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Updated: June 13, 2025
Until she was seventeen, she was precisely like any other rather stupid girl; never given to novel-reading or fancies; never, frightened by the dark or ghost-stories; proving herself warmly attached to us, after a while, and rousing in us, in return, the kindly interest naturally felt for a faithful servant; but she was not in any respect uncommon, quite far from it, except in the circumstance that she never told a false-hood.
In Hillsboro we explain to ourselves the enormous amount of novel-reading and play-going in the great cities as due to a perverted form of this natural hunger for human life.
I deprecate the vice of excessive novel-reading in young persons. But for myself I wish that there were more really interesting novels to read. Most of the old ones I have read already." A smile flickered around the circle. "What do you call old?" asked the Cynic. "Have you read 'The Vulgarities of Antoinette'?"
But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious criticism while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time the novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often; by digression and divagation still oftener.
Old as I am, I feel almost ashamed to repeat this nonsense now; and had I then possessed more sense myself, or made by mother the confidant of these flights of fancy, I need not now relate my own silly experience to warn you from the effects of novel-reading.
Accordingly Mrs Wititterly broke ground next morning, during a pause in the novel-reading. 'Miss Nickleby, said Mrs Wititterly, 'I wish to speak to you very gravely.
She has no method, and yet she is the only person who ever thinks of doing a thing properly. I wish your friend Madison would come home and take her off our hands, for she is always alternating between fits of novel-reading and of remorse, in which she nearly works herself to death with running after lost time.
But let's examine this thing. When we consider the enormous risks people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad whenever they don't do it. I believe that this popular demand for the matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading.
Euphemia knew very well what she was accustomed to be fond of; but not choosing to let her austere sister into her predilection for the contemplation of superior beauty, she merely answered, "You know, Diana, you often reproach me for my absurd devotion to novel-reading, and my repugnance to graver books; now I want at once to be like you, a woman of great erudition: and for that purpose I will study day and night at the German, till I can read all the philosophers, and be a fit companion for my sister."
Such banquets are spread for the frugal, not one of whom would swap that immortal cook-book review for a dinner with Lucullus. Rascals will not read. Men of action do not read. They look upon it as the gambler does upon the game where "no money passes." It may almost be said that the capacity for novel-reading is the patent of just and noble minds.
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