poisonous matter has unavoidably come to the surface in English
fiction. The writers who have prostituted their talents in pandering to
the low tastes of their readers, have carefully avoided any such open
representation of vice as was permissible in the last century. But they
have hidden under an outward respectability of words the most immoral
and degrading thoughts. They have recognized the fact that a not
inconsiderable number of persons would be be glad to find in a work of
fiction the same gross ideas which occupy their own minds. And thus a
more dangerous, because a more insidious, species of literature has
sprung up. The absence of parental censorship, the general freedom with
which works of fiction are allowed to enter almost every household,
permit these novels to fall into the hands of the youngest and most
susceptible. The young girl or boy whose parents carefully put away the
newspaper which contains an account of a divorce trial or a rape, is
very possibly reading a novel of which the main interest lies in a
detailed description of a seduction. It is not of the so-called "dime
novels" or of the stories published in a police gazette to which
reference is made, but to books issued by respectable publishers and
often written by women. Of these novels, the subject is the unlawful
gratification of the passions. Bigamy, seduction, adultery, are the
incidents on which the story turns, and an effort is always made by the
novelist to give to the sinners as attractive and interesting an aspect
as possible, and to hold up any respectable people who may appear in
the book to the contempt and derision of the reader. Perhaps we would
be wrong in blaming a writer for his or her vulgarity. This is a fault
into which some authors fall unconsciously, and is a part of their
nature which they cannot shake off. If Rhoda Broughton or "Ouida" were
to cease being vulgar in print, they would be obliged to stop writing
altogether, a public benefit which we can hardly expect them to confer.
But we have a right to severely call an author to task for representing
vice in an attractive aspect, for condoning offences against morality,
for depicting licentiousness as unattended by retributive consequences.
In so doing, a writer is false to art and to nature, as well as to
morality.

Critics have done their utmost to discourage and expose this kind of
literature. The pages of _The Spectator_, of _The Saturday Review_, of
_The Athenaeum_,