Trollope I had to find out for myself, oddly enough. I suppose my own family were too advanced to care to advocate the reading of projections of the lives of the cathedral clergy. That, at any rate, was the reading of a boy of from twelve to eighteen of fairly advanced family in the ’eighties of last century. It will be observed that, with the possible exception of Wilkie Collins’ two books, these were all works that would not normally be read in Middle Class families, either because of social outspokennesses, individuality of outlook, or difficulties of style. But even for my family it was then possible to go too far. I remember my mother being seriously perturbed because at the age of thirteen or so I was kissed at a tea-party by Mrs. Lynn Lynton whose gleaming spectacles certainly frightened me and whose novels advocated the Revolt of the Daughters of that day--and, if it had lain within the ideas of right and wrong of my family to forbid anyone to read anything, I should certainly have been forbidden to read the works of Rhoda Broughton, who advocated the giving of latchkeys to women. Nemesis was by then on the way. The newer ideas began with the cheapening of the products of the press--and I dare say that cheapening was a good deal hastened by the pirating of American works. I remember still with delight the shilling edition--it was bound in scarlet paper--in which I first purchased at the age of fourteen in a place called Malvern Wells, Artemus Ward’s _Among the Mormons_, Sam Slick’s _The Clockmaker_, Mark Twain’s _Mississippi Pilot_, Carleton’s _Farm Ballads_, and ever so many other American books which I suppose must have been pirated or they could scarcely have been sold for a shilling. And, though I was ready at the injunctions of my family to read Lope da Vega or Smollett, nothing would have induced me to spend sixpence on taking out from a circulating library the three-volume novels of William Black, Besant and Rice and the other purveyors of the nuvvle when by saving up my pocket-money I could buy for a shilling--or ninepence net--the _Biglow Ballads_ or _Hans Breitmann_.