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“... but Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the biggest seller of them all, is a significant exception. Mary ElizabethBraddon was the most prolific of the sensationalists, publishing more than eighty novels, as well as poems, short stories and plays. She began to write at a time when the publishing market offered a wide ...”

“... you tired​ of them? One hears nothing else nowadays.’ The peevish Mrs Snowdon, a character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’ (1887), is grumbling about the popularity of ghost stories. Nevertheless, she is gripped by the one that follows. Accounts of the supernatural proliferated in the 19th century, as the certainties of ...”

“... Arsenic was plentiful. Life insurance in particular was feared and not without justification. Mary Ann Cotton managed to do away with three husbands, 15 children and stepchildren, her mother, a friend and her lover, claiming life insurance almost every time, before anyone thought something might be going on. Six of her children died in one year, but then ...”