The Rage for Fiction by Albany Spectator

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 25, 1856

The Rage for Fiction.

By Albany Spectator

"I WANT a paper that has long stories in it," said a young lady, and she added, "I don't want a paper for anything else." Poor girl! much to be pitied, and a pitiful appearance she will make through life, at the present rate. She wants nothing serious, no acquaintance with the history of her times, nothing intellectual, nothing but newspaper novels! Empty heads they must be that can find room every week, for some ten columns of a sham story. Yet these are the heads for which the weekly press toils and groans, throwing off by the ten thousands its sheets of shallow, insipid and disgusting fiction; and for this, an amount of money is paid, which a good, sound literature utterly fails to command. Yes, Christian fathers and mothers buy this vile trash for their sons and daughters, and so minister to their ignorance and destitution of all taste and fitness for life's duties. Doubtless, the periodical press does more than any other one instrumentality, to decide the opinions, habits of thought, and general character of the age. A family will very soon begin to show a sympathy with its weekly paper, and parent and child will soon begin assimilating to it in sentiment and feeling; and as families are, so is the community at large. Blind and stupid, therefore, yea, worse, are those parents who tolerate in their houses a class of papers which are good for nothing, made up of the writings of silly, ignorant scribblers, who would be "at the foot" in a town school, much more in a school of good morals. Such are the teachers of half the present generation.—Albany Spectator.