Great Readers | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 10, 1871

Great Readers.

“Laviny’s a great reader,” said my neighbor, Mrs. Peters, with an air of pride. “There ain’t nothin’ hardly that she do n’t read. I never had no education, and I work so hard that if I take up a paper just before I go to bed—and that’s all the time I get—I drop right off to sleep; but Laviny, she makes up for it. She sets up half the night porin’ over her books, till I tell her ’twill kill her. Hard? Well, yes, ’tis rather hard for me to do all the work for eight of us, and I sort of hoped that Laviny would take to housework after she came from the seminary, but she do n’t care for nothin’ but her readin’.”

I waited with some curiosity the entrance of the young lady, whom I hoped to interest in a great subject that lay near my heart. I felt more curious than hopeful, for I had seen too many of these great readers, and yet, if I could have one well-read, sensible woman-friend at Bumbleville my exile would be more tolerable. Miss Peters entered the room, and my faint hope fell to zero. I had known her all my life, only she was not always called Miss Peters. I had heard her called Miss Brown, Miss Smith—any name you like, but always the same inane body, with sometimes a Grecian nose and sometimes a snub, just so many braids, so many curls and so many crimps, with huge panniers, a trailing dress, and much cheap jewelry. We entered into conversation.

“Did she often climb the mountains that commanded a grand and extensive view?”

“No; she did n’t care for scenery; her passion was reading.”

“Indeed! Had she read Buckle and Froude and Lecky and Ruskin?”

“Never heard of such people. What queer names! She took all the magazines for ladies, and six story papers! and, had I read the ‘Maid of Cocheco Mountain?’ and wasn’t the ‘Wolfman of the Haunted Forest, or the Hero of the Bloody Butcher Knife,’ a sweet thing?”

It was the old story. A mother toiling early and late that her daughter may be better educated than herself; a superficial training; a smattering of philosophy, mathematics and history, with a little French and music, and the girl goes home, not to help bear the family burdens, but to dawdle about, tatting a little, crocheting a little, and reading sensational novels without limit; novels whose interest hinges on the love of a pure girl for a dissipated villain, who offers at the shrine of the heroine’s innocence and beauty the remains of the vice-eaten muscle he terms his heart. Laviny reads, weeps, sighs and—mildews. By-and-by her prince arrives, with his waxed moustache, his white hands, his empty head, his cigars, his drunken sprees. He tells Laviny that he has been “rather too wild,” but she can save him, and if she won’t his ruin will lay at her door. Laviny’s friends remonstrate, but she says firmly that she will marry the idol of her soul if she has to carry him home drunk every night.

They marry, and soon the husband returns to his old fashions, and there is little of him but blasphemy, tobacco smoke, and the fumes of liquor. Children are born feeble and wretched, some to escape happily into eternity after a short, wailing life, others to live, inheriting their father’s base nature, and crushing slowly the weak woman’s heart by their misconduct, and people say, “Strange that some people are born to trouble! Laviny was pretty, and she had good advantages, and was a great reader, but she has had a sad life.”

Strange? There is nothing strange about it. The strange thing would be a happy and fortunate life after sowing and watering such trouble-bearing seeds.

Dear girls, the best novels ever written will harm you if you read nothing else. You will grow sentimental, morbid, and self-seeking. Common duties will become distasteful, common pleasures insipid, your brain will be flaccid, your mental tone destroyed. I believe that half the wretched marriages spring from the romantic, rapid reading of our girls. She who can talk sensibly of the current topics of the day, who can tell whether San Domingo is one of the Orkney Islands or not, and whether, on the whole, she wants it annexed; who reads Spencer and Ruskin and Stuart Mill, does n’t throw her life into the care of the first booby of a roue who asks her to do so, because it is romantic to be engaged. She considers well what marriage means for herself, her husband and her children, and would one million times rather live unwed than be mated to a fool or a knave.—Woman’s Journal.