Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Indroduction: Problems now and then
- Part One ENLIGHTENMENT
- Part Two MARGINALIA
- Preamble: Swinish multitudes
- Chapter Three The poorer sort
- Chapter Four Masculine women
- Chapter Five Oriental literature
- Conclusion: Romantic revisions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Preamble: Swinish multitudes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Indroduction: Problems now and then
- Part One ENLIGHTENMENT
- Part Two MARGINALIA
- Preamble: Swinish multitudes
- Chapter Three The poorer sort
- Chapter Four Masculine women
- Chapter Five Oriental literature
- Conclusion: Romantic revisions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Two letters appeared in the November 1797 and January 1798 editions of the Gentleman's Magazine, signed with the pen-name Eusebius. They highlighted the dangers of the wrong sort of literature falling into the hands of young women, in the first letter, and the labouring classes, in the second. Together they suggest the growing anxieties we have already encountered about literature as a sphere for the exchange of ideas and as a means for the diffusion of knowledge. To be published was to be placed before the public, which would act as the arbiter of a work's success or failure, but paradoxically, this heightened rather than eradicated the task of ensuring proper taste on the part of those who were to act in this role as arbiters. ‘Of all reading, that of novels is the most frivolous, and frequently the most pernicious’, Eusebius warned:
Many of them suggest false notions of life, inflame the imagination, deprave the judgement, and vitiate the heart. A lady, whose mind is not engaged in more useful, or capable of more rational, employment, sends her servant to the Circulating Library; and he returns loaded with volumes, containing pathetic tales of love and madness; tales, which fill her head with the most ridiculous chimeras; with romantic scenes of gallantry; with an admiration of young rakes of spirit; with dreams of conquests, amorous interviews, and matrimonial excursions …
A young woman, who employs her time in reading novels, will never find amusement in any other sort of books. Her mind will be soon debauched by licentious description, and lascivious images; and she will, consequently, remain the same frivolous and insignificant creature through life; her mind will become a magazine of trifles and follies, or rather impure and wanton ideas. Her favourite novels will never teach her the social virtues, the qualifications of domestic life, the principles of her native language, history, geography, morality, the precepts of Christianity, or any other useful science. (67 (1797): 912)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Crisis of Literature in the 1790sPrint Culture and the Public Sphere, pp. 135 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999