“A wild, wick slip she was …”

Kaya Scodelario as Catherine Earnshaw and James Howson as Heathcliff in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights.

I am supposed to be working on some thematic revision units for Romeo and Juliet but a coffee-time LRB article pulled me back to Wuthering Heights and - once again - to Nelly Dean.

In ‘Heathcliff Redounding’, David Trotter writes beautifully about Emily Brontë’s use of punctuation to create rhythm in her prose. In particular, Trotter draws attention to the construction of Nelly’s distinctive narrative style in paragraphs internally directed by strategic semi-colons. This precise, perceptive micro-analysis sent me straight back to my most-used edition of the novel, marked STAFF COPY 2003, and full of my teaching notes and sun-bleached post-its from that year’s work.

I went directly to Chapter 4 and the transition from Lockwood’s narrative to Nelly’s story, noticing how the conversation between them shifts into Nelly’s sustained memories of growing up alongside the youngsters at the farmhouse known as Wuthering Heights: “I got used to playing with the children - I ran errands too, and helped to make hay, and hung about the farm ready for anything that anybody would set me to.” As Nelly explains to Lockwood, her mother “nursed Mr Hindley Earnshaw”, a phrase that could mean wet-nursing or nannying or both, and it seems that Mrs Dean senior maintained her relationship with the family as the little Earnshaws grew up.

Nelly’s farm-orientated childhood at Wuthering Heights does not, however, explain her sophisticated vocabulary and complex sentence construction. While her fellow servant Joseph is characterised by his strong Yorkshire accent and dialect, Nelly narrates in a manner that belies her practical upbringing. As an example, she describes Edgar Linton’s response to his sister’s infatuation with Heathcliff with the comment, “He would have recoiled still more had he been aware that her attachment rose unsolicited, and was bestowed where it awakened no reciprocation of sentiment …”

Although this style of expression might have suited the narrative expectations of a Victorian reader, Brontë is compelled to justify the discrepancy between Nelly’s childhood and her narrative style in order to make her novel credible. She does this by having Lockwood question Nelly’s storytelling at the end of Chapter 7: “Excepting a few provincialisms of slight consequence, you have no marks of the manners that I am habituated to consider as peculiar to your class.” Lockwood’s patronising manner and rigid social judgement always make me flinch (as they are intended to) but he does have a point, as Nelly acknowledges in her reply:

“I have read more than you would fancy, Mr Lockwood. You could not open a book in this library that I have not looked into, and got something out of also, unless it be that range of Greek and Latin, and that of French - and those I know one from another: it is as much as you can expect of a poor man’s daughter.”

Here, Nelly identifies herself as an auto-didact and defends the limits of her learning, leaving readers to understand that her narrative style is the result of self-directed reading and - presumably - the absorption of literary vocabulary and syntax. Given the dominance of Nelly’s formal language, I encourage students to keep notes of Nelly’s “few provincialisms” because these anchor her narrative in lived experience rather than in the style that she has adopted osmotically from the Linton’s library at Thrushcross Grange.

Perhaps my favourite of Nelly’s “provincialisms” is her description of Catherine Earnshaw as the young girl who became deeply connected to the ‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ that her father brought home from Liverpool. In Chapter 5, Nelly recalls how Catherine ‘had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener a day … A wild, wick slip she was - but she had the bonniest eye, and the sweetest smile … and I believe she meant no harm.”

I have often explained the etymology of this description to students, telling them that ‘slip’ probably originates from the Germanic word for a young shoot or twig used for grafting that evolved to describe a ‘young person of small build.’ ‘Bonny’ is easier to define for students familiar with French because it is so clearly related to ‘good’ (bon) and therefore to images of moral and physical attractiveness. And for the first twenty years of teaching Wuthering Heights, I connected ‘wick’ to the adjective ‘wicked’ as an indication of Catherine’s mischief. Then I worked on a Cumbrian farm during calving season and everything changed.

The first time that I heard ‘wick’ used in conversation, I spun round and gazed at Farmer Ian until he stopped talking - midsentence - in confusion. It was the summer of 2021 and we were in the middle of the farmyard. Ian was wearing a blood-spattered t-shirt and his waterproof calving trousers, and I was carrying a bucket of water for a recently delivered cow.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Say that again,” I requested.

“What?”

“The bit about the newborn calf.”

“Oh. I just said that it’s fine. A wick calf.”

“What is a wick calf?”

“You know: wick.”

“No, I don’t know. What does wick mean?”

By this point, I was hopping from foot to foot in excitement and Ian was clearly beginning to wonder how fast he might be able to source a new farm hand.

“Wick is a good calf. Easy. Straight up on its feet and strong.”

This definition of ‘wick’ was a revelation to me and I still smile when I hear it during calving season. Partly, of course, this is because I now associate the word with reassurance: a wick calf usually has a straightforward birth; it is soon licked clean and warm by its mum, and it quickly finds her udder for colostrum. When I asked Ian for the opposite of wick he frowned at my stupidity, “Dead, of course.”

In fact, there are lots of linguistic possibilities for a non-wick calf and I have looked after wobbly examples of these antonyms. As a ‘non-thriver’, Tiny Pink (2021) was first rejected by her mum and then she struggled to feed from her adoptive mother. Things didn’t improve when I fed her from a bucket. Eventually, even standing became too much for her so she was taken to the vet to be euthanised while I cleaned out her pen and sobbed. Then there was the ‘waffy’ silver-grey bullock who spent Easter 2022 under the heat lamp with a nasty dose of scour. He seemed to be getting better with antibiotics and a thick bed of warm straw but he died very suddenly one night, to my abject misery. And right at the end of 2023’s calving season, Dopey the ‘special lad’ arrived with all manner of problems. A great big bullock, he had a difficult and prolonged birth and yet he seemed - initially - to be a wick calf, quickly up and looking for milk. But he had been deprived of oxygen and so his tongue didn’t work properly. His mum loved him but he couldn’t co-ordinate his mouth with her teats so he butted her and butted her to no avail. Ian tried to feed him with a bucket but became hugely frustrated when Dopey tipped it over (repeatedly) and only succeeded in drinking a few sips. After a few days of this, sticky with spilt milk and back-sore, Ian started muttering about the knackerman so I took over and eventually succeeded in teaching Dopey how to drink the warm milk supplement. This meant donning full waterproofs three times a day and kneeling in sloshing milk while trying to encourage Dopey not to chew on my fingers as I stimulated his suck-reflex. A year later, and after a transfer to the expert care of the Clark family at Low Longmire farm, Dopey is now weaned and able to graze with the other suckler calves in the Troutbeck Valley.

This week, I asked Ian if ‘wick’ is used exclusively on farms and he shook his head. “No. I’ve heard it elsewhere. It is a Westmorland word though. You won’t hear it down south.”

Back in Wuthering Heights, Chapter 5, I think of the nuances of this adjective that conveys a dynamic energy that is both life-force and potentially mischievous. Mammoth, the most ‘wick’ of all my calves, was up on his feet and scrambling towards milk even before the vet had finished stitching his mother’s caesarean wound. Over the next few years, Mammoth developed lots of escape strategies and I once found him almost two miles from home after a nocturnal adventure, waiting at the front door of another farm, demanding his breakfast cow-cake as usual.
Mammoth was also responsible for the bullock shaped hole in next door’s hedge …

We will never know the context in which Emily Brontë heard ‘wick’ used in her childhood but the survival of this word amongst Nelly’s formal English alerts sensitive readers to a very distinctive linguistic energy that vibrates throughout this extraordinary novel.