1. Title Page
  2. Introduction and Acknowledgements
  3. Where does Sir Thomas’s wealth come from?
    Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
  4. How much English blood (if any) does Waverley spill?
    Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)
  5. Apple-blossom in June?
    Jane Austen, Emma (1816)
  6. Effie Deans’s phantom pregnancy
    Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818)
  7. How does Victor make his monsters?
    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
  8. Is Oliver dreaming?
    Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837–8)
  9. Mysteries of the Dickensian year
    Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4)
  10. Is Heathcliff a murderer?
    Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
  11. Rochester’s celestial telegram
    Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
  12. Does Becky kill Jos?
    W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
  13. Who is Helen Graham?
    Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
  14. What kind of murderer is John Barton?
    Mrs Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
  15. On a gross anachronism
    W.M. Thackeray, Henry Esmond (1852)
  16. What is Jo sweeping?
    Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–3)
  17. Villette’s double ending
    Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)
  18. What is Hetty waiting for?
    George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
  19. The missing fortnight
    Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859–60)
  20. Two-timing novelists
    W.M. Thackeray, Pendennis (1850)
    Mrs Gaskell, A Dark Night’s Work (1863)
    Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray (1863)
  21. The phantom pregnancy of Mary Flood Jones
    Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn (1869)
  22. Is Will Ladislaw legitimate?
    George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2)
  23. Is Melmotte Jewish?
    Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)
  24. Where is Tenway Junction?
    Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (1876)
  25. Was he Popenjoy?
    Anthony Trollope, Is he Popenjoy? (1878)
  26. R.H. Hutton’s spoiling hand
    Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
  27. What does Edward Hyde look like?
    R.L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
  28. Who is Alexander’s father?
    R.L. Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
  29. Why does this novel disturb us?
    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
  30. Is Alec a rapist?
    Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
  31. Mysteries of the Speckled Band
    Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
  32. What does Arabella Donn throw?
    Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
  33. What is Duncan Jopp’s crime?
    R.L. Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston (1896)
  34. Why is Griffin cold?
    H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897)
  35. Why does the Count come to England?
    Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
  36. How old is Kim?
    Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)
  37. About the Author
  38. Copyright