Claims that Novels Are Bad For Teens

Jane AustenJane Austen

Last night I was teaching a Jane Austen class at a local retirement center and was talking about the defense of novels that appears in Northanger Abbey.

Catherine, the book’s heroine, has just made a new friend in Isabella Thorpe.  They go everywhere together in Bath and, when the weather is bad, meet to discuss novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic novel by Anne Radcliffe.  But no sooner has she mentioned novels than Austen feels it is necessary to come to their defense.  Here’s what she says:

They [Catherine and Isabella] called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other’s train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; — for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” — Such is the common cant. — “And what are you reading, Miss ———-?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. — “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;” or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

Some background is useful here.  First, novels exploded on the English literary scene in the 18th century.  No one was sure what they were—they had a literary quality to them in that they were fictional. But unlike other literary forms, they were formless.  They didn’t rhyme or have meter like poetry, they didn’t have acts like plays. They could be short or long and you could pour virtually anything into them. In Moll Flanders Defoe even includes copies of three competing cost estimates from people willing to take Moll’s child off her hands. Novels were something novel, and so people called them novels.

They were also viewed suspiciously by the moral authorities of the day.  When he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678, John Bunyan had to include a very defensive introduction.  While Pilgrim’s Progress is more allegory than novel, it has a fictional character who goes on a journey  and must overcome various obstacles and temptations. Bunyan was afraid that people would seem him as lying or using words as ornamentation.  Words were supposed to point straight to God’s truth and not engage in fictional circumlocution.

Bunyan paved the way for the novels that were to come, and when they did they swept up readers, especially young people and women.  My dissertation advisor Paul Hunter has written a wonderfully titled article, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader,” in which he talks about how threatening this new form was.  After all, one disappeared into a novel and had some intense kind of private experience before emerging. It wasn’t like other art experiences, which were public.  (Poetry, for instance, would get passed around amongst groups.)  If the novel was, say, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which is a million words long, a husband might see his wife disappear into her private room (her “closet,” as it was known then) and neglect household duties for days at a time.

In 1750, when the city of London experienced two earthquakes (leaving everyone waiting for the third), the bishop of London delivered a sermon blaming them on the publication of Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.  Young people were being led astray, he warned.

I’ll return to the Jane Austen passage in my next post and go more into exactly why novels were seen as so dangerous. I’ll just note that the suspicion hasn’t entirely gone away, as the furor among certain Christian groups over Harry Potter or The Golden Compass indicates. That distress, and the distress of 18th century moralists, is on to something. Maybe novels are not as innocuous as we think. More to come.

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