‘Since the little puzzle amuses the ladies, it would be a pity to spoil their sport by giving them the key.’
(Charlotte Brontë, about two female correspondents who had written to her publisher inquiring about the fate of Paul Emanuel in Villette)
Personally, I have always thought ‘how many children had Lady Macbeth?’ a perfectly good question. I am also curious about how old Hamlet is, what subjects he studied at the University of Wittenberg, and what grades he got from his teachers there. Is Heathcliff a Murderer? explores that forbidden territory, the hors texte – or, more precisely, that implied and ambiguous world which lies on the other side of the words on the page.
This little book addresses, and joins company with, ‘the common reader’ (as Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf called us). There are millions of common readers and the mass of such readers do not, I suspect, much worry about Deconstruction, New Historicism, or the distinction between extradiegesis and intradiegesis. But they do wonder, in their close-reading way, whether Becky killed Jos, exactly what nationality Melmotte is, what the ‘missile’ is that Arabella Donn pitches at Jude Fawley’s head, what Heathcliff does in the three years which sees him leave Wuthering Heights a stable-boy and return a gentleman, and what Paul Emanuel does in his three years’ sojourn in Guadaloupe.
What follow are literary brain-teasers. In the spirit of those who enjoy such games, I have let my ingenuity rip in places. I would not go to the stake for some of the readings offered here, and I have no doubt that many readers will come up with cleverer and more plausible solutions than mine. But I would argue that however far my solutions are fetched the problems which inspire them are not frivolous. It is worthwhile for readers to be curious where Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth comes from, or to wonder why The Picture of Dorian Gray is so ‘queerly’ disturbing, or to inquire why George Eliot and Henry James consciously flawed the printed endings to their greatest novels. It is less crucial, but no less thought-provoking, that Henry Esmond – the highly literate creation of a highly literate author – should quote from a work forty years before it will be written. The questions which have provoked this book are, I maintain, good questions.
I have a number of debts to acknowledge. David Lodge (who adapted the novel for television) drew my attention to the striking seasonal anomaly in Martin Chuzzlewit. Rosemary Ashton corrected the Middlemarch chapter radically. Alison Winter helped with the ‘science’ in the Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist chapters. Philip Horne pointed out to me R.H. Hutton’s meddling review of The Portrait of a Lady.
J.S.