MANUSCRIPT: On Novel Reading.
“There is something so enticing in novels…”
[Education] Wight, Abigail W. On Novel Reading. Bradford Academy, Nov. 9, 1818.
Manuscript leaf of this Maine schoolgirl’s thoughts on novel reading; one page, recto only; lightly browned and toned with age; signed and dated at the bottom of the page; creased, with several tiny holes at the center fold, not affecting text.
A charming example of penmanship and juvenile literary criticism by a fifteen year-old schoolgirl. Wight supported reading books of “merit and importance,” though she viewed novels as only capable of rendering the mind “dissipated and fickle”; a rather mature stance to take at such a young age. The manuscript reads in full:
There is no species of reading to which youth are so much addicted and which is productive of so pernicious and destructive consequences as novel reading. When once the mind is engaged in the perusal of such fanciful representations as are held forth in fictitious history, it soon becomes vitiated and subjected to every folly and vanity. A relish for higher and nobler objects is perverted and the mind is rendered dissipated and fickle. While we are amusing ourselves by contemplating the enchanting scenes and almost spotless characters delineated in the pages of romance we are lost to all inferior things; we have no longer a relish for that enjoyment which is to be found in a domestic life, and fancy to ourselves that happiness is found only in those fictitious scenes which we are so enchanting to our minds.
Numerous are the evils arising from an early attention to such kind of reading. There is something so enticing in novels that those who have acquired a taste for them find it almost impossible to check the growing propensity. Many an amiable person has spent the playful morning of childhood and the important season of youth in the perusal of these illusions of the fancy, and many a novel has been wholly perused when tired nature required repose. Those hours of which ought to have been devoted to retirement and meditation have thus been foolishly wasted. Let us endeavor to guard against the enchantments of romance, and by a strict attention to works of merit and importance cultivate our intellectual powers, which will render us useful members of society.
Considering Wight’s thesis now – almost two hundred years after she wrote it – it is compelling to think of all of the distractions plaguing teenagers today. One looks with nostalgia on the “evils” of novel reading.
Wight (1797-1854) attended the now-defunct Bradford Academy, which was in the town of Bradford (now Haverhill) Massachusetts. She was born and raised in Penobscot, Maine (then part of Massachusetts); her parents were Edward and Hannah Wight. In 1819, at age 22, she married Samuel Wardwell, a ship’s captain in Penobscot who later became a merchant; the Wardwell’s had four children.
(#12907)
Print Inquire
