Jabez Branderham

Jabez Branderham is a minor but symbolically charged figure who appears solely within Lockwood's feverish nightmare during his first night at Wuthering Heights. He is the preacher of a fantastical, interminable sermon delivered in the decaying chapel of Gimmerden Sough, a place Lockwood has passed in his waking walks. Branderham's name and his text—'Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First'—are drawn from a mildewed religious volume Lockwood discovers in the oak-panelled bed, a book titled Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First. A Pious Discourse delivered by the Reverend Jabez Branderham, in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough. The nightmare transforms this printed title into a lived ordeal, making Branderham the agent of a grotesque, punitive sermon that mirrors the oppressive religious atmosphere Lockwood has already sensed at the Heights.

The Nightmare Sermon and Its Structure

In Lockwood's dream, Branderham preaches to a full and attentive congregation, dividing his discourse into exactly four hundred and ninety parts, each fully equal to an ordinary address from the pulpit and each discussing a separate sin. Lockwood, who has come to the chapel with Joseph as his guide, endures the entire performance with mounting agony, writhing, yawning, pinching himself, and nudging Joseph to ask when it will end. The sermon's absurd length and its meticulous enumeration of 'odd transgressions that I never imagined previously' turn the act of listening into a form of punishment, a parody of the endless religious exhortations that Joseph inflicts on the household. When Branderham finally reaches the 'First of the Seventy-First,' Lockwood is moved to rise and denounce him as the sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon, crying out, 'Seventy times seven times have I plucked up my hat and been about to depart—Seventy times seven times have you preposterously forced me to resume my seat. The four hundred and ninety-first is too much.'

The Denunciation and the Dream's Collapse

Branderham responds by turning the accusation back on Lockwood, declaring, 'Thou art the Man!' and calling on the congregation to execute judgment upon him. The assembly rushes at Lockwood with their pilgrim's staves, and a general melee erupts, with blows aimed at him falling on other heads and the whole chapel resounding with rappings and counter rappings. Branderham himself pours forth his zeal in a shower of loud taps on the boards of the pulpit. The tumult is revealed, upon Lockwood's waking, to have been caused by nothing more than the branch of a fir-tree touching his lattice as the wind wailed by and rattled its dry cones against the panes. The entire elaborate vision—the chapel, the congregation, the four-hundred-and-ninety-part sermon, the violent denouement—is thus a product of Lockwood's disordered imagination, triggered by the oppressive atmosphere of the house, the bad tea, and the bad temper that has left him 'capable of suffering.'

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Branderham functions as a dream-figure who condenses several of the novel's preoccupations: the tyranny of religious observance as practiced by Joseph, the motif of endless repetition and deferred resolution, and the way the past (here, a printed sermon from a forgotten book) erupts into the present with hallucinatory force. His name, linked to the chapel of Gimmerden Sough—a place Lockwood describes as lying in a hollow near a swamp, whose peaty moisture is said to answer all the purposes of embalming—connects him to the themes of decay, burial, and the persistence of the dead. The sermon's text, 'Seventy Times Seven,' drawn from the Gospel of Matthew on the necessity of unlimited forgiveness, is grotesquely inverted into a mechanism of accusation and violence. Branderham thus serves as a darkly comic prelude to the more profound hauntings that follow: the ghost of Catherine Linton that appears at the window immediately after the dream, and Heathcliff's own anguished communion with her spirit. The dream, with Branderham at its center, establishes the novel's governing logic in which religious forms are hollowed out and repurposed as instruments of torment, and in which the boundary between the real and the imagined, the living and the dead, is permeable and treacherous.