Continuing my Trove Treasures series, I am turning this week to some of the discussions I found about the value of novel-reading. Three months ago, I shared some of the arguments made against novel-reading, but in fact, in the papers I found, there seemed to be more arguments pro such reading. So much so that I’m planning two posts – one on the mid-to-late 19th century, and the other on the beginning of the 20th century.

Today’s 19th century articles range from 1867 to 1899, and they traverse the topic from some interesting angles.

Prose vs Poetry

The earliest article was published in the Geelong Advertiser, on 7 May 1867, but appears to be from London’s Saturday Review. So, not Australian-written but published here. Several of the articles I’ll discuss comment on what reading novels can teach us, but this one did surprise me. It commences:

As every novel turns upon love and matrimony, the first effect of universal novel reading must necessarily be to familiarise the young imagination with the idea of both. 

What’s this assumption that “every” novel is about love and matrimony? Was this so at the time? Well, not “every”, because then our writer offers exceptions. Regardless, the writer recognises that novels aren’t the means by which people become aware of the “matrimonial adventures to come”. Fairy tales, for example, contribute to the construction of “masculine and feminine ideals”. What is “left” for novels to do is “to train and develop an instinct which is already in existence in the germ” but, says our writer, this knowledge must “ripen gently”. Indeed,

premature cultivation tends to every species of social mischief. Nobody ever yet knew a very sentimental boy, unless indeed he came under the exceptional category of a genius, arrive at much good; and though to pass the same general censure upon sentimental girls would be hard upon the sex; it may be believed that women who go through life most happily whose capacity for sentiment has flowered late.

The language is convoluted but I think you get the gist. Basically, the article claims that sentimentality stimulates imagination at the expense of observation:

Sentimental boys and girls seldom notice nature, keenly, and with the eye of a student or an inquirer. They get into a lazy habit of liking sunsets, and deriving a number of prematurely solemn impressions from them; but they have no healthy interest in butterflies, birds nests, and fossils.

The problem, according to the article, is that this sentimentality – that comes, remember, from understanding “matrimonial adventures” too quickly – results in high sensitivity to natural phenomena but limited understanding of how it all works. For these reasons, the writer does not greatly like poets – particularly Byron. Wordsworth is acceptable, because the writer believes his “sentimentality” is that “of a middle-aged genius, not of an overgrown and morbid boy”.

Was this a common view of romantic poetry? The article then describes the value of novel-reading:

a fairly good novel presents young minds with a better and more correct notion of the relations between men and women than they would be likely to form if left to their unassisted efforts. It does away with a good deal of unnecessary mystery in which young people are inclined to clothe the idea of love. Marriage is not what it appears to be in most romances, but it is more like the literary pictures than it is like the vague and hazy conception which emanates from the youthful brain. Fiction in prose is truer to nature than fiction in verse, and novelists may be trusted more than poets. 

Take that, poets! The reason, says our writer, is that “prose fiction is generally written by less morbid people”. The article then discusses the sorts of people who write novels. Its point is that novelists (aka “literary men”) mix in the world while poets live in the closet or within garden walls. Surely a generalisation! Anyhow, then he gives a recommendation – Mr Trollope. Our writer is concerned about

flirtation with married women becoming an unnecessarily frequent ingredient in his literary conversaziones; but life is life, and it is probably difficult to produce monthly humour without a little impropriety. On the whole, the bent of his pen is to sketch love and matrimony as healthy domestic pleasures, and not to depict them in the artificial colours in which diseased imaginations dress them.

Basically, Trollope is a good example of the “better class of novel writers” and is much better for the English youth than French romance! I’ll leave you with that thought and move to the 1890s …

A practical education

The two articles from the 1890s were published in Queensland’s Darling Downs Gazette (17 December 1890) and Sydney’s Sunday Times (26 February 1899). The first article quotes two British men on the value of novel reading. The first was Sir Edward Clarke QC MP, who, opening a “free library” in London, said that reading novels “was not a mischievous but a good thing”. “Good novels”, he believed, contain “elements of history” that are more valuable and easier for readers to digest than can be found in other books.

The other was the Scottish poet, biographer and translator, Sir Theodore Martin, who was presiding at the annual meeting of another free library, this one in Wales. That year, 2,492 novels had been read versus 811 of everything else combined. This disproportion was similar in other libraries, and Sir Theodore had some qualms. He didn’t criticise “reasonable indulgence in the delights of good novels and romances” because they widen our sympathies, and, he hoped, they inculcated a taste for reading which might lead readers to more demanding studies in areas like natural history, biography, poetry, and science. (He, clearly, saw poetry as having a higher value than prose fiction!) For Sir Theodore, reading fiction does not leave the lasting impression or give the satisfaction that other reading does.

The 1899 article was titled “The reading of novels and the morals of the public” and came from Women’s World, edited by Vivienne. Vivienne’s interest is in whether reading novels is “a judicious measure of education” and whether it should be encouraged. Her response? She failed to see that such reading caused “any great harm or moral wrong”. Indeed, she argued that novel reading provided “a kind of practical education”.

Novels illustrate the mechanism of the world at large, and show the various points of the machinery of life. They tell of every-day episodes; of the romance of days gone by; and, in fact, deal with life in all its forms, from the lowest to the highest grades of society, and from the earliest ages to present times. 

Sounds right to me, but the passing comment at the end did stop me: “of course, children should not be allowed to read novels, for obvious reasons”. 

So, there you have it … there were those who viewed novel reading positively, even where they had some reservations. This is a tiny sample, but you can see some progression from the idea mid-century that novels were primarily about marriage to the end of the century when they were seen to have broader relevance to understanding the world. I’ll be interested to see if things change in the next few decades …