We continue meandering through my latest old book acquisition, A View of the Pleasures Arising from a Love of Books: In Letters to a Lady, Edward Mangin (1814). Link goes to Archive. I’ll do one each week.

By way of background, in the Preface we learn that the Mangin desires to convey the 

numerous Pleasures communicated by Books to the Lovers of Reading; and this, not only to meet the wishes of the person for whose immediate perusal the Letters were designed, but likewise to convey, through her, a few suggestions to a circle of youthful friends, in whose happiness the parties are interested.

The topic of today’s Letter is the Novel. The author does not hold novels of the sort his youthful friends are reading in high regard—

Novels, in the usual acceptation of that word, form a species of reading which prevents the admirers of these compositions from relishing books of any other kind. 

Acceptation is not a word I bandy around much. You? 

From what he says next, we get the idea that he and the Lady have tried before to convince their friends to reconsider reading this novel trash, and have had no success. But “in the spirit of duty” he’s going to give it another go. 

He characterizes the genre thusly:

The adventures of imaginary beings, involved in various improbable difficulties, falsely insinuated to be the result of the passion of Love.

He acknowledges that many will not care for his description, but notes that they are many who have “as inadequate notions of Love, as they have of human character.” The “cure of minds thus distempered?” 

A perusal of History, and of the real memoirs of real men and women, taken up immediately after they have read one of their beloved novels.

Of course, memoirs of real men and women can “want of truth.” Here he makes an interesting observation. He cites two historians whose names I did not recognize. What they have in common is that their histories are not free from fiction. He observes that should the reader rely on one of these for stories of real people, he or she has the 

double gratifica­tion of believing and doubting; while the woes, and mysteries, and wonders, and sorrows of the circulating library must be received with unqualified assent, or be totally rejected.

Mangin then invites us to a ponder a question. Could a reader get “as much entertaining reflection from this

by fan­cying ourselves, for instance, in White­hall, at the concluding scene of the life of Charles; imagining the lofty scaffold, surrounded by mute and hor­ror-stricken multitudes; the spectral form of the masked executioner, the glitter of the fatal axe, and the un­happy king bending with manly com­posure to the block

as could be gotten from 

believing that Clarabellisima Bergenopzoom is actually sitting under torrents of rain on the Cliff at Brighton, dressed partly a la Belisaire, with a Wellington hat on her head, lemon-kid slippers on her feet, and a volume of Little’s Poems in her hand, while the monks of a neighbouring abbey are chanting vespers? 

I got the sarcasm in Clarabellisima, but the last name was over my head. It translates to “hills on the zoom.” A zoom is the elevated ground and edge marshes, originally that near the Zoom River in SW Netherlands. 

Our author concludes this second Letter to a Lady by asking her to communicate this question—fancying the real vs. believing the fiction—to the circle of youthful friends.

On first reading, I realized I knew practically nothing about popular, i.e., non-classical literature from the turn of the 18^th century. So I did some background reading in English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1965; 1^st 1904). This would be time of a “gradual extension of the reading class.” The plebs learned to read and publishers churned out a bunch of what we’d call dime-store novels. 

What might some of the novels of “imaginary beings, involved in various improbable difficulties, falsely insinuated to be the result of the passion of Love”  be titled? To answer this, I turned to the “Minor fiction” subsection of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature III 1800-1900 (1941). Here’s a sample (it goes on for pages):

• The Heroine or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader. 3 vols. 1813.
• Anna, or Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob. 4 vols. 1786.
• The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors. 2 vols. 1794.
• Astonishment! A Romance of a Century Ago. 2 vols. 1802.
• Very Strange but Very True, or the History of an Old Man’s Young Wife. 4 vols. 1803.

As I was skimming through, I happened upon this, also in “Minor Fiction.” Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 2 vols. 1818. Anon. The second edition was the first to credit Shelley.