The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  That Heathcliff goes to the grave, and his hyperactive afterlife, with a perfect set of gnashers in his jaw is disclosed in Nelly’s recollection to Lockwood of finding his emaciated corpse at the window where he has starved to death, waiting, until death do them join, for his spectral love, Cathy.

  I hasped the window; I combed his black long hair from his forehead; I tried to close his eyes: to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation before any one else beheld it. They would not shut: they seemed to sneer at my attempts; and his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneered too!

  How, one may wonder, has Heathcliff contrived to keep his ‘sharp white teeth’ in such Tom Cruise-like condition? Is this proof of his ‘vampirism’ (see below, ‘Vampirology [1]’, page 173)?

  There are more mundane explanations. He learned many things, we may deduce, in his three lost years, returning, as he did, a well-spoken ‘gentleman’ with a foreign accent and money in his purse. One important thing he may well have learned was how gentlemen cared for their teeth.

  Sponges dipped in aromatic fluid were what Lord Chesterfield, that arbiter elegantiarum, advocated (it sweetened the breath, which the ladies liked). There were also dentifrice powders (the poor used, if anything, chimney dust). Handled brushes, of the kind we are familiar with, were used by the genteel classes – particularly women.

  A utensil much in favour with gentlemen was the toothbrush and razor set, sold by jewellers or high-class barbers. They would contain, in an elegant (goatskin-coated) box, brushes, a tooth powder recess, and a tongue scraper. And, of course, an open razor.

  The point is stressed that on his return, the ‘transformed’ Heathcliff has learned the gentlemanly use of the razor during his three years’ absence. On first catching sight of his face Nelly notes that his cheeks are ‘half covered with black whiskers’. Other male residents of Wuthering Heights, we gather from Lockwood’s appalled description, have shaggy beards. Hareton’s whiskers, for example, ‘encroach bearishly over his cheeks’.

  And, of course, gentlemen, alone and in male company, would always have to hand, in their waistcoat pockets, their toothpicks (often metal; sometimes precious metal). These instruments would appear, along with cigars and chamber pots behind screens, when the ladies ‘retired’, after dinner, and the men could ‘untruss’; and tell smoking room stories, while they scraped their ivories. Dickens’s toothpick, with ivory and gold decorations, was sold for $9,000 at auction in 2009. Lovers of Jurassic Park will wonder if any DNA remained on it, wherewith future science might recreate the Great Inimitable. Dream on.

  All of this by way of explanation of Heathcliff ’s dentition. But why, one may ask, were Charlotte’s teeth so rotted? My guess is that the Brontës (at least the ladies) would have had one shared toothbrush, as they also had one face flannel and towel over their bedroom bowls and pitchers. They looked after their teeth.

  But one deduces, from scraps of evidence, that Charlotte had more trouble with her teeth than her grown siblings. I am neither a dentist nor a physician but I think the reason may have been her chronic ill-health and the ‘blue pill’ she took by way of remedy. Blue pills were prescribed for every ailment: minor and major, from syphilis to constipation. Their active ingredient was mercury.

  There was, in 19th-century Britain and America, a secret epidemic of mercury poisoning as a result of this popular, toxic, medication. The long-term, overdose symptoms were depression, insomnia and fits of mental instability – even madness (mercury does terrible things to the brain and nervous system). And loose teeth. Loose enough to be pulled out at home, by the owners themselves. It’s as good an explanation as any for the sad tooth-lessness of the 34-year-old Charlotte Brontë. No woman, said George Smith (sympathetically), wanted more to be pretty. The blue pill did not help.

  TRANSFORMATION

  The central crux in Wuthering Heights occurs when Heathcliff overhears Cathy say, in conversation with Nelly, ‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.’ It’s an odd scene. Nelly is ‘sensible of Heathcliff ’s presence’ – she knows he is eavesdropping. But she does not, as a well-intentioned person would, warn Cathy, who is unaware Heathcliff is listening. It looks suspiciously as if Nelly leads Cathy on.

  Heathcliff does not linger to hear anything more than that awful word ‘degrade’. He runs off, taking nothing with him (money?) and leaving no explanation, verbal or written. He vanishes and remains vanished. He leaves Wuthering Heights in August 1780. Over the next three years there are no letters, nor any other news about him.

  Jump to September 1783. Cathy has married the un-degrading Edgar. Nelly too has come up in the world. She is now housekeeper at the Lintons’ Thrushcross Grange. A top spot. ‘Nelly’ is now ‘Mrs Dean’ (the title is honorary, not marital). Was this why she connived to get Heathcliff out of the way (see below, ‘Villainy’, page 180)?

  It is ‘mellow’ evening. Nelly has been picking apples. Dusk is falling, the moon is rising. Then, out of the shadows, from nowhere:

  I heard a voice behind me say –

  ‘Nelly, is that you?’

  It was a deep voice, and foreign in tone; yet there was something in the manner of pronouncing my name which made it sound familiar.

  The word ‘foreign’ is arresting. Nelly turns to make out, in the shadows, ‘a tall man dressed in dark clothes, with dark face and hair’. She still does not recognise him. ‘Look, I’m not a stranger!’ the dark man tells her:

  A ray fell on his features; the cheeks were sallow, and half covered with black whiskers; the brows lowering, the eyes deep set and singular. I remembered the eyes.

  Full recognition is hampered by the fact that he seems a different man from the stable boy who ran away three years ago. ‘And you are Heathcliff!’ Nelly finally says, adding, ‘But altered! Nay, there’s no comprehending it. Have you been for a soldier?’

  He does not answer the question. When informed by Nelly that Heathcliff is back, and wishes to see his wife, Edgar insultingly asks, ‘What, the gipsy – the plough-boy?’ But the visitor no longer occupies that lowly position in life. Nelly immediately apprehends that she must address him, henceforth, as ‘Mr Heathcliff’.

  Mr Heathcliff has money in his pocket – funds enough to gamble for high stakes with the drunken Hindley and win, over the table, possession of Wuthering Heights. How has the ‘transformation of Heathcliff’, as Nelly calls it, happened?

  Looking at his ‘athletic’ frame and his upright stance, she continues to suppose he has been in the army. The American War of Independence was still raging in the early 1780s. But taking the king’s shilling and serving in the lowest ranks, would not have transformed the ploughboy into a gentleman.

  His face, when Nelly can study it in the light,

  looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. 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: quite divested of roughness …

  Only the black fire in the eyes recalls the old ‘untransformed’ Heathcliff.

  Is Nelly’s supposition, that he joined the army, plausible if we assume that Corporal Heathcliff became an officer’s servant (like Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, a novel the Brontës may have read in its Fraser’s Magazine serialisation) and learned, by observation of the officer class, social graces, and how to shave and dress himself elegantly? But how, if that were the case, did he get all his money? Theft? Gambling? (where did he learn to play the gentleman’s game, picquet, so well?)

  A flight of fantasy could explain the transformation. Heathcliff has spent three years at university – abroad, perhaps (recall the foreign accent). Patrick Brontë had left Ireland, a son of the soil, and in three years he was a young Cantab, a gentleman, with a foreign (English) accent and prospects.

  Alas, the undergraduate Heathcliff is not a convincing fable. One dismisses it out of hand. What, then? It has been convincingly argued that the Brontës read Bulwer L
ytton and that Wuthering Heights contains echoes of Lytton’s then-popular (now jeered at)1 fiction. Has Heathcliff, like Paul Clifford in the ‘Newgate novel’ of that title, taken the night road as a gentleman highwayman?

  Did he, perhaps, take off somewhere and set himself up as a gigolo seducer of rich women, trading on his good looks, burning eyes, ruthlessness and white teeth (see above, ‘Toothsome’, page 165)?

  A little thought on the matter, if one must come up with an explanation, suggests that he returned to where he started in life: Liverpool. By the mid-18th century the city had overtaken London and Bristol in the exportation of slaves, in the golden triangle between Africa, Britain, and the West Indies. For a man of Heathcliff ’s intelligent savagery and moral unscrupulosity the opportunities in Liverpool would be immense.

  However the ‘transformation’ happened, neither Heathcliff, nor the novel, give the slightest explanation. It leaves a question every reader must, after a careful reading, decide for themselves.

  There is an additional question. Is this black hole at the centre of Brontë’s narrative artistic design? Aesthetic vacancy? Heathcliff, from his origin onwards, pulsates darkness. Is that the motive? Or is it simply that Emily Brontë, country mouse that she was, did not know enough of the outside world to invent a convincing storyline? Literary critical judgement has come down strongly in favour of the first. So do I. The narrative darkness around Heathcliff is as artful as a Whistler nocturne.

  Footnote

  1. See the annual ‘dark and stormy night’ competition for opening lines as bad as that of Paul Clifford (1830).

  VAMPIROLOGY (1)

  ‘“Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?” I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons.’ Nelly is wondering about Heathcliff in his last night as a living being on earth.

  Ghouls (ghūls) Nelly could plausibly have read about in some version of the Arabian Nights. But where, one may ask, did Mistress Ellen Dean read about vampires? Heathcliff, one recalls, kills himself in April 1802, by the novel’s timeline.

  There is an oblique reference to vampirism in Robert Southey’s twelve-book epic Thalaba the Destroyer – although it’s hard to imagine Nelly wading through the puddingy mass. The Brontës may have read it, before sending off their poems to the poet laureate. The first popularisation of the subject of vampirism came with Lord Byron’s bestselling oriental romance The Giaour, which came out in 1813. Viz. the curse:

  But first, on earth as vampire sent,

  Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:

  Then ghostly haunt thy native place,

  And suck the blood of all thy race;

  Vampires, as a superstition, are as old as mankind’s decision to dispose, decently, of its dead mankind.1 It took literature a long time to realise what a rich vein they could open.

  Nelly’s reference is an anachronism, but an interesting one. It tells us something about her but also rather more about the Brontës. The children were all Byronists, from the creation of Glasstown onwards. It’s safe to guess they knew The Giaour.

  It is possible, of course, that Emily Brontë had got wind of the bestseller which was taking off serially as she was writing Wuthering Heights: James Rymer’s Varney the Vampire. But it’s crude stuff, originating in the depths of penny literature and sub-Gothic spine-chillers for the semi-literate masses. The classic works of vampire literature, Carmilla and Dracula, would not appear until decades after all the Brontës had gone to their rest, their line extinct.

  If not The Giaour or Varney the Vampire, Emily’s principal source (which may, indirectly, have had some formative effect on the creation of Heathcliff) can almost certainly be traced back to the legendarily wet summer of 1816. The downpours prevented a party of distinguished literary tourists in Switzerland – Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori – from actually touring. They were confined to their rented accommodation. And very bored.

  The bad weather had begun, far away, in Indonesia, with the eruption of Mount Tambora. It hit seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making it a thousand-year event. The result, worldwide, was the ‘year without a summer’ and, concurrently, a remarkable eruption of Gothicism in Villa Diodati, alongside Lake Geneva, where the English tourists were staying.

  Pent up by the foul weather, they beguiled the rainy days and nights with light reading and a competition to write the most spine-chilling ghost story their ennuyés minds could come up with. Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) elected to rewrite Paradise Lost as Frankenstein. Shelley and Byron rather fizzled out: literature was more than a parlour game for them.

  The author of ‘The Vampyre’, ‘Dr’ Polidori was a graduate of Edinburgh medical school. Polidori had learned his sawbone trade on cadavers criminally supplied by Edinburgh’s ‘resurrectionists’. Burke and Hare were the most notorious practitioners of that grisly trade. (Heathcliff, of course, is also a resurrectionist.) Byron had recruited ‘Polly’ for the duration of the tour abroad, on a handsome stipend of £500.

  The plot of ‘The Vampyre’ is simple. The sinister Lord Ruthven takes the handsome young Aubrey on a Continental tour with him. On his travels, Ruthven cold-bloodedly destroys every young person who comes his way. Finally, having sucked Aubrey dry as a walnut shell, he turns his dead, grey, irresistible eye on Aubrey’s sister:

  The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

  Ruthven was conceived as an idoliser’s compliment to Byron the irresistible.

  Byron had soon had more of the young man than he could stand and sent him on his way to cross the Alps, alone, friendless and penniless. ‘The Vampyre’ was long forgotten until it rose from the grave in suspicious circumstances. Henry Colburn, the most unscrupulous publisher in London, put it out in 1819 as ‘by Lord Byron’. Polidori protested bitterly, and in vain. Money talked. With Byron’s name attached to it, ‘the trashy tale’ was sensationally popular. Polidori profited not at all. He died aged 25, suicidally depressed and probably by a self-administered dose of prussic acid. But it’s a safe bet his little book planted a seed at Haworth. And an interesting anachronism in Wuthering Heights.

  Footnote

  1. See the classic work on the subject, Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death (1988).

  VAMPIROLOGY (2)

  There is another curious reference to the undead in Jane Eyre. ‘Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?’ the heroine asks Rochester, having seen his wife. ‘You may,’ he graciously replies. Not a ‘madwoman’, she says. Bertha reminds her ‘of the foul German spectre – the Vampyre’. Jane is recalling an older tradition of the female vampire – something virtually obliterated in contemporary folklore. These female vampires were purple in hue, full of blood – it was their victims who were cadaverous. The description fits Bertha, to a ‘v’, one is tempted to say.

  The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognised well that purple face,—those bloated features.

  Her sharp teeth sink, thirstily, into Rochester’s cheek. Blood drips down her chin.

  The pale, famished, rather dapper vampire of today’s screen, a later variation, was originated by Bram Stoker. He is conventionally male. The Draculas, and sub-Draculas may, of course, have had a harem of toothsome living-dead lovelies in attendance but vampirism, since Stoker, has been seen as essentially manly.

  Charlotte, I suspect, was, in inventing Rochester’s Jamaican bride, thinking of Goethe’s well-known poem, ‘The Bride of Corinth’. It centres on an undead woman who rises from the grave to revenge herself on a faithless ‘spouse’:

  Nightly from my narrow chamber driven,

  Come I to fulfil my destin’d part,

  Him to seek to whom my troth was given,

  And to draw the life-blood from his heart.

  Marriage and vampirism are symbolically conjoined, as ero
tic blood-union. The victim wife becomes murderess. There is no actual use of the V-word in Goethe’s poem. But the vindictive exsanguination says it all. ‘The Bride of Corinth’ is called, popularly, ‘the first vampire poem’, and it’s odds-on Charlotte wants us to know Jane Eyre has read it.

  VEGETARIANISM

  Mrs Gaskell got her most colourful details about everyday life at Haworth in the 1820s from a dubious source. Subsequent biographers have lined up for and against what Mrs Martha Wright ‘revealed’. Or maliciously ‘invented’ (see above, ‘Normality?’, page 113). Martha was a local nurse, employed by the Brontës when they came to Haworth. She attended Patrick’s wife as she died, from cancer, in 1821. It was an unsettled period for the family. Wright was subsequently dismissed by Patrick – a Grace Poole-like weakness for the bottle is sometimes surmised. Nonetheless, she survived the whole family and was a wholly respectable woman when Gaskell interviewed her.1 She may, however, have had a burning grudge, nursed for thirty years.

  Patrick

  It was Wright who revealed/invented the image of a Revd Brontë who would cut up his wife’s and daughters’ clothes and shoes, if they were, to his mind, irreligiously colourful, and who would blaze away with his pistol around the church and parsonage grounds like a western cowboy on a Saturday night. A broad streak of madness was hinted at. Mrs Gaskell swallowed it all.

  The following, however, is one of the more curious facts Martha passed on: