ABOUT PENNY DREADFULS.

Press, Volume XLV, Issue 7142, 1 September 1888, Page 6

ABOUT PENNY DREADFULS.

ByRL Stevenson. I have tried to write for them, says Mr Stevenson in Scribner, and on the whole I have failed ; just as Egan and Hemming failed in the circulating libraries. It is my consolation that Charles Beade nearly wrecked that valuable property the London Journal, which must instantly fall back on Mr Egan ; and the king of us all, George Meredith, once staggered the circulation of a weekly newspaper. A servent-maid used to come and boast when she had read another chapter of "Treasure Island;"that any pleasure should attend the exercise never crossed her thoughts. The same tale, in a penny paper of a high class, was mighty coldly looked upon; by the delicate test of the correspondence column, I could see I was far to leeward ; and there was one giant on the staff (a man with some talent, when he chose to use it) with whom I very early perceived it was in vain to rival. HOW HE BEGAN THE DOWNWARD COURSE' How I came to be such a student of our penny press demands perhaps some explanation. I was brought up on CasseWs Family Paper ; but the lady who was kind enough to read the tales aloud to mc was subject to sharp attacks of conscience.

IShe took the Family Paper on confidence; the tales it contained being Family Tales, not novels. But every now and then something would occur to alarm her finer sense; she would express a well-grounded fear that the current fiction was " going to turn out a Regular Novel;" and the family paper, with my pious approval, would be dropped. Yec neither she nor I were wholly stoical; and when Saturday came round, we would study the windows of the stationer and try to fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the further adventures of our favourites This inexpensive pleasure mastered mc. Each new Saturday I would go from one newsvendor's window to another's, till I was master of the weekly gallery and had thoroughly digested "The Baronet Unmasked," "So-and-so approaching the Mysterious House," " The Discovery of the Dead Body in the Blue Marl Pit," " Dr. Vargas removing the Senseless Body of Fair Lilias," and whatever other snatch of unknown story, and glimpse of unknown characters that gallery afforded. Ido not know that I ever enjoyed fiction more; those books that we have (in such a way) avoided reading, are all so excellently written 1 ABOUT THE "YO —— I—DIES* JOURNAL.' The Young Ladies 1 Journal is an elegant miscellany -which I have frequently observed in tbe possession of the barmaid. In a lone house on a moorland I was once supplied with quite a considerable file of this production, and (the weather being violent) devoutly read it, The tales were not ill done; they were well abreast of the average tale in a circulating library; there was only one difference, only one thing to remind mc I was in the land of penny numbers instead of the parish of three volumes; disguise it a. the authors pleased (and they showed ingenuity in doing so) it was always the same tale they must relate -. the tale of a poor girl ultimately married to a peer of the realm or (at the worst) a I baronet. The circumstance is not common in life; but how familiar to the | musings of the barmaid! The tales were | not true to what men see; they were true to what the readers dreamed. MB STEVES*—-*— THEORY. Uneducated readers seem to mc to long, not to enter into the lives of others, but > to behold themselves in changed situations, ardently but impotently preconceived. '_ The imagination (save the mark!) of the i I popular author here comes to the rescue, j ! supplies some body of circumstance to j 1 these phantom aspirations, and conducts \ r the readers where they will. Where they 1 will: that is the point; elsewhere they ( will not follow. When I was a child, if I s came ou a book in which the characters , wore armour, it fell from my hand; I had I no criterion of merit, simply that one r f decisive taste, that my fancy refused to linger in the middle ages. And the mind . j of the uneducated reader is mailed with s j similar restrictions. So it is that we * j must account for a thing otherwise un. \ t accountable; the popularity of some of these _jreat ones of the dust. In defect of i. any other gift, they have instinctive sympathy with the popular mind. They can thus supply to the shop girl and the shock black vesture cut to the pattern of their ___ naked fancies, and furnish them with weln come scenery and properties for auto- ?, biographical romancing. Even iv readers c of an upper class we may perceive the , ' traces of a similar hesitation; even for ? ' - « writer may be too exotic The * I _"i ~ " -he heroine, may be a f wMi mu _'i eVc „ l .' * nai ? oa condition II Fiji Islander, ba. - i, v the hero is one of ourselves.