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Start giftingA Defence of Skeletons
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreWhy do humans have a horror of skeletons? Is this aversion justified? What does it signify?
Such are the animating questions of this essay by G. K. Chesterton, who acts as a witty defendant for humanity’s hidden form:
“Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty,” he writes, “we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression.”
This essay is one in a series titled ‘The Defendant’, first published as a collection in 1901, after the individual essays were published in The Speaker. Here, a selection of these essays has been reissued by Voices of Today for a new generation.
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English philosopher, author, and Christian apologist, as well as being a critic of literature and art. His literary catalog is diverse, spanning from Christian philosophy and apologetics (‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heretics’) to the Father Brown Detective Series. Chesterton’s writing is characterised by wit and a love of paradox.
Sarah Bacaller is a writer, researcher, and audiobook narrator from Melbourne, Australia.