Episode 332: "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" by G. K. Chesterton, Short Story Summer Series Remix

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast – Episode 332: "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" by G.K. Chesterton
Short Story Summer Series Remix
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins
Date: June 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on G.K. Chesterton’s essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” as part of The Literary Life Podcast’s “Short Story Summer Series Remix.” Angelina and Cindy dive into the cultural and educational significance of ‘lowbrow’ popular literature, drawing parallels between Victorian penny dreadfuls and contemporary entertainment, and challenge the tendency to categorize popular storytelling as merely vulgar or corrupting. Throughout, they highlight the vital role such literature plays in developing the imagination and in reflecting fundamental human desires for order, justice, and adventure.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Conferences and Personal Anecdotes

• [01:12] Angelina recounts meeting listeners at a recent conference and hints at Thomas Banks’ upcoming poetry teaching sessions.
• Cindy discusses upcoming events—including a four-day “Repairing the Ruins” conference focused on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy, morning time, poetry, and the wonder in literature.

2. Commonplace Book Segment

• [06:09] Cindy’s Charlotte Mason Quote:

  “Imagination is stored with those images supplied day by day, whether by the cinema, the penny dreadful, by Homer or Shakespeare, by the great picture or the flaming shocker... It is enough for us to remember that imagination is stored with those images supplied day by day....” (Cindy, 07:06)

• [08:02] Angelina’s Tolstoy Quote:

  “Everything that I understand, I understand because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Angelina, 10:04)

• Both discuss how love and understanding are intertwined—paralleling C.S. Lewis’ ideas about finding something good in any book.

3. What Is a Penny Dreadful? Historical Context

• [17:18] Penny dreadfuls were cheap, serialized adventure stories (pirates, crime, gothic), primarily for the working class, parallel to today’s pop culture and streaming media (Angelina, 21:18).
• [22:33] They filled a new leisure reading niche post-1830s as literacy and technology expanded. They were often formulaic, heavily illustrated, and veered into cliffhanger serials.
• They paved the way for detective fiction and mass-market narratives for youth—precursors of comics, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and modern binge-watching phenomena.
• Popular stories like "Sweeney Todd" first appeared as penny dreadfuls (Angelina, 27:50).

4. The Tension: High Art vs. Pop Literature

• [18:11] Angelina challenges the “hoity toity tension” between high and low art, noting even Shakespeare was popular entertainment (Angelina, 18:11).
• [18:19] “They love to be elitist. And if something is popular, it can't be good.” (Angelina)
• Critical dismissal of working-class tastes is a persistent theme, with critics “tick[ing] their own agenda boxes.”
• [33:51] “What the elitist is despising about the penny dreadful is that the good guy wins and evil is punished and order is restored....” (Angelina)
• There’s a human longing for meaning, justice, and narrative closure behind the enduring popularity of such works.

5. Defense of ‘Vulgar’ Literature: Chesterton’s Central Arguments

• [35:44] Cindy reads:

  “One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense... but it is not vulgar intrinsically. It is the actual center of a million flaming imaginations.”

• [37:37] Angelina highlights that formerly, highbrow society simply ignored pop culture; modern critics, instead, actively despise and police it.
• Chesterton’s paradox: “We despise everything and we ignore nothing.” (Cindy, 36:24)

6. The Human Need for Story

• [43:52] Cindy reads:

  “People must have conversation, they must have houses and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world... is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of the good art and much more important.” (Cindy)

• [45:00] Both hosts echo how “fiction is a necessity,” crucial for developing the imagination through play, mud pies, and make-believe—not just for achieving great art but for being fully human.
• [46:34] “Better to imagine the sound of the egg frying than to actually have a frying pan that you wind up...” (Angelina)
• [48:11] Imagination’s limits—discussion of real-life consequences when children can’t imagine alternatives to their environment.

7. The Escalating Critique of Pop Culture

• [54:23] Discussion of evolving storytelling models: from printed serials to soap operas to binge-able Netflix series, noting both the risks and benefits.

8. Popular Stories as Moral Touchstones

• [58:49] Stories of adventure and honor serve as aspirational vehicles, even when actual life will never mirror them literally:

  “This wildlife is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it.” (Angelina)

• [59:29] Cindy notes, “Honor... is something lacking in our culture. We’re so uncomfortable with masculinity... these books had that heroic ideal of honor.”

• [61:00] Sentimentalism is not a vice. Chesterton (via Cindy):

  “Ordinary men... will always be sentimentalists. For a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them.”

9. The Real Danger: High Art vs. Penny Dreadfuls

• [64:49] Angelina quotes Chesterton:

  “With all their idiocy, [these stories] are normal; we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated... which is avowedly and aggressively criminal.” “At the very instant that we curse the penny dreadful for encouraging thefts, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft....”

• The hosts discuss the danger of fashionable intellectual nihilism versus the simple morality of the masses.

• [65:42] "We are so assaulted in our daily lives by nihilism ... [so] when it comes to putting our money down to watch a movie ... we want to see the good guys win, want to see evil punished, want to see order restored." (Angelina)

10. Application to Parenting and Education

• [43:43] The motto: “Childhood is for the good books, not the great books.”
• Overemphasis on “great” literature for children can close rather than open doors to reading.
• “Let them have dessert sometimes,” rather than demanding every book be five-course haute cuisine (Angelina, 43:44).

11. Conclusions and Takeaways

• [74:56] Angelina: “We need to be very careful, I think, not to blow up the last bastions of the playground.”
• Cindy summarizes, “The point is that we do not want to be sitting on our high horse thinking we’re better than people without examining our own motives.” (75:12)
• Final metaphor: “A mud pie is not a wedding cake and should not be judged the same way. Amen.” (Angelina & Cindy, 76:07)
• Chesterton’s argument is not that everything is of equal value, but that the function and purpose of “low” art is distinct—and essential.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [10:04] (Angelina): “Everything that I understand, I understand because I love.” —Tolstoy, War and Peace
• [18:19] (Angelina): “They love to be elitist. And if something is popular, it can't be good.”
• [35:44] (Cindy, reading Chesterton): “We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness.”
• [45:51] (Angelina): “Literature is a luxury, but fiction is a necessity.”
• [46:34] (Angelina): “Better to imagine the sound of the egg frying than to actually have a frying pan that you wind up.”
• [58:49] (Angelina): “We recognize that this wildlife is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it.”
• [61:40] (Cindy): “Ordinary men... will always be sentimentalists. For a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them.”
• [64:49] (Chesterton, via Angelina): “For they, with all their idiocy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated... which is avowedly and aggressively criminal.”
• [76:07] (Angelina): “A mud pie is not a wedding cake and should not be judged the same way.”

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Content | |-------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:12 | Hosts discuss upcoming conference and Thomas Banks' poetry sessions | | 06:09 | Commonplace book quotes: Charlotte Mason, Tolstoy & connections to C.S. Lewis | | 15:45 | Introduction to Chesterton’s essay and relevance of “beach reads” | | 17:18 | What are penny dreadfuls? Their historical and cultural context | | 21:31 | How social/economic changes fueled the rise of mass literature | | 27:50 | Sweeney Todd: From penny dreadful to enduring pop culture phenomenon | | 33:51 | The real reason critics despise pop fiction: it affirms justice and order | | 35:44 | [Reading] Chesterton’s paradox: despising vs. ignoring low culture | | 43:52 | Stories as a universal need, not a luxury | | 45:51 | “Literature is a luxury, but fiction is a necessity.” | | 58:49 | The real force of adventure stories and honor in shaping imagination and virtue | | 64:49 | Chesterton’s “real danger”: High (nihilistic) art vs. low (moral) pop culture | | 74:56 | Concluding thoughts: Don’t eliminate the playground in childhood reading | | 76:07 | Mud pies vs. wedding cake: judging books by purpose, not by one single standard |

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Tone and Takeaway

Angelina and Cindy remain warm, confessional, and intellectually robust throughout, encouraging a charitable, nuanced approach to reading, parenting, and cultural commentary. They model Chesterton’s joy and robust common sense: seeing value where others see only vulgarity, and urging listeners to examine their own motives when policing taste. The episode is rich with literary allusions, practical parenting wisdom, and cultural analysis, making a compelling case for the formative—and even necessary—role of “minor” storytelling in our lives.

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Next Episode:
Cindy picks “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield. As always, short stories and essays are also available as audio readings by Thomas Banks for Patreon supporters.

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Endnote:
Angelina and Cindy remind listeners: Don’t judge the mud pie for not being a wedding cake. Both have their place in a healthy literary life.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[B]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast where. Where your hosts, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, explore a life shaped by books, stories and poetry. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I'm here with Cindy Ross. Cindy, I'm so excited to talk about Chesterton's essay, A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. Before we do that, how's the summer going?

[C]

It's going like a summer should. Sort of off track.

[B]

Well, I just got back from a conference and it was a lot of fun to meet some of our listeners and they got to meet the mysterious Mr. Banks. So that was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to watch people come up to him and feel like they already knew him because they had listened to him read. So that was really. That was very sweet and it touched both of us. We had a. We had a good time.

[C]

Well, that, that, and that's neat because he is getting more and more exposure. We're actually going to be exposing him to, to the world very soon with our conference that we're having in August, August 26th through 29th.

[B]

Yes, yes. We're both really excited about that. He, you know, he's been quietly teaching at a classical school for the last decade and writing poetry and being a scholar. The things I could tell you about this man, the scholarly rigor of this man is just phenomenal. And it really is a sight to behold. And I am so excited to share him. I just, I think he is the best kept secret in education right now as we try to renew and repair the ruins and to renew our minds and renew the culture. And I'm so excited to share him. He's got just an incredible skill set that's very, very rare. So I thank you, Cindy, for the opportunity to share him with the world with this back to school online conference. Why don't you tell us about that? Because I'm pretty pumped.

[C]

Yeah, I'm really excited about it. So we are going to have a Four day conference. Each day we're going to have various sessions. The first session day we're going to have. We talked about last week. And then today we're talking a little bit about the, the third day, which is going to be Tom doing some introduction to poetry. Because in the future he is going to be doing some fabulous work on poetry. And this is just like the very beginning. And then he is. And then there's just going to be so much available from Thomas Banks about poetry coming up soon. So if you want to get a head start in learning about poetry from him, this is the place to do it. I'll have some Charlotte Mason. I'll be doing a morning time session, a morning time immersion. I love doing those. And I think this is going to be a lot of fun. So we're going to have a Charlotte Mason intensive. I mean, it is going to be intensive on day one. We're going to have a morning time sessions on day two, poetry on day three. And then Angelina is going to do her fabulous work of closing us out on day four with talking about the wonder of literature and the topic she is just so good at bringing home to all of us and making us say, yeah, duh, I knew I was smart. I just need to explain it to me.

[B]

I feel like that's my, that's my unique gift in life. I can name the thing that everyone senses but doesn't realize. They. And they're like, oh, oh. That's why, that's why I love this thing. That's why I connect to this thing. That's a lot of fun to have that role.

[C]

So if you want sign up, sign up for the conference. We're gonna have a blast. It's gonna be a great week and we are all gonna be ready to go back to school. Having done a lot of good work on repairing the ruins. We're going to be just sitting there building bricks on the wall. We're going to be, we're going to be fixing the wall as best we can before we get thrown back into the thick of it.

[B]

And I'm glad you said that. The idea of the conference here is repairing the ruins because people ask, people are asking, who exactly is this conference for? It is for anyone who wants to repair the ruins. And so for some people, that's going to be teachers who want more information and get pumped up for the school year. It might be homeschoolers, might be parents. It might just be people who want to be better educated and are taking their own education seriously. So the conference is for everyone. And like you said, four days, four speakers, six sessions. And you don't have to be there live. This is, you know, live. Live in your own time, when and ready when you can. Right? In your pajamas, in your slippers, sipping your coffee, eating your ice cream here and there, when you can, sneak it in around your schedule. So anybody who registers for the conference gets lifetime access to the recordings, which you can then watch in any time you want. So this is one of the ways that I get excited about what technology can do for you.

[C]

And it's also schools. If you want some teacher training, this would be a great place to have teachers going into the school year with some fresh ideas. So we are looking forward to it. And you can head over to my website and sign up.

[B]

Absolutely, absolutely. We hope to see you guys there. And the last conference that Cindy and I put on just was such a treat for us. I had a blast with that group of people. So I know this is going to be. This could be even better. And we're really excited about that. All right, Cindy, what have you got going on in your commonplace book today?

[C]

Well, I just changed it because I have my little group that I. My summer group that I lead, and it's been so. That group has been phenomenal. But today we were reading aloud from Charlotte Mason. And I kind of, as I was reading Chesterton, I was thinking about Charlotte Mason quite a bit, thinking, I bet she wouldn't totally agree with him. But I was reading aloud to the girls this morning, and there it was, the penny dreadful. So I thought, this is a quote I will read, and we'll bring this into the great conversation that we're going to have. And I mean great conversation in quotes and as people have opinions. But Charlotte Mason says, and in tours of philosophy of education, chapter three, imagination may become like that cave, Ezekiel tells us, wherein we're all manner of unseemly and evil things. It may be a temple wherein self is glorified. It may be a chamber of horrors and dangers, but it may also be a house beautiful. It is enough for us to remember that imagination is stored with those images supplied day by day, whether by the cinema, the penny dreadful by Homer or Shakespeare, by the great picture or the flaming shocker. We have heard of the imaginative man who conceived a passion for the sphinx. And I think what she's saying is he fell in love with a sphinx. Sphinx. Because he had such a great imagination, he could imagine that as something possible. And that is how the imagination works. Isn't is very powerful. For good or for bad.

[B]

Yeah, that's a very appropriate quote for what we're talking about today. That's really good.

[C]

What about you?

[B]

So my quote comes from Leo Tolstoy. And one of the great things about being married to not only my best friend, but a scholar and a colleague is we have a lot of literary conversations at our house. Like, you just never know where we're gonna end up with these conversations. And we end up pulling books off the shelf and researching articles and finding this and that and trying to solve all these literary mysteries and understand things more. We are having a lot of fun being married. So we somehow got started talking about Leo Tolstoy and his career and what happened to him in the later years of his life. I don't know if you. If you know the story there, that at one point he renounces his novels and he starts writing more parables, and he gets very much into politics and spiritualism and a few other things. And. And so.

[C]

Well, Thomas Winner got to Amy.

[B]

You know it. You know it. I. I just think you can't write War and Peace and Anna Karenina and not have something taken from you, if that makes sense. Like, he just put it all into those pages, and then, you know, it doesn't surprise.

[C]

He was an idealist. And it was.

[B]

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So, anyway, we were talking about all that, and Tom kept referencing this movie that I had never heard of. And he said, oh, it's with Helen Marin and Christopher Plummer and all these people. It's about Tolstoy's last days. It's called the Last Station. So we watched it last night. It was very good. It's very. It's very interesting. Very, very interesting. We've actually been on a Russian kick lately. We've been watching a lot, like, Russian documentaries around that time period. Stuff about the Romanov.

[C]

Have you watched Dr. Zhivago?

[B]

We did. We actually watched that before we got married. That was one of the first movies we watched as a couple.

[C]

Which one did you watch? The newer one or the older one?

[B]

No, there was a newer one. We watched the old one.

[C]

Yeah, the old one's better.

[B]

So, anyway, the movie opened with a quote, and I had to pause it and write it down in my commonplace book. It's a quote from War and Peace. And this is the quote. Everything that I understand, understand, because I love.

[C]

Hmm. Wow.

[B]

And I thought of a lot of things.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm thinking of to the pure. All things are pure. I've thought about Lewis and this is where it ties into what we're going to talk about today. Lewis, in an experiment and criticism, talks about whether or not there is such a thing as a bad book, quote, unquote. Because he says to a good reader, they will find something good in any kind of book. And so this quote, everything that I understand, I understand because I love. You know, when you love something, there's a depth of, well, knowing and loving always goes together in scriptures. Right? It's a very.

[C]

Right, you know.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. Exactly, exactly. So to know and to love that goes together. And so he's drawing to. He's tying those things together, our understanding and our love. This, this goes hand in hand. And we can argue all day long about which comes first. I don't think it's so easy to separate. Do you love first and then you understand? Do you understand, then you love? For me, that moment always sor. It happens together. You know, I fall in love. And the understanding, the epiphany, it's sort of all at once, but there's no doubt that it's mysteriously connected. And I thought in a weird way, that quote is also apropos to Chesterton's argument because he talks about the disdain that. This sort of elitist disdain of what the working class people love. And so they don't love it and they don't understand it, the elitist. And so I just thought that was sort of all tied in together.

[C]

Oh, it does. And it ties in so much with Charlotte Mason, because that's exactly what she says, that we feed our children food and we, we want to tell them what they're going to love and what they're going to take out of it. And they sometimes love different parts of it than what we love. And that's why when we hand them a worksheet, we're telling them what to love.

[B]

Amen.

[C]

And they're not paying attention because they don't love it. They don't know. They don't know the material because they don't love it. So. So. But they are gonna love something. And when we present good material, we present material they'll find, like you said, they'll find something to love. If we're presenting them with material that is narrative, is what Charlotte Mason would say, so that their mind can hold onto it. And the penny dreadful is definitely a narrative.

[D]

I hope you're enjoying today's best of episode of the Literary Life podcast. Because this episode was recorded many years ago, I wanted to let you know what we've got going on right now. This podcast is always available for free,

[B]

but for people who want to go

[D]

deeper or explore different topics, we've got a great summer lineup for you of webinars and mini classes. The May webinar was Mary Poppins, Venus in a Blue Coat with Silver Buttons, which takes a look at Mary Poppins as goddess slash Celtic fae who is there to enter us into the world of fairy through these books. It was fantastic. In June, we've got a mini class coming up. Frankly, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled about our entire summer lineup.

[B]

But Ms. Jen Rogers is going to

[D]

be bringing us a mini class called the Chronicles of Narnia A Complete Transmutation, and she's going to be looking at the Chronicles as a whole and showing us what Lewis is trying to accomplish with the whole whole series and how it works as one story. In July, we've got a mini class called Players on a Cosmic the Grammar of Nature in Shakespeare. If you enjoyed Ms. Ella Hornstra's classes and webinars on the symbolic meaning of nature, you're going to really love this class where she's going to go through the images of nature in Shakespeare and show us that once again because we are so disconnected from nature and disconnected from symbolic language, the that we miss major things going on in Shakespeare's work. So even if you haven't taken those other classes, you'll be able to start here. I'm really looking forward to that one. In July, we also have a webinar, what Became of the Weaving Maid? An introduction to Chinese folklore. That's going to be fantastic. And we're going to continue to explore the ways in which the Tree of Tales has roots in the east as well as the West. And in August, I'll be rounding up the summer lineup with the next installment of my Harry Potter Gateway to the Literary Tradition course, and I will be covering the Half Blood Prince. I also encourage you to check out our publishing wing, cassiodoruspress.com to see the latest from Dr. Jason Baxter. He's got a new book out with us called Falling Inward. You can also check out his other book, why Literature Still Matters. He's also got an audiobook read by himself and get on the mailing list there because we've got some exciting projects coming out and in the next couple of years there may also be one or two more surprises this summer, so keep checking back to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and remember, all of our purchases are available live or later. You also might notice we have a brand new dashboard set up on the website. We're continuing to move all the classes over to that. But I think you're going to really, really like the new setup and how user friendly it is. It's just going to make taking our classes easier, even easier and even better. So thanks so much for listening. Let's continue with the show.

[B]

Oh, I thought this essay was absolutely fascinating. And this was a Thomas Banks pick. So, yeah, you know, I got to keep bragging about my husband when I asked him to help me put together a list of essays, that was one of the first ones off the top of his head. Oh, you should do Chesterton's A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. And even without reading it, I just thought the title was so, so appropriate for a summer discussion. Right. As we, as we talk about beach reading.

[C]

Beach books. Yeah.

[B]

Leisure reading. And, you know, what is the role of the beach read and the leisure reading? I loved this essay. I can't wait to unpack it. How should we approach this? You want to go line my line? You want to get some background? You want to. First impressions?

[C]

I thought what we could do is you tell us first about what a penny dreadful is and then we can start, you know, reading it paragraph by paragraph and talking about it. Because I don't. I mean, we could try that.

[B]

All right. No, that sounds great.

[C]

So. Because every paragraph I felt like, oh, oh, oh, oh.

[B]

I know where I was highlighting every line. And now you.

[C]

I don't want to jump around too much and be like, oh, and then back here and then, oh, back up there.

[B]

Okay, I think that's a great idea. And what I love about. One of the things I love about this essay is that it is one of those transcendent moments where he's writing about something very particular. But at the same time, everything he is saying is so applicable to all these other things. To how we view leisure, to how we view leisure activities. The relationship between art and popular culture, which is a long standing debate. You know, look at Shakespeare. You know, he was not considered high art in his day. This was, you paid a penny and you got in and you watched it.

[C]

That's right. That's right. That's a very good point. So

[B]

my mind went in a million directions as I read this. So I'm so excited to unpack it. But yes, of course, let's talk about what is a penny dreadful.

[C]

Yeah. And just before you move away from Shakespeare, you know, that's why you have Shakespeare having these weird scenes right in the middle it's like here's the scene for the upper class and here's the scene for the people sitting on the ground down here. Standing. Standing on the ground.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. It's operating on so many different levels.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But you know, whenever I hear this sort of hoity toity tension between high art and pop culture, and I know if people have heard me talk about this before, I am fascinated in what is popular stories much more than I am in what is the quote unquote, indie movie. What's the art of the day? What's. What are the critics darlings? The critics darlings are not going to last. Okay? That is my firm. Because the critics are often looking at what they're often looking at with a certain agenda, aren't they? To see certain boxes have been ticked.

[C]

And they find they love to be obtuse, they love to puzzle that you can't undo unless you actually know what they're talking about.

[B]

And they love to be elitist. And if something is popular, it can't be good.

[C]

And that is where, like Charlotte Mason, like the penny dreadfuls, having a straight narrative, a beautiful thing, it's not. It's not a terrible thing. Right.

[B]

And so you run into all kinds of problems with artists like Shakespeare and Dickens who were, who were popular, the popular entertainment of the day. Shakespeare was a Saturday matinee, that is what he was for a penny. And he packed him in week after week. And so you have things operating on multiple levels. You have extraordinary high art, on the other hand, but not a high art that excludes people. Right. It's operating on many levels. And there's body humor and there's silly puns and there's physical humor, and there's something for everyone. He didn't cast it above their head and look disparagingly at anybody who was beneath it. It's a story for everyone and anyone. And I think that's part of what Chesterton's argument is here. So just to put things sort of in a context, because, you know, when you're on the other end of time, as we are now, right. As everyone is, everyone feels like their moment is at the other end of time, but

[C]

we're on the crack of doom.

[B]

As time moves, it tends to do a lot of things. One of the things is we picture a long time ago as maybe being quaint or better than us in some way, or that it was a different type of human being who lived at some other time. But when you study it, of course, you have all the same sorts of tensions that people have right now. And one of the tensions you have is between high art and low art. So the penny drift, the Victorian age, and I know I've talked about them a lot, but in so many ways, I don't think we've recovered from them. You have the birth of modernity in that time. So one of the things that happened, if you look historically right, you don't have historically high literacy rates universally. The United States actually was one of those rare things where, because Benjamin Franklin believed so strongly in literacy, the United States had free public libraries. England did not lending libraries in the Victorian age, you paid a subscription for that. It was like renting a blockbuster movie. You checking out a library book meant you paid for it, you rented it, and then you brought it back. So even in England, you didn't have these super high literacy rates. So in the Victorian period, so, you know, around the 1830s, you get high literacy rates. You also have improvements in technology. So printing becomes cheaper where it used to be, you know, so high that by necessity people were shut out from owning books, having access to that. So newspapers, cheap printing people start to have a little more money in their pocket as economics change. And for the first time, you have leisure spending for the working class, you have money to spend on entertainment. And again, such a parallel to our own time.

[C]

So is this taking place? This is like almost like as society is dealing with some of these bad issues and changing them work hours, then that is also opening the door for reading.

[B]

Yes, yes. So you see two things happening. People have money to spend on entertainment. So you also see like the theater, music, shows, people are. People are spending money on entertainment. And it's not just the aristocracy, right? It's not just rich people, but anyone can go to see a Saturday matinee, Anyone can buy a penny dreadful because it cost a penny. And people are also looking at, for the first time, as reading as a form of entertainment. Because again, you didn't have high literacy rates and you didn't have access to books. But because of the newspapers and the high literacy rates, you have the ability people to choose as entertainment reading. So this is a whole new idea that.

[C]

Right, because the novels are, you know, they don't go very back, back very far. What we have with Tom Jones and a few things before that. And then we have this now. So it's like a steamroller now. We're getting more and more people. Oh, novels, let's read.

[B]

That's right. Okay. So it's just this incredible boom comes out. All of A sudden you have these really cheap books. They're a penny a piece. That's the name, Penny Dreadful. They're sensational. They're very illustrated. They're super short with lots of illustrations. And, you know, the illustrations would be blood, blood and more blood, that kind of thing. It's a publishing phenomenon, crazily popular, and it's primarily focused on the working class. So just to give you an example here, so they would be sold in cereals. So it would end on a cliffhanger, and you'd have to buy the next one. I keep thinking Netflix. I think everything Chesterton says in this essay is so apropos to Netflix binging. And the way you just keep going and it comes at you fast and furious in these little short installments that keep you hooked for the next one. And you're paying a very low subscription rate to Netflix, right, Or any of these streaming services. And they keep you kind of addicted. And then we kind of have this like, well, what have I done all weekend? I just binged this series. And we wonder if that's even a good use of our time and what the effect of it is on us. So it's that kind of situation. So it cost a penny to get each part. Now, contrast that to Dickens. So Dickens also wrote by the word cereals, right? He wrote cereals that came out. So a Dickens cereal cost a shilling, which was 12 pennies per.

[C]

Wow. Wow.

[B]

So this is how cheap it is.

[C]

It is high art.

[B]

That's exactly right. It's exactly right.

[C]

So.

[B]

So Dickens would be paying the full price of a movie ticket kind of thing. And. And the penny things are just, you know, it's coming at you on Netflix. So it's primarily for the working class. It is primarily adventure stories. It starts off with a lot of pirate kind of stuff and a lot of gothic elements. So the gothic novel had been popular. And so you see a lot of those elements. Kidnappings, all that kind of stuff. Lots of pirate stories. Then you see crime fiction. Now, this was particularly interesting to me as we have talked on this show before about the importance of the detective novel. A lot of crime fiction now at the beginning, focused primarily on the criminal, the crime, the gore. You know, it's a thriller. And, you know, you seeing this person commit all these crimes, and you're kind of wrapped up in that. Then in, like, around the 1860s, the focus starts to shift to the person solving the crime. So you begin to see the birth of detective fiction. One of the really popular serials. It was a 70 part serial series was the Boy Detective. So you see the forerunner here of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldeman again, serials, right? Coming at you fast and furious. Very formulaic, not high art, very popular.

[C]

So right away we see we have plenty of things going on in our life right now that. That really fill the same need that this penny dreadful for them.

[B]

Mm, absolutely. And then, of course, anytime, you know, just like we have with Netflix, there's some junk on there, but then there's some really good stuff too, that was happening as well. So you have people like Wilkie Collins who begin to elevate the form, take a lot of the form that was already there, but then elevate it to high art. And so he starts writing more high art thrillers. So he's the first one to write like a Page Turner novel, not in serial, but as a whole novel with the Woman in White and the moonstone. So you begin to see the form elevating. So these books had a really wide audience. And originally the target audience was working class adults, but by the 1860s, you begin to see them primarily targeted to children. And that's what Chesterton's talking about, that it's being perceived as this sort of mindless, wasteful, perhaps corrupting influence on children in a lot of the same ways of video games. So a lot of the attacks against penny dreadfuls are the same sort of attacks you would have about video games

[C]

or what about graphic novels or comic books?

[B]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[C]

Very similar. And I went through a comic book stage when I was a young girl, Archie, which apparently you can't really give to your kids anymore.

[B]

That's a shame. I read Archie too, when I was a kid.

[C]

I know.

[B]

So the Guardian called the penny dreadful Britain's first taste of mass produced pop culture for the young. So you're even kind of getting a little bit of a generation gap now because you're getting. You getting a pop culture. And really, pop culture can only. A youth culture can only exist when you have things like child labor laws and reform and leisure time and literacy and money for leisure. Right. If you read a Dickens novel, you know that primarily these kids have been working in the factory, but things. Things begin to change. And so you sort of have this youth culture popping up. And to give you an example of the kind of thing that Chesterton is pushing back against. Okay, this is a contemporary. I found this headline in the Guardian. It's a contemporary article and it's called Cheap and the Horrid Legacy of the Penny Dreadful.

[C]

Okay, so this is what you have tracts coming out by righteous people that now that are against these penny.

[B]

Right. So he's pushing back against. Now. This was very interesting to me when I started researching what were some of the titles. I knew some of them. Vorny the Vampire is familiar with that one. This was a surprise to me, researching this. Okay, you ready for this? One of the most successful penny dreadfuls was a serial story about Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Sweet street that first appeared in 1846. It was so popular that before the series was over, it had already been adapted for the stage.

[C]

Now, is this the first instance of Sweeney Todd?

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Okay. Because it was based on a true story. I was always told that there was a some. I think there was a news story at the time, but we'll have to look that up.

[B]

Well, there's always been that connection where people write fictionalized versions of things that. That are somewhat based in reality. Alexandre Dumas got. Got a lot of the ideas for his stories from things he'd read about. Robinson Crusoe, of course, that was based on something he read about somebody that was shipwrecked. Daniel Defoe read about. So, yeah, you definitely see that. But what was funny to me is that Sweeney Todd is still part of our pop culture. It's still being adapted for the stage. It's still, you know, you have the Johnny Depp movie, you have the Broadway play of it. I mean, there's even an Office episode devoted to it. And that was just so. Just I was tickled by that. To see that something that has been condemned as throwaway trash ended up having more staying power than anyone would have thought.

[C]

So I'm just reading here online that. So the fact that Sweeney Todd was. There's really no evidence that there was a real Sweeney Todd. But halfway through this serial, somebody, like, started hinting around that there was a real Sweeney Todd. So how exciting that would be.

[B]

Art imitating life imitating art.

[C]

Yeah. So saying, you know, and making it more appealing. Oh, there might even be a real person doing this. So.

[B]

So this helps us to have a context, I think, for Chesterton. So Chesterton has often come out in defense of things that have been under attack. He had defends fairy tales, a lot of defensive fairy tales. Again, at a time when this was not something children should be reading. So once again, Chesterton's favorite, faced with some kind of storytelling under attack, and he, you know, decides to lend his considerable powers to defending something that a lot of people would have thought indefensible.

[C]

Yeah. And it was convicting to me as I read this that I'm. I'm often the one who is. I'm very snobby sometimes about what, what books I think you should give children. I did read an article a couple years ago about boys, and it was by a very high minded person. But they said, you know, let them read some of these comic books. And it's not. Just as long as they're reading, it doesn't matter. They should just anything goes. But there is a value in some things that we might dismiss at first.

[B]

Well, I think as much as we've talked on this show about how formative Nancy Drew is for so many of us, I think that's a really good example. Nancy Drew is not art.

[C]

Right, Right.

[B]

And it is highly formulaic and it is a serial. And I read one after another. And I'm not gonna pretend it's art, but it was, it was, it was good. I think it was good for me.

[C]

Yeah. And how many. I know, when I was in high school, I was reading formulaic romance novels. That's because my grandmother and her sisters passed around boxes and boxes of these romances. Some were Grace Livingston Hill, which would be, you know, a step up, and then somewhere way down here, Harlequin Romance. But it was to me that I read millions of those and I did not become. I never read a romance novel now, so it didn't harm me in any way.

[B]

It's really interesting because as I revisited an experiment in criticism, which we will be doing on this podcast at the end of the summer. So we have our summer series on short stories and essays. And then the fall we're going to go to Lewis's Experiment and Criticism, which is his book where he tries to think through ideas of what it means to read. And the more that I wrestle with that essay, the more that I wonder if there is such a thing as a bad book. He says there are bad readers, and he makes some distinctions there. And I heard echoes of that reading this Chesterton thing where he's saying these books are not as corrupting as you think they are. In fact, it's high art that is far more likely to corrupt than popular entertainment.

[C]

Yes, yes. Because he's not saying it. It doesn't matter that they're, you know, he, that they have, but we know what the bad guy is and we know who, who has the knife and we know who is, you know, where the blood is coming from. But in, in a, in a hierarch kind of way, you can have People in a very snooty way, pretending, calling good evil and evil good. And you don't see him in a penny dreadful.

[B]

That's right. And one of the things he says, and this really connected with me because I've made the same point in quite a few of my talks, he says that what the elitist is despising about the pity dreadful is that the good guy wins and evil is punished and order is restored. And that's exactly what I say. When you look at what are the popular movies of our day, when you look at the superhero movies, what is it that people are attracted to, that there's justice? That we live in an ordered universe that makes sense and high. And this is what Chesterton says that, you know, he says it's, it's us, it's the hoity toity elitists who have books on our nightstand that say there is no good in the world, life doesn't even have meaning. And so we despise the fact that in popular culture we see stories of people going to great lengths to preserve life, to rescue damsels in distress, to, you know, reassort order. One of the things that critics right now, despite they despise the happy ending.

[C]

Right? Right. I mean, I see this all the time with our children. When I talk about what we're, what we're passionately against, has such a profound effect on our kids because we can teach them not to care. And these novels do not teach you not to care. But there are other things that we do that we, we're teaching our children not to care or to despise, to be critics and to despise things that someone else cares about. And that doesn't make you a better person to be the person who is higher than or just despising. In fact, if you're always despising something, you're despicable.

[B]

That's right. Lewis says if you, if you ask. So if someone tells you, you know, my favorite book is. And they. And they list a book that you think is trash. He describes that moment. We've all been there, right? When somebody's like, oh, well, my favorite book is. And they mentioned some book that horrifies you. He says that you cannot jump to the conclusion that you know what it is they love about this book? That you cannot judge their ability as a reader because they may have seen something and love something in this book that you didn't see. So he says the follow up question is, why did you love something this book? Explain it to me. Explain what it is that you love. And he says very often you might be surprised. I think that that's true with what Chesterton's talking about, too. There's an assumption, that's why he says it's elitist, that their love of this book, the love of the penny dreadful, in some way indicates, you know what, a lack of conviction, a lack of intelligence. Oh, they must not be very smart if they like these stories, that kind of thing. But Chesterton says, no, look, that's not what's going on at all. So do you want. You want to just jump right in?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I'm going to read the first two paragraphs, and then we'll jump off and talk about it.

[B]

All right, go for it.

[C]

All right. One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense or the economic sense or the astronomical sense, but it is not vulgar intrinsically. It is the actual center of a million flaming imaginations. In former centuries, the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his mustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole world of popular compositions to a similar darkness. Today we have reversed this principle. We do not. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness. I'll stop right there for this minute. That wasn't the whole paragraph, but that part was. I didn't want to stop in the middle, but right away you're just going, yes. He's so good at these paradoxes that we. That they. They ignored them in the past, but they did not despise them. And we. This. Oh, my goodness, I can't even gather my thoughts. But it's just our whole culture now. We despise everything and we ignore nothing. And we're just.

[B]

Amen. That's so good, Cindy. Yes. We feel like we have to make a comment on everything. Nothing is below our notice. And that's what he's saying. Historically, we didn't worry about the stories that. And he's gonna go on to say, you know, every. Every town has a storyteller. And we didn't feel like we needed to make sure every story he told was high art.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

We've all been there, right? We've all sat around with cousins and grandpa and they're telling stories, and you. You just. You're just enjoying that moment. You're like, well, that was not a high art story Shakespeare has written. So it's just. That's not. But it's. It doesn't deserve that sort of critique.

[C]

Right, right, exactly. My uncle was here yesterday, and he's so funny. And his wife, I said to him, she laughed at all his jokes. And I said, you're still laughing at his jokes? And she said, yes, I still laugh at them even though I've heard him a million times. But there's a love there, a love of hearing him tell a story, even if she's already heard the story. And I think when we know a storyteller, we don't care if we've heard the story before, if it's simple or stupid. We love the storyteller and we just want to hear them do that thing they do.

[B]

You know, this is an interesting parallel. I think you might. Maybe you'll tell me I'm completely off my rock or who. But I'm thinking about the other ways that we can be hoity toity and despise, quote, unquote, vulgar things. I think about cooking. Like restaurants went so off the deep end with haute cuisine. Right. And crazy concoctions and little tiny servings, and you don't even know what you're eating. And it certainly wasn't, like, emotionally satisfying, but it was, you know, it was cutting edge. It was. It was very, very high.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Elevated to the status of art. And then you despise, you know, the meatloaf that mom made for dinner, even though that is your soul food. Right. We talk about comfort food, but no one goes to some haute cuisine restaurant for comfort food. Right. But the backlash of what we're seeing now is that there are all these restaurants that focus on things like meatloaf. Have you seen this?

[C]

Yes. It's like a meatloaf every other lingerie crazy.

[B]

It's great. Like these really fancy hipster restaurants that serve meatloaf and fried chicken and all this comfort food. And I just think it's a backlash against all this hoity toity. We have to elevate friends to art.

[C]

Well, and bringing out the fairy tale in this or whatever, whatever. This is the whole emperor's new clothes. You know, somebody, we all sit down to eat and we pretend. Or what is it? The bar that has the drink that's really just an ice cube or some smoke that you whiff? And nobody says, this is not food, this is not drink. Because we would feel foolish. We've been put in a position where if you really want to be somebody in the know, you have to say this, that the emperor is wearing his clothes when obviously he is not.

[B]

And I think the other parallel is that comfort food is deeply emotionally satisfying. It's something connected to our childhoods. And I think the same thing about the type of stories Chesterton talks about. We can mock them for being formulaic and that, you know, the. The guy is always going to rescue the damsel in distress and the bad guy is going to be punished and the good guy is going to find the reward. But there's something so deeply emotionally satisfying about that, and we need that as human beings. So I'm not saying it's wrong to have a haute cuisine meal, but not every meal can be. It sometimes needs to be meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

[C]

And that's why we said in the detective fiction that if you're in a slump and you can't get back to reading, you don't start with Shakespeare or Homer. You go get a murder mystery or you, you go get a penny dreadful. You get something that'll pull you back into reading and get your mind exercising the imagination exercising. And then you'll be ready to take it onto some heavier things. Not to get too ahead, but I'm going to because it goes here so well. But I love what he said. We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the lower classes when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

[B]

Oh, yes. The fact that he just put his finger right on the fact that. Look, you're being elitist. Yeah, that. That was very convicting for me, thinking that we're somehow above all of that.

[C]

Yeah, it was. I did find it very convicting because we don't want to block. It's like the Pharisees. Jesus said, not only are you not going through the door, but you're blocking everybody else from getting in. So maybe we're blocking our children from being readers by saying making the door too narrow for them.

[B]

Ah, yes, right, right.

[C]

I mean, not that we don't want to. There is the true and good and beautiful. But I think moms can get very caught up in fantasy world.

[B]

And you've said it before. We're gonna say it again. Childhood is for the good books, not the great books.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And people who think that they need to be giving their third grader the great books. You are doing a disservice to the child in the book. Childhood is for childhood books. It is for myths and fairy tales and legends. It is for the golden age of children's literature. It is for adventure stories and pirates and kidnappings. You know, it is for Nancy Drew and the horny boys. There is world enough in time for the great books. It's not a rush to the finish line. So I think that's exactly what he's getting here. And I love that you say that, that we're. We're shutting the door on our kids and we don't realize it by trying to make sure everything they read is a great book or reaches the state of literature. That isn't to say you want a steady diet of junk food. We all know that. I think that for our audience, the words that need to be spoken to our audience is not, make sure you don't give your kid junk food. Okay? Our audience is already way on the other end of the spectrum.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

To be told dessert sometimes is okay. That's what we need to be told. Right. Not everything has to be the five course meal.

[C]

And I'll just start reading. I'm going to skip down a couple lines and I'm going to start reading because it goes along with what you said. But people must have conversation, they must have houses and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of the good art. And much more important, these imaginative worlds that we get sucked into and maybe we read over and over and over another one, another one. You know, we're going to the high school with Archie and that becomes our high school. And we're working out life and we're working out problems, or we're reading the Bobsy Twins and we're learning how to just have a relationship with people. You know, we want to see our friends again. We want to see Nan and Ned and all the kids that we play with. And that's. And these books can provide a need. It's a very basic human need. It's not. It's not a strange, weird need that we have for stories. It's a very basic need that we have.

[B]

Yeah. And I love that he says, all of us in childhood played make believe, right? We're all acting out stories. And he says, you know, you're Your nurse would have never thought to correct you that this isn't a very good story you're playing.

[C]

Yes. That you should be. Yeah, because that's not the point.

[B]

Right. The point is that we're developing our imagination. You know, one of my favorite things to do is, do kids still do this? I made mud pies. Did you do that as a kid? That was like. Right. That was like my favorite thing. I would. Oh, my gosh, my whole backyard would be covered in all of my different concoctions. And I like to decorate them with all kind of poisonous berries. And my mother would come out always so worried. Don't eat those. Which I was like, you think I'm going to eat this mud pie? Mom, there's no risk of that. But, you know, the fact that I made mud pie, I mean, thank God no one came out there and said, that's disgusting. We waste your time. Why aren't you in the kitchen making some real food?

[C]

Yeah, that would make so much more sense. You could make cookies and eat them, but no, you're just wasting your time making these little mud pies. Well, he says here literature is a luxury, but fiction is a necessity. It was necessary for you as a young child to be practicing making mud pies not as an art of making food, but as an art of being a person who provides food to other

[B]

people and developing the imagination.

[C]

Yes, yes.

[B]

I remember reading this article that said that we do a disservice to children by having such realistic toys.

[C]

Ah, that's good.

[B]

That imagination is about taking one thing and imagining a different. Useful for that. When I was a kid, we just didn't have very much money, so everything was. But pretend. Even. Even my tea set, you know, I was. Everything was double duty. But now, like pretend food and pretend cookware, and it makes real sounds like that's actually detrimental to a child's imagination.

[C]

Wow, that makes so much sense.

[B]

It does, right? Better to imagine the sound of the egg frying than to actually have a frying pan that you wind up. And it makes sense. The sound of frying.

[C]

Wow. Yeah. I mean, just think how far away that is for the reality, though. It's pretending to be what it's not. Whereas if you're. You're pretending to make it something instead of it pretending. Does that make any sense?

[B]

Well, it does, because even to prepare real food requires imagination, right?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

To be able to imagine how these ingredients will work together and the satisfaction you're going to get that people are going to enjoy it. You know, Anything done well requires the imagination. Whether you're, you know, designing clothes or preparing a meal or building a house, it all requires an imagination.

[C]

Right. You have to be able to see the end product before you start in the beginning, or at least know what the framework is of it. And without an imagination, what do you have that's. I don't. If you have no imagination, then how do you set about doing anything?

[B]

Yes, and we are seeing so much of that in the culture, people who just do not have an imagination. And there are some startling ways in which that begins to exhibit. So I was involved for a short time, few years in an inner city ministry. We did tutoring for students to help them pass standardized tests and stuff like that. And they had a different. A lot of different things going on. And one of the things that we sort of came face to face with was that some of these kids had lives that they simply could not imagine anything other than the life they grew up in. And so if you. If you tried to. If you tried to, like, inspire them, like, what's your dream job? Okay. Their dream job was always whatever was on their corner, right. Working at that restaurant or that store or working where my mom works or.

[C]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Because they simply did not have an imagination cultivated to be able to envision anything. One at one of my friends had tried to give these students. She was, you know, it was one of those lessons that we're going to teach you how to budget money and, you know, one of these kind of life skills classes. And the assignment she gave him was pick, pick any place in the world, and we're going to plan your dream vacation. I'm going to teach you how to, like, make travel arrangements and, you know, life skill stuff. None of them could imagine anything more than like, a visit to the next town.

[C]

And what I find so interesting about this, and from my experience, that is absolutely dead untrue. Kids who have never been out of their own neighborhood can imagine another place, but they have the television. So what is it about the television that doesn't. That they don't relate to those places?

[B]

I wondered the same thing. If you've watched movies, they're set in other places. There must be something deeply unreal about that. It must seem out of reach.

[C]

It must just be so outside of their experience that it's totally. I don't know, because they. There used to be the thing with deaf children that they said they couldn't. If you have two deaf parents, you can't learn to talk by watching television.

[B]

Oh, that's Fascinating.

[C]

I don't know if that's true, but I remember hearing that at one point. I don't. I don't know. I'm not. That's not my scientific contribution to this.

[B]

So I do think, even though Chesterton doesn't specifically say that, that that is part of. Behind his defense is that the development of a child's imagination is essential, and therefore they need to have lots of opportunities to. To do that without us judging the quality of their imaginative experience. Right. Like we've all been there with a kid learning to play an instrument. God bless all the parents whose kids take violin lessons. And what is a more horrific sound. Right. But. But we take the long view. You take the long view. Right. And. And you listen to me.

[C]

Or not.

[B]

And you try to capture their imagination so that they can keep going when what they're doing in no way looks like what they just.

[C]

Exactly. Right. You have to have imagination to make that noise and keep on doing it,

[B]

to believe that that noise is going to be something else at some point. Absolutely, yeah.

[C]

So what is he saying here when he says a story can never be too long? Or he says a work of art can hardly be too short for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long for its concept is merely to be deplored like the last half penny or the last pipeline. And so what he's saying, I guess, is that when we. A story can't be too long because we're. We've loved living in it.

[B]

Yes. That's what I think, too. We all know that that story that you don't want to end, those books

[C]

that it takes you three or four days to come out of, you just can't get out of them.

[B]

Yes, yes. And of course, the best art is the one that can do both of those things can be art and a story. But I think that he's right when he says literature is a luxury and fiction is a necessity. I think that we see that. I am just utterly fascinated with the Netflix model, just utterly fascinated with how it has changed the way that people get their stories. And one of the things that's so interesting to me about that, the fact that we now binge series all at one time, as opposed to, you know, once a week, installments.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Means that there's a continuity in the story that there's never been before. You don't have to. In our. In our last episode, this is like. You don't have to remind anybody. Right. You just. Everybody knows you're gonna end this one and start the next one.

[C]

Right. It's really hard to watch shows that that doesn't happen.

[B]

Oh, I know, totally. For me, I lose interest. You better. You better put your whole. Whole thing at once or I'm gonna lose interest. But what's so interesting to me is that I believe that that has created much better storytelling. Because you see patient storytelling, right? Like where each episode feels like a chapter in a book and so many subplots and so much character development. Some of the best series that are being designed to be binge watched will let you have two or three episodes where nothing really happens. It's just character development. But that would have been. Never happened in the old model. Right. Because people would have stopped because they

[C]

would have lost the audience.

[B]

That's right. It had to end on this cliffhanger. And so I see a lot of positive things in that. You know, for all that we're tempted to get nothing done and just binge Netflix all day, there's also some positive things coming out of it too, because I think that we're handling more subplots and more sophisticated ideas and more characters and character development in those kinds of things.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, that makes me question because we. What we had before was a soap opera. I mean, I grew up with my mom. I get home from school, she'd be folding the laundry watching Days of our Lives, and I'd sit there and watch that with her. And that was also. That had the potential to be good storytelling. Because on the model, you're saying. Because it went on and on and on for 30 or 40 years, but it did not rise above the model, I don't think.

[B]

No.

[D]

And.

[B]

Well, part of the reason for that is that that's before the days where you could record it. And so they had to create a system of storytelling in which you could miss an episode or a week and not be lost. So that's why it would be.

[C]

You couldn't go back and watch.

[B]

So there would be hardly anything significant happening in one episode because if you missed it then. Then you lost your audience.

[C]

Right. I forgot about that. That we. Oh, if you used to. It used to watch reruns, you could watch reruns. But soap operas didn't have reruns. Right.

[B]

So. So they were working on a slightly different model. But I think he's right that you see storytelling as an essential part of all cultures, even non literate cultures where you have oral storytelling and the Bard tradition. So I think he's absolutely right that the need to tell stories to hear stories, to craft our experience via narrative, to develop the imagination, is an essential human experience. And we have to be very careful to come in here and always be judging the quality of it. It's just like there's again another example. There's the dad joke that your dad tells and we all roll our eyes at, but we enjoy it and it has a part in our life. It makes our families a little more light hearted even as we groan at some of the dad jokes.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But we know that you don't judge dad jokes by when you paid $40 to go see a professional comedian. Right. It's not the same thing.

[C]

Right, Right.

[B]

And you don't go to your child's piano recital expecting that you would just bought a ticket to the symphony. Right. They both have their role and hardly anybody who takes piano lessons is going to end up in the symphony. So you can't even make the utilitarian argument that they're learning how to be in the, the symphony because that's just not true.

[C]

Mm.

[B]

And your dad is not gonna ever be a professional comedian, but you don't tell him, stop telling jokes because you're not.

[C]

That is actually the next point he makes when he talks about the boys. You know, the boys themselves find it easy to blame the pulp fiction because they're looking for a way to get out of some crime they've committed.

[B]

Oh, yes. I love that he says, look, they're not learning how to be criminals reading crime books.

[C]

Right? Right.

[B]

The books are not corrupting the boys. That's nonsense.

[C]

Mm.

[B]

And that's such a valid point because I think we, I think we fear a lot the corrupting influence of certain stories or music. And again, I'm not saying there's no such thing as. They're certainly corrupting images. I do, I do definitely believe that. But, but if you're just talking about lower quality story, that's not like inherently evil just because it has. Just if somebody's obsessed with watching, you know, ncis, that doesn't mean they're plotting to be a serial killer.

[C]

Right, right, right. And there's a lot of those shows. We have this very.

[B]

I thought a lot about those shows,

[C]

reading so many of them. They're all, many of them are extremely popular and have been going on for 15, 20 years on TV. And yet, you know, how many. It makes you wonder how many serial killers are out there, whether you should even get. Go out the door at all. But he says here that what the, what the, what you really find in this literature Is not criminal activity, but adventures. Rambling, lots of disconnected, endless, you know, episodes of an adventure. And it does not express any passion of any sort. For there is no human character of any sort. It makes me think of there's dueling, there's knights, there's cowboys. It made me think of Ga hinty. Some people get. Really don't like Ga hinty for kids. And he is a little moralistic, but not so much. I think he has enough of the adventure and comparison.

[B]

It's very formulaic.

[C]

Yes, it's definitely formulaic. It's not great literature. And yet it's just a little bit higher tone for boys to read about real places and real things and somebody dropping down in the middle of it. And I never could stop liking GA Henty, no matter how many people criticized him. I thought he was a great author for young boys.

[B]

I liked this section of the essay. And I think he's right when he says, we recognize that this wildlife is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And you're in reading those kinds of books or being immersed in those kinds of stories, like the swashbuckling hero kind of stories. Our sons are never gonna have that in their real life.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yet there's something that draws them to those stories. Some nobility, some desire to rescue. And I think every young boy would like to believe, if it push came to shove, they'd step in front of the flying bullet for their mom or sister. Right.

[C]

But. Right.

[B]

Hardly anybody's ever gonna have a life like that. But you can cultivate that spirit in these stories. Right. That self. That. That nobility of self, Sacrificial love and willing to die and fighting the bad guys.

[C]

Well, I do think that honor that is. That is something that we have identified as so lacking in our culture, and we were so uncomfortable with masculinity. And honor is very tied to traditional masculinity, that there was such a thing as honor. And I used to say that my guys, I worried too much because I thought if in a Ga hinty book, if the bully said something ugly and the boy punched him in the nose and it changed the course of his life because then he had to flee to Africa. And then he took up with, you know, some exciting period of history. But the boy usually started out doing something very honorable. But I was always telling my boys, you know, it's not honorable to go around punching people in the nose because they. But they are very drawn to honor. And these books had that this heroic ideal of honor. Even like greater books have greater books, real literature has this heroic ideal of honor in some of these. But he does make the point here that how many of our stories are about people who are doing disobedient things? I mean, Robin Hood is a criminal

[B]

and doesn't teach boys, right?

[C]

They don't become criminals because they read Robin Hood and Ivanhoe or any of these books where. Where the bad, the good guy is kind of a. Not. Not following all the rules.

[B]

And, you know, I think you can also make an application to Hallmark movies, which we like to make fun of that too. But they're very, very popular. Right. People find something comforting in there. And so, you know, he talks about the accusation of the. Of sentimentalism. I like what he says about this. Ordinary men, and he means humans will always be sentimentalists. For a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. And really, that's the. That's the criticism of a Hallmark movie is. It's just keep saying the same old thing over and over. But maybe it's a thing people really like and need to have said.

[C]

And this all goes for poetry too. People are very snobby. Yes, there is really wonderful poetry. And I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree is not. Does not rise to the level of great poetry. But does that mean no one should read it, enjoy it and have fun with it? You know, I think people can be very snobby about poetry. That. It doesn't mean you can't go on and read great poetry just because you read a ballad or two. That is just regular poetry. Mm.

[B]

No, I completely agree. Completely agree with that. And.

[C]

And I think he's right. This is what civilization. I thought of that because I have an article I've written about the Charge of the Light Brigade and how people have turned. Have turned against that poem. It's not a good poem.

[B]

It's.

[C]

It's very xenophobic. And yet the civilization that believed that there's not to make reply there's not the reason why is a civilization that conquered the entire world. And silly as that poem is, it captures something that these people believed in.

[B]

Yeah. And you see the same thing in visual arts as well. I have several friends in art school who say that the biggest, the worst criticism a professor or critic can give your art is to say it's beautiful. Think about that. Right? So we don't want anything that's representative art or beautiful that's gonna be. That's gonna be condemned. And yet we know our souls have the deepest need for beauty. We like to have beautiful artwork in our home, even if it's not critics choice, because that's how we're made. And we have a deep longing for that. I like what he says here too, and I think he absolutely nails it in this next section where he says, look, it's not the penny dreadful that is your kid bad. It's high art that is much more likely to make the reader bad. I love that. For they, with all their idiocy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Then skipping down a few lines, this is so good. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter boys for their immorality. At the very time that we are discussing with equivocal German professors whether morality is valid at all, at the very instant that we curse the penny dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

The very instant we accuse it quite unjustly of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have not never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued and vanquished enemies spared.

[C]

But yeah, then he goes the ends

[B]

up with saying, the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call penny dreadfuls. A plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. And that's it. He absolutely nailed it. I say this all the time about films, right? That we are so assaulted in our daily lives by nihilism and the fact that the idea that there's no meaning in the universe, no good, no evil, you can't make sense of anything. And so when it comes to putting our money down to watch a movie, the last thing we want to do just go to some indie movie, some critics, darling movie which says life Is meaningless and there's no goodness. Everything's random and sad and depressed. No, we put our money down to see grown men in American flag, you know, onesies tell us with no irony that good wins.

[C]

Nobody's good.

[B]

You know, at a time when we have so much irony, we're ironic about irony. Captain America is the antithesis of irony in every way. He is so genuine. He has nothing ironic about him.

[C]

Right.

[B]

There's no edge, there's no dark tortured soul under that flag body suit. It is pure good guy gonna be good. And that is where we put our money. We want to see the good guys win, want to see evil punished, want to see order restored. That's where people spend their moneys. And the critics don't know what to do with that. They don't know what to do except to say, well, some are blockbusters. I mean, what do you expect? People are gonna be stupid and want it. They'll call it escapism. But is it escapism to want to escape into a universe where just exists and goodness is validated?

[C]

Yes. I mean all of this, this whole section reminds me of the abolition of man. And we have these hoity toity professors writing a textbook and Lewis just pulls it off and says, you know, they don't, they don't, they don't. They're demanding, they're, they're making fun of things and then they're turning around and demanding that we behave differently. They're shocked, we're shocked when we find traitors among us. And yet, yet we scorn and laugh at honor. And these books don't do that. These movies do not do that. And when we see it, we like it. We like it when it's okay to care about something.

[B]

Yes, yes.

[C]

We're always, when we're trained to act like we don't. Oh, I don't, you know, it's much more upper class act like you don't care about anything.

[B]

Think that's so. I think that's so true. And that's why I think we're seeing people connecting with those kinds of stories. And the critics don't know what to do about it, you know, and so you had all of these movies that came out for such a long time with these complicated anti heroes, right? Like, like I'm being forced to do the right thing, but I don't even know if I really believe there is a right thing. All of these movies that called into question, is there any even essential difference between the good guy and the bad guy? Right. They all act the same way. They're all equally tortured. What made this one good and that one bad. And then you contrast those kinds of films with something like Wonder Woman, right where she is, she is, she cares. Right. We can't not help those people. She said, there are women and children in there. I'm gonna go rescue the women and children because that is the right thing to do. And I don't care if it's not good military strategy. And then she just goes and does and.

[C]

Yeah, and it also comes down to believing in evil. If we, if in these stories there's a, there's a bad guy and he's not tortured by being, you know, ill, raised by his mother or father. He's just a bad guy. He's evil. And, and he can be labeled that way. And, and when we don't believe in evil, we don't really know how to handle the world properly. We get very, very confused about speaking truth. We're afraid to speak truth when we don't believe in evil. And I'm not just saying we should vilify our enemies, but there is a time to speak the truth, even if that isn't a popular thing to do.

[B]

Chesterton talks about that in a lot of his essays about fairy tales too. That people are afraid if you, if you have a scary fairy tale monster, that, that's gonna frighten your child. He said the kids already afraid. Your child knows there are monsters in the world. They're hiding under their bed and in the cloud closet. Like if you don't give them fairy tales, you have not told them there are no monsters. You've just gotten rid of St. George, who can help him slay the dragon. That's all you've done. So, I mean, I don't think you are. Neither of us is saying there's no, there's no such thing as high art

[C]

and low art doesn't matter what you read.

[B]

Just go right. We're not saying that because obviously a steady diet of pulp fiction is going to cause long term problems like for sentence structure and attention span and all of these things. But I think he's right that it's not by definition intrinsically corrupting to read something of lower art, but it is

[C]

corrupting to read something that teaches you that nothing matters and it doesn't the world. You know, property doesn't matter. Other people's don't matter. These things are serious problems, but these, these simple stories are not serious problems.

[B]

Yes, and I think he's also asking us to take a Look at what we despise about these. You know. Who despises a mud pie? No one. We understand its role. Right. You know, it's beneath your notice. You don't despise it. Why do you despise these stories?

[C]

Well, you know, in the book Penrod, he's this funny boy. It's. These are hilarious stories. They're very much a product of their times.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Offensive in a lot of ways. But the very first chapter of Penrod, he. He's up in the barn and at the loft of his barn, riding what is essentially a penny dreadful. And it is so hilariously funny. And once you read about this guy, Harold Ramorez, that Penrod is writing about, he, you know, he gets a. He gets a wound to the abdomen, he gets shot in the abdomen, and he goes on. And it's just. You see that Penrod is working through. You can very clearly see it in this story that Booth Tarkington has Penrod working through what it means to grow up and what it means to be a man. And he's doing it through these romantic, awful stories.

[B]

You know, I also found myself thinking about. I have a great love of old television, so I was thinking of, like, all these films from the 1930s, like the Bowery Boys and Our Gang, the things that were movie serials, and they're not high art, and they were directed at kids, and they were about kids, and they were kind of about guttered children. You know, the poor Depression era kids who just played on the street and had no money. And it's sort of, again, sort of the same kind of, you know, pond there, I think, that Chesterton is describing.

[C]

Yeah. And there's all kinds of book serials like that for kids. My boys love these books called Dave Dawson, Flight Lieutenant and Dave Dawson and the raf, and there were just millions of them. They're very formulaic and they're very. It was very good for them to read those. For one thing, they. It was just good practice for reading, but it was good practice for reading with something that was what. That was good and not evil. Mm.

[B]

And another thing is that, quote unquote, Vulgar Entertainment is almost always much more conservative than Higher art. So you'll actually, you see much more conservative, like Family Picture than you would in maybe the Higher Art and stuff like that. It tends to. It tends to hold on to older values longer. I think that's what I'm trying to say.

[C]

Right.

[B]

It doesn't. They don't have. They don't have like a. They're not gonna like challenge the status quo. Quo in those kinds of stories. Now, challenging the status quo has its place. And that's actually, that's always been something that art has done, that it's raised questions that needed to be asked. That's not necessarily, that's not, that's, that's not the kind of questions children should be wrestling with. Right. Children have a different, they're at a different stage in their journey. You know, you don't, you don't give birth to a child and start asking them to contemplate the great questions of the universe. They, they're not ready for that yet. They don't even know what the status quo is to be challenging it.

[C]

Yeah. So Chesterton here is just telling us that it's not that we like them or don't like them, it's why we don't like them that really comes into question.

[B]

Right, right. And again, not to say that there aren't bad stories in the world, but he's talking about a popular low brow form of entertainment that taken as a whole, is not inherently corrupting and bad and has a lot of merit to it.

[C]

And he was part of a group of men that were critical of these other group, group of men. So there was a clash of ideas during his time. And you had, you know, the history, history of the world guy, and you had, oh, H.G.

[B]

wells.

[C]

H.G. wells. You had some of these men that were putting out these, these just soul destroying ideas. And Chesterton was trying to bring it back down and say, and he was very good at laughing. I love how joyful he comes across. He did. He never comes across as, oh my goodness, the world's going down, these guys are winning. But always like, oh, how silly these men are.

[B]

Well, the other thing too is that as these books are being marketed toward lower class children, I mean, if this is a, this, these are childhood stories. And when we talk about how we have this really disturbing lack of childhood in our culture now.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, so, so we need to be very careful, I think, not to blow up the last bastions of the playground.

[C]

Oh, that's a good way to end. I think that's really good. Do you have anything else you want to add after that? Wonderful.

[B]

No, Cindy, I'm just, I've learned how to exit. I'll leave you wanting more then.

[C]

That's right.

[B]

How about you? Do you have a final thought?

[C]

No, I just think this was a great thing to talk about. I love that we did that. The point is that we do not want to be sitting on our high horse thinking we're better than people without examining our own motives.

[B]

Yes, yes. And I suspect we'll come back to some of these ideas when we do Lewis's in exchange Spearman criticism because he has a lot to say too, about the attitude a reader brings to a book.

[C]

Yes, I always say that we need, there's a time and a place for elites when we need people to blame in times of crisis. So that's the role of the elite in culture. We do need our elites. We're not, we're not anti elite.

[B]

And we need art. I am the last person to be against art.

[C]

Absolutely. But that is not what these are. So let's not, let's not treat them as art. Let's treat them as what they are.

[B]

Right. Let's not judge them for failing to be art. They never tried to be art. That's not right. Exactly. A mud pie is not a wedding cake and should not be judged the same way.

[C]

Amen.

[B]

They both have alright, well, next, thanks so much for listening to this episode, guys. Next week we'll be back with a Cindy Pick. So this was a Tom pick. The next one's a Cindy pick. We're going to be reading the Garden Party by Kathryn Mansfield, which I know you're very excited to talk about, Cindy. I have never read it before, so I am really looking forward to this. And again, I would like to remind our listeners that all of these short stories and essays are read to you by Thomas Banks and are available for our patreon [e-mail] theliterarylife so if you would like to support this podcast, you get a ton of bonuses content including all of these short stories and essays read out loud to you. We've been having a lot of fun adding to the comment there and we are so grateful to our friends and fellows for supporting this podcast endeavor and helping us to continue to provide the content for our dedicated and wonderful listeners. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please go over to itunes or Stitcher or any of the places where you get your podcast and subscribe, rate and review to help us out. And we will leave you until next time with Thomas Banks reading another poem for you. Thanks so much.

[C]

Before we close with our poem, we want to thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast. You can find [e-mail] and you can find [e-mail] and you can find the podcast at TheLiterary Life. You can also participate in our vigorous book discussions on our Facebook group, the Literary Life Podcast Discussion Group. Now here is our poem, beautifully read

[A]

by Thomas Banks Bavarian Gentians by D. H. Lawrence not every man has Gentians in his house in soft September at slow, sad Michaelmas, Bavarian Gentians big and dark, only dark darkening the daytime torchlight, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom, ribbed and torchlike with their blaze of darkness spread blue down, flattening into points flattened under the sweep of white day. Torch flower of the blue smoking darkness, Pluto's dark blue days Black lamps from the halls of dis burning dark blue giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light. Lead me then, lead me the way, Reach me a gentian, give me a torch. Let me guide myself with the blue forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness, even where Persephone goes just now from the frosted September to the sightless realm, where darkness is awake upon the dark, and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible, enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.