The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  This rock leads a dog’s life. Hindley, Earnshaw’s son, forces Heathcliff to labor outdoors and flogs him brutally when he resists being treated like a slave. Hardened to ill-treatment, Heathcliff doesn’t protest much when he is repeatedly cast out of the human world of houses, parties, and fine clothes because he is a “lurcher” type of human—a vagabond, castaway, “lascar,” gypsy, an “out-and-outer.” As a boy, his dark face causes the local magistrate to comment, “Would it not be a kindness to the county to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features?” Ground down repeatedly, he becomes more and more like the dark “devil” he is accused of being. Growing sullen and morose, he lets his gait turn slouching and his hair like a “colt’s mane,” while he develops the expression of a “vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are his deserts, and yet hates all the world as well as the kicker.”

  Heathcliff reminds us of our ties to animals. His difference from the canines that weave in and out of his life is slight, as if Emily had dogs, and perhaps Keeper especially, in mind when she created him. He is Catherine’s faithful pet: she calls him, with fondness, “fierce, pitiless, wolfish.” Her greatest delight comes from commanding him, making him do her bidding. A characteristic scene: Cathy sits at the hearth, Heathcliff lying on the floor with his head in her lap. He does put on the sheen of a gentleman when he is gone for three years, but his nature slips out from beneath the mask. He wants, for instance, to tear out Linton’s heart and drink his blood, and Isabella pictures him eating his enemies, with his “sharp cannibal teeth.” In their final moments together, just before Catherine dies, she springs at him, and their bruising embrace ends with Catherine fainting, Heathcliff gnashing and foaming over her “like a mad dog.” Nelly, watching the fury of the scene, is convinced she is not “in the company of a creature of my own species.” After Catherine dies, Heathcliff “howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears.” He could, it is suggested, stretch himself over her grave and “die like a faithful dog.” His permanent loyalty to Catherine, his love for her shot through with a need to be mastered by her—or to master her—calls to mind a tough, unredeemed mongrel.

  As Heathcliff starts on his path of revenge, he moves past the canine and becomes a different type of creature altogether. Isabella asks, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” His particular brand of savagery turns him into a kind of monster, a supernatural being like a goblin, ghoul, afreet, imp, fiend, and vampire—all labels he gains in the novel. Gytrash—an evil spirit taking a canine or human shape—would also be appropriate, although no character calls him this. Shakespeare’s hanged wolf spirit that enters into the body of a man works even more cannily. Perhaps Emily had this passage in mind when she conjured up Heathcliff.

  Hareton, Hindley’s son mostly raised by Heathcliff, takes up Heathcliff’s canine mantel. Despite his rabbit-like name, Hareton exemplifies the best qualities of the dog. Loyal even to those who treat him with cruelty (Heathcliff and, for a time, the second Cathy), he doesn’t seem to know what it means to hold a grudge or seek revenge. His father, Hindley (whose name reminds us of a deer, but who glares “like a hungry wolf”), drunkenly throws him about and talks of cropping his ears because “it makes a dog fiercer, and I love something fierce.” The second Cathy says of him, in a surly criticism, but one that rings true: “he’s just like a dog . . . or a cart-horse.” He shares an affinity with those dogs at the Heights who, in the opening pages, show such a tigerish ferocity toward strangers, but are for the most part just doing their job and who turn pretty friendly under different circumstances. When “two hairy monsters” appear to fly at the throat of Lockwood, they pin him down and then seem “more bent on stretching their paws, and yawning, and flourishing their tails, than devouring me alive.” One Juno deigns to “move the extreme tip of her tail, in token of owning” his acquaintance. Another “snoozled its nose over-forwardly into” the younger Catherine’s face. Companionable dogs include Skulker, who, after he bites Catherine’s ankle, is fed cakes by her and lets her pinch his nose, and Skulker’s son, who is the only creature friendly to Isabella when she arrives at the Heights after a disastrous marriage with Heathcliff. Skulker’s son pushes his “nose against mine by way of salute.” When Heathcliff approaches the Grange, sure of no welcome, a large dog lying on the sunny grass raises its ears as if about to bark, but then smooths them back instead, announcing by a wag of the tail his recognition of Heathcliff.

  Not only do many different sorts of creatures in Wuthering Heights play their role—Isabella’s tame pheasant, the pony Minnie, a heap of dead rabbits on a cushion, a hive of bees—but the humans fulfill various creaturely roles, too. The first Catherine is a “little monkey,” while Isabella Linton has dove’s eyes, strays like a sheep out of the fold, and can be repugnant like a “centipede from the Indies.” Linton, the son of Heathcliff and Isabella, pules like a chicken, shares kinship with a whelp, and exits out a door “exactly as a spaniel might which suspected the person who attended on it of designing a spiteful squeeze.” Hareton not only has mongrel qualities but also takes the roles of an “infernal calf,” an “unfledged dunnock,” and an “unnatural cub.” Creatures of all sorts share in the scuffle that is life, human and nonhuman alike, Emily seems to be saying, challenging “the settled boundaries between human and animal species,” in the words of the great Emily Brontë scholar Stevie Davies. 17

  Nature’s central driving principle is destruction, Emily believed. “Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live,” she wrote in 1842, well before Darwin would publish his Origin of Species (in 1859), which helped popularize the notion that creatures only survived by being fitter than other creatures in vying for scarce resources. Some beasts, especially dogs, could at times rise above the fray, attain a touch of grace, in Emily’s philosophy. Birds also had the potential for redemption. While the starkest picture of family life in Wuthering Heights is a lapwing nest “full of little skeletons,” Catherine also describes them with words of yearning for freedom, not long before her death: “Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor.” A pair of ousels builds a nest close to Heathcliff when he stands against a tree, rooted in mourning Catherine. The second Catherine’s idea of the perfect day—of paradise—includes larks singing high overhead, and throstles, blackbirds, linnets, and cuckoos “pouring out music on every side . . . the whole world awake and wild with joy.” Birdsong also runs through many of Emily’s poems, such as the redbreast early in the morning: “wildly tender is thy music.” In an 1841 poem, she identifies with a chained bird, who is “like myself lone wholly lone.” If things were different:

  Give we the hills our equal prayer

  Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea

  We ask for nothing further here

  But our own hearts and liberty

  Yet the bird remains chained until its death, the poem implies, and the same might be said of Heathcliff. 18

  This chained bird takes us back to the real-life Brontë pets. To our modern sensibility, Keeper’s heavy-metal collar seems to speak of this time when dogs were more likely to be used for hard work and their skin for leather. The adjustable brass strip has been extended to its largest setting, in order to fit around a massive neck. Its edges turn out, to prevent chafing. A small padlock on one side locks the adjustable band into its current setting. Slaves were sometimes fitted with collars like this, and slavery, while illegal by this time in Britain, was not yet outlawed in the United States and other parts of the world. In the eighteenth century, the London silversmith Matthew Dyer specialized in “silver padlocks for blacks or dogs; collars, etc.” Keeper’s collar reminds us that dogs were property in the eyes of English law, like humans were elsewhere. Its engraving—“The Revd P. Bronte Haworth”—marks the wearer as the possession of the man of the house. As a teenage girl, Emily wouldn’t be cons
idered the actual owner of Keeper, even if she and Keeper saw it differently. Patrick paid a tax on his dogs (as he did on his windows and hair powder), which had been implemented in 1796 as a way to gather revenue, ostensibly to support the Poor Rates, but in reality to fund the Napoleonic Wars. One’s property could be seized for nonpayment of the dog tax: a tax collector was once murdered by an irate dog owner whose possessions were being taken away. The tax also worked to limit the humbler classes from legally owning dogs and using them for “unruly” practices, such as poaching on the estates of the wealthy (who wanted to kill their own game with their expensive hunting dogs) or letting them run around loose making trouble. In other words, the tax helped control a potentially rebellious people, their dogs an extension of their—sometimes righteous—lawlessness. 19

  There was nothing extraordinary about Keeper’s collar; it was an inexpensive version of what most dogs of the time wore, although leather ones were also common. For the wealthy, silver or gold dog collars signaled status. Prince Albert’s favorite greyhound Eos had an intricately decorated silver collar, and the prince also owned a Malacca walking stick that had as its handle a bulldog carved of ivory sporting a lovely gold collar—both of which Edwin Landseer depicted in his 1841 painting, Eos, A Favorite Greyhound. The thickness and height of metal collars protected the wearer’s throat from the teeth and jaws of attacking dogs or other animals. Some had spikes on the outside for this purpose, a great aid if the dog was used to hunt large game. In previous centuries, dogs hunted boars and wolves, even men, as wars in the Middle Ages saw mastiffs, alaunts, and Great Irish hounds being used as soldiers on the battlefield. 20

  Dog collars could be bought at shops that specialized in brass or metal goods, and street traders sold them around London and other major cities—the smaller ones going for sixpence and larger ones for three shillings—with matching padlocks. Some of these metal collars had soft linings on the inside, made of fabrics, paper, or leather. Mention of brass collars appeared frequently in the pet “lost and found” columns in newspapers of the time, as a way to identify the dog that had gone astray or been recovered, such as a black-and-tan English terrier lost at Cultra Station, answering to the name of Dixey. The Dog Collar Museum at Leeds Castle has metal bands of all sorts dating back to the Middle Ages. Sturdy enough to be reused, some were turned inside out so that the old inscription would be hidden against the dog’s neck; others had old engravings filed away. Pilfering one resulted in a year’s prison time for one thief. They lingered so long that treasure hunters retrieved them from the bottom of the sea: in October 1841, divers searching the wreck of the Royal George found a brass dog collar—probably originally belonging to a Newfoundland, commonly used as working dogs on ships—engraved “Thomas Little, Victory [probably the dog’s name], 1781,” and they returned it to a relative. Another collar, pulled in 2005 from the HMS Swift, which sank in 1770 off the coast of Argentina, had belonged to one “I. Child in North Street Poplar Middlesex.” 21

  Many of these metal dog collars had engraved inscriptions that recorded and commemorated events and relationships. Silver ones awarded to greyhounds that won coursing stakes or to bulldogs for top prizes in pedigree competitions noted these facts in lengthy inscriptions that included the dogs’ and the owners’ names, as well as the place and dates of the shows. One early-nineteenth-century silver presentation collar had three separate inscriptions, plus scenes of bear baiting, bull baiting, and two cocks fighting. An inscription on the inside stated, “Bulldog Champion collar for length of pedigree founded by The Hon’ble Arthur Wellesley [Charlotte’s hero, who would become the Duke of Wellington], given as first prize at the bulldog breeding show.” Two later inscriptions added on the outside of the collar recorded it being given, first “From Frank Redmond to Harry Brown Esq.” and then “To Captain W. H. Patten-Saunders K.C.G.,” presumably a gift from Brown. Other collars were awarded to dogs who labored on behalf of charities, usually by being led around cities wearing charity boxes attached to their collars or strapped around their middles. Such a collar was presented to a dog called Wimbledon Jack, “for his work in the Cause of Charity,” who, after his death, was stuffed and displayed in a glass case at Wimbledon Station. 22

  Some collars evoked the characters of certain dogs and their jolly owners, such as a small brass one that declares, “Stop me not but let me jog for i am S. Oliver’s Dog, Bicknell.” Alexander Pope started something of a fad when he gave a puppy, the offspring of his Great Dane Bounce, to Frederick, Prince of Wales in the 1730s, with a collar saying, “I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew / Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?” This “Whose dog are you?” appeared on a number of later collars, usually bragging about the noble birth of the dogs’ owners, but also a poignant reminder to the reader of the collar of the obvious fact that the dogs themselves cared nothing about human notions of status and class. (Of course, the inscriptions also carried a second meaning for the readers of the collars, reminding them that they were themselves “dogs” with “masters” that they must serve.) Numerous metal collars once worn by the dogs of the famous—like Keeper’s—still exist today, such as Lord Nelson’s silver collar for his dog Nileus. A leather one that belonged to Dickens has a brass plaque stating, “C. Dickens Esq. / Gad’s Hill Place / Higham.” Robert Burns, who wrote a poem in which the dog of a wealthy man has a “Locked, letter’d, braw brass collar,” had a favorite collie whose collar said, “Robert Burns, Poet.” Charlotte wrote in an early story of an “enormous dog” that belonged to the “body snatcher” Doctor Hume Badey (of the magical macerating tub) with an iron collar that says, “Surgeon. A bloody rascal.” Keeper’s collar is relatively mute in comparison. 23

  Another Brontë dog collar (now missing) that looks like it was made of leather belonged to Grasper. Little is known about this terrier of some sort who preceded Keeper. Emily immortalized him in the expressive pencil portrait she did in January 1834 (pictured here). An inscribed plaque on his collar is drawn so as to be illegible (a form of asemic writing). A few years after Keeper’s appearance came Anne’s Flossy. His smaller collar has the same inscription as Keeper’s. It may have been purchased by Emily in 1846 using money she inherited from Aunt Branwell, since she records in an account booklet, “collar for F,” one shilling, six pence. Its brass has a high shine, while Keeper’s has scuffs, dents, and tears as if from numerous scuffles and adventures. Many biographers call Flossy a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, which is unlikely given his appearance in the watercolors Anne and Emily made of him, in which he looks exactly like an English springer spaniel, called in the early nineteenth century a springing spaniel—no toy, but rather an extended-legged gun dog with a longish, straight snout and curls on his back. Hunters cross-bred and created all sorts of spaniel breeds in early-nineteenth-century England, some of which have now disappeared, and others, like the Cavalier, were not developed until after the 1840s. 24

  Other pets filled up the Brontë household: there was Dick the canary; the cats “little, black Tom” and Tiger; and two geese called Victoria and Adelaide (after the queen and her aunt). 25 It wasn’t only Grasper who had his portrait drawn. Branwell made a pencil profile of a sleeping cat, for instance, probably a house feline. Emily drew a portrait of Nero, her merlin hawk that she had found wounded on the moors and had nursed back to health, and a now-missing picture that included Keeper, Flossy, and the cat Tiger. Keeper got his own watercolor in 1838, a sleepy one where we see him, curiously, without his collar (see photograph). As did Flossy, who gambled along or looked peacefully out the window (usually with his collar on) in Emily’s and Anne’s watercolors. We find Flossy doing things that must have been forbidden, like sleeping on Emily’s bed, while she sat on her stool writing, Keeper on the rug close by, his head resting on his paws.

  A kinship with animals of all sorts seemed to run in the blood of the Brontë clan. Local creatures provided another favorite subject to draw and paint, sometimes copied from prints or illustrated books, other times �
�from life.” The Brontë siblings adored especially their two volumes of Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds, and all four of them drew versions of the animals (and vignettes with people) depicted in them. Charlotte did a watercolor copy of “The Mountain Sparrow,” Branwell of the “Gos Hawk,” and Anne a pencil sketch of some magpies standing on a rock. In one volume, Emily noticed the bird species that lived on their moors, and these are the ones she duplicated, in delicate pencil strokes: “The Winchat” and the “Ring ouzel.” In the scene of reading that opens Jane Eyre, it is Bewick’s history that Jane has in her lap and that takes her off into a fantasy world. Branwell wrote an essay admiring Bewick, whose “quiet poetry” teaches one, he felt, to muse on the simple world of nature “where every changing cloud, or opening leaf, or mossy stone, or fleeting wave, may yield something of pleasure,” may even have “the greatest power or pathos.” 26

  Branwell doesn’t seem to have had a dog, unless Grasper belonged to him. His lack of canine companionship appears odd, especially since he owned guns and probably hunted game—like rabbits and red grouse—on the moors, an activity usually done with bird dogs, such as setters, pointers, or spaniels like Flossy. He even made an oil painting of himself with a rifle in the crook of his arm, standing with his sisters in front of dead birds, books, and papers piled on a table. Perhaps Branwell’s lack of a dog was a result of his knowledge that he must make a living away from home and, as the only son, eventually support his sisters. He was dismissed from the tutoring job in the Lake District in 1840 for unknown reasons, although some sort of bad behavior is speculated, drinking perhaps, or even impregnating a local woman. Within a few months, he had found a completely different type of position, working as a clerk on the new Leeds-Manchester Railway, in Sowerby Bridge, a town close to Halifax. In 1841, while on this job, Branwell composed a poem about a popular painting by Edwin Landseer, which he must have seen reproduced in a book or magazine, called Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner. It depicts a collie keeping watch at twilight over his master’s coffin. Branwell contrasts the human mourners, who show only the “form” of grief, with the “low heart broken whine” of the collie, who spends “long hours to pine / For him if love had power thy love could save.” The dog has an emotional genuineness missing in humanity. Moved by the painting of canine fidelity in the face of death, Branwell may have been remembering the deaths in his own family. 27