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Updated: June 13, 2025
She rarely conversed with me at length; but if I made inquiries concerning any matter of knowledge, I was sure to find a book or pamphlet on my desk the next day, with slips marking the valuable pages. She kept me so steadily employed during the hours I was not in bed or in the fresh air that I had no time for novel-reading, a pastime I had indulged in formerly to a considerable extent.
Walter Scott had made novel-reading common among the well-read; but the narrower sectarians in England, the people of the back country and the small towns in America, learned to regard the novel as unprofitable, if not positively leading toward ungodliness, and their unnumbered descendants make up the vast army of uncritical readers for which Grub Street strives and sweats to-day.
"Indeed it is," said Mary "very good indeed." And then she went on with the history of "Rasselas" in his happy valley, by which study Mrs. Thomas intended to initiate her into that course of novel-reading which has become necessary for a British lady. But Mrs. Thomas had a mind to improve the present occasion.
The novel-reading, theatre-going girls rallied around her to a girl; and the young men in the store were not far behind. Elizabeth was popular from the first.
It is in such circles, which, I am happy to say, I hardly know but by report, that knowledge of modern literature is called novel-reading; a commodious name, invented by ignorance and applied by envy, in the same manner as men without learning call a scholar a pedant, and men without principle call a Christian a Methodist. To me the attacks of such men are valuable as compliments.
If not a hypocrite or a vain man, he may find himself blushing at the thought de me fabula narratur. The only alteration that our satire on others may require is to change the name of the folly or fault we lash, and then the stripes will be merited by ourselves. The other day Temple and I listened to a discourse of the Rev. Dr. Waddell of St Magdalen's on the perils of novel-reading.
I am praying that God will entirely take away the unnatural appetite which you have been fostering." It was not long until Bessie rejoiced in full deliverance from her taste for novel-reading, and her interest in her mother's talks returned.
I think it was De Quincey who said that novels are the opium of the West; and I have myself observed that novel-reading is one of those bad habits that grow upon people until they are enslaved by it, demoralised by it; and if that is the case with the reader, what must the writer suffer?" Beth bent her brows upon this.
It may be a mountain-climbing expedition, or rowing and angling in the lake, or fishing for trout in some stream two or three miles distant. Nobody can stir far from camp without a guide. Hammocks are swung, bowers are built novel-reading begins, worsted work appears, cards are shuffled and dealt. The day passes in absolute freedom from responsibility to one's self.
His chief end was to please and instruct at the same time, stimulating the mind through the imagination rather than the reason; so healthful that fastidious parents made an exception of his novels among all others that had ever been written, and encouraged the young to read them. Sir Walter Scott took off the ban which religious people had imposed on novel-reading.
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