Confessions of a Novel Reader

[Derleth]

It has become my duty to expose the horrors of novels, novel-reading, and the addiction thereto. Citing from this first-hand account from 1839, I shall attempt to reform some lives in this den of iniquity and prose fiction and save some souls from the brink of damnation:

At an early age I acquired a taste for novel reading, and indulged it to such an excess, that my mind was enervated, and its relish destroyed for higher and more solid attainments.

The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.

There was even a novel written by an opium-eater. Coincidence? I very much doubt it!

I was naturally imaginative. From my earliest childhood I was addicted to that visionary propensity of the mind called castle-building. Though not averse to the usual pastimes of my age, I delighted to withdraw from my companions, to repose under some tree in a dreamy abstracted state of mind, lulled by the hum of insects and the song of birds, while bright scenes and forms of loveliness, dim and shadowy like the recollections of a by-gone existence, flitted before my imagination. I would sometimes remain for hours, entranced in these fantasies, and peopling the surrounding solitudes with beings of my own creation.

Does this remind you of yourself or anyone you know? Could someone near to you already be heading down the wrong path?

By dint of perseverance, I was instructed in the art and mystery of reading, and, to confirm me in the practise of it, I was supplied with story books, garnished with cuts, according to the most approved plan of modern education. These works were miserable catchpennies, compiled, rather than composed, by that numerous class of writers, whom benevolence, or the itch of scribbling, or more probably the desire of profit, has prompted to contribute to the instruction of children. These authors displayed no deep knowledge of the metaphysics of education, and proceeded upon the hypothesis, that the only aim was to arrest the attention, without regarding the objects to which it should be directed.

This course of reading exercised a baneful influence, not only on the habits of my mind, but threatened, at this time, to produce an effect not less fatally injurious to my moral character. I have never had a taste for the pleasures of dissipation and debauchery. The cold selfishness and brutal sensuality of such pursuits are, usually, offensive and disgusting to ardent and imaginative characters. Persons, of that temperament, have a native delicacy and refinement, which recoil from a participation in those low and degrading scenes, in which the habitual libertine delights to revel. But habit reconciles us to every thing; and evil example, operating on hearts governed by impulse rather than principle, has often perverted the best dispositions. I had now reached a time of life when the passions are peculiarly inflammable, and when the blandishments of vice too often find a responsive chord in the youthful bosom. At this critical period, accident threw in my way the works of Smollet and Fielding. Their inimitable humor, their deep knowledge of human weaknesses, their acute discrimination of character, their consummate art in the development of their stories, their infinite fertility of invention, and their vigorous powers of description, though indications of a high order of genius, afford but a feeble compensation for the immoral tendency of their writings. I was so charmed with their amusing qualities, that I was unconscious of the poison that lurked beneath them. The apologists of these writers allege, that they drew their pictures from real life; but surely the pencil of genius might find more fit employment, than in transferring to the canvass every loathsome object in nature, or in weakening our abhorrence of things intrinsically hideous and detestable.

Ban Smollet! Ban Fielding! How many are they leading to an early doom at this very moment!

As an aside, I have no doubt that this person had read way too much 19th Century fiction: He uses words like a cudgel, not a scalpel, and attempts to sharpen rhetorical pencils with a myriad of dull axes as opposed to a single sharp knife.

[j666]

I do remember reading a list of ‘Signs of a Drinking Problem’ and realizing that something like 9 out of 12 applied to me, not about alcohol, but about reading.

“Have you missed work because you were [reading] the night before?”

“Have you disappointed friends or family in order to [finish a book]?”

“Do you look forward to your first [chapter] each day? Do you start to [read] earlier and earlier in the day?”

“Do you ever [read] in the morning as a “pick-me-up”?”

“Do friends comment on how much you [read]?”

“Do you feel anxious in situations where [books] are not available?”

“Do you sneak quick [chapters] when no-one will notice?”

[Sage_Rat]

I once spent a summer trying to craft the Oxford translation of the Count of Monte Cristo into a screenplay. That left a 19th century way of writing on me that’s occasionally a bit of a hassle.

That guy could really use to shorten his paragraphs though.

[The_Scrivener]

[19th-C. moralist] The problem with novels stems from their source, the novel-writers; and what a disreputable and often anti-clerical lot they are – their oft insensate and irresponsible ranks being comprised mostly of moral degenerates of the lowest order, numbering myriad rakes, habitual drunkards, pederasts, opium-eaters, harlots, syphilitics and other free-lovers, like those brazen Continental strumpets George Sand and Mary Shelley. The unhappy yield of their endeavors, I fear, is merely a literary hogslop that threatens to reduce all who partake of its bounty to a morally porcine state.

Mark my words; it would be more providential for a gentleman to house a mortal India viper in his nursery, than to maintain a fashionable library, accessible by his wife and children, under his roof. [/19th-C. moralist]

[Eleanor_of_Aquitaine]

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”