FRENCH AND ENGLISH NOVELS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3058, 1 December 1908, Page 3

FRENCH AND ENGLISH NOVELS.

"We are very glad „indeed," says the "Guardian," "to see that the American Booksellers' Association has just passed a resolution exhorting its members 'to discourage the publication and sale of books of pronounced immoral plot and tone.' We should be still more gratified if some analogous organisation in England would pass an act up to a similar resolution. The past year or two have seen the publication in London of an unusually large number of novels which are not only poisonous to the young and inexperienced, but are unfit reading even for those more or less well-armed against such influences. And not only has this type of book increased in number, but it had grown enormously in virulence. Fiction which twenty years ago no publisher would have dared to issue is now printed with impunity and read with an avidity which ensures substatial pecuniary success. There is something peculiarly nauseous in the spectacle of men, and still worse of women—who are unhappily among the worst offenders —making money by the exploitation of subjects and situations of a peculiarly offensive type. It is a humiliating reflection that as French novels have grown cleaner English ones have grown dirtier."