Mrs. Grundy and the difference between convention and injury
He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it.
Mrs. Grundy is the repeatedly invoked neighbour in Thomas Morton's Speed the Plough, first published in 1800 (the Wellcome catalogue records an edition of that year). The play is inspected here in Gutenberg's transcription of a later Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme edition, printed from the prompt book with remarks by Mrs. Inchbald; its displayed title page supplies no date. These witnesses should not be conflated. 1800 edition catalogue; inspected play text.
In Act I, scene 1, Dame Ashfield constantly measures her family against the Grundys' prosperity and social standing. In Act II, scene 3, anxiety about Susan's possible sexual disgrace prompts another appeal to Mrs. Grundy's judgment. Farmer Ashfield responds by putting his own wounded affection for his daughter before the neighbour's opinion. The name consequently brings into Chesterton's sentence a familiar figure for social surveillance, particularly over women's respectability. Morton, Acts I.1 and II.3.
Chesterton uses that contrast to argue that an accuser cannot simultaneously treat chastity as sacred and contemptible. But the literary reference also helps expose an unstated premise: disapproving of coercive sexual injury and disapproving of oppressive judgments about consensual conduct need not be inconsistent. The contradiction follows only if the two denunciations reject and affirm the same moral principle. This is an assessment of Chesterton's inference, not an identification of the unnamed author of the two books: the paragraph offers a composite polemical figure without naming a work or writer for this example.
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