Truly the testimony of Charlotte Brontë's child-phantom were alone the sign-manual that she and none other wrote Wuthering Heights.
CHAPTER VII.
THE ORIGINALS OF GIMMERTON, GIMMERDEN, GIMMERTON KIRK AND CHAPEL, PENISTON CRAGS, THE FAIRY CAVE, ETC., IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND OF THE FAIRY CAVE AND THE FAIRY JANET IN "JANE EYRE."
The uncommon stress Charlotte Brontë has laid upon the outlandishness of the Wuthering Heights country and its solitudes assuredly would have been absent from that work had she drawn her background from the comparatively characterless Haworth moors on the skirts of manufacturing towns, and not from impressions created in her mind by Montagu's description in his Gleanings in Craven of the wildest and weirdest scenery in Yorkshire. There has been a noticeable tendency on the part of town-bred, and also of romantic, biographers to be awed by the ordinary moorland surroundings of Haworth, and to associate with them all the wildness of the Craven or Scottish Highlands, though Miss Mary Robinson, whose work entitled Emily Brontë is in effect an "appreciation" of Wuthering Heights, says frankly regarding the house standing beyond the street on the summit of Haworth Hill, shown as the original of Wuthering Heights, that to her thinking "this fine old farm of the Sowdens is far too near the mills of Haworth to represent the God-forsaken, lonely house." But of course an author can place a given abode against any background. Wuthering Heights has been connected by some people with a locality called Withins—how wrongly a reference to the origin of Gimmerton and Gimmerden alone shows. The primary origin of the name and title of "Wuthering Heights" I reveal in the final chapter on "The Recoil."
The following passage from Wuthering Heights tells that Charlotte Brontë's imagination was enjoying the latitude of a half-realized, suggested background. It reads just like the traveller Montagu with his horse, attendant servant on horseback, roadside inns, hostlers, and description of country. But the connection of Montagu with Lockwood of Wuthering Heights we have already seen in the early chapters of The Key to the Brontë Works:—
1802—This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the North, and on my journey ... I unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. The hostler at a roadside public-house was holding a pail of water to refresh my horses when a cart of very green oats ... passed by, and he remarked—
"Yon's frough Gimmerton, nah! They're allus three wick after other folk wi' ther harvest."
"Gimmerton?" I repeated; my residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy. "Ah, I know. How far is it from this?"