Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908 by William Oddie (review)

724 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE the 1970s-those by Christopher Hibbert, John Wain, and Walter Jackson Batefloundered . Forty years later, with newspapers dying and television networks struggling to defend their content, Johnson's great achievement should be clear to usan achievement that dwarfs the details of his troubled sexuality. Through his Dictionary, his edition of Shakespeare, and his Lives, Johnson redefined literacy; he moved the English-speaking people beyond Alexander Pope's brilliant (but also nasty) anger about the decline of the Classics, the end of patronage, and the new literary commerce. Johnson's great threesome all were produced at the prompting of and in association with consortiums of booksellers; profit was a motive. Johnson established Shakespeare as the new "Classic;' outlined a canon (not the canon) for British poetry, and slowed the inevitable (as he acknowledged) mutation of our language. He was not a great novelist, not a great dramatist, not a great poet (although he wrote some great poems). He was a brilliant essayist and, frequently, a great critic (but remember that he preferred Nahum Tate's happy ending for King Lear). His greatness lies in his establishing "English" as a written language that all with talent and energy might use; this islikelywhy the Irish Beckett and the Russian Nabokov appreciated him so greatly. His version of literacy has lasted more than 200 years and today, as it dies amidst the futile lamentations of op-ed writers in the New York Times and expressions of concern from members of the United States Congress, we might better ponder what he would have made of the Internet than whether his lashings were real or metaphorical. Brian McCrea University ofFlorida Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908. By William Oddie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-955165-1. Pp. xii + 401. $50. As Ian Ker authoritatively indicates on the back cover, this is an extremely important and impressive new study of Chesterton. William Oddie has used for the first time a variety of scholarly materials, especially the Chesterton papers in the British Library recently catalogued by A. R. Christophers, and this has brought both important new insights and a major new synthesis. Oddie covers here the first half of the career, tracing, as he puts it, "the growth of Chesterton's mind to the point in his literary career at which ... he had fully established the intellectual foundations on which the massive oeuvre of his last three decades was to be built" (10-11), that is, the publication of Orthodoxy in 1910. In doing so, he has revolutionized our sense of Chesterton's intellectual development and of his sources and the rich BOOK REVIEWS 725 variety of influences on him. Especially crucial is his careful mapping out of the process of Chesterton's growing interest in Christianity and then soon in Catholic Christianity, both of which he shows as predating what has always been supposed before. The importance of Chesterton's childhood has certainly been well rehearsed by other biographers, especially the influence of his playful and fantastical fatherthe toy theater and so on. Oddies excitement at his new material is not always matched at this stage of the book by an appropriate sense of their importance, and I found some degree of unnecessary quotation from Chesterton's early poems and prose, including his first story written at the age of three. Admittedly they show his precociousness and touch on later themes, but none of this material has much merit in its own right. This pattern continues to some extent into the account of the years at St. Paul's school, and I am not sure we really need to hear, for example, that Chesterton missed his friends who left before him or to have a quotation from his doggerel poem on having tea with them. Yetthere are also some brilliant illuminations on the way. I was struck by the account of Chesterton's early reaction to a George MacDonald story "The Princess and the Goblin;' for example, and especially pleased to recognize that the motif of the golden thread that the fairy grandmother uses to guide the heroine is clearly the source of...