“AS WELCOME AND GRATEFUL AS THE GIRLS IN MUSLIN”:

Abstract

Nineteenth Century Studies hether read on hotel verandas or in the shade of summer oak trees, books were one of the many temptations facing vacationers at America’s summer watering places – or so the Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage (1832–1902) warned at the start of the 1876 summer season. Almost everyone took them along, the popular Brooklyn preacher noted, some from libraries, others from bookstands, and still others from the boys who hawked them in the aisles of railroad cars headed to Newport, Saratoga, or Cape May. Whether bought or borrowed, though, such novels spelled danger to his congregation’s immortal souls. “Do not let the frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing press jump and crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White Mountain valise,” the pastor warned in a sermon reprinted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1841–1955). “Would it not be an awful thing,” he continued, “for you to be struck with lightning some day when you had in your hand one of these paper covered romances, the hero a Parisian roue – the heroine an unprincipled flirt – chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of a hundred dollars a line?” Summer novels, Talmage warned, were “literary poison” – and that poison was readily available. In W