(This lively book, filled with essays from Chesterton’s da...)
This lively book, filled with essays from Chesterton’s days as a budding journalist for the Speaker, vindicates everything from skeletons to detective stories, from patriotism to penny dreadfuls. An ardent defender of the indefensible, Chesterton earns his reputation as the "prince of paradox" in The Defendant and reminds us why he is often regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of his age.
(The Club of Queer Trades is a collection of stories by G....)
The Club of Queer Trades is a collection of stories by G. K. Chesterton first published in 1905. Each story in the collection is centered on a person who is making his living by some novel and extraordinary means (a "queer trade," using the word "queer" in the sense of "peculiar").
(The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a novel by G. K....)
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a novel by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1908. The book is sometimes referred to as a metaphysical thriller.
(Written by G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy addresses the fore...)
Written by G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy addresses the foremost one main problem: How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
(When two men decide to fight for their respective beliefs...)
When two men decide to fight for their respective beliefs, they discover to their astonishment that an unbelieving world won’t let them, and they find themselves partners and fugitives from the law in this steampunk satire.
(A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somew...)
A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of population, a decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a chapter that is generally called "The Remedy."
(More than a thousand years ago, the ruler of a beleaguere...)
More than a thousand years ago, the ruler of a beleaguered kingdom saw a vision of the Virgin Mary that moved him to rally his chiefs and make a last stand. Alfred the Great freed his realm from Danish invaders in the year 878 with an against-all-odds triumph at the Battle of Ethandune.
(The Flying Inn is set in a future England where the Tempe...)
The Flying Inn is set in a future England where the Temperance movement has allowed a bizarre form of "Progressive" Islam to dominate the political and social life of the country.
(If one might hazard an opinion as to the literary form in...)
If one might hazard an opinion as to the literary form in which this protean writer excels, one might justly predicate the essay, particularly such, not long enough to allow him to become tangled in his own complicated cleverness.
(The Man Who Knew Too Much and other stories (1922) is a b...)
The Man Who Knew Too Much and other stories (1922) is a book of detective stories by English writer G. K. Chesterton, published in 1922 by Cassell and Company in the United Kingdom, and Harper Brothers in the United States.
(What I Saw in America is G. K. Chesterton’s classic trave...)
What I Saw in America is G. K. Chesterton’s classic travelogue about his 1921 tour of America. The bitingly sardonic author pulls no punches with his wry observations on culture, giving us his take on everything American from Pennsylvania to Prohibition.
(The Queen of Seven Swords is a rare book of poems by G. K...)
The Queen of Seven Swords is a rare book of poems by G. K. Chesterton, focused on Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is a volume of poems that Chesterton published in 1926, the title being a reference to the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel.
(Father Brown, an unassuming and shabbily dressed priest, ...)
Father Brown, an unassuming and shabbily dressed priest, possesses an incredible ability to solve crimes and murders. Here he reveals the secret of his success. He discovers the culprit by imagining himself to be inside the mind of the criminal.
(An eccentric poet acts as a spiritual detective in eight ...)
An eccentric poet acts as a spiritual detective in eight thought-provoking tales. Gabriel Gale employs his extraordinary gifts of empathy to solve and prevent crimes perpetrated by madmen.
(In 1932 the Eucharistic Congress came to a young independ...)
In 1932 the Eucharistic Congress came to a young independent Ireland. It was an important event for the struggling country, which wanted to show itself capable so soon after breaking free from British control.
(All of the usual caveats about Chesterton's writing apply...)
All of the usual caveats about Chesterton's writing apply here: he cannot resist a digression, he cannot resist an alliterative allusion, he cannot resist a pun. He is so full of life that he is constantly threatening to spin out of control.
Gilbert Chesterton was a British writer, philosopher, and art critic. He was a highly versatile individual who was as respected as a writer as he was for being an orator and Christian apologist. His works covered a wide range of genres and he could write anything from poetry to drama, from biographies to crime novels, and about almost all imaginable topics.
Background
Gilbert Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874, in Kensington, London, England, the United Kingdom, to Marie Louise, née Grosjean, and Edward Chesterton. He was the second of three children. A sister, five years older than Gilbert, died at the age of eight. His brother, Cecil, five years younger than Gilbert, remained his close companion and debating partner throughout Cecil's life.
Education
Chesterton would look back on his childhood as a time of almost unshadowed happiness. Especially strong and positive memories focused on a toy theater he was given by his father. His father, gifted in many lines of amateur creativity, exerted no pressure on the boy to distinguish himself in either scholarship or athletics.
Gilbert was a day boy at St. Paul's. The masters rated him as an under-achiever, but he earned some recognition as a writer and debater. From St. Paul's he went to the University College London's Slade School of Art, where he became a proficient draftsman and caricaturist; later he took courses in English literature.
Around 1893 he had gone through a crisis of skepticism and depression and during this period he experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with diabolism. He attended classes in English, French, Latin, and fine arts, without ever sitting for an examination or taking a degree. His study of art, though quickly terminated, confirmed in him a distaste for the aestheticism and impressionism that he saw as dominating the art world of the time.
Chesterton began his literary career as a manuscript reader for a London publishing house, but he soon moved into writing art criticism. From art, Chesterton drifted into journalism. He was vitally concerned with the injustices of Great Britain to its dependencies. He progressed from newspaper to public debate. He used logic, laughter, paradox, and his own winning personality to show that imperialism was destroying English patriotism.
His first collection of poems, Greybeards At Play was published in 1900. From 1904 to 1936 Chesterton published nearly a dozen novels, the most important being The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday(1908). In 1911 Chesterton created the Father Brown detective stories. During his literary career, he published 90 books and numerous articles.
Chesterton spoke of himself as primarily a journalist. He contributed to and helped edit Eye Witness and New Witness. He edited G. K.'s Weekly, which advocated distributism, the social philosophy developed by Belloc. Chesterton's overriding concern with political and social injustice is reflected in Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1909), perhaps his most important work.
His second preoccupation was literary criticism. Robert Browning (1903) was followed by Charles Dickens (1906) and Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), prefaces to the individual novels, which are among his finest contributions to criticism.
His George Bernard Shaw (1909) and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) together with William Blake (1910) and the later monographs William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1927) have a spontaneity that places them above the works of many academic critics.
Chesterton’s third major concern was theology and religious argument. He was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Although he had written on Christianity earlier, as in his book Orthodoxy (1909), his conversion added edge to his controversial writing, notably The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), his writings in G.K.’s Weekly, and Avowals and Denials (1934). Other works arising from his conversion were St. Francis of Assisi (1923), the essay in historical theology The Everlasting Man (1925), The Thing (1929; also published as The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic), and St. Thomas Aquinas (1933).
Due to his tremendous popularity, the BBC invited him to do a series of radio talks in 1931. He delivered over 40 talks per year from 1932 until his death. His talks were very popular because they were informal and intimate in nature.
In 1922 Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism. Chesterton was an articulate spokesman for the breadth and depth of Catholic thought.
Politics
As a young man, Chesterton identified as a Socialist, because at that time he thought that Socialism was the only alternative to support for free-market capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, all of which he loathed, and continued to loathe throughout his life.
He supported the Liberal Party in British politics against the Conservatives (the party of big business and big landowners) but later withdrew his support because he thought the Liberal Party was corrupt (the Marconi Scandal of 1912 was a key moment in his alienation from the Liberals). He strongly believed in Home Rule for Ireland, which the Liberals supported and the Conservatives opposed. In general, his dislike for imperialism went with sympathy for the nationalism of small nations.
He came to espouse the philosophy of Distributism, which advocated a third way between capitalism and socialism, consisting of widely-distributed property ownership, and self-governing local communities. In this, he was influenced by the development of Catholic social thought, inspired by Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum.
Though he thought the British parliamentary system was corrupt, he strongly supported Britain’s participation in the First World War. His political ideas were strongly influenced by his views of French history: he was an admirer of the French Revolution, but he showed some sympathy for the Action Française, a monarchist movement, generally identified as of the Right.
Views
Throughout his career, Chesterton was a vigorous enemy of pacifism. What he did believe in was the right, or the duty rather, of self-defense and the defense of others. Chesterton was also a vigorous enemy of militarism. Both ideas, he argued, were really a single idea - that the strong must not be resisted. The militarist, he said, uses this idea aggressively as a conqueror, as a bully. The pacifist uses the idea passively by acquiescing to the conqueror and permitting himself and others around him to be bullied. Of the two, Chesterton thought the pacifist far less admirable. In fact, the pacifist, for him, was "the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society."
Chesterton’s followers considered his views about womankind quaintly outdated. His detractors found his notions about women’s rights hopelessly repressive and bigoted. Many accepted the doctrine that women can find fulfillment and happiness only in professional careers. The role of wife, mother, and homemaker was mercilessly attacked and belittled.
His main argument about careers for women was that the feminist view is simply the masculine view applied to women. Rather than follow a revolutionary course with truly feminine ideals, the feminists of his day and ours simply demand to have what men have. If men have careers, then women must have careers, for if men have economic independence women must have the same.
It was quite clear to Chesterton that having a job might make a woman independent of husbands and families, but it also made them dependent on employers, dependent on wage-earning, and servants to a business as most men already were.
Quotations:
"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."
"Men are men, but Man is a Woman."
"The first effect of not believing in God is that you lose your common sense."
"Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."
"Never tear down a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place."
Personality
Chesterton was a very absent-minded and clumsy man and his wife faithfully took care of him all his life. He debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism.
Physical Characteristics:
Chesterton was a big guy, standing 6’4", weighing around 290 lbs. and embraced it with wit and cynicism. One story goes that he told his friend, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, that "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England," Shaw appropriately replied that "To look at you, anyone would think you had caused it."
Quotes from others about the person
"Mr. Chesterton was not mistaken in his vocation when he set out to write stories. He is a born story-teller, which is quite a different thing from being a born novelist." - Cecil Chesterton
"Chesterton was important - as important to me in his way as C. S. Lewis had been." - Neil Gaiman
"The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton." - George Bernard Shaw
Interests
drawing, painting, photography
Connections
Chesterson married Frances Blogg in 1901. The couple shared a long and happy marriage that lasted till his death.
Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton
Through years of meticulous research and access to the literary estate of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce presents a major biography of a 20th-century literary giant, providing a great deal of important information on GKC never before published.