Think of the children!

From On Novel Reading by Vicessimus Knox, 1778:

If it be true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of Novels has probably contributed to its degeneracy....

[T]he memoirs, private histories, and curious anecdotes, imported from our neighbouring land of libertinism, have seldom any thing to recommend them to perusal but their profligacy. Yet even these, adorned with specious titles, and a pert vivacity of language, have found their way to the circulating libraries, and are often obtruded on the attention at an early age.

The English Press has teemed with similar original productions. That coarse taste, which was introduced in the reign of Charles the Second, was greedily adopted by the juvenile reader. At an inflammatory age, the fuel of licentious ideas will always find a ready reception. The sentimental manner seems of late to have supplanted it. But it is matter of doubt, whether even this manner is not equally dangerous. It has given an amiable name to vice, and has obliquely excused the extravagance of the passions, by representing them as the effect of lovely sensibility. The least refined affections of humanity have lost their indelicate nature, in the ideas of many, when dignified by the epithet of sentimental; and transgressions forbidden by the laws of God and man have been absurdly palliated, as proceeding from an excess of those finer feelings, which vanity has arrogated to itself as elegant and amiable distinctions. A softened appellation has given a degree of gracefulness to moral deformity....

There is another evil arising from a too early attention to Novels. They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study. Authentic history becomes insipid. The reserved graces of the chaste matron Truth pass unobserved admist the gaudy and painted decorations of fiction. The boy who can procure a variety of books like Gil Blas, and the Devil upon Two Sticks, will no longer think his Livy, his Sallust, his Homer, or his Virgil pleasing. He will not study old Lilly, while he can read Pamela and Tom Jones, and a thousand inferior and more dangerous novels....

If, however, Novels are to be prohibited, in what, it will be asked, can the young mind employ itself during the hours of necessary leisure? To this it may be answered, that when the sweetened poison is removed, plain and wholesome food will always be relished. The growing mind will crave nourishment, and will gladly seek it in true histories, written in a pleasing style, on purpose for its use. Voyages and travels, when not obscured by scientific observations, are always delightful to youthful curiosity.

From “Novels and Novel-Readers,” in the Hobart (Australia) Mercury, January 20, 1870:

It is not easy to measure to its full extent the social influence of novel-reading. The incessant production of works of this kind is a proof at least that there are amongst us hundreds of men and women who derive their chief intellectual recreation from mere stories; and it is a fair question whether the trade is not unduly developed and excited, not only to the detriment of literature, but also with the effect of a certain loosening of moral fibre. “All these sort of books,” writes Lady Mary Wortley Montague, “have the same fault, which I cannot easily pardon, being very mischievous. They place a merit in extravagant passions, and encourage young people to hope for impossible events to draw them out of the misery they choose to plunge themselves into, expecting legacies from unknown relations and generous benefactors to distressed virtue, as much out of nature as fairy treasures.”...

It is impossible for a brain to disturb itself with phantoms, and then possess the power of dismissing them at will out of all knowledge, and out of the reach of effect. And here we are disposed to go further than the divine. If the whole business of the novel be idle – idle in the strict sense of the word – there can scarce be a more thoroughly relaxing description of mental dissipation than the reading of it presents. And what is the truth of the bulk of latter-day novels? Their aims are either ignoble or silly. These works are as weak in structure as houses of cards, or the stucco villas of a building speculator. They make, however, loud and violent attacks upon the faculties that people may possess for wonder of for passion. The romance reader is alternately thrilled or fretted about incidents of an entirely irrational kind, and is it not inevitable that this habit of putting the mind in a flutter for nothing must leave it jaded for the right employment of the emotions in the real affairs of the world?.....

As the general run of novels are written, reading them to excess must have, ultimately, a debilitating, and even a destructive consequence upon mental energy. It unfits and unhinges the mind, so that it is only by the most painful efforts that the faculties can be called off and employed for serious practical purposes. The confirmed novel reader resembles in many respects the confirmed opium eater, with this difference – that while a humper of laudanum occasionally wakes up the latter to a spasmodic and even brilliant activity, the glutton who constantly devours literary force-meat becomes more and more torpid and helpless after the consumption of every dish.

From an editorial by Sterling North in the Chicago Daily News, May 8, 1940:

Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed - a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems - the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child's natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the ‘comic' magazine."

From Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham, M.D., 1954:

The average parent has no idea that every imaginable crime is described in detail in comic books. That is their main stock in trade. When questioned more closely even experts who have defended the industry did not know what an endless variety of crimes is described in detail in story after story, picture after picture. If one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised. It is of course easy and natural for the child to translate these crimes into a minor key: stealing from a candy store instead of breaking into a bank; stabbing and hurting a little girl with a sharp pen if a knife is not handy; beating and threatening younger children, following the Superman formula of winning by force....

The contempt for law and police and the brutality of punishment in comic books is subconsciously translated by children into conflict with authority, and they develop a special indifference to it. Gerald, a boy of eleven, stole from stores with a group of older boys. One night after such an exploit two police-men followed them. Gerald had a B.B. gun, turned around and shot at one of the policemen. He was charged with armed robbery. When the whole group was in Children's Court the judge talked to them very seriously. Gerald told us all about that. "Didn't you feel strange in court?" he was asked. "No," he replied. "I read the comics and I feel I am used to it."...

Many comic books describe how to set fires, by methods too various to enumerate. In some stories fire-setting is related just as a detail; in other stories such as "The Arson Racket" the lesson is more systematic. There are other sidelights, like how to break windows so you cannot be found out; all this highlighted by the philosophy of the character who says: "From now on - I'm making dough the easy way - with a gun-! Only SAPS work!" That lesson, incidentally, is true of crime comics as a whole: glamour for crime, contempt for work....

In the spring of 1951 a teen-ager driving a stolen car tried to run down a policeman who had stepped out of his radio car to arrest him. People wondered at such cold-blooded brutality. How can a young boy get such an idea? For comics readers this is a lesson of the elementary grades, described and illustrated over and over again.

Junior may be too young to wish to forge checks, but many children whom I have seen have forged their parents' signatures for school purposes. Forgery is, of course, also described in comic books. The preferred method is to pick up a blotter which has been used and copy the signature with the aid of a mirror....

In countless books, it is brought home that it is wrong not to kill - because the victim may tell. Nothing is overlooked in these crime comics, however mean. One book shows how to steal the money box from the blind man who runs the newsstand. Of course, as in the vast majority of criminal acts depicted in comic books, this particular act is successful and not punished....

Often comic books describe real crimes that have been featured in the newspapers. In adapting them for children the following points are stressed: the daring and success of the criminals is exalted; brutal acts are shown in detail; sordid details are emphasized; if there are any sexual episodes they are featured. In 1952 three men escaped from a penitentiary. They stole cars, evaded the police, kidnaped people, held up a bank, and were finally caught in New York where they were living with three girls. A real children's story! In the first picture there is an unmade bed, a half-nude man and a girl. The prison break is described like a heroic feat. The ease with which you can steal cars in the country from a farmer is pointed out to youngsters who do not know that yet. One of the criminals boasts to a little boy that he has killed fifteen or sixteen people, "I lost count."

The girls living with the criminals are featured, two of them hiding behind a shower curtain. There are seventy-six pictures of exploits; in the seventy-seventh picture the police take over with a cheap wisecrack.

All this is only a small sample from my collection and an infinitesimal part of the whole story. Juvenile delinquency is not just a prank nor an "emotional illness." The modern and more serious forms of delinquency involve knowledge of technique. By showing the technique, comic books also suggest the content. The moral lesson is that innocence doesn't pay....

What is the relationship of crime comic books to juvenile delinquency? If they would prevent juvenile delinquency, there would be very little of it left. And if they were the outlet for children's primitive aggressions, this would be a generation of very subdued and controlled children.

Our researches have proved that there is a significant correlation between crime-comics reading and the more serious forms of juvenile delinquency. Many children read only few comics, read them for only a short time, read the better type (to the extent that there is a better type) and do not become imbued with the whole crime-comics atmosphere. Those children, on the other hand, who commit the more serious types of delinquency nowadays, read a lot of comic books, go in for the worst type of crime comics, read them for a long time and live in thought in the crime-comics world. The whole publicity-stunt claim that crime comics prevent juvenile delinquency is a hoax. I have not seen a single crime comic book that would have any such effect, nor have I ever seen a child or young adult who felt that he had been prevented from anything wrong by a comic book. Supposing you wanted to prevent promiscuous, illegitimate sexual relations, would you publish millions of books showing in detail where and how the man picks up the girl, where they go, the details of their relationships in bed and then how the next morning somebody breaks into their room and tosses them out of bed? A comic-book defender would say this teaches that "Sex does not pay.

The role of comic books in delinquency is not the whole nor by any means the worst harm they do to children. It is just one part of it. Many children who never become delinquent or conspicuously disturbed have been adversely affected by them. Pouring sordid stories into the minds of children is not the same as pouring water over a duck's back. One would think that this would be the most elementary lesson in child guidance. But child experts have overlooked this for years without really studying children's comic-book reading.