Journalist, philosopher, writer, literary critic, orator… Gilbert Keith Chesterton has more accurately been described as a “thinking man”, a man who was constantly thinking about all sorts of things: from the meaning of human life to the value of popular conversation in taverns, from the most transcendent to the, in appearance, more insignificant. This insatiable quest for knowledge turned him into polygraph and his extensive work has made him an intellectual committed to his times and fundamental to the understanding of European culture from the early 20th century to the present. Chesterton wrote poetry, allegorical (like The Man Who Was Thursday) and prescient (like The Napoleon of Notting Hill) novels and the renowned Father Brown stories, half detective fiction, half metaphysical; biographies and studies on religious (Saint Francis and Saint Thomas) and literary (Dickens or Robert L. Stevenson) figures, and a valuable Autobiography (1936); many essays, such as Heretics (1905), Orthodoxy (1908), Eugenics and other evils (1922) or the eulogy The Everlasting Man (1925), when he’d already converted to Catholicism; and multiple articles and short essays in newspapers and magazines. His versatility and ability to surprise and his poetic and, to some point, haphazard ways are only some of the striking qualities of this brilliant writer, who produced an intellectual and critical work, deeply immersed in Christianity, and a body of detective fiction which garnered huge success.
Chesterton’s literary career took off while still a teenager. He went to St Paul’s School, in Hammersmith, where he founded with some classmates the Junior Debating Society, with him as moderator. In school Chesterton quickly manifested his literary talent. He later described himself as a boy with a natural inclination towards literature, beholden, one could say, by imagination and fiction, and capable of quoting Dickens or repeating from memory the comical lines of Gilbert’s Bab Ballads or anything else he had read. In his own words, he found himself “plunged into a friendly discussion on literature which has gone on, intermittently, from that day to this”.[1] By this early stage, while he took part in the debating club and published his first poems in its journal, he was already showing a distinctive controversial temperament and a precocious talent for words, which brought him, a few years later, to the world of journalism. His took his first steps in the trade in 1899, in the literary weekly The Bookman and in The Speaker, the most radical liberal voice of the period, where he mainly wrote art reports and book reviews.[2] Some of the reports published in The Speaker were collected in Chesterton’s first anthology of press articles in 1901, bearing the provocative title The Defendant; it contained essays on nonsense, detective stories, heraldry, farce and patriotism, in which popular culture and the common man already featured as symbols of a reactionary ideology which found in the genre of the argument in self-defence a blueprint for conducting opposition and a precursor of apologetics.[3] In the course of these first years of his career as a journalist, Chesterton fashioned a position of populist intellectual with a controversial style which will appeal to a large sector of unconventional readers.[4] Just as John Coates, a renowned expert on the Edwardian press, has explained, it’s fair to say that during the first decade of the 20th century Chesterton used his stylistic prowess and provocative techniques as a strategy to make his ideas popular in the mainstream and mass media.[5] Specifically, it was through his weekly column, begun in 1901, in the Daily News –a liberal newspaper with a circulation of 400.000 in 1909– that he was able to reach out to a bigger audience. He surprised thousands of readers with his reports on history, books, art and culture, but also delved into politics attacking the liberals, in power from 1904 to 1915. As a result of it his relationship with the newspaper was strained and, in the end, his contributions to the newspaper were discontinued in 1913.[6]
Chesterton’s journalism came to the fore thanks to his treatment of the Second Boer War (1899-1902), which took place in the South African republics of Transvaal and Orange. His direct opposition to the war earned him a reputation for going against the tide. His stance, clearly in the minority in England, went hand in hand with Hilaire Belloc’s, another prominent Edwardian writer and polemicist with whom Chesterton worked in The Speaker, the publication which spearheaded opposition to the war and criticism of British imperialism.[7] Thus started a typically Chestertonian attitude favourable to small nations and opposed to empires and great political or financial powers; an attitude in agreement with his sympathy for small things in general –family, the local community, well-defined things and everything which adjusts to the phrase “small is beautiful”.[8]
The lengthy controversies he maintained in the press in the early years of the century shaped Chestertonian thinking and reflect the development of a distinctive Christianity from 1901 onwards.[9] Worthy of note are the so-called Blatchford Controversies, a prolonged controversy on religion with Robert Blatchford, editor of the socialist weekly Clarion, which started with Chesterton’s responses in the Daily News and ended with the publication of his articles in the Clarion itself from July 1904.[10] Chesterton later explained how Blatchford invited him to write in the weekly to broaden the opinions available to its readers, until then only familiar with the editor’s point of view. Chesterton thought that by agreeing to do so, the defence of Christianity would be bolstered next to the opposing argument. Furthermore, publishing the argument in a non-Christian newspaper gave relevance to the debate and proved, in a certain way, that the religious question aroused the interest of non-believers.[11] Treading the road that brought secularists closer to religion was, therefore, part of Chestertonian theology long before his conversion to Catholicism.
Not long after this controversy, his first significant book of essays came out: Heretics, published in 1905. It’s an organic book and, even so, fully integrated in the literary and journalistic context of the age: there’s plenty of literary references to prestigious novelists, minor detective or romantic novel authors and first-rate playwrights and authors of farces, as well as to liberal and conservative politicians, Boer War generals –with the war and anti-imperialism in the background– or several characters or journalists of contemporary public life. It’s a difficult book for the foreign reader in that sense. To understand its details, it is helpful to know about the circ*mstances and the journalistic context in its origin, for it is clear Chesterton made use of articles he had already published in the Daily News: sometimes he would rewrite parts of them, other times he would extend them with new examples or illustrations or omit any extract at his discretion.[12] The link between journalism and literature is constant throughout Chesterton’s work. His next publication, still in this Edwardian context marked by an intense media activity, was Orthodoxy (1908), a capital text amongst his essays. The spirit of the media controversy pervades the book. Thus, for example, the controversy maintained in the pages of the Clarion is very much alive from the moment that one of Blatchford’s supporters appears in the book to illustrate the author’s point of view on free will. The polemicist’s strategy which nurtures Chesterton’s intense media career also fostered his most prominent essay volumes of before the Great War, which include, together with those mentioned above, What’s Wrong with the World (1910).[13]
During the first years of the First World War, Chesterton’s energies were devoted to defending the allied cause, as one can gather from his articles dedicated exclusively to promoting the anti-German cause and published in the Illustrated London News (Chesterton’s lengthiest collaboration in the press).[14] It is at this time where his patriotism emerges with full force, just as it did during his campaign against the Boer War in the first years of the century. His visceral anti-imperialism is now projected on a European scale. For example, the German invasion of Belgium led Chesterton to write a widely circulated pamphlet, The Barbarism of Berlin (1914), translated simultaneously to French and Italian that same year and published in Spanish in Barcelona in 1916.[15] In the same regard, Chesterton’s interest in the Irish cause took a more patriotic course: his past sympathy for a small and invaded country gave way to a campaign to convince the sinn feiners to abandon their pro-German stance. The articles written for that purpose made up Irish Impressions (1919), one of the first of Chesterton’s books to be reported in the Catalan press. Another result of the war was A Short History of England (1917), a history lacking facts and dates written with a clear political intention: to defend the English nation (Little England) from the perspective of the “ordinary Englishman”.[16] The controversial Chesterton, who had made a name for himself through his conspicuous presence in newspapers and reviews, and in the several clubs and societies which burgeoned in Edwardian England, had already produced his best work before the Great War.
Afterwards, as of his conversion to Catholicism in the summer of 1922, Chesterton’s monographies will shift to, in the first place, the display of this faith, be it in the volumes on Saint Francis (1923) and Saint Thomas (1933) or, more importantly, in The Everlasting Man (1925).[17] With these works, as with his conversion, came both press coverage and controversy, which boosted Chesterton’s popularity in France or Catalonia.[18] Chesterton’s media activity following the European war was linked to campaigns addressed to public opinion –against eugenics and in favour of distributism, the two subjects chosen for the social strand of his anthology–, to the point where, in 1925, he ended up launching his own publication, G. K’s Weekly (a replacement of Belloc’s New Witness), to which he devoted himself feverously during the last stage of his life by providing reports and op-eds and even covering its financial losses, all with the aim of promoting the doctrine of distributism.[19] Chesterton’s prolific output from 1920 to his death (on 14 June 1936) led to many compilations, all due to his burgeoning activity.[20] These volumes, though, have much less repercussion than the Edwardian ones (The Defendant, Heretics, Orthodoxy), for they include, in some way, a worn-out kind of essay due to the recurrence of the same subjects and the excessive use of some stylistic resources, a fact which may justify the accusation of being a verbose writer.[21] Always paying attention to his reception amongst the public, in his last years Chesterton made the leap to radio journalism, and began broadcasting for the BBC in 1932. He never managed to lead a more private life, despite the efforts of his wife Frances. Volumes of essays and poetry have continued to be published posthumously,[22] together with his Autobiography, which came out just after his death and has become one his most successful works surviving in the English and foreign market.
In the context of the Victorian novel, specifically from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods (that is, from the late 19th century to the First World War), Chesterton’s literary reflections are in line with a current of reaction against a realism which is mindful of describing society and is presided by the cult of science.[23] His defence of fantasy, adventure and romance, with appeals to fiction and imagination, translates into the literary canon he subscribes in an early book, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), which reviews the preceding Victorian generation with the clear aim of reappraising it critically.[24] Emphasizing the reaction against the Victorian commitment to science’s triumphs and materialism –a reaction expressed by the Oxford Movement, Dickens or the Carlyle and Ruskin’s new Protestant romanticism–, Chesterton offers in this essay a new reading of the Victorian age’s main representatives. Dickens emerges as a master of romance, nonsense and sympathy, as an advocate of an optimist tendency, in contrast to, for example, Thomas Hardy. In fact, The Victorian Age in Literature conducts a eulogy of Dickens, the popular novelist par excellence and the author who, in Chesterton’s opinion, best engaged with the tastes of the common man. Some years earlier, Chesterton had already dedicated a biographical volume to Dickens.[25] Just as with other Chesterton biographies, he ends up depicting himself when describing the subject of the book. Dickens is viewed as a writer who reacted against his time, the same as Chesterton (who in the beginning of the book mentions the fin de siècle atmosphere in which he was educated); a writer who flew the flag for humanitarianism when it was uncommon to do so among popular authors, the likes of which Chesterton compares with contemporary examples like George Gissing and his pessimism and Walter Pater and his scepticism; a writer, to conclude, who represented, through his instinctive comprehension of the common man, a democratic optimism which Chesterton fully espoused.[26]
In 1967 Robert Hamilton called for the reading of Chesterton’s work with “reflexive attention” rather than with an eye on quarrying brilliant quotes.[27] Chesterton’s work is suited to quoting and is so vast that many readers will identify with one statement or another, as finding someone who defends your beliefs and exposes them with conviction and force is always reassuring. It is reasonable, then, that the work of a polemicist be read in that way, in bits and scraps and to the reader’s discretion. But to go beyond its unmistakable literary quality and discover the validity it still enjoys one must understand the author as a whole. The figure of Chesterton cannot be reduced to just that of a Catholic convert in an Anglican country, that of a defender of a religious standpoint in a society dominated by secular progressivism and scientific asepsis, or that of a radical liberal in a world governed by economic interests which mediatize democracy. Those aspects are all present but have to be taken into account jointly in order to find in his unmistakable traditionalism, with its lights and shadows, an up-to-date version which benefits the man of the 21st century.
[Text adapted from the “Introducció” in G. K. Chesterton: Cristianisme, pensament social i literatura. Recopilación de textos, ed. Sílvia Coll-Vinent. Barcelona: Viena Ediciones – Fundació Joan Maragall, 2017, p. 7-19)]
Lifelong trajectory
Chesterton’s childhood was joyous, happy and bright. Mostly against a family backdrop, both Gilbert and his brother Cecil received firm human, moral and cultural values from their parents, based on respect and freedom. His adolescence and youth were marked by successive academic stages: primary school at Colet Court, St Paul’s School, art school at St John’s Wood, University College and, finally, the Slade School of Fine Art. During his time at St Paul’s, Chesterton and his friend Lucian Oldershaw created the Junior Debating Club. Some of its members were his friends for the rest of his life. This youth stage ends with an existential crisis. The beginning of his friendship with Hilaire Belloc and with the Anglo-Catholic cleric Conrad Noel, his relationship and marriage with Frances Blogg, his first media contributions, his work in two publishing houses, his stance on the Second Boer War, the publication of two poetry books, his presence in Fleet Street and the start of his public appearances in lectures, rallies, debates and electoral campaigns made Chesterton a well-considered character of his time. In 1909, the Chestertons moved to Beaconsfield. His slow and gradual rapprochement to Catholicism, until his formal conversion to the Roman Church in 1922, characterize this last stage in his life, marked by the defense of the Catholic faith in his literary and journalistic work.
A huge body and a peculiar character
Chesterton’s height and size were compared to those of a man from the North whose weight “made the ground of the streets of Barcelona tremble”, as a journalist from La Veu de Catalunya wrote in May 1926. He underwent this physical change after the Great War, during which he suffered a nervous disease. Chesterton was a bon vivant, and therefore proactive in his fight against the prohibitionism and vegetarian campaigns of his friend Bernard Shaw. His joie de vivre and optimistic temper were essential to his character; “The making of an optimist” was the title chosen by the Times Literary Supplement for a tribute published at the time of Chesterton’s death in June 1936. There are plenty of anecdotes in his biographies on his absent-minded demeanour, his cordial and generous spirit and his smooth character. In public he won over his opponents in the disputes he maintained due to the literary and imaginative force of his arguments, his ability to surprise and to astound the audience or the readers, his skill in the art of the paradox and his good sense of humour.
Chesterton explains himself
Beneath Chesterton’s works, such as the biographies on Stevenson, Dickens, Blake, Browning, Cobbett, Saint Thomas or Saint Francis, or his fiction (from The Napoleon of Notting Hill to the Father Brown stories) we find G. K. Chesterton’s personal side, like his fighting and controversial spirit, the Christian foundations of his thinking, the literary values which guide him and the faith in the common man. His work –be it non-fiction, fiction or in the press– is understood as a unitary body, presided by a view of the world to which he was always faithful and sustained by a feeling of surprise and wonder at mere daily existence. Chesterton explains in his Autobiography how he reached this point, from his childhood games and reads through to the battles against his contemporaries to defeat the ubiquitous atmosphere of pessimism and scepticism, amidst other battles and controversies of his time, and his day-to-day experience of discovering Christianity.
Others write about Chesterton
Maisie Ward led the way in the approach to Chesterton’s life with her biography published in 1943. The centenary of Chesterton’s birth in 1874 contributed to showing the value of his legacy from several perspectives, mainly literary and poetic but from the social and political ones as well. Chesterton has been viewed along the way as a great romantic storyteller and a writer of powerful and brilliant imagination, as a man of letters committed to his age, as a radical populist, as a social critic who updated the social thinking of the Church, and as a lively and travelled writer who contributed to rebuilding the cultural bridges between his little England and both interwar Europe (united in their medieval past) and America. Personal friends, relatives, scholars and biographers (like, for example, Joseph Pearce) have helped in filling in his personal profile and career. The most important dissemination of his life and works has been made from the United States and Canada, through platforms like the American Chesterton Society (and his president, Dale Ahlquist), the Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture (founded in Canada in 1974 by Ian Boyd and located at Seton Hall University), which publishes the Chesterton Review, or the Ignatius Press (in San Francisco), which began the publication of his complete works.
[1] Chesterton, Autobiography, pp. 57-79 (59).
[2] Ved Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, pp. 65-67, 129-140; Frank Swinnerton, «A True Edwardian» (1938), in Conlon, G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views, pp. 26-38.
[3] Chesterton, The Defendant, London, Diente, 1901.
[4] Margaret Canovan, G. K. Chesterton, Radical Populist, London, Jovanovich, 1977, pp. 8 y 14, describes Chesterton’s readers as «members of the Nonconformist middle class, teetotal, semi-pacifist believers in progress and enlightenment».
[5] John D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, Hull, Hull University Press, 1984, pp. 67-69.
[6] Ibid., p. 69.
[7] Ibid., p. 7. See also Jay P. Corran, G. K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity, Athens-London, Ohio University Press, 1981, p. 3. Chesterton makes clear his pro-Boer position in his Autobiography, pp. 113-114. On nationalism and patriotism, see Canovan, G. K. Chesterton, pp. 99-111, y Bernard Bergonzi, «Introduction», in G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, ed. B. Bergonzi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. xviii-xix.
[8] Ibid., p. x.
[9] It is commonly thought that Chesterton embraced Christianity spurred on by his Anglo-Catholic wife, with whom he married in 1901. See Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: En Life of G. K. Chesterton, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, pp. 41-42. Pol Escudé, «Romanus civis sum», Diàlegs. Revista d’estudis polítics i socials, n.º 64 (April-June 2014), pp. 41-57 (48-49).
[10] These articles were edited with the title The Blatchford Controversies, in Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. I, ed. D. Dooley, pp. 369-395. See also Stanley L. Jaki, «Chesterton’s Landmark Year: The Blatchford-Chesterton Debate of 1903-1904», Chesterton Review, 10 (November 1984), pp. 409-423.
[11] The Blatchford Controversies, ed. Dooley, p. 372.
[12] See David Evans, «The Making of Chesterton’s Heretics», The Yearbook of English Studies, 5 (1975), pp. 207-213.
[13] Included in Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. IV: What’s Wrong with the World, The Superstition of Divorce, Eugenic and Other Evils, introd. James V. Schall, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1987, pp. 31-218. The Catalan translation is by Pau Romeva: Allò que no està bé, Barcelona, Edicions de la Nova Revista, 1929.
[14] The weekly articles Chesterton wrote in the Illustrated London News, from 1905 to 1936, have been published in ten volumes: Chesterton, Collected Works, vols. XXVII-XXXVII, San Francisco, Ignatius, 1986-2012.
[15] Sobre el concepto de Barbarie, trad. Héctor Oriol, Barcelona, Oliva de Vilanova, 1916. The edition was preceded by a preface by Miguel de Unamuno (pp. 7-16), who presented the author as a famous writer, humorous and paradoxical, and emulated Chesterton’s style with the aim of demonstrating to what point paradox was a powerful weapon for the attack on the Prussian soul.
[16] According to Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, London, Dent, 1938, p. 93, this book by Chesterton was probably the most read in England.
[17] The three works are compiled in Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. II, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1986.
[18] For the case of St Francis of Assisi, see Coll-Vinent, «La biografía santfranciscana de G. K. Chesterton», pp. 443-448.
[19] On G. K’s Weekly and distributism, see Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, pp. 433-448, y Return to Chesterton, London, Sheed & Ward, 1952, pp. 213-231. The echo the weekly acquired in its early stage, shown by the 8000 sold copies in November 1925, was accompanied by Chesterton’s European outreach thanks to PEN Club organization, especially in countries with a Catholic tradition like Spain and Poland.
[20] The volumes keep on coming: Generally Speaking (1928), Come to Think of It (1930), All Is Grist (1931), All I Survey (1933), Avowals and Denials (1934), The Well and the Shallows (1935), As I Was Saying (1936).
[21] See, for example, C. S. Lewis, «On Stephens on Chesterton» (1946), in Conlon, G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views, pp. 69-71; John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987, pp. 258-259.
[22] Chesterton’s posthumous works are: The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937), The Common Man (1950), A Handful of Authors (1953), The Glass Walking Stick (1955), Lunacy and Letters (1958), Essays and Poems (1958), The Spice of Life (1964), Chesterton on Shakespeare (1971).
[23] See Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, London, Pimlico, 1991, pp. 146-147.
[24] The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), in Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. XV: Chesterton on Dickens, ed. Alzina Stone Dale, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1989, pp. 413-530.
[25] Charles Dickens (1906), in Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. XV: Chesterton donde Dickens, ed. Alzina Stone Dale, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1989, pp. 413-530.
[26] Ibid., p. 47. Chesterton’s Dickens is one the works Romeva had planned to translate within the compilation project “Obres de G. K. Chesterton”, undertaken by La Nova Revista, a translation which was never published: see Coll-Vinent, G. K. Chesterton a Catalunya, pp. 32-33, 176.
[27] Hamilton, «The Rationalist from Fairyland», p. 232.
