Have you read Atonement? I have not but I have read the synopsis so I can see how this scene could relate to Ian McEwan’s book.
“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
Rose Fairbanks 
I saw that movie and hated it as there is not a happy ending for that couple. I did not read the book. I want my HEA in books I read…thank you very much.
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I haven’t seen the movie. I think I would rather not. But I think it’s very interesting that the author quoted that passage of Northanger Abbey in his preface. I read an article discussing it and it suggested that the author believes Henry is also naive in arguing that there were not extreme crimes in England. I think that’s a rather simplistic interpretation of what he is saying.
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