From The Clergyman’s Almanack (1815) as quoted in America and her Almanacs : Wit, Wisdom, and Weather 1639-1970 by Robb Sagendorph:

“The indiscriminate reading of Novels and Romances is to young females of the most dangerous tendency … it agitates their fancy to delerium of pleasure never to be realized … and opens to their view the Elysium fields which exist only in the imagination … fields which will involve them in wretchedness and inconsolable sorrow.  Such reading converts them into a bundle of acutely feeling nerves and makes them ‘ready to expire of a rose in aromatic pain’ … The most profligate villain, bent on the infernal purpose of seducing a woman, could not wish a symptom more favorable to his purpose than a strong imagination inflamed with the rhapsodies of artful and corrupting novels.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  (Just imagine what they’d say about Twilight!  Or internet porn…)