Episode 66. G. K. Chesterton

SYNOPSIS

Largely known to a modern audience as the creator of the fictional detective, Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) established himself in the Edwardian heyday of print journalism as a major and distinctive voice. A controversialist and, later, a Christian apologist, he crossed literary swords, but only playfully, with leading secularists of the time, Robert Blatchford, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Not one to dispense false praise, Shaw described Chesterton as ‘a colossal genius’.

Dedicating himself over many decades to meeting the unforgiving deadlines of Fleet Street as a contributor and later magazine editor (the Australian cultural critic, Clive James once quipped that Chesterton could write faster than most people could read), Chesterton also found time to release ground-breaking reappraisals of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens. His hard-to-classify novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) explore alternative realities, influencing the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.

Raised in a climate of free thought, then rejecting the cultural pessimism of the time while at the Slade School of Fine Art, Chesterton embraced Anglo-Catholicism through the influence of his wife Frances Blogg; their wedding ceremony was conducted by the future Red Vicar of Thaxted, Conrad Noel. Chesterton’s friendship with the lifelong Catholic, Hilaire Belloc, led to him espousing distributism as a social palliative to the extremes of unbridled capitalism or doctrinaire communism. He was received into the Church of Rome in 1922.

GUESTS

Dale Ahlquist is President of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Publisher of Gilbert Magazine. Acknowledged as probably the greatest living authority on the life and work of G. K. Chesterton, Dale has authored six books and edited fourteen. Influenced by Chesterton’s social thought, Dale is also the co-founder of Chesterton Academy, a Catholic high school in Minnesota and the flagship of the growing Chesterton Schools Network, which includes nearly 60 high schools in the U.S., Canada, Italy, Iraq and Sierra Leone.

Simon’s interview with Dale Ahlquist was recorded online on 7 April 2025.