Study Edition · Essay 80
A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls
Source: From The Defendant (1901). Text from Project Gutenberg #12245. Complete. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
G. K. Chesterton, the huge, cheerful creator of Father Brown, loved to defend things that respectable people despised. His first book of essays, The Defendant, defends skeletons, nonsense, slang, ugly things and, here, “penny dreadfuls”: cheap, sensational adventure stories sold to working-class boys for a penny. Magistrates blamed them for juvenile crime. Chesterton turns the accusation around: the cheap stories teach simple, healthy morals, while the fashionable books of the educated preach doubt and despair. Notice his paradoxes, his comic comparisons, and how he keeps reversing who is “normal” and who is “criminal.”
76 sentences: 16 simple, 26 moderate, 34 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- vulgarcommon; lacking good taste
- intrinsicallyin its basic nature
- ostentatiouslyin a showy way meant to attract notice
- stratuma layer or level, here of society
- unhamperedfree; not held back
- deploreto regret strongly
- voluminousvery long; filling many volumes
- penitentsorry for having done wrong
- cupiditygreed for money
- plebeianbelonging to the common people
- philanthropista person who helps others, often with money
- sanguinehopeful; optimistic
- truisma statement so obvious it hardly needs saying
- profligacyreckless, immoral living
- equivocalunclear; open to more than one meaning
- lubricitylewdness; sexual indecency
- iridescentshimmering with changing colours
- ficklechanging loyalties easily
The Essay
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar.1 The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.2
In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature.3 They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it.4 Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride.5 A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes.6 The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.7
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle.8 We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them.9 We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again.10 There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys’ literature of the lowest stratum.11 This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist.12 It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.13 But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories.14 The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.15 Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac.16 In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus.17 But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship.18 Literature and fiction are two entirely different things.19 Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.20 A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit.21 A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight.22 And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash.23 There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine.24 These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.25
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact—that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness—we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read ‘The Egoist’ and ‘The Master Builder.’26 It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes.27 If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child’s knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches.28 The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour.29 If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore’s novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion.30 At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.31
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit.32 Bad story writing is not a crime.33 Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.34 The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys’ novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty.35 This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.36
So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless.37 It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort.38 It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern.39 I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.40
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval.41 That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe,’ Scott’s ‘Rob Roy,’ Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake,’ Byron’s ‘Corsair,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s ‘Macaire,’ Mr. Max Pemberton’s ‘Iron Pirate,’ and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents.42 Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in ‘Ivanhoe’ will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.43 In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it.44 It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads ‘The Red Revenge,’ it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.45
In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.46 This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human.47 The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.48 He says, with a modest swagger, ‘I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.’49 If he said ‘I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,’ everyone would see the humour of so simple a classification.50 But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man.51 Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them.52 These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them.53 They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.54 Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.55
If the authors and publishers of ‘Dick Deadshot,’ and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed.56 Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal.57 It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal.58 Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables.59 If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police.60 These things are our luxuries.61 And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all.62 At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft.63 At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency.64 At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.65
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the criminal class.66 This should be our great comfort.67 The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.68 There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists.69 But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets.70 It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a ‘many-faced and fickle traitor,’ but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d’Annunzio’s downwards.71 So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral.72 It is always on the side of life.73 The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless.74 That is a class privilege, like cigars.75 Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.76
Sentence Notes
In plain English: One of the oddest examples of how little we value ordinary life is popular reading, most of which we happily call vulgar.
Reference & context: Penny dreadfuls were cheap weekly story papers of the Victorian era, full of highwaymen, pirates and detectives.
In plain English: A boys' adventure story may be ignorant about literature, but that's like saying a modern novel is ignorant about chemistry, economics or astronomy; it isn't vulgar in itself; it is the real heart of a million fiery imaginations.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A comic comparison followed by a soaring image of what the cheap stories actually do.
In plain English: In earlier centuries, educated people ignored the heap of popular writing.
Reference & context: “Ruck” means a crowd or ordinary mass.
In plain English: They ignored it, so strictly speaking they didn't look down on it.
In plain English: Simply not knowing or caring about something doesn't puff you up with pride.
In plain English: A man doesn't stroll down the street proudly twirling his moustache because he feels superior to some kind of deep-sea fish.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A ridiculous picture that makes the point instantly.
In plain English: The old scholars left the whole underworld of popular writing in the same kind of darkness.
In plain English: Today, however, we've reversed this.
In plain English: We do look down on popular writing, and we don't ignore it.
In plain English: We risk becoming petty ourselves by studying petty things; there is a terrible magic law behind it, as with Circe, that if the soul bends down too showily to examine something, it never stands up again.
Reference & context: In Homer's Odyssey, the witch Circe turns Odysseus's men into pigs.
In plain English: In my opinion, no kind of cheap publication is more ridiculously exaggerated and misunderstood than today's lowest-level boys' stories.
In plain English: This kind of writing has probably always existed, and it must.
In plain English: It no more claims to be fine literature than its readers' everyday chat claims to be great public speaking, or the cheap rooms and tenements they live in claim to be magnificent architecture.
In plain English: But people need conversation, they need houses, and they need stories.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Stories are placed beside talk and shelter as basic human needs.
In plain English: The simple need for an imaginary world where invented characters can act freely is far deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.
In plain English: Every one of us as children invented an invisible cast of characters like this, but our nannies never thought of correcting it by comparing it carefully with Balzac.
Reference & context: Dramatis personae (Latin): the list of characters in a play. Honoré de Balzac was a great French realist novelist.
In plain English: In the Middle East and Asia, professional storytellers travel from village to village with a small carpet; and I sincerely wish someone were brave enough to spread that carpet and sit on it in the middle of a busy London street.
Reference & context: Ludgate Circus is a busy road junction near Fleet Street, then the home of London's newspapers.
In plain English: But it's unlikely that every story the carpet-carrier tells is a little gem of original art.
In plain English: Literature and fiction are two completely different things.
In plain English: Literature (fine writing) is a luxury; fiction (storytelling) is a necessity.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay's key distinction, in a perfectly balanced epigram.
In plain English: A work of art can hardly be too short, because its value is in its climax.
In plain English: A story can never be too long, because its ending is just something to be sorry about, like spending your last coin or lighting your last pipe.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The comparison catches exactly how a child feels at the end of a story.
In plain English: So while serious writers, becoming more artistically careful, tend toward short, impressionistic works, the makers of true romantic trash still produce enormous amounts.
In plain English: The ballads about Robin Hood never ended, and neither do the books about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine.
Reference & context: Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine are invented, typical penny-dreadful heroes.
In plain English: Both kinds of hero are deliberately designed never to die.
In plain English: But instead of starting from the common-sense fact that working-class young people always have had, and always will have, some kind of shapeless, endless adventure reading, and then trying to make sure it's healthy, we usually start by wildly attacking all of it and being shocked that the errand boys we're talking about don't read Meredith's The Egoist or Ibsen's The Master Builder.
Reference & context: The Egoist (1879) is a difficult novel by George Meredith; The Master Builder (1892) is a play by Henrik Ibsen. Both were admired by intellectuals.
In plain English: It's common, especially among judges, to blame cheap stories for half the crimes in London.
Reference & context: Magistrates are judges in minor criminal courts. Victorian newspapers often reported boys blaming penny dreadfuls for their thefts.
In plain English: If some dirty street child runs off with an apple, the judge cleverly points out that the child must have learned from his strange reading that apples satisfy hunger.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Mock-solemn irony: hunger, not books, is the obvious cause.
In plain English: The boys themselves, when they're sorry, often blame the stories bitterly, which is just what you'd expect from young people with a good natural sense of humour.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Chesterton suggests the boys are cheerfully telling the judges what they want to hear.
In plain English: If I had forged a will and could win sympathy by blaming the novels of George Moore, I would find the excuse great fun.
Reference & context: George Moore (1852–1933) was an Irish novelist whose realistic novels were considered shocking.
In plain English: Anyway, most people firmly believe that poor street boys, unlike everyone else, get their main reasons for behaving as they do from books.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The irony: nobody believes this of anyone else.
In plain English: Now it's quite clear that the judges' complaint has nothing to do with literary quality.
In plain English: Writing bad stories isn't a crime.
In plain English: Hall Caine walks around in public and can't be jailed for a disappointing ending.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A joke at a living best-selling author's expense.
Reference & context: Hall Caine (1853–1931) was a hugely popular but melodramatic novelist of the day.
In plain English: The complaint is based on the idea that most boys' stories are criminal and corrupt in tone, appealing to base greed and cruelty.
In plain English: That's the judges' theory, and it's nonsense.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A blunt, plain-spoken verdict after the long build-up.
In plain English: From what I've seen at the dirtiest bookstalls in the poorest neighbourhoods, the facts are simply these: the whole confusing mass of cheap children's stories is about adventures that wander on, unconnected and without end.
In plain English: It doesn't express any passion at all, because it has no real human characters at all.
In plain English: It runs forever in the same tracks of familiar types: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist and the modern cowboy keep coming back, as stiff and simple as the standard human figures woven into an Eastern rug.
In plain English: I can just as easily imagine someone being stirred to wild desires by staring at his Turkish carpet as by such lifeless, bare storytelling.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The carpet image from earlier returns as a punchline.
In plain English: Some of these stories treat robbers, outlaws and pirates sympathetically, showing thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval in a dignified, romantic way.
Reference & context: Dick Turpin (hanged 1739) and Claude Duval (hanged 1670) were real highwaymen who became romantic legends.
In plain English: In other words, they do exactly what Scott's Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and The Lady of the Lake, Byron's The Corsair, Wordsworth's “Rob Roy's Grave,” Stevenson's Macaire, Max Pemberton's The Iron Pirate and a thousand other works do, which are regularly given to children as school prizes and Christmas presents.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The long list of respectable classics is itself the argument.
In plain English: Nobody thinks that admiring Robin Hood (Locksley) in Ivanhoe will make a boy shoot arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; nobody thinks that carelessly opening Wordsworth at the Rob Roy poem will start him on a life of blackmail.
Reference & context: Locksley is Robin Hood's name in Ivanhoe. Richmond Park is a royal deer park in London. The Scottish outlaw Rob Roy ran a protection racket, a kind of blackmail. “Japanese arrows” are probably just an exotic comic detail.
In plain English: When it comes to our own class, we understand that young people enjoy imagining this wild life not because it's like their own lives, but because it's different.
In plain English: We might at least consider that, whatever else makes the errand boy read The Red Revenge, it really isn't because he's covered in the blood of his own friends and family.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Comic exaggeration exposes the absurdity of the magistrates' view.
Reference & context: The Red Revenge is an invented, typical penny-dreadful title.
In plain English: Here, as always, we get completely lost by talking about “the lower classes” when what we mean is “everyone except us.”
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A sharp definition that exposes class snobbery.
In plain English: This light adventure writing isn't specially working-class; it's just human.
In plain English: The charitable reformer can never forget people's class and job.
In plain English: He says, with a humble-sounding boast, “I've invited twenty-five factory workers to tea.”
Why this phrase is worth keeping: “Modest swagger”: an oxymoron (contradiction in terms) that pins down false humility.
In plain English: If he said, “I've invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,” everyone would see how funny it is to group people that way.
In plain English: But that's what we've done with this junkyard of silly writing: we've investigated it like some horrible new disease, when it's really nothing but the foolish, brave heart of humanity.
Reference & context: “Lumberland” is Chesterton's coinage, from lumber, meaning old, useless junk.
In plain English: Ordinary people will always be sentimental, because a sentimentalist is just someone who has feelings and doesn't bother to invent a new way to express them.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Chesterton redefines an insult as something harmless and decent.
In plain English: These ordinary popular publications have nothing basically evil about them.
In plain English: They express the hopeful, heroic, obvious truths that civilization is built on; for clearly, if civilization isn't built on obvious truths, it isn't built at all.
In plain English: Obviously, a society couldn't be safe if a top judge's remark that murder is wrong were treated as a brilliant new witticism.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A comic test case: basic morals must be obvious, not clever.
In plain English: If the writers and publishers of Dick Deadshot and similar works suddenly raided the educated classes, took down the name of every man, however important, caught at an adult-education lecture, seized all our novels and warned us to reform our lives, we would be very annoyed.
Reference & context: University Extension Lectures were public courses for adults. Chesterton imagines a police raid in reverse.
In plain English: Yet they would have much more right to do it than we have; because, for all their silliness, they are normal and we are not.
In plain English: It's the modern literature of educated people, not of uneducated people, that is openly and aggressively criminal.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay's great reversal.
In plain English: Books that recommend wild living and despair, which would horrify the noble-minded errand boy, lie on all our living-room tables.
In plain English: If the dirtiest old bookseller in Whitechapel dared to display books that really recommended having several wives or killing yourself, the police would seize his stock.
Reference & context: Whitechapel was one of the poorest districts of East London.
In plain English: Those things are the luxuries of the educated.
In plain English: And with a hypocrisy so ridiculous it's almost unique in history, we scold street boys for being immoral at the very moment we're debating, with slippery German professors, whether morality means anything at all.
Reference & context: Probably aimed at the followers of Friedrich Nietzsche (died 1900), who attacked conventional morality.
In plain English: At the same moment we condemn penny dreadfuls for encouraging theft, we're seriously discussing the idea that all property is theft.
Reference & context: “Property is theft!” is the famous slogan of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840).
In plain English: At the same moment we accuse it (quite unfairly) of lewdness and indecency, we're happily reading philosophies that celebrate lewdness and indecency.
In plain English: At the same moment we accuse it of encouraging young people to kill, we're calmly debating whether life is worth keeping.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Three “at the very instant” sentences build a rhythm of accusation.
Reference & context: Refers to the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his followers.
In plain English: But it's we, the educated, who are the unhealthy exceptions; we are the criminal class.
In plain English: This should comfort us greatly.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A surprising twist: it is comforting because the great mass of people are sound.
In plain English: The great majority of people, with their great heap of light books and idle talk, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is wonderful, loyalty is noble, women in danger should be rescued, and defeated enemies should be spared.
In plain English: Many cultured people doubt these everyday rules, just as many people believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I'm told both groups are fun to talk to.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Sophisticated doubters are compared, deadpan, to lunatics.
In plain English: But the ordinary man or boy writes every day, in these big, gaudy diaries of his soul that we call penny dreadfuls, a simpler and better creed than any of the dazzling moral paradoxes that fashionable people change as often as their hats.
In plain English: Shooting a “two-faced, disloyal traitor” may be a narrow moral goal, but it's better than being a two-faced, disloyal traitor, which sums up quite a lot of modern philosophies, starting with Gabriele d'Annunzio's.
Reference & context: Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian writer famous for his cult of pleasure and the superman.
In plain English: As long as rough, flimsy popular adventure stories aren't infected by shabby fashionable culture, they will never be seriously immoral.
In plain English: It always takes the side of life.
In plain English: The poor, who are truly bent under the weight of life, have often been crazy, foolish and cruel, but never without hope.
In plain English: Hopelessness is a privilege of the rich, like cigars.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Despair is presented as a luxury item; a stinging, funny line.
In plain English: Their silly literature will always be “blood and thunder” stories, as simple as the thunder in the sky and the blood in our veins.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The insulting phrase “blood and thunder” is turned into something elemental and noble.
Fun Fact
Chesterton practised what he preached: he created the much-loved Father Brown detective stories and wrote for popular magazines all his life. He was so large and absent-minded that he once sent his wife a telegram: “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” She wired back: “Home.”