G.K. Chesterton
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London on May 29, 1874, and died at Beaconsfield on June 14, 1936. He trained at the Slade School of Art, which shows in how visually he writes, then went into journalism and stayed there. He was a working columnist for most of his life, producing an article or two a week for decades.
He was physically enormous, famously absent-minded, and on cordial terms with the men he argued against hardest, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells among them. He received into the Catholic Church in 1922, having argued his way there in public over twenty years.
Why he wrote it
The Man Who Was Thursday appeared in 1908, subtitled A Nightmare, a subtitle readers routinely ignore and should not.
It belongs to a period when Chesterton was working out of a personal crisis of pessimism, and it is addressed, in its dedicatory poem, to a school friend who had lived through the same fog with him. It is shaped like a thriller about a cell of anarchists in which almost nobody is who he claims to be, and it is really about whether the universe is on your side.
The book we publish, and why
We publish The Man Who Was Thursday because it speaks directly to a reader who suspects the two sides on offer are the same side.
The plot keeps pulling the floor away. Every unmasking leads to another mask. A reader who has ever felt that the opposition and the authority are somehow in business together will recognize the sensation exactly, and the book takes that feeling seriously rather than mocking it.
The benefit is nerve. It does not tell you that your suspicion is foolish. It tells you to keep asking, and it gets you to the end with your sanity and your sense of humor intact.
How to read it
Read it fast. It is short, it moves like a chase, and it is much better at speed than it is dissected. Resist working out the allegory on the first pass.
Take the subtitle literally. It is a nightmare, and it follows dream logic rather than detective logic. Readers who try to solve it as a mystery end up frustrated, because the solution is not the kind of thing a mystery has.
Read the dedicatory poem at the front, and then read it again at the end. It is the key to the whole book and almost everyone skips it.
Pair it with
- Machiavelli, The Prince. Machiavelli explains how the appearance of a thing is managed; Chesterton writes the nightmare of living inside that management.
- Thomas Aquinas, whom Chesterton later wrote a short book about, and who supplies the reasoning behind the sanity Chesterton is defending.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, another master of the serious adventure, and a writer Chesterton admired and wrote about.
His principal works
He published around eighty books and several thousand essays. These are the ones most readers start from.
- The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904. His first novel.
- Heretics, 1905. Essays against the fashionable thinkers of the day.
- Charles Dickens, 1906. The criticism credited with reviving Dickens's reputation.
- The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, 1908.
- Orthodoxy, 1908. His account of how he reasoned his way to belief.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911, and four further collections to 1935.
- The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911. A long narrative poem on Alfred the Great.
- The Everlasting Man, 1925. Credited by C.S. Lewis as important to his own conversion.
- St. Francis of Assisi, 1923, and St. Thomas Aquinas, 1933.
- Autobiography, 1936, published after his death.
General reference on G.K. Chesterton. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by G.K. Chesterton