In November 1839, American artist and ethnographer, George Catlin, who had lived for seven years amongst and documented several native American nations, boarded the Roscius for Liverpool with an impressive eight tons of cargo. Catlin had manuscripts, paintings, sketches and journals along with two caged grizzly bears and some Ojibwe native American men and women, he intended to ‘display’ in a ‘public amusement’.
Catlin signed a three-year lease on a famous exhibition space, the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London and his show opened in February 1840 to great acclaim. Catlin’s North American Indian Gallery was a must-see. It went viral, in the same way the British Museum’s Tutankhamun exhibition did in 1972.
Catlin was introduced to Queen Victoria, and England’s most famous publisher, Murray, published his journals in 1841. They got rave reviews, as did his exhibition on native American life.
I stumbled on Catlin a few years before I started researching and publishing pieces on the Brontës, and put two and two together. So this theory is in print for the first time, here.
What does George Catlin have to do with Wuthering Heights? We’ll circle back to it. First, let’s go to the cinema.
The problem with Heathcliff
This week, if you can push your way through the crowds going to see Melania you might decide instead to go and see Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of a Yorkshire classic, “Wuthering Heights” (the quote marks are part of Fennell’s chosen title).
Past Heathcliffs were, in line with Hollywood convention, overwhelmingly white. Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes, and more recently Tom Hardy. With the exception of Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights which did cast black actor, James Howson in the role (with Solomon Glave playing the young Heathcliff), most Heathcliffs have been in the same old mould.
Fennell’s version stars Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.
Casting BIPOC actors in adaptations of ‘the classics’ draws all the usual suspect, far-right racists to the yard. They complain about the prevalence of actors of varying heritages in advertisements. People who would never watch a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens adaptation suddenly have Important Thoughts to share about contemporary race-blind casting.
Was Heathcliff even white, anyway?
Turns out that whatever his ethnicity, canonical Heathcliff is not white. Emily Brontë’s novel is almost unique in that it is a classic, 19th century book with a non-white central character.
Fennell claimed she cast Elordi as he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. To be fair, the movie is meant to reflect an adolescent’s mindscape. And let’s face it, the Brontës themselves were no strangers to overblown juvenilia. As children, they created a fantasy world, Angria, and wrote about it compulsively.
One of the main characters they developed was that of a black child, Quashia Quamina, son of the King of the Ashantees, who was orphaned, adopted and sometimes featured as a sort of cuckoo in the nest character, not unlike Heathcliff. As the Brontës grew older, Quashia became a rakish, corrupt anti-hero. He was a central character in the juvenilia for years. Branwell continued to write about him in adulthood in his unpublished novel And The Weary Are At Rest.
What do Emily Brontë’s own words tell us about Heathcliff?
In Chapter One, Mr Lockwood describes Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect”.
There is even a hint in the text that he was thought to be a runaway slave. The day he brings Heathcliff home, Mr Earnshaw tells them a tale of:
“his seeing it starving; and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and enquired for its owner – Not a soul knew to whom it belonged…”
Children have parents. Slaves have owners.
Mr. Earnshaw introduces Heathcliff’s arrival as something the Earnshaws must “‘…take as a gift from God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil’”. Servant Nellie Dean, who is a narrator of the book, remarks he was “a gipsy brat” and “a black-haired child” who just stood there “and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand”.
In Chapter Six, when the young Cathy and Heathcliff are caught in the grounds of Thrushcross Grange, Edgar Linton’s mother also refers to Heathcliff as a “gipsy”. Mr Linton says;
“…I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.”
Branwell had visited Liverpool in 1845, just before Emily started writing the novel, and no doubt recounted hearing people speaking foreign languages in the port. We tend to assume that Irish immigration started at the time of the potato blight which started slightly later that same year but in fact Yorkshire cities like York and Leeds already had a thriving Irish population from the 1820s-30s onwards. In York, there was a substantial Irish population in the Bedern, close by York Minster. Emily visited York with Anne in the 1840s and definitely visited the Minster, less than a five-minute walk away from the Bedern.
Isabella Linton takes one look at Heathcliff and remarks: “‘…Put him in the cellar, papa. He’s exactly like the son of the fortune-teller, that stole my tame pheasant…’”
The adult Heathcliff
When Heathcliff returns home, after a few mysterious years absent, Ellen describes:
“…the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man; beside whom my master seemed quite slender and youth-like. His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army… A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified …”
Heathcliff’s reaction to Cathy’s death is one of the most striking passages in the novel: “….He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears. I observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained…”
In Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 1841, George Catlin described the mourning rites of the Mandan nation. Self-harming was one common response to extreme grief. Catlin described mourners “howling forth incessantly… tearing their hair, cutting their flesh with knives, and doing other penance to appease the spirits of the dead… sometimes inflict(ing) the most excruciating self-torture”.
The importance of Liverpool
Mr Earnshaw found Heathclif in Liverpool, a port that was very active in the transatlantic slave trade. Around the time the slave trade was abolished, in 1807, Liverpool accounted for almost 85% of the trade. The events described in the opening chapters were set around the 1770s, when the Liverpool slave trade was at its height.
Most of this trade centred around West Africa. The port also saw a brisk general trading and back and forth between the UK and the US, hence the speculation Heathcliff could have been ‘American’. And ‘American’ could imply any ethnicity, but most likely native American, or Hispanic, given the descriptions of him.
The Brontës in London
So we come to Mr Catlin and his famous exhibition.
In February 1842, Emily Brontë, along with her sister Charlotte and father Patrick, passed through London on their way to Brussels. They had three days to spend sightseeing before they caught the Ostend cross-channel packet boat.
It’s not out of the question that the Brontës visited Catlin’s exhibition. It had wide coverage in the national and local press for several years with weekly advertisements and, only months before the Brontës visited, lengthy passages from Catlin’s book were précised in the press.
Catlin must have extended his lease on the Egyptian Hall. An advert from 4 January, 1844’s Morning Post said:
“The Ojibberway [sic] Indians, Nine in number, will this day give a war dance and other Dances and Songs, as given before Her Majesty at Windsor Castle… in the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly… The room will be open from Twelve until Three… The Indians will be in the room dancing… Mr Catlin is in the room explaining….”
The three Brontës stayed at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, within sight of St. Paul’s Cathedral. According to a friend, writing years later, both women wanted to cram all the museums and galleries they could into those few days. It’s not known precisely where they went, but the Egyptian Hall at the time was the one space in London where the largest works of art could be accommodated and it’s likely the Brontes saw in the newspapers the regular and prominent advertisements and reviews for Catlin’s exhibition.
The Yorkshire slave trade connection
James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans had been published 20 years earlier, but remained so popular it was outselling Sir Walter Scott’s bestseller novels in the 1840s. This novel almost originated the ‘noble savage’ trope, which the Egyptian Hall exhibition will have amplified. In the light of all this ambient music, it’s maybe not surprising that Heathcliff happened.
If Heathcliff wasn’t inspired by George Catlin’s show, maybe he originated in the links between Liverpool, Yorkshire and the slave trade.
In the 18th century, the UK’s involvement in slavery wasn’t just something happening out of sight in the Caribbean. It was going on right here in the Brontës’ beloved Yorkshire.
The Yorkshire Dales had a thriving cottage industry producing handknitted goods in the 18th and 19th centuries. One big product was making ‘bump caps’ for black slaves. The bump cap was a simple, rough-spun woollen knitted cap, exported in their thousands, to US slaveowners. (‘Bump’ was a low grade, thickly spun and cheap wool). Many Yorkshire folk supplemented their income handknitting these.
There were also slaveowners with Caribbean plantations living and working all over the UK including Dent town (then in Yorkshire, now Cumbria). Most notable was the Sill family, yeoman farmers who ‘owned’ a Jamaican plantation and around 180 slaves. John Sill also had shares in two slave ships registered to Liverpool. I’ve written about the Sill family of Dent and their connections with slavery previously.
Dent was rumoured to have had an entire community of slaves, working as farm labourers and/or in the handknitting industry in the later 18th century. It was said Dent’s black population were buried out in the countryside, beyond the town. They have been lost to history – almost – but Emily may well have been aware of their existence, or similar lost communities closer to home, as she lived within living memory of them.
We forget that the Yorkshire newspapers had only stopped printing runaway slave notices a decade or two before Emily Brontë’s birth, when slavery was finally abolished. Her father will have been aware of them in his younger days.
Irish immigrants: escaping the Famine
Patrick Brontë also faced challenges for being an Irishman in the Church of England. Born into a Catholic family, although later adopting the Protestanism of his patron, he remained a vocal advocate of Catholics’ rights. At a time when there was huge discrimination against the Irish in England, Patrick wrote to local Yorkshire papers about Catholic emancipation. His publicly liberal views made him a target.
The 1840s’ English newspapers were soon to be full of stories about Irish immigrants landing in Liverpool by the boatload to escape the Famine. The English press then are echoed in today’s ‘small boats’ narrative. Patrick Brontë was born in a one room cottage in Drumballyroney, Co. Down, son of labourer, Hugh Brunty or Prunty.
In 1835, during the general election hustings, Patrick Brontë was shouted down when trying to speak and Branwell leapt up in his defence. Villagers made an effigy of Branwell and paraded it through the streets. The effigy held a potato in one hand, a herring in the other. If this didn’t remind Emily Brontë she was the daughter of an immigrant – nothing could.
If dropped down in the middle of 1830s’ Yorkshire, today’s Tory, Reform and far-right supporters would have company. Otherness wasn’t an abstract concept for Emily Brontë, it was her everyday reality. As the daughter of an immigrant.
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