The Wicked Boy Quotes

“me.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

“For Robert, the achievement was very particular. In Broadmoor, every aspect of his life had been regulated, from the temperature of his bath to the location of his tailoring shears; on the ridges of Gallipoli he was subject to unfettered sensation and danger. Some of the sights and smells and sounds were weirdly reminiscent of the scene in his mother’s bedroom at Cave Road: the groaning bodies, the sweet, ammoniac stink of rotting flesh, the descent of the flies. This time, though, it fell to Robert to save the wounded and to honour the dead.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

“looking round him wildly. The boys were calm and said nothing.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

“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.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

“In June it took part in an elaborately planned action at Messines Ridge, in Belgian Flanders, which opened with the Allies detonating a million pounds of explosives next to the German trenches, instantly killing 10,000 enemy soldiers. The blast was heard in London and felt across southern England. In the fighting that ensued, Bill Alabaster led the parties carrying grenades, ammunition and water from the 45th Battalion headquarters to the troops at the front line, across open ground raked by artillery and machine-gun fire. Herring recommended him for the Military Medal. The 45th lost seven officers and 344 other ranks over four days of combat.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy

“and Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s Vice Versa: a Lesson to Fathers, a novel of 1882 about a schoolboy and his father, a City merchant, who exchange bodies and inhabit each others’ lives. The boy’s father is taught how trapped a lively-minded boy can feel when he has ‘no money and few rights’, ‘virtually no way to assert himself in the world around him’.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy

“fifteen-year-old from Shepherd’s Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a ‘good hiding’, the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading ‘I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work’, but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of ‘literary offal’.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy

“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.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy

“Charles Lewis had investigated the deaths from diphtheria of several children whose parents were Peculiar People, members of a Wesleyan sect formed in Essex in 1838. In accordance with their interpretation of a passage in St James’s Epistle, the parents had not called a doctor when their children fell ill, and instead tried to cure them through prayer and the anointment of oil. The Children’s Act of 1889 enabled the state to prosecute a parent for the ill-treatment or culpable neglect of a child, and an amendment of 1894 specified that failure to obtain medical help could be an offence. Yet all that the coroner’s court was able to do in the Peculiar People cases was give a verdict of death from natural causes – it was hard to prove that a death from diphtheria could have been prevented or even delayed by medical intervention. Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’ of having these cases reported to him when he was powerless to act, and demanded that the law be tightened up. When a Peculiar father explained to him, ‘I stand up for the Lord’, Lewis returned: ‘You can lie [down] and die, if you like, but it is cowardly, most cowardly, to allow helpless children to do so.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy

“the medical journal The Lancet explained the process by which the dreadfuls could foster violence. People of a lower evolutionary type, the journal said, had an ape-like tendency to imitation. If exposed to stories of suicide or murder, degenerate individuals might be impelled to act them out.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer