G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton KC*SG
Born	Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-05-29)29 May 1874 Kensington, London, England
Died	14 June 1936(1936-06-14) (aged 62) Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England
Resting place	Roman Catholic Cemetery, Beaconsfield
Occupation	Journalist, novelist, essayist, poet
Citizenship	British
Education	St Paul's School
Alma mater	Slade School of Art
Period	1900–1936
Genre	Essays, Fantasy, Christian apologetics, Catholic apologetics, Mystery, poetry
Literary movement	Catholic literary revival
Notable works	The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) Orthodoxy (1908) Father Brown stories (1910–1935) The Everlasting Man (1925)
Spouse	Frances Blogg
Relatives	Cecil Chesterton (brother)
Signature

Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Time magazine observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."

Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. On his contributions, T.S. Eliot wrote,

He was importantly and consistently on the side of the angels. Behind the Johnsonian fancy-dress, so reassuring to the British public, he concealed the most serious and revolutionary designs—concealing them by exposure ... Chesterton's social and economic ideas...were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more, I think, than any man of his time—and was able to do more than anyone else, because of his particular background, development and abilities as a public performer—to maintain the existence of the important minority in the modern world. He leaves behind a permanent claim upon our loyalty, to see that the work that he did in his time is continued in ours.

Early life

G. K. Chesterton at the age of 17

Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, the son of Marie Louise, née Grosjean, and Edward Chesterton. He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England, though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians. According to his autobiography, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.

Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. The Slade is a department of University College London, where Chesterton also took classes in literature, but did not complete a degree in either subject.

Family life

Chesterton married Frances Blogg in 1901; the marriage lasted the rest of his life. Chesterton credited Frances with leading him back to Anglicanism, though he later considered Anglicanism to be a "pale imitation". He entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922. The couple were unable to have children.

Career

In September 1895 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, where he remained for just over a year. In October 1896 he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work, as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1902 the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years.

Early on Chesterton showed a great interest in and talent for art. He had planned to become an artist, and his writing shows a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images. Even his fiction contained carefully concealed parables. Father Brown is perpetually correcting the incorrect vision of the bewildered folks at the scene of the crime and wandering off at the end with the criminal to exercise his priestly role of recognition and repentance. For example, in the story "The Flying Stars", Father Brown entreats the character Flambeau to give up his life of crime: "There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime."

Caricature of Chesterton, by Max Beerbohm

Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Shaw played cowboys in a silent film that was never released.

Visual wit

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 20 stone 6 pounds (130 kg; 286 lb). His girth gave rise to an anecdote during the First World War, when a lady in London asked why he was not "out at the Front"; he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am." On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England." Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you had caused it." P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as "a sound like G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin".

Chesterton usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. He had a tendency to forget where he was supposed to be going and miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife Frances from an incorrect location, writing such things as "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she would reply, "Home". Chesterton himself told this story, omitting, however, his wife's alleged reply, in his autobiography.

Radio

In 1931, the BBC invited Chesterton to give a series of radio talks. He accepted, tentatively at first. However, from 1932 until his death, Chesterton delivered over 40 talks per year. He was allowed (and encouraged) to improvise on the scripts. This allowed his talks to maintain an intimate character, as did the decision to allow his wife and secretary to sit with him during his broadcasts.

The talks were very popular. A BBC official remarked, after Chesterton's death, that "in another year or so, he would have become the dominating voice from Broadcasting House."

Death and veneration

Telegram sent by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII) on behalf of Pope Pius XI to the people of England following the death of Chesterton

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His last known words were a greeting spoken to his wife. The sermon at Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox on 27 June 1936. Knox said, "All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton." He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at £28,389, equivalent to £2,436,459 in 2023.

Near the end of Chesterton's life, Pope Pius XI invested him as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great (KC*SG). The Chesterton Society has proposed that he be beatified. He is remembered liturgically on 13 June by the Episcopal Church, with a provisional feast day as adopted at the 2009 General Convention.

Writing

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns), and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, The Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularised through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.

Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has received some of the broadest-based praise. According to Ian Ker (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961, 2003), "In Chesterton's eyes Dickens belongs to Merry, not Puritan, England"; Ker treats Chesterton's thought in Chapter 4 of that book as largely growing out of his true appreciation of Dickens, a somewhat shop-soiled property in the view of other literary opinions of the time.

Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics.

Views and contemporaries

Self-portrait of Chesterton based on the distributist slogan "Three acres and a cow"

Chesterton's writing has been seen by some analysts as combining two earlier strands in English literature. Dickens' approach is one of these. Another is represented by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whom Chesterton knew well: satirists and social commentators following in the tradition of Samuel Butler, vigorously wielding paradox as a weapon against complacent acceptance of the conventional view of things.

Chesterton's style and thinking were all his own, however, and his conclusions were often opposed to those of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Wilde: "The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw." More briefly, and with a closer approximation of Wilde's own style, he writes in Orthodoxy concerning the necessity of making symbolic sacrifices for the gift of creation: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

Chesterton and Shaw were famous friends and enjoyed their arguments and discussions. Although rarely in agreement, they both maintained good will toward, and respect for, each other. However, in his writing, Chesterton expressed himself very plainly on where they differed and why. In Heretics he writes of Shaw:

After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.

Shaw represented the new school of thought, modernism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton's views, on the other hand, became increasingly more focused towards the Church. In Orthodoxy he writes: "The worship of will is the negation of will … If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, 'Will something', that is tantamount to saying, 'I do not mind what you will', and that is tantamount to saying, 'I have no will in the matter.' You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular."

Title page of the 1909 edition of Orthodoxy, first published in the previous year

This style of argumentation is what Chesterton refers to as using 'Uncommon Sense' – that is, that the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, though very clever, were saying things that were nonsensical. This is illustrated again in Orthodoxy: "Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), 'All chairs are quite different', he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them 'all chairs'." Or, again from Orthodoxy:

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless – one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is – well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both progressivism and conservatism, saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." He was an early member of the Fabian Society, but resigned from it at the time of the Boer War.

Another contemporary and friend from schooldays was Edmund Bentley, inventor of the clerihew. Chesterton himself wrote clerihews and illustrated his friend's first published collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners (1905), which popularised the clerihew form. Chesterton was also godfather to Bentley's son, Nicolas, and opened his novel The Man Who Was Thursday with a poem written to Bentley.

Charges of anti-Semitism

Chesterton faced accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, saying in chapter 13 of The New Jerusalem (1920) that it was something "for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled". Despite his prostestations to the contrary, the accusation continues to be repeated. An early supporter of Captain Dreyfus, by 1906 he had turned into an anti-dreyfusard. From the early 20th century, his fictional work included caricatures of Jews, stereotyping them as greedy, cowardly, disloyal and communists.

The Marconi scandal of 1912–13 brought issues of anti-Semitism into the political mainstream. Senior ministers in the Liberal government had secretly profited from advanced knowledge of deals regarding wireless telegraphy, and critics regarded it as relevant that some of the key players were Jewish. According to historian Todd Endelman, who identified Chesterton as among the most vocal critics, "The Jew baiting at the time of the Boer War and the Marconi scandal was linked to a broader protest, mounted in the main by the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, against the growing visibility of successful businessmen in national life and their challenge to what were seen as traditional English values."

In a work of 1917, titled A Short History of England, Chesterton considers the royal decree of 1290 by which Edward I expelled Jews from England, a policy that remained in place until 1655. Chesterton writes that popular perception of Jewish moneylenders could well have led Edward I's subjects to regard him as a "tender father of his people" for "breaking the rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth". He felt that Jews, "a sensitive and highly civilized people" who "were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use", might legitimately complain that "Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor".

In The New Jerusalem Chesterton dedicated a chapter to his views on the Jewish question: the sense that Jews were a distinct people without a homeland of their own, living as foreigners in countries where they were always a minority. He wrote that in the past, his position:

was always called Anti-Semitism; but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. ... my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter; and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more rational to call it Semitism.

In the same place he proposed the thought experiment (describing it as "a parable" and "a flippant fancy") that Jews should be admitted to any role in English public life on condition that they must wear distinctively Middle Eastern garb, explaining that "The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land."

Chesterton, like Belloc, openly expressed his abhorrence of Hitler's rule almost as soon as it started. As Rabbi Stephen Wise wrote in a posthumous tribute to Chesterton in 1937 :

When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory!

In The Truth about the Tribes Chesterton blasted German race theories, writing: "the essence of Nazi Nationalism is to preserve the purity of a race in a continent where all races are impure."

The historian Simon Mayers points out that Chesterton wrote in works such as The Crank, The Heresy of Race, and The Barbarian as Bore against the concept of racial superiority and critiqued pseudo-scientific race theories, saying they were akin to a new religion. In The Truth About the Tribes Chesterton wrote, "the curse of race religion is that it makes each separate man the sacred image which he worships. His own bones are the sacred relics; his own blood is the blood of St. Januarius." Mayers records that despite "his hostility towards Nazi antisemitism … [it is unfortunate that he made] claims that 'Hitlerism' was a form of Judaism, and that the Jews were partly responsible for race theory." In The Judaism of Hitler, as well as in A Queer Choice and The Crank, Chesterton made much of the fact that the very notion of "a Chosen Race" was of Jewish origin, saying in The Crank: "If there is one outstanding quality in Hitlerism it is its Hebraism" and "the new Nordic Man has all the worst faults of the worst Jews: jealousy, greed, the mania of conspiracy, and above all, the belief in a Chosen Race."

Mayers also shows that Chesterton portrayed Jews not only as culturally and religiously distinct, but racially as well. In The Feud of the Foreigner (1920) he said that the Jew "is a foreigner far more remote from us than is a Bavarian from a Frenchman; he is divided by the same type of division as that between us and a Chinaman or a Hindoo. He not only is not, but never was, of the same race."

In The Everlasting Man, while writing about human sacrifice, Chesterton suggested that medieval stories about Jews killing children might have resulted from a distortion of genuine cases of devil-worship. Chesterton wrote:

the Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews.

The American Chesterton Society has devoted a whole issue of its magazine, Gilbert, to defending Chesterton against charges of antisemitism. Likewise, Ann Farmer, author of Chesterton and the Jews: Friend, Critic, Defender, writes, "Public figures from Winston Churchill to Wells proposed remedies for the "Jewish problem" – the seemingly endless cycle of anti-Jewish persecution – all shaped by their worldviews. As patriots, Churchill and Chesterton embraced Zionism; both were among the first to defend the Jews from Nazism," concluding that "A defender of Jews in his youth – a conciliator as well as a defender – GKC returned to the defence when the Jewish people needed it most."

Opposition to eugenics

In Eugenics and Other Evils Chesterton attacked eugenics as Britain was moving towards passage of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. Some backing the ideas of eugenics called for the government to sterilise people deemed "mentally defective"; this view did not gain popularity but the idea of segregating them from the rest of society and thereby preventing them from reproducing did gain traction. These ideas disgusted Chesterton who wrote, "It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children." He blasted the proposed wording for such measures as being so vague as to apply to anyone, including "Every tramp who is sulk, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that is the point … we are already under the Eugenist State; and nothing remains to us but rebellion."

He derided such ideas as founded on nonsense, "as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment".

Chesterton also mocked the idea that poverty was a result of bad breeding: "[it is a] strange new disposition to regard the poor as a race; as if they were a colony of Japs or Chinese coolies … The poor are not a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact, what Dickens describes: 'a dustbin of individual accidents,' of damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility."

"Chesterbelloc"

See also: G. K.'s Weekly

George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, and G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. George Bernard Shaw coined the name "Chesterbelloc" for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in the Catholic faith, and both voiced criticisms of capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism. G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother, who died in World War I.

Legacy

Literary

• In his book, On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters, Hilaire Belloc writes: "Everything he wrote upon any one of the great English literary names was of the first quality. He summed up any one pen (that of Jane Austen, for instance) in exact sentences; sometimes in a single sentence, after a fashion which no one else has approached. He stood quite by himself in this department. He understood the very minds (to take the two most famous names) of Thackeray and of Dickens. He understood and presented Meredith. He understood the supremacy in Milton. He understood Pope. He understood the great Dryden. He was not swamped as nearly all his contemporaries were by Shakespeare, wherein they drown as in a vast sea---for that is what Shakespeare is. Gilbert Chesterton continued to understand the youngest and latest comers as he understood the forefathers in our great corpus of English verse and prose."
• On the literary contributions of Chesterton, T.S. Eliot summarizes, "His poetry was first-rate journalistic balladry, and I do not suppose that he took it more seriously than it deserved. He reached a high imaginative level with The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and higher with The Man Who Was Thursday, romances in which he turned the Stevensonian fantasy to more serious purpose. His book on Dickens seems to me the best essay on that author that has ever been written. Some of his essays can be read again and again; though of his essay-writing as a whole, one can only say that it is remarkable to have maintained such a high average with so large an output."
• Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950) Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know", and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947) "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man". The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life".
• Chesterton was a very early and outspoken critic of eugenics. Eugenics and Other Evils represents one of the first book-length oppositions to the Eugenics movement that began to gain momentum in England during the early 1900s.
• Chesterton's 1906 biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars.
• Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins with the idea: "If you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out." Collins's favourite work of Chesterton was The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and he was "almost fanatically attached to it", according to his friend Sir William Darling who cemented their friendship in their shared appreciation of Chesterton's work.
• Etienne Gilson praised Chesterton's Aquinas volume as follows: "I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever written on Saint Thomas … the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame."
• Chesterton's column in the Illustrated London News on 18 September 1909 had a profound effect on Mahatma Gandhi. P. N. Furbank asserts that Gandhi was "thunderstruck" when he read it, while Martin Green notes that "Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it."
• Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, author of seventy books, identified Chesterton as the stylist who had the greatest impact on his own writing, stating in his autobiography Treasure in Clay, "the greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite." Chesterton wrote the introduction for Sheen's book God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy; A Critical Study in the Light of the Philosophy of Saint Thomas.
• Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was heavily influenced by Chesterton; McLuhan said the book What's Wrong with the World changed his life in terms of ideas and religion.
• Neil Gaiman has stated that he grew up reading Chesterton in his school's library, and that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere, which used a quote from it as an epigraph. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton, and the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett is dedicated to him.
• Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges cited Chesterton as a major influence on his own fiction. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges said, "Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story."
• Author James Parker in The Atlantic gives a modern appraisal:

  In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate...Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”; he was an anti-modernist...a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true...for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius. Touched once by the live wire of his thought, you don’t forget it ... His prose...[is] supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) "earthquake irony." He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.

Chesterton's fence

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood (compare to the Precautionary principle). The quotation is from Chesterton's 1929 book, The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, in the chapter, "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'

Other

• Father Ian Boyd, C.S.B, founded The Chesterton Review in 1974, a scholarly journal devoted to Chesterton and his circle. The journal is published by the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture based in Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, US
• Dale Ahlquist founded the American Chesterton Society in 1996 to explore and promote his writings.
• In 2008, a Catholic high school, Chesterton Academy, opened in the Minneapolis area. In the same year Scuola Libera Chesterton opened in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy.
• In 2012, a crater on the planet Mercury was named Chesterton after the author.
• In the Fall of 2014, a Catholic high school, G.K. Chesterton Academy of Chicago, opened in Highland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
• A fictionalised GK Chesterton is the central character in the Young Chesterton Chronicles, a series of young adult adventure novels written by John McNichol, and published by Sophia Institute Press and Bezalel Books.
• A fictionalised GK Chesterton is the central character in the G K Chesterton Mystery series, a series of detective novels written by Australian Kel Richards, and published by Riveroak Publishing.
• Chesterton wrote the hymn O God of Earth and Altar which was printed in The Commonwealth and then included in the English Hymnal in 1906. Several lines of the hymn are sung in the beginning of the song Revelations by the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden on their 1983 album Piece of Mind. Lead singer Bruce Dickinson in an interview stated "I have a fondness for hymns. I love some of the ritual, the beautiful words, Jerusalem and there was another one, with words by G.K. Chesterton O God of Earth and Altar – very fire and brimstone: 'Bow down and hear our cry'. I used that for an Iron Maiden song, Revelations. In my strange and clumsy way I was trying to say look it's all the same stuff."
• The American Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys used to have a picture of Chesterton on their drums. Their drummer, Matt Kelly, explained that "Chesterton is his hero for his contributions to Theology, Economics and Literature. A great intellectual who had always respect for his adversaries".

Major works

Main article: G. K. Chesterton bibliography

• Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1904), Ward, M (ed.), The Napoleon of Notting Hill, UK: DMU.
• ——— (1905), Heretics, Project Gutenberg, ISBN 978-0-7661-7476-4.
• ——— (1906), Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, p. 299
• ——— (1908a), The Man Who Was Thursday.
• ——— (1908b), Orthodoxy.
• ——— (6 July 2008) [1911a], The Innocence of Father Brown, Project Gutenberg's.
• ——— (1911b), Ward, M (ed.), The Ballad of the White Horse, UK: DMU.
• ——— (1912), Manalive.
• ———, Father Brown (short stories) (detective fiction).
• ——— (1920), Ward, M (ed.), The New Jerusalem, UK: DMU.
• ——— (1922), Eugenics and Other Evils .
• ——— (1923), Saint Francis of Assisi.
• ——— (1925), The Everlasting Man.
• ——— (1933), Saint Thomas Aquinas.
• ——— (1936), The Autobiography.
• ——— (1950), Ward, M (ed.), The Common Man, UK: DMU.

Articles

• "Literary Pictures of the Year," Part II, The Bookman, July/August 1900.
• "Literary Portraits of G. F. Watts," The Bookman, January 1901.
• "England’s Novelists in the National Portrait Gallery," The Bookman, January 1902.
• "Books to Read," The Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. XXVI, January/April 1902.
• "The Conspiracy of Journalism," The Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. XXVI, January/April 1902.
• "The Ways of the World: The New English Academy," The Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. XXVI, January/April 1902.
• "Five Painters and a Critic," The Bookman, April 1902.
• "Thomas Carlyle," The Bookman, May 1902.
• "Alexandre Dumas," Part II, The Bookman, June 1902.
• "Matthew Arnold," Part II, The Bookman, September/October 1902.
• "The Just-So Stories," The Bookman, December 1902.
• "Tennyson," The Bookman, December 1902.
• "Tackeray," The Bookman, April 1903.
• "The Yellow Van," The Bookman, December 1903.
• "Christianity and Rationalism." In: George Haw, ed., Religious Doubts of Democracy, Macmillan & Co., 1904.
• "Why I Believe in Christianity." In: George Haw, ed., Religious Doubts of Democracy, Macmillan & Co., 1904.
• "Miracles and Modern Civilisation." In: George Haw, ed., Religious Doubts of Democracy, Macmillan & Co., 1904.
• "The Ethernal Heroism of the Slums." In: George Haw, ed., Religious Doubts of Democracy, Macmillan & Co., 1904.
• "The Atmosphere of Matthew Arnold," The Bookman, April 1904.
• "Mr. Wells and the Giants," The Bookman, December 1904.
• "The Poetic Quality in Liberalism," The Living Age, Vol. XXVI, January/March 1905.
• "The Saint," The Bookman, July 1906.
• "Why I am Not a Socialist," The New Age, Vol. II, No. 10, 4 January 1908.
• "On Wells and a Glass of Beer," The New Age, Vol. II, No. 13, 25 January 1908.
• "The Last of the Rationalists," The New Age, Vol. II, No. 18, 29 February 1908.
• "Milton and his Age," The Oxford and Cambridge Review, 1909.
• "Objections to Socialism," The Forum, Vol. XLI, 1909.
• "The Modern Surrender of Women," The Dublin Review, Vol. CXLV, No. 290-291, July/October 1909.
• "What is Toleration?," The Dublin Review, Vol. CXLVII, No. 294-295, July/October 1910.
• "An Agnostic Defeat," The Dublin Review, Vol. CL, No. 300-301, January/April 1912.
• "What is a Conservative?," The Dublin Review, Vol. CL, No. 300-301, January/April 1912.
• "The Chance of the Peasant," Everyman, Vol. I, No. 1, 18 October 1912.
• "The Collapse of Socialism," Everyman, Vol. I, No. 6, 22 November 1912.
• "The Absence of Mr. Glass," McClure's Magazine, November 1912.
• "A Salute to the Last Socialist," Everyman, Vol. I, No. 10, 20 December 1912.

• "The Strange Crime of John Boulnois," McClure's Magazine, February 1913.
• "The Paradise of Thieves," McClure's Magazine, March 1913.
• "The Man in the Passage," McClure's Magazine, April 1913.
• "The Purple Wig," McClure's Magazine, July 1913.
• "The Head of Caesar," McClure's Magazine, August 1913.
• "Slavery and the American Store," The Century Magazine, November 1913.
• "Magic," The Dublin Review, Vol. CLIV, No. 308-309, January/April 1914.
• "Wilfrid Ward," The Dublin Review, Vol. CLIX, No. 314-315, July/October 1916.
• "The English Blunder about Russia." In: Winifred Stephens, ed., The Soul of Russia, Macmillan & Co., 1916.
• "Human Nature and the Historian," The Catholic World, Vol. CIV, No. 624, March 1917.
• "The Plan for a New War," The North American Review, Vol. 206, No. 745, Dec. 1917.
• "Stopford Brooke," The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XVI, 1917/1918.
• "Germany and Alsace-Lorraine: How to Help Annexation," The North American Review, Vol. 207, No. 748, Mar. 1918.
• "The Real Secret Diplomacy," The North American Review, Vol. 207, No. 749, Apr. 1918.
• "A Note on the New Martyrdom," The Lotus Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 2, Feb. 1919.
• "On Newspaper Proprietors," The Living Age, March 1919.
• "The Heretic and the Home Visitor," The Living Age, May 1919.
• "Mr. Shaw and the Danger of Living," The Living Age, July 1919.
• "The True Case Against Bolshevism," The Living Age, September 1919.
• "Anti-Catholic History." In: Catholic and Anti-Catholic History, The America Press, 1920.
• "The New Renascence, I: The Same Old Game," Vanity Fair, January 1920.
• "The New Renascence, II: The Machine of Tomfoolery," Vanity Fair, Vol. 13, No. 5, February 1920.
• "The New Renascence, III: Public Laws and Public Liquors," Vanity Fair, March 1920.
• "The Romance of Rhyme," The Living Age, March 1920.
• "The Fastidious Futurist," The Living Age, March 1920.
• "The New Renascence, IV: Beauty and the Bricklayer," Vanity Fair, April 1920.
• "The New Renascence, V: The Library Broken Loose," Vanity Fair, Vol. 14, No. 3, May 1920.
• "The New Renascence, VI: Nothing and the New Religions," Vanity Fair, June 1920.
• "The New Renascence, VII: The Soul of Skylarking," Vanity Fair, Vol. XIV, No. 5, July 1920.
• "The Sleepwalker and the State," Vanity Fair, Vol. XIV, No. 6, August 1920.
• "The Doctor and the Doctrinaire," Vanity Fair, Vol. 15, No. 1, September 1920.
• "The New Renascence, XI: The Wreck of the Modern Machine," Vanity Fair, Vol. XV, No. 2, October 1920.

• "Old King Cole: A Parody," The Living Age, January 1921.
• "The Next Renascence, XII: The Mad Hatter and the Sane Householder," Vanity Fair, Vol. XV, January 1921.
• "The Republican in the Ruins," The Living Age, August 1921.
• "Charles Dickens," The Living Age, February 1922.
• "The Myth of Arthur," The Living Age, September 1922.
• "Where All Roads Lead," The Catholic World, Vol. CXVI, No. 692, November 1922.
• "Are the Artists Going Mad?," The Century Magazine, December 1922.
• "The Patriot of the Planet," The Century Magazine, March 1923.
• "The Game of Psychoanalysis," The Century Magazine, May 1923.
• "A Defense of Detective Stories." In: Essays of Today, George G. Harrap & Co., 1923.
• "The World State," The Living Age, June 1925.
• "Why I Am a Catholic," The Forum, January 1926.
• "The International Irritant," The Forum, June 1928.
• "The Skeptic as a Critic," The Forum, February 1929.
• "Is Humanism a Religion?," The Bookman, May 1929.
• "The West’s Defense," The Forum, June 1929.
• "The Doom of the Darnaways," The North American Review, Vol. 228, No. 4, Oct. 1929.
• "The Inefficiency of Science," The North American Review, Vol. 228, No. 5, Nov. 1929.
• "Magic and Fantasy in Fiction," The Bookman, March 1930.
• "Keeping up with Mr. Shaw," The Living Age, July 1930.
• "The Spirit of the Age in Literature," The Bookman, October 1930.
• "Reflections on a Rotten Apple," The Forum, October 1931.
• "The Mission of Ireland," Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 21, No. 83, Sep. 1932.
• "The End of the Moderns," The Bookman, December 1932 Rep. in The American Conservative.
• "The Day of the Lord," The American Review, Vol. I, No. 1, April 1933.
• "Sex and Property," The American Review, January 1934.
• "Seven Days," The Living Age, April 1934.
• "The Masterless Man," The American Review, June 1934.
• "A Mild Remonstance," The American Review, September 1935.
• "Persecuting the Common Man," The American Mercury, January 1936.
• "The Case Against Corruption," The American Review, September 1936.
• "Some Literary Celebrities," The Saturday Review, September 1936.
• "Portrait of a Friend," The American Review, October 1936.
• "The Huxley Heritage," The American Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4, February 1937.
• "Euthanasia and Murder," The American Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4, February 1937.
• "How to Write a Detective Story," Best Seller Mystery Magazine, March 1960.

Short stories

• "The Trees of Pride," 1922
• "The Crime of the Communist," Collier's Weekly, July 1934.
• "The Three Horsemen," Collier's Weekly, April 1935.
• "The Ring of the Lovers," Collier's Weekly, April 1935.
• "A Tall Story," Collier's Weekly, April 1935.
• "The Angry Street – A Bad Dream," Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1947.

Miscellany

• Elsie M. Lang, Literary London, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906.
• George Haw, From Workhouse to Westminster, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton. London: Cassell & Company, 1907.
• Darrell Figgs, A Vision of Life with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1909.
• C. Creighton Mandell, Hilaire Belloc: The Man and his Work, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton. London: Methuen & Co., 1916.
• Harendranath Maitra, Hinduism: The World-Ideal, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton. London: Cecil Palmer & Hayward, 1916.
• Maxim Gorki, Creatures that Once Were Men, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton. New York: The Modern Library, 1918.
• Sibyl Bristowe, Provocations, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton. London: Erskine Macdonald, 1918.
• W.J. Lockington, The Soul of Ireland, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920.
• Arthur J. Penty, Post-Industrialism, with a preface by G. K. Chesterton. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922.
• Leonard Merrick, The House of Lynch, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923.
• Henri Massis, Defence of the West, with a preface by G. K. Chesterton. London: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928.
• Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven and other Poems, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton. Boston: International Pocket Library, 1936.

See also

• A. K. Chesterton (his second cousin)

Further reading

• Ahlquist, Dale (2012), The Complete Thinker: The Marvelous Mind of G.K. Chesterton, Ignatius Press, ISBN 978-1-58617-675-4.
• ——— (2003), G.K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense, Ignatius Press, ISBN 978-0-89870-857-8.
• Belmonte, Kevin (2011). Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson.
• Blackstock, Alan R. (2012). The Rhetoric of Redemption: Chesterton, Ethical Criticism, and the Common Man. New York. Peter Lang Publishing.
• Braybrooke, Patrick (1922). Gilbert Keith Chesterton. London: Chelsea Publishing Company.
• Cammaerts, Émile (1937). The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues And G. K. Chesterton. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd.
• Campbell, W. E. (1908). "G.K. Chesterton: Inquisitor and Democrat," The Catholic World, Vol. LXXXVIII, pp. 769–782.
• Campbell, W. E. (1909). "G.K. Chesterton: Catholic Apologist" The Catholic World, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 529, pp. 1–12.
• Chesterton, Cecil (1908). G.K. Chesterton: A Criticism. London: Alston Rivers (Rep. by John Lane Company, 1909).
• Clipper, Lawrence J. (1974). G.K. Chesterton. New York: Twayne Publishers.
• Coates, John (1984). Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis. Hull University Press.
• Coates, John (2002). G.K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic. N.Y.: E. Mellen Press
• Conlon, D. J. (1987). G.K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views. Oxford University Press.
• Cooney, A (1999), G.K. Chesterton, One Sword at Least, London: Third Way, ISBN 978-0-9535077-1-9.
• Coren, Michael (2001) [1989], Gilbert: The Man who was G.K. Chesterton, Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, ISBN 9781573831956, OCLC 45190713 {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help).
• Corrin, Jay P. (1981). G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity. Ohio University Press.
• Ervine, St. John G. (1922). "G.K. Chesterton." In: Some Impressions of my Elders. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 90–112.
• Ffinch, Michael (1986), G.K. Chesterton, Harper & Row.
• Hitchens, Christopher (2012). "The Reactionary," The Atlantic.
• Herts, B. Russell (1914). "Gilbert K. Chesterton: Defender of the Discarded." In: Depreciations. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, pp. 65–86.
• Hollis, Christopher (1970). The Mind of Chesterton. London: Hollis & Carter.
• Hunter, Lynette (1979). G.K. Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory. London: Macmillan Press.
• Jaki, Stanley (1986). Chesterton: A Seer of Science. University of Illinois Press.
• Jaki, Stanley (1986). "Chesterton's Landmark Year." In: Chance or Reality and Other Essays. University Press of America.
• Kenner, Hugh (1947). Paradox in Chesterton. New York: Sheed & Ward.
• Ker, Ian (2011), G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-960128-8 {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kimball, Roger (2011). "G. K. Chesterton: Master of Rejuvenation," The New Criterion, Vol. XXX, p. 26.
• Kirk, Russell (1971). "Chesterton, Madmen, and Madhouses," Modern Age, Vol. XV, No. 1, pp. 6–16.
• Knight, Mark (2004). Chesterton and Evil. Fordham University Press.
• Lea, F.A. (1947). "G. K. Chesterton." In: Donald Attwater (ed.) Modern Christian Revolutionaries. New York: Devin-Adair Co.
• McCleary, Joseph R. (2009). The Historical Imagination of G.K. Chesterton: Locality, Patriotism, and Nationalism. Taylor & Francis.
• McLuhan, Marshall (1936), "GK Chesterton: A Practical Mystic", Dalhousie Review, 15 (4).
• McNichol, J. (2008), The Young Chesterton Chronicles, vol. Book One: The Tripods Attack!, Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute, ISBN 978-1-933184-26-5.
• Oddie, William (2010). Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908. Oxford University Press.
• Orage, Alfred Richard. (1922). "G.K. Chesterton on Rome and Germany." In: Readers and Writers (1917–1921). London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 155–161.
• Oser, Lee (2007). The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History. University of Missouri Press.
• Paine, Randall (1999), The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, Sherwood Sugden, ISBN 978-0-89385-511-6.
• Pearce, Joseph (1997), Wisdom and Innocence – A Life of GK Chesterton, Ignatius Press, ISBN 978-0-89870-700-7.
• Peck, William George (1920). "Mr. G.K. Chesterton and the Return to Sanity." In: From Chaos to Catholicism. London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 52–92.
• Raymond, E. T. (1919). "Mr. G.K. Chesterton." In: All & Sundry. London: T. Fisher Unwin, pp. 68–76.
• Schall, James V. (2000). Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes. Catholic University of America Press.
• Scott, William T. (1912). Chesterton and Other Essays. Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham.
• Seaber, Luke (2011). G.K. Chesterton's Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
• Sheed, Wilfrid (1971). "Chesterbelloc and the Jews," The New York Review of Books, Vol. XVII, No. 3.
• Shuster, Norman (1922). "The Adventures of a Journalist: G.K. Chesterton." In: The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 229–248.
• Slosson, Edwin E. (1917). "G.K. Chesterton: Knight Errant of Orthodoxy." In: Six Major Prophets. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 129–189.
• Smith, Marion Couthouy (1921). "The Rightness of G.K. Chesterton," The Catholic World, Vol. CXIII, No. 678, pp. 163–168.
• Stapleton, Julia (2009). Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G.K. Chesterton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Sullivan, John (1974), G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, London: Paul Elek, ISBN 978-0-236-17628-1.
• Tonquédec, Joseph de (1920). G.K. Chesterton, ses Idées et son Caractère, Nouvelle Librairie National.
• Ward, Maisie (1944), Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sheed & Ward.
• Ward, Maisie (1952). Return to Chesterton, London: Sheed & Ward.
• West, Julius (1915). G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study. London: Martin Secker.
• Williams, Donald T (2006), Mere Humanity: G.K. Chesterton, CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien on the Human Condition.

External links

• Template:DMOZ
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Project Gutenberg
• Works by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about G. K. Chesterton at the Internet Archive
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by G.K. Chesterton, at HathiTrust
• "Archival material relating to G. K. Chesterton". UK National Archives.
• What's Wrong: GKC in Periodicals Articles by G. K. Chesterton in periodicals, with critical annotations.
• The American Chesterton Society, retrieved 28 October 2010.
• G. K. Chesterton: Quotidiana
• G.K. Chesterton research collection at The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College
• G.K. Chesterton Archival Collection at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto
• Newspaper clippings about G. K. Chesterton in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW