Warning: Reading Can Damage Your Health

‘A whole family, brought to destitution, has lately had all its misfortunes clearly traced . . . to an ungovernable passion for novel -reading entertained by the wife and mother. The husband was sober and industrious, but his wife was indolent, addicted to reading everything procurable in the shape of a romance. This led her to utterly neglect her husband, herself, and her eight children. One daughter, is despair, fled the parental home and threw herself into the haunts of vice. . . The house exhibited the most offensive appearance of filth and indigence. In the midst of this pollution, privation, and poverty, the cause of it sat reading the latest ‘sensation work’ of the season. . .’
From THE CHRISTIAN’S PENNY MAGAZINE AND FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE, 1859, quoted in Kate Flint, THE WOMAN READER 1837-1814.
Don’t say I haven’t warned you.