Revision Cards - Wuthering Heights: A Level, Context

As Wuthering Heights is a historical novel, i.e. set in a different period to which it was written, it does not deal directly with Victorian issues.
The novel is set roughly between Lord Mansfield’s judgement abolishing slavery in the UK (1772) and the lull in the War with France (1802).
These great events do not make it directly into the novel, but they influence aspects of it, especially a sense of creative rebellion.
By back-dating her novel, Brontë is able to make her characters, especially the women, more aware and expressive of their sexuality than their Victorian equivalents would be.

Context

Wuthering Heights: A Level

The Evangelical Revival, both within and outside the Church of England, was the great spiritual movement of the eighteenth century.
So-called Millenarian prophecies were widespread in the 1790s, as social upheaval in France was interpreted as the ‘latter days’ prophesied in the Bible.
Lockwood’s dream of the ‘famous preacher’, Jabes Branderham, and the opening of a new nonconformist chapel at Gimmerton, seems to reflect this energetic new Puritanism.
The faith of Joseph, the ‘self-righteous Pharisee’, is thus the only powerful religious counterweight in the novel to the private cult of Catherine and Heathcliff.

Context

Wuthering Heights: A Level

Called variously Gimmerton Church, Kirk and even (confusingly) Chapel, the Anglican Church ends the novel without a Minister.
There was much criticism of the Anglican Church at this time that its clergy were lazy and often absent. The ‘parson’ refuses to visit Mr Earnshaw when he lies dead, at least until the next day.
The roof of the Anglican Church is falling off, the churchyard is overrun with moorland thorns, and the whole (appropriately in a Gothic novel) is starting to resemble a Gothic ruin.
Brontë contrasts Anglican dereliction and the decline of traditional faith with the energy of the nonconformists – perhaps Methodists or Baptists – who have founded a new chapel.

Context

Wuthering Heights: A Level

When Mr Earnshaw visits Liverpool in 1771 it was already a major port for slaves, sugar and tobacco.
When Branwell Brontë visited Liverpool in August 1845 he would have seen the first refugees from the Irish famine.
Liverpool had many poor, homeless and migrant people by the mid-eighteenth century.
The American Herman Melville was appalled by the squalor and poverty he observed in the city in the 1830s, providing a documentary account in his novel Redburn (1849).

Context

Wuthering Heights: A Level

The Brontës were a close-knit family of siblings, playing games together and sharing dream-worlds. The sisters entered into writing as a shared project.
Although there is no textual evidence that Heathcliff is Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate child, and therefore Catherine’s half-brother, the two bond as siblings, and share a rebellious life together on the moor.
It has often been noted that Catherine’s view of Heathcliff as a detached second self is more like a brother and sister relationship than a sexual one.
Intimate brother-sister relationships are frequent in English Romanticism: Charles and Mary Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Byron’s relationship with his half-sister, the inspiration for Manfred.

Context

Wuthering Heights: A Level

A Level Study Notes and Revision Guides