inspirato (new! the moral tale):

there was an opening for didactic charity, which saw a new mode for influencing my writing, by the medium of good little novelets.
hitherto these had been chiefly of a feminine character. but i guess there are volumes upon volumes in existence to be found (its funny how i see reality in morality), in which a young lady might see the mirror held up to nature for her warning and her edification; presenting, on the one side, the scapegrace of her own establishment, which cheats on teachers, steals her companions' pocket money, and gets into all kinds of disgrace, until she is finally either reformed by an angelic half-boarder, or dismissed to her friends or (maybe you can help me remember) marries a drunken dancing-master (what an awful example); and, on the other hand, the pattern school girl, who just passes through a furnace of unjust suspicions and jealousies, never does wrong, wins all the prizes, always knows where to find her gloves, is crowned by her schoolfellows at the last half-yearly ball with a laurel-wreath as the "reward of virtue," and withdraws from the scene gracefully, amidst a tumult of applause, into the bosom of grown-up society, to make, we should conceive (though we are bound to say the story never gives a hint of it), a highly-accomplished and rather disagreeable wife.
realism is a bloody, angry bitch.