Industrial Revolution (early) · 1790s–1830s
Printed Novels & Mass Literacy
Moral Corruption and Idleness
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, doctors and moralists across Western Europe identified an alarming public-health menace. Too many novels. Cheap printing, growing literacy and circulating libraries (early commercial lending libraries, a bit like a paid Netflix of paperbacks) had put popular fiction in more hands than ever before, and clergymen, educators and writers warned that an epidemic of "reading mania" — Lesesucht in German — was seducing young women and the idle poor into vice and lunacy. Alarmists claimed that gorging on novels left readers unable to tell fiction from reality, stirring dangerous fantasies, lust and neglect of duties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan philosopher, declared that "no chaste maiden ever read novels" — in the preface to his own runaway bestselling novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). A generation later, critics including the German dramatist G. E. Lessing feared that Goethe's wildly popular The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which a lovelorn young man shoots himself, was triggering a wave of copycat romantic suicides. Modern historians (Andrew Bell, Rüdiger Safranski and others) now regard the "Werther-Fieber" suicide epidemic as largely a moral-panic artifact with little documented evidence. The English reformer Hannah More denounced novel-reading as corrupting to female virtue. Doctors reported cases of Lesesucht producing hysteria or insanity in women readers. Sermons thundered against fiction from the pulpit. Particular novels were censored or locked away. Young people's access to the circulating libraries was restricted in an effort to contain the perceived moral contagion.
In hindsight, the panic was a gross overreaction to the rise of print literacy. It also foreshadowed every subsequent anxiety over new media corrupting the next generation. What the panic also identified — that fiction can transport, disorient and remake the reading mind — turned out to be precisely why the novel became an instrument of empathy and social change.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan philosopher, declared that "no chaste maiden ever read novels" — in the preface to his own runaway bestselling novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). A generation later, critics including the German dramatist G. E. Lessing feared that Goethe's wildly popular The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which a lovelorn young man shoots himself, was triggering a wave of copycat romantic suicides. Modern historians (Andrew Bell, Rüdiger Safranski and others) now regard the "Werther-Fieber" suicide epidemic as largely a moral-panic artifact with little documented evidence. The English reformer Hannah More denounced novel-reading as corrupting to female virtue. Doctors reported cases of Lesesucht producing hysteria or insanity in women readers. Sermons thundered against fiction from the pulpit. Particular novels were censored or locked away. Young people's access to the circulating libraries was restricted in an effort to contain the perceived moral contagion.
In hindsight, the panic was a gross overreaction to the rise of print literacy. It also foreshadowed every subsequent anxiety over new media corrupting the next generation. What the panic also identified — that fiction can transport, disorient and remake the reading mind — turned out to be precisely why the novel became an instrument of empathy and social change.