Kate Summerscale > Quotes

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"

(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

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

“Better it seems to me, never to have lived at all than to advance through ignorance & perplexities to the land of innihilation.”
― Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

“Ferenczi, Sándor, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint & Nicola Zarday Jackson (Harvard, 1988)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story

“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

“In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness" (2007) Christopher Lane describes how pharmaceutical companies helped to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to include social phobia in the "DSM" of 1980. He argues that the diagnosis in many cases turned a personality trait into an illness, pathologising people who were resvered, private or quiet. 'Over the course of six years,' he writes, 'a small group of self-selecting American psychiatrists built a sweeping new consensus: shyness and a host of comparable traits were anxiety and personality disorders. And they stemmed not from psychological conflicts or social tensions, but rather from a chemical imbalance or faulty neurotransmitters in the brain.' Lane believes that there is a great cost to medicalising our quirks, eccentricities and ordinary feelings. "The sad consequence,' he says, 'is a vast, perhaps irrecoverable, loss of emotional range, an impovershment of human experience.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of Obsession

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

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

“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

“Fortune, Christopher, ‘The Case of “R. N.”: Sándor Ferenczi’s Radical Experiment in Psychoanalysis’, in The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris (Abingdon, 1993)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story

“Frankel, Jay B., ‘Ferenczi’s Theory of Trauma’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis 58 (1998)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.”
― Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

“Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“I think people marry far too much, it is such a lottery after all, and to a poor woman very doubtful happiness.”
― Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

“Joe said of herself: 'I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water

“In tribunale il valore del diario di Isabella rimase dubbio. Come ogni altro libro dello stesso genere, oltre che di ricordi era fatto anche di aspettative: era provvisorio e instabile, si situava al confine tra pensiero e azione, desiderio e realtà. Ma, come cruda testimonianza emotiva, era un’opera che lasciava attoniti, che poteva destare entusiasmo o allarme. Il diario diede ai suoi lettori vittoriani un’immagine del futuro, come offre a noi un’immagine del nostro mondo plasmato sul passato. Sicuramente non ci dice ciò che accadde nella vita di Isabella, ma ci dice ciò che lei desiderava.
Il diario dipingeva un ritratto delle libertà a cui le donne avrebbero potuto aspirare, se avessero rinunciato a credere in Dio e nel matrimonio: il diritto ad avere delle proprietà e del denaro, a ottenere la custodia dei figli, a sperimentare dal punto di vista sessuale ed intellettuale. Accennava anche al dolore e alla confusione che queste libertà avrebbero generato. Nel decennio in cui la Chiesa rinunciò al proprio controllo sul matrimonio e Darwin gettò nel dubbio più profondo le origini spirituali dell’umanità, quel diario era un segno dei tumulti che si sarebbero verificati.
In una pagina senza data Isabella si rivolgeva esplicitamente a un futuro lettore. «Una settimana del nuovo anno se n’è già andata, - esordiva. – Ah! Se avessi la speranza dell’altra vita di cui parla mia madre (oggi lei e mio fratello mi hanno scritto delle lettere affettuose), e che il signor B. ci ha sollecitato a conquistarci, sarei allegra e felice. Ma, ahimé!, non ce l’ho, e non potrò mai ottenerla; e per quanto riguarda questa vita, la mia anima è invasa e lacerata dalla rabbia, dalla sensualità, dall’impotenza e dalla disperazione, che mi riempiono di rimorso e di cattivi presentimenti».
«Lettore, -scrisse – tu vedi la mia anima più nascosta. Devi disprezzarmi e odiarmi. Ti soffermi anche a provare pietà? No; perché quando leggerai queste pagine, la vita di colei che “era troppo flessibile per la virtù; troppo virtuosa per diventare una cattiva fiera e trionfante” sarà finita». Era una citazione imprecisa dall’opera teatrale The Fatal Falsehood (1779) di Hannah More, in cui un giovane conte italiano – un «miscuglio di aspetti strani e contraddittori» – si innamora perdutamente di una donna promessa al suo migliore amico.
Quando Edward Lane lesse il diario, fu questo passaggio in particolare a suscitare la sua rabbia e il suo disprezzo: «Si rivolge al Lettore! – scrisse a Combe – Ma chi è il Lettore? Allora quel prezioso diario è stato scritto per essere pubblicato, o, almeno, era destinato a un erede della sua famiglia? In entrambi i casi, io affermo che è completa follia – e se anche non ci fossero ulteriori pagine, in questo guazzabuglio farraginoso, a confermare la mia ipotesi, a mio parere questa sarebbe già sufficiente».
Eppure il richiamo di Isabella a un lettore immaginario può, al contrario, fornire la spiegazione più limpida del perché avesse tenuto il diario. Almeno una parte di lei voleva essere ascoltata. Coltivava la speranza che qualcuno, leggendo quelle parole dopo la sua morte, avrebbe esitato prima di condannarla; che un giorno la sua storia potesse essere accolta con compassione e perfino amore. In assenza di un aldilà spirituale, noi eravamo l’unico futuro che aveva.
«Buona notte, - concludeva, con una triste benedizione: - Possa tu essere più felice!».”
― Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

“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

“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

“Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago, 1989)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story

“The uncertainty was torture: "Am I never to get any nearer the truth," asks Robert Audley, "but am I to be tormented all my life by vague doubts, and wretched suspicions, which may grown upon me till I become a monomaniac?" Yet if he succeeds in solving the mystery it might only magnify the horror: "why should I try to unravel the tangled skein, to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle, and gather together the stray fragments which when collected may make such a hideous whole?”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“Like Frankenstein, I am afraid of the monster I have called into existence.”
― Kate Summerscale

“Sándor Ferenczi’s paper on the effects of sexual abuse on children was published in English in 1949, and thirty-five years later the publication of his clinical diaries revealed how his theory of trauma had emerged from his psychoanalysis of ‘RN’.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story