• This piece is written the day after the Archbishop's sermon is excerpted, in support of that sermon, which highlights the moral dangers of sensation fiction.
• ". . . the acquired taste for exciting works of fiction has begotten a distaste for wholesome reading, as highly seasoned dishes spoil the appetite for simple food." (8)
• "It is a strange though patent fact that in. . . an age in which the prevailing habits of thought are critical and scientific, and of which the besetting sin is undue devotion to material interests, the passion for tales of thrilling improbability should have been developed beyond all precedent." (8)
• Sensation novels fill the gap created by a business-like world, and "No one exactly believes what they say, for everybody expects the details of romance to be over-coloured, yet the general view of life and human nature implied in such works become more or less consciously accepted." (8)
• "Most people are conscious that their knowledge of mankind is, after all, very limited, and hold themselves ready to be startled from time to time, and it is to this feeling, exaggerated to a morbid degree, that the sensational novelist panders." (8)
• "It is the difficulty of all novelists, as well as of all dramatists, to exhibit things in their just proportions, and the necessity of crowding many incidents into three volumes perhaps into one–makes it a great temptation to leave out everything trivial or commonplace. But there are ways known to authors of indicating the existence of what is not actually described, and the wilful omission to do this is a grave fault." (9)
• "Still more mischievous than this, because more subtle, is the constant association of criminal propensities with strength of character." (9)
• As the Archbishop says, "he who indulges in [crime] becomes less and less capable of exercising ascendency over his fellows. Such is the testimony of experience, but the contrary theory is one of the ‘properties' of sensation writers, and, it is to be feared, has already borne practical fruit." (9)
• "The vicious taste having once been created, novelists, it will be said, will of course meet it–the supply has created the demand, and the demand now keeps up the supply" (9)
• "Two or three really great novels in a calmer style than is now fashionable would go far to restore the balance of public taste" (9)
• "It is the unskilful artist who, finding himself unable to copy the noble outlines and mellow tones of nature, gives a bolder contour to the mountain peak, and a gaudier crimson to the moor. It is the shallow moralist who, not content with the marvellous counterplay of motives and wills, which transcends in complexity the most ingenious plot, loves to portray them as acting with a convulsive energy inconsistent with the existence of society." (9)

Pamela E. Bedore