Professor W. Smythe to Mary Berry, [1828]: 'Your book [vol. 1 of "The Comparative View of Social Life in France and England"] quite succeeded with me, giving me a great deal of information that was very entertaining, and that had not reached me before [...] I still observe in it some long sentences, which it would have been very easy for you, I should have thought, to have broken up [...] You have not always remembered that you are writing for an English, not a French public -- where not only men, but men, women, and children, read, when a book is considered worth reading.'