Last week, in my Trove Treasures series, I shared some ideas published in the 19th century arguing for reading novels. Now, I am sharing some from the first decades of the 20th century. The articles range from 1903 to 1928, with many, again, coming from London.

Diversion and instruction

Two papers – Brisbane’s The Telegraph (18 December) and Perth’s The Spectator (31 December) – reported in 1903 on the annual address given by Professor Dicey to the Working Men’s College in London. Dicey argued that the main benefit of novels was “to take a man out of himself — to afford some relief from the petty and tiresome thoughts of every-day life by substituting a world of larger and more varied interest”. (We must forgive him and the others below their gender specificity – I suppose.)

Interestingly, The Spectator says, and this seems to be its own reflection, that it’s not always “the highest class that serves this purpose best” and goes on to share a variety of novels from penny novelettes, like the Deadwood Dick novels, to Scott, Thackeray and Balzac. This idea of novels as valid – indeed useful – recreation is refreshing. The Spectator goes so far as to say that

That degree of mental absorption and excitement to be found in works of fiction, fine and trashy alike, and more often in the trashy ones, has become part and parcel of the home life.

But, this sort of reading must not be “indulged too far”. The Telegraph reports a month or so later (8 February) that Prof Dicey does comment on the issue of quality, making this recommendation:

take good care that you read novels of a good kind — each good of its kind. If you like a detective story take care you read a good detective story, and think about what you have read.

Dicey also believed – and here we are in more familiar territory – that novel reading provides “an introduction to life and thought”. This idea though, says The Spectator, is one few – including itself – “will be prepared to admit”. It fears that novels might teach readers what to expect in life but not how to meet it.

Moving to 1905, we have another Englishman’s point of view, this time Sir Richard Henn Collins*, Master of Rolls in England. The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser (7 February) reports Sir Richard’s argument that much useful knowledge can be acquired through reading fiction. Indeed – are you listening Bill – he argued for the value of the historical novel, saying, “that he himself had won a scholarship mainly through having imbibed French history by reading Dumas’ famous Three Musketeers and other French novels of a similar class”. Even I think that might be going a bit too far – as does our newspaper. It argues that while this might be an appealing way of learning, the fact is that the public service and many professions require the passing of examinations. This means that the “the greater part of the schoolboy’s career must necessarily be occupied in the process of stuffing with dates, syntax rules, and other learned matter. The novel as an educator cannot, therefore, be recommended as an essential part of the ordinary public school curriculum”.

A year later, on 16 March 1906, The Hebrew Standard of Australasia, picks up the argument favouring the reading of novels. It suggests that “many people, especiallv men between twenty-five and forty-five, men in responsible positions, serious people engrossed by the details of a large business, consider novels simply as a kind of dross”, but this, it argues, is a “mistake”:

To read a good novel and read it with undivided attention is a means of instruction and education, which very few men below fifty can afford to entirely neglect. We have met not one, but many business men, excellent, successful and commanding our admiration in a very high degree, in whose manner of conducting business we have noticed defects, not to say faults, which most probably, would never have occurred if they had been in the habit of reading, now and then, a good novel, and had been able to extract from that reading the good which it can yield [my emph].

It then spends some time elaborating exactly what businessmen can learn from novels. It’s a thoughtful article, well worth reading.

Varying the diet

Support for novel reading continued in the 1920s, but I found some qualifications. For example, Leeton’s The Murrumbidgee Irrigator (20 March 1923), shares an argument put forward by Thackeray, half a century previously, “that all people with healthy literary tastes love novels” but “that overindulgence in them in youth spoils the taste for them in after-life, even as a schoolboy outgrows his love for pudding and jelly”. He goes on to discuss the truth of this in his era, particularly regarding those decadent modern novels which cannot hold his attention. Yet, speaking for himself and his fellow-sufferers, he admits that, regardless of having over-indulged in their youth, they can still “find a corrective in those romances which used to entrance us — ah! how many years ago”.

And in 1928, Brisbane’s Daily Standard (17 March) shared an argument from London’s Evening Standard that “the habitual novel-reader should sometimes vary his mental diet”. Indeed, the Evening Standard suggests that this is important given that the other works of literature, which preceded the novel and continue alongside it, “will no doubt be still vigorous when the novel has had its day”. Little did it know!

It then goes on to say something rather interesting:

There is no good novel which is not veiled autobiography, either from the emotional or from the intellectual standpoint; but a writer can under the protection of the veil, be franker than he could possibly be in a ‘Confession’ or ‘Apologia pro vita sus.’ There is perpetual complaint of the indecent novel; but in a sense all novels are indecent —that is, they reveal thoughts and feelings that the writer would never dream of exposing to a company of even close friends.

It says more, arguing that there is value in wide reading – hard and low-brow, fiction and nonfiction – but I’ll leave you with its closing remarks because they tickled me:

it is neither polite nor grateful to many excellent modern writers in non-fiction genres to talk as if ‘books’ were only another name for novels.

So there!

* Collins was the judge in the Wilde vs Queensberry libel case.

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 …

Number 7 in my Trove Treasures series was inspired by a little piece that appeared in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 6 December 1946. It was titled, “Men join police force after reading novels”. Naturally, I was intrigued. What novels, for example?

The story’s subject was one Constable J. Simons who had just resigned the police force, after having served for 17 years. He was speaking at a Police Association meeting and he said, to quote the Telegraph, that “most men joined the police force for adventure after reading detective stories”. (The rest of the piece was about why he is was resigning, which related to pay and and conditions, particularly regarding slow promotion due to the system operating at the time.)

It made sense that detective reading might inspire young men to look to the police as a career, but I wanted to find out more. Unfortunately, this proved quite difficult because it was hard to find specific search terms to get what I was looking for. As it turned out, in the time I gave to it, I didn’t find much, but what I did find was illuminating.

What I found were articles about what policemen (as they were mostly then) read – rather than about what caused them to join the police force. One article came from New York in 1914, and another two came from Queensland in the 1930s. All indicated that policemen did not read detective stories. Neither talked about what might have inspired them into the force, but both stated very clearly what they read once in the force.

New York New York

The 1914 article appeared in Sydney’s The Sun on 4 August. It commences with:

Whatever the world at large may think of detective stories, they do not win the esteem of those whose business it is to follow up crime. The police care least of all for this line of literature — a fact discovered by reports of books most favored among those consigned by the New York Public Library for use at the police stations. 

This story, then, is about the NYPL’s providing books to police stations for police reading. The article implied that what the police read might be affected by the sorts of books selected! They’d be, the article said, “standard and classic books” chosen by the library authorities “as to what they ought to read, that being an inclination of librarians everywhere”. (Oh dear, but I think this sort of high-minded prescription was more the case then, than in modern libraries!) Nonetheless, the article does explicitly discuss detective stories:

According to report, these particular readers find little of interest and nothing of profit in the ‘detective stories’ which have such a wide sale with the ununiformed public. The policemen say that ‘real’ detective work is not done after the fashion of the sagacious heroes of Conan Doyle and his predecessors, and therefore they scorn romantic crime-hunting. This condemnation involves the assumption that the methods of ‘practical’ men cannot be bettered — an assumption wildly fallacious, but entirely natural. The police antagonism to detective novels may be due in some part to the fact that in almost every such book it is the scientific amateur who works all the miracles, while the ‘headquarters man’ is usually a comic character who laboriously follows a false clue while the other fellow gets the results.

The article goes on to defend the writers of these books, suggesting that errors in detective work “may be intentionally made by an author for the sake of attaining some higher end of emphasis or excitement”. Indeed, says the article, “all the great advances in the task of crime-detection have been made, not by policemen, but by scientists”. Lest, however, we feel that the police were being unfairly targeted, the article continues that this is true of many professions and trades, so ‘that “the force” need not be humiliated by it”. Still, the article ends with a little sting in the tail for the poor copper, which I’ll leave for you to read.

Caring for police in Queensland

We then skip a couple of decades to Queensland and the creation of a library in that state’s Police Welfare Club. I found two articles on this initiative. One appeared in Brisbane’s The Courier Mail (24 November 1937), titled “Policemen’s reading: Logic, forensic ballistics: Why thrillers are unpopular”, and the other, nearly two years later, in that city’s The Telegraph (19 June 1939), titled “Our policemen study the classics”.

The 1937 article commences with

Few of Queensland’s detectives read detective stories. They find the novelists’ supermen unreal to the point of irritation.

The article quotes the C.I.B. man who showed the writer around the Club’s “fine new library” as saying that “We don’t detect that way”. This new library, the article claims, indicates “the higher education of the modern policeman”.

Both articles describe the broad content of the library, but it’s the second one that provides more detail about its genesis, noting something that harked back to that first article I found. It says that “a policeman’s pay does not ordinarily permit him to possess as his very own a library of any consequence”. Our detective novel reading Constable from 1946 would probably agree! Anyhow, the article’s writer, a “special correspondent”, explains that Queensland’s Commissioner of Police (Mr. C. J. Carroll), who had been appointed in 1934, had immediately set about creating a club “to give his men better facilities for recreation, educational advancement, and departmental advancement”. In 1936, after fundraising had got the club going, he turned to creating a communal library for the police and their families, in Brisbane and state-wide via mail.

Both articles write about the breadth of the collection, and engage in discussion about was being read, which ranged widely from poetry and the classics to political satire and books reconstructing real crimes and trials.

Towards the end of the second article, the writer asks the wife of a detective:

“Does he go in for detective stories?” 
“No, he reads to relax” she replied. Adventure stories—the lighter the better—were first favourite with him for recreational reading. 

The earlier article says that “Wild West books are the most popular in the relaxation class of reading”, so maybe this is what her husband was reading!

Much of the second article is anecdotal so it’s impossible to say just what “real” impact the library had on the state’s policing, but I’d like to think that our “special correspondent”, who concludes by quoting Arnold Bennet on the value of reading, is right when s/he says that

… with the aid of their library the men in the police force are developing greater understanding of mankind; consequently they must surely become better policemen.