by Ian Ker
40 Ffinch, 55.
41 Ward, RC 34–5, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fo. 21.
42 Ward, GKC 84.
43 Ward, GKC 83.
44 G. K. Chesterton to Annie Firmin, n.d., BL Add. MS 73237, fo. 51. Ward, GKC 84, quotes the first two sentences.
45 Barker, 87.
46 Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s secretary and later literary executor, left three notes among the letters that Maisie Ward was allowed to see. The first reads: ‘All other letters which have not been quoted [in Ward] have been destroyed according to a promise made to Frances.’ The second reads: ‘Cut according to a promise made to Frances,’ and the third: Beautiful love paragraphs. Cut according to a promise made to Frances.’ BL Add. MS 73193, fos. 9, 14. Dorothy Collins had been left all Chesterton’s papers ‘to keep or destroy as I thought fit. The only promise I was asked to give was to destroy the love-letters which he wrote to Frances. She most generously allowed me to go through these and copy the less personal parts for the use of his biographer which I did, after which I burnt them.’ Free Europe Radio interview, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 15. Maisie Ward considered that it was tragic indeed that the whole of this correspondence was not spared. Dorothy Collins begged Frances to let me at least read it, but she could not prevail. And deeply as I regret, I do partly understand. Gilbert shared her feeling and with both of them it arose in part from the fact that no couple ever suffered more from the impertinences of journalistic intrusion into private life’ (Ward, RC 47).
47 G. K. Chesterton to Frances Blogg, n.d., BL Add. MS 73193, fo. 13.
48 Ward, GKC 85–6, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fos. 10–11.
49 Ward, GKC 90.
50 Ward, GKC 93–4, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fos. 19–20.
51 Ward, RC 42,
52 Ward, RC 43.
53 Pencilled note by an unknown hand among material gathered by Maisie Ward for RC. BL Add. MS 73481A, fo. 184.
54 Ward, RC 43.
55 Ward, GKC 97–101.
56 Ward, GKC 102–4.
57 Ward, RC 43, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fo. 40.
58 Barker, 104.
59 Ward, GKC 105; Ward, RC 46–7.
60 Coren, 108; Ffinch, 68.
61 Ward, GKC 105–6, 109.
62 Ffinch, 60.
63 A. 112–15, 141.
64 Ward, RC 54.
65 Ffinch, 83.
66 A. 118–19.
67 Ffinch, 86.
68 Ffinch, 49.
69 Ward, GKC 113.
70 Clemens, 19, with corrected date.
71 Oddie, 176.
72 Ward, GKC 163–4.
73 H. 186–8.
74 T 326.
75 A. 28–9, 277–81.
76 Clemens, 24.
77 Ward, GKC 113.
78 G. K. Chesterton, introduction to C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks, Hilaire Belloc: The Man and his Work (London: Methuen, 1916), pp. vii, ix.
79 Ward, GKC 114–15.
80 A. 116–18.
81 Ward, GKC 119–20.
82 Ward, GKC 123.
83 ‘The Liberal Party’, CP i. 396.
84 Ward, RC 53.
85 A. 126–7.
86 A. 127–8.
87 Barker, 56, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73193, fos. 48–9.
88 Sullivan, 78–9.
89 A. 98.
90 CP ii. 366–71.
91 Conlon, i. 23–4, who follows Sullivan, G. K. Chesterton: A Bibliography, 161, in wrongly attributing the review to Chesterton’s father (who could hardly have reviewed his own son’s book).
92 Bentley, 68.
93 Ffinch, 78.
94 Barker, 106.
95 Ward, RC 62.
96 CC 31.
97 Ffinch, 78.
98 Ward, GKC 125.
99 A. 98.
100 Ward, GKC 126.
101 CP i. 134.
102 CP i. 198.
103 Oddie, 6, 200–1. However, to be fair to Chesterton, he did himself write a sardonic critique, which he circulated among his friends, of a number of his own poems, some of which were included in The Wild Knight. It has been published in P ii. xxi—xxvi, although some opening and closing pages may be missing.
104 CC 38.
105 Ffinch, 81.
106 Ward, GKC 127.
107 Ward, GKC 128–9.
108 Barker, 115; Ffinch, 82, 95.
109 Ward, GKC 131–2, text corrected from BL MS Add. 73193, fos. 80–2.
1 Ward, GKC 133; Barker, 105, 109–11; Ward, RC 66.
2 See above, pp. 8–9.
3 Ward, GKC 133–4.
4 CP i. 344.
5 Ward, RC 67.
6 MCC 26, 171.
7 Ward, GKC 210. See also Margaret Joyce to Dorothy Collins, 25 Oct. 1942, BL Add. MS 73475A, fo. 72: ‘The fact that she underwent an operation in the attempt to cure her sterility shows how anxious she was to have children.’ Dr Joyce was attached to the local Battersea Bridge branch of the Clapham Maternity Hospital (The Medical Directory, 1907), the first maternity hospital where women were treated solely by women doctors. The operation was not performed by her but by a young doctor, the then unmarried Frances Ivens, who had only recently qualified in 1900 and was to have a highly distinguished medical career. ‘The operation was not performed by me,’ Dr Joyce told Dorothy Collins, ‘but by Mrs Ivens-Knowles the gynaecological surgeon. I forget the date.’ Margaret Joyce to Dorothy Collins, n.d., BL Add. MS 73475A, fo. 74. On reading ‘Keith’s’ book The Chestertons many years later, Dr Joyce remarked: ‘How jealous she [‘Keith’] must have been of Frances! And how fiendishly she sugars her sourest bits!’ Margaret Joyce to Dorothy Collins, 11 Nov. 1942, BL Add. MS 73475A, fo. 75.In 1924 Frances was referred to a specialist at the Clinical Medical Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, who wrote to her general practitioner, Dr Bakewell, in Beaconsfield: ‘She has apparently been putting on weight—chiefly about the hips—and getting rather easily fatigued. I think this is largely the result of the menopause. She appears to me to have been always an individual of the rather underdeveloped pituitary type—onset of menstruation late (c 17)—sterility—lack of genital development etc.’ Harold Gardiner Hill to George Bakewell, 9 Dec. 1924, BL Add. MS 74370, fo. 26.
8 Ward, GKC 560–1.
9 According to Oddie, 216–17, ‘Keith’, as a writer of sensational romantic literature, ‘either … imagined it all and believed her own imaginings or … she simply made it up, consciously or unconsciously prompted by her detestation of Frances and envy of her long and happy marriage (she had lost Cecil after only two years of her own marriage)’, or else ‘perhaps (much less likely) it was Cecil who imagined it or made it up’. As Oddie notes, Maisie Ward, who knew Cecil well, found it ‘difficult to imagine’ that he told ‘Keith’ that his brother never again attempted marital intimacy (Ward, GKC 560). But the story of what happened on that first honeymoon night needs to be separated from ‘Keith’s’ allegation of what the consequence of that night was—an allegation she does not attribute to Cecil. It is much more likely that, as in all such stories, there is at least a grain of truth in it—in this case perhaps more than a grain, as Cecil perhaps did recount to ‘Keith’ what his brother had told him about that first honeymoon night. The grain or more than grain of untruth was what Keith’ deduced from the story—what it suited her to believe was the clear implication of the story and which she believed to be true to Frances’s character. As for Frances’s husband, nobody has ever suggested that he was unable to consummate the marriage: indeed, his mother told Annie Kidd nee Firmin that she ‘knew’ it was not her son’s fault that he and Frances could not have children. Annie Kidd to Maisie Ward, n.d., BL Add. MS 73481A, fo. 27.
10 Ward, GKC 134.
11 G. K. Chesterton to Doris Child, n.d., BL Add. MS 73236, fo. 31.
12 Ward, RC 90.
13 BL Add. MS 73236, fo. 32.
14 MCC 65.
15 Ward, GKC 134; Ffinch, 99.<
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16 Ward, RC 68–70.
17 Ffinch, 107.
18 Oddie, 189–90.
19 Def. 13–14 70 84.
20 Def. 85, 88, 97–9, 133, 137, 158–9, l6l.
21 Def. 141–2, 145–6.
22 Def. 107–10, 160.
23 Def. 33, 36.
24 Def. 46,48,49,114,115,117.
25 Def. 123–4, 149, 153
26 Def. 165–8, 170–1.
27 For the following account, I am indebted to John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).
28 Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 4–5.
29 Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 7–8.
30 Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 12, 16, 24.
31 ILN xxviii. 31–2.
32 ILN xxviii. 198–9, 570; xxix. 108–9.
33 Ward, GKC 137.
34 Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 62–3, 93, 123.
35 The hero of Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses is Arnold Bennett, with Conan Doyle as a minor hero. Chesterton himself similarly had ‘a great admiration’ for Bennett as a writer and ‘a strong liking’ for his ‘personality’ : ‘I like his … contempt for contempt. I like his humanity and merciful curiosity about everything human. I like [his] essential absence of snobbishness …’ (T. 297). This makes the conspicuous absence of Chesterton from Carey’s book, apart from a mention of his sympathy with the suburbs, all the more unfortunate. However, Carey does elsewhere briefly acknowledge Chesterton’s ‘lifelong respect for the common man, as against intellectuals and other cranks’ (Conlon ii. 346).
36 But cf. Oddie, 203, who says that ‘his first signed piece appeared on 31 May 1901’.
37 Oddie, 203–4.
38 Dale, 77–8.
39 Oddie, 271.
40 Ffinch, 83.
41 A. 119–20.
42 MCC 1.
43 Ward, RC 61, 72–3.
44 Conlon, i. 530.
45 Lucy Masterman, ‘The Private Chesterton’, Manchester Guardian, 28 Apr. 1955.
46 MCC 47.
47 Ward, GKC 138.
48 Masterman, ‘The Private Chesterton’.
49 MCC 44–5.
50 Ward, GKC 139–40.
51 Ward, RC 72.
52 Ward, RC 20–1.
53 Dorothy Collins’s notes for talks, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 136.
54 Ward, GKC 138, recognizes that Frances gave up the struggle to try and make her husband tidy in conventional clothes, but then unfortunately adds, ‘By a stroke of genius she decided instead to make him picturesque.’ This would seem to support the charge that Frances aided and abetted Chesterton in cultivating a public image.
55 Barker, 132–3, who quotes Chesterton on the ‘faintly ostentatious’ appearance of Stevenson (‘such a man is not entirely averse from being looked at’) who wore a hat with a long feather or an embroidered smoking cap over his long flowing hair and carried a rapier at the ready, concludes that ‘the remarks apply equally to himself’. But Chesterton’s costume was strictly functional and by no means so ostentatious—apart from the sword-stick.
56 See Ward, RC 47.
57 Barker, 135.
58 CC 254–5.
59 MCC 52–3. Barker, 134, claims that ‘Keith’ Jones was one of those close to Chesterton who ‘assisted in the legend’ he and Frances had created, and that ‘it is unbelievable that Ada Jones or any of the others failed to realise what had happened’. But how could ‘Keith’ and Cecil have realized that there was another, the right, evening dress suit lying on another, the wrong, bed? Given Chesterton’s understandable anxiety to leave as soon as possible for the lecture, there was not much time for reflection anyway.
60 A. 157–8.
61 O’Connor, 44.
62 Conlon, ii. 209.
63 Clemens, 44.
64 Sullivan, 157, 160.
65 Ward, GKC 249–50; Ffinch, 103–4; Dale, 83.
66 Oddie, 209.
67 TWTY 8, 10–11, 13–14.
68 TWTY 18–20, 23–8.
69 TWTY 49–51.
70 TWTY 65, 69, 74–6.
71 TWTY 74.
72 TWTY 79, 81–2.
73 ILN xxvii. 153; xxviii. 24.
74 TWTY 111–13.
75 TWTY 117.
76 TWTY 183–5, 187–9, 191–3, 197–8.
77 TWTY 122–4, 128–9, 131, 135, 137–8.
78 TWTY 40, 145, 147–9, 151, 164–6.
79 TWTY 170–5.
80 Ward, GKC 121.
81 A. 159.
82 A. 152–4.
83 A. 158.
84 A. 165. But cf. Oddie, 179: ‘That this was an exaggeration is clear enough: “The Notebook, for instance, shows plainly that by 1894, although Chesterton’s religious feelings were far from dogmatically well-defined, they amounted to something considerably more definite and powerfully experienced than can properly be described as “the very haziest religiosity”.’
85 A. 159–63, l65.
86 G. K. Chesterton to Sidney Colvin, n.d., BL Add. MS 73236, fo. 59.
87 A. 99–100.
88 Ward, GKC 135.
89 Ward, GKC 135–6. The reference is probably to Chesterton’s article ‘The Position of Sir Walter Scott’ in the Daily News, 10 Aug. 1901, in which he praises Shaw and his play Candida. Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1926–1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1988), 464.
90 Ward, GKC 136; Dale, 105.
91 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, ii. 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), 182.
92 Ward, GKC 136.
93 A. 101.
94 A. 101.
95 Barker, 127–8.
96 Clemens, 14–15.
97 Ward, GKC 145–6.
98 Daily News, 28 Sept. 1912. See also Barker, 128.
99 Ward, GKC 146.
100 See, e.g., Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1995), 311.
101 Anne Ritchie to G. K. Chesterton, 15 July 1903, GKCL.
102 B. 1–2, 22–4, 28.
103 B. 73, 86–8, 92, 96, 98, 100, 109.
1 Oddie, 239.
2 Oddie, 338–9.
3 Oddie, 340–2.
4 A. 173–5.
5 Oddie, 343–4, 348, 352.
6 BC 387–8. Cf. Stanley L. Jaki, Chesterton: A Seer of Science (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 13–16.
7 Oddie, 352–4.
8 BC 374–7, 379.
9 BC 380, 382–5, 394–5.
10 A. 173–4.
11 Ward, GKC 150–2, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73237, fo. 52.
12 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton, 1904–1905’, ed. Aidan Mackey, CR 25/3 (August 1999), 283–4. Aidan Mackey found the diary, which is at GKCL, in a thick boarded exercise book given to him by Dorothy Collins, containing records of a local Chesterton society that she had founded in Beaconsfield.
13 John Coates, ‘Commentary on the Diary of Frances Chesterton,’ CR 25/3 (August 1999), 295–6. But Coates, pp. 296–8, reads too much into what Frances does say and what she does not say about the famous people she met.
14 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 284–5.
15 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 286.
16 W. 3, 8, 11–13, 69.
17 W. 63, 70, 87.
18 W 149. See Oddie, 276: ‘In 1900, Chesterton [in a review] had seen Watts’s attitude to his subjects as being simply allegorical; by 1904 he has enlarged Watts’s vision by perceiving it as being sacramental’.
19 W. 101, 130, 165–6.
20 W. 136, 139.
21 NNH 228.