Pernicious Reading

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 25, 1870

Pernicious Reading.

Of the several novels laid upon our table during the month, not much that is favorable can be said. It is a painful subject for reflection, that every month adds a dozen or twenty to the number of works of this class, scarcely one of which possesses sufficient literary worth to give it any claim to recognition in the world of letters, or power to exert any other influence than to vitiate still more the literary taste and corrupt the morals of the reading community. We recollect no time during the last two or three decades of years when novels were more numerously published than now, or when they were characterized so generally by a low moral and intellectual tone. They are nearly all of them the product of English brains—and the English school of novels at the present time is hardly on a par with the French in the matter of morality—republished here, in cheap form, and through thousands of agencies, sold by the trade to an immense extent all over the country. One of these novels was recently fished up from the purlieus of London, and the name of a popular sensational author attached to it by a publishing house here, and more than ten thousand copies of it sold in a few weeks. It seems to us that many of our respectable publishers are rolling up a fearful account with God and with the community, in using their names and facilities to give currency and circulation to such a class of novels as is now flooding and cursing the land. Unless some means can be devised to arrest this rapidly-augmenting currency of licentious and semi-infidel literature, its demoralizing effects will soon be everywhere manifest.—Hours at Home.