A Solemn Appeal

READING NOVELS, LOVE TALES, ETC., INJURIOUS

“‘The fashionable reading of the day is still more objectionable. As to its amount, let publishers, and the editors of family newspapers, testify. Whose sales are the greatest? Whose patronage is the most extensive? Those who publish the most novels, and the best (? worst) love-tales. Let those weeklies that boast of their “30,000 subscribers.” and claim “the largest circulation in the world,” have a red line drawn across every column containing a story, the substance and seasoning of which is love, and more than half their entire contents will be crimsoned with the sign of Amativeness! Try this experiment and it will astonish you. Country newspapers also must have a part on the whole of some love-tale every week, or else run down. These stories, girls are allowed and encouraged to read. How often have I seen girls not twelve years old, as hungry for a story or novel as they should be for their dinners! A sickly sentimentalism is thus formed, and their minds are sullied with impure desires. Every fashionable young lady must of course read every new novel, though nearly all of them contain exceptionable allusions, perhaps delicately covered over with a thin gauze of fashionable refinement; yet, on that very account, the more objectionable. If this work contained one improper allusion to their ten, many of those fastidious ladies who now eagerly devour the vulgarities of Marryatt, and the double-entendres of Bulwer, and even converse with gentlemen about their contents, would discountenance or condemn it as improper. SHAME ON NOVEL-READING WOMEN! for they cannot have pure minds or unsullied feelings, but Cupid, and the beaux, and waking dreams of love, are first consuming their health and virtue. SOAP 265.1

“‘Not that I impute the lest blame to those respectable editors and publishers, who fill their coffers by feasting this diseased public appetite, especially of the ladies, even though they pander to, and increase, this worst vice of this our vicious age and nation; any more than I blame grog-sellers for making money out of another diseased public taste; because both are aiming mainly at dollars and cents, yet stabbing public virtue to the heart. But their money will be a curse to them, and their trash is a curse to its readers.’ SOAP 266.1

“A heating, stimulating diet still more prematurely develops this passion. By heating up and fevering the body, it of course fevers the propensities, but none more than this. We have already seen, that meats, teas, coffee, mustards, spices, etc., stimulate it in adults. Hence, they of course induce precocious sexuality in children. On this account, if on no other, these things, coffee in particular, are utterly unfit for the young. Rather feed them on what will allay this impulse, instead of prematurely exciting it. Nor can we expect the world to become pure morally till a correct system of dietetics is generally practiced. A heating diet, after all, is the most prolific cause of ‘excessive and perverted sexuality.’ Parents, mind what you feed your children. Youth, observe a correct regimen. Married and single, who would reduce this feeling, eat and drink cooling, calming articles only.” SOAP 267.1