“Read Jane Eyre if you dare” warned papers recently. The Daily Mail had sent a request for information to Salford University and subsequently claimed that the institution had issued “trigger warnings” on a literature module that included Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.
The Daily Mail article quoted Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen who noted that “generations of children have been able to cope” with reading these novels “without being damaged”. The argument appears to be based partly on the fact that many of these books have been the subject of [film and TV adaptations] “aimed at family audiences”.
