How Things Change
Okay, this totally cracked me up.
Sir Walter Scott's Diary and Letters is well worth reading now. It's full of interesting observations about writing, books (his comments about Jane Austen are especially nifty), of his times.
But here's something he wrote in answer to a question from a correspondent:
It is very difficult to answer your Ladyship’s curious question concerning change of taste; but whether in young or old, it takes place insensibly without the parties being aware of it.
A grand-aunt of my own, Mrs Keith of Ravelstone . . .lived with unabated vigour of intellect to a very advanced age. she was very fond of reading, and enjoyed it to the last of her long life. One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs Behn’s novels?
I confessed the charge.
[She asked] whether I could get her a sight of them.
I said with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners, or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II’s time to be quite proper reading.
‘Nevertheless,’ said the good lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’
To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words:
‘Take back your bonny Mrs Behn. And, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ she said, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, felt myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London.’
Lockhart, J.G. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., Second Edition (Edinburgh and London, 1839), Vol. VI, pp. 406-7.
Sir Walter Scott's Diary and Letters is well worth reading now. It's full of interesting observations about writing, books (his comments about Jane Austen are especially nifty), of his times.
But here's something he wrote in answer to a question from a correspondent:
It is very difficult to answer your Ladyship’s curious question concerning change of taste; but whether in young or old, it takes place insensibly without the parties being aware of it.
A grand-aunt of my own, Mrs Keith of Ravelstone . . .lived with unabated vigour of intellect to a very advanced age. she was very fond of reading, and enjoyed it to the last of her long life. One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs Behn’s novels?
I confessed the charge.
[She asked] whether I could get her a sight of them.
I said with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners, or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II’s time to be quite proper reading.
‘Nevertheless,’ said the good lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’
To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words:
‘Take back your bonny Mrs Behn. And, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ she said, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, felt myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London.’
Lockhart, J.G. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., Second Edition (Edinburgh and London, 1839), Vol. VI, pp. 406-7.