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Updated: July 24, 2025
He was thinking that under some conditions there were worse things than stuffy cabins. "And Nancy's so discontented," said the mother, looking at the girl who was reading quietly by her side. "She doesn't like ships or sailors. She gets her head turned reading those penny novelettes." "You look after your own head," said Nancy elegantly, without looking up.
She gave him a hunk of nuncheon and a bundle of her novelettes, and he stole up to an empty garret and squatted on the bare boards. The sun streamed through the skylight window and lay, an oblong patch, in the centre of the floor. John noted the head of a nail that stuck gleaming up.
Great numbers of children were playing about in distinct bands; each troop was accompanied by one and sometimes two older people, girls or women who lay stretched out on the warm grass or leaned against the tree-trunks reading novelettes, and around them the children whirled and screamed and laughed. It was a world of waving pinafores and thin black-stockinged legs and shrill, sweet voices.
Instead he found next day, when his aunt had gone out shopping, a little square of cardboard at the back of the dresser drawer, among the dirty dusters and clothes pegs and string and corks and novelettes. It was a pawn-ticket "Rattle. One shilling." Dickie knew all about pawn-tickets. You, of course, don't. Well, ask some grown-up person to explain; I haven't time.
In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder. It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes.
A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes.
'Le Fils de Titien and Croiselles' are carefully elaborated historical novelettes; the latter is considered one of his best works, overflowing with romantic spirit, and contrasting in this respect strangely with 'La Mouche' , one of the last flickerings of his imagination. 'Maggot' bears marks of the influence of George Sand; 'Le Merle Blanc' is a sort of allegory dealing with their quarrel.
One Saturday morning, two years ago, Pinkey had set out for the factory as usual, and had come home to dinner with her wages in her handkerchief and a wedding ring on her finger. Mrs Partridge gave up novelettes for a week when she learned that her stepdaughter had married Chook that morning at the registry office.
"My ma 'ad a grite friend, sold winkles; 'er 'usbin was lost at sea for years and years, till just wen she was comfortably settled with 'er second, along 'e comes, as large as loife. Besides, I've read of such things in the Princess Novelettes; only there it's most generally lovers, not 'usbins, nor yet fathers. Would you know yours again, if you seen 'im?"
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