Gimmerton Band

The Gimmerton Band is a travelling musical ensemble of fifteen performers—comprising a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns, and a bass viol, together with singers—that makes the rounds of all the respectable houses in the district every Christmas, receiving contributions for its performances. In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the band appears at a single, decisive moment: the Christmas dance at Wuthering Heights following Heathcliff's return from Liverpool and his subsequent imprisonment by Hindley Earnshaw. Its music, described as a first-rate treat by the household, provides the festive backdrop against which Catherine Earnshaw's most significant act of defiance unfolds, making the band a small but resonant emblem of the social rituals that the novel's central characters both inhabit and betray.

The Band's Role at the Christmas Dance

The band arrives at Wuthering Heights on the evening of the dance, mustering fifteen strong and bringing with them a full complement of instruments: a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns, and a bass viol, in addition to their singers. The household esteems their arrival as a first-rate treat, and after the usual carols have been sung, the company sets them to songs and glees. Mrs. Earnshaw loves the music, and so they give plenty of it, filling the house with sound that drowns out the smaller movements of the household. The band's presence swells the gathering until the house door is shut below, so full of people that no one notices Catherine's absence—a circumstance that proves essential to her secret errand.

Catherine's Secret Visit to Heathcliff

While the band plays, Catherine slips away, claiming that the music sounds sweetest at the top of the steps. She mounts farther, to the garret where Heathcliff is confined, and calls to him through the boards. He stubbornly declines answering for a while, but she perseveres and finally persuades him to hold communion with her through the wooden partition. The music below masks their conversation, and when Ellen Dean climbs the ladder to warn Catherine that the songs are about to cease, she finds the girl has crept by the skylight of one garret, along the roof, into the skylight of the other, so that she is inside with Heathcliff. Ellen coaxes her out with the utmost difficulty, and Heathcliff comes with her, insisting that Ellen take him into the kitchen. The band's music thus serves as both cover and contrast: the communal celebration below proceeds in ignorance while the two outcasts conduct their forbidden communion above.

Heathcliff's Vow of Revenge

In the kitchen, seated by the fire on a stool Ellen sets for him, Heathcliff remains sick and unable to eat, leaning his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, rapt in dumb meditation. When Ellen inquires the subject of his thoughts, he answers gravely that he is trying to settle how he shall pay Hindley back, declaring that he does not care how long he waits, if he can only do it at last, and hoping that Hindley will not die before he has the chance. This vow, spoken in the immediate aftermath of the Christmas festivities, marks the beginning of Heathcliff's lifelong project of revenge—a project that will consume the remainder of the novel. The band's cheerful music, still echoing through the house, stands in stark ironic contrast to the dark resolution forming in the kitchen below.

The Band's Place in the Novel's Social World

The Gimmerton Band belongs to the novel's broader depiction of Yorkshire moorland society, where Christmas brings communal rituals of music and contribution. The band goes the rounds of all the respectable houses, receiving contributions every Christmas, and its arrival is anticipated as a treat. The band's appearance also highlights the social stratification of the novel: it performs for respectable houses, and its presence at Wuthering Heights marks the household's place within that respectable world, even as the Earnshaws' internal disorder—Hindley's tyranny, Heathcliff's imprisonment, Catherine's rebellion—belies the festive surface. The band's music, which Catherine finds sweetest at the top of the steps, becomes a figure for the novel's layered narration itself: the public, harmonious surface beneath which private griefs and vengeances seethe.

Narrative Significance and Contrast

The band's brief appearance resonates with the novel's larger patterns of contrast between communal celebration and individual suffering. The Christmas dance, with its fifteen musicians and abundant songs, is the last moment of untroubled festivity at Wuthering Heights before Heathcliff's vow of revenge sets the tragedy in motion. The band's music also anticipates later moments of isolation and haunting: just as the carols mask Catherine's secret visit, so too will the sounds of the house later mask darker secrets—the imprisonment of Catherine Linton, the forced marriage, the deaths that follow. The Gimmerton Band thus functions as a marker of the ordinary social world that the novel's extraordinary characters continually rupture, a reminder of the festive traditions that persist even as the Earnshaws and Lintons destroy one another.