More on Ravens and Wuthering Heights
Inquiring minds might want to know: ARE there any ravens in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights? No, they aren’t mentioned–although they certainly suit its windswept, craggy wildness. They do appear in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, however.
Jane observes the “rookery” on Thornfield Hall–that is, the nesting place of corvids, any bird in the crow family. Later, when she has traveled as far as she can afford from Thornfield by coach and is wandering the moors in desperation, she thinks:
Top Withens, the isolated farmhouse believed to have been the model for Wuthering Heights
‘And far better that crows and ravens—if any ravens there be in these regions—should pick
my flesh from my bones, than that they should be prisoned in a workhouse coffin and moulder in a pauper’s grave.’
Like Dickens in Oliver Twist, Bronte takes for granted that a workhouse will lead to a pauper’s death, a terrible death worse than a free death outside alone in nature. So Jane decides to sleep on the moors.
It is interesting that Charlotte Bronte takes the presence of crows for granted, but wonders about ravens. Were there ravens in Yorkshire in the 19th century? Yes. A little research reveals that they are birds of moors and hillsides in northern England, although Victorian gamekeepers drove them away because they prey on newly fledged chicks.
So it is possible that the Bronte sisters saw them infrequently or not at all around Haworth. But ravens are making a big comeback in England nowadays. They are even spotted in the lowland areas.
As they are now at Wellesley College. Maybe in a few years we’ll have a whole “rookery” of them!