NON – READERS.

Evening Star, Issue 4193, 4 August 1876, Page 3

NON - READERS.

{Good Wm-ds.)

The non-readers may be divided into three types. First come those who are utterly unable to read at all, still a lamentably-large number, but happily a constantly-diminishing proportion of the working classes at large. They are a dismal type to contemplate. They are so ignorant as to be incapable of of realising the extent and intensity of their own ignorance, or the greatness and many-sidedness of their loss. Much of life is necessarily a blank to them, and, debarred from intellectual pleasures, it is no wonder that drunkenness and other vices should abound among them. The second type consists of those who can read, but very seldom do. They have had the advantage of schooling, and, as children, may have been able to read fluently, but from disuse the power has become impaired. As men, they read, not fluently or with ease to themselves, but more or less lamely, and with effort. Many of them can just manage to hobble their way through a poster, or the letter-press of the titles to the illustrations to the ' Illustrated Police News,' and other such delectable publications, while others confine their literary exercises to laboriously wading their way through the criminal records of the cheap weekly newspapers. The third type are only non-readers in the sense that they do not read anything worthy of the name of literature —anything from which they can gain either knowledge or taste. They do read, but not books, not what is ordinarily understood as periodicals, but penny weekly journals and " numbers," which, as I hare just hinted, cannot by any permissible extension of the term be classed as literature, and which it is certainly no libel to class as trash. These publications consist of "To-be-continued-in-our-uext" stories of the most outrageously absurd character. The central line on which they are all constructed is the picturing of what the readers of such rubbish fondly take to be the social and inner life of the aristocracy. Princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies—rbotb home and foreigu—stalk through their pages, not certainly as " things of life," but as horrid examples of the abortive images that can be evolved fiom the consciousness of. the Beusatioual novelists of \he lower pan. dering to a foolisli taste, a,od writing without the fear of .criticism before their eyes. Magnificent ancestral " seats " and estates figure as prominently and frequently as titled personagrs. The halls of dazzling light are a stock property, and money, jewels, and gorgeous dress and furniture are scattered about with an Arabian-Nights-like lavishness. The stolen heir, the children changed at nurse, the abducted heiress, the secret-drawer and lost will, the scientific poisoner, the hired bravo, the broad-shouldered, black-bearded, ha ! ha-ing villain who has a " hold " upon the equally villanous but less robust and more aristocratic personage who is in possession of " the ancestral estate,"

til these and other oreatures are popularly supposed to have died with the old form of melodrama, are* in these tales made to walk again. All is glare and glitter; tall talk, false lilt*, false sentiment, false morality. These publications are supported almost exclusively by the working classes, who buy them by tens and luiudi-ecls of thousands. They form the chief reading of the women and girls of those classes, and it is probably to suit this portion of their clients that the authors of the tales throw iu the character of " the poor but virtuous maiden," who commences life as a milliner and rises to be a marchioness. Females form a majority of the readers, but the number of male readers is very large, and this is the most wonderful part of the business. That grown and bearded men who can read, and who for the most part have a world before them where to choose in the matter of reading, should be found giving themselves up to the exclusive reading of such worthless, contemptible, enervating trash, is really surprising; but po it is, and pity His, 'tis so.