New Publications
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NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Charter and Ordinances of the City of Brooklyn, issued by authority of the Common Council, Brooklyn: George C. Bennett,1 145 Grand street.
We have a few copies remaining of this work, forming a complete collection of the laws and ordinances under which our municipal government is carried on. The work forms a handsome 8vo. volume of 312 pages. Price $1.25. For sale at the TIMES office.
BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE,2 for February. New York: Leonard Scott & Co.,3 79 Fulton street.
This number opens with an article on the condition of women, in which the class of “strong-minded” females is handled without gloves. The following passage may not be without its interest to such of our readers as have met with the work in question:
It is very odd to remark how questionable many of those productions are, which are warranted by the newspapers to be suitable giftbooks for young ladies. Chance threw in our way, some time ago, a little volume with a very innocent title, fresh from America, and the production of an elder sister of the world famous Mrs. Stowe. With such a name on the title-page, who could entertain any doubts about Letters to the People on Health and Happiness? We did not certainly, though we were somewhat astounded to find the little book adorned with anatomical diagrams: but we cannot say that we were at all impressed with this symptom of the increased elevation and profundity of the age, when we found this volume to consist, not of an elderly lady's kindly counsels to her country-folk upon subjects within her own knowledge, but, in the first place, of surgical lectures upon the construction of the human frame; and, in the second, of an anatomy much more shocking, a sort of morbid dissection of the health and morals of the United States, full of hints and implications of the most unbelievable evil. Doing all justice to the entire lack of evil intention, or even of the evil consciousness, on the part of the writer of this and of other such productions, we are obliged to add our sincere conviction that no French novel, under rigorous taboo, bears more, or perhaps as much, mischief in it, as one of those didactic expositions of mysterious and secret vice, those public whispers of scandal, which do not indeed take away personal reputation, but which, so far as one believes them, throw a blight upon the universal fair fame, and suggest to the inexperienced a horrible suspicion of everybody and of everything around them. Private scandal has no cloak to keep it from the contempt of every one whose opinion is worth caring for. Public scandal, which—strange shame to think of! is to be found in no hands more frequently than in those of women, puts on the robes of the preacher, and asserts for itself one of the highest of moral uses. Nothing in this country, which we have ever seen or heard of, dares go so far as the letters of Miss Beecher.
But why, of all classes in the world, our tender young girls, the margin of innocence, and, if you will, ignorance, which we are all heartily glad to believe in, fringing the garment of the sadder world, should be instructed in all the delicate social questions of an artificial life, and put up to every possible emergency of all the relationships between men and women, it seems to us impossible to conceive. Not to say that it is ridiculously unfair in the first instance, for people don't write books for the lads their compeers, instructing them how to arrange their love affairs, and informing them what the young ladies think of their general conduct. The unfortunate boys have to collect their information on this subject at first hand, or to take the hints of their favorite novels; and we really think it might be a happy experiment to suspend all the talk for a generation, and leave their partners to follow their example.
“People I have never Met” is the title of a series of witty sketches, from which we cull a sentence or two. The writer’s first instance of people who are supposed to exist, but who can never be met with, is that of the man who wrote a bad book; the second is, the mother who had a disagreeable or ugly baby. The next one is, one who will hear the truth. There are many authors who solicit criticisms on their works, desiring you to tell them nothing but the truth; but as sure as you do so, you make them your enemies for life. The other characters are, the man who knows his place, the man who believes in a fortuitous concourse of atoms, as the original cause of all things, and the man whose word is as good as his bond. As to the last, the writer grants that there may be such a man, but only one whose bond is good for nothing. The rest he considers to be suppositious characters, who have no existence but in the imagination. The model man he thus describes:
The best men I have known have been more generous than prudent, more imaginative than Bentham, less virtuous than Cato. They have been found of children, of animals, of poetry; of art, of sentiment, of joking, of buffoonery, of extravagance, of good society, of private theatricals—in short, men with no inconsiderable amount of nonsense mingled in their daily lives; but one form of nonsense they were entirely free from, and that is, the pretension of having no nonsense about them.
Notes:
1. George C. Bennett (1824–1885) served as the Commissioner for the Department of City Works and founded the Brooklyn Times, a Republican paper. [back]
2. Blackwood's Magazine, or Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, was a monthly magazine created by William Blackwood in 1817. Though it was published in Scotland it quickly attracted a wide readership in Great Britain and the U.S., especially for its fiction offerings. For more information, see David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Age? (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). [back]
3. Leonard Scott & Co. was a New York publishing company created by Leonard Scott (1810–1895) that focused on reprinting British magazines. [back]