marks are not used to mark Ellen Dean’s story, even though the indicative is used throughout. Furthermore, speech marks are not used when Ellen Dean addresses Mr. Lockwood in the course of her monologue – which is repeatedly the case – nor are they used for Mr. Lockwood’s insertions, such as “she said”. However, they are used in dialogue between Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean to mark direct speech, and for the conversations between Ellen Dean and other characters in her story. Only occasionally are speech marks used for the soliloquised reflections of Mr. Lockwood in his report or for those of Ellen Dean in her story.
Ellen Dean’s story is accordingly embedded in Mr. Lockwood’s report and presents the events preceding those which Mr. Lockwood witnesses during his stays and which he then records in his report.
On three occasions either a dotted, starred or continuous crossline occurs in the novel, both to separate the notes written by Catherine in 1775 from Mr. Lockwood’s report (WH, 24f.) and to distinguish between the report and Ellen Dean’s story (WH, 41). Only the first starred line appears in the Norton Critical Edition (2003, p. 18), while the Clarendon Edition has only the first two starred lines (p. 27). These typographical differences have no chronological meaning, however.
In contrast to Ellen Dean’s story, Mr. Lockwood’s report is composed using the present, past and perfect tenses, with the occasional inclusion of the future. Consequently, the construction of the report is much more complicated than that of the story in terms of the tenses used. Like Ellen Dean when she comes to the end of a section of her story, Mr. Lockwood lapses into the present tense when speaking to Ellen Dean, as if to himself, or to readers at the end of a passage of his report. In addition, he uses the present tense five times when commenting or describing: at the beginning of Chapters 1, 10 and 15, at the end of the first section of Chapter 4 before the crossline and at the end of Chapter 30. This is of great importance for the dating of events. The Lockwood-present of his reported experiences must not under any circumstances be equated with the real present, ←22 | 23→that is the reporting-present, unless correlated with other dates, and nor therefore may it be used for the reconstruction of the chronology.
It is not easy to determine when Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights and chronicles those visits or when Ellen Dean tells him her story. Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights four times in total, twice in quick succession in the winter of one year and twice six months apart the following year, in January and in summer. What is certain is that, according to Mr. Lockwood’s account, Ellen Dean begins her story on the day that he returns from his second visit to Wuthering Heights (WH, 38). This is evident from the context, but it is only revealed to the reader after the first four chapters.
Even though it initially seems as if the year 1801 at the beginning of the novel can be used to date events unambiguously, it is nevertheless difficult to establish in which years the events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange take place. This is because the year 1801 is seemingly inconsistently connected with the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, 1778, by numerous relative time expressions relating to the events depicted in the report and the story, and above all with the year of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding, her death and the so-called major episode.2 This means that the years do not cohere when counting from 1801 on the one hand or from 1778 on the other. With two exceptions, there is a discrepancy of one year between 1778 and 1801, as shown in the introductory example (see Chap. I above). This one-year discrepancy does not affect the dating as far as the months are concerned. Apart from the two exceptions, the months given in the report and the story are always consistent and can, indeed must, be used for chronological calculations as year-independent quantities.
Accordingly, there are two different years possible for the events mentioned above. The major episode takes place in either 1779 or 1780, Catherine Earnshaw marries in either 1782 or 1783, and the death of Catherine Earnshaw and the birth of Cathy Linton are in either 1783 or 1784. Mathematically speaking, four chronological hypotheses must therefore be tested. These are:
←23 | 24→
– Both 1778 (as the year of Hareton’s birth) and 1801 (as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit) are correct.
– Both 1778 and 1801 are incorrect.
– 1778 is incorrect and 1801 correct.
– 1778 is correct and 1801 incorrect.
The discrepancies mentioned above show that it is not possible for 1778 to be the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 to be the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit. If 1778 is not the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 is not the year of both Mr. Lockwood’s first visit and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s story, the whole timeline of the novel is wrong. There would be no rigorous, consistent time scheme for the report or the story, and no further discussion would be necessary. For this reason, the validity of the years 1778 and 1801 need to be verified only in connection with the respective events that take place. It will be demonstrated that the last option is evidence-based and therefore correct: placing Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights in the year 1801 cannot be correct. Only in the last option is there a coherence between all the usable time data (there are also unusable data) – in the sense of external evidence – and a congruence between these data and the continuity of events, i.e. all the plot details (internal evidence), in the sense of combined evidence.3 The differentiation between the report and the story is the first of four crucial steps on the way to solving the chronological confusion. The second step is the realisation that Mr. Lockwood is a diarist, the third is that Ellen Dean does not know the dates that Mr. Lockwood uses, and the fourth is that Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean pursue the same narrative intentions. An analysis of Mr. Lockwood’s report is focused on first because Wuthering Heights begins and ends with it and – as will become apparent – it is from the report that the timelines of the novel can most easily be followed.
The Time Scheme of Mr. Lockwood’s Report
In his ground-breaking and much-cited essay of 1926, Sanger explains what originally induced him to study the chronology of Wuthering Heights. “What first brought me to study the book more closely was when I noticed that the first word in the book was a date – 1801. I thought this must have some significance” (Sanger, p. 11). However, like every general reader, Sanger recognises that the ←24 | 25→year must have some relevance, without recognising its real significance. This is shown by his omission of the em-dash following “1801” and his use of that year as the starting point for all his calculations, that is as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Mr. Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and as the year in which Mr. Lockwood begins his report.
However, this assumption must be an error for the reasons that follow below.
Although Mr. Lockwood himself never explicitly states that he is reporting events retrospectively like a diary writer, this is a reasonable assumption to make. Even without algebraic arithmetic, the assumption that Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Wuthering Heights do not take place until November 1801 can be ruled out from the start by a fact that is just as plausible as it is banal, though it has never been recognised as such. If the visits had taken place at that time, Mr. Lockwood’s report of his third visit to Wuthering Heights in January would have come under the year 1802. However, this is not the case. Under the year 1802, he only chronicles his fourth visit to Wuthering Heights in the summer, a short visit six months after his premature departure in January of the same year. The report of his third visit, in January, comes under the year 1801, together with the descriptions of his first two visits. Events from two different years cannot
