rte."

_Caboussat._ "Ce que c'est que notre pauvre humanite!"

Penny Dreadfuls and Matricide.

Our friends have been occupied with the case of a half-witted boy who
consumed Penny Dreadfuls and afterwards went and killed his mother.
They infer that he killed his mother because he had read Penny
Dreadfuls (_post hoc ergo propter hoc_) and they conclude very
naturally that Penny Dreadfuls should be suppressed. But before
roundly pronouncing the doom of this--to me unattractive--branch of
fiction, would it not be well to inquire a trifle more deeply into
cause and effect? In the first place matricide is so utterly unnatural
a crime that there must be something abominably peculiar in a form of
literature that persuades to it. But a year or two back, on the
occasion of a former crusade, I took the pains to study a
considerable number of Penny Dreadfuls. My reading embraced all
those--I believe I am right in saying all--which were reviewed, a few
days back, in the _Daily Chronicle_; and some others. I give you my
word I could find nothing peculiar about them. They were even rather
ostentatiously on the side of virtue. As for the bloodshed in them, it
would not compare with that in many of the five-shilling adventure
stories at that time read so eagerly by boys of the middle and upper
classes. The style was ridiculous, of course: but a bad style excites
nobody but a reviewer, and does not even excite him to deeds of the
kind we are now trying to account for. The reviewer in the _Daily
Chronicle_ thinks worse of these books than I do. But he certainly
failed to quote anything from them that by the wildest fancy could be
interpreted as sanctioning such a crime as matricide.

The Cause to be sought in the Boy rather than in the Book.

Let us for a moment turn our attention from the Penny Dreadful to the
boy--from the _eponge a laver les cabriolets_ to _notre pauvre
humanite_. Now--to speak quite seriously--it is well known to every
doctor and every schoolmaster (and should be known, if it is not, to
every parent), that all boys sooner or later pass through a crisis in
growth during which absolutely nothing can be predicted of their
behavior. At such times honest boys have given way to lying and theft,
gentle boys have developed an unexpected savagery, ordinary boys--"the
small apple-eating urchins whom we know"--have fallen into morbid
brooding upon unhealthy subjects. In the immense majority of cases the
crisis is