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Books and Libraries

"The immense exhalation of periodical trash, which penetrates into every cot and corner of the country, and which is greedily sucked in by all ranks, is unquestionably one great cause of its inferiority." This opinion of American literature and reading habits by the English visitor Mrs. Trollope shortly before the founding of Nauvoo was similar to the opinion of many Europeans. In spite of what she considered the "trashy" character of the literature, there is no question that Americans were readers. Francis Grund, another visitor to these shores about the same time, observed that: "The Americans, as a nation, are the most reading people on the face of the earth . . . but the favorite works are poetry, and next to them novels." Grund ascribed the high rate to the numbers of American women who could read. Martha Whitehouse, writing in The Ladies' Repository of 1852, felt that a major cause for women's assigned inferiority was their morbid taste for light reading. "This unreal world unfitted them for the real."

Women were expected to read religious books and moral essays. American history was perfectly acceptable reading, too, but women were warned against most novels. Shakespeare was considered a pagan and most of his writings too coarse. Byron was not advisable reading, but Thomson, Milton, Cowper, and Goldsmith were desirable.

Mrs. Trollope was absolutely right about the American love affair with periodicals. There was in the early nineteenth century a mania for periodicals. Even many of the principal English periodicals were reprinted in America. The most popular American magazines were the Saturday Evening Post and the Godey's Lady's Book. Other popular periodicals were the Metropolitan Magazine, Journal of the Franklin Institute, American Farmer's Companion, Ladies' Garland, and the United States Magazine. Most of these were monthlies, costing between one and five dollars per year. Few magazines were devoted to children, so it is difficult to determine which periodical the Prophet was referring to when he wrote in his journal three days before Christmas in 1843: "At home at nine o'clock, A.M., reading a magazine to my children."

Many books might have gone unread, as they do today, but all the magazines were read assiduously. One author in 1845 commented that the reading public's lack of patience and longing after variety led them to read periodicals rather than books. The same observer then went on to note that the "prevailing aim of the English publications was to instruct and convince, that of the Americans to please."