Sutcliffe: Lonesome Heights

Sutcliffe's Pennines: a compressed map of the pass west of Haworth

1] = Oldfield and Oldfield Farm

2] = Laverack Hall

3] = Height Laithe Farm

4] = Scar Top and Scartop Hall

Halliwell Sutcliffe

Lonesome Heights

London, Ward Locke & Co, 1991 [1917]

Statue of Richard Oastler, Northgate/Rawson Road, Bradford.

An historical figure who becomes one of the heroes of Sutcliffe’s fiction.

Social and Literary Placing

John Wordsworth politely remarks of A Man of the Moors that ‘The time of the novel is not altogether clear from the text’ (http://www.users.waitrose.com/~jbwords/hsbib.html).  This is equally true of Lonesome Heights.  The confusion begins, as it did in The Strength of the Hills, with the frontispiece.  In The Strength of the Hills the artist placed the story in the century preceding the events of the novel; in Lonesome Heights the frontispiece depicts the rider as dressed in riding gear that would have suited 1917; bowler hat, tie and jodhpurs.   The plot concerns Richard Oastler’s campaign against children working in mills leading to the passing of what is simply called ‘the Bill’ (XIX.237).  This makes it seem as if Oastler ran one campaign that led to success, instead of having to continue the struggle for more than a decade, facing vicissitudes such as passing of the Allthorpe Act of 1833 or imprisonment for debt in 1840 and agitation against the new Poor Law.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Oastler)   None of these are mentioned; the only indication in the text that ‘the Bill’ is what will become the 1847 Factory Act (https://spartacus-educational.com/IRoastler.htm) is a reference to ‘Parson Bronte’s lass’ who has produced a book with a ‘Rev Joseph Brandraham’ in it (XVIII.216).  This seems a garbled version of ‘Jabes Branderham’, briefly referred to in Wuthering Heights in chapter III (Wuthering Heights, London, Everyman’s 1972, III. 19).    However Wuthering Heights was published in 1847.  As the Factory Act has not yet passed but is ‘safe’ (XIX.237) chapter XIX seems to be to be taking place in 1846, before Wuthering Heights is published.   The date is further complicated by the fact that it was not until 1848 that Charlotte publicly revealed that the three ‘Bells’, the pseudonym chosen by the sisters, were actually the daughters of Parson Bronte.    

Haworth parsonage

Despite this late date, Yorkshire seems as unpoliced as it was in the 1780s.    Lonesome Heights does not even have the comic constable ‘Billy Puff’, who is more like a village watchman, featured in The Strength of the Hills.  Readers of Lonesome Heights would not realise that the London Metropolitan police had been founded in 1829 and police forces had been set up in all the major West Riding towns between 1833 and 1835( https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/westyorkpolice/ ).   Chapter XVI looks as if it is set in 1746 not 1846, for there are still highwaymen robbing coaches on Hampsted Heath and Royd and Jasper carry pistols when they traverse the heath.   The weapons deter ‘The ruffler who had held up the coach last night’ (XVI.185).   For some reason they do not use the Great North Road to travel back to Yorkshire but contrive to arrive in the Marshcotes (Haworth) region via  Lancashire, crossing Blackstone Edge with the ‘lively hope’ that they should ‘happen on a couple of the highwaymen who still kept the old tradition’, (XVI.190-191).   Sutcliffe may have George Lyon in mind for his Lancashire highwayman.   Wikipedia claims that he was the last highwayman hanged in England, executed in Lancaster in April 1815, which is still 31 years earlier than the preparation of the Factory Act  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highwaymen).  However, as this site shows Lyon and his accomplices were actually executed ‘for an offence of burglary at Westwood Hall, Ince, Wigan’ and the highwayman legends were invented later, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/lancashire/content/articles/2008/05/30/history_michael_graves.shtml). Here Sutcliffe seems to be engaging with but also rejecting the Victorian fascination with the highwayman, epitomised by the transformation of Dick Turpin.   Turpin was changed from a brutal part of a burglary gang into a gallant highway man by William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Rookwood (1834) and a cult of Dick Turpin artefacts arose.   The most widespread may be the Dick Turpin ceramic figurine that found its way onto the mantle pieces of many respectable middle-class families. 

Dick Turpin figurine.

Lonesome Heights is a strange book to publish during WWI.  The text ignores the war and seeks to attract readers wanting to be reassured by the idea of continuity at a time of breaking of nations.   This is introduced by the fire that is never allowed to go out in Squire Holt’s ‘Moorseats’ (I.26).   This undying flame links the hall to sacred sites such as the temple of Vesta in ancient Rome, though Sutcliffe was probably familiar with a Yorkshire equivalent.   The fire at the Saltersgate Inn was supposed have been kept alight since 1730s until the inn closed in 2007 (http://www.hidden-teesside.co.uk/2017/01/06/saltersgate-inn-the-fire-that-never-goes-out/)  The building has since been demolished (https://www.whitbygazette.co.uk/news/saltersgate-inn-is-demolished-to-make-way-for-cafe-1-9347845)

 Less originally, continuity is provided by the recurrence of familiar Sutcliffe themes to the extent that the text appears like a collage of Mistress Barbara Cunliffe and The Strength of the Hills.   The tension between the Gothic and the realistic is resolved in favour of the gothic.  It has the ‘ghostly huntsman’ that Mistress Barbara Cunliffe associated with Squire Cunliffe of Wycoller, mentions ‘the Barguest’ (V.63), adds the genuine Yorkshire superstition of ‘Gabriel’s Ratchets’ (geese as the souls of unbaptised children IX.106) and invents a ghostly shepherd to wander through the text.  The hunchback Robbie is the equivalent of the ‘deformed’ Jabe of the Barns in The Strength of the Hills and Robbie adds to the Gothic strain of the book by being given ‘second sight’.  Where the Squire of The Strength of the Hills complains that all the old beliefs are gone and ‘the bairns do not see fairies,’ (III.44); Robbie does, calling them ‘the Green People’ (VI.79).   In The Strength of the Hills Eller Beck Mead, looks ‘like fairy land ‘(IV.78) but there is no suggestion that fairies live there, especially after Roger’s mill is built.   Robbie’s ‘Green People’ suffer no similar intrusion.    Lonesome Heights has a heroine beloved since childhood but separated from the hero by a mixture of snobbery and misunderstanding, it has attacks on mills (chapter IV and XIV) and a mill owner (Murgatroyd) who is haunted by the ghost of a child in the same way that Ephraim Booth was in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe.   Murgatroyd complains ‘I cannot shake the wee, soft devil off,’ (XIV.163).

Factory children

Details copied from George Walker, The Costumes of Yorkshire, Plate 36, 1814

The text is simultaneously a close tribute to the Brontes.  It has the mill siege of Charlotte’s Shirley, a telepathic bond between two people, in this case brothers not lovers, that has featured in Jane Eyre and, yet again, the ‘Gytrash’ of Jane Eyre.   Beyond these resemblances Lonesome Heights is especially close to Wuthering Heights.   Emily’s title is evoked by Sutcliffe’s; they are only one word different; and Murgatroyd’s experience of a child ghost is similar to that of Lockwood in chapter III.   The ghost is similar but diminished.  Instead of a frighteningly physical being who is strong enough to grasp Lockwood’s hand and keep hold as he tries ‘shaking the creature off’ and is alive enough to bleed when ‘rubbed’ on the ‘broken pain’ ‘till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes’ (Wuthering Heights, III.20) Sutcliffe’s ghost is merely an icy presence: ‘her hand lay cold in his’ (XIV.163).    Sutcliffe’s heroes are equally simplified.   Charlotte and Emily deconstruct as much as maintain the myth of the desirable, strong, amoral Byronic man whilst Sutcliffe’s males are merely expected to be ‘masterful’ (The Strength of the Hills XVIII.307).     The closest Sutcliffe gets in Lonesome Heights to the transgressive, taboo-breaking Heathcliff is the younger twin Dick.   Dick is a poacher, an offence always treated as manly and romantic in Sutcliffe and gets the girl he loves pregnant, before going as a sailor, not knowing of her condition.    This is nothing compared to Heathcliff’s physical and mental abuse of animals and children and his obsession with Cathy that leads to a necrophiliac unearthing.    The unexpected word Sutcliffe uses to describe Dick’s personality throughout the text is ‘random’: ‘this random brother of his’ (II.25), a word that would never be used about Heathcliff.    

An isolated farmhouse csalled ‘Old Snap’ near Wycoller looks like the Nutter’s type of farm.

Jasper has earned the right to Hazel because of the hard work he has put into reclaiming intake land (land once prepared for grazing but now being taken over by heather).  This theme has been used by Sutcliffe in the 1904 Through Sorrow’s Gate, where Griff Lomax works the land as part of his repentance for deeds done in the 1897 novel A Man of the Moors.  In Lonesome Heights the clearing of intake land is more complex.  It represents the resumption of care for the land that the Squire has neglected.  Although the spectral shepherd and his ghost flock are to be taken as genuine supernatural phenomena, they are not sinister but appear to be an emanation of the conscience of those who own the land.   The message is the same one as in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe and The Strength of the Hills; the land is the source of true wealth; agriculture sustains where machinery destroys.  As in The Strength of the Hills a water source is desired by a mill owner but in Lonesome Heights Jasper manages to preserve ‘Cringle Water’ untouched, whereas Roger is forced to exploit water power and build his own mill in the earlier novel.   In Lonesome Heights the economics is even more unrealistic than in The Strength of the Hills.  In the earlier novel the need for heather to sustain gamebirds and the letting of the shooting rights of the moors by Roger is shown as a valuable asset.  Here the shooting of birds is shown as self-indulgence; in chapter XVII Jasper shoots 20 grouse and over 6 ducks.

Intake land near Wycoller.

Land taken in from the moors and cultivated.  Walling is often part of the process; walling asserts ownership.

Jasper’s act is in response to the rumours about him and Jess, rumours that prevent his courtship of Hazel.     The displacement of sexual desire into shooting is part of a subtext of the novel that is more in touch with WWI and with the emerging ideas of Freud.   Murgatroyd’s mill is described as ‘wife and all-in-all’ to him (IV.52).   The ‘quiet housewives’ of Consett turn into violent furies who want to watch men burn alive or die jumping onto cobblestones.   This subtext is at odds with a main text that regards violence as a healthy, masculine sport, whether it involved shooting birds or fighting other men.   In this vein a mill strike, as in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe and The Strength of the Hills is quelled by force.  Considering that ‘cudgels’ are used (IV.51), the fighting is surprisingly bloodless.  It  appears to be merely a violent game based on the ‘feud’ (IV.39) between the men of the moors and Consett: ‘the Squire took wounds and gave them,’ (IV.51).   Inadvertently Sutcliffe’s nostalgia for the supposed stability of feudalism uncovers the word disruptive word ‘feud’.   Both words share the same root and are part of the same concept constellation.   As in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley the confrontation at the mill becomes a matter of masculine assertion.  However as the men fight, some of the Consett wives set fire to the mill: ‘”It will make a bonny fire,” laughed one of them, ‘(IV.50).    They are no longer ‘quiet housewives’, the suffering of their children has driven them to utter ‘the wild beast cries of women who have forgotten womanhood,’ (IV.50).   This seems to be done quite self-consciously; one of them, Lucy, says ‘there’s times when the wild-cat comes to a body,’ (IV.50).  Despite their fury, they are quelled by admiration for manhood.  When the Squire sees the fire he suddenly decides ‘it was time again for law and order,’ and he organises a bucket line to save the mill (IV.52).  The women’s ‘storm of protest’ is ‘silenced’ when one of them, Tabitha, observes: ‘” they shape very like men, the Squire and Murgatroyd; and happen we were hasty-like,’’ (IV.52), bringing the event to an unintendedly comic climax.    The progress of WWI up to 1916 shows how wishful Sutcliffe’s treatment of violence is.  Despite the text having more dark undercurrents than Sutcliffe’s pre-war books, its plot is still tied to Sutcliffe’s pre-war conviction that ‘law and order’ can be easily restored and is not compromised by the violence used to restore order.

A small Mill on the River Worth in Keighley.

Typical of the small mills in the area. 

 Unlike Phyllis Bentley who follows the industrial struggle from the 1790s to the 1960s, Sutcliffe gives the impression that the only social problem caused by the mills was the employment of children and this problem ceased thanks to Oastler and his fictional friends .  Mistress Barbara Cunliffe showed a manufacturer return to the land and become a squire, Lonesome Heights goes further.  The heroes, the Squire and his heir Jasper seem to be free of the economic pressure that causes their counterparts in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe and The Strength of the Hills to become manufacturers.   This leads to a situation in which Oastler can say: ‘Machinery is of yesterday,’ (XVIII.239).  It is a strange conclusion to come to in 1917 when thousands of soldiers and civilians were being killed by products of the industrialised West including unprecedented inventions such as the submarine and the aeroplane.

Locations

Bouldsworth Hill, where Dick goes poaching, is

Boulsworth Hill

The boggy nature of Boulsworth Hill, that Sutcliffe frequently mentions, is evident in this photo.

Bride-Kirk: (XIII.150-1) appears to be invented or perhaps inspired by Heptonstall Old Church. The legend of the dead bride may be adapted from the woman in black, one of the ghosts that supposedly haunts Wycoller. 

Heptonstall Old Church

Consett   is probably Keighley.  This is the only town close to the Haworth district with mills and a ‘grey old kirk’ (IX.101).  The ‘Angel Tavern’ ‘hard by the church’ (IX.101) is in the same place as ‘The Lord Rodney’ that stands next to Keighley Parish Church.

Lord Rodney pub, Keighley

Distance seems to have been compressed by the novel

Cringle Water appears to be near Wycoller

Smithy Clough might be a possibility

Cringle Dene

May be based on Dean Clough ;The nearest hamlet is Oldfield.

Moorseats is set in ‘leagues of untamed moorland’(I.6) but when the Squire is buried, the churchyard is described as ‘three miles’ away (XI.127).   Three miles up the Worth valley does not lead to ‘untamed moorland’ and the halls of the valley avoid the exposed heights.    At the other end of the valley, near Wycoller, are some more exposed hall-like farms, such as this one.

Combe House

Wycoller is not named but it is a site Sutcliffe uses in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe and would fit the description of the ‘ruined hall’ glimpsed by the squire (IV.40).

Wycoller Hall

Sutcliffe names unrecorded by OS include ‘Daft Lad’s Wood’ (V.63), ‘Fiddler’s Hollow’ (VII.89), and  ‘Elvie’s Beck’ (VI.76) , though this may be suggested by ‘Fairey Field Dyke’ near Keighley Moor Reservoir.  Other evocative place names on the hills, such as ‘Great Wolf Stones’ or ‘The Wage of Crow Hill’ seem not to have caught his imagination.  

On the other hand there are plenty of large farms, often called 'halls' to inspire the idea of ‘Lonesome Heights’ 

Height Laithe Farm. 

‘Height Laithe Farm’ overlooking Wycoller has ‘Height’ in its name.