G. K. Chesterton: life, ideas and books

Life

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874 and educated at St Paul's School, then studied art and literature without taking a degree. He worked for publishers, began a weekly column in The Daily News in 1902 and from 1905 wrote a weekly column for The Illustrated London News for about thirty years. During the First World War he edited The New Witness.

He wrote about eighty books, hundreds of poems, about two hundred short stories and thousands of essays. He became a Roman Catholic in 1922, gave popular radio talks for the BBC in 1931 and was the first president of the Detection Club. He died at his home in Beaconsfield in 1936. He was accused in his lifetime of antisemitism, a charge that is still debated.

Ideas

Chesterton was famed for paradox, the use of surprising reversals to make a plain truth fresh. He defended tradition as the "democracy of the dead", giving a vote to the generations before us, and he defended common sense against fashionable theories. He championed distributism, a "third way" between capitalism and socialism that favoured widespread ownership of small property. He opposed imperialism, including the Boer War, and eugenics.

In Orthodoxy (1908) he argued for the Christian creed as the source of a robust, joyful view of life.

Major works

• Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1908).
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908).
• The Father Brown detective stories (from 1910).
• The Everlasting Man (1925).

Why conservatives read him

Chesterton is a favourite of traditionalist and religious conservatives for his defence of family, property, local life and inherited custom against abstract theory and big institutions. His arguments for humility toward tradition echo Edmund Burke, and his writing influenced C. S. Lewis and many others. Readers also take pleasure in the wit of his prose.