six months of the marriage between March and September. If Sanger thinks he can conclude from this that Catherine is “happily married”, he is mistaken and reveals some rather peculiar ideas about marriage. There follow another six months until Catherine’s death, from September until the following March, as will be calculated in the biographies of Catherine Earnshaw and Mr. Heathcliff (Chap. IV). The twelve months between Catherine’s wedding and death make up the one-year time span that is so important for the chronology.
In order to calculate the year of the wedding, the year of the major episode must be determined. The fact that the major episode takes place in 1779, not in 1780, is shown as follows: if the major episode had taken place in the summer of 1780, there would be two years between Hareton Earnshaw’s birth in 1778 and the major episode, but this is too long. The text makes it clear that the time span could only have been one year, the period in which the young Edgar Linton undertakes his rare visits to the Heights before his engagement to Catherine during the major episode (WH, 80). There is no evidence in the text for an additional year. The chronological sequence is rigorous: the birth of Hareton in 1778, the major episode in 1779, the absence of Heathcliff and the engagement of Catherine for the period up until 1782, the death of Catherine and the birth of Cathy in 1783. A further year would be superfluous. These fictional facts thus make it clear that the major episode takes place a little more than a year after Hareton Earnshaw’s birth in June 1778, namely in the summer of 1779. ←44 | 45→Sanger and Daley, who argue that the wedding takes place in 1783, overlook this crucial point.
The fact that the major episode takes place in 1779 is also reinforced by two aspects of Hareton Earnshaw’s developmental physiology.
At the time of the episode, Hareton is an infant sitting on the ground at Ellen Dean’s feet during the dramatic events. He can follow her around, which means that he can crawl and walk, and he can say the words “wicked aunt Cathy” (WH, 85f.).10 Ellen Dean calls him “[l];ittle Hareton” and tries to hide him from his drunken father in the kitchen cupboard. He is a “little wretch” and her “little lamb” (WH, 88, 90, 92). When his father carries him upstairs and holds him over the banister, he screams and tries to squirm away. This all fits with the theory that he is only about fifteen months old at the time. If the major episode had taken place in the summer of 1780, Hareton – as a child over the age of two – would have behaved differently. He would have been psycho-motorically more advanced and it would not have been possible to hide him from his father in a kitchen cupboard, even if he had already learned to fear his father’s emotional outbursts and to behave quietly (cf. Baumann 2007, p. 366).
Time references based on numerical data (external evidence)
Two unambiguous time references in the story confirm the fact that 1779 is indeed the year of the major episode and thus 1782 the year of the move.
First time reference:
Regarding Hareton Earnshaw’s date of birth, June 1778, Ellen Dean says in the first section of the first part of her story:
[…] and instead of leaping three years, I will be content to pass to the next summer – the summer of 1778, that is nearly twenty-three years ago. (WH, 75)
This date proves that she tells her story in the year 1800, because “nearly twenty-three” stands for twenty-two plus X, which means June 1778 plus twenty-two is June 1800 plus X. X then corresponds to five months, less than half a year (from June to November). “Nearly” accordingly means seven months less. If 1801 were the correct year of reference, it would read “more than twenty-three years ago” or “nearly twenty-four”. Thus, 1782 is the year of the wedding and the move, not 1783.
Clay (1952, p. 101) blames the discrepancy between the “nearly twenty-three years ago” and his hypothesis that 1801 is the year of the writing of the report on ←45 | 46→an inaccuracy by Ellen Dean, which he calls “a slight slip”. He turns the “nearly” into “rather more than”, leaving aside the fact that he should have continued the sentence with “twenty-three years”, or that he should have written “nearly twenty-four years ago” in the manner of Ellen Dean.11
Before Clay, Sanger (1926, p. 11) discusses this important time reference. In contrast to Clay, he does not reinterpret it, but he does make a miscalculation in its interpretation: he adds the twenty-three to the 1778 according to the arithmetic of the decimal system and thus lands in the year 1801 – without taking into consideration that months must be included in calendrical calculations and that the “nearly” must not be ignored. To be arithmetically and calendrically correct, the equation must read:
June 1778 + 22 years + X months = November 1800 =
6 months + 1778 years + 22 years + X months = 11 months + 1800 years =
21342 months + 264 months + X = 21611 months
X = 21611 - (21342 + 264) = 21611 - 21606 = 5 months
With any other number greater than five, one arrives in December, the following January, or an even later month. The text rules out these months as the possible beginning of the report and the story.
Heywood (2004, pp. 433, 437) also focuses on this reference to “nearly twenty-three years ago” and its discrepancy with the year 1801 as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to the Heights and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s story. He believes that the discrepancy was probably intended by Emily Brontë, and he even goes so far as to consider 1778 a misstatement. He entertains the idea that Hareton is not born until 1779, making this year the starting point of a hypothetical second timeline, which he calls the “1779 series” (ibid., p. 433). Instead of moving the year of the visits one year to the left on the timeline as he should, he moves Hareton’s year of birth one year to the right. He does not think of questioning 1801 as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits, changing instead one of the three absolute years on which the chronology of Wuthering Heights is irrefutably based.
Second time reference:
According to Ellen Dean in the second section of her story, Cathy is thirteen years old when she first meets Hareton Earnshaw one July. This age is extremely important for the chronology and is clearly evidenced three times in the text, ←46 | 47→once indirectly and twice directly (WH, 233, 234, 239). Hareton is eighteen years old at the time, which is categorically stated in the text (WH, 239). Since he is born in 1778 (as one of the three absolute years proves), their meeting must take place in 1796, which means that Cathy is born (and her mother Catherine dies) on 20 March 1783.12 Accordingly, the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton must take place in March 1782, the conception of Cathy in September 1782 and the dramatic events of the major episode in 1779 because Mr. Heathcliff disappears for three years after these events, only reappearing in September 1782, Cathy is “a seven months’ child” and the period between Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and death is the already specified one year. The reference to Hareton Earnshaw’s year of birth indicates the correct path through the time labyrinth. It is out of the question that Catherine marries in 1783 and dies in 1784.
Clay (1952, p. 101) does not address these important chronological realities. He holds the view that the wedding takes place in 1783, justifying this with the “for eighteen years”, which has already been refuted. He feels corroborated by Edgar Linton’s remark to Catherine Earnshaw shortly before her death in March that at the same time one year earlier he had wanted her under his roof (ibid., p. 101). However, for methodological reasons, it is not possible to prove a particular year with this time span. The stated interval of one year is always correct because it is year-independent. The only thing that the time span proves is that – as stated – Catherine dies one year after her wedding. In his other calculations, Clay does not take into account this important one-year span, leading him
