In the Victorian Era viral illness incited pathological fear exacerbated by the lack of empirical understanding about what germs were or how viruses mutated. In Charles Dickens’ novels, fevers served a narrative function, leading to the victim’s disfigurement, destruction or moral salvation. Writing in The Critic, Natasha Green suggests that our own paranoid fears aren’t so different from our ancestors’.
A Spite That Knows No Bounds
Gratingly awful global scold Greta Thunberg’s latest stunt is to turn on her own motherland. Sweden has been very good to her, but the former social-democratic paradise’s mugging by the realities of uncontrolled immigration do not sit well with the keffiyeh-clad rabblerouser. “For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe,” writes Fredrik Karrholm in The Spectator. “Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985.”
