By Audrey Dewjee
John Ellis’s recent article about Richard Umhala http://historycalroots.com/a-great-favourite-with-both-officers-and-men-richard-umhala-an-african-prince-in-victorian-bradford reminded me of the controversy that ensued following the opening of the 2011 film version of Wuthering Heights, when its director, Andrea Arnold, decided to depict Heathcliff as Black. I wrote an article about this for the BASA Newsletter[1] [No. 62, March 2012]. An illustrated and slightly edited version of my article follows.
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In the new film version of Wuthering Heights, the fact that Heathcliff is played by a black actor may be more than an example of integrated casting. Portraying him as having African ancestry could be closer to Emily Bronte’s original intention than previous interpretations, where he was often seen as being a Traveller or Gypsy.
Remember how Heathcliff is introduced into the story. Mr. Earnshaw returns from a visit to Liverpool with a child he had seen “starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets”. He “picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged…and his money and time, being both limited, he thought it better, to take it home with him, at once, than run into vain expenses there; because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it.” Mr. Earnshaw tells his family, “you must…take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil” (my italics). Later in the book, Mr. Linton, commenting on Heathcliff’s origins, suggests he could be “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”.
As another indication of his possible origins, Emily Bronte gives Heathcliff just one name, which has to serve as both his personal and family name. Having only one name was common for many of the enslaved Africans who came to Britain. Masters were fond of renaming them after classical heroes such as Scipio, Pompey and Caesar, or with place names such as Liverpool, York, Pembroke and Barnard Castle. Some, like Olaudah Equiano, who spent many years named Gustavus Vassa after a Swedish king, managed to reclaim their African names. Emily, who was very well-read, may have been influenced by Equiano’s autobiography, first published in 1797, which played such an important part in the abolition campaign, or she may have heard of the impact Equiano made when he visited Yorkshire on his speaking tours.
What could have given her the idea to place a person of African (or Asian) descent on the moors of Yorkshire? Most likely because she saw, or heard of, such individuals in her daily life. There may have been black workers in the mills of Haworth.
Domestic servants, sailors, mixed-race family members and, I suspect, formerly-enslaved skilled plantation workers (such as millwrights and blacksmiths), made their way to Britain. They settled in Bradford, Leeds, Scarborough and various other towns, as well as villages in the moors and dales, where the Bronte sisters may have encountered them. The sisters could have heard of others in the stories of the locality, at a time when gossip and news
furnished much of country folk’s entertainment. As Charlotte explained, Emily knew the people around her, she “knew their ways, their language, their family histories, she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate” and she was used to “listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage (i.e. neighbourhood)”. This was the material from which she fashioned her story.
Perhaps she heard about John Yorke “a negro servant belonging to Mr. Hutton,” who was baptised in the parish church of Marske, near Richmond. He saved someone’s life in a fire on the moors and, as a reward for his bravery, he was given a cottage. Having his own home enabled him to marry a local girl and start a family. One of his sons became a noted bare-knuckle boxer; one of his grandsons moved to Bradford in search of work and found it at Bowling Iron Works. Over one hundred and thirty of John Yorke’s descendants are living in Britain today.
Maybe Emily heard tales of Ira Aldridge, a young African American, whose ambition to be an actor could not have been fulfilled in his native New York. Ira arrived in England about 1823 and a year later he married Margaret Gill, the daughter of a Yorkshire stocking weaver. He toured all over Britain, earning rave reviews wherever he went. Ira Aldridge later took British nationality, achieved star status (and a knighthood) in Europe, and died while on tour in Poland in 1867.
Thomas Leigh, “a fine sharp boy of colour” aged 9, who had been apprenticed to a chimney sweep, had to be rescued, as he had been very badly treated by his master, whereas Thomas Anson (who may have been a partial inspiration for Heathcliff’s character in the film) liberated himself from enslavement by running away from the Sill family’s farm, high up on the slopes of Whernside.[2]
Entries in parish registers record a variety of Africans and Asians who were baptised, married or buried in Yorkshire. Henry Osmyn, who was born in India and baptised in York at the age of three, remained in the county, where he also founded a large family.
Although the majority of the people of colour who came here were men, there were women too. Ruth “a native of Hindoostan” (i.e. India) was baptised in Knaresborough in 1820, while Betsy Sawyer, formerly enslaved in Antigua, was buried at Yeadon in 1839, where her gravestone can still be seen.
These are just a few examples of the real-life people of Asian and African descent living in Yorkshire around the time that Emily Bronte was growing up and creating her masterpiece.
Why would Emily choose a black hero for her powerful love story? Wuthering Heights has been classed as one of the greatest romantic stories in English literature and no-one can fail to be aware of the passion it contains, but it is even more a story of revenge. Heathcliff fully repays those who for years had subjected him to degradation and torment. Coming from a fiercely anti-slavery family, perhaps Emily Bronte was trying to provide a warning of what can happen when such wrongs are heaped upon innocent people – they may acquire warped values and bring about the eventual ruin of their oppressors.
Although first published in 1847, Bronte’s story is set in the years 1801-02, with the narrative ranging backwards as far as 1758. Until the passing of the Act abolishing the shipment of enslaved people across the Atlantic in 1807, buying enslaved Africans and shipping them to the Americas was a legitimate trade for British merchants. After a long and hard-fought campaign by people in and out of Parliament and, not least, by the increasingly successful efforts of the Africans themselves, enslavement in British dominions was finally brought to an end in 1838. However, at the time of the novel’s publication, slavery was still flourishing in both North and South America. It was a big issue for many people in Britain who were involved in campaigns to end it globally and especially in North America where some had kith and kin.
Liverpool had been Britain’s most important slave trading port. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it must have had a sizeable black population. On a visit to the town around 1789, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck commented, “What surprised me most in the aspect of Liverpool was the multitude of black servants, almost all of whom had originally been slaves”.
African men, women and children were auctioned in Liverpool from time to time, for example eight people from the ship Thomas (3 men, 2 women, 2 boys and a girl) were put up for sale at the Customs House in 1766. Black sailors, from the Caribbean as well as Africa, were employed on board British ships, to replace the many white crew members who had died or deserted while abroad. Even greater numbers of sailors were recruited in India. Known as Lascars, they were less likely to be integrated into existing crews because of language obstacles. Ruled over by a bilingual serang, they usually remained apart, and thus were more easily exploited and underpaid. Liverpool became home to seafarers from both groups and it is therefore not surprising that there could have been black or mixed-race children among the many street-urchins who tried to stay alive on the city’s streets.
For over a hundred years, British merchants from ports such as Liverpool and Lancaster had purchased people in Africa and taken them to the Caribbean and North America where they could be tortured and worked to death on sugar and tobacco plantations, or in growing an abundance of other crops such as coffee, cotton, rice and arrowroot.
These crops were then shipped back to Britain on the third leg of a journey which, if the ship arrived safely, could net its owners a very handsome profit. Golden opportunities existed for adventurous spirits, the poverty stricken, or those who needed to leave the country for a while to escape various forms of trouble. Although many would perish from shipwreck or war or the ever-present menace of tropical diseases, some became rich as a result and a number managed to return to their native land.
Yorkshiremen from towns and cities and from the remotest corners of the dales went to seek their fortunes in this new world. Charles Inman, a man who was in line to inherit family property, chose to go to Lancaster to be apprenticed to a merchant. From there he went to Jamaica, where he died in 1767. His family in Nidderdale inherited his wealth. Henry Foster from Oughtershaw in remote Langstrothdale and John Sill of Dent both went to Jamaica, while George Kearton from Oxnop Hall in the wilds of Swaledale chose to establish an arrowroot plantation on the island of St. Vincent. When George Metcalfe retired to Hawes, he still held large sugar estates in Dominica and Demerara (now Guyana).
Many of those who became owners of, or workers on, plantations, fathered children with enslaved African women, regardless of whether they had a white wife and family with them or back at home.
When planters and their families returned to Britain on a visit or for good, they often brought enslaved Africans with them to look after their needs en route in order to make the long, arduous voyage more bearable. The same was true for those who went to India to seek their fortunes as traders or soldiers. They too fathered children with Indian women, and brought servants back with them; whilst men from both groups sent their mixed-race children to attend schools in Yorkshire.
Emily Bronte would have been well-aware of such facts. Intending to set her readers thinking, she shrouded Heathcliff’s origins in mystery. In portraying Heathcliff as a man of African descent, Andrea Arnold, the director of the new film, has chosen a plausible, if less-familiar, interpretation of his background. In so doing she has rendered a valuable service, by reminding us of an inter-racial British past which is, too often, overlooked.
[1] BASA Newsletter – BASA, the Black and Asian Studies Association (originally known as ASACACHIB – Association for the Study of African, Caribbean and Asian Culture and History in Britain), published a thrice-yearly journal which was full of interesting articles by a wide variety of writers on a hugely diverse range of topics. It also included snippets of information about Black and Asian people in Britain over many centuries, which could then be followed up by anyone interested in pursuing their stories. Several of the later issues of the Newsletter are available online at http://www.blackandasianstudies.org/newsletter_newsletter-html
[2] For more about Thomas Anson and the Sill family, see: https://runaways.gla.ac.uk/blog/index.php/2018/12/14/thomas-anson/
