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The writer for the Argus expresses deep disappointment in the quality of offerings at Melbourne's Penny Readings: 'When the penny readings were first established in Melbourne and its suburbs we shared in the hope, entertained by some of their promoters, that this form of entertainment would conduce to instruct the minds and improve the intellectual tastes of those for whom it was specially designed. We anticipated that it would help to popularise the writings of some of our best authors, that it would enable our young men to acquire a good delivery both in reading and speaking, that it would assist to correct many defects in pronunciation, accent, and emphasis, which are, unfortunately, too prevalent in this colony, and that it might become a kind of subsidiary educational agency. We are bound to acknowledge that these expectations have not been realised, and that in too many instances penny readings are having a precisely opposite effect.
'... No doubt those who take part in these entertainments, whether as readers, vocalists, or listeners, might be worse employed; but this constitutes an indifferent apology for them. They might be made highly instructive without being necessarily dull. They might be rendered instrumental in disseminating valuable knowledge in connexion with literature, art, science, political economy, sociology, and industry; instead of which they are merely calculated "to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh" at songs which are vulgar as well as frivolous, and recitations which are often open to the same objection.'
[The quotation in the Argus's final paragraph is from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2.]
