkshire. For more on this see Christopher Heywood, ‘Yorkshire slavery in Wuthering Heights’, The Review of English Studies, 38.150, (1987), 184–98.
6 Kim Lyon, A Regular Black, 18.02 minutes. Lyon’s history of the Sill family and her views on its parallels to Wuthering Heights can be found in her book, The Dentdale Brontë Trail (Dent: Lyon Equipment, 1985).
7 Jack Sharp was a nephew of John Walker of Waterclough Hall. The property had belonged to the Walker family since the seventeenth century. Although he had two sons of his own, Walker favoured Sharp, and trained him to take over the family’s thriving woollen business. Sharp eventually took on the business, and Waterclough Hall too, but by the time that Walker died in 1771, Sharp was in possession of the estate but had no legal claim on it. Following a lengthy familial and legal dispute, Walker’s legal heir, his son, also named John Walker, ousted Sharp from the property. Before vacating the premises, however, Sharp sought vengeance on Walker junior by removing nearly all of the furniture and chattels, leaving merely the house. Sharp went on to build his own home, Law Hill, as near as legally possible to Walker’s domain, but he also made a woollen apprentice of Sam Stead, the son of one of Mr Walker’s sisters. Sharp worked Stead to a state of degradation with drink and gambling.
8 Emily’s grandfather, Hugh Brunty (possibly ‘Prunty’), was a cattle-dealer who made frequent business trips to Liverpool. On one occasion, a child was found hidden in the ship’s hold. It is said he was young, dark and dirty, images not dissimilar to Heathcliff. There was no doctor on the ship and only Mrs Brunty would take care of him. The decision was made to adopt the child. It is suggested that the boy was Welsh, and he was called ‘Welsh’ by the Brunty family. Welsh was attached to Mr Brunty and the affection was reciprocated; he, rather than Mr Brunty’s sons, accompanied the elder to fairs and markets, and became very able in business management. When Mr Brunty died and the family were unable to support themselves, Welsh proposed that he would take control of the business if the younger Brunty daughter, Mary, would marry him. The suggestion was rejected, and Welsh left the property, but claimed on his departure that Mary would marry him, and he would remove the family from the home. Although he didn’t continue in the cattle market trade, Welsh became a sub-agent, collecting rental payments, and he treated the tenants, including the Bruntys, rudely. Mary ultimately became involved with Welsh and, after their home burned down, the pair adopted their nephew, Hugh Brunty. Hugh was treated harshly by Welsh, but eventually escaped his ‘uncle’s’ home aged fifteen. From William Wright, The Brontës in Ireland or Facts Stranger than Fiction [1893], 2nd edn (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894).
9 Kim Lyon, A Regular Black, 22.24 minutes.
10 The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Writings, ed. by Christine Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xxvii
11 See Cassandra Pybus, A Regular Black, 06.22 minutes. Corinne Fowler also makes this point in her article ‘Was Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff black?’ See The Conversation, 25 October 2017 < http://theconversation.com/was-emily-bront-s-heathcliff-black-85341> (accessed 25 April 2019).
12 Philips, A Regular Black, 05.46 minutes.
13 Such references appear close together across pp. 39–40 in chapter four.
14 Iain McCalman, A Regular Black, 07.50 minutes.
15 See Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1995).
16 Several images from nineteenth-century periodicals used the same dehumanising stereotypes for both Irish and black people, portraying them as ape-like to suggest racial difference and inferiority. With respect to the Irish, see, for example, John Leech’s ‘The British Lion and The Irish Monkey’ (1848), or ‘Mr G-O’Rilla, I presume?’ (1861). For more detail on this topic see L. Perry Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Smithsonian Books: Washington, 1997) and Sheridan Gilley, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900’, in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed. by Colin Holmes (London, 1978), pp. 81–110.
17 Elsie Michie, ‘From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25:2 (1992), 125–40, p. 125. Of course, there were Irish subjects in Liverpool too. For more on the connection between the description of Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights and Victorian representations of Irish children in Britain as a result of the potato famine, see Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
18 John Sutherland, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
19 These statistics appear in Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern’s ‘Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade’, ELH, 62.1 (1995), 171–196.
20 Philips, A Regular Black, 07.00 minutes.
21 Anon, ‘Unsigned review of Wuthering Heights’, Examiner, January 1848, in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Miriam Allott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 220–22 (p. 220); Anonymous, ‘From an unsigned review’, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 15 January 1848, in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, p. 227; Anonymous, Paterson’s Magazine, March 1848, reproduced on The Reader’s Guide to Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” website (see https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/wh/index)
22 Edward Chitham, ‘Law Hill and Emily Brontë: Behind Charlotte’s Evasions’, Brontë Studies, 43.3 (2018), 176–87.
23 Philips, A Regular Black, 13:56 minutes.
24 See Michael Stewart, Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 182.
25 For more on the conception of Wuthering Heights and ‘the other’, see Steven Vine, ‘The Wuther of the Other in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49:3 (1994), 339–59.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Claire O’Callaghan
Dr Claire O’Callaghan is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University where her research focuses Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and queerness. She is the author of Emily Brontë Reappraised: A View from the Twenty-First Century (2018).
Michael Stewart
Michael Stewart’s debut novel, King Crow, was the winner of The Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Award. His latest novel, Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff, is published by HarperCollins and optioned by Kudos Films. He is also the creator of the Brontë Stones project.