Published January, February, March, April, May, June, September, October, November, December, 1915 Composed and Printed By In a leading New York newspaper2 there appeared recently an editorial, entitled "Teaching Light Reading." The title is provocative, and the text that follows is good enough to quote in full: A few years ago if one of our friends had asked us to suggest what light reading was we should have said: "Oh, Maupassant's stories, I suppose, and Boccaccio, certainly; Dickens' Pickwick Papers, Charles Lamb's Essays. But why do you ask?" Today one is hard put to it for an answer. For nowadays what we thought of in youth as mere frivolity is "prescribed reading" at our colleges. Boccaccio and Maupassant figure there in the lectures of Professor Somebody on the history of fiction. Dickens and Lamb are important names in the venerable Dr. Who's-who's university extension course on English literature from the Death of Scott to the Recovery of Kipling. And it is announced from England that Mr. A. C. Benson has been given a Royal Society "Chair of English Fiction." Doubtless light reading was never precisely the same tract of letters for all readers. The author of Pamela did not find Joseph Andrews amusing, and, in general, Richardson's partisans make wry faces at the "grossness" of Fielding; just as Fielding's admirers yawn at Richardson's alleged morality. Yet the constituency which we name "the reading public" has pitched upon a certain general classification of books for secular amusement-or had pitched The president's address at the fourth annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Chicago, November 27, 1914. 2 The Tribune. I 291667 |