G. K.

Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer,[2] philosopher, lay
theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox".[3] Time magazine
observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs,
allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."[4]
 G. K. Chesterton
KC*SG

Born 29 May 1874

Kensington, London, England

Died 14 June 1936 (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

University College London

Period 1900–1936

Genre Essays, fantasy, Christian apologetics, Catholic

apologetics, mystery, poetry

Literary movement Catholic literary revival[1]

Notable works The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Man Who Was Thursday

Orthodoxy

Father Brown stories

The Everlasting Man

Spouse Frances Blogg (m. 1901)​

Relatives Cecil Chesterton (brother)

A. K. Chesterton (2nd cousin)

Signature
Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown,[5] 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.[4][6] 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,
John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin.[7]

Biography

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 (1841–1922).[8][9] Chesterton was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England,[10]
though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians.[11] According to his autobiography, as a
young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija
boards.[12] He 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. He 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.[13] The couple were unable to have children.[14][15]

A friend from schooldays was Edmund Clerihew 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. He became godfather to Bentley's son, Nicolas, and opened his novel The
Man Who Was Thursday with a poem written to Bentley.

Career

In September 1895, Chesterton began working for the London publisher George Redway, where he remained
for just over a year.[16] In October 1896 he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin,[16] 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."[17]
Caricature by Max Beerbohm

Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard
Shaw,[18] H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow.[19][20] According to his autobiography, he and Shaw
played cowboys in a silent film that was never released.[21] On 7 January 1914 Chesterton (along with his
brother Cecil and future sister-in-law Ada) took part in the mock-trial of John Jasper for the murder of
Edwin Drood. Chesterton was Judge and George Bernard Shaw played the role of foreman of the jury.[22]

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) tall 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."[23] 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."[24] P. G. Wodehouse
once described a very loud crash as "a sound like G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin".[25] 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".[26] Chesterton himself told this story, omitting, however, his wife's alleged reply, in his
autobiography.[27]

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.[28] 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."[29]

Chesterton was part of the Detection Club, a society of British mystery authors founded by Anthony
Berkeley in 1928. He was elected as the first president and served from 1930 to 1936 till he was succeeded by
E. C. Bentley.[30]

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 14 June 1936, aged 62, at his home in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire. 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."[31] He is buried in Beaconsfield in
the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at £28,389, equivalent to £1,972,065 in 2020.[32]

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).[29] The Chesterton Society has proposed that he be beatified.[33] He
is remembered liturgically on 13 June by the Episcopal Church, with a provisional feast day as adopted at the
2009 General Convention.[34]
 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[35][36] 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,[5] 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. The biography was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for
Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars.[37]

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.[38][39]

T.S. Eliot summed up his work as follows:

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.[40]

Eliot commented further that "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."[40]

Views and contemporaries

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

Wilde and Shaw

In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Oscar 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."[41] More briefly, and with a closer approximation of Wilde's own style, he writes in his 1908 book
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 George Bernard 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.[42]
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.[43]

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."[44]

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'."[45] 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.[46]

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."[47] He
was an early member of the Fabian Society, but resigned from it at the time of the Boer War.[48]

The 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.[49]

Advocacy of Catholicism

Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to

Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950),[50] Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know",[51] and to
Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947)[52] "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".[53]

Chesterton's hymn "O God of Earth and Altar" was printed in The Commonwealth and then included in the
English Hymnal in 1906.[54] 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.[55] 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."[56]

Étienne Gilson praised Chesterton's book on St Thomas Aquinas: "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."[57]

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the 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."[58] 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.[59]

Charges of antisemitism
Chesterton faced accusations of antisemitism during his lifetime, saying in his 1920 book The New Jerusalem
that it was something "for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled".[60]
Despite his protestations to the contrary, the accusation continues to be repeated.[61] An early supporter of
Captain Dreyfus, by 1906 he had turned into an anti-dreyfusard.[62] From the early 20th century, his fictional
work included caricatures of Jews, stereotyping them as greedy, cowardly, disloyal and communists.[63] Martin
Gardner suggests that Four Faultless Felons was allowed to go out of print in the United States because of
the "anti-Semitism which mars so many pages."[64]

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.[65]
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."[66]

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".[67][68]

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.[69] 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.[69]

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."[69]

Chesterton, like Belloc, openly expressed his abhorrence of Hitler's rule almost as soon as it started.[70] 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![71]

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."[72]

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.[63] 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."[63] 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."[63] 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."[63]

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."[63]

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.[63][73]

The American Chesterton Society has devoted a whole issue of its magazine, Gilbert, to defending
Chesterton against charges of antisemitism.[74] Likewise, Ann Farmer, author of Chesterton and the Jews:
Friend, Critic, Defender,[75][76] 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."[77]

Opposition to eugenics

In Eugenics and Other Evils, Chesterton attacked eugenics as Parliament 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."[78] 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."[78] 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".[78] Chesterton 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."[78][79]

'
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. 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.'[80]

"Chesterbelloc"

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

Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc.[81][82] George
Bernard Shaw coined the name "Chesterbelloc"[83] for their partnership,[84] and this stuck. Though they were
very different men, they shared many beliefs;[85] in 1922, Chesterton joined Belloc in the Catholic faith, and
both voiced criticisms of capitalism and socialism.[86] They instead espoused a third way: distributism.[87]
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.
In his book On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters, Belloc wrote that "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."[88]

Legacy

Literary

Chesterton's socio-economic system of Distributism affected the sculptor Eric Gill, who established a
commune of Catholic artists at Ditchling in Sussex. The Ditchling group developed a journal called The Game,
in which they expressed many Chestertonian principles, particularly anti-industrialism and an advocacy of
religious family life. His novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican leader Michael
Collins with the idea that "If you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out."[89] 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.[90] His column in the Illustrated London News on 18 September 1909 had a
profound effect on Mahatma Gandhi.[91] P. N. Furbank asserts that Gandhi was "thunderstruck" when he read
it,[92] while Martin Green notes that "Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to
reprint it."[93] Another convert was Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who said that the book
What's Wrong with the World changed his life in terms of ideas and religion.[94] The author Neil Gaiman
stated that he grew up reading Chesterton in his school's library, and that The Napoleon of Notting Hill
influenced his own book Neverwhere. Gaiman based the character Gilbert from the comic book The Sandman on
Chesterton,[95] while the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett is dedicated to him. The Argentine author
and essayist Jorge Luis Borges cited Chesterton as influential on his fiction, telling interviewer Richard
Burgin that "Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story."[96]

Namesakes

In 1974, Father Ian Boyd, C.S.B, founded The Chesterton Review, 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.[97]
In 1996, Dale Ahlquist founded the American Chesterton Society to explore and promote his writings.[98]

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.[99]

In 2012, a crater on the planet Mercury was named Chesterton after the author.[100]

In 2014, G.K. Chesterton Academy of Chicago, a Catholic high school, opened in Highland Park, Illinois.[101]

A fictionalised G. K. Chesterton is the central character in the Young Chesterton Chronicles, a series of young
adult adventure novels by John McNichol, and in the G K Chesterton Mystery series, a series of detective
novels by Australian Kel Richards.[102]

Major works

Books
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1904), Ward, M. (ed.), The Napoleon of Notting Hill

——— (1903), Robert Browning, Macmillan[103]

——— (1905), Heretics, John Lane

——— (1906), Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (https://archive.org/stream/charlesdickenscr01ches/charles

dickenscr01ches_ djvu.txt) , Dodd, Mead & Co., p. 299

——— (1908a), The Man Who Was Thursday

——— (1908b), Orthodoxy

——— (1911a), The Innocence of Father Brown (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/204/204-h/204-h.htm)

——— (1911b), The Ballad of the White Horse

——— (1912), Manalive

———, Father Brown (short stories) (detective fiction)

——— (1920), Ward, M. (ed.), The New Jerusalem (http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/New_ Jerusal

em.txt)

——— (1922), Eugenics and Other Evils  (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eugenics_ and_ other_ Evils)

——— (1923), Saint Francis of Assisi

——— (1925), The Everlasting Man

 ——— (1925), William Cobbett

——— (1933), Saint Thomas Aquinas

——— (1935), The Well and the Shallows

——— (1936), The Autobiography

——— (1950), Ward, M. (ed.), The Common Man (http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Common_ Man.

txt)

Short stories
"The Trees of Pride" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/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.

Plays
Magic, 1913.

References

Citations
1. Ker, Ian (2003), The Catholic Revival in English Literature (1845–1961): Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene,
Waugh, University of Notre Dame Press

2. "Obituary", Variety, 17 June 1936

3. Douglas, J. D. (24 May 1974). "G.K. Chesterton, the Eccentric Prince of Paradox" (http://www.christianitytoday.com/
ct/2001/augustweb-only/8-27-52.0.html?paging=off#bmb=1) . Christianity Today. Archived (https://web.archive.o
rg/web/20141101102137/http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/augustweb-only/8-27-52.0.html?paging=off#
bmb=1) from the original on 1 November 2014. Retrieved 8 July 2014.

4. "Orthodoxologist" (https://web.archive.org/web/20091120195520/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,
9171,774701-3,00.html) , Time, 11 October 1943, archived from the original (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/a
rticle/0,9171,774701-3,00.html) on 20 November 2009, retrieved 24 October 2008
 5. O'Connor, John (1937). Father Brown on Chesterton (http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/Father_Brown_on_Cheste
rton.pdf) (PDF). Frederick Muller Ltd. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20130403054646/http://www.cse.d
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6. Douglas 1974: "Like his friend Ronald Knox he was both entertainer and Christian apologist. The world never fails
to appreciate the combination when it is well done; even evangelicals sometimes give the impression of bestowing
a waiver on deviations if a man is enough of a genius."

7. Ker 2011, p. 485.

8. Simkin, John. "G. K. Chesterton" (http://spartacus-educational.com/Jchesterton.htm) . Spartacus Educational.

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9. Haushalter, Walter M. (1912), "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" (https://archive.org/stream/universitymagazi11mcgiuoft

#page/232/mode/2up) , The University Magazine, vol. XI, p. 236 – via Internet Archive

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14. Chesterton and the child - A Collection of Papers presented at a conference of the Australian Chesterton Society
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s/chesterton_conference_papers_2018.pdf) (PDF). Sidney, Australia: Australian Chesterton Society. 2018. p. 41.
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15. Ker 2011, p. 162–163.

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2up) , The Innocence of Father Brown, London: Cassell & Company, Ltd., p. 118

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Sources

Cited biographies

Ker, Ian (2011), G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-960128-8

Ward, Maisie (1944), Gilbert Keith Chesterton (https://archive.org/stream/gilbertkeithches001579mbp#page/n7/mod

e/2up) , Sheedgi & Ward

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.
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External links

G. K. Chesterton
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Media from Commons

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Data from Wikidata

Works by G. K. Chesterton in eBook form (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/g-k-chesterton) at Standard

Ebooks

Works by G. K. Chesterton (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/80) at Project Gutenberg

Works by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton (https://fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Chesterton%2C%20
G.%20K.%20%28Gilbert%20Keith%29) at Faded Page (Canada)

Works by or about G. K. Chesterton (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Chester

ton%2C%20Gilbert%20Keith%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20Gilbert%20K%2E%22%2
0OR%20subject%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20G%2E%20K%2E%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Gilbert%20K
eith%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Gilbert%20K%2E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20subje
ct%3A%22G%2E%20K%2E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20Gilbert%2
2%20OR%20subject%3A%22Gilbert%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Gilbert%20Keith%20
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22G%2E%20K%2E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22G%2E%20Keith%20Chesterton%22%20
OR%20creator%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20Gilbert%20Keith%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Chesterton%
2C%20Gilbert%20K%2E%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20G%2E%20K%2E%22%20OR%
20creator%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20G%2E%20Keith%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Gilbert%20Chester
ton%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20Gilbert%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Gilbert%20K
eith%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Gilbert%20K%2E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20title%3
A%22G%2E%20K%2E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Gilbert%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20
description%3A%22Gilbert%20Keith%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Gilbert%20K%2
E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20description%3A%22G%2E%20K%2E%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20descri
ption%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20Gilbert%20Keith%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Chesterton%2C%2
0Gilbert%20K%2E%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Gilbert%20Chesterton%22%20OR%20descriptio
n%3A%22Chesterton%2C%20Gilbert%22%29%20OR%20%28%221874-1936%22%20AND%20Chesterton%
29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29) at Internet Archive

Works by G. K. Chesterton (https://librivox.org/author/426) at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

G. K. Chesterton (https://curlie.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/C/Chesterton%2C_ G._ K./Works/) at Curlie

Works by G.K. Chesterton (http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?lookfor=%22Chesterton,%20G.%20

K.%201874-1936.%22&type=author&inst=) , at HathiTrust

"Archival material relating to G. K. Chesterton" (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/c/F71

679) . UK National Archives.

What's Wrong: GKC in Periodicals (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d_ OFbxl1hD4S7pTg6Vchv8xJMMqx

hhYffxRtgH9MZE4/pub) Articles by G. K. Chesterton in periodicals, with critical annotations.

The American Chesterton Society (http://www.chesterton.org/) , retrieved 28 October 2010.

G. K. Chesterton: Quotidiana (http://essays.quotidiana.org/chesterton/)

 G.K. Chesterton research collection (https://web.archive.org/web/20170816084200/http://www.wheaton.ed
u/wadecenter/Authors/GK-Chesterton) at The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College

G.K. Chesterton Archival Collection (https://web.archive.org/web/20151029081006/http://stmikes.utoront

o.ca/kelly/760-2/) at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto

Newspaper clippings about G. K. Chesterton (http://purl.org/pressemappe20/folder/pe/003215) in the

20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

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