It's always interesting to look back at other eras, because it's so much easier to see, not only how weird their obsessions were, but what they were in the first place. Our own culture's obsession with (for instance) healthy eating is comparatively invisible because it's just the water in which we swim. But if you look at the nineteenth century, it really jumps out at you the way the characters obsess about The Horrors of Draughts.