Susanna Rustin (Killer Drivers are the biggest stranger danger of all, 7 December) tells us that in 1925 F Scott Fitzgerald “perceived the sociopathic potential of driving”. But careless driving was not born with the motor car. In A Tale of Two Cities in 1859 Charles Dickens had written of the dangers of “hard driving” and describes an aristocrat in his horse-drawn coach being driven at a reckless speed, “with an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to understand in these days”. So when his coach kills a child, he obviously feels no remorse or fear of the law, telling the distraught father: “It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children.” He then speeds carelessly away, presumably to endanger and ruin more lives. So what’s new?
Bill Tordoff
Bedford
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