Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw
'He had a kind heart, though he was rather severe.'
We are introduced to Mr. Earnshaw in Volume I: Chapter IV.
The “Old Master” Earnshaw owned Wuthering Heights until 1777.
Ellen “Nelly” Dean—in service at Wuthering Heights since she was a child—shares an episode from Late-Summer of 1771.
One fine summer morning—it was the beginning of harvest, I remember—Mr. Earnshaw, the old master, came downstairs, dressed for a journey; and, after he had told Joseph what was to be done during the day, he turned to Hindley, and Cathy, and me—for I sat eating my porridge with them—and he said, speaking to his son—
“Now, my bonny man, I’m going to Liverpool, today. What shall I bring you? You may choose what you like; only let it be little, for I shall walk there and back; sixty miles each way, that is a long spell!”Hindley named a fiddle, and then he asked Miss Cathy; she was hardly six years old, but she could ride any horse in the stable, and she chose a whip.
He did not forget me, for he had a kind heart, though he was rather severe, sometimes. He promised to bring me a pocketful of apples and pears, and then he kissed his children good-bye, and set off.
From Nelly’s depiction of this domestic scene, we as readers learn a number of things. Earlier in the passage she explains that she was ‘almost always at Wuthering Heights,” and, “got used to playing with the children,” because her own mother had nursed Mr. Hindley Earnshaw (b. Summer 1757).
This passage, about Hindley’s father (given no forename by Brontë), describes a loving and generous man—who not only enjoys spoiling his biological children but wishes to include the housekeeper’s daughter by promising, “a pocketful of apples and pears.”
Mr. Earnshaw, Nelly Dean explains, is gone for a period of three days. Upon his late-evening return, “he throws himself into a chair, laughing and groaning,” announcing, “he would not have such another walk for the three kingdoms.”1
Opening his great-coat, which he held bundled up in his arms, the children’s father reveals a surprise…
A dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough to walk and talk—indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s—yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.
After this alarming episode, readers meet Mrs. Earnshaw.
The mistress of the house—Mrs. Earnshaw—coldly, “wanted to fling [the child] out of doors.” Berating her husband, she asks how he could possibly bring a “gipsy brat into the house when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for?”
Mrs. Earnshaw “grumbled herself calm” and the more charitable Mr. Earnshaw, “told [Nelly] to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.”
Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw are the parents of Hindley & Catherine Earnshaw
England, Ireland and Scotland