# The moral education of adventure stories

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH05.P003](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH05.P003/#char=290,344): "We all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls."

The earlier essay ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls’ supplies a concrete meaning for this otherwise provocative claim. Against accusations that cheap boys’ adventures encourage crime, Chesterton argues that their conventional heroes sustain ordinary moral commitments: courage, fidelity, rescuing the endangered and sparing defeated enemies. Their literary crudeness does not, for him, cancel their ethical value. He also challenges a class distinction: respectable readers admire romantic outlaws in Scott and Stevenson while condemning similar pleasures among poor boys. [The Defendant, ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls’](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12245).

The connection clarifies the move from wonder to allegiance in this paragraph. Adventure stories offer the child a position within a conflict, with people and things to defend. Chesterton transfers that position to existence itself. This is an interpretation of the two passages together; the earlier essay does not establish the actual effects of these stories on all readers.

## Sources

- [G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12245), ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls’, paragraphs beginning ‘Among these stories’, ‘In this matter’, and ‘But it is we who are the morbid exceptions’. First published 1901; inspected Gutenberg transcription of the second edition, London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902.

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