Typhoid Mary: captive to the public's health

sustained is by omitting any reference to the sensation novels thronged with palpably nervous middle-class bodies which gave rise during the 1860s to a fury of indignation. "The reader's nerves are affected like the hero's", Margaret Oliphant stridently complained in a review of the most famous of them all, Wilkie Collins's The woman in white (1860). Such omissions make Nerves and narratives, admirable though it is in the terms announced by its title, something less than a "cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose".