26 
of an immature mind, but the product of long and laborious 
thought and great genius, and to understand and enjoy them 
the reader must bring to them a mind capable of appreciating 
the author. The imagination must not be raw, but must 
have been already stimulated and fed, and the reader must 
have learnt to look beyond mere incident. We had not got 
these conditions in the mind of our young people. Reading 
too is not necessarily always to be done for the cultivation of 
the intellect, but ought to give some pleasure ; life is not all 
work. We must avoid the mistake that what is not worth 
keeping as classical is not worth reading. We must try and 
realise the mental condition of the people who read that 
for which we do not care and which we would condemn. 
Many people condemn the literature for boys and girls described 
as “ penny dreadfuls.” He did not, nor would he, 
sentence novelettes. They give a touch of the romantic to 
lives otherwise dull and sordid. They arouse the hitherto 
sluggish and unawakened mind in a healthy direction and 
give a taste for reading of a better kind. The people who 
read them would probably read nothing were they deprived 
of this simple literature which they can understand and 
enjoy. Such literature would be an empty dish to ourselves 
and it would require no effort to peruse it ; but the people 
who read it cannot digest what we can, and they need as much 
mental concentration for their reading as we do. We must 
imagine them struggling through the classics which would 
give them nothing but mental indigestion. The assumption 
is often made, too, that these stories for boys and girls are 
‘‘ pernicious.” This assumption was quite without founda- 
tion. He himself had read a great many, and had never found 
anything pernicious in them. They were exciting in incident ; 
but so also were the tales of Henty, Doyle, and Haggard, which 
we put into the hands of our young people without hesitation. 
Their moral was always “ virtue will triumph in the end.” 
It would be suggested later by Mr. Rothwell that we ought 
to subsidise the classics so that they would displace these 
cheaper publications. But many of our classical works 
which are fit for the fully formed minds of adults, would have 
a grossly pernicious effect if studied by the young, and would 
develop a very unhealthy side of their imagination. 
In considering the present vast output of new novels, he 
thought very few of them indeed were worth reading and 
would live, but he thought that even the “ trash ” of this 
kind was not without its place in the world. It was better, 
he thought, that reading of any kind, even though unsub- 
stantial or “ trashy,” should be done rather than nothing 
