The Life and Words of GK Chesterton (2 page)

Unlike so many middle class boys of his generation, G. K. Chesterton was spared the cruelty and penalism of the boarding schools, where the older boys ruled the younger through rigid and violent structures with little interference from the schoolmasters. Instead, he attended a day school not far from his parents’ home in Kensington.

The first school that young Gilbert attended was called Colet Court. He graduated at age 12, in January 1887, and transferred to the preparatory school across the street: St. Paul’s School. It was a rather prominent school, where academics were held in high esteem. It was a school where winning scholarships was considered more important than other achievements, such as sport.

In speaking of St. Paul’s in his Autobiography, G. K. Chesterton, seemingly unwittingly, reveals his sheltered upbringing. At an age when many boys were experiencing systematic violence, Chesterton's own main preoccupation was his dislike for Greek minuscules.

Although he had always been an avid reader and a bright young boy, Gilbert felt most at home when he was invisible. He thrived on neglect and found obscurity and failure to be protective forces. He was happiest at the back of the row and at the bottom of the class, appearing to sleep through his classes, even though on his way to school, he may have skipped giddily along the street reciting quotes from the past day’s readings. Although Chesterton later referred to himself at this age as part of the larger group of “that monster the schoolboy,” according to one of his school masters, Gilbert was in fact “as easy to control as an old sheep.”

Gilbert was, in his own words, for most part a loner, although not sorry about it. For some time, he was teased by the other boys for his tallness, his untidiness, his absent-mindedness, and his poor eyesight, but in the end, he was accepted and even admired, certainly largely due to his wit.

Despite considering himself a loner, it would seem that Chesterton had a number of close friends at St. Paul’s. Perhaps the closest friend he ever made was found there one day on the St. Paul schoolyard. His name was E. C. Bentley. They met on the school’s playground and were inexplicably drawn to each other, despite never having seen each other before, with a mutual desire to fight in the way that schoolboys sometimes do without malign intent or even disliking each other. They fought wildly for forty-five minutes, rolling over and over again in the mud. They parted tousled and the best of friends.

Young Gilbert’s passion and pastime in those days were his drawings. He drew on every piece of scrap paper, illustrating jokes and stories of his and Bentley’s, much to their mutual amusement. Chesterton said once that those scraps of drawings “covered enough waste paper to stock a library.”

The dynamic duo, however, did not remain a duo for long. A thin and dark-haired youth appeared seemingly out of nowhere, a transfer student with more outspoken, confident, and worldly ways. “Above all,” Gilbert wrote, “there possessed him, almost feverishly, a vast, amazing and devastating idea, the idea of doing something; of doing something in the manner of grown-up people, who were the only people who could be conceived as doing things.” His name was Lucian Oldershaw, and the loner Gilbert found himself one third of a trio.

In July 1890 they founded the Junior Debating Club together, a society that attracted at least a handful of other boys from St. Paul’s School. As if running a club were not enough, Oldershaw, always the more forceful of the boys, had more ideas. Chesterton wrote in his Autobiography:

I well remember how my hair stood on end, when he first spoke casually about the official School Magazine; which was to me something like the School Prayers or the School Foundation. None of us had ever dreamed of contributing to it, any more than to the Encyclopedia Britannica. And my new friend, who was somewhat younger than I, spoke lightly about an old idea he had had of establishing some cooperation between all the great school magazines, those of Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest. If he had proposed that we should conquer and rule the British Empire, I could not have been more staggered; but he dismissed it as casually as he had called it up, and then proposed in cold blood that we should publish a magazine of our own; and have it printed at a real printer’s. He must have possessed considerable persuasive powers; because we actually did.

The magazine that they published was called the Debater, and its purpose was to record the papers read at each meeting of the Junior Debating Club, along with notes from said meetings, and essays or even short stories and poems by members of the society. The first copy of the magazine came out in March 1891 and had been produced on a duplicating machine in one of the boys’ homes.

Chesterton contributed something in every issue, often in both prose and verse. The seventeen-year-old Chesterton argued for such topics as a moral basis in literature and against such things as aestheticism for the sake of art alone. He wrote poetry that was overtly religious but anti-dogmatic, often echoing the views of the Unitarian preacher, Reverend Stopford Brooke, one of the few whose services the Chesterton family attended. He also began to write essays on religious topics, in which he defended what was at that time, by his peers, deemed a medieval kind of piety, with ever present saints and angels, and against the kind of religion that was exhibited only on Sundays.

Although art was Chesterton's primary domain, he very much enjoyed writing for the Debater. Perhaps it was writing for his own club magazine that led him to start sending out poetry to the national press. His first ever nationally published poem was The Song of Labour, a poem in which Chesterton aligned himself with the workers of the world, and it appeared in a journal called the Speaker in 1892, when Gilbert was 18 years old.

When Gilbert’s time at St. Paul’s came to an end in the summer of 1892, Edward Chesterton decided to take his eldest son on a joint graduation and 18th birthday trip. It was Gilbert’s first trip abroad. They traveled across the English Channel by boat and explored the northern French coast of Normandy. As close as Normandy is to England, it was a whole new world to Chesterton, with its abbeys and the nuns in their black robes and broad rimmed wimples.

Returning to England, Gilbert took a gap year of sorts during which he spent much of his time completing drawings for a collection of four-line verses. His best friend Bentley was not only the editor of said collection but also the primary contributor, although several others from the old debating club at St. Paul’s School joined in.

Unlike his friends, Gilbert was not destined for Oxford or Cambridge. He had his mind set on art school. Although he had already been published in the national press and spent much of his time working on writing for the Debater while in school, Gilbert, his friends, his parents, and his teachers all felt that art was where Gilbert’s true talent lay. So in October 1893 he enrolled at the Slade School of Art at University College London.

Since Slade was part of University College London, Chesterton was allowed to attend any of the university’s lectures, and although it was unusual to do so, Gilbert did so with gusto. He attended nearly as many lectures for other departments as he did his own. In particular, he favored the Latin, English, and French departments. Being enrolled at Slade, however, he did not need passing grades in any of the classes that he took, so he did not take any exams. He thus gained a reputation amongst his fellow students and some of the faculty as a man devoted to culture for culture’s sake, a rumor that Gilbert himself felt was entirely undeserved.

If we are to trust Bentley, Gilbert did not improve his art at all during his time at Slade. Even his teachers seem to have felt that studying art was a waste of Gilbert’s time. Henry Tonks, one of Gilbert’s art instructors, told the Chestertons that their son had such genius and such a mature style to start with that his teachers could only ruin his originality by trying to teach him anything.

The real problem, however, was that Gilbert was not enthusiastic enough about art. He was a natural at the decorative and the grotesque but lacked the patience for the labor and technical toil of fine art. Curiously, he never felt that way about writing even though he expressed to his friends that creative writing was the “hardest of hard labour” and that “there is no work so tiring as writing; that is, not for fun, but for publication.”

He ended up studying art for only one year and English and French for two; leaving University College London at the age of 20 in the summer of 1895 without a degree in anything.

His school years were also a time when Chesterton himself purported to have gotten to know the devil intimately. His trespass into the sinner’s territory may seem very light in most modern eyes, but in Chesterton’s eyes, it was a grave and dangerous misstep. “But I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil,” he wrote. “I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led me to devil-worship or the devil knows what.” He called it his period of “madness.” In reality, he did not come closer to the devil than many school children today. In the spirit of play, he dabbled in spiritualist matters such as playing with Ouija boards. Nothing remotely spiritual ever came of it. Chesterton wrote:

My father, who was present while my brother and I were playing the fool in this fashion, had a curiosity to see whether the oracle could answer a question about something that he knew and we did not. He therefore asked the maiden name of the wife of an uncle of mine in a distant country; a lady whom we of the younger generation had never known. With the lightning decision of infallibility, the spirit pen said, “Manning”. With equal decision my father said, “Nonsense”.

As if a continuation from his habitually spiritualist school days, Gilbert landed a job with a publishing house almost immediately upon leaving school. In September 1895 he started working for Redway’s, a publisher of occult literature, where it was his duty to read his way through the pile of unsolicited manuscripts and to send out review copies of recently published works. He was incredibly busy, but the work excited him. In the evenings, after a long day at Redway’s, he sat at home and wrote, polishing, amongst other things, a short story called “A Picture of Tuesday,” which came to be published in a new journal called Quatro. It was a large hardbound quarterly publication featuring principally the works of Slade alumni.

After a year at Redway’s, Gilbert left to work for Fisher Unwin, a significantly more prestigious publishing house. There, he had the surprising fortune of being given a much more distinguished job by mere happenstance. Being the only person at the publishing house who knew any Latin, he was put to work on a book called Rome and the Empire. He was its all-round editor, choosing illustrations, correcting its notes, and working on the introduction and the text itself. Otherwise, his work at Fisher Unwin much more resembled his work at Redway’s.

It was when he had just started his work at Fisher Unwin that Gilbert’s friend Oldershaw brought him to a debate held in the London suburb of Bedford Park in the home of the Blogg family. They were the wife and three daughters of a deceased diamond merchant, fallen from considerable wealth into near poverty. The daughters were very beautiful, all three of them, so young men flocked to the home. Oldershaw was there, no doubt, in large part to woo young Ethel, whom he later married. On this particular day in 1896, Gilbert sat down next to Frances Blogg and fell immediately in love. The feelings were mutual.

Unfortunately, their families did not feel as strongly about the match as Gilbert and Frances did. Marie Chesterton had already picked out a suitable wife for her son: Annie Firmin, a practical and not too bookish young lady who was Gilbert’s cousin on his father’s side. Neither Annie nor Gilbert, although friends, had any romantic feelings towards the other.

Mrs. Boggs was no less easily persuaded. The fact that Gilbert only earned 25 shillings per week, scarcely enough to provide for a wife, must have played a part in her skepticism, but she also felt that Gilbert was something of a “a self-opinionated scarecrow.” The scarecrow comment may have been related to Gilbert’s personal appearance. Just as during his schoolboy years, the 22-year-old Gilbert took very little care of himself. In fact, Mrs. Boggs turned to Lucian Oldershaw on one occasion to ask him to please convince Gilbert to at least try to improve his appearance somewhat. Gilbert responded to his friend that Francis loved him as he was and thus he would be a fool to change.

The mothers did eventually give in, and Gilbert and Frances were engaged. Theirs was a long engagement, not uncommon in those days. Frances remained in her mother’s home, working as a secretary during the days, and Gilbert continued to work in publishing while they got to know each other more closely through visits and letters.

Oldershaw once said of Gilbert: “He did nothing for himself till we came down from Oxford and pushed him.” Such a push in 1899, three years into Gilbert and Frances’s engagement, resulted in Gilbert’s decision to leave Fisher Unwin and live only by his own pen.

Gilbert himself, in true G. K. Chesterton spirit, ascribed his success in literature to someone other than himself. He claimed that it was Ernest Hodder Williams, a friend of his from University College London, who was to be credited with steering the young Gilbert onto the writing path. During their literary conversations after their joint English lectures, it was William who persuaded Chesterton that he could write. According to Chesterton, Williams did far more, however; he used his connections. Williams belonged to a publishing family. They ran the publishing house Hodder & Stoughton, which published a magazine called the Bookman. Williams supposedly gave Chesterton some books on art to review for the magazine, the first of which appeared as early as December 1899. Modern biographers, however, have come to doubt this story as neither the issue in question or any issues released close to that date contain any reviews under G. K. Chesterton’s name nor any anonymous reviews.

In any case, Gilbert did start writing professionally in 1899. Mostly, he worked as a freelance journalist of sorts for a magazine called the Speaker, which had recently been taken over by a group of opinionated young liberals.