Immediately after the discussion of history, we have an entertaining misunderstanding in which Catherine Morland is discussing fiction and Miss Tilney takes her to be discussing fact. Miss Tilney imagines that the truly terrible, meaning hair raising, novel to come out of London that Catherine is discussing is actually real social unrest taking place in that city—a riot in fact..
The first thing we need to remind ourselves of when reading the misunderstanding about "something very shocking" that will come out of London is that riots were not unheard of at the time. The Gordon Riots and the Spa Fields riots were both serious events and Miss Tilney, with a brother in the military, would be quite right to worry about such a thing.
Henry takes Catherine's side here, although he could just as easily have gone the other way. His possible motives for doing so aren't hard to guess. It perhaps does not matter because the lesson seems clear either way: these two women were talking right past one another. They were using the same words to mean very different things.
Except that Henry can tell what both mean.
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