David Goodway, The Libertarian Politics of G.K. Chesterton[1]
​
 

In Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow:  Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward I included G.K. Chesterton in a list of ‘anarchist and libertarian writers’, but then say no more other than that with Hilaire Belloc he was to develop the theory of distributism.  In the second edition I remarked: ‘The large, though complicated and difficult, figure of G.K. Chesterton demands extended treatment (and perhaps one day I shall give it him)’.[2]  The pun was intentional:  Chesterton’s corporeality was so massive that the large chair provided for a lecture series was the second week replaced by a sofa.[3]  Yet he was also large by virtue of his intellectual brilliance and literary gifts.  His achievement has probably always been disproportionately admired by his Roman Catholic co-religionists.  As Eric Hobsbawm (rather surprisingly) comments ‘the dimensions of [his] talent have been concealed from non-Catholics by the very closeness of his association with the Church…’, going on to quote the major Italian novelist Italo Calvino as once saying that one of his ambitions was to become ‘the Chesterton of the Communists’.  Hobsbawm’s fellow labour historian Henry Pelling had astutely recognized that ‘the fantasy of G.K. Chesterton and the satire of Hilaire Belloc linked Anglo-Catholicism and Roman Catholicism respectively to a strong social criticism akin to that of the syndicalists’.[4]  It is, of course, my intention in this essay to give Chesterton the extended treatment I consider he deserves.
 
When in 1970 W.H. Auden edited a selection of Chesterton’s work he began by confessing that, although he had always enjoyed the poetry and fiction, it had been many years since he had read any of the non-fictional prose.  He gives two reasons for this neglect.  He disliked – and thought a mistake – the essays, originating as they did from Chesterton’s weekly journalism.  In contrast, I believe that his finest work is as an essayist and literary critic.  Several of the essays Auden lists as meriting derision were reprinted in the outstanding Tremendous Trifles (1909) and include one, ‘A Piece of Chalk’, which I relish.  But the other reason for Auden’s neglect (and to which he gives priority) was Chesterton’s notorious, undeniable anti-semitism.[5]  It puzzles Chesterton’s admirers that a man who it is agreed was otherwise warm-hearted and generous of spirit should be so flawed.  His fiction is disfigured by the obsessional introduction of Jewish caricatures.  The growth of this monstrous blemish will be explained – although naturally in no way excused – at the appropriate point in what is largely a chronological treatment.
 
In 2013 an investigation was opened by the Bishop of Northampton as to whether Chesterton merited canonization (that is, could ultimately be declared a saint by the Pope).  Six years later the conclusion not surprisingly was that he did not, his anti-semitism being instanced as a major obstacle.[6]  Yet there is an ingrained anti-semitism in much Catholic thinking.  One’s heart sinks on reading in the index to Ian Ker’s vast biography of Chesterton an entry reading ‘anti-Semitism of, alleged’.  (Ker was the admired biographer and editor of the works of John Henry Newman, successfully sanctified in 2019, but falls far short in an entirely uncritical second biography.)[7]    This inherent Catholic anti-semitism was associated with anti-Bolshevism and a sympathy for Fascism.  For example, there is the egregious letter of 1939 in which David Jones, another individual of personal sweetness, shaped by membership of Eric Gill’s communities and workshops, wrote of being ‘deeply impressed’ by the full edition of Mein Kampf (he had previously read a ‘miserable cut-about edition’):  ‘God, he’s nearly right….Compared with his opponents he is grand….I back him…against all this currish, leftish, money thing…’[8]

 
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on 29 May 1874 in Campden Hill, Kensington - whose Waterworks Tower was to feature prominently in The Napoleon of Notting Hill – although most of his childhood was spent in nearby Warwick Gardens.  His father Edward Chesterton was an estate agent; his mother, Marie Louise, née Grosjean, had a grandfather of Swiss French origin who had married into an Aberdeen family called Keith, hence Chesterton’s second name.  He was educated at St Paul’s School and the Slade School of Art.[9]  He had initially considered art as a career but, on graduation, embarked immediately on a literary one, first working as a publisher’s reader and then establishing himself, still in the 1890s, as a contributor to the newspaper and periodical press. His breakthrough book came as early as 1903 with Robert Browning, commissioned for the long-established English Men of Letters series.  Experts seized upon its many factual mistakes and misquotations - there is even a line of verse supposedly by Browning though of Chesterton’s composition – but the criticism was brilliant, full of acute judgment, and the volume continues to be occasionally reprinted.  Literary criticism was one of his fields of major achievement.  Robert Browning was followed by Heretics (1905), a collection of essays largely on writers;  Charles Dickens (1906);  George Bernard Shaw (1909), knowledgeable, admiring, penetrating and wonderfully written, it deliberately excludes discussion of Shaw’s state socialism – Shaw himself hailed it on publication as ‘the best work of literary art I have yet provoked’;[10]  and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), original, profound and incisive, placing literature within a framework of socio-political history and the history of ideas, which was contributed to the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, a series that was to be taken over by Oxford University Press, and is said to have remained continuously in print.
 
The two touchstones of The Victorian Age in Literature are William Cobbett, although a pre-Victorian writer, and Charles Dickens:

 …to any one who feels literature as human, the empty chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne.  With him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which only poets and mobs can understand.  After him Radicalism is urban…Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds.  But Shelley would have called Birmingham what Cobbett called it – a hell-hole.  Cobbett was one with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of no mean city.  He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

As for Dickens, ‘he represents the return of Cobbett in that…he is proud of being the ordinary man…. Dickens… liked the things that Cobbett had liked;  what is perhaps more to the point, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated;  the Tudors, the lawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor’.  It may therefore be readily seen that Chesterton’s appreciation of Cobbett and Dickens as prose writers is inextricably connected to their social radicalism, a radicalism to which he himself  was passionately committed.[11]
 
Chesterton was to publish a study of Cobbett in 1925, but it is his Charles Dickens of 1906 that is his exceptional work on a writer.  His overriding admiration was for the earlier novels, especially the joviality of The Pickwick Papers, and so was unable to do justice to the remarkable novels after David Copperfield - Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend – that are so much to modern taste.  Yet this does not matter since the book is scarcely an exercise in literary criticism, but an unveiling of Dickens’s personality and inclinations (identical as they were to Chesterton’s own).  The assessment of no less a critic than V.S. Pritchett, on re-reading it in 1974, was as ‘not merely good;  it is a masterpiece and contains, among other things, the most enlightening portrait of Dickens himself that I have ever read…it is the decent, sensible liveliness of Chesterton’s detail that spreads, like a kind of wisdom, into the portrait’.[12]
 
In 1896 Chesterton had been introduced to Frances Blogg, four years his senior, in Bedford Park where she lived with her mother and four siblings, their father a diamond merchant who he had died when she was fourteen.  Bedford Park provides the setting for the opening chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday, the only realistic element of a bafflingly overrated extravaganza:

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.  It was built of bright brick throughout;  its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild….It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, although it never in any definable way produced any art.  But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable.[13]

Frances had necessarily to take paid employment, working as a secretary for an educational society (the Parents’ National Educational Union) until she and Chesterton married in 1901.  His family were nominally Anglican, but on their irregular attendance at church it was to hear Unitarian sermons, whereas Frances was a fervent Anglo-Catholic.  In consequence he now began to take an interest in religion, initially as a devout Anglo-Catholic himself – Pelling’s reference to Anglo-Catholicism quoted in the first paragraph was entirely correct.  His public declaration of adherence to the Church of Rome was to be delayed until as late as 1922 out of respect for his wife’s faith (though she followed him four years later).  Frances Chesterton’s family was most probably Jewish: diamond merchants who had converted to Christianity several generations earlier.  What, one necessarily wonders, would have been the effect of this on Chesterton’s anti-Semitism had he known?[14]
The Chestertons’ early married life was spent in Battersea;  but in 1909 Frances secured her husband’s agreement to move away from London - and the temptations of the pubs of Fleet Street – to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, still within easy reach of London.  The new location suited them both well, although they remained childless, especially disappointing for Chesterton, who loved children and was in many ways childlike himself.  His everyday affairs, above all financial, remained chaotic however, until Dorothy Collins took over as secretary in 1926.   This remarkable young woman was super-competent, sorting out all the problems and chauffeuring the Chestertons in her own Rover throughout Britain and across the Channel.  She became in all but name their adopted daughter.  In his autobiography (published shortly after his death) Chesterton wrote that she ‘acted as secretary, courier, chauffeuse, guide, philosopher, and above all, friend, without whom my wife and I would have often been without friends and in need of philosophy’.[15]  He appointed her his literary executor, an excellent choice since she displayed great devotion to his reputation.  She was to be responsible for the posthumous publication of several volumes of uncollected essays, including The Common Man (1950), The Glass Walking-Stick (1955), The Spice of Life (1964) and The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (1975).
 
While there had been little concern for religion in Chesterton’s upbringing, with politics matters were quite different.  His parents were staunch Liberals and he imbibed Liberalism from them.  He recalled that as a very young man:

I called myself a Socialist;  because the only alternative to being a Socialist was not being a Socialist.  And not being a Socialist was a perfectly ghastly thing….But in my heart I was a reluctant Socialist.

This would have been in the 1890s and Dudley Barker associates it with his involvement with ‘Bedford Park circles’.[16]  But from the Khaki Election of 1900 he reverted to his family’s Liberalism.  He was a pro-Boer and a proud anti-Imperialist Little Englander.  ‘All our ordinary intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row’, he was to maintain:  ‘I remember during the Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen’s Hall, and giving and receiving a bloody nose’.[17]  His prolific journalism for the leading Liberal newspaper, the Daily News, dates from 1901 and his columns are peppered with references to his support for the Party and its principles.  ‘Speaking as a Liberal’, he writes of ‘we Liberals’, ‘the Radical idealists of my own party’ and
We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism.  Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith.[18]
 
During the first decade of the twentieth century Chesterton numbered among his close friends some of the liveliest and most able of the younger intellectuals, frequently fellow members of the Christian Social Union.  Conrad Noel, already a Christian Socialist but before his leftward lurch as Vicar of Thaxted, had officiated at the Chestertons’ wedding.  Charles (C.F.G.) Masterman was a rising Liberal politician, the author of The Condition of England (1909) and prominent as an advocate of the New Liberalism, working for the transformation of classic laissez-faire Liberalism by social reform and state intervention.  Chesterton dedicated What’s Wrong with the World to him in 1910 ‘because there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing called friendship;  an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which, please god, will never break’.[19]  And in 1900 Chesterton met, fatally, Belloc.

 
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was the son of a French father and an English mother, the daughter of Joseph Parkes, the Birmingham Radical who had played a devious role as an intermediary during the Reform Crisis of 1831-32.  He was brought up in England as a devout Catholic.[20]  Probably best remembered nowadays for his brilliant but cruel comic verse (Cautionary Tales for Children;  The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts), he was, like Chesterton, a prolific author yet most dissimilar in personality: harsh, flinty, unyielding.  His deep anti-semitism was first manifested while he was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and was an opponent of Dreyfus;  and there is agreement that it was through his friendship with Belloc that Chesterton became an anti-semite.[21]
 
In 1906 Belloc was elected Liberal MP for Salford South.  There were to be two general elections in 1910 and although he was returned at the first, he then stood down.  He had never been at ease in the House of Commons and by 1910 was considerably disaffected with the British parliamentary system in general and the Liberal Party in particular.  He told the Salford South caucus that he would only stand again as an independent but they would not accept, as was only to expected, ‘a candidate pledged to ridicule and criticize the Party System’.[22]
 
The following year he founded a weekly journal, the Eye Witness in collaboration with Cecil Chesterton.  Cecil was GKC’s only sibling, five years younger and adored by him.  He had been a socialist – and actually a member of the Fabian Society’s executive – but was now a radical Liberal with similar beliefs to Belloc.  He was a very talented but a fierce crusading journalist whose impetuousness was to land him in serious trouble.  As early as 1912 Belloc, bored and overworked, resigned his editorship to Cecil Chesterton and pulled out financially.  Cecil continued single-handedly, renaming the paper the New Witness.[23] 
 
Then came the Marconi Affair with disastrous, indeed tragic, consequences for Cecil’s brother.  This case of possible insider dealing concerned the need for an ‘Imperial wireless chain’, utilizing the new technology of radio telegraphy.  In March 1912 Herbert Samuel, the Liberal Postmaster-General, accepted, subject to parliamentary ratification, the tender of the Marconi Company, the prospect of such a large contract causing the company’s shares to soar.  The terms of the agreement were announced in August with their consideration by Parliament deferred until October, but there were rumours that some ministers had influenced the deal so as to profit by owning shares.  When the contract came up for ratification the Commons sent it to a select committee to inquire into the conduct of ministers as well as the technical aspects of the agreement.  An advisory committee of experts reported with respect to the latter that ‘the Marconi system is at present the only system of which it can be said with any certainty that it is capable of fulfilling the requirements of the Imperial chain’.  It was the ministerial conduct that was controversial.
 
Samuel was exonerated;  but Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General, the Master of Elibank (a Scottish aristocrat who had been the Liberal Chief Whip until August), and none other than David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the central figure in the current ambitious programme of radical reform, were shown to have owned shares, not in the British Marconi Company, but in the sister company functioning in the USA.  The three could not have corruptly influenced acceptance of the tender since their earliest purchases of shares occurred over five weeks following its announcement.  The committee therefore agreed that the ministers had not used privileged knowledge to buy stocks which they knew must rise.  On the other hand, Godfrey Isaacs, the attorney-general’s brother, was the secretary of the British Marconi Company, and had originally offered him the American Marconi shares.  Rufus Isaacs had declined, but subsequently acquired them from a third brother, Harry.  It was these shares that formed the first purchases of the three ministers – and so the blood relationship between the attorney-general and the secretary of the company was really pertinent.  The US and British companies were distinct and the Liberal majority of the select committee held that ‘the ministers concerned, when entering into the purchases, were all bona-fide convinced that the American company had no interest in the agreement’, whereas the Conservative minority was also correct that such an interest existed and was ‘material, although indirect’.  So the Liberal majority acquitted the ministers of wrongdoing, while the Conservatives found the original purchases were a ‘grave impropriety’ and that they, for keeping silent about them in the debate of 11 October were ‘wanting in frankness and in respect for the House of Commons’.  Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs freely owned their error of judgment and expressed their regret for it to the Commons on 18 June 1913.  A vote then followed on party lines in which the expressions of regret were accepted and the charges of corruption rejected.[24]
 
Cecil Chesterton attacked all involved in the scandal with delighted vigour.  His first article, ‘The Case of the Marconi Company’, actually appeared in the first issue of the New Witness on 8 August 1912.  His accusation of the politicians’ corruption was sustained over a dozen articles, but it was only when he turned his attention in January 1913 to the financial probity of Godfrey Isaacs that he was issued with a writ for criminal libel.  In ‘Godfrey Isaacs and Marconis’ he examined Godfrey’s record as a man of business and financier, concluding that ‘a man with such an amazing past should have the power to influence negotiations involving vast sums of public money is as staggering as it is scandalous’.  He went further in ‘Mr Godfrey Isaacs’ Past’ by itemizing twenty-one companies of which he had been a director: with few exceptions they had paid no dividends and ended with the appointment of a liquidator.  The preliminary hearing was at Bow Street on 26 February;  the trial opened at the Old Bailey on 27 May, with the heavyweight KCs Sir Edward Carson and F.E. Smith acting for Godfrey Isaacs.  On 8 June Cecil Chesterton was found guilty on five of the six counts of the indictment.  On each he could have been imprisoned for a year, but was instead fined £100 (£9,000 at today’s prices).  In addition he was to pay the entire costs of the prosecution, which amounted to a huge £1,504 (£140,000).  His friends and supporters, however, quickly clubbed together to cover these sums, while the circulation of the New Witness had significantly increased on account of the publicity occasioned by the trial.[25]
 
The remainder of Cecil Chesterton’s rather short life is easily summarized.  A bellicose supporter of war from its outbreak in 1914, he was invited to visit the USA early the following year to lecture and debate in favour of the allied cause.  The running of the New Witness he assigned to GKC.  On his return to the UK he enlisted and was to die, not in combat, but shortly after the armistice on 6 December 1918, aged thirty-nine, in a military hospital at Wimereux, near Boulogne.  The cause of his death was nephritis, aggravated by chronic kidney disease and heavy drinking.[26]  His History of the United States was published posthumously, having the distinction of being included later in Dent’s Everyman’s Library.
 
GKC was to maintain in his autobiography:

It is the fashion to divide recent history into Pre-War and Post-War conditions.  I believe it is almost as essential to divide them into the Pre-Marconi and Post-Marconi days….I think it probable that centuries will pass before [the affair] is seen clearly and in its right perspective; and that then it will be seen as one of the turning-points in the whole history of England and the world.[27]

This contention is, of course, nonsense;  yet for Chesterton himself Marconi was an undeniable turning-point:  post-1913 his life was transformed.  He had been devastated by his beloved brother narrowly escaping imprisonment. In November 1914 he suffered a physical and mental breakdown, lying in a coma for three months, from which he was fortunate to recover.  He terminated his prolific, twelve-year relationship with the Daily News, contributing his final column on 1 February 1913. He immediately transferred the column to George Lansbury’s militantly socialist Daily Herald (where it ran from April 1913 until November 1914).  The Isaacs brothers and Herbert Samuel were Jewish: with Marconi Chesterton’s antisemitism became obsessive.[28]  Cecil and Belloc had accused Charles Masterman of being unprincipled, even corrupt, in their The Party System, a book of 1911 for which Cecil was mainly responsible.  He continued his assault in the New Witness, compelling his brother to side with him and terminate his affectionate friendship with Masterman.[29]  GKC was to take over the editorship of the New Witness from Cecil and this he maintained – at least nominally – out of loyalty to his brother until 1923, when the paper was suspended for a couple of years.  It resumed in 1925 as GK’s Weekly, with the Distributist League as its offshoot.  Even if he relied on others to do the actual editing, he wrote extensively for both the New Witness and GK’s Weekly, while bankrolling them (and the League).  The physical and financial strains were immense.  Dorothy Collins recalled:

To the large printers’ bills for GK’s Weekly we owe some of the Father Brown stories.  I would say, ‘We have only got £100 in the bank’. ‘Oh well, we must write another Father Brown story’, and this would be done at lightning speed a day or two later from a few notes on the back of an envelope.[30]

Chesterton’s output of books (and articles) soon began to flow again – not a single book had appeared in 1918 - but with the possible exception of several religious works (for which I am not equipped to judge) – St Francis of Assisi (1923), The Everlasting Man (1925), St Thomas Aquinas (1933) -  there is consensus that there was a definite decline, a falling away from the pre-Marconi quality.
 
Belloc ceased to be an MP in November 1910.  He had already been developing his political ideas in articles for A.R. Orage’s New Age.  As early as 1908 he used the term ‘servile state’ to describe an otherwise benevolent system in which the working class exchanged its freedom for measures of social welfare.  In ‘The Servile State’ of May 1910 he applied it to the tendencies of recent legislation.[31]  And in 1912 he published his extremely influential book, The Servile State, in which he warned against ‘Slavery, or a servile state in which those who do own the means of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood’. Against this he posited ‘the re-establishment of a distributive state in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production’.  By the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth he believed that the three forms under which labour was exercised – the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce;  the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent;  the guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce – all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property….And on ownership the freedom of the state should repose.[32]
 
Belloc was advocating a society of peasant proprietors, such as had existed in France since the Revolution and been recently established in Ireland as consequence of Conservative land reform – both Catholic nations it should be noted - and of small producers.  Raymond Williams concludes a benign discussion of The Servile State by questioning how this was to be recovered in a country such as Britain:

It was never clear…how distributivism [sic] was to be effected, except in a general way by recovery of the old faith.  The distribution of property, Belloc emphasized, had to be in significant amounts, and it was this that capitalism could not allow.[33]

The Servile State is currently available in an edition published by a right-libertarian imprint in Indianapolis with an introduction by the distinguished sociologist Robert A. Nisbet.  Nisbet explains how he had read Belloc’s book in 1936 while still a student with considerable faith in the New Deal;  but Belloc had ‘anticipated much of what lay in New Deal legislation, and there was no mistaking his hostility to it’.  The effect on Nisbet was ‘profound’, since ‘never again…did I imagine that there could be genuine intellectual freedom apart from individual ownership of property’.[34] 

Nisbet also highlights the correspondence between Belloc’s servile state and James Burnham’s ‘managerial state’.[35]  In 1941 Burnham, briefly a left-libertarian on his passage from Trotskyism to the far right, was to publish The Managerial Revolution asserting that Russia remained socialist in name alone:  Trotsky’s bureaucracy had taken power there as a new ruling class of managers.  Furthermore, he argued, this socio-economic transformation was occurring internationally and was already well advanced in the principal capitalist nations:  liberal Britain, fascist Germany and the New Deal USA alike.  In ‘The Servile State Has Begun’, the concluding chapter of his book, Belloc attacked the establishment of labour exchanges, employer’s liability, the great National Insurance Act, minimum wage legislation (as yet applying only to the miners), compulsory arbitration, compulsory labour even and the possibility of labour colonies –all reduced the worker legally to a mere employee, losing the freedom to make equitable bargains with employers.  While syndicalists, industrial unionists and Guild Socialists, supplemented during wartime by the leadership of the Shop Stewards’ Movement, had no sympathy for Belloc’s political programme, they were impressed by his contention that ‘our laws have already begun to impose a servile status upon the proletariat…’  The Clyde Workers’ Committee declared in 1915:

You have to remember that for some years past there has been considerable nibbling at the individuality of the worker.  During all his working hours he is merely a cipher - known by a check number.  At the Labour Exchange he has a number, and when he is ill, under the State Insurance, he is also known by a number.  The Munitions Act and the Defence of the Realm Act have divested him of the last shreds of individuality, and it begins to look to him as if they were gone permanently…

Lloyd George was told:  ‘We regard you with suspicion…because every Act with which your name is associated has the taint of slavery about it’.[36]
 
Maurice Reckitt believed that ‘syndicalism was so plainly an importation without any organic relation to English tradition or the industrial situation here, that apart from its effect in giving an impulse to the trade union amalgamation movement, its direct influence was very slight’. ‘The anti-collectivist and anti-political trend found,’ he considered, ‘its true tongue in quite other quarters.’  One of these was the New Age in general and in particular S.G. Hobson’s articles there kickstarting Guild Socialism;  the other was The Servile State.  ‘I cannot overestimate the impact of this book upon my mind,’ Reckitt recalled:

Belloc argued…that the whole allegedly Socialist trend, which the Fabians were so fond of boasting that they had grafted upon Liberalism, was leading not to a community of free and equal citizens, not even to any true collectivism, but to the imposition upon the masses as the price of the reforms by which their social condition was to be ameliorated, of a servile status, definitely sundering them from the condition of those more prosperous members of the community not requiring to be subjected to any such legislation.[37]
 
Reckitt considered Chesterton to be ‘England’s greatest modern democrat’: ‘When I first established myself in London [c.1915] I bought and set on my sideboard photographs of Chesterton and George Lansbury, whom I thought (and still think) to have been the two Englishmen who in their different ways had done most to make the idea of democracy mean something real in this country, with its strongly rooted, if largely subconscious, aristocratic tradition’.[38]  Reckitt had been a prominent figure in Guild Socialism, but after its failure by the early 1920s he moved on to distributism, Chesterton inviting him to join the editorial board of GK’s Weekly on its launch in 1925.  The following year the Distributist League was formed, with Chesterton as president, in order to shore up the shaky circulation of GK’s Weekly, a curious relationship indeed.  It was therefore never more than a propaganda organization, advocating small proprietorship in its various forms.  GK’s Weekly and the League shared as offices two small rooms at the top of a rickety building in Little Essex Street, off the Strand but close to Fleet Street.  The main strength of the League was to be in the Midlands:  Birmingham, Leicester, Derby. Chesterton died in 1936 and the already struggling League was wound up in 1940, but GK’s Weekly, renamed the Weekly Review, lasted until 1947.  Distributism was compromised by internal dispute, especially concerning the use of machinery, but also over religion…[39]
 
A former editor of the Distributist (a newsletter published by the League from 1931) was to summarize distributism as

a social system which encourages small-scale private productive ownership, based on the family unit and primarily, though not necessarily, on the land:  the small farm, the small shop, the small factory, the small professional practice, formed into small communities widely distributed over what is now a largely depopulated countryside, each centred on church and school and living together in warm Christian neighbourliness.  On the other hand, it involves disengagement from all manifestations of the existing practice of usurious finance, expressed for so many people in the processes of house mortgage, hire purchase, and substitution of thrifty independence by the false ‘norms’ of urban life.[40]
 
Belloc and Chesterton were the key distributists, yet Belloc withdrew from most practical activity and it was Chesterton who took the very considerable strain - with GK’s Weekly, usually writing the editorial as well as an article each week, and the League, subsidizing both.  On the other hand, The Servile State was the foundational and unrivalled text.  Chesterton himself never came up with a systematic account of what he himself meant by distributism.  The closest was with The Outline of Sanity (1926), not a through-written book but reprinting articles from GK’s Weekly and, as he admitted, ‘not arranged with any resemblance to a political programme’.[41]  A Short History of England of 1917 fits snugly with The Servile State:  always lively, always interesting, this a distributist history of England.  The proportions are remarkable.  While only 240 pages long, it is not until page 132 that 1485 is reached, and then page 179 for 1660 and page 225 for 1832.  Chesterton’s concern is with making of medieval Christendom and its subsequent disruption:

We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but what occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization.  Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders…looted the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church.  Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of the great dukes and marquises of our own day.  But…perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds.  The medieval Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by the soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility.[42]
 
Ian Boyd, a most erudite Chesterton specialist and founding editor in the 1970s of the valuable scholarly resource, the Chesterton Review, contends that Chesterton wrote three ‘Distributist novels’ – The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), Tales of the Long Bow (1925) and The Return of Don Quixote (1927) – believing that it is necessary to ‘turn to his fiction for the clearest and most vivid expression of what he meant by Distributism’.  Yet only one of these little-known works is unquestionably a novel and in none is there a clear expression of distributism.[43]  The Man Who Knew Too Much consists of six tales linked by the curious person of Horne Fisher, very similar to Father Brown, and solving a series of fantastic crimes.  Otherwise the connecting thread is the socio-political education by him of the young journalist Harold March.  The interest of Tales of the Long Bow is that in the final chapter a distributist ‘revolution’ occurs, but only when a US magnate hands a landed estate over to its occupants.  The Return of Don Quixote is actually a real novel and the only one of Chesterton’s fictions I have enjoyed reading.  This isn’t to say that it is a good novel, but it is much better constructed than his others and concludes, significantly, with three couples marrying and women – certainly Olive Ashley and arguably Rosamund Severn – are for the first time well-developed and central to the action/plot.[44]  On the other hand, its politics are far from clear.  There is again a distributist ‘revolution’, this time initiated by the prime minister and dismantled when he withdraws his support.  This leaves distributism obliged to make common cause, perhaps fusing, with the syndicalism of the organized working class, possibly Chesterton’s fundamental position.
 
In his admirable Political Ideas in Modern Britain Rodney Barker has oddly similar advice to that proffered by Boyd:  that Chesterton’s political ideas were ‘most clearly expressed in his apparently non-political writings’, recommending the earlier and much better known novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Flying Inn (1914).[45]  The Napoleon of Notting Hill celebrates the reinstatement of medieval localism, with each London borough having ‘a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset’ and ‘a city guard, armed to the teeth’, yet culminates in a bloody civil war.  Adam Wayne is the Napoleon of the title;  Turnbull, his commander-in-chief and a toyshop owner, enjoyed  the 

reversion from the things he hated – modernity and monotony and civilization.  To break up the vast machinery of modern life and use the fragments as engines of war, to make barricade of omnibuses and points of vantage of chimney-pots was to him a game worth infinite risk and trouble.  He had that rational and deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life and a merry one.[46]
 
The Flying Inn, countering the attempt to suppress popular English freedoms, is for all its energy a fictional mess, partially redeemed by a libertarian revolution two chapters before the end.  It is the songs of Captain Patrick Dalroy, interspersed throughout the text and including the rollicking popular classic, ‘The Rolling English Road’, that are of a real political import.  These Chesterton published eighteen months later as a 64-page book, Wine, Water and Song, and the lyrics became ‘the song book’ of the youthful Guild Socialists.  Margaret Cole recalled that

almost all meetings, of the National Guilds League or Labour Research Department [the former Fabian body captured and renamed by the Guild Socialists], finished up with noisy performances of the songs which G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Flying Inn and to which the Guildsmen, particularly Douglas [Cole] and Maurice Reckitt, had fitted tunes – hymn tunes, for the most part, but a few from other sources;  there was an especially rousing one which began:
Feast on wine or fast on water
and went to the tune of ‘Deutschland über alles’.

Proceedings would then conclude with the singing of The Red Flag.  That this was not just an enthusiasm of the predominately middle-class Londoners is confirmed by Edwin Muir, the Orcadian writer who had left school at fourteen, worked as a clerk on Clydeside throughout the First World War and was a committed Guildsman:  ‘In summer we went out for rambles round Glasgow, and at one time contracted a passion for Chesterton’s drinking songs, bawling out “Old Noah he had an ostrich farm” and “God made the wicked Grocer” at the public-houses and tea-rooms…’[47] 
 
The Guild Socialists felt a deep affinity with Chesterton, even though he was a strenuous opponent of socialism and the extent to which he reciprocated, if at all, is unknown.  Maurice Reckitt, as has been seen, admired Chesterton profoundly and G.D.H. Cole, his close friend who became leader and the outstanding theorist of Guild Socialism, was also hooked.   Margaret Cole recalled that the ‘fairy story, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, had a great fascination for the Guild Socialists’.  And the Coles were to publish a Chesterton essay, ‘The End of Punch and Judy’, in their ‘journal of workers’ control’, New Standards.[48]
 
Chesterton wrote much fiction, both novels and short stories, throughout his career.  It may therefore appear paradoxical to say that there were major problems with his novels, something he seems to have appreciated. Tim Robinson persuasively contends that ‘the short, vivid and hastily produced essay was a form well suited to his talents’, lacking as he did ‘a taste (not necessarily a capacity) for sustained, rigorous argument’.  ‘A robust and genially optimistic matter-of-factness’ was linked to ‘a fantastic imagination’:

His mind was too full of ideas and the fascinating absurdities to which other opposing ideas might lead.  Moreover the ideas came to him…in such a vivid, pictorial form that they immediately suggested a host of further thoughts.

Such a mental disposition was at odds with the writing of naturalistic novels, something he sought to escape by turning to, as he stated, short stories ‘in which modern thoughts are typified, not by long arguments, but by rapid symbolic incidents’.  His ideal was Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, which in 1901 he had praised for revealing ‘the poetry of modern life’ in the great city[49].  Stevenson was indeed a major literary inspiration.  Chesterton was to publish a book on him in 1927;  and The Victorian Age in Literature, while outstanding, was weakened by the centrality, intellectual as well as artistic, accorded to Stevenson in the chapter on the eighties and nineties.  This is the background to the most distinctive detective stories and the creation of Father Brown, the first (and best) collection, The Innocence of Father Brown, appearing in 1911 long before the onset of financial need.  There were to be a further four volumes:  in 1914, 1926, 1927 and 1935.  An irony of the Father Brown stories is that the unreality of the settings and their bejewelled exoticism belongs to the decadent writing Chesterton reviled:  that of Oscar Wilde and the French Symbolists.[50]
 
Chesterton broke with the Daily News early in 1913, his column then appearing in Lansbury’s Daily Herald until November 1914, when he fell ill.  The association was also breached by the war which, like his brother, he supported belligerently, whereas Lansbury and the Herald were strongly pacifist.  Chesterton, along with Belloc, had been a great catch, especially as they wrote ‘for little or no payment’.  He
came down to Fleet Street to tell Lansbury he felt he should contribute no more.  ‘I can see him now’, Lansbury said, ‘looking apologetic, with his hand on the door-handle.  I told him we would let him write exactly what he pleased. “Yes, I know you would, George”, he answered gently, “but, you see, we don’t any longer mean the same thing”’.[51]

The Herald columns (with only one exception) were collected in 1917 as Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays in New York alone.  The book has never been published in the UK and it is easy to see why for it is lamentably bad:  the writing is slack, the anger unfocussed, the politics muddled, the tone shrill and unconvincing.  Chesterton writes of ‘we of the world in revolt – Syndicalists, Socialists, Guild Socialists, or whatever we call ourselves…’, only three sentences later to admit that he is an ex-socialist.[52] It was in November 1914 that he suffered a complete breakdown and the likelihood is that there is a connection between his impending illness and this bluster.  One biographer observes restrainedly that ‘the literary worth of these articles remains in doubt’, a view seemingly shared by the unpolitical Maisie Ward.  In contrast there is Raymond Postgate, the brother of Margaret Cole and who was to marry Lansbury’s daughter, Daisy:

When he left the Daily News for the Daily Herald he felt he was regaining his freedom;  and for a long time he wrote regular weekly articles of a high merit and great political significance.  I still consider that the Socialists would have been well advised to take note of some of his fundamental criticisms, and had he remained with the Daily Herald group the course of history might have changed to some extent.  What he wrote in this period ranks with letters of Junius as among the best polemical English writing, and deserves reprinting.  He separated from the Herald people only after his illness and Lansbury has more than once told me about the interview in which he announced his decision.  He did not even after that regard himself as wholly separated from the Socialist movement, and was a very powerful influence on what was called Guild Socialism.[53]

How is Postgate’s misjudgement to be explained – for misjudgement it must be given the publication history of the articles and the absence of other voices in their favour?  He would have been sixteen or seventeen when the Herald carried them, probably have read them then and was impressed by such a celebrated writer as Chesterton taking so radical a stance – and was unable to revise his high opinion in the maturity of middle age.[54]
 
Chesterton had anarchistic tendencies, but was not an anarchist.  His portrayal of anarchism as thoroughly evil and destructive, as solely terrorist conspiracy, in The Man Who Was Thursday is pure fancy, having no basis in the historic movement.  He was also consistent in his fulminations against anarchy or anarchism as either a political philosophy or social order:
​
You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor.  Why should it?  The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists;  they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country.  The rich man hasn’t;  he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;  the rich have always objected to being governed at all.  Aristocrats were always anarchists…[55]

He also uses ‘anarchism’ as a catch-all for all the modern ‘isms’ he so detests:  atheism, rationalism, scepticism, German philosophy, Nietzscheanism, even Impressionism in painting.  As John Wain helpfully explained:

Chesterton grew up during the fin de siècle, when atheism and pessimism were more or less compulsory, and the hallmark of a serious mind was a gloomy sense of futility – and he reacted so strongly against this attitude that it is not too much to say that he made it his life’s work to combat it. Even his conversion to Roman Catholicism, was only one more means to this end….

Wain continued:

The figure of the typical lumpen-intellectual of the 1890s, sitting with folded arms staring darkly into his glass of absinthe and working out new ways of stating his final disillusion with the universe, remained always in his mind as the image of his enemy.  He fought his enemy in everything he wrote…[56]

Yet while he can dismiss ‘the aesthete’ as an anarchist in The Victorian Age in Literature, he went on to describe William Morris, whom he admired, as ‘an artist as well as an anarchist’, even as ‘a sort of Dickensian anarchist’.  Morris, he stated, ‘was not a Socialist, but he was a Revolutionist’  - for Chesterton socialism necessitated state control – explaining:  ‘By Morris’s time and ever since, England has been divided into three classes:  Knaves, Fools and Revolutionists’.[57]
 
Chesterton was a liberal and remained one even after he had severed his connections with the Liberal Party and its press:

As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism.  But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.[58]

He was a radical liberal, a left-libertarian in fact.  He opposed big business – ‘millionaires’ was his perennial shorthand – and an unduly large state with all its intrusiveness.  He was a consistent anti-Imperialist and unfailingly supported trade unionism.  The great originality of his political thinking – or should it be feeling?  - was his celebration of ‘the common man’.
 
His hatred of the great capitalists of the twentieth century did not imply any acceptance of the traditional ruling class:  ‘I am quite convinced that the English aristocracy is the curse of England…’[59]  In 1910 meditating on the Chiltern Hills, neighbouring his Beaconsfield home, he wrote in typically rich language:

I know men governing despotically great stretches of that country, whose every step in life has been such that a slip would have sent them to Dartmoor;  but they trod along the high hard wall between right and wrong, the wall as sharp a sword-edge, as softly and craftily and lightly as a cat.  The vastness of their silent violence itself obscured what they were at;  if they seemed to stand for the rights of property it is really because they have so often invaded them.  And if they do not break the laws, it is only because they make them.[60]
 
His view of the state could be entirely anarchist:  ‘The State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment, more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal everywhere’.  In the Father Brown stories it is noticeable that the revealed malefactor is not handed to the authority of the police and state – the thieves return the stolen goods, the murderers commit suicide….[61]  Customarily, Chesterton views the problem of the state as of increasing size and its interventions into the lives of ordinary people, as well as the expansion of officialdom: ‘The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paid person who writes certificates and “passes”   this, that, or the other:  this sort of man is being trusted with more authority…’  He believes that ‘at the very time when we are beginning to doubt these authorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capricious powers’: 

In one room we are asking why the Government and the great experts between them cannot sail a ship.  In another room we are deciding that the Government and experts shall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one’s body, damn any one’s soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levity of a pagan god.  We are putting the official on the throne while he is still in the dock.[62]
 
These statist tendencies Chesterton associated with the influence of Fabian socialism, which he detested.  Beatrice Webb ‘settles things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state, as she might the servants in a kitchen.’  The ‘great defect’ of Bernard Shaw, whom he claimed had written most of the Fabian pamphlets, ‘was and is the lack of democratic sentiment…there was nothing democratic in either his humanitarianism or his Socialism’.   The only work by Wilde of which he thoroughly approved was The Ballad of Reading Gaol, since in it ‘we hear a cry for common justice and brotherhood very much deeper, more democratic and more true to the real trend of the populace today, than anything the Socialists ever uttered even in the boldest pages of Bernard Shaw’.  As for the Fabian cult of the expert, ‘that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted’, it

would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who had studied a thing and practised it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance.  But he does not.  He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.

He did allow, though, that ‘even Fabians have never proposed to interfere with’ things ‘airy, instinctive, or intangible – caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice’, all ‘fancies men feel should be private’.  On the other hand, in wording for which Chesterton must have been responsible, the Distributist League stood for ‘the Liberty of the Individual and the Family against interference by busybodies, monopolies, or the State’.[63]
 
Not only was Chesterton fiercely opposed to the New Imperialism (‘the Scramble for Africa’), it repelled him:  ‘The world was full of the trampling of totally new forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism:  the guns opened across Africa…’  ‘For my part’, he said,
I greatly prefer the Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional [sic:  Kipling’s poem].  I have no objection to Britannia ruling the waves.  I draw the line when she begins to rule the dry land and such damnably dry land too – as in Africa.[64]
 
Chesterton was also a thoroughgoing advocate of trade unionism, unlike most middle-class observers never criticizing it.  He was out of the country when the General Strike began in 1926;  G.K.s Weekly carried the banner ‘Standby the Strikers’, causing many readers to protest;  but on his return he explained that ‘while we ourselves have always preferred the policy of small property, we have never hesitated to defend the proletarian organization as the only actual defence of the classes without property’.[65]
 
Most attractive of all is Chesterton’s concern for, his belief in, the common people.  (‘Man’ is the word he customarily employs, the standard parlance of his time.  He was not misogynistic, but his is a masculine world in which women, if they appear, are consigned to the side lines.)  Writing of his alter ego Dickens, he remarks that when reading his novels:  ‘We are filled with the first of all democratic doctrines, that all men are interesting….It is useless for us to attempt to imagine Dickens and his life unless we are able at least to imagine this old atmosphere of a democratic optimism – a confidence in common men’.[66]  ‘…I happen to hold a view which is almost unknown among Socialists, Anarchists, Liberals, and Conservatives’, he rightly declared in ‘Why I Am Not a Socialist’ that appeared in the New Age in 1908 (and unaccountably never collected):  ‘I believe very strongly in the mass of the common people’:

I do not mean in their ‘potentialities’, I mean in their faces, in their habits, and their admirable language. Caught in the trap of a terrible industrial machinery, harried by a shameful economic cruelty, surrounded with an ugliness and desolation never endured before among men, stunted by a stupid and stunted religion, or by a more stupid and more provincial irreligion, the poor are still by far the sanest, jolliest, and most reliable part of the community…[67]

The previous year he had said:

If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men.  I would always prefer to go by the bulk of humanity;  that is why I am a democrat.[68]
 
Only one book has been written exclusively about Chesterton’s politics:  G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (1977).  The title is not a half-considered, journalistic flourish but deeply considered by its author, Margaret Canovan, an academic political theorist whose previous monograph had been on Hannah Arendt.  Canovan holds back from ‘any rigid definition of populism’, saying instead that

At its heart lies always a faith in the common sense of ordinary, hard-working people, especially country people, and an intense suspicion of metropolitan society, plutocrats, bureaucrats, and intellectuals.  Populists are usually tradition-minded advocates of the simple virtues of country life;  they are often fierce defenders of small property, though hostile to the landlords, moneylenders, and other intruders who threaten the small farmer’s security.  They dislike complex arrangements and subtle compromises, and have the outsider’s distrust of professional politicians.

Cobbett, who began as a Tory but ended as a Radical, she regards as ‘a pure populist’.  Chartism had many populist characteristics, but thereafter ‘English populists are few and far between’.  Chesterton is ‘one of the most interesting’.  To distinguish this current of populism from that rallying to the likes of Donald Trump she qualifies it as ‘radical’.[69]  Elsewhere Canovan draws attention the way in which Chesterton’s use of ‘the people’ elides, in particular, ‘the common people’, or ‘the lower classes’, with ‘the whole community, or people as everyman’.   While this is of philosophical import, for the delineation of his politics attempted here it is, as she acknowledges, immaterial.[70]
 
In a populist twist he argues for ‘hereditary despotism’ as a form of sortition, that it is
in essence and sentiment democratic, because it chooses from mankind at random.  If it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing;  it declares that any man may rule.
This is not a matter of Chestertonian paradox, but a carefully thought-through political position:

Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is an hereditary despotism.  I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post.  Rational despotism – that is, selective despotism – is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned.  The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. In contrast: Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him.  Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves.[71]
 
Chesterton tells of a visit to the foothills of the French alps when he hired a peasant to drive him for the day.  The man was ‘as far as appearance goes, rather like very a rude beggar’:  ‘His clothes were coarse and threadbare, his face rugged, but sharp…’;  but he ‘owned a ramshackle carriage with an excellent horse…’  When Chesterton attempted to tip him he was uncomprehending;  and the day ended with him giving Chesterton ‘a bottle of the wine he manufactured himself’.  Chesterton’s conclusion was that his peasant was ‘a free man’.  Canovan and her husband observe that the reason why he accorded such importance to property is that ‘there is nothing like property for casting a protective mantle around human personality and reminding other people that one has rights’.  Property is a bulwark against power whether the power is exercised by warriors, landlords, capitalists or commissars.[72]
 
There is considerable correspondence between Chesterton’s political ideas and those of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the theorist who first named himself an ‘anarchist’ and famously declared that ‘property is theft’.  Yet Proudhon, while anti-statist and anti-capitalist, was not a socialist, let alone a communist.  It was property disassociated from use that he opposed, his concern being with the small independent producer, whether artisan or peasant.  The state was to be replaced by federations of the autonomous communes of small-scale producers and consumers.  It is through his federalism - and the onetime dominance of Proudhonist mutualism in the French labour movement - that he can legitimately be seen the forerunner of syndicalism, to which it has been seen that Chesterton was extremely sympathetic.[73]
 
In a notable essay, ‘The Common Man’, Chesterton asserts that whereas modern emancipation has liberated ‘in rather special and narrow ways’ ‘the Uncommon Man’ it has really amounted to ‘a new persecution of the Common Man’.  The Common Man has no interest in founding a religious sect, more likely wanting to found a family.  He doesn’t want to publish a newspaper, even if he could afford to;  he would prefer ‘to go on talking about politics in a pothouse or the parlour of an inn’.  He does not want to write a book, but ‘he does want to talk, to sing, to shout, to yell and howl on due and suitable occasions…’  ‘It is quite certain’, Chesterton believed, ‘that many modern thinkers and writers honestly feel a contempt for the Common Man;  it is also quite certain that I myself feel a contempt for those who feel this contempt’.  He concludes by stating that while he doesn’t ‘adore’ the Common Man, he does ‘believe in him’.[74]
 
The very different ‘Some Policemen and a Moral’, is even more remarkable, almost certainly recounting, however improbably, an actual event:

The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood in Yorkshire.  I was on holiday…At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson’s romances.

(The Chestertons stayed in Ilkley several times with the Steinthals.  Mrs Steinthal had formerly worked with Frances Chesterton;  her businessman husband, Francis, was probably Jewish.)

After some half-hour’s animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished poem…. the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the Daily News…and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.

Chesterton’s rumination is typical of him:

I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a known house.  The inference seems painfully clear;  either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man.  Suppose a very poor person…a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent.  Suppose he had read Stevenson’s novels….Suppose he had thrown knives at trees, and could give no description of a dwelling-place except that he had been fired out of the last.  As I walked home through a cloudy and purple twilight  I wondered  how he would have got on.[75]
 
Whereas the standard middle-class response was – and probably still is – not to treat a working man or woman as a fellow human being, Chesterton noticed – and revered - them.  The conventional, class response mars many Victorian novels.  In Trollope’s otherwise first-rate Phineas Finn, for example, the servants, on whom the propertied classes were utterly dependent, merit no attention and the streets, which in reality would have been heaving with people, are deserted.  Two of the best-known stories in The Innocence of Father Brown belong to a different mental universe:

Suppose one lady says to another in a country-house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn’t answer ‘Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlour-maid, and so on’, even though the parlour-maid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair.

This is from ‘The Invisible Man’ in which the murderer is revealed as the postman:

When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them….a man did go into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him.
Father Brown comments:  ‘Nobody ever notices postmen, somehow…yet they have passions like other men…’[76]
 
In ‘The Queer Feet’, probably the most admired of the tales, he solves a theft by recognizing the difference between rich diners and their waiters by the different sounds their different gaits make:

…I heard a pair of feet…First, came quick, funny little steps, like a man walking on tiptoe for a wager;  then came slow, careless, creaking steps, as of a big man walking about with a cigar.  But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came in rotation;  first the run and then the walk, and then the run again….One walk I knew;  it was just like yours, colonel.  It was the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something…I knew that I knew the other walk, too….It was the walk of a waiter – that walk with the body slanted forward, the eyes looking down, the ball of the toe spurning away the ground, the coat tails and napkin flying.[77]
 
Careful readers of this essay, those who pay attention to the references, may have noted the profusion of Chesterton publications in the last quarter of the twentieth century and that that has not been repeated in the first decades of the twenty-first.  Interest in his writings and personality has indeed reached a very low point.  But in 2009 attention was drawn to something which had escaped Chesterton specialists, that he had had a significant influence on the development of Indian nationalism.
 
In 1909 the Indian Sociologist was suppressed for its advocacy of self-government by disciples of Herbert Spencer, a bête noire for whom Chesterton never had a good word.  In his weekly essay for the Illustrated London News he therefore laid in with gusto:

When young Indians talk of independence for India, I get a feeling that they do not understand what they are talking about….What they want is not very Indian and not very national….What is the good of the Indian national spirit if they cannot protect themselves from Herbert Spencer?....Do the Indian youths want to pollute their ancient villages and poison their kindly homes by introducing Spencer’s philosophy into them?

He continued:
​
Indians have a right to be and to live as Indians.  But Herbert Spencer is not Indian;  his philosophy is not Indian philosophy;  all this clatter about the science of education and other things is not Indian.  I often wish it were not English either.  But this is our first difficulty, that the Indian nationalist is not national.

Mohandas K. Gandhi was in London when the article appeared on 18 September.  He quoted it at length in his own journal, Indian Opinion (of Durban), introducing it by saying

Mr G.K. Chesterton is one of the great writers here.  He is an Englishman of liberal temper.  Such is the perfection of his style that writings are read by millions with great avidity.

He pondered whether ‘we have been endeavouring to destroy what the Indian people have carefully nurtured through thousands of years’.  On the voyage back to South Africa he wrote Hind Swaraj in Gujerati in only ten days - published in that language as well as Indian Home Rule in Durban in 1910 – an innovative defence of the virtues of ancient Indian civilization and non-violence but also of religious pluralism.[78]
 
Chesterton’s great days, as both a writer and public man, were before the First World War, indeed before Marconi.  He debated with the likes of H.G. Wells and Shaw, and was rightly considered their equal, on world government and socialism in the pages of the New Age and elsewhere.  He was certainly a vicious anti-Semite but, extraordinarily, otherwise everyone spoke well of him;  and he maintained warm friendships with both Wells and (despite some astringent criticism) especially Shaw, recruiting them even to write for G.K.’s Weekly.  On the day after Chesterton’s death, Shaw commiserated with Frances:

It seems the most ridiculous thing in the world that I, 18 years older than Gilbert, should be heartlessly surviving him.
However, this is only to say that if you have any temporal bothers that I can remove, a line on a postcard (or three figures) will be sufficient.
The trumpets are sounding for him;  and the slightest interruption must be intolerable.

When several months later Chesterton’s Autobiography was published, Shaw wrote again:
It is really an ANGELIC book.  I can’t find any other word for it;  and it has never occurred to me to apply it to any book before.[79]
 
 
[1]  This essay is dedicated to Alastair Reid and the late Nicholas Gould.  Nick was my best friend from Oxford;  he considered Chesterton the outstanding twentieth-century writer;  and after his death in 2014 I inherited almost forty books either by or about Chesterton.  It has been Alastair who consistently urged me write this piece when I was experiencing considerable reservations about doing so.  It is also appropriate to acknowledge here the role of Paul Gibbard.  It was as the external examiner in 2001 of his excellent Oxford doctorate, ‘Anarchism in English and French Literature, 1885-1914:  Zola, the Symbolists, Conrad and Chesterton’ that I was first alerted to Chesterton’s proximity to anarchism.  I am indebted to Alastair, Peter Inch and Kevin Morgan for their comments on my text.
 
[2]  David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow:  Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool:  Liverpool University Press, 2006), pp. 12, 32;  David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow:  Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Oakland, CA:  PM Press, 2nd edn, 2012), p. 339.

[3]  Richard Baker, John J. Connolly and Ronald Zudeck, ‘Notes on Chesterton’s Notre Dame Lectures on Victorian Literature’, Chesterton Review, III (1976-77), p. 165.

[4]  Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London:  Allen Lane, 2002), p. 303;  Henry Pelling,  Modern Britain, 1885-1955 (1960;  London:  Sphere Books, 1974), p. 69.

[5]   W.H. Auden (ed), G.K. Chesterton:  A Selection from His Non-Fictional Prose (London:  Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 11-13.

[6] Richard Ingrams, The Sins of G.K. Chesterton (Chelmsford:  Harbour Books, 2021), p. 2.

[7]  Ian Ker, G.K. Chesterton:  A Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 733.  For an obituary appreciation:  ‘Father Ian Ker’, The Times, 7 December 2022.

[8]  René Hague (ed), Dai Greatcoat:  A Self-Portrait of David Jones in His Letters (London:  Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 92-3.

[9] The first biography, written by a friend, is a classic:  Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London:  Sheed & Ward, 1944), supplemented by Maisie Ward, Return to Chesterton (London:  Sheed and Ward, 1952).  Ian Ker’s enormous (747-page) work of 2007 is, as already implied, most unsatisfactory.  William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy:  The Making of GKC, 1874-1908 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008), is extremely impressive, indeed majestic, yet terminates when Chesterton was only 34 years old.  Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton:  A Biography (London:  Constable, 1973), has several merits, not least a very helpful bibliography of Chesterton’s principal works.  Brief but reliable overviews of Chesterton’s career are provided by John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull:  Hull University Press, 1984), chap. 1;  P.J. Kavanagh, ‘Introduction’ to P.J. Kavanagh (ed), The Bodley Head G.K. Chesterton (London:  The Bodley Head, 1985) [a substantial and judicious selection];  and the entry by Bernard Bergonzi, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).  John Sullivan, G.K. Chesterton:  A Bibliography (London:  University of London Press, 1958), is indispensable, attempting as it does to list all of Chesterton’s periodical contributions, including his many columns.  It can be assumed that all details below, unless otherwise attributed, have been derived from one – or more – of these sources.
 
[10]   Ker, p. 248.

[11]   G.K. Chesterton [hereafter GKC], The Victorian Age in Literature (London:  Williams and Norgate, revised edn, 1914), pp. 16-17, 88.
 
[12]   V.S. Pritchett, ‘Secret Terrors’, in D.J. Conlon (ed), G.K. Chesterton:  A Half Century of Views (Oxford:   Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 326.
 
[13]   GKC, The Man Who Was Thursday:  A Nightmare (Bristol:  J.W. Arrowsmith, 1908), pp. 9-10.  See also GKC, Autobiography (London:  Hutchinson, 1936), p. 139.
 
[14]   Ingrams, pp. 246-7, n2.
 
[15]   GKC, Autobiography, p. 315.
 
[16]   Ibid, p. 111;  Dudley Barker, p. 99.
 
[17]  GKC, All Things Considered (1908;  London: Methuen, 8th edn, 1915), p. 87.  See also GKC, Autobiography, pp. 114-15.  In an article of 1905, ‘The Poetic Quality in Liberalism’, however, he confronted the reality of the existence of Liberal Imperialism (reprinted in Chesterton Review, XVIII (1982), pp. 118-19, 122-4).
 
[18]  GKC, A Miscellany of Men (London:  Methuen, 1912), p. 77;  GKC, Heretics (1905;  London:  Library Press, n.d.), pp. 82, 299, 307.
 
[19]   GKC, What’s Wrong with the World (London: Cassell, 1910), p. vi.
 
[20]   For Belloc see Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957;  Freeport, NY:  Books for Libraries Press, 1970);   A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London:  Hamish Hamilton, 1984).
 
[21]  Jay P. Corrin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc:  The Battle against Modernity (Athens, OH:  Ohio University Press, 1981), pp. 14, 22-5.
 
[22]  Speaight, pp. 292-3.
 
[23]   There is a biography:  Brocard Sewell, Cecil Chesterton (Faversham;  Saint Albert’s Press, 1975).
 
[24]  The above is largely reliant on the clear and even-handed account provided by R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 456-9.  See also Denis Judd, Lord Reading:  Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading, Lord Chief Justice and Viceroy of India, 1860-1935 (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), chap. 8.  For damning assessments of the conduct of Lloyd George, Isaacs and Elibank:  T.O. Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State:  English History, 1906-1976 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1979), pp. 51-2;  and Donald Read, The Age of Urban Democracy:  England, 1868-1914 (Harlow:  Longman, revised edn, 1994), p. 483.

[25]  Sewell, chap. 5, esp. pp. 46, 48-9, 69-70.
 
[26]   Ingrams, pp. 175-6.
 
[27]  GKC, Autobiography, p. 202.
 
[28]  For his anti-semitism:  Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939 (London:  Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. 101-3, 210-12;  Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘The Innocence of Rufus Isaacs’, Part II, Chesterton Review, XI (1985), esp. pp. 502-14.
 
[29]   See Ingrams, pp. 89-100.
 
[30]  Ingrams, p. 43.
 
[31]  Wallace Martin, ‘The New Age’ under Orage:  Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1967), p. 204.
 
[32]  Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (2nd edn, 1913;  Indianapolis:  Liberty Fund, 1977), pp. 42, 77-8.  For his fetishization of property, see also a pamphlet:  Hilaire Belloc, The Catholic Church and the Principle of Private Property (London:  Catholic Truth Society, n.d.).
 
[33]  Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958;  Harmondsworth:  Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 188-9.  For more searching treatments:  John L. Finlay, Social Credit:  The English Origins (Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972), pp. 52-4;  Rodney Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain:  In and after the Twentieth Century (1978; London:  Routledge, 2nd edn, 1997), pp. 94-7.
 
[34]   Belloc, Servile State, p. 14
 
[35]   Ibid, pp. 23-4.
 
[36]  Ibid;  James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London:  George Allen & Unwin, 1973), pp. 43-4.  For the adoption by the industrial radicals of Belloc’s analysis see Bob Holton, British Syndicalism:  Myths and Realities (London:  Pluto Press, 1976), pp. 137-8, 182-3;  Hinton, pp. 44-6.
 
[37]  Maurice B. Reckitt, As It Happened: An Autobiography (London: J.M. Dent, 1941), pp. 107–8.
 
[38]  Ibid, pp. 179, 185.
 
[39]  The outstanding work on Distributism and the League is Corrin, Chesterton and Belloc, chaps. 5-10.  In Brocard Sewell, The Habit of a Lifetime:  An Autobiography (Padstow:  Tabb House, 1992), pp. 37-48, 65-9, the future literary monk recounts his time as office boy for GK’s Weekly and the League, secretary for the committee of the Central Branch of the League and, finally, assistant secretary of the League itself.  For further reminiscence concerning the premises and staff:  Gregory Macdonald, ‘The Other Face:  That Distributist Decade’, Chesterton Review, I (1974-5), pp. 87-8.   Finlay, chap. 3, affords a rare consideration of distributism.  See also Ian Boyd, ‘Chesterton and Distributism’, in Conlon, esp. pp. 283-6.
 
[40]  Adrian Mackey, ‘A Distributist Colony: ’Tis Forty Years Since’,  Chesterton Review, III (1976-77), p. 163.   The emphases are Mackey’s.
 
[41]  GKC, The Outline of Sanity (London:  Methuen, 1926), p. vii.  Jay P. Corrin, ‘The Social Vision of George Orwell and G.K. Chesterton’, Faith & Reason, XXVIII (2003), p. 10, believes that Chesterton’s ‘reluctance to fill in the details of his outline of sanity, namely, the Distributist state’ is to be explained by his being ‘obsessively opposed to all forms of system building’, but the contention that he lacked ‘a taste (not necessarily a capacity) for sustained, rigorous argument’ seems more plausible (Tim Robinson, ‘G.K. Chesterton and the Classic Detective Story’, London Magazine, New Series, XLI, 1 & 2 (April/May 2001), pp. 57)

[42]   GKC, A Short History of England (London:  Chatto & Windus, 1917), pp. 149-50.  See also GKC, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Other Stories (1922;  Cassell, 1923 edn), pp. 94-6.  Chesterton’s unrepentant introduction for the 1924 edition of A Short History is usefully reprinted by Kavanagh, pp. 361-64.
 
[43]  Boyd, ‘Chesterton and Distributism’, pp. 286-7.  For the contentions at length:  Ian Boyd, The Novels of G.K. Chesterton:  A Study in Art and Propaganda (London:  Paul Elek, 1975), chap. 4
 
[44]  Boyd, Novels, pp. 116-19, also considers The Return of Don Quixote to be ‘perhaps the best and most interesting of all [Chesterton’s] novels’, stressing the active female contribution.
 
[45]   Rodney Barker, p. 91.
 
[46]  GKC, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London:  The Bodley Head, 1961 edn), pp. 54, 108.  For a perceptive Marxist discussion, rightly emphasizing Chesterton’s opposition to Fabian uniformity, see A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London:  Lawrence & Wishart, 1952), pp. 194-7.  Also deserving attention is A.L. Morton, ‘Chesterton:  The Man of Thermidor’, Twentieth Century, VI, xxxvi (September 1934) (reprinted in A.L. Morton, Language of Men (London:  Cobbett Press, 1945)).
 
[47]   Reckitt, p. 138;  Margaret Cole, The Life of G.D.H. Cole (London;  Macmillan, 1971), p. 136;  Margaret Cole, Growing Up into Revolution (London:  Longman, Green, 1940), p. 71;  Edwin Muir,  An Autobiography (London:  Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 148-9.  The songs are to be found in either The Flying Inn or The Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton (London:  Methuen, 3rd edn, 1933), 197-218. They were also sung by the circle around Henry Slesser, Labour’s first Solicitor-General and a distributist (although the Labour Party had in 1918 committed itself to public ownership), an art collector and patron of Stanley Spencer.  For a vivid account see Gilbert Spencer, Stanley Spencer by His Brother (London:  Victor Gollancz, 1961), pp. 159-60.  There is also Patrick Wright, ‘Purposeful Art in a Climate of Cultural Reaction:  Stanley Spencer in the 1920s’, in Timothy Hyman and Patrick Wright (eds), Stanley Spencer (London:  Tate Publishing, 2001), pp. 66-9, which discusses Chesterton.
 
[48]  Cole, Life, p. 53;  GKC, ‘The End of Punch and Judy’, New Standards, no. 4 (February 1924).  See also Cole, Life, p. 183.  For Guild Socialism and the Coles, there is my ‘G.D.H. Cole:  A Libertarian Trapped in the Labour Party’, the introduction to G.D.H. Cole, Towards a Libertarian Socialism:  Reflections on the British Labour Party and European Working-Class Movements, ed. David Goodway (Chico, CA:  AK Press, 2021), pp. 4-10.
 
[49]  Robinson, pp. 56-9.  Cf. GKC, Robert Louis Stevenson (London:  Hodder and Stoughton, 1929 edn), pp. 168-73.
 
[50]   Cf  Pritchett, p. 326, and Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Volume II:  Assaults (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 312-13.
 
[51]   Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury (London:  Longmans, Green, 1951), 138, 155.
 
[52]   Gilbert K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays (New York:  Boni and Liveright, 1917), p. 175.  The omitted article, ‘The Epitaph of Pierpont Morgan’, can be found in GKC, The Common Man (London:  Sheed and Ward, 1950), pp. 221-5.
 
[53]  Michael Ffinch, G.K. Chesterton (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 224;  Ward, Return, p. 136.
 
[54]  There is a biography by his son and daughter-in-law:  John and Mary Postgate, A Stomach for Dissent:  The Life of Raymond Postgate, 1896-1971 (Keele:  Keele University Press, 1994);  but more useful politically is the brief summary by his sister:  Margaret Cole, ‘Postgate, Raymond William (1896-1971)’, in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, II (London:  Macmillan, 1974), esp. pp. 305-06.
 
[55]  GKC, Thursday, pp. 226-7.  The wording of a Daily News article, ‘The Voice of Shelley’, published three years earlier is almost identical (GKC, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks and Other Essays, ed. Dorothy E. Collins (London:  Paul Elek, 1975), pp. 138-40 (reprinted in Kavanagh, pp. 243-5)).  See also GKC, Manalive (1912;  Beaconsfield:  Darwen Finlayson, 1964), p. 35.
 
[56]  John Wain, ‘Manalive, a Good Bad Book’, in Conlon, p. 220.  Cf. the very different, extremely abstract Lynette Hunter, G.K. Chesterton:  Explorations in Allegory (London and Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1979), esp. chap. 1.
 
[57]  GKC, Victorian Age, pp. 9, 199-200, 232-3.
 
[58]  GKC, Orthodoxy (1908;  London and Glasgow:  Fontana Books, 1961), p. 45.
 
[59]  GKC, George Bernard Shaw (1909;  London:  John Lane,  The Bodley Head, 1937 edn), p. 41.

[60]   GKC, Alarms and Discursions (1910;  London:  Methuen, 1939 edn), p. 158.  Cf. GKC, Charles Dickens (1906;  London:  1907 edn), pp. 68-9.
 
[61]  GKC, Miscellany, p. 236.  Cf. Margaret Canovan, G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 7;  and GKC, Miscellany, p. 235.
 
[62]   GKC, Miscellany, pp. 247-8.
 
[63]  GKC, Victorian Age, p. 91;  GKC, Shaw, pp. 75-6;  GKC, Victorian Age, p. 227;  GKC, Tremendous Trifles (London:  Methuen, 1909), p. 67;  GKC, All Things, pp. 93-4;  G.K.’s Weekly, 19 January 1929.
 
[64]  GKC, Victorian Age, p. 250;  GKC, Miscellany, pp. 79-80.  It should be noted that, while rejecting Kipling’s imperialism, Chesterton saluted his great literary gifts.
 
[65] Boyd, Novels, p. 215 n136;  Corrin, Chesterton and Belloc, pp. 117-18, 225 n22.
 
[66]   GKC, Dickens, p. 15.
 
[67]  GKC, ‘Why I Am Not a Socialist’, New Age, 4 January 1908.   
 
[68]  GKC, All Things, pp. 159-60.
 
[69]  Canovan, pp. 5-7.  Cf. GKC, William Cobbett (London;  Hodder and Stoughton [1925]), pp. 72-8 et seq.
 
[70]  Margaret Canovan, ‘Chesterton and the People’, Chesterton Review, X (1984), pp. 49-50, 56.
 
[71]  GKC, Heretics, pp. 270-72.
 
[72]  GKC, The Spice of Life and Other Essays, ed. Dorothy Collins (Beaconsfield:  Darwen Finlayson, 1964), pp. 129-31;  James and Margaret Canovan, ‘Chesterton’s Politics Today’, Chesterton Review, V (1978-9), p. 273.
 
[73]  For Proudhon:  Paul Eltzbacher, Anarchism:  Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy (London:  Freedom Press, 1969), esp. pp. 52-5;  George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1956; Montréal:  Black Rose Books, 1987), esp. pp. 239-40;  Ian McKay (ed.), Property Is Theft!  A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Oakland, CA, and Edinburgh:  AK Press, 2011), esp. pp. 36-7, 775;  Alex Pritchard, ‘Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Mutualist Social Science’, in Marcel van der Linden (ed.), The Cambridge History of Socialism (Cambridge;  Cambridge University Press, 2 vols, 2023), I, esp. p. 306.  Also useful (and by an editor of Proudhon) is Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London:  Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971), pp. 12-13. 
 
[74]  GKC, Common Man, pp. 1-3, 6, 9.
 
[75]  GKC, Trifles, pp. 173-6.    For Ilkley and the Steinthals, as well as the knife:  Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, pp. 217-19;  Dudley Barker, p. 153;  Ker, pp. 135-6.
                     
[76]  GKC, The Father Brown Stories (London:  Cassell, 8th edn, 1956), pp. 76-7.
 
[77]  Ibid, p. 51.
 
[78]  The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, IX (September 1908 – November 1909 (Delhi:  Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1963), pp. 425-7;  Ramachandra Guha, ‘A Prophet Announces Himself:  Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Hind Swaraj’ a Hundred Years On’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 September 2009.  For the text of Hind Swaraj see M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997).  The novelty of the revelation is clear from Ker, p. 249.  For Chesterton on Spencer see, for example, GKC, Victorian Age, pp. 233-4.

[79]  Ker, p. 728.