THE PENNY DREADFUL.

Evening Post, Volume XLIX, Issue 134, 8 June 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE PENNY DREADFUL.

Tens of this trash is vomited forth from Fleet Street day after day and read, marked, learned and I inwardly digested by those' whose mental pabulum is on a level .with | the stuff for which ' it craves. The ' imitative is nowhere more developed than iv the tendtney to- crime. Hundreds of cases of juvenile depravity have been .traced to ¦ the ; poisonous influence of penny novelettes bristling with "burglary and "blood." ¦* These rags do not, for the most part, openly . sympathise with with crime; far from it. On the contrary ;the'yv adopt a loft/ Pedki sniffian tone of morality, and after making the virtuous hero and hero, me rub shoulders with every imaginable form of crime, leave them happy ever after in the last chapter in the approved fashion of the Adelphi melodrama. It is only the hero of penny novelettes who cau touch, pitch, and not be defiled j and he is generally such an unconscionable prig that one's sympathies go with the villain out of " pure cussedness." Yet this sort of rubbish ia sent forth to the world in "wholesome fiction of an r exciting character," and the prudent Puritanism which shrieks itself hoarse at the scientific diecuasion of questions which affect the very life-blood ol humanity is silent here. — Humanitarian. ,'.' ,

A young woman' was one of the competitors in a one-legged race near Paris the other day. She did not win, but the publication of her name' has .brought >her a fortune, a lawyer having long been on the search for'ft wooden-logged woman of that name, a large'sumTbaving been left her l>y a relative. 1 / „ >,<«£# , , lS! ,[t_ •> ,