G. K. Chesterton:A Biography
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Chesterton scholarship is hardly more advanced than Chesterton criticism, but in the last few years there have been two very significant publications that have been of enormous help to me. In 2001 the British Library published an indispensable catalogue, compiled by R. A. Christophers, of the Chesterton papers that came into its possession on the death of Dorothy Collins.1 And then in 2008 William Oddie published his ground-breaking Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874–1908, a detailed study of Chesterton’s religious development in the years up to the time that he discovered Christian ‘orthodoxy’, which draws on barely explored sources and unpublished papers, making it the most original and serious work of research since Maisie Ward’s pioneering biography and its sequel. Readers will notice my great debt to this work of careful scholarship in the early part of this book. I am also much indebted to its author for many long conversations about Chesterton, which have been of great help in formulating my thoughts.
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
LIST OF PLATES
1. The Early Days
2. Publishing and Engagement
3. Marriage and Fame
4. Controversy
5. Dickens
6. Orthodoxy
7. Shaw and Beaconsfield
8. Father Brown and the Marconi Scandal
9. The Victorian Compromise and Illness
10. War and Travel
11. America and Conversion
12. The Everlasting Man
13. Distributism and Apologetics
14. Rome and America Again
15. The Last Years
INDEX
ABBREVIATIONS
All references are to The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986—), with the relevant volume number following in brackets, except where otherwise stated. Where the Ignatius Collected Works invents a title to cover a number of writings, which were in fact never published as a book, the title is not italicized.
Chesterton’s Works
A.
Autobiography (XVI)
ACD
Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (XV)
AD
Alarms and Discussions (London: Methuen, 1910)
AG
All is Grist: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1931)
AIS
‘All I Survey’: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1933)
AP
‘Appendix’ (XXI)
AS
As I was Saying: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1936)
AT
The Appetite of Tyranny (V)
ATC
All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908)
AV
Avowals and Denials: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1934)
AWD
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks and Other Essays, ed. Dorothy L. Collins (London: Paul Elek, 1975)
B.
Robert Browning (XVII)
BAC
The Ball and the Cross (VI)
BC
The Blatchford Controversies (I)
BH
Basil Howe, ed. Denis J. Conlon (London: New City, 2001)
C.
Chaucer (XVIII)
CCC
The Catholic Church and Conversion (III)
CD
Charles Dickens (XV)
CE
Crimes of England (V)
CID
Christendom in Dublin (XX)
CL
The Coloured Lands, ed. Maisie Ward (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938)
CM
The Common Man (London: Sheed & Ward, 1950)
COS
Chesterton on Shakespeare, ed. Dorothy Collins (Henley-on-Thames: Darwen Finlayson, 1971)
CP i, ii
Collected Poetry, i, ii (X, pts 1, 2)
CP (1933)
Collected Poetry (London: Methuen, 1933)
CQT
The Club of Queer Trades (VI)
CS
Chesterton on Shaw (XI)
CT
Come to Think of it… A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1930)
DD
Divorce versus Democracy (IV)
Def.
The Defendant (London: J. M. Dent, 1914)
DJ
The Judgement of Dr Johnson (XI)
EA
The End of the Armistice (V)
EM
The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993)
EOE
Eugenics and Other Evils (IV)
FB i, ii
The Father Brown Stories (XII, XIII)
FFF
Four Faultless Felons (IX)
FI
The Flying Inn (VII)
FVF
Fancies versus Fads (London: Methuen, 1923)
GS
Generally Speaking: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1928)
H.
Heretics (I)
HA
Handful of Authors, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward 1953)
II
Irish Impressions (XX)
ILN
Illustrated London News (XXVII-XXXV)
K.
Lord Kitchener (V)
LL
Lunacy and Letters, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1958)
LT
Leo Tolstoy (XVIII)
M.
Manalive (VII)
MC
G.K.C. as M.C.: Being a Collection of Thirty-Seven Introductions, ed. J. P. de Fonseka (London: Methuen, 1929)
MKM
The Man who Knew too Much (VIII)
MM
A Miscellany of Men (London: Methuen, 1912)
MO
The Man who was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings, ed. L. Maycock (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963)
MT
The Man who was Thursday (VI)
NJ
The New Jerusalem (XX)
NNH
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (VI)
O.
Orthodoxy (I)
OS
The Outline of Sanity (V)
PI
‘The Patriotic Idea’, in Lucian Oldershaw (ed.), England: A Nation (London and Edinburgh: R. Brimley Johnson, 1904), 1–43
PL
The Poet and the Lunatics (IX)
RDQ
The Return of Don Quixote (VIII)
RLS
Robert Louis Stevenson (XVIII)
RR
The Resurrection of Rome (XXI)
S.
Sidelights (XXI)
SD
The Superstition of Divorce (IV)
SFA
St Francis of Assisi (II)
SHE
A Short History of England (XX)
SL
The Spice of Life, ed. Dorothy Collins (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964)
SRBC
Social Reform versus Birth Control (IV)
SS
The Superstitions of the Sceptic (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1925)
T.
The Thing (III)
TA
St Thomas Aquinas (II)
TC
Thomas Carlyle (XVIII)
TLB
Tales of the Long Bow (VIII)
TS
The Surprise (XI)
TT
Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1909)
TWTY
Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902)
UD
The Uses of Diversity: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1920)
UU
Utopia of Usurers (V)
VAL
The Victorian Age in Literature (XV)
W.
G.F. Watts (XVII)
WARL
Where All Roads Lead (III)
WB
William Blake (XVII)
WC
William Cobbett (XVII)
; WIC
Why I am a Catholic (III)
WISA
What I Saw in America (XXI)
WK
The Wild Knight (London: J. M. Dent, 1914)
WS
The Well and the Shallows (III)
WW
What’s Wrong with the World (IV)
Other Abbreviations
Barker
Dudley Barker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973)
Bentley
E. C. Bentley, Those Days (London: Constable, 1940)
BL
British Library
CC
[Cecil Chesterton], G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism (London: Alston Rivers, 1908)
Clemens
Cyril Clemens, Chesterton as Seen by his Contemporaries (New York: Haskell House, 1969)
Conlon, i
D.J. Conlon (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments Part I: 1900–1937 (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976)
Conlon, ii
D. J. Conlon (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
Coren
Michael Coren, Gilbert: The Man who was G. K. Chesterton (New York: Paragon House, 1990)
CR
Chesterton Review
Dale
Alzina Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity: A Biography of G. K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982)
Ffinch
Michael Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986)
GKCL
G. K. Chesterton Library (see Acknowledgements)
JJBL
John J. Burns Library, Boston College
MCC
Mrs Cecil Chesterton, The Chestertons (London: Chapman and Hall, 1941)
O’Connor
John O’Connor, Father Brown on Chesterton (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938)
Oddie
William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Pearce
Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996)
Sullivan
John Sullivan (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal (London: Paul Elek, 1974)
Titterton
W. R. Titterton, G. K. Chesterton: A Portrait (London: Douglas Organ 1936)
UNDA
University of Notre Dame Archives
Ward, GKC
Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed and Ward, 1944)
Ward, RC
Maisie Ward, Return to Chesterton (London: Sheed and Ward, 1952)
LIST OF PLATES
1. The young Gilbert Keith Chesterton, aged 7 or 8, with his younger brother Cecil.
2. Chesterton’s childhood home, 11 Warwick Gardens, Kensington.
3. Members of the Junior Debating Club, St. Paul’s School. Chesterton is on the third row on the left.
4. Chesterton and Frances Blogg before their marriage.
5. Frances Chesterton, 1901, the year of her marriage.
6. Frances Chesterton at the time of her marriage.
7. Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, where the Chesterton lived from 1901 to 1909.
8. Cecil Chesterton sometime before his death in 1914.
9. Overroads, Beaconsfield, where the Chestertons lived from 1909 to 1922.
10. Chesterton sometime before 1920.
11. Chesterton c. 1920.
12. Chesterton and Frances in 1922.
13. Studio portrait of Chesterton by Howard Coster, 1926.
14. Chesterton with his host, Fr Michael Earls, S.J., at Holy Cross College, Massachussets, when he lectured there in December 1930.
15. Top Meadow, Beaconsfield, where the Chestertons lived from 1922.
16. Chesterton and Dorothy Collins with a young friend, Manhattan Beach, California, 14 February 1931.2
All images listed above appear by kind permission of the G. K. Chesterton Library Trust with the exception of images 13 and 14. Image 13 appears by kind permission of Martin Thompson and image 14 by kind permission of Thomas J. Sullivan.
1
The Early Days
1
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON began his posthumously published Autobiography (1936) with an ironic reference to himself as an apologist for dogmatic Christianity and the Church of Rome: ‘Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.’1 Employing one of his most important strategies as an apologist, he added humorously: ‘I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’ Whereas the Waterworks Tower was to feature later in his life, his birth was simply ‘an accident which I accept, like some poor ignorant peasant, only because it has been handed down to me by oral tradition’. Not only are Catholic ideas of authority and tradition invoked, but ‘common sense’ agrees (another part of his apologetic strategy) that, while ‘some of the sceptical methods applied to the world’s origin might be applied to my origin, and a grave and earnest enquirer come to the conclusion that I was never born at all’, this conclusion should be rejected.2
Of Chesterton’s ancestry we know very little apart from what he tells us in his Autobiography, since on his mother’s death he threw away ‘without examination’ all the family records preserved in his father’s study. He also threw away his father’s collection of press cuttings, mostly relating to his famous son, about a quarter of which, however, his secretary Dorothy Collins managed to save, rather against Chesterton’s will, from the dust-men.3 When it was once suggested to him, while lecturing in Cambridge, by the vicar of the nearby village of Chesterton that it might have been named after his ancestors, he replied that this was possible, but he thought it more likely that his father’s family had taken the name from the village. Perhaps they had once lived there under a different name, but then a worthless member of the family was driven out and came to live in Cambridge, where he was given the nickname of Chesterton after the village he had come from.4 His father enjoyed reading out to the family letters written from the debtors’ prison by the head of the family at the time of the Regency who was a friend of the Prince and led a disreputable life and squandered his fortune. As a result of the loss of his inheritance, Chesterton’s great-grandfather Charles had become first a poulterer, then a coal merchant, and finally an estate agent.5
Although we can add details to Chesterton’s account of his early childhood, no biographer has ever improved on, or could improve on, the story as he tells it in the best and most strictly autobiographical part of the Autobiography. At the end of the first chapter, he admits that his story is ‘deficient in all those unpleasant qualities that make a biography really popular. I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptation of the artistic temperament.’ He was unable to do what was expected of him ‘by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am’. On the contrary, he was ‘compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist’.6 This was not mere loyalty to or even partiality for his family; as the man who was his closest boyhood friend later recalled:
Family affection, indeed, was the cradle of that immense benevolence that lived in him. I never met with such parental devotion or conjugal sympathy more strong than they were in the exc
eptional woman who was his mother; or with greater kindliness—to say nothing of other sterling qualities—than that of his father, the business man whose feeling for literature and all beautiful things worked so much upon his sons in childhood. The parents made their home a place of happiness for their two boys’ many friends …7