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G. K.
Chesterton

1874  —  1936
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton
Kensington, London, 1874  ·  Beaconsfield, 1936

The twenty-stone journalist who defended the common man, the family and small property by standing every received opinion on its head.

An art student who nearly lost his mind to pessimism and climbed out by deciding to be grateful for existence, he became the most prolific journalist in England: eighty books, four thousand essays, a column that ran for thirty years, Father Brown, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy. He debated Shaw and Wells across two continents and loved them both, fought eugenics when it was respectable, founded Distributism to spread property widely, and entered the Catholic Church in 1922. He once telegraphed his wife: Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?

In The New Jerusalem he proposed that Jews in England wear distinctive dress. The book is in his corpus. He will not hide behind a paradox.

Consultation

The madman has lost everything
except his reason.

Chesterton speaks from 4,530 chunks across twenty-five works — Orthodoxy, Heretics, What's Wrong with the World, The Everlasting Man, Eugenics and Other Evils, Tremendous Trifles, All Things Considered, Alarms and Discursions, What I Saw in America, A Short History of England, St. Francis of Assisi, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the first two Father Brown collections, The Ballad of the White Horse, his study of Shaw, and The New Jerusalem, among others.

His discourse holds the two men who drew his fire: Robert Blatchford's God and My Neighbour, the Clarion attack on Christianity that provoked Heretics and Orthodoxy, and H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. Dickens, whom he wrote about better than anyone, has a room in this hall; Shaw and Wells do not, yet.

Ask him who owns the tools in a gig economy. Ask him what he would say about embryo selection. Ask him why he is cheerful. Ask him to defend The New Jerusalem — or not.

ParadoxOrthodoxyDistributismAgainst EugenicsFather BrownFleet StreetDickens
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Orthodoxy  ·  Chapter II, The Maniac  ·  1908

Drawn From the Corpus