G. K.'s Weekly

G. K.'s Weekly was a British publication founded in 1925 by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, continuing until his death in 1936. It contained much of his later journalism, and extracts from it were published as The Outline of Sanity. At the time of its founding, Chesterton had for seven years been continuing The New Witness, previously owne by his brother Cecil Chesterton who had died in 1918. Gilbert had kept it going with Cecil's widow. That paper had been founded (as The Eye Witness) by Hilaire Belloc. With the continuation of G. K.'s Weekly after Gilbert's death, by Hilary Pepler, the complete series of publications therefore reads as

The Eye Witness → The New Witness → G. K.'s Weekly → The Weekly Review

The essential continuity under the main editorial figures (those mentioned, plus W. R. Titterton who was Gilbert's sub-editor, is a manifestation of the political and economic doctrine of distributism. This was mainly the work of Belloc, Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton, and Arthur Penty, and had its origins in an Edwardian-era split of Fabian socialism in London circles, around A. R. Orage and his prominent publication The New Age. (A full account is complicated by the way from about 1920 Orage also had a comparable political and economic doctrine, Social Credit, amongst his major concerns; this other 'wing' drew in Ezra Pound, for example.) The papers under discussion in this article became, in practical terms, the organs of the distributist group. This came together as the Distributist League in or about 1925, just as G. K.'s Weekly appeared as a revamped publication. The main business of the League, organisationally, fell to Titterton.

Chesterton travelled the country to local distributist chapters. There is an account by Marshall McLuhan of how he attended a London League meeting in June 1935, travelling from Cambridge, where he was a doctoral student, with the local distributist activist.

G. K.'s Weekly in fact gained little financially for Chesterton; it was not a lucrative venture, but a gesture of respect for Cecil's memory.