Quotes from Kate Summerscale

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.

In every other age and class man is held responsible for his reading, and not reading responsible for man. The books a man or woman reads are less the making of character than the expression of it.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.

There is so much bias for self-love, so much recklessness about truth in general, and so much of even a sincere faithlessness of narration, that no partial account of anything is to be trusted.