Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
“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’.”
― The Wicked Boy
― The Wicked Boy
“the late tenth-century ‘Aja’ib al-Hind (Marvels of India), attributed to the sea captain Burzug ibn Shahriyar, presented alleged facts about the Sea of Fire, whales, mermaids, cannibals, cattle-eating snakes, ritual suicides and so forth.”
― Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
― Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
“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.”
― The Wicked Boy
― The Wicked Boy
“But racism is most outrageously to the fore in ‘Ashraf and Anjab’, in which the sadistically villainous Anjab is described by Harun al-Rashid as follows: ‘This man is black as a negro … with red eyes, a nose like a clay pot and lips like kidneys’, and his mother is no better looking for she ‘was black as pitch with a snub nose, red eyes and an unpleasant smell’. In ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ the monk Simeon predicts that the shrine of the Ka’ba will be destroyed by drunken and singing blacks. As Bernard Lewis’s Race and Slavery in the Middle East put it when discussing the role of blacks in The Thousand and One Nights, it ‘reveals a familiar pattern of sexual fantasy, social and occupational discrimination, and an unthinking identification of lighter with better and darker with worse’.9”
― Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
― Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
“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.”
― The Wicked Boy
― The Wicked Boy
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 348487 members
— last activity 0 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Sara’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Sara’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,312 books
|
97 friends
610 books
|
55 friends
815 books
|
91 friends
1,318 books
|
158 friends
67 books
|
21 friends
3,838 books
|
51 friends
75 books
|
11 friends
407 books
|
55 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Sara
Lists liked by Sara