Effects of Novels.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 443, 5 February 1890, Page 3

Effects of Novels.

The statistics of popular and circulating ■ libraries show that 75 per cent, of all the books taken out are novels of recent production, writes Edward J. Phelps, exMinister to England, in “Scribner s A library for the general public that did not' furnish them could not be sustained, whatever real treasures of knowledge and literature it might offer. Probably the most numerous readers of novels are to be found among women, perhaps because they have more time and fewer other diversions than men. In the large class of them who derive their ideas of life and of the world from this source the result is seen in the enormous and increasing business of the divorce courts, of which they and their husbands are the principal patrons. Aside from the loose and vague notions of morality that become familiar to them, unconsciously, from the books they read, they enter upon married life with ideas and expectations so false and theories so absurd that nothing but disappointment and unhappiness can follow. Instead of the impossible and self - sacrificing heroes of their dreams, they awake to find themselves married only to men, with the imperfections common to humanity. They perceive that the perfection they are in search of is to be found in other women’s husbands, notin their own ; on which point they would be speedily undeceived if they could exchange situations with their apparently more fortunate sisters. It is not long before both parties to a union that has proved a disappointment are ready to escape from it; or, if not, one or the other is determined to break away. It is probable that all other causes put together are nob so prolific of divorce among the class in which it commonly takes place as the fact that its women are brought up on novels of a low grade as their habitual and almost only reading.