Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber
on the day that he returns from his second visit to Wuthering Heights (WH, 38). This is evident from the context, but it is only revealed to the reader after the first four chapters.
Even though it initially seems as if the year 1801 at the beginning of the novel can be used to date events unambiguously, it is nevertheless difficult to establish in which years the events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange take place. This is because the year 1801 is seemingly inconsistently connected with the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, 1778, by numerous relative time expressions relating to the events depicted in the report and the story, and above all with the year of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding, her death and the so-called major episode.2 This means that the years do not cohere when counting from 1801 on the one hand or from 1778 on the other. With two exceptions, there is a discrepancy of one year between 1778 and 1801, as shown in the introductory example (see Chap. I above). This one-year discrepancy does not affect the dating as far as the months are concerned. Apart from the two exceptions, the months given in the report and the story are always consistent and can, indeed must, be used for chronological calculations as year-independent quantities.
Accordingly, there are two different years possible for the events mentioned above. The major episode takes place in either 1779 or 1780, Catherine Earnshaw marries in either 1782 or 1783, and the death of Catherine Earnshaw and the birth of Cathy Linton are in either 1783 or 1784. Mathematically speaking, four chronological hypotheses must therefore be tested. These are:
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– Both 1778 (as the year of Hareton’s birth) and 1801 (as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit) are correct.
– Both 1778 and 1801 are incorrect.
– 1778 is incorrect and 1801 correct.
– 1778 is correct and 1801 incorrect.
The discrepancies mentioned above show that it is not possible for 1778 to be the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 to be the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit. If 1778 is not the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 is not the year of both Mr. Lockwood’s first visit and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s story, the whole timeline of the novel is wrong. There would be no rigorous, consistent time scheme for the report or the story, and no further discussion would be necessary. For this reason, the validity of the years 1778 and 1801 need to be verified only in connection with the respective events that take place. It will be demonstrated that the last option is evidence-based and therefore correct: placing Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights in the year 1801 cannot be correct. Only in the last option is there a coherence between all the usable time data (there are also unusable data) – in the sense of external evidence – and a congruence between these data and the continuity of events, i.e. all the plot details (internal evidence), in the sense of combined evidence.3 The differentiation between the report and the story is the first of four crucial steps on the way to solving the chronological confusion. The second step is the realisation that Mr. Lockwood is a diarist, the third is that Ellen Dean does not know the dates that Mr. Lockwood uses, and the fourth is that Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean pursue the same narrative intentions. An analysis of Mr. Lockwood’s report is focused on first because Wuthering Heights begins and ends with it and – as will become apparent – it is from the report that the timelines of the novel can most easily be followed.
The Time Scheme of Mr. Lockwood’s Report
In his ground-breaking and much-cited essay of 1926, Sanger explains what originally induced him to study the chronology of Wuthering Heights. “What first brought me to study the book more closely was when I noticed that the first word in the book was a date – 1801. I thought this must have some significance” (Sanger, p. 11). However, like every general reader, Sanger recognises that the ←24 | 25→year must have some relevance, without recognising its real significance. This is shown by his omission of the em-dash following “1801” and his use of that year as the starting point for all his calculations, that is as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Mr. Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and as the year in which Mr. Lockwood begins his report.
However, this assumption must be an error for the reasons that follow below.
Although Mr. Lockwood himself never explicitly states that he is reporting events retrospectively like a diary writer, this is a reasonable assumption to make. Even without algebraic arithmetic, the assumption that Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Wuthering Heights do not take place until November 1801 can be ruled out from the start by a fact that is just as plausible as it is banal, though it has never been recognised as such. If the visits had taken place at that time, Mr. Lockwood’s report of his third visit to Wuthering Heights in January would have come under the year 1802. However, this is not the case. Under the year 1802, he only chronicles his fourth visit to Wuthering Heights in the summer, a short visit six months after his premature departure in January of the same year. The report of his third visit, in January, comes under the year 1801, together with the descriptions of his first two visits. Events from two different years cannot logically be reported under one and the same year when that year is used to date those events. The two years brought into play by Mr. Lockwood cannot therefore be used to date his visits to Wuthering Heights. This realisation (after the differentiation between the ‘report’ and the ‘story’ described above) is the second crucial step on the way to solving the chronological paradoxes of the novel.
The only rational explanation for the use of both dates is that they indicate the years in which Mr. Lockwood composes his report, that is they do not refer to the reported events but rather to when Mr. Lockwood reports the events. The years “1801 —” and “1802. –” only create the impression that they date the plot. In fact, “1801 —” dates the year Mr. Lockwood sets down on paper his first two visits in 1800, as well as his third visit in 1801 and his report of the visit. On the other hand, “1802. –” dates the recording of his fourth visit, which also takes place in 1801.
The recording of his first two visits and that of his fourth (and last) visit thus occur in the year following the events reported. Only the third visit takes place in the same year in which it is reported. Mr. Lockwood begins his diary at the beginning of January 1801, continuing it until the “second week in January” 1801 when, by his own account, he is “so many days nearer health” (WH, 191). He ←25 | 26→concludes the first part of his report between his third visit to Wuthering Heights and his departure later that same month (WH, 367).
The two dates 1801 and 1802 can therefore only come from some sort of diary kept by Mr. Lockwood, written retrospectively from the perspective of the beginning of 1801 and later of 1802, rather than being composed concurrently with Ellen Dean’s account of events. This explains the use of the em-dash after the date 1801, followed by Mr. Lockwood’s initially reflective then more discursive report of the year 1800. The em-dash is in fact used only once in the critical edition of the novel. A full stop and an en-dash appear after the date 1802, followed by the report of Mr. Lockwood’s journey to the north of England in the July of 1801 and his fourth visit to Wuthering Heights. Similarly, the dash in the first line of Chapter 15 – as will be elucidated – signifies Mr. Lockwood’s mental leap out of the reporting present into the reported past. In January 1801, he initially jumps back in time to his first visit to Wuthering Heights, then to the end of the fifth week of his illness, and sometime in the year 1802 he jumps back to July 1801. All three dashes have a specific chronological meaning.
The idea that the dates “1801 —” and “1802. –” refer to the recording of Mr. Lockwood’s report rather than to the chronology of the storyline has, astoundingly, never occurred to anyone until now. It is evidently so counterintuitive, at least to the authors who cling to the traditional chronologies and to those who are perhaps otherwise biased, that it may provoke violent emotions for some time to come. Heywood (2004, p. 434) prefers to question the reliability of the year 1778 as the unambiguous year of Hareton’s birth rather than consider the chronological relevance of the date “1801 —”, despite the fact