Heathcliff's ethnicity is a mystery: all we know for certain in the novel is that he was rescued from the streets of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw - but that is it. Who was Heathcliff? The enigma of Heathcliff's birth origins are all part of the enduring fascination with Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff is described in many different ways by the characters of the Wuthering Heights: old Mr Earnshaw calls him both 'a gift of God' and 'dark almost as if it came from the devil'; Mrs Earnshaw rejects him as a 'gypsy brat' ; Mr Linton thinks he is 'little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway' ; while Nelly consoles him with the thought that his father might be 'the Emperor of China and your mother an Indian queen' but also says to him, 'If you were a regular black ...'. Through these descriptions, Brontë cleverly implies that Heathcliff was not a white Anglo Saxon child of the streets of Liverpool but was 'foreign', referring to his 'otherness', his 'dark hair and dusky skin'. She also shows how he is subjected to discriminatory, degrading and abusive treatment by others - all except Cathy . As Steph Reed writes in The Literature Blog (2018), 'Throughout the novel, Heathcliff is repeatedly collocated with notions of racial inferiority; he is frequently compared to darkness and criminality'.
When we first encounter Heathcliff, Nelly comments that, 'I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child... it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.' From this we can surmise that his mother tongue is not English, though this still leaves open numerous options as to his real origins. We can narrow this down by better understanding the context of Liverpool at the time.
Wuthering Heights is set in Yorkshire and the action of the novel takes place from 1801 to 1802 with the retrospective plot events taking place over the previous 30 years. During this period, Liverpool, where Heathcliff was found, was at the heart of Britain's links with the slave trade, controlling over 60 per cent of British and over 40 per cent of Europe's slave trade. Profits from Liverpool's involvement in the slave trade financed urban and industrial development throughout the North West and indeed, across England.
The Brontë sisters' home may have been nearly a hundred miles away from Liverpool, but their school, Clergy Daughters School, was just a few miles from the Dentdale home of a notorious slave trading family, the Sills, who worked more than 30 enslaved Africans on the grounds of their estate. Emily Brontë would have been aware of the debates and discussions around the subject of abolition of slavery and certainly aware of the wealth of the local sugar barons. Heathcliff can certainly be read as someone affected by the dehumanisation of the slave trade, and his claiming of the house and land can even be seen as an act of revenge for the colonial plunder of land and for Britain treating human beings as property.
Liverpool's involvement in the British Empire had links closer to home as well. When Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, the potato famine in Ireland was surging. Starving, and seeking food and shelter, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants came to Liverpool. It is thought that in just five months in 1847, the population of Liverpool doubled as a result of immigration from Ireland. Most Irish immigrants lived in atrocious conditions, with 60,000 catching typhus and 40,000 suffering from dysentery in just the single year of 1847.
The newly arrived Irish met a hostile reception in Liverpool and were harshly treated and demonised- unfairly blamed for taking English jobs and spreading disease. If Bronte intended Heathcliff to be the child of an Irish immigrant abandoned on the streets of Liverpool, this scapegoating and xenophobia would make sense of the distrust and bigotry he met in his life.
Another possible reason that Heathcliff could have found himself in Liverpool, is because he may have been at sea or related in some ways to the lascars in the merchant navy. 'Lascars' first began to be employed in small numbers from the 17th century by the East India Company, which was founded by Royal Charter to increase trade with India. Although the term 'lascar' was used for almost all non-European sailors, including Arab, Cypriot, Chinese and East African sailors, the majority of 'lascars' came from the Indian subcontinent, mainly from the coastal areas of Gujarat, Malabar and Bengal, with Bombay and Calcutta being major ports for their recruitment. Lascars worked in every role from being able seamen to stoking furnaces, from being cooks, storekeepers or on-board butchers to being first mates (known as 'serangs').
From the early 19th century it is estimated that at least 1,000 lascars visited Britain every year and this rose to over 10,000 a year by the end of the century. Many lascars would be temporarily stranded, often-for months at a time over winter, as they waited for their next opportunity to work. The shipping companies assumed no responsibility for them during these periods and distressed lascars were often left homeless, wandering the streets - becoming known as 'the black poor'. Christian missionary societies were often the only source of help.
Moreover, low pay, appalling conditions and abusive treatment on many of the ships led some lascars to desert or jump ship in Britain, settling in run-down port areas such as Liverpool, mixing freely with the local population and sometimes marrying and starting families with English and Irish working-class women, creating some of the first multi-racial communities. Heathcliff could have been an unwanted or abandoned child from such a relationship. But he could also have been a lascar cabin boy (who were sometimes as young as eight), who jumped ship in Liverpool. He may even have been a stowaway who smuggled on board a ship in a port somewhere in the Empire and who was thrown off in Liverpool.
Liverpool was so linked with the British Empire in the late 18th century, that Heathcliff's origins are likely to always be out of reach. But that is perhaps the point. Emily Brontë keeps Heathcliff's origins deliberately mysterious but plants enough seeds for readers to imagine him as being connected to the transatlantic slave trade or lascars in the merchant navy or refugees from the Irish famine. In one way or another he is a product of the British Empire. He may be of unknown birth, but he represents someone whose origins are connected to a colonised under-class, defined in part by the colour of their skin, who are consistently 'othered' by white British society. The power of his character comes from the universality of his backstory combined with the enigma or his origins.