Life & Wisdom Quote by A. C. Benson

There is a wickedly polite bite in Benson's line: he flatters the newspaper as essential daily reading, then flips it into a genre label that undercuts its authority. "Avidly" signals genuine appetite, but the payoff is the reclassification of news as "continuous fiction" - not merely error-prone or biased, but structurally committed to storytelling. The joke lands because it refuses the newspaper's self-myth as a neutral window and instead treats it like a serial novel with recurring characters, villains, cliffhangers, and the comforting illusion that today's installment will make sense of yesterday's.

Benson is writing from a world where mass circulation papers had become the modern habit, turning politics, empire, and social anxiety into consumable narrative. His era's press was expanding, competitive, and sensational enough to make "avidly" plausible and "fiction" plausible too. The subtext isn't simply "the press lies". It's sharper: the machinery of news must keep producing plot, even when reality is flat, complex, or boring. Continuity matters more than accuracy; coherence matters more than truth. The paper can't stop, so it can't admit uncertainty without breaking the spell.

Calling it his "one form" of continuous fiction also hints at self-awareness, even complicity. He isn't above it; he's hooked. Benson sketches an early portrait of the modern reader: cynical about media, dependent on it anyway, consuming the world as narrative because narrative is easier to live with than randomness.