POPULAR LITERARY TASTES.

Evening Star, Issue 3098, 23 January 1873, Page 3

POPULAR LITERARY TASTES.

An interesting article, appeared in a recent number of the Mew Fork Nation, founded on the experience of the Boston Public Library. The Nation asserts that, judged by the demand at that institution, the three most popular authors of fiction are Mrs South worth, Mrs Lee Hontz, and Marie J. Holmes. The statt ment will be, no doubt, surprising to mmy persons, but it is not new to those familiar with the facts of American literature. The same paper gives the statistics of-a public library established in a town near Boston, which are as follows : f every hundred books taken out, there wiF, upon an average, be 45 works of fiction for adults, 35 of fiction for juveniles, and 20 volumes of every other description of literature. This library does not happen to contain the works of either Mrs tonthworth or Mrs Heutz, which would undoubtedly bo in as great demand here as they are found to he in the City Library at Boston. Meanwhile, in their absence, the three writers whose works a: e most eagerly sought are Mrs Stowe, Mrs Whitney, and Miss Alcott, while the most frequently read books are Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miss Cummings’s Lamplighter, and, strange to say, side by side with Wee Girls and Little Men, and in close competition with these modern favorites, come the literary offspring of good old Misses Koche and Porter- The Children of the Abbey, Thaddens of Waisaw, and the Scottish Chiefs Meanwhile the groat Sir Walter, the world-renowned contemporary of the last named two excellent ladies, lingers far behind them in popoular appreciation. If the writers of fiction in most popular demand were to be roughly clarified, it would be somewhat as follows In the first class, after the various chief favorites already mentioned, would come Mayne Reid, Charles Reade, Bicktns, Cooper, Charlotte' Bronte, A. S, 800, Miss Mnlnch, Wilkie Collins, M. T. Holmes. T, 8. Arthur, and, pleasant to add, good old Miss Anste 1 . The works of those wr ters and a few miscellaneous favorites, such as Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and Gulliver’s Trave's, are almost never on the shelves : as the copies a e read to pieces they are replaced by others, but the demand does not stop. In the see nd class, popular, but not nearly so popular, would come Marryat, D’laraeli, Anthony Trollope, lever, Dumas, Hawthorne, Bnlwer, Thackeray, Mrs Charles, Mis Walker, Miss Douglas, Walter Scott, Miss Kavan-igh, and Miss Edgeworth. It is useless to go into details as to the works of the authors thus miscellaneously jumbled together; it may bo, enough to say of the three probably greatest masters of contemporary English fiction, that 'J he Old Curiosity Shop is t-ie favorite among the pro-, duct’ons of Dickens ; that not many books qyc more read tl an The Scarlet Letter ; and that Thackeray is confined to a comparatively limited circle, which is chiefly addicted to Vanity Fair.