# The moral education concealed in cheap adventures

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH06.P006](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH06.P006/#char=1507,1644): "The penny dreadfuls which I also read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity; but I did not know this at the time."

An earlier essay supplies the missing argument. In 'A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls', collected in The Defendant (first published 1901), Chesterton defends cheap juvenile adventures against the accusation that they corrupt their readers. He distinguishes their crude literary workmanship from their moral commitments: courage, fidelity, rescuing people in danger, and sparing defeated enemies. Their heroes may be outlaws, but the stories still assume that loyalty is better than treachery and that life deserves defence. He accordingly calls their teaching a better 'gospel' than fashionable ethical speculation.

The aside in Orthodoxy compresses that defence into an account of his own education. While his explicitly philosophical reading challenged Christianity, his recreational reading preserved an imaginative allegiance to heroic virtues. Calling this tradition Christian is Chesterton's retrospective interpretation; the earlier essay itself presents these virtues as broadly human foundations of civilization. It therefore explains the moral continuity without demonstrating that every penny dreadful had Christian authorship or doctrine. The inspected Gutenberg witness reproduces The Defendant's second edition, London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902, rather than the 1901 first edition.

## Sources

- [G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12245/12245-h/12245-h.htm), Title page and 'A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls', especially final three paragraphs beginning 'If the authors and publishers', 'But it is we'; second edition, 1902

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