Readers of Victorian fiction must often have tripped up on seeming anomalies, enigmas, and mysteries in their favourite novels. Does Becky kill Jos at the end of "Vanity Fair"? Why does no one notice that Hetty is pregnant in "Adam Bede"? How, exactly, does Victor Frankenstein make his monster? In "Is Heathcliff a murderer?" (well, is he?) John Sutherland investigates thirty-four conundrums of nineteenth-century fiction. Applying these "real world" questions to fiction is not in any sense intended to catch out the novelists who are invariably cleverer than their most detectively inclined readers. Typically, one finds a reason for the seeming anomaly. Not blunders, that is, but unexpected felicities and ingenious justifications.
