Hinterland

Father Brown novelist, careless critic, outmoded poet, bigot: does anyone still read GK Chesterton?

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose 150th birthday falls later this month, developed slowly for a man whose output was almost incalculable. He did not speak until he was three, but then all his life loved debating. He did not read until eight, but then seemed never to have stopped except to write instead. It is little wonder his writings became known for their paradoxes. He wrote approximately 4,000 essays and reviews. His literary debut came with two volumes of poetry in 1900, aged just 26. That was the year he met Hilaire Belloc, who became a not entirely good influence on him and with whom he was so closely associated that Bernard Shaw decided they were a composite beast, “Chesterbelloc”.

His first prose work was on Robert Browning. It appealed to those who knew even less about the poet than Chesterton, but Browning aficionados lambasted it for inaccuracy. The author set a standard for carelessness that he would, unfortunately, never shake off. Chestertonians say Browning’s interest in human nature and the beauties of the earth suggested a Christian faith such as Chesterton himself was embracing: his 20s were a restless search for a spiritual haven. It was only after he married in 1901 that he espoused his wife’s high-church Anglicanism, with what would become a customary intensity.

His first novel was The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in 1904. It is a confection about London’s constituent parts splitting into autonomous polities, and Notting Hill waging war on a neighbour that wishes to drive a new road through it. Critics have suggested that Chesterton sympathised with the Boers against the British, who wished to absorb their small republic into South Africa. The theme of anti-authoritarianism was further developed in The Man Who Was Thursday in 1908, about an anarchist cell that is, in fact, made up of policemen sent undercover to spy on one another.

His most famous invention is Father Brown, the first of whose stories appeared in 1911. The unique selling point of a priest as a detective is that, in his time spent on pastoral duties – notably in the confession box – he has developed intuition about the nature of man and, especially, of criminality.

By the time war came in 1914 Chesterton had acquired a broad reputation as a writer – as novelist, writer of short stories, essayist, critic and poet. He took himself seriously in what he did, as did much of his public, though he was anathema to the literary elite who were coming to be represented by the Bloomsbury Set.

How good a writer was he? The early novels have a fantastic charm but lack profundity. The Father Brown stories are entertaining and clever, and an impressive forerunner to what, between the wars, would become the golden age of detective fiction. His work as a literary critic was praised by some but disdained by others; and once practical criticism became a fixture of university English courses, academic exponents barely noticed that Chesterton’s criticism, based on simple

He didn’t read until he was eight, then went on to write 4,000 essays and reviews

19th-century methods of appraisal, existed. An exception is his Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, with insights into the novels and massive affection for them and their author. It is also valuable as a historical document revealing the almost overpowering influence of Dickens on the Edwardian mind.

As a poet, Chesterton has hardly survived. The Ballad of the White Horse, published in 1911, recalls King Alfred’s victory against Danish invaders. It was popular during the ensuing war with Germany. Very much a period piece, it is redolent of Kipling at his most unselfconscious; his glory days, like Chesterton’s, are now behind him.

The image of “G K” today is mixed: an anti-Semite (a prejudice picked up from Belloc), he at least lived to denounce Hitler, suggesting his own bigotry was a pose. Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1922 he turned out dense theological works. Perhaps we know him most from his photographs: a vast figure swaddled in a theatrical cloak, fedora concealing his mop of unruly hair. There have been imitators, not least in the world of journalism, where he felt he most deeply belonged – but, more so than many figures of the past, he seems a stranger to our shores.