The unmentionable

While looking at an article from the New Catholic World, I became quite intrigued by the end of this author's list of tasteless, corruption-breeding novelists:

Tory Trollope, one of the most popular of contemporary English novelists, in his Barchester novels, especially in his Can You Forgive Her? forces us, if we read him, to associate through wearisome pages with people whose morals and manners are of the lowest type, and whose acquaintance in real life we should as carefully avoid as we shun persons infected with the small-pox or the plague. We may say as much of his brother's Lindisfarne, and not less of the works of such writers as Holme Lee, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, Amelia Edwards, Charles Reade, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, the mistress or wife of the Positivist Lewes, and others too numerous to mention.

The ambiguity there is fascinating.  "George Eliot" is unmentionable, but clearly has to be mentioned--so she winds up being demoted to Lewes' maybe-paramour.  One wonders if she is all Lewes' fault, as it were.  Here's one dismissive Victorian solution to the Great George Eliot Problem: erase her name entirely and append her to the offending man.  In any event, from a twenty-first century perspective, this is a fairly astonishing list--one would hardly expect to find Trollope and Collins and Braddon and Gaskell (and Eliot) all denounced for doing the same type of thing.