5 Dark Realities 'Wuthering Heights' Reveals About the Victorian Era

Heathcliff first arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1771, when he’s about 7 years old. Nelly Dean, the servant who narrates most of the novel, explains that Mr. Earnshaw found the boy on the streets of Liverpool and brought him back to his rural home in West Yorkshire. Earnshaw names the child Heathcliff and treats him like a son, but resentment quickly takes root in the Earnshaw family.

The eldest child, Hindley, grows jealous of the newcomer as years pass. When their patriarch dies, Heathcliff is about 13. Hindley strips Heathcliff of his status and makes him a servant in the stables—a humiliation he never forgets.

But Heathcliff’s young age as a servant wasn’t unusual in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when children as young as 5 worked in factories and mines. Careful readers will note that Dean also worked for the Earnshaws as a child. She is roughly the same age as Hindley and grew up as both his playmate and servant.

In the late 19th century, the United Kingdom reduced child labor by making school compulsory. An 1880 act mandated school for children ages 5 to 10. Over the next two decades, the country extended compulsory schooling to age 12.

Heathcliff’s origins remain a mystery. He arrives without a name or family. Dean says he speaks “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” Mrs. Earnshaw indignantly asks how her husband could bring home a “gipsy brat.” Throughout the book, characters call Heathcliff this slur against Romani people, who faced discrimination and criminalization in England during this time. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English law and social prejudice framed Romani communities and punished them with statutes like the 1744 Vagrancy Act.

The novel’s characters speculate about what country Heathcliff or his parents may have come from. The neighboring Mr. Linton says Heathcliff may be “a little Lascar,” a term for Indian sailors “or an American or Spanish castaway.” When trying to raise Heathcliff’s spirits, Dean tells him his father could be the "Emperor of China" and his mother an "Indian queen.”

Modern scholars have pointed out that Liverpool was a major slave-trading port in the 1770s (when Earnshaw found the boy there), suggesting Heathcliff could also have African ancestry. 

“He’s definitely racially and ethnically ambiguous,” says Danielle Mariann Dove, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Surrey. His unclear racial identity marks him as different from the white English characters in the novel, as does his unfixed class status.

The Earnshaws are a family of landowning farmers who employ servants. During Heathcliff’s first years at Wuthering Heights, he mostly lives as the family does, but his demotion to servant removes his financial stability and influences Cathy’s decision to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton instead.

“If she married Heathcliff, she would have literally had nothing,” says Sue Newby, a learning officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, England. “For the fact that she marries Linton instead of Heathcliff, I honestly think that she doesn’t really have a lot of choice.”

When 16-year-old Heathcliff overhears Cathy tell Dean she is considering marrying Edgar because it would “degrade” her to marry Heathcliff, he runs away from Wuthering Heights. Three years later, Heathcliff returns as a gentleman who has somehow made a fortune. His class status changes; and with it, his marriage prospects. Since Cathy is already married to Linton, he pursues Linton's sister instead.

Marrying Linton’s sister Isabella is part of Heathcliff’s revenge scheme. As soon as they wed, he becomes cruel and abusive. He traps her at Wuthering Heights, which he has financially acquired due to Hindley’s gambling debts. While pregnant, Isabella runs away to raise their child alone—a decision that would have carried serious legal repercussions at the time.

The real-life case of Caroline Norton illustrates those risks. After leaving her abusive husband, George Norton, in 1835, he retaliated by denying her the ability to see their kids. With no legal right to custody, Caroline returned to the marriage to raise her children. The following year, George kicked Caroline out and again kept their children from her. Norton’s ordeal exposed the legal power husbands held over wives in Victorian England. Her petitions to the government led to the passage of the 1839 Custody of Infants Act and helped her gain shared custody in 1841.

In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff doesn't exercise legal action to bring his son back until after his wife’s death.

Heathcliff doesn’t just acquire Wuthering Heights, he pursues the neighboring estate of Thrushcross Grange by forcing his son Linton and Cathy's daughter, Cathy Jr., to wed. (As if the names aren’t confusing enough, these twoare also first cousins.)

Wuthering Heights “is one of the most carefully legally plotted novels I think I’ve ever read,” says Katherine Gilbert, an English professor at Drury University. Because of the legal concept of coverture, in which any property a woman inherited was owned by her husband, “women in the novel often serve as conduits for the property that transfers between the men.”

Heathcliff orchestrates the marriage so that Linton will inherit Thrushcross Grange when Cathy Jr.'s ailing father dies. Linton also dies from an illness shortly after the union. The property transfers to Heathcliff, and he becomes the master of both estates. 

What happens to Cathy Jr. after her husband-cousin dies? For that, you’ll have to read the book.