When Novels Had a Bad Reputation
“Kids these days are rotting their brains and ruining their eyes! They should be doing something educational!”
Sound familiar? Whatever you’re thinking that complaint is about, you’re probably wrong. This was the sentiment expressed a hundred and fifty years ago by city council members in Eau Claire when considering whether or not the library should have fiction books on the shelves! Gasp!
It seems ridiculous to us now, in the age of New York Times bestseller lists and Goodreads, but a hundred and fifty years ago novels were considered a frivolous waste of time—time that would be better spent on educational pursuits.
In 1876, the public library board in Eau Claire considered adding novels to the collection for the first time. The proposal met with fervent pushback from the city council. After all, fiction was considered low-brow entertainment, hardly fitting for the shelves of our dignified institution of learning. The debate raged in the pages of local newspapers as aldermen and other prominent citizens wrote letters to the editor expressing their views. Ours wasn’t the only city facing the issue at the time. The value of fiction was a hotly contested topic all over the country.
“Reading novels will turn children into ruthless gangsters…at least according to some people a few generations ago.”
Critics worried that fiction readers would form unrealistic expectations and become depressed when real life failed to live up to the storybook ideals. Even worse, some might try to act out what they read in novels, turning children into miscreants and giving women wild ideas about independence and romance. (We’ve come a long way in a century and a half, and not just in terms of library collections…)
Other anti-novel critics believed that reading about others’ misfortunes would leave the public numb to real tragedies. Modern studies have suggested that the opposite is true: reading fiction from the point of view of people different from ourselves makes it easier to empathize with them in the real world.
Some critics acknowledged that reading fiction was an acceptable leisure activity, but balked at using the citizens’ tax dollars to buy novels. The city didn’t pay for people to engage in sports and hobbies, so why should this be any different?
Ultimately, the library board of 1876 decided not to open a can of worms by adding fiction to the collection. However, the public took matters into their own hands by donating many novels to the library. Four years later, 413 of the library’s 1,947 books were fiction.
By 1897, seventy percent of the library’s eight thousand books were fiction, despite one City Council member complaining that novels were “as injurious as whiskey to the rising generation.” A former alderman wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper urging the library to pull all fiction from its shelves and sell it. Another alderman suggested that more children than ever were wearing glasses as a result of reading too much.
These complaints could not stem the tide. Fiction continued rising in popularity.
In 2022, over 404 million fiction books were sold in the U.S, generating nearly $10 billion and accounting for fifty-two percent of all the country’s print book sales.
Today, the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library owns 22,231 adult fiction books. With a collection like that, we could give two novels to everyone living in Eau Claire in 1880. The city council members back then wouldn’t have liked that, and I’m pretty sure they would have keeled over in shock to know we also loan out sewing machines, ukuleles, telescopes and so much more!
