Everything about G K Chesterton totally explained
» This article is about the English writer. For his cousin, see A. K. Chesterton.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (
May 29,
1874 –
June 14,
1936) was an influential
English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included
journalism,
philosophy,
poetry,
biography,
Christian apologetics,
fantasy and
detective fiction.
Chesterton has been called the "prince of
paradox." He wrote in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. For example: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it." He is one of the few Christian thinkers who are equally admired and quoted by both liberal and conservative Christians, and indeed by many non-Christians. Chesterton's own theological and political views were far too nuanced to fit comfortably under the "
liberal" or "
conservative" banner. And in his own words he cast aspersions on the labels 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 routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox Christian," and came to identify such a position with Catholicism more and more, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism.
Life
Born in Campden Hill in
Kensington in
London, Chesterton was educated at
St Paul's School. He attended the
Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator and also took literature classes at
University College London but didn't complete a degree at either. In 1896 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, and 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 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. In 1902 he was given a weekly opinion column in the
Daily News, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in
The Illustrated London News, for which he'd continue to write for the next thirty years.
According to Chesterton, as a young man he became fascinated with the
occult and, along with his brother
Cecil, experimented with
Ouija boards. However, as he grew older, he became an increasingly orthodox
Christian, culminating in his conversion to
Roman Catholicism in 1922.
Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21
stone (134 kg or 294 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he wasn't 'out at the Front'; he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you'll see that I am.' On another occasion he remarked to his friend
George Bernard Shaw, 'To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England.' Shaw retorted, 'To look at you, anyone would think you caused it.'
He usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a
swordstick in hand, and had a
cigar hanging out of his mouth. Chesterton often forgot where he was supposed to be going and would miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as "Am at
Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she'd reply, "Home."
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 movie that was never released.
Chesterton died on
14 June 1936, at his home in
Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire. The
homily at Chesterton's
Requiem Mass in
Westminster Cathedral,
London, was delivered by
Ronald Knox. He is buried in Beaconsfield in the
Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was
probated at 28,389 pounds sterling, approximately equivalent to USD 2.6 million in modern terms.
Writing
Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000
essays, 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 popularized through
The American Review, published by
Seward Collins in New York.
Much of his poetry is little known, though well reflecting his beliefs and opinions. The best written is probably, with the most familiar, and
The Secret People perhaps the most quoted ("we are the people of England; and we've not spoken yet"). Another excellent poem is
A Ballade of Suicide.
Of his nonfiction,
Charles Dickens (1903) 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 in Chapter 4 of that book Chesterton's thought 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. When
The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's contribution took the form of a letter:
» Dear Sirs,
» I am.
» Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton
Typically, Chesterton here combined wit with a serious point (that of human sinfulness) and self-deprecation.
Much of Chesterton's work remains in print, including collections of the Father Brown detective stories.
Ignatius Press is currently in the process of publishing a Complete Works.
Views and contemporaries
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 Wilde and Shaw. In his book
Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Wilde:
Orthodoxy concerning the necessity of making symbolic sacrifices for the gift of creation:
Heretics he writes of Shaw:
humanism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton's views, on the other hand, became increasingly more polarized towards the church. In
Orthodoxy he writes:
Orthodoxy:
Orthodoxy:
The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states:
» For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad, » For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
The Chesterbelloc
» See G. K.'s Weekly for a fuller treatment.
Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist
Hilaire Belloc. 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 his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards
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.
Both Chesterton and Belloc have faced accusations of
anti-Semitism during their lifetimes and subsequently. Their criticisms of the "international Jewish banking families" are some of the most important reasons for these accusations. For example, G.K., Belloc, and G.K.'s brother Cecil were vehement critics of the Isaacs, who were involved in the
Marconi scandal in the years before World War I.
George Orwell accused Chesterton of being guilty of "endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts."
In
The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity/Semitism) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe. He suggested the formation of a
Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to
Palestine by Jewish
Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In 1934, after the
Nazi Party took power in
Germany he wrote that:
Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he wasn't an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."
Chesterton condemned the
Nuremberg Laws, and he died in
1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the
Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.
List of major works
See
List of books by G. K. Chesterton for all works.
Influence
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 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's 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 writings have been praised by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Frederick Buechner, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel Čapek, David Dark, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Andrew Greeley, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day, Tim Powers, and Franz Kafka.
Philip Yancey said that if he were "stranded on a desert island … and could choose only one book apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy."
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.'
His physical appearance and apparently some of his mannerisms were a direct inspiration for the character of Dr. Gideon Fell, a well-known fictional detective created in the early 1930s by the Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr.
The author Neil Gaiman has stated that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton, as well as featuring a quotation from The Man who was October, a book Chesterton wrote "only in dreams", at the end of Season of Mists. Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens is dedicated "to the memory of G.K. Chesterton: A man who knew what was going on." In a prescript to his novel, Coraline, Gaiman quotes Chesterton: "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
Ingmar Bergman considered Chesterton's little known play Magic to be one of his favourites and even staged a production in Swedish. Later he reworked Magic into his movie The Magician in 1958.
The Third Way (UK) campaigns for the widespread ownership of property are inspired by the economic system Chesterton espoused: Distributism.
The Innocence of Father Brown is cited by Guillermo Martinez as one of the inspirations for his thriller The Oxford Murders.Further Information
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