time span, only describing it as “not long” (ibid., p. 101). Clay also sees 1783 corroborated as the alleged year of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding when Mr. Heathcliff comes to take Cathy to Wuthering Heights on the evening of Edgar Linton’s funeral. Ellen Dean indicates at that time that eighteen years have passed since his return (WH, 352). Again, this is only correct in terms of the time span. The dating, however, must be based on 1782, not 1783. Later, Clay unacceptably uses another time span for dating: concerning the dream that she has during the hallucinations in the year of her death, Catherine Earnshaw declares that “the whole last seven years of my life grew a blank!” (WH, 154) – the seven years since her father’s death. Clay (ibid., p. 103) draws on these seven years to help date Mr. Earnshaw’s ←47 | 48→death to 1776, because he places Catherine’s illness at the end of 1783 instead of at the end of 1782.
Because of the one-year span (the period between Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and her death, and Cathy’s birth), Clay, proceeding from 1783, dates the year of Cathy’s birth to 1784 instead of 1783. This mistake inevitably brings with it a whole string of further misdating, because, although Clay quite correctly identifies the time spans, his year of reference is wrong. There is, therefore, a systemic error. To be correct, all his year dates need to be pre-dated by one year, i.e. they must be shifted to the left on the timeline. It is true that Cathy is seventeen years old in the year of Edgar Linton’s death (WH, 299), which is why he must have died in 1800 and not in 1801, as Clay (ibid., p. 102) thinks. It is also true that, in the November of the year before his death, Edgar Linton forbids Cathy from continuing her secret visits to Wuthering Heights. However, this is in 1799, not 1800. It is true that, in the second section of the first part of her story, Ellen Dean points out that she is describing the prohibition of the visits and its attendant circumstances exactly one year after the events. This necessarily dates the narration of the story to November 1800 and does not – as Clay (ibid., p. 102) thinks, in an unacceptable reverse conclusion – date the prohibition to 1800. Despite Ellen Dean’s indisputable time reference, Clay (ibid., p. 101) surprisingly dates this passage of the story to 1802 rather than one year after the prohibition, that is – to follow his incorrect approach, which is out by one year – to 1801. This is explained by the fact that, right at the beginning of his treatise, he decides that Ellen Dean relates this passage of her story in 1802 (ibid., p. 100), which is incorrect. This mistake in the dating of the narrative should have occurred to Clay when determining the time of the prohibition – either 1801 is correct or 1802. Both cannot be true. The systemic post-dating error by one year is of course also observable in the biographical data of the main characters, deduced from Catherine Earnshaw’s year of birth (cf. Chap. VI, ‘The Genealogies of the Earnshaw and Linton Families’). Thus, Clay (ibid., pp. 102f.) gives the year of Isabella Linton’s death as 1797 instead of 1796, the year of Hindley Earnshaw’s death as 1784 instead of 1783, etc.
The fact that Cathy is thirteen years old when she first meets Hareton is also noted by Heywood (2004, p. 439). However, he is wrong to state that their meeting takes place on Cathy’s thirteenth birthday, i.e. in March. Cathy in fact meets Hareton for the first time in summer. Heywood is probably confusing this meeting with that of Cathy and Linton Heathcliff, which does actually take place on her birthday – but on her sixteenth. In neither the first nor second of Heywood’s editions of Wuthering Heights does he make any mention of Ellen ←48 | 49→Dean’s crucial statement that Hareton is eighteen years old at their first meeting, proven by the fact that their first meeting takes place in 1796.13
Time references based on misleading ages
There are two places in Ellen Dean’s narrative that could indicate that 1801 is the first year of the narration – if they stand up to critical scrutiny. These two places suggest that Cathy is born in 1784, not in 1783, and contradict Ellen Dean’s two unambiguous statements mentioned above, that she narrates the first half of her story nearly twenty-three years after Hareton’s birth in June 1778 and that Cathy is thirteen and Hareton eighteen years old when they meet for the first time. The two discrepant statements concern Hareton’s age at the time of Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton (he is allegedly “nearly five years old” at the time) and Hareton’s age at a much later point when he is reconciled with Cathy on an Easter Monday in April (he is allegedly “twenty-three years old” at the time). Both ages are dubious from the very start because of their incompatibility with the unambiguous and proven ages already stated and they must therefore be examined particularly critically. In fact, both ages could simply be incorrect since Cathy cannot have been born in 1784 according to the textual information regarding the year of the major episode mentioned above, in other words according to the internal evidence: if 1784 were the year of her birth, Catherine’s wedding would have taken place one year earlier, in March 1783. But then, because of Heathcliff’s three-year absence, the major episode would have occurred in the summer of 1780, which has already been ruled out in view of the internal evidence.
It is therefore more plausible to assume that the ages are incorrect rather than to assume that 1801, not 1800, is the first year of the narration. In fact, the two ages can be discredited, and a plausible explanation can be found for the deception, based on Ellen Dean’s intention to use chronological ambiguity to conceal certain correlations in the story. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, Ellen Dean herself provides the opportunity for her misleading statements regarding these ages to be recognised as such. She does this by referring to discrepancies regarding the wedding month of Catherine and Edgar Linton and the birth months of Cathy and Hareton.
The first refutable assertion:
Ellen Dean states at the end of the first section of her story that Hareton Earnshaw is “nearly five years old” when she leaves him to move to Thrushcross Grange with the newly married Catherine (WH, 108). Since Hareton is born in June ←49 | 50→1778, according to the hypothesis to be tested, the move would have taken place before June, sometime in the spring of 1783. Immediately before this relativised age, Ellen Dean also states that the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton takes place three years after the death of Edgar Linton’s father:
Edgar Linton […] believed himself the happiest man alive on the day he led her to Gimmerton chapel, three years subsequent to his father’s death. (WH, 108)
The usability of Hareton’s age is thus compromised by two interlinked additional details: what does “nearly” mean and when exactly did Edgar Linton’s father die? Why does Ellen Dean not simply say that three years after the death of Edgar Linton’s father in the November after Heathcliff’s disappearance, Hareton was such and such an age? This lack of clarity must give pause for thought in view of the unambiguousness of the other two temporal references already discussed.
Mr. Lockwood and readers have to assume up to this point in the story that Ellen Dean’s move to Thrushcross Grange takes place one November or December because before she begins her story, one November or December, Ellen Dean tells Mr. Lockwood that she has lived at Thrushcross Grange “eighteen years”.14 It will be concluded from this that Edgar Linton’s father also dies in November or December. The fact that Ellen Dean then also temporally links Hareton’s birthday with the wedding of Catherine and Edgar Linton one spring raises questions. This new temporal association of the month of death in winter with the month of birth inevitably plunges the reader into chronological confusion.15 So, when in fact do the move and the wedding take place? As will shortly ←50 | 51→be made clear, the wedding takes place in spring, and from this it can only be concluded that something is incorrect regarding Hareton’s age.
In the attempt to resolve the chronological confusion, it becomes apparent that the date of the wedding and the move up until the account of the move itself is based on only two imprecise (because they are approximate or are to be understood as approximate) time references by Ellen Dean. Ellen Dean states only a very long time after the move and only in a veiled way that the wedding took place in March. In Chapter 21, when Ellen Dean describes how Mr. Heathcliff catches Cathy plundering “moor-game” nests on
