In The Mill on the Floss, having been given a ‘petrifying’ summary of Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil by young Maggie, Mr Riley challenges Mr Tulliver with allowing his daughter access to such dangerous reading material. A perplexed Tulliver explains:
Why, it’s one o’ the books I bought at Partridge’s sale.They was all bound alike — it’s a good binding, you see — and I thought they’d be all good books. There’s Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying among ’em. I read in it often of a Sunday’ (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer, because his name was Jeremy). ‘And there’s a lot more of ’em — sermons mostly, I think — but they’ve all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o’ one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn’t judge by th’ outside. This is a puzzlin’ world.

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