Background.

During the 1780s Americans developed a growing interest in the relatively new literary form of the novel, reading books by British novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, as well as European authors. One particular favorite was German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the story of a sensitive, alienated young romantic who commits suicide. The novel became especially popular after an American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1784. Yet despite the rise of novel reading, Americans in general remained highly ambivalent about the novel.

The Question of Morality.

Some critics called novels frivolous and immoral diversions and expressed the fear that fiction would lure popular attention away from serious and edifying works such as history or religion. They also distrusted novels because of their imaginative quality, a deeply rooted prejudice with origins...