Eugene Aram/Advert
STANDARD NOVELS
AND
ROMANCES.
This popular Work has now reached its Tenth Number, and has every where obtained approval and encouragement.
No kind of literature is so generally attractive as Fiction. Pictures of life and manners, and Stories of adventure, are more eagerly received by the many, than graver productions, however important these latter may be to the instruction of mankind. Apuleius is better remembered by his Fable of Cupid and Psyche, than by his abstruser Platonic writings; and the Decameron of Boccaccio has outlived the Latin treatises, and other learned works of that author.
But well-wrought fiction is characterised not alone by amusement: it is made subservient to the purposes of instruction, in acquainting us with the hearts and motives of our fellow-creatures—in familiarising us with many-coloured life among ourselves and in distant lands—in telling us what it is best to imitate—in warning us what we ought to shun, and in demonstrating, by its almost living examples, the fatal consequences of rashness and vice. To the young, in particular, the lessons afforded by good fictions are inestimable; and the young will eagerly receive advice thus proffered. It is therefore more necessary in novel-writing, than in any other branch of literature, that the utmost care should be bestowed in the selection of incidents destined to be indelibly impressed on the youthful mind; the danger of doing wrong being in proportion to the power of the writer, and the popularity of the agency. No one, however, can deny that until within the last twenty or thirty years, the great masters of fiction have been, if not immoral in their aim, exceedingly impure in their details; so much so, indeed, as to render it impossible that a considerate parent should present their works to his children.
The Standard Novels are not liable to this charge. The Proprietors may confidently assert that a body of popular fictions are now, for the first time, printed in one series, which are not only equal in talent to those in other collections, but, being written in accordance with morality and decorum, present just and interesting pictures of life in all its aspects, without involving the slightest danger of contaminating the minds of their readers.
The Stories already published in "The Standard Novels" consist of "The Pilot," "The Spy," and "The Last of the Mohicans," by Cooper, the admirable historical novelist of America; "Caleb Williams" and "St. Leon," by the English sage, Godwin; Miss Jane Porter's "Thaddeus of Warsaw," and "Scottish Chiefs;" Mrs. Shelley's romance of "Frankenstein;" Schiller's "Ghost-Seer;" and Brockden Brown's "Edgar Huntly, or the Sleep Walker." Any of these might safely and with profit be perused by the young, for whom they are well adapted as cheap and acceptable Christmas Presents, and New-Year's Gifts.
The Authors of the Volumes already published, have been induced to revise their works, and to write notes and new introductions expressly for this series. Among the fictions immediately forthcoming in "The Standard Novels," the Proprietors may particularly mention "The Canterbury Tales," by Sophia and Harriet Lee; a new translation of Madame de Stael's "Corinne," Miss Hamilton's Cottagers of Glenburnie," more of the National Tales of Cooper, &c. &c.
New Burlington Street,
Jan. I, 1832.