Preaching parents to death: or, the moral dangers of didactic fiction, ctd.

Today's installment comes courtesy of a Catholic critic, who seems rather wearied by the book s/he is reviewing:

We tend to forget that the Victorians were not necessarily any more enthusiastic about didactic literature than we are, even when they were the target audience.  Or, to put it differently: standards of critical evaluation were not always greatly different from ours.  And that's before one gets to the serious reservations many readers had about the genre of religious fiction more generally--bad theology, problematic narrative structure, incoherent lessons, and so forth.