Charles Knight; A Sketch (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. An article written in 1819 in the textit{Windsor Express set forth Charles Knight's opinions of the publications which were then being first sent out at cheap prices, and it was in consequence of this article that textit{The Plain Englishman was started, in the hope of obviating the evils disseminated by those, publications. The article said, "The mass of useful books are not accessible to the poor; newspapers, with their admixture of good and evil, seldom find their way into the domestic circle of the labourer or artisan; the tracts which pious persons distribute are exclusively religious, and the tone of them is often either fanatical or puerile. The 'twopenny trash, ' as it is called, has seen farther, with the quick perception of avarice or ambition, into the intellectual wants of the working classes. It was just because there was no healthful food for this newly created appetite that sedition and infidelity have been so widely disseminated. The writers employed in this work, and their leader and prototype Cobbett in particular, show us pretty accurately.the sort of talent which is required to provide this healthful food. ' textit{Fas cst et ab hoste doceri' They state an argument with great clearness and precision; they divest knowledge of all pedantic incum- brances; they make powerful appeals to the deepest passions of the human heart. Let a man of genius set out upon these principles, in the task of building up a more popular literature than we possess; and let him add, what the seditious and infidel writers have thrown away, the power of directing the affections to what is reverend and beautiful in national manners and . institutions tender and subduing in pure and domestic associations sacred and glowing in what belongs to the high and mysterious des...