Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction, by John Sutherland

Retrieved from: ILL
(0192838849), 1999
Suggested by: me
My Ratings: 5 Merit, 5 Interest, 4 Fun

Boy, do I feel ignorant: out of 34 chapters in this book, I have read only 7 of the titles discussed. Just about 20%. Apparently, my Brit Lit class needed to be 5 times longer than it was!

Of the ones with which I'm familiar:

How do the Cratchits cook Scrooge’s turkey? (A Christmas Carol)-- ...because, after all, it is huge and delivered in the middle of the day on Christmas and needs to have the feathers removed, etc. Sutherland’s solution is that they ate in the middle of the night, causing Bob to be late to work the next day.

Heathcliff’s toothbrush (Wuthering Heights)--This isn’t really about toothbrushes, but teething rings and their use. Sutherland is referring to a short passage after Cathy dies when he says something about “moral teething.“ And we get extended discussion of the alimentary canals of earthworms. Lovely. It’s a bit hard to explain here.

Where does Sidney Carton get his chloroform? (A Tale of Two Cities)-- ...since chloroform wasn’t “invented” until at least several decades after the French Revolution ended. Oh, but Dickens never calls it chloroform...

Why was Pip not invited to Joe’s wedding? (Great Expectations)--Joe, being his very best friend and indeed savior, still leaves Pip in the dark. There’s no satisfactory explanation for this. And to me it’s just a plot function, so it’s no big deal to me anyway.

How long is Alice in Wonderland for? (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)--She goes down the rabbit hole in the heat of summer and returns when the cards turn into falling leaves. An extended metaphor for her entrance into puberty? Soft, silly and ridiculous. Maybe in England leaves stick to trees until the bitter end, but here in midwestern America, leaves come off trees all summer long....

What happens to Jim’s family? (Huckleberry Finn)--Remember, he has a wife and son he’s trying to rescue. That’s why he goes south with Huck. But when they arrive, he never mentions his family again. Another plot device we’re supposed to conveniently ignore? It is rather awful how they just disappear....

Cabinets and detectives (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)--A cabinet was as specific type of photo, slightly larger than a postcard (carte de visite) which was copied to give to friends. So why is the King so worried about this compromising picture? Because it probably wasn’t really a cabinet, but a candid photo not taken at a studio. The irony is that Irene Adler leaves an actual cabinet in a cabinet for Holmes to find instead of the missing photo.

Here’s a partial list of some of the other books he takes to task, or explains: Mansfield Park (one of three Jane Austen books), Rob Roy, Vanity Fair, North and South, Bleak House (one of four Dickens books), The Moonstone, Anna Karenina, Dracula...