The Defendant
1901
G.K. Chesterton wrote these essays to put certain things on trial - and you won't believe who wins. In his first collection, published when he was just 27, the young Chesterton takes on the role of attorney for the defense in case after case: detective stories, penny dreadfuls, newspaper headlines, awkward silences, the whole disregarded dunghill of daily existence. His argument is simple and radical: the world dismisses too easily. What we call "trash" often contains more genuine joy, more wild invention, more honest emotion than the solemn productions of the cultured elite. Chesterton writes with a pleasure that still feels electric more than a century later, as if he's letting you in on a secret. The essays range from celebrations of detective fiction to meditations on why we love coats of arms, from defenses of popular songs to the strange case of the thing we call "nonsense." If you've ever felt guilty for enjoying something unpretentious, The Defendant is your acquittal. It remains a joyful manual for anyone who wants to learn how to pay attention to the world and find it astonishing.
Editions
X-Ray
“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“the function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man”
— G. K. Chesterton
“The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are”
— G. K. Chesterton
“Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.””
— G. K. Chesterton
