In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, Terry Eagleton makes an interesting observation on the figure of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. He begins by recalling that Brontë started her novel in 1848 a few months after her brother Branwell had visited Liverpool, and that the city at that time would have had a large number of Irish immigrants (as a consequence of the Great Famine). Eagleton goes on to remind us that Heathcliff, who is picked up starving and homeless from the Liverpool streets by Mr Earnshaw, is described as a ‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’, ‘as good as dumb’, who, when he does speak, utters only ‘some gibberish that nobody could understand’ (Brontë 1995: 35). Eagleton's conclusion from this collection of historico-literary facts is that Heathcliff, the quayside waif, is Irish. In fact he suggests a variety of potential identities: ‘Heathcliff may be a gypsy, or (like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) a Creole, or any kind of alien.’ But his judgement, which is central to his argument, is that Heathcliff is the archetypal figure of the ‘beast, savage, lunatic and demon’ best known to the English as an Irishman (Eagleton 1995: 3).