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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox,” and Time magazine observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.”

He was a large man in every way, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighing around 286 pounds. His girth gave rise to an anecdote during the First World War, when a lady in London asked why he was not “out at the Front.” He replied, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.” On another occasion, he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, “To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England.” Shaw retorted, “To look at you, anyone would think you had caused it.” And P.G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as “a sound like G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin.”

He affected an unusual style for the time, and could be found wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. He had a tendency to forget where he was supposed to be going and miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent telegrams to his wife from an incorrect location, writing such things as “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” to which she would reply, “Home.” Chesterton himself told this story—omitting, however, his wife’s alleged reply, in his autobiography.

Much of his work is religious in nature. Even his most famous creation, the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, has a religious background. He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England, though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians. He married Frances Blogg in 1901; the marriage lasted the rest of his life. Chesterton credited Frances with leading him back to Anglicanism, though he later decided Anglicanism was a “pale imitation” and entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922.

Even some of those who disagree with his theological writings have recognized the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an “orthodox” Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. On his contributions, T. S. Eliot wrote:

He was importantly and consistently on the side of the angels. Behind the Johnsonian fancy-dress, so reassuring to the British public, he concealed the most serious and revolutionary designs—concealing them by exposure ... Chesterton’s social and economic ideas...were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more, I think, than any man of his time—and was able to do more than anyone else, because of his particular background, development and abilities as a public performer—to maintain the existence of the important minority in the modern world. He leaves behind a permanent claim upon our loyalty, to see that the work that he did in his time is continued in ours.

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The sermon at Chesterton’s Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox. Knox said, “All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.” He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery.

—Karl Wurf

Rockville, Maryland