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Updated: June 13, 2025
The intervening years have been passed in practising music, in fancy-work, in novel-reading, and in party-going: no thought having yet been given to the grave responsibilities of maternity; and scarcely any of that solid intellectual culture obtained which would be some preparation for such responsibilities.
Next to fairy tales the original world-fiction our modern novels may be ranked as our most precious possessions; and so it has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the Free Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in training exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support of wholesome, honest, unpretending novel-reading.
'Robert has no lack of choice. His manner had an animation and ease usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a little. 'He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced at last to stealing the servant's Family Herald out of the kitchen cupboard, she said, a smile dawning. Langham laughed. 'Has he such an episcopal appetite for them?
There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. Cannot the intellect of man devise a means of guaranteeing the deserving poor against starvation? Novel-reading is the woman's substitute for gambling the thing that takes her outside her narrow circle of interests. Her ravenous appetite for new novels is amazing; children are not so gluttonous of cream-tarts.
It had been his intention, in reviewing what he considered to be the necessary proprieties of clerical life, in laying out his own future mode of living, to assume no peculiar sacerdotal strictness; he would not be known as a denouncer of dancing or of card-tables, of theatres or of novel-reading; he would take the world around him as he found it, endeavouring by precept and practice to lend a hand to the gradual amelioration which Christianity is producing; but he would attempt no sudden or majestic reforms.
Pictures were drawn of my treatment of her which would make your heart throb. I don't know of what monstrosities she did not accuse me, and what miseries and starvation she did not profess herself to undergo; all the while she was living exceedingly fat and contented, to outward appearances, at our house at Castle Lyndon. Novel-reading and vanity had turned her brain.
Then I have no doubt that, merely as mental exercise, they do some good in keeping the mind in training for the serious work of novel-reading.
"From the time she was brought here except for that one outing and a change to Torquay, I believe, after Peter's birth she has scarce set foot outside Barracombe. Sir Timothy would not, so he was resolved she should not. His sisters, who have as much cultivation as that stone figure, disapproved of novel-reading or of any other reading, I should fancy and he followed suit.
They are taught to place a portion of their happiness in finery and show: utility is abandoned for fashion: The knowledge of the etiquette of the drawing-room usurps the place of the knowledge of the domestic duties: A kind of false and dangerous taste predominates: Scandal and the card-table are preferred to the pleasures of a rural walk: Virtue and Modesty are seen with only half their energies, being overpowered by the noxiousness of novel-reading principles, and by the moral taint which infects those who engage in the varied rounds of a fashionable life.
"Carrie was laughing at me for liking wise books and wanting to improve my mind. Is it foolish and a waste of time?" asked Alice, eager to convince her friend and secure so powerful an ally. "No, my dear, it is a very sensible desire, and I wish more girls had it. Only don't be greedy, and read too much; cramming and smattering is as bad as promiscuous novel-reading, or no reading at all.
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