G. K. Chesterton:A Biography
Page 100
Whistler, James 31, 154, 192, 247
White, Pearl 451
Whitman, Walt 35–7, 54, 331–2, 427, 500
Wilde, Oscar 32, 192, 591
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 351
Williams, Ernest Hodder 39, 41
Wills, Gary 146 n.82
Wilson, Woodrow 394, 697
Wise, Stephen S. 698–9
Wiseman, Nicholas 340
Wolfe, James 630
Woodruff, Douglas 619–21
Wordsworth, William 268, 590–1
Wyndham, George 156–7, 278–80
Wyndham, Lady Grosvenor 279
Xavier, St Francis 23
Yeats, John Butler 46–7, 450
Yeats, W. B. 46–50, 89–90, 348, 401–2, 427
Youens, Laurence 724
Zangwill, Israel 254
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 Chestertons lived from 1901 to 1909.
8. Cecil Chesterton sometime before his death in 1918.
9. Overroads, Beaconsfi eld, 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, Beaconsfi eld, where the Chestertons lived from 1922.
16. Chesterton and Dorothy Collins with a young friend, Manhattan Beach, California, 14 February 1931.
1 Newman once even described himself as ‘a Christian journalist’. See The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, xviii, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (London: Nelson, 1968), 580.
2 Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 305.
3 See Oddie, 109, 144-5.
4 Ward, GKC 7, 536; Dorothy Collins’s notes for talks, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 139.
5 Aidan Mackey, ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton, 1904–1905’, CR 25/3 (Aug. 1999), 283.
6 Dorothy Collins’s notes for talks, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 110.
7 Maisie Ward to Dorothy Collins, 7 Jan. 1943, BL Add. MS 73472, fo. 4.
1 The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts. The G. K. Chesterton Papers. Additional Manuscripts 73186-73484 (London: British Library, 2001).
1 He was baptized on 1 July 1874. Photocopy of parish baptismal record, GKCL.
2 A. 21.
3 Ward, GKC 7; Ffinch, 6.
4 Clemens, 48.
5 Ward, GKC 7, 8; Ffinch, 6.
6 A. 38.
7 Bentley, 48–9.
8 A. 38.
9 A. 25–6.
10 Ward, GKC 9.
11 A. 29–30.
12 Ward, GKC 8, 555–7.
13 A. 30–3.
14 A. 33–5.
15 A 36–7.
16 A. 46–7, 49–50.
17 A. 39–41.
18 A. 42–4.
19 A. 45–6, 51.
20 A. 48; Ward, GKC 17.
21 Ward, GKC 13.
22 MCC 119.
23 G. K. Chesterton, introduction to Cecil Chesterton, A History of the United States (New York: George Doran, 1919), pp. vii-viii.
24 Barker, 38–9.
25 Ward, GKC 112.
26 According to Annie Kidd nee Firmin, Birdie died of typhoid fever. Annie Kidd to Maisie Ward, 13 Aug. [1942], BL Add. MS 73481A, fo. 24. This memory may be correct, as she was intimate with the family then, but her recollection all those years later that it was Frances who persuaded Chesterton to give up the Slade School and art for publishing and writing is certainly wrong, as the two had not yet met. Annie Kidd to Maisie Ward, 16 Dec. 1941, 3 Aug. [1942], BL Add. MS 73481A, fos. 8, 22.
27 Ward, GKC 13, 16; Ffinch, 10.
28 Ward, GKC 17–18.
29 Ffinch, 11.
30 For the background influence of Romanticism, see Oddie, 347, 349.
31 A. 53, 56–8.
32 A. 59.
33 Ward, GKC 11.
34 CC 8.
35 CP ii. 346–7.
36 A. 167.
37 A. 140.
38 Ward, GKC 20–2.
39 Oddie, 43. Dale, 18, gives the date as Jan. 1880 and Pearce, 13, as 1881; neither offers any evidence or reason for his statement. Ward, GKC 23, does not profess to know. But her assertion on p. 14 that Chesterton was ‘in some ways a very backward child’ who did not ‘talk much’ before he was 3 and learned to read only at 8 (according to Coren, 23, not until he was 9) should be treated with caution. Oddie, 25, argues that ‘there is good evidence… which suggests not only that he was reading well before the age of eight, but which establishes that he was writing stories at the latest by the age of six and probably sooner, and quoting poetry that he had learned by heart not long afterwards. By the age of eight, he was writing tidily in cursive script; there has survived an exercise book which belongs either to his early days at prep school or (more likely) from the period immediately before it. This contains, among other exercises, a number of neatly written passages taken down from dictation; this alone disproves the notion that he was at this age still struggling to read.’ Oddie notes that this exercise book contains, inside the cover, an inscription in Dorothy Collins’s handwriting, ‘With Miss Seamark | eight years old.’ As Oddie points out, it would not have been normal then for a preparatory school for boys to have women on the staff, and so this teacher was probably privately engaged before Chesterton went to Collet Court and was not his form mistress there (pace Pearce, 13). No doubt Maisie Ward herself selected the age of8 for Chesterton’s entry to Collet Court because of this exercise book.
40 Ward, RC 12–13.
41 Cf. Oddie, 52, on how Chesterton was saved from this ‘major traumatic shock … which … might well have undermined forever his essentially warm and secure personality’.
42 A. 61–3.
43 A. 61–2, 65–6.
44 A. 66.
45 Ronald Knox to G. K. Chesterton, 29 July 1928, BL Add. MS 73195, fo. 155.
46 BL Add. MS 73191, fo. 3.
47 Oddie, 58.
48 Ward, GKC 31 ; Bentley, 49–50; Barker, 31; Oddie, 58.
49 A. 67, 71.
50 Bentley, 49.
51 Ward, GKC 31–3; Bentley, 48–9.
52 Clemens, p. iii; Bentley, 45–7.
53 Ward, GKC 30–3, 36, 40–2; Clemens, iii. 4–5.
54 MC 228.
55 A. 70–2.
56 Clemens, 1–2.
57 Dorothy Collins’s notes for talks, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 102.
58 A. 72.
59 Ward, GKC 42.
60 A. 72–3.
61 Clemens, 2, 8–9.
62 Bentley, 46.
63 A. 72; Ward, GKC 25–6.
64 A. 72; Ward, GKC 25–6; Ward, RC 13–14.
65 A. 73.
66 Clemens, p. iii; Bentley, 49.
67 Ward, GKC, pp. ii. 15.
68 Clemens, 3.
69 A. 74–5.
70 Oddie, 80.
71 Barker, 36–7. This sense of the foreignness of Jews, which was not peculiar to Chesterton, is not the same as anti-Semitism, as Barker claims.
72 A. 77.
73 CP i. 28.
74 BL Add. MS 73317A, fo. 24.
75 Oddie, 81.
76 A. 78.
77 Clemens, 2.
78 Bentley, 67.
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sp; 79 Ward, GKC 42.
80 A. 78.
81 For the following account, see Oddie, 67–74.
82 Oddie, 69.
83 Ward, GKC 26.
84 G. K. Chesterton to E. C. Bentley, n.d. but annotated by hand (presumably Bentley’s) on typewritten copy, ‘Long vac 1893’, BL Add. MS 73191, fo. 33.
85 Oddie, 73.
86 Oddie, 75–6.
87 CP i. 166.
88 Ward, GKC 29.
89 Ffinch, 27–8.
90 CP i. 413. Bentley, 68, mistakenly thought Chesterton’s first publication was his first review published in 1895 (see below, p. 39).
91 Oddie, 100.
92 Barker, 44–5.
93 Bentley, 46.
94 A. 85–6.
95 A. 86–8, 91–3.
96 O’Connor, 74.
97 ILN xxviii. 417–18.
98 This explains why Ward, GKC 43, thought Chesterton started at University College in 1892.
99 Oddie, 86–7.
100 Ward, GKC 43. But, according to Ffinch, 33, Calderon’s was a group of artists in St John’s Wood presided over by the son of a Spanish ex-priest, called Philip Calderon, who, Oddie, 88, points out was actually Keeper of the Royal Academy.
101 Ffinch, 34. The notebook was eventually published in facsimile as The First Clerihews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). About a third of the verses were published in Biography for Beginners: Being a Collection of Miscellaneous Examples for the Use of Upper Forms, ed. E. C. Bentley, with 40 diagrams by G. K. Chesterton (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1905).
102 CP i. 344.
103 Stephen Chaplin, ‘The Slade Archive Reader’, unpublished typescript, n.d., University College Library Services, Special Collections, Add. MS 400, p. 42, n. 31.
104 G. K. Chesterton, Culture and the Coming Peril (London: London University Press, 1927), 5.
105 University College, London, Records Office.
106 Ward, GKC 49.
107 Bentley, 67; Ward, RC 19.
108 Dorothy Collins’s notes for talks, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 91.
109 CC 16.
110 According to Ward, RC 19, while he was still at the Slade.
111 Ward, RC 19–20. Strangely, Maisie Ward denies that the story is ‘an adumbration’ of The Man who was Thursday, but claims it reflects Chesterton’s preoccupation at this time with ‘creation and existence’, as if that were not also the subject of the later novel that recalls this period of his life. See also Oddie, 160–1.
112 Ward, RC 19–20.
113 See n. 104 above.
114 A. 101–2. According to Ffinch, 36, the ‘forms he filled in at the beginning of each academic year show a blank where students were invited to state which examinations they had in view’. But Oddie, 91, cites an unpublished letter to Oldershaw noting that Chesterton had ‘discovered, much to my amusement, that I did rather well in the year’s French examination at U.C.’. He had been ‘awarded the Sixth Form (‘A’ Group) Prize for French at St Paul’s School in 1891’. Aidan Mackey, G. K. Chesterton: A Prophet for the 21st Century (privately printed, n.d.), 30. See also Aidan Mackey, ‘G. K. Chesterton among the Permanent Poets’, in Andrew A. Tadie and Michael H. Macdonald (eds.), Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 190–1, on Chesterton’s verse translation of a French poem, ‘Translation from du Bellay’ (CP. i. 373–4; first published in Occasional Papers, 1/4 (July 1904), 130–1): ‘It was printed in a little book, Masterpieces of Lyrical Translation[1911] … Much later, in 1966, it was included in the prestigious Penguin Book of Modern Verse in Translation. The tribute paid to it by the compiler, George Steiner, is astonishing …’.
115 Chesterton, Culture and the Coming Peril, 6.
116 A. 94–5.
117 A. 95–6.
118 Ward, GKC 43.
119 A. 96.
120 TT 226–31.
121 A. 96–7.
122 Some of the best drawings and completed fairy tales were published posthumously in The Coloured Lands (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938), with an introduction by Maisie Ward.
123 BL Add. MS 73334.
124 Ward, GKC 47.
125 Ward, GKC 48, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 43191, fo. 145.
126 Oddie, 133.
127 Ward, GKC 49.
128 CC 24–5.
129 G. K. Chesterton to E. C. Bentley, n.d., BL Add MS 73191, fos. 33–4.
130 Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love, ed. Denis J. Conlon (London: New City, 2001). For the date, see pp. 12–13.
131 Oddie, 138.
132 Ward, GKC 51, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73191, fo. 43.
133 Oddie, 156. Oddie, 145–56, enlarges on and corrects the account given in Ward, GKC 60–4.
1 A. 101–2.
2 See above, p. 23.
3 Oddie, 157.
4 Ward, GKC 65, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73191, fos. 141–2. Ward is not the most accurate of transcribers, but here her text is unusually inaccurate. In particular, she fails to transcribe ‘He is my first taskmaster’ but prints instead ‘And my joy in having begun my life is very great’, words that do not appear in this undated letter to Bentley.
5 A. 102–3.
6 Barker, 67.
7 ‘A Picture of Tuesday’, as well as the other story, ‘A Crazy Tale’, that he had been working on as a student in either 1894 or more likely 1895, were published respectively in the first number of summer 1896 (pp. 19–22) and the third number of autumn 1897 (pp. 25–31) of the Quarto, and have been republished in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, xiv (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp. 60–3, 69–75.
8 Ward, GKC 66–8, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73191, fos. 146–7.
9 Oddie, 159, 162.
10 Ward, GKC 68–70.
11 Barker, 69–70; Coren, 76.
12 Ward, GKC 70.
13 Oddie, 100, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73197, fo. 6.
14 Ward, GKC 72–4, 76.
15 CP (1933), 223.
16 Ward, GKC 76, who attributes this fragmentary manuscript to the years 1895–8.
17 Ward, GKC 56–7.
18 Ward, GKC 77. For the poem, see also CP i. 62.
19 Oddie, 156.
20 She was born on 28 June 1870. St Augustine’s Church, High Wycombe, baptismal register.
21 Ward, GKC 77–8; Ffinch, 49.
22 Barker, 70–2.
23 Ward, GKC 15.
24 Ward, GKC 80–3, with text corrected from BL MS Add. 73193, fos. 73–9.
25 Ward, RC 36–7, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fo. 26.
26 A. 135–6.
27 A. 138–9, 144–7.
28 A. 148.
29 G. K. Chesterton to Miss Blogg, n.d., photocopy, GKCL.
30 A. 148–9.
31 Ward, RC 23–4.
32 MCC, 26.
33 A. 150.
34 Ward, RC 39, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fo. 45.
35 Ward, RC 40, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fo. 28.
36 A. 150–1.
37 A. 151.
38 RR 382.
39 A. 151; Ward, RC 29.