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"Good Bad Books" is an essay by George Orwell first published in Tribune on 2 November 1945. After Orwell's death, the essay was republished in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950).
Contents
The essay examines the lasting popularity of works not usually considered great literature. Orwell defines a "good bad book" as "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished."
Orwell concludes: "I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies."
He acknowledges G. K. Chesterton as the originator of the term, as seen in his defences of penny dreadfuls and detective stories in the 1901 collection The Defendant.
Orwell's examples
Orwell claims that "perhaps the supreme example of the 'good bad' book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other."
Other examples he gives include the Sherlock Holmes and Raffles stories, R. Austin Freeman's stories The Singing Bone, The Eye of Osiris and others, Max Carrados, Dracula, Helen's Babies and King Solomon's Mines.
The minor novelists W. L. George, Leonard Merrick, J. D. Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and A. S. M. Hutchinson are also mentioned as writers "whom it is quite impossible to call 'good' by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste."
Related essays by Orwell
Helen's Babies by John Habberton is also discussed by Orwell in his 1946 essay "Riding Down from Bangor".
Other uses
The notion is inverted in The Anti-Booklist by Brian Redhead and Kenneth McLeish, in which the authors critique a range of "bad good" books, generally thought to be "good books".