Where Chesterton Began

This collection of Chesterton’s early journalism also includes a number of letters to the editor of the Daily News. Many come from disgruntled readers, such as 180 or so self-styled ‘women workers’ of Selfridges, Oxford Street, who object to a recent piece on department stores. ‘His whole charge against what he calls the atmosphere of the personnel of department stores is without the slightest foundation’, they write (viii. 15). Turning to the article, you find that Chesterton has in fact compared the department store to Hell:

Every home has a centre, the hearth and altar of the ancients; and this is where the modern shop is hellish because it is homeless … Heaven, as I conceive it, would be a place where you could find God. Hell would be a place where you could not find anything, not even Satan. Satan would only be a vast, invisible, elusive eternal essence.

(viii. 12)

The easygoing supernaturalism is characteristic, as is the style: a high rhetoric which some readers will always find embarrassing, delivered in a tone which takes its life from ordinary speech (‘You can’t find anything in Selfridges nowadays, not even Satan’). Also characteristic is the note of social protest, since for Chesterton the department store exemplifies modern wage-slavery: why else, he wonders, would all the workers be in uniform? Indeed, the editor Julia Stapleton, a historian of the period, notes that the Selfridges employees may well have been coerced by their manager to write the letter.

The piece typifies Chesterton’s liking for clear-cut definitions – evil is ‘invisible, elusive’ – and his willingness to find moral significance in almost everything, a trait which exasperated George Orwell. Chesterton, Orwell wrote, had ‘worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved’.¹ Department stores do not exhaust Chesterton’s capacity for denunciation, which he also extends to cars, gin, Sabbath gloom, horse-racing, Marcus Aurelius, saying ‘Happy Christmas’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’, good taste, the House of Lords, vivisection, intellectuals, and millionaires. On the other hand, he admires kitchen gardens, the French Revolution, barrel-organs, talking about the weather, charades, the Luddites, platitudes, the minimum wage, puns, the football news (‘of which I do not understand a single word’), April Fool’s Day, and the belligerent verse which is always left out of the National Anthem.

The last five years have seen something of a Chesterton revival, from monographs and biographical studies to popular anthologies, and a discussion of Chesterton as philosopher between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek.² Now, for the first time, we have an edition of his journalism produced to high scholarly standards. True, the Collected Works published by Ignatius Press includes thirty years of columns for the Illustrated London News, but those volumes lack Stapleton’s extensive editorial work. Moreover, the Daily News pieces have a unique importance for understanding how Chesterton’s thought developed.

Development can seem a redundant concept when, aged 27, Chesterton is already breezing into this kind of sentence: ‘Romantic love is especially akin to Christianity and especially opposed to Paganism in its profoundly personal note, in its recklessness, in its tone of certainty, in its ingrained mysticism, and in its insistence on the value of the separated soul’ (i. 131). Such extreme confidence can give the impression that Chesterton’s thinking had already settled into the positions he would later advocate. Even his best critics – still more the well-meaning hagiographers – have struggled to see his early political writings other than in terms of the Christian beliefs he championed from Orthodoxy (1908) onwards and the political ideas, based on a version of Catholic social teaching, which he proposed in later years.

More than most writers, Chesterton can be uprooted from his context and remain intelligible – except in...