From penny dreadfuls to an immortal adventure
It is full of _danger_ like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis.
The comparison grows out of Chesterton’s sustained defence of cheap adventure fiction. In ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,’ collected in The Defendant (first published 1901; inspected in the 1902 second edition transcribed as Project Gutenberg #12245), he distinguishes the universal need for stories from accomplished literary art. Cheap romances preserve ordinary convictions about courage, loyalty, rescue and mercy that sophisticated readers sometimes question. Their formal crudity does not discredit their moral imagination. See the essay, especially the paragraphs beginning ‘To-day, however,’ ‘In this matter,’ and ‘But it is we.’
Here that defence becomes theological. Popular fiction supplies an experiential model for Christianity: choices matter because something precious can actually be lost. There is also a revealing shift. The earlier essay stresses the reader’s appetite for adventures that go on indefinitely, with heroes conceived as immortal; this paragraph makes continuation beyond death frightening as well as desirable. The attraction of another instalment is joined to uncertainty about its character. This is a continuity in Chesterton’s argument, rather than evidence that boys’ fiction historically originated in Christian doctrine.
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