Life & Wisdom Quote by Rebecca H. Davis

“Crime” lands here less as a legal category than as a mood - something atmospheric, almost supernatural. Davis’s phrasing (“alien,” “monstrous,” “terror”) tells you she’s not describing a tidy moral code so much as a worldview where social order still feels intimate and defensible. To “the man of the forties,” wrongdoing isn’t an everyday statistic or a policy problem; it’s an intrusion from outside the community’s imagined boundaries, a thing that doesn’t belong. That’s the point: crime is terrifying precisely because it’s construed as unnatural, not merely harmful.

The subtext is a critique of that innocence. By painting the 1840s sensibility as shocked by the very existence of crime, Davis implies a society that has not yet metabolized modernity - industrial cities, anonymity, wage labor, mass immigration, the emerging press economy that turns transgression into spectacle. When you believe the world is legible and neighbors are knowable, you can treat crime as a monstrous exception. Once life becomes crowded and impersonal, crime starts to look less like an alien visitation and more like a predictable feature of the system.

Davis, a writer attuned to the frictions of class and gender, also hints at who gets to feel “terror” and who has to live with threat as normal. Calling crime “alien” is a way of exiling it from the self - and from respectable society - a rhetorical move that protects the “man of the forties” from confronting complicity, inequality, or the quieter violences baked into everyday life.