Fascinated by street urchins

First of all, we bring proof that we were right yesterday about our suspicions regarding a supposedly old Wuthering Heights trailer shown on New Zealand's TV One. The New Zealand Herald rectifies:

Wuthering Heights, which screened on TV One on Sunday, was made this year, not in 1998 as suggested in yesterday's first edition of the Herald by the Westmere reader, who has erred for the first time. (Ana Samways)

That said - and don't think it has gone to our heads - we feel we must right other wrongs today. The first one is particularly worrying. It comes from the City of Liverpool website and it announces a forthcoming talk:

What have Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, William Blake and Samuel Coleridge all got in common?
Some of their most famous works were inspired by Liverpool.
On Friday (19 June) local historian Frank Carlyle will host a special evening at St George's Hall dedicated to the history of Liverpool, its famous literary visitors who have spent time here and how it influenced their work.
His fascinating stories include how Charlotte and Emily Bronte visited the city many times and were so fascinated by street urchins, at the beginning of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is found living in Liverpool, starving and homeless.

We sincerely hope Mr Carlyle reads our blog (we told you it hadn't gone to our heads!) or checks his sources before making quite a blunder. Fascination? Well, Mr Earnshaw does bring Heathcliff back from a trip to Liverpool, but that's about all, so we wouldn't quite call it 'fascination'. And as for Charlotte and Emily visiting Liverpool 'many times' - erm - actually they didn't - not once. Branwell did once though. Soon after being dismissed from Thorp Green, his father sent him there (and the north of Wales) for a few days in the company of John Brown. As far as we can recall, that's all there is to the Liverpool-Brontë connection.

EDIT (20 June, 2009): The Liverpool Daily News mentions this talk but only quotes the following statement:

He talked about how Charlotte and Emily Bronte were so fascinated by the street urchins that in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is found living in Liverpool, starving and homeless.

We sure hope Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William Blake and Samuel Coleridge provide more material or Mr Carlyle has a real gift for story-telling, else the talk is going to be quite short.

A Crosswalk blog identifies wrongly - we think - the reasons why religious zealots disliked Jane Eyre when it was first published.

Making matters worse, at times this privileged order was sanctioned by the church as being part of God’s divine providence. For example, Charlotte Bronte was attacked by church people as godless and anti-Christian because in Jane Eyre she had undermined the God-given social order of her time. How? By the end of the novel she had allowed a mere governess to marry the lord of the manor. For tradition lovers this was a scandal of biblical proportions—which is amusing, given Jesus’ aforementioned unmannerly disregard for convention. (Paul Coughlin)

The subject is ample and up for debate, but we always thought that - more importantly - Rochester's behaviour and the fact that Jane briefly doubts whether to become the mistress of a married man as well as the depictions of church men such as Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers bore the brunt of the religious critiques.

Two articles on summer reads rejoice at the fact that more than just classics such as the Brontës are starting to infiltrate the lists: The Miami Herald and Publishers' Weekly. And an article on Oprah.com briefly mentions reading Jane Eyre as a child.

Infinito Particular - in Portuguese - has watched Wuthering Heights 1992.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights