The moral education of adventure stories
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’.
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.
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