G.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity 9781472543592

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Acknowledgements The origin of this collection of essays was a symposium titled ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Paradox of the City’, held at University College London in September 2011 to mark the 75th anniversary of the author’s death, in the academic institution to which he was affiliated. Thanks go to UCL English Department for hosting and funding that event, and to all those who attended and contributed in one way or another, particularly in the round-table session at the end of the day, the stimulating fruitfulness of which helped to convince us that it was important to see into print a book on the topic in question. We are also grateful to Eliza Cubitt for her diligence in copy-editing the script.

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Introduction Matthew Ingleby

A ten-part television series based on G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories aired on the BBC in January 2013. Coupling this adaptation with a series based on short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, the critic Mark Lawson identified these commissions as symptomatic of a nostalgic current in contemporary British popular culture, the most remarked phenomenon of which has been ITV’s Downton Abbey.1 But does Chesterton fit naturally into this turn to what might be called ‘posh pastoral’? A novelist of ideas as much as fun and fizz, viewers that seek out his fiction expecting to find the same aristocratic insouciance one encounters in Wodehouse risk being somewhat surprised by Chesterton’s moral pugnaciousness. A comparison of the geographies of Chesterton’s and Wodehouse’s fictions illustrates the important difference between them. While the Wodehouse stories are all set in the vicinity of Blandings Castle, an idyllic corner of Shropshire, the Father Brown stories are often set in the centre and suburbs of London. The Wodehousian geography is dutifully retained by the BBC, but the urban and suburban quality of many of the Brown stories has been lost in their translation to television. The TV series relocates all the tales to one village in the heart of the English countryside, complete with a crew of oddball minor characters. Ruralizing the original texts, the adaptation retrofits Chesterton to meet the demands of the Downton generation, introducing a nostalgic element that is absent from the originals. In the second episode, for instance, an adaptation of ‘The Flying Stars’, the setting is changed from a suburban villa near Putney to a Cotswolds country house, which leaves unexplained why a radical journalist has come to be marooned in a rural backwater. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine the Church of Apollo, an ultra-

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primitivist institution that is metropolitan through and through, finding its way to bucolic ‘Kembleford’, as is envisioned in the fifth episode. Voices from the conservative Catholic blogosphere have condemned the adaptation for being too modern, anachronistically tainting the orthodox original texts with the current ‘BBC’s obsession with homosexuality’.2 But the displacement of modern London’s pervasive presence in Chesterton’s stories suggests that the problem with the television series is rather that it is not modern enough. A writer with a vivid geographical imagination, Chesterton was alert to the meanings of urban and suburban locations represented in his fiction. His persistent and serious-minded engagement with metropolitan modernity differentiates his writings from pastoralists such as Wodehouse, with whom he is sometimes grouped. A distinctive commentator on the city, Chesterton’s interrogation of the aesthetics of the urban everyday bears more comparison with the writings of Walter Benjamin than it does with contemporaneous ‘middlebrow’ novelists.3 If the boulevards, balconies and arcades of Haussmannized Paris absorbed Benjamin, it was the railings, omnibuses, cabs, pub-signs and lamp-posts of London that stimulated Chesterton. London preoccupies Chesterton’s thinking, and he addresses it across a range of genres throughout his career. That persistent interest in the city is an aspect of his work that lends itself to reinterpretation today, when the urban functions as a privileged object of interdisciplinary study in the Humanities. This collection of essays draws attention to the urban geographies of Chesterton’s work, which have hitherto been neglected. Emphasizing his fascination with the materiality and symbolism of modern urban life in general, its principal focus is on London, the city around which Chesterton gravitated throughout his life.

The subject of London Chesterton was a Londoner when it was the largest, wealthiest and most powerful city in the world; and, although he lived for the latter part of his life in the market town of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, he continued, till his death in 1936, to be defined by the metropolis in which he was raised. Chesterton grew up in one of the most prosperous parts of solidly middleclass west London. Born in Campden Hill, on 29 May 1874, he lived for most of his childhood in Kensington. The family income was derived from

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a successful estate agency business, the modern descendant of which has 70 offices worldwide, including some 27 dotted across the most salubrious parts of London. The Chestertons thrived on London’s commercial centrality to both nation and empire, successfully exploiting the feverishly fluctuating residential housing market that characterized the city then as now. Chesterton’s educational experience, unusually, was located exclusively in London. Rather than being sent away to one of the public boarding schools in the Home Counties, he attended St Paul’s, a day school within the city. Similarly, his reputedly unhappy undergraduate years were spent not in Oxford or Cambridge but the Slade School of Art, University College London. And if his intellectual formation was peculiarly metropolitan, so also, significantly, was his initial exposure to matters spiritual. His liberal parents rarely took him to church, but when they did it was to a decidedly metropolitan variety of religious establishment on the south edge of Bloomsbury – Bedford Chapel – where a Unitarian, the Rev. Stopford Brooke, officiated, as one of the ‘clerihews’ of Chesterton’s youth records with amusing concision: The Rev. Stopford Brooke The Church forsook. He preached about an apple In Bedford Chapel.4

Chesterton’s working life, too, was thoroughly bound up with London from the beginning. As a young man, the publisher Fisher Unwin, in Paternoster Buildings, near St Paul’s, employed him to read thousands of manuscripts, as well as to contribute editorial work. And his lifelong career in journalism meant that he was as deeply rooted in the city as he would have been as a banker or barrister. Columnist for one of the most important newspapers of the age, The Daily News, he became one of London’s most recognizable hacks. Later, at ease with the modern medium of radio broadcasting, Chesterton’s 1927 debate with one of his great antagonists, George Bernard Shaw, was broadcast to the nation by the BBC from Kingsway Hall, Holborn.5 The social and intellectual networks and alliances he most affirmed, meanwhile, were also metropolitan phenomena. The birthplace of the ‘Chesterbelloc’ – Shaw’s coinage for the ‘twinformed monster’ of Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc – was, after all, a ‘dingy little Soho café’.6 Indeed, so consistently was Chesterton defined by the capital city, that his friends’ memories of him often place him there with great precision. In one

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anecdote that his biographers have drawn on, for example, a school friend recalls him ‘in the middle of Fleet Street’, having ‘abruptly come to a standstill in the centre of the traffic’: He stood there for some time, wrapped in thought, while buses, taxis and lorries eddied about him in a whirlpool and while drivers exercised to the full their gentle art of expostulation. Having come to the end of his meditations, he held up his hand . . . and returned to Shoe Lane. It was just as though he had deliberately chosen the middle of Fleet Street as the most fruitful place for thought.7

The rush and roar of the modern city certainly seems to have provided the impetus for much of his published writing. In his literary fiction, he frequently appropriates various apparently anodyne parts of London for his most outlandish tales, playing with the apparent banality of the city in order to reveal its poetry or allegorical significance. A large proportion of his major imaginative works are decidedly urban. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) playfully fantasizes an alternative London in which the ‘villages’ of which it is composed emerge as culturally distinct, each with its own flag and forms of patriotism. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), meanwhile, trades on the phenomenon of terrorist and anarchist conspiracy, which had been something of a London speciality since the 1880s, and which had already borne fruit in literature set in the city by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. As has already been stated, many of the Father Brown stories (1911–35) make nuanced use of London’s centre and suburbs in order to stage the narrative blend of detective plot and moral query that makes them so idiosyncratic, while other works such as The Club of Queer Trades (1905), Manalive (1912) and a plethora of lesser known novels and stories, likewise reflect upon and reconfigure everyday aspects of the city. His fictions were not the only occasions in which he constructed and reconstructed London. Much of Chesterton’s literary criticism addresses the life and work of nineteenth-century figures associated with London, and his writing about these literary forebears also offers him another opportunity to write about the city. Dickens, about whom he composed one of his most successful critical books, published in 1906, is the best-known example. But Blake, Cobbett, Thackeray, Browning, Stevenson and Bernard Shaw, all

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of whom Chesterton mediated to the public either through monographs or anthologies, also inhabited or wrote about the capital, and in most cases, both. Chesterton frequently attends to the geographical aspect of his subjects’ lives and work, teasing out the particularities of their relations to London. In Chesterton’s William Blake (1910), for instance, the poet is a Londoner, though doubtless a Londoner of the time when London was small enough to feel itself on every side to be on the edge of the country. Still Blake had never in any true sense been in the heart of the country. In his earliest poems we read of seraphs stirring in the trees; but we have a feeling that they were garden trees. We read of saints and sages walking in the fields, and we almost have the feeling that they were brick-fields . . . The black chimney-sweep is as obvious as the white lamb . . . He was, in fact, a Cockney, like Keats; and Cockneys as a class tend to have too poetical and luxuriantly imaginative a view of life.8

In the act of writing about Blake, Chesterton is unable to resist meditating more generally on the city of Cockney poets in which he places him. In another instance of this drift to urban questions, Chesterton situates Shaw in the revolutionary clamour of the late nineteenth-century capital, and suggests that the playwright’s experiences as a young unknown in the city had a formative impact on his politics: When he first went to London he mixed with every kind of revolutionary society, and met every kind of person except the ordinary person. He knew everybody, so to speak, except everybody. He was more than once a momentary apparition among the respectable atheists. He knew Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that Hall of Science in which very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance, when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life.9

In Chesterton’s spatial metaphor, the Hall of Science, located at 142 Old Street, becomes a material influence on Shaw’s intellectual identity. While Chesterton was convinced that he himself was not a determinist, his writing about the city indicates that he understood that concrete space shapes the individual even as the individual shapes concrete space.

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Beyond the ‘God Debates’ Chesterton was an astute and appreciative critic of Victorian culture, defending writers that Modernists routinely debunked and desecrated. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was capable of seeing past the apparent obsolescence of art that others deemed unfashionable. But if his judgements on writers like Dickens and Stevenson have proved of durable value to critics, his imaginative work has remained in the shadow of his more canonical peers. In departments of English Literature, Chesterton has long been a decidedly minor figure in a major period of research. As Mark Knight has recently argued, he has been consistently neglected in key studies of the era of Modernism.10 But the twenty-first century has heralded something of a resurgence of interest in Chesterton. Affordable new editions of The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown stories have lately featured both on bookshop shelves and undergraduate reading lists (each edited by contributors to this present volume).11 Critical reassessments of Chesterton have also been published, in the shape of William Oddie’s account of his early life and Ian Ker’s full biography.12 Michael D. Hurley and Mark Knight have written useful monographs from a literary studies perspective, while Aidan Nichols has contributed one within a theological disciplinary framework.13 Julia Stapleton has explored Chesterton’s engagement with the idea of Englishness, and Luke Seaber has examined his writings alongside Orwell’s.14 Articles by Lucas Harriman and Anna Vaninskaya have respectively addressed Chesterton from a comparative literature perspective, discussing a Soviet theatrical adaptation of his most famous novel, and placed the novelist’s views on patriotism alongside the interventions of better-known figures such as William Morris.15 Chesterton’s restless dialectical games with the ideal and the material have attracted the admiration of philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, moreover, who extensively discussed the writer in a book he has co-written with theologian John Milbank.16 These recent publications, all appearing since 2004, indicate a climate for Chesterton studies that is more fertile today than it has been for a long time. Beyond academia, Chesterton’s books have always been read and admired, in part because of his popularity in religious circles, a popularity that is currently increasing. Indeed, it is mainly due to his enthusiastic Anglo-American

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Catholic readership that the writer is, extramurally, a much more popular figure at present than he has been for several decades. Chesterton’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922 is, for these readers, the central moment of his life and career. A much-quoted voice in current debates about the status of religious ideas and practices, Chesterton is frequently dragooned against Richard Dawkins and other cultural warriors. Some commentators wish to demonize him, others to canonize him.17 Chesterton’s Catholicism has in the last five years or so become a peculiarly urgent matter for both sides of the contestation after rumours emerged that he might be recognized as a saint.18 Following the beatification of Cardinal Newman, the ‘cause’ of St Chesterton colours much that is currently written about him from a religious perspective. The matter of his faith, as a result, implicitly overrides or underwrites much that is said about him. When prominent Catholic convert and former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe presented a radio programme to mark the centenary of the appearance of the first Father Brown collection, she pointedly focused on the actual priest Father O’Connor on whom the detective was modelled. Meanwhile, one of the last pieces that the well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens wrote, published posthumously in 2012, was a full-throated attack on the dogmatic extremity of Chesterton’s Catholicism. Drawing attention to Chesterton’s misdiagnosis of Hitlerism as a Protestant heresy, Hitchens accuses him of failing to ‘meet [the] distinct moral challenge’ of Nazism.19 Embroiled as some of his writings are in the ‘God debates’ of the early twenty-first century, there is a clear threat that, though he may be in some respects a larger figure in the popular imagination, ‘Chesterton’ is also becoming reified, through discursive reductionism, into little more than an emblematic concept. This collection will tread lightly in, if not sidestep, these contested fields, and seeks to complicate our understanding of the author rather than brandish him for one ‘cause’ or another. A journalist and provocateur, Chesterton could be relied on to make interventions in contemporaneous debates on a full range of topics, and he deserves to be appreciated as a flexible public intellectual rather than either a single-minded saint or a religious monomaniac. Taken as a whole, his oeuvre is highly heterogeneous, far more so than either the pro- or anti-Chesterton camps can encompass. As this volume reveals, when Chesterton’s work is relieved of the imperative to exemplify ‘orthodoxy’, for either side in the ‘God debates’, he emerges as someone with much to offer areas

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quite removed from religious matters as conventionally articulated. Once we separate Chesterton’s observations on a range of phenomena from the question of his faith, he becomes at once a more amenable and more challenging figure within critical discourse.

Space for new thought This volume contributes to Chesterton’s ongoing reassessment in literary and cultural studies of the early twentieth century, and represents an alternative to the emphasis on his spiritual trajectory that has characterized much previous scholarship about the author. Though the geographical is by no means incommensurable with a theological approach, as a number of the chapters in this book demonstrate, this book emphasizes the material context of modern London in order to reconsider a cross-section of Chesterton’s work. The subject of the metropolis necessarily prompts a range of perspectives. As Eliot intuited, in his echo of Dickens, the city prompts and articulates ‘different voices’. Multiple and messy, London will here function not simply as a different context in which to read Chesterton’s writing but as an abiding intellectual problem in his thinking. The ten chapters and Afterword (by Julian Wolfreys) presented offer a variety of approaches to the topic, and exemplify a range of literary critical and historical practices, but all represent responses to Chesterton’s material encounters and intellectual engagement with metropolitan modernity. In Chapter 1, Michael D. Hurley finds in Chesterton’s city writings a celebratory alternative to the pessimistic rendering of the metropolis with which we are familiar from the work of T. S. Eliot, among other canonical modernists. Comparing one of Chesterton’s little-known poems to The Waste Land (1922), he analyses the different uses to which London Bridge and the nursery rhyme in which it ‘falls down’ are put. For Hurley this exemplifies the authors’ contrasting attitudes to the question of what is salvageable in urban modernity. Lynne Hapgood, by contrast, suggests in Chapter 2 that Chesterton’s narratives reveal the author’s anxieties that the modern city had become an ‘undifferentiated rubbish dump from which both past and present meaning had been stripped’. The author’s fictions, in this model, do the opposite of celebrating the city; instead, they imagine circumstances in which

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its contradictions might be resolved. Specifically, she finds in Chesterton’s work an interest in the irreducible tension between the ‘plural’ and the ‘singular’ in the modern city. As The Napoleon of Notting Hill explores, a reconfigured London might be made to express the ‘singularly plural’ nature of reality, being at once a collection of knowable, distinct villages and a vast, unfathomable metropolis. Mark Knight in Chapter 3 also interrogates the relations of the ‘one’ to the ‘many’ in Chesterton’s fiction, but traces a specifically theological root for the author’s interest in the ‘particularity’ of London as much as its ‘universality’. This dialectic is posed in terms of ‘sacrament’: ‘Chesterton extends his interests beyond local patriotism and explores the capacity of Christian theological resources to address the competing demands of the one and the many in the modern world.’ Knight poses Theodor Adorno’s passive consumers of urban advertising against those of Chesterton’s theocentric model, arguing that in the novelist’s work, the sign is always something more than what its commercial funders intend, being as much a part of creation as the citydwellers who encounter it on the billboards of shop walls. For Nick Freeman too, in Chapter 4, the Chestertonian city is always bound up with the process of reading, though the interpreter’s quest is here cast as that of a scholar sifting a palimpsest. Beneath the everyday grime and banality of the modern streets, Chesterton suggests, ‘a city’s soul [lies] deeply buried’. Transposing Augustine’s ideas about the individual onto the metropolis, Chesterton and Arthur Machen, the Welsh fantasy writer with whom Freeman compares him, ‘were mystical archaeologists who attempted to burrow down through the layers of cultural accretion while . . . adding further layers of their own’. The writer of The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill thus looks forward to the ‘gnomic ruminations’ of Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller. Matthew Beaumont’s reading, in Chapter 5, itself performs a kind of excavation – of the literary relations of Chesterton and his Victorian predecessor Robert Browning. Exploring one of the concrete ways in which a city can shape a writer’s thinking, Beaumont delineates the novelist’s exposure to the poet through his experiences as a student at UCL in the 1890s, when he attended Professor Ker’s illuminating lectures in English Literature. Beaumont shows that, in both Chesterton’s critical writings on Browning and his own poems and fiction, the traces of the former’s influence on the latter can be

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found in mediaevalist images of ‘dark towers’ and ‘knights errant’. Chesterton urbanizes Browning. In another essay that dwells upon Chesterton’s student days in the 1890s Chapter 6, by Merrick Burrow, situates the author in relation to the homosocial club-world of late-Victorian London, and reveals distinctly ambivalent attitudes to the decadent metropolis in his work. The chapter shows how Chesterton’s representations of metropolitan bachelor identities in The Club of Queer Trades bear the imprint of the Wildean ‘Green Carnation’ they intended to reject. A further example of the way the fiction plays with cultural phenomena antithetical to bourgeois normativity can be found in Matthew Ingleby’s account of Chesterton’s ambiguous representation of the figure of the burglar in Chapter 7. Exploring the burglary episode in Manalive in the context of earlier sympathetic burglar narratives, the chapter inserts Chesterton into a cultural political debate about the ethics of acquisitive crime in an unequal modern city. For Michael Shallcross, in Chapter 8, meanwhile, Chesterton’s urban fictions display some of the qualities of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, subverting the cartography of social reformers such as Charles Booth who were trying to map social inequality in order to control the city more completely. Drawing out the Rabelasian playfulness with which the first of the Father Brown Stories, ‘The Blue Cross’, ‘disrupts’ the city, he argues that the text transforms London into a ‘playground for adults’, in which criminal and detective are bonded affectively in a game of hide and seek that escapes the punishment-oriented conservative paradigm of Holmesian detective fiction. In Chapter 9, Colin Cavendish-Jones compares the use of estrangement in Chesterton’s London fiction to the Russian Formalist principle of ostranenie: ‘Modern town populations think life dull because, like Lucian Gregory’s clerks on the underground railway, or the Clapham journalist deaf to the roar of Thunderclapham, they have not really looked at, listened to or thought about the strangeness of the modern town.’ The confusion of the modern city is an invitation for the Chestertonian reader actively to pursue a fuller truth, an injunction that is not so legibly signposted in the canonical works of Modernism. By contrast, Matthew Taunton suggests that Chesterton took the materiality of such infrastructural urban phenomena as underground railways more seriously than his casual references to them in fiction might lead us to think. His Chapter 10 considers the spatial dimensions of Chesterton’s economic

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theory known as Distributism. Insisting on the need to follow recent trends in the social sciences that stress the pervasive but invisible physical systems that enable a city to work, rather than only its surface features, Taunton suggests that the critique of urban modernity contained in Chesterton’s later political journalism, though eccentric, is much more complex than has previously been appreciated. Finally, in a punningly titled afterword, Julian Wolfreys provocatively invites us to think about the way Chesterton’s fictional and critical writing (on Dickens, in particular) resists positivistic interpretation, arguing that reading him can restore a sense of the phenomenological complexity – the ‘unremarkability’ – of modern urban life itself. The key works of British Modernism have in recent years attracted a great deal of scholarship that relates them to the capital city in which most of them were published. Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) are now standardly discussed and taught as London texts, which emerge out of and comment upon the metropolis. This has proved a successful way of contextualizing and complicating our understanding of canonical works that had previously been read too formalistically, too hermetically sealed off from their place in space and time. But for a fuller recognition of metropolitan representation in the early twentieth century, the unremitting focus on a small literary geographical canon secures too restricted, too lopsided a view of a period in which the city was a highly contested subject. Contributing to the recent critical turn to ‘Middle Brow’ fiction, which champions the work of popular but intellectually ambitious writers that have never been considered as part of the Modernist canon, this volume intends to show that Chesterton deserves and, indeed, rewards the scrutiny of those that come to his texts afresh, because of his distinctive commentary upon and play with the everyday matter of urban modernity.

Notes 1 M. Lawson, ‘Blandings and Father Brown: Nostalgia TV at Its Best’. See www. guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/jan/11/blandings-father-brownnostalgia?INTCMP=SRCH. 2 http://ecumenicaldiablog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-bbcs-father-brown-etc.html.

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3 Michael D. Hurley G. K. Chesterton (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2012) makes a comparison between these two figures when he quotes comments by Hannah Arendt upon Benjamin in relation to Chesterton: that ‘he was neither a poet nor a philosopher’ but something in between (p. 16). 4 W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 68. I. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 13. 5 L. W. Conolly, Bernard Shaw and the BBC (University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 23. 6 Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, p. 66. 7 Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, p. 48; Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, p. 94. 8 G. K. Chesterton, William Blake (London: Duckworth & Co., 1910), pp. 32–5. 9 G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (New York: John Lane Company, 1909), p. 72. 10 For more about the neglect of Chesterton within critical histories, see M. Knight, who instances the slight attention he receives in D. Trotter, The English Novel in History 1895–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993); J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 11 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, ed. Matthew Beaumont (London: Penguin, 2011); G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, ed. Michael Hurley (London: Penguin, 2012). 12 Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy; Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography. 13 M. D. Hurley, G. K. Chesterton (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2012); M. Knight, Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); A. Nichols, G. K. Chesterton, Theologian (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009). 14 J. Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009); L. Seaber, G. K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011). 15 L. H. Harriman, ‘The Russian Betrayal of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday ’, Comparative Literature (Winter 2010), 62(1) 41–54; A. Vaninskaya, ‘ “My Mother, Drunk or Sober”: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-imperialism’, History of European Ideas (2008), 34(4), 535–47. 16 S. Žižek and J. Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. C. Davis (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009). It might surprise those who appropriate Chesterton as a conservative thinker that, like Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Gramsci was a fan of Father Brown. 17 Adam Gopnik summed up the ‘problem’ of Chesterton reception today neatly thus: ‘Those of us who are used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard

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job of protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he was not. His Catholic devotees are legion and fanatic . . . but not always helpful to his non-cult reputation . . . his most strenuous advocates are mainly conservative pre-Vatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm may have contributed to it.’ A. Gopnik, ‘The Back of the World: The Troubling Genius of G. K. Chesterton’. New Yorker (July 2008), 7, 52–9 (52). 18 See W. Oddie (ed.), The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton (Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2010), which assembles seven essays that respond to the idea of the author’s possible future canonization. 19 C. Hitchens, ‘The Reactionary: The Charming, Sinister G. K. Chesterton’, The Atlantic (March 2012), 309(2), 76–82.

Bibliography Carey, J., The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). Chesterton, G. K., George Bernard Shaw (New York: John Lane Company, 1909). —, William Blake (London: Duckworth & Co., 1910). —, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, ed. Matthew Beaumont (London: Penguin, 2011). —, The Complete Father Brown Stories, ed. Michael D. Hurley (London: Penguin, 2012). Conolly, L. W., Bernard Shaw and the BBC (University of Toronto Press, 2009). Gopnik, A., ‘The Back of the World: The Troubling Genius of G. K. Chesterton’, New Yorker (7 July 2008), 52–9. Harriman, L. H., ‘The Russian Betrayal of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday’, Comparative Literature (Winter 2010), 62(1), 41–54. Hitchens, C., ‘The Reactionary: The Charming, Sinister G. K. Chesterton’, The Atlantic (March 2012), 309(2), 76–82. Hurley, M. D., G. K. Chesterton (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2012). Ker, I., G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Knight, M., Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Lawson, M., ‘Blandings and Father Brown: Nostalgia TV at Its Best’. See www. guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/jan/11/blandings-fatherbrown-nostalgia?INTCMP=SRCH. Nichols, A., G. K. Chesterton, Theologian (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009).

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Oddie, W., Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Oddie, W. (ed.) The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton (Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2010). Seaber, L., G. K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011). Stapleton, J., Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009). Trotter, D., The English Novel in History 1895–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993). Vaninskaya, A., ‘“My Mother, Drunk or Sober”: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Antiimperialism’, History of European Ideas (2008), 34(4), 535–47. Žižek, S. and Milbank J., The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Ed. C. Davis (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009).

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Why Chesterton Loved London Michael D. Hurley

It is curious that one of England’s greatest poets of the countryside, the laureate of the Lake District, William Wordsworth, should write one of his greatest poems in praise of London. ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ opens with arresting stridency, at once establishing a tone of self-witnessing authority: ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. Both grammatically (as a discrete declarative phrase) and also prosodically (in the confident fit of the sense-unit with the lineation) this first line neither invites nor allows for contradiction. And if the fact that it is sealed off by a colon rather than a full-stop entertains the possibility of subsequent qualification, then that possibility is only opened up just far enough to be slammed shut again. In the lines that immediately follow, the claim is not contextualized, it is universalized: ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty.’ Grammatical and prosodic features once again collude to press the argument and provoke the reader. Rhetorically and rhythmically, the accent falls on ‘Dull’. To object to the sentiment would be to concede that adjective not merely to one’s dissenting aesthetic sensibility, but to one’s very ‘soul’. Can Wordsworth really believe this? Here is the poem in full: Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty; This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

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Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!1

There is, we may notice, an irony that ripens through this poetical panegyric.2 Not in the crude sense that Wordsworth reveals himself to be sarcastically insincere, but in the more subtle sense that, it becomes apparent, London’s beauty affects him with special poignancy because of his awareness of its fragile ephemerality. For the city’s lovely vista is indirectly figured in terms of the ugliness of human activity temporarily suspended. The air is not ‘fresh’ but ‘smokeless’, and once stripped of the early morning’s ‘garment’, of nature’s borrowed splendour not its own, the scars of industrial pollution will return: the air will become smoke-filled, the river will be not run by its ‘own sweet will’, but by boat-traffic; and all will cease to be ‘touching’ and to evoke ‘calm’. The poem’s punning conclusion, that the city’s mighty heart is lying still, finally and brilliantly clarifies Wordsworth’s double perspective: London is a geographical place, but it is also a human event. While Wordsworth registers distaste here for the human industry threatening to pollute the city at slumber, he elsewhere articulates a symmetrical anxiety, about the way the city threatens its inhabitants. He worries that dull souls might miss the beauty of London – but also that London itself might dull souls. As a child, he warmed to the idea of bustling streets, processions and theatres: ‘Marvellous things / My fancy had shaped forth, of sights and shows’. His dreams of it were ‘hardly less intense’, he says, than those that inspired Dick Whittington. One thought above all, however, left him ‘Baffled’: ‘how men lived / Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still / Strangers, and knowing not each other’s names’. Anonymity tips into alienation: How often in the overflowing streets Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said Unto myself. The face of everyone That passes by me is a mystery! Thus have I look’d, nor ceas’d to look, oppress’d

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By thoughts of what and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams, And all the ballast of familiar life – The present and the past, hope, fear, all stays, All laws, of acting, thinking, speaking man – Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known.3

Those delightful fancies that once excited his boyhood are thus, in his mature imaginings, converted into something that ‘oppress’d’. The sentiment is characteristic of its time. There are, as Raymond Williams observes, ‘hundreds of cases, from James Thomson to George Gissing and beyond, of the relatively simple transition of earlier forms of isolation and alienation to their specific location in the city.’4 Conspicuously, though, G. K. Chesterton may not be counted in that company. Although he shares Wordsworth’s double vision of the city as a place and as a human event (as he also understood the way they mutually influence one another), he rejects Wordsworth’s governing assumptions. For a start, he rejects the notion that environment shapes the person as a determinate force. ‘The idea that surroundings will mould a man is’, he avers in What’s Wrong with the World (1910), ‘always mixed up with the totally different idea that they will mould him in a particular way’: To take the broadest case, landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is quite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean loving pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of these or any degree of any of them . . . It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they inhabit mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It may be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills; did the Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn’t? Personally I should think it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well as positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild skyline, but because of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of it.5

What determines one’s way of living is not therefore the environment as such, it is one’s response to that environment. The suggestion is implicitly illustrated by his own often-expressed fondness for London, in which his reaction to the

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city differs from Wordsworth and others not about the facts of its conditions, but in his interpretation of those facts. This is the second sense in which he rejects Wordsworth’s assumptions: he does not see the fair beauty and physical splendour of London as defiled but as defined by the thrum of its human activity. Even when the city is ‘asleep’, he admires it as active with the human agency that brought its material landscape into being. What distinguishes Chesterton’s counter-cultural love for London is partly a matter of scale. He does not see an endless brick and concrete sprawl, he notices its historically demarcated districts (that ‘London was already too large and loose a thing to be a city in the sense of a citadel’ is the anxious observation that inspires The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), his comic fantasy of reasserting the primacy of these districts).6 For Chesterton, the city expresses its humanity even in the tiniest elements of its construction: ‘Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon.’7 This is a bold entreaty self-consciously set against the Romantic habit of handwringing over urban engorgement, in which (as Shelley describes it) ‘Hell is a city much like London’.8 Blake’s London poem is perhaps the most anthologized of all English verses on how – in both senses – the city ‘appals’. And yet Chesterton invites us to notice in his biography of Blake that the poet himself never succumbs to this iniquitous influence: his imagination allows him not only to observe acutely but also to transcend, to reconfigure, what he sees. ‘Blake had more positive joy on his death-bed than any other of the sons of Adam’, Chesterton claims; and the reason for that seems to be directly explained by an earlier proposition of equal extremity: namely, that ‘Blake was about as little affected by environment as any man that ever lived in this world’.9 Chesterton’s own transcendence from, and reconfiguration of, the city relies less on retreating into an ethereal spiritual realm and more on seeing the realm of the city itself as spiritual in its very physical fabric. Blake ruefully observes ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ in every face, and ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ in every cry that rings out from London’s streets.10 Chesterton, by contrast, thrills to the idea of human creativity as marked within the streets themselves, for testifying that the city might express as well as oppress the ‘soul’. This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant

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symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it . . .11

It is one thing to read a metropolis for the poetry of its human agency as inscribed with the ‘deliberate symbol’ and ‘intention’ of its architecture (his most sustained and impressive interpretation of this sort is to be found in The Resurrection of Rome [1930]); it is quite another to read poetry as embodied by that city’s inhabitants. For the literary intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban living is inevitably understood as depressingly prosaic rather than romantically poetic: as mechanized soullessness, or living death.12 Once again, though, Chesterton takes a different line; and, once again, his account is distinguished by its smaller and more differentiated scale. So, while he acknowledges the numbing tendency of modern urban living, he does not dwell on the idea of homogeneous masses; he concerns himself instead with the singularity of individuals. The distinction may be neatly illustrated by comparing T. S. Eliot’s influential account of London as an ‘unreal city’ in which workers swarm like the condemned of Dante’s Inferno (‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’),13 with an unfinished and unpublished verse by Chesterton from the 1890s: London A thousand housetops under the dome And every house is one man’s home, With love and quarrel and truth and sin. I should find it if I walked therein Under the eaves of every house Secrets, laughter and sullen brows, And bitter battles, and comrades kind And the love of a woman I should find [Every anger] and hope there comes, In any home of a thousand homes. And strangest yet, find them in the press Who say that the world is emptiness.14

The date of the poem’s composition coincides with the time in Chesterton’s life when, by his own account (in his autobiography and elsewhere), he gave

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himself over to a morbid ‘lunacy’; when he suffered most keenly the pervasive ‘pessimism’ of the age. But even at that lowest ebb, he rejected the aspersion of London’s purported ‘emptiness’. Seeing a thousand rooftops, he did not see a thousand houses, he saw a thousand homes, each uniquely animated by the plenary range of human experience: truth, love, laughter and hope embroiled with sullenness, secrets, quarrelling, bitterness, anger and sin. The consistency of this perspective may be illustrated, and that vision also further refined, by tracing a line from this early poem to something he wrote at the very end of his life. His Autobiography appeared in 1936, the year of his death – which happened also to be the same year in which George Orwell published Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Whereas Orwell’s expression of modernist anomie through the character of Gordon Comstock describes a fall from idealism to cynicism, Chesterton records how he ‘always retained a dim sense of something sacred in English stock, or in human stock, which separated me from the mere pessimism of the period’. He never comes to see his fellow city folk through Comstock’s eyes, as ‘meaningless people . . . rotting upright’ in their houses.15 On the contrary, he ‘never doubted that the human beings inside the houses were themselves almost miraculous; like magic and talismanic dolls, in whatever ugly dolls’-houses’. For Chesterton, ‘those brown brick boxes were really Christmas boxes’.16 That last analogical leap – a typical Chestertonian contrarianism – may seem whimsical, and in a sense it is; but there is a wider context for the comment that deserves serious attention. Chesterton’s London is not perversely reactionary or naively Panglossian. He is quite aware of the city’s unattractive and (to use Wordsworth’s term) oppressive qualities, and freely admits the ways in which it can feel ‘unthinkably large’, or dispiritingly unlovely (cluttered with ‘flat-chested houses, blank windows, ugly iron lamp-posts and vulgar vermilion pillarboxes’).17 But his characteristic attitude is to see the city’s vastness as happily thinkable and positively attractive after all, when scaled to the human beings who make it what it is. To be a ‘serious mystic’ inspecting a city, one must, Chesterton insists, be ‘a materialist also’.18 That means having a metaphysical appreciation of, and for, the physical: to see the soul of man in man’s environment. Miraculousness may be redeemed from the vulgar megalopolitan city, in other words, when it is approached as a romantically rebellious cluster of districts, and the drab brownness of the housing as the index of what, at a human level,

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is miraculous within. The city is not, for him, beautiful and engaging in spite of the things that are potentially overbearing or unsightly. It is beautiful and engaging because of these things, rightly considered. Of course the houses for beautiful souls are brown because, he reasons, that’s the colour in which beautiful Christmas presents come to us: ‘For, after all, Christmas boxes often came tied up in brown paper; and the jerry-builders’ achievements in brown brick were often extremely like brown paper.’19 Common to Chesterton’s remarks here, whether on the human vitality of London simmering within the walls of the castle that is each Englishman’s home, or in Johnsonian sympathy for the city’s zestful atmosphere as it spills into the streets, is a sense of joyous mystery. In particular, the rich mystery of the metropolitan is, he thinks, expressed through its unfamiliar and unsettling qualities. London’s very inscrutability is not only part of what makes it energizing, it is also what paradoxically secures the possibility of its redemption as a site of anonymity and potential alienation. Wordsworth exclaimed that ‘The face of everyone / That passes by me is a mystery!’ Chesterton exclaimed the same, but with eagerness rather than solicitude, for it is that persistent sense of the enigmatic and unpredictable which makes the city the symbolic home of his favourite literary genre. Here is how his essay quoted earlier on ‘the poetry of London’ continues, by folding an apology for the popular literature of detective fiction into the popular assumptions about urban living: Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh might be a notorious thief.20

The ‘romance of detail in civilization’ – the intricate clue-gathering culture of the whodunit – is, he suggests, the romance of the unfathomable in human character; and it encourages ‘a good thing’: ‘the habit of looking imaginatively’ at each other. In this respect, detective fiction is recommended for its salutary influence on its readers. It offers an instructive example of how even (or especially) that which is seemingly irrelevant, unknowable or inconsequential deserves our rapt and reverent attention as a feature of ‘the poetry of modern life’.21

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Wondering whether our fellow men might secretly be criminals is not perhaps the most wholesome kind of speculation – but it is yet preferable to the characteristic malaise of modernity, which expresses itself as a jaded inability to imagine anything at all: We may dream, perhaps, that it might be possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men’s souls have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson) decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace.22

The parenthetic note identifying Robert Louis Stevenson as an admirable exception to the great authors of the age singles him out as one who brings the city to primal life, where the contemporary habit was to show it as deadening. Although Stevenson is typically writing about Edinburgh rather than London, the point is not that he sees a different city to those who take London as their working symbol of modernity. The point is that he sees the idea of the modern city differently – because he sees modern life differently. In Chesterton’s biography of Stevenson, he declares that everything there is to know about Stevenson’s work may be traced to his experience of playing with a toy theatre, ‘the mysterious Mr Skelt of the Juvenile Drama’.23 This may seem like a glib commendation. But in the wider survey of Stevenson’s writings, Chesterton’s description of the toy theatre as the toy ‘of all toys’ that ‘has most of the effect of magic on the mind’ acts as a stay against the lugubrious lucubrations of the modern temper.24 Having sketched the artistic and intellectual ‘tendency’ of Stevenson’s age (‘he felt it in the realism of nineteenth-century literature, in the pessimism of contemporary poetry, in the timidity of hygienic precaution, in the smugness of middle-class uniformity’), Chesterton casts Stevenson’s fey playfulness as an act of heroic defiance: ‘he had that within him which could not but break out in a sort of passionate protest for more personal and poetical things. He flung out his arms with a wide and blind gesture, as one who would find wings at the moment when the world sank beneath him.’25

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In his sympathy for Stevenson, the mysterious Mr Skelt and the persistent ‘magic’ of the toy theatre, Chesterton risks looking not merely innocent but immature; not merely childlike but childish. He did not shy from this charge. The ‘characteristic contemporary literature’, he laments, displays ‘an almost complete absence of joy’, such that ‘it would be true to say, in a general fashion, that it is not childish enough to be cheerful’.26 As a high priest of modernism, Eliot is predictably impatient with such ‘outbursts of heavy-weight PeterPantheism’.27 But years before Eliot levied his criticism, Chesterton made clear his view that ‘Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but to the world of Peter’.28 Which is to say: the levity of childish joy may carry metaphysical weight. ‘The object of the artistic and spiritual life’ is, Chesterton proposes, ‘to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.’29 It is well to linger over his peculiar and puzzling phrasing here – to notice the common cause he conceives for ‘the artistic and spiritual life’, and the daft loveliness with which it is pursued (digging for the sun).30 His testimony clarifies the difference between his and Eliot’s accounts of London. For Chesterton, it is precisely the modern assumption that we are living in a waste land that inhibits the possibility of living a more vigorous existence. In his Autobiography, he looks back at his ‘primary problem’ that ‘grew out of ’ ‘[e]verything that I have thought and done’: ‘It was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.’ Chesterton’s response to the ‘primary problem’ of enlivening the modern sensibility is not, therefore, passively to record that sensibility, but actively to challenge the mental inertia that enshrouds it. His writing aims to spark the imagination through its audaciously capering narratives and wordplay, and to kindle thereby the ‘forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence’ that lurks somewhere ‘at the back of our brains’.31 Where other writers may register the travails of modern living as exemplified in the city – and most of all in that commercial city of cities, London – Chesterton promises to startle us into experiencing modernity differently. The most sustained dramatization of Chesterton’s refusal to accede to the anaesthetizing effects of modern life is to be found in his novel Manalive (1912), in which the book’s protagonist, ‘Innocent Smith’, is presented as ‘a

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kind of fanatic of the joy of life’ who ‘had somehow made a giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed the crisis in youth when most of us grow old’.32 The interest of this story does not, however, derive from the fact of his perpetual ‘innocence’, but rather from the fact that his innocence is perpetually under threat. We are told that he must work hard to avoid being ‘imprisoned in the commonplace’, something he achieves by constantly playing, and through other extravagant efforts to defamiliarize his existence: stealing his own wine, having an affair with his own wife; even walking out of the back door of his house and all the way around the world that he may enter from the front door again, truly renewed.33 It might be said, then, that Chesterton controverts Blake’s binary of innocence versus experience. His innocence is not some prelapsarian state, it is something nurtured by and through experience. That is not one of Chesterton’s (purportedly) idle paradoxes. As it applies to London in particular, his counterintuitive commitment to forge innocence out of experience expresses an earnest truth on at least three interpenetrating levels. First: personally, Chesterton was himself a Londoner, by birth, schooling and throughout his working life, initially establishing himself in the crush of Fleet Street, and latterly retreating to write from leafy Beaconsfield. His comments about London therefore necessarily insinuate more than purely symbolic significance. London can never be for him, as it was for some writers of his age, a mere metonym for modernity: to whatever purpose he invokes its name, he does so as an intimate. That he adores the city where others loathe it cannot be peremptorily dismissed as a fantasy sustained by ignorance. Unlike Wordsworth’s boyish fancies strung together from fairy-tales and hearsay of the city’s wonders, Chesterton’s enchantment arises out of sustained acquaintance. Second: aesthetically, Chesterton self-consciously sought to ensure the innocence of his perceptions that – like those of Innocent Smith – typically have an uncannily defamiliarized quality about them. ‘I believe about the universal cosmos, or for that matter about every weed and pebble in the cosmos, that men will never rightly realize that it is beautiful, until they realize that it is strange.’34 He makes his own writing beautifully strange because he saw the world in that same way, but also because he believed art opens the possibility of revitalizing our experience of the world: ‘Poetry is the separation of the soul from some object, whereby we can regard it with wonder.’35 In short, and

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in John Ruskin’s more famous formulation – Ruskin being an exemplar for him as both an artist and also as social critic, who (in The Stones of Venice, and elsewhere) bequeaths the practice of reading the sedimented ideology of a city through its architectural styles – Chesterton sought to cultivate an ‘innocent eye’. Third: theologically, Chesterton regards human beings themselves as innocent, or at least capable of redemption into innocence. This tenet of Chesterton’s faith is grounded in the example of St Francis, but it may be more conveniently glossed via his famous fictional character, Father Brown, who expresses his super-sleuthing power as a refusal to recognize the usual suspects and the likely type.36 This democratic outlook is at once principled and pragmatic; it is a wisdom accrued in the confessional box, which also answers to the catholic imperative of the Catholic faith. By recognizing his common humanity with even the worst of his suspects, Father Brown can solve their crimes by seeing the world through their eyes. It is a matter of assizing them as people rather than criminals. In that sense, the Father Brown stories are the heir to Browning’s dramatic monologues, in which Chesterton found ‘a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves’ kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue’;37 or perhaps to Dickens, who wrote about, and out of, ‘the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration’.38 It is a wry recognition of this principle and praxis that Father Brown’s arch-nemesis, Flambeau, is not in the end convicted but converted; and that, moreover, the first published collection of these stories takes for its title, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). It should be clear, even from this much-compressed account, that Chesterton’s innocence is not of the anaemic, milk-soppy sort. Most often, the impulse to startle the reader’s imagination takes a darkly fantastical form, of disquieting scenes of all varieties, frequently involving murder or madness. But the ‘misunderstanding’ of the mystery story is, he explains, ‘only meant as a dark outline of a cloud to bring out the brightness of that instant intelligibility.’39 It is the gargoyles that announce the Church, and ‘it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it.’40 So it is that in confecting his own ‘higher romance of London’, Chesterton casts the city into a kind of innocent darkness. That is the atmosphere in which Auberon Quin conceives his ‘momentary fancy’

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in The Napoleon of Notting Hill that ‘had merely the effect of all miracles’ (it ‘changed the universe’).41 That is the ‘nightmare’ adumbrated in the subtitle of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). That is the vertiginous impulse of The Club of Queer Trades (1905), which takes us ‘on one of those journeys in which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell Park.’42 In each of these works, London dramatizes the triumph of innocent wonder and its attendant joys. The lesson Quin is said to learn from indulging his ‘momentary fancy’ may in this respect be taken as emblematic of Chesterton’s artistic and theological education into innocence: He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.43

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, it was earlier noted, fantasizes a revolutionary civil order based on provinces small enough to excite fellowship and pride within their communities. But it would be over-simple to take the book as a straightforward attack on London as the swollen site of all that’s bad in modern as against medieval society. In this work of fiction and others where London provides a setting, Chesterton celebrates the city’s potential and possibilities, actual and fanciful. Whether in nightmarish or in whimsical vein, London is inevitably presented as a habitat of delightful adventure. We share what the protagonist of The Club of Queer Trades describes as the ‘curiously refreshing’ experience of discovering a ‘strange society’ operating in a place at once known and unknown to us, as if all things were yet fresh with opportunity: as if we were, yet, ‘in the childhood of the world’.44 Figuring London’s rich and strange capacity to surprise us is not something Chesterton invented. Although he may have been out of step with the cultivated ennui of his immediate contemporaries, the dizzying awe with which he treats England’s capital aligns with a literary tradition reaching back two centuries and more; a tradition that perhaps reached its apogee in the work of one of Chesterton’s very favourite authors, Charles Dickens. To take only a single example: in the phantasmagoria of all-consuming mud and fog with which he opens Bleak House (where ‘it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’45), Dickens offered Chesterton all the wit and warrant he could need for the augural sky-

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scape over Saffron Park that looms ‘like the end of the world’ in the opening of The Man Who Was Thursday.46 It may be added that although Bleak House is a book of many horrors, taken as a whole it betrays the promise of its title, for being anything but bleak when it comes to representing the humour and tenacity of the human spirit. So, too, does Chesterton confound the subtitle of The Man Who Was Thursday. The book declares itself a ‘nightmare’, but as Chesterton explains in his Autobiography, it is ‘a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young halfpessimist of the ’90s . . . it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black.’47 Even where Chesterton indulges his richest apocalyptic imagining, that vision never approaches sheer bleakness; it is always teeming, exciting, endearing. A final point worth noting on the atmospheres of foreboding that both Dickens and Chesterton propagate through their descriptions of London’s smoke and clouds, and the sunsets diffused through them, is that they often serve as more than a pathetic fallacy or as a negative commentary on the city as polluted. As Chesterton’s great friend Hilaire Belloc submits in his evocative book on the North Sea, the effects upon London of its smoke and cloud ‘are not wholly produced by modern industrial conditions’. In a less loaded and more elusive way, the city’s micro-meteorology is a natural phenomenon that shapes its aesthetic as a location like no other: The mists of the Thames estuary, the murkiness of the North Sea fog, were there long before London arose. But between them all the forces which have produced the London sky have made something which all Londoners know, and which no one who has never seen London has ever seen. Among other things it produced the visions of Turner. How many there are who, if they recall their childhood, will chiefly remember the particular tone of London clouds, especially at evening.48

While Chesterton cherished the example of pre-industrial living, therefore, and held a special affection for the open road, contrary to what has been suggested – and unlike other writers who shared similar sympathies, such as Jerome K. Jerome, H. G. Wells or Richard Jefferies – he never ‘vengefully imagined the London of the future as a desolate swamp’.49 Gothic though they may be, his depictions of London are never annihilative. Almost never, anyway; his little-known poem ‘The Old Song’ perhaps asks to be treated as

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an equivocal exception, and tests the limit and coherence of this chapter’s argument. At 52 lines, the poem is reasonably long. It is nonetheless worth quoting in full, because its effects depend significantly upon a certain build-up of momentum, and of a development through modified refrains. The Old Song (On the Embankment in stormy weather) A livid sky on London And like the iron steeds that rear A shock of engines halted, And I knew the end was near: And something said that far away, over the hills and far away, There came a crawling thunder and the end of all things here. For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down, As digging lets the daylight on the sunken streets of yore, The lightning looked on London town, the broken bridge of London town, The ending of a broken road where men shall go no more. I saw the kings of London town, The kings that buy and sell, That built it up with penny loaves And penny lies as well: And where the streets were paved with gold the shrivelled paper shone for gold, The scorching light of promises that pave the streets of hell. For penny loaves will melt away, melt away, melt away, Mock the mean that haggled in the grain they did not grow; With hungry faces in the gate, a hundred thousand in the gate, A thunder-flash on London and the finding of the foe. I heard the hundred pin-makers Slow down their racking din, Till in the stillness men could hear The dropping of the pin: And somewhere men without the wall, beneath the wood, without the wall, Had found the place where London ends and England can begin. For pins and needles bend and break, bend and break, bend and break, Faster than the breaking spears or the bending of the bow, Of pageants pale in thunder-light, ‘twixt thunder-load and thunder-light, The Hundreds marching on the hills in the wars of long ago.

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I saw great Cobbett riding, The horseman of the shires; And his face was red with judgement And a light of Luddite fires: And south to Sussex and the sea the lights leapt up for liberty, The trumpet of the yeomanry, the hammer of the squires; For bars of iron rust away, rust away, rust away, Rend before the hammer and the horseman riding in, Crying that all men at the last, and at the worst and at the last, Have found the place where England ends and England can begin. His horse-hoofs go before you Far beyond your bursting tyres; And time is bridged behind him And our sons are with our sires. A trailing meteor on the Downs he rides above the rotting towns, The Horseman of Apocalypse, the Rider of the Shires. For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down; Blow the horn of Huntington from Scotland to the sea – . . . Only flash of thunder-light, a flying dream of thunderlight, Had shown under the shattered sky a people that were free.50

The poem was composed between 1916 and 1921, and so antedates Eliot’s invocation of London Bridge as the locus for London life in The Waste Land (published 1922). Eliot actually makes two references to London Bridge in his poem. The first was noted above, in which he associates Londoners with the suffering souls of Dante’s Inferno (‘so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’); the second reference comes some 364 lines later, once again as a symbol of universal depredation, but this time through an old English nursery rhyme: ‘London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.’ How intriguing that Chesterton should do the same here, though in a tone more triumphant than is afforded by the prophetic figure of Eliot’s poem, the enfeebled and dispassionate Tiresias. If The Waste Land is grousingly defeated and defeatist – Eliot later glossed it as ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’51 – ‘The Old Song’ catches, in its insistent beat, its repetitions and reprises, its vivid images and strong narrative arc, the tenor of the balladic hurrah. Wordsworth confessed to have been as naive as Whittington before he actually visited London, and the disillusionment of that folk tale infuses this

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poem too, as the prospect of streets ‘paved with gold’ segues into an image of the false promises ‘that pave the streets of hell’. With all the bracing menace of Chesterton’s much-quoted poem ‘The Secret People’, but with more active and explicit ambitions, ‘The Old Song’ rejoices in its lusty destruction. London Bridge is synecdochic of the city – its breaking up is the ‘ending of a broken road where men shall go no more’ – which is itself both the margin and the centre of England. That revolutionaries ‘Had found the place where London ends and England can begin’ at first seems like a variation on that memorable moment in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), where Chesterton riffs on how ‘The end of London looked very like the end of the world’.52 But the city takes on a different aspect here: the sense of it demarcating a world distinct from the rest of England ultimately collapses as London is re-discovered as ‘the place where England ends and England can begin’. Chesterton presses something of the same idea in a short essay on the political history of the city, in which he observes that London’s landscape not only creates a particular atmosphere for the Londoner, it also expresses the temper of the English in general. Specifically, he identifies a ‘rather surly love of liberty’, which may be found written in ‘the straggling map of London, and proclaimed in its patchwork architecture’. Recent town-planning changes have attempted to clear broader, sweeping thoroughfares in the Continental manner – but the very name of one of them, Kingsway, ‘unintentionally illustrates something not native to the place’. For there never was in its long history a ‘King’s way’ through London: ‘There was nothing Napoleonic; no roads that could properly be decorated with his victories, or properly cleared with his cannon. It had something of the licence and privilege of that Alsatia that was its sore; the little impenetrable kingdom of rascals that revelled down in Whitefriars.’53 There is in this, the city’s stubborn commitment to independence, articulated in the secrets, side-streets and short-cuts of the city, ‘something that every Englishman feels in himself, though he does not always feel it to be good; something of the amateur; something of the eccentric.’ Chesterton goes further: ‘London is so English, that it can hardly even be called the capital of England. It is not even the county town of the county in which it stands . . . It is just London.’54 If ‘The Old Song’ may read, then, as an exception to the ardent affection Chesterton otherwise expressed towards London, it more convincingly

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rereads as heartily exemplifying that affection. Wordsworth’s encomium in ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’ is, we come to notice, haunted by a contingent antagonism towards London; and so too the millenarian urgings of ‘The Old Song’ obliquely asservate a contrary but corollary desire for London’s renewal. The poem is not, it turns out, so much about London as it is about England, and not so much about endings as beginnings. Where The Waste Land concludes in fragments shored against ruins, the very last word of ‘The Old Song’, which rings out in its rhyme, is of the reaffirmed glory of the city’s cussed commitment to ‘liberty’, to being ‘free’. Chesterton addresses the modern world, but his is an old song, the song of Cobbett and the Luddites that remembers the ingenuous hopes and fears of even older native folk tales and nursery rhymes – ‘over the hills and far away’. It might even be called a medieval hymn to modernity, for though it rouses like a war song, it is a love song, a song of the city of London that it is a song for the people of England.

Notes 1 W. Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802’, in de Selincourt, E. (ed.), Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 204. 2 Some critics do not recognise this irony. See, for instance, Wolfreys’s account of Wordsworth’s ‘Citephobia’, which presents this poem as straightforwardly anomalous with his other visions of London (‘and one which he will strive to disavow’), in J. Wolfreys (ed.), Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 121. 3 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude. VII (108–9; 113–14; 118–20; 594–606), in de Selincourt and Darbishire (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 261. 4 R. Williams, ‘The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Edward Timms and David Kelley (eds), Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 16. 5 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 4 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 158. 6 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 16 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 111. 7 G. K. Chesterton, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, in The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901), p. 159. All further references to this edition. 8 P. B. Shelley, ‘Peter Bell the Third’ (l. 147), in Thomas Hutchinson (ed.), Poetical Works. (2nd edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 350. 9 G. K. Chesterton, William Blake (London: Duckworth & Co., 1920), pp. 69, 35.

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10 W. Blake, ‘London’, in W. B. Yeats (ed.), Collected Poems (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 76. 11 Chesterton, The Defendant, p. 120. 12 See J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), Ch. 1 (passim). This book offers a somewhat cartoonish account of the subject, but nonetheless provides a wealth of illustrative quotations from the literary intelligentsia on the subject of modern – especially modern, urban – living as a characteristically soulless, zombielike existence. 13 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), pp. 51–74 (p. 53). 14 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 10 (part I) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 61. The words that appear in square brackets were, this edition advises, ‘struck through in the original holograph, but no substitution was made’. 15 G. Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell. Vol. 4 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997), pp. 92, 94. 16 Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 135. 17 Ibid., p. 133. 18 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 20 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), p. 637. 19 Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 135. 20 Chesterton, The Defendant, p. 121. 21 Ibid., p. 119. He elsewhere presses the analogy between the extravagant contrivance of the detective tale and the commonplace experience of real life: ‘What we call’ the ‘triviality’ of life is, he argues, ‘really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon’ – G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen & Co., 1909), p. 9. For a fuller account of Chesterton’s sense of this analogy, see Michael D. Hurley, ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Father Brown Stories (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. xv–xxxviii. 22 Chesterton, The Defendant, p. 121. 23 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 18 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 58. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., pp. 130–1. 26 Ibid., p. 141. 27 See D. J. Conlon (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgements, 1900–1937 (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976), p. 445. 28 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 332. 29 Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 97. 30 For a fuller account of the serious import of his seemingly nonsensical phrasing here, see Michael D. Hurley, G. K. Chesterton (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2012), pp. 6–16.

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52 53 54

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Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 132. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 7 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 279. Ibid., p. 281. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 20, p. 48. Ibid., p. 49. For a fuller exploration of this idea, see Michael D. Hurley, ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Father Brown Stories (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. xv–xxxviii. G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (London: Macmillan & Co., 1903), p. 52. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 15 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 473–4. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 13 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 15. Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 151. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 6 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 227–8. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 12 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 39. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 6, p. 228. Ibid., p. 53. C. Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1853), p. 1. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 6, p. 477. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 16, pp. 103–4. H. Belloc, Hilaire Belloc’s Prefaces, Written for Fellow Authors (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971), p. 332. John Carey presses this misleading claim in The Intellectuals and the Masses, p. 146. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 10 (part I), pp. 401–3. This comment was made by Eliot to his brother, Henry Ware Eliot, Jr: See V. Eliot (ed.), T. S. Eliot, A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), p. 1. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 8 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), p. 643. Chesterton, Collected Works. Vol. 20, p. 637. Ibid., pp. 634–45.

Bibliography Belloc, H., Hilaire Belloc’s Prefaces, Written for Fellow Authors (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971). Blake, W., ‘London’, in W. B. Yeats (ed.), Collected Poems (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 76. Carey, J., The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).

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Chesterton, G. K., The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901). —, Robert Browning (London: Macmillan & Co., 1903). —, Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen & Co., 1909). —, William Blake (London: Duckworth & Co., 1920). —, Collected Works, Vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). —, Collected Works, Vol. 4 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987). —, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). —, Collected Works, Vol. 15 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989). —, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991a). —, Collected Works, Vol. 18 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991b). —, Collected Works, Vol. 10 (part I) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994). —, Collected Works, Vol. 8 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999). —, Collected Works, Vol. 20 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001). —, Collected Works, Vol. 7 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). —, Collected Works, Vol. 12 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). —, Collected Works, Vol. 13 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). Conlon, D. J. (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgements, 1900–1937 (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976). Dickens, C., Bleak House (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1853). Eliot, T. S., Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1954). Eliot, V. (ed.), T. S. Eliot, A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1971). Hurley, M. D., G. K. Chesterton (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2012a). Hurley, M. D. (ed.), The Complete Father Brown Stories (London: Penguin, 2012b). Orwell, G., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 4 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997). Shelley, P. B., Poetical Works (2nd edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Timms, E. and Kelley, D. (eds), Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Wolfreys, J. (ed.), Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Wordsworth, W., Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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The Chestertonian City: A Singularly Plural Approach Lynne Hapgood

‘Nothing in the world is single.’ P. B. Shelley1 On a recent visit to Cresswell Crags, a prehistoric site in north Nottinghamshire, I listened to the guide talk about understanding the past, and, although he didn’t realize it, about G. K. Chesterton. Standing on the earth floor of an ancient cave dwelling, the guide asked the children to imagine their bedrooms if they didn’t tidy them until, after many years, they finally had to climb a ladder to squeeze in at the top. ‘What’, he asked, ‘would you find if you dug back down to the very bottom?’ ‘My teddy’, said one; ‘slippers’, said another; ‘bits of Lego’, chimed in another, and so on. In a stroke, the guide had revealed one very important means through which individuals can access the impersonal vastness of the past: that is, through objects which serve as a conduit for memory, for significance, for subjective meaning. Chesterton understood this double history well. Although historical narratives provide a frame for a diversity of material objects whose social context, known function and place in a hierarchy of value have been identified, even if only speculatively, he recognized that this process entraps the essentially plural nature of reality into an apparently logical and comprehensible singleness. It is this formal history that provides the ambiguous but powerful realism of Chesterton’s novels. Saffron Park/Bedford Park, Hampstead Heath and Notting Hill, for instance, were cartographically defined districts incorporated into a

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larger identity labelled ‘London’. But, as Chesterton makes clear, the quotidian experience of a citizen of a Bedford Park, a Hampstead Heath or a Notting Hill jostles these time-specific, enclosed identities, replacing them with the random specificity of familiar objects – ‘a street lamp’, ‘irregular buildings’, ‘three shops’. In his vision of the material world, these phenomena, far from being inert, become participative, animated by subjective responses and observed through the changing light of seasons, sunlight and shadows.2 Absorbed into an emotional landscape, they assume an additional identity, an individualized and ahistorical vitality. Is this interplay of the single and plural simply a straightforward binary contained, for the purposes of this discussion, within Chesterton’s view of a double history comprised of subjective memory and objective reality? If so, its contribution to understanding Chesterton’s world might be more appropriately contained in a discussion of paradox. However, what I want to explore is a philosophical perspective, not a literary device. Chesterton himself commented that paradox was generally understood to be ‘truth inherent in a contradiction’.3 ‘Truth’ may (or may not) be the outcome of a paradox but the paradox itself is simply a form of linguistic cleverness intended to surprise readers into a reconsideration of their assumptions. Although paradox is undoubtedly characteristic of Chesterton’s writing, such literary devices are not my concern here. I also want to differentiate my argument from Robert Caserio’s interesting discussion of modernism and Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, in which he identifies what he calls Chesterton’s strategy of ‘double-writing’, where the exuberant creation of ‘multiple’ and ‘equivocal’ meanings flatter to deceive, because, as Caserio argues, ‘equivocation’ merely terminates in ‘the discovery of definiteness’.4 The question I want to consider is not about the success or otherwise of Chesterton’s stylistic techniques but rather about the angle of perception, the orientation that deploys such techniques. To articulate it another way: ‘What is the ontological source that generated Chesterton’s sense of a world structured by a single/plural paradigm?’ By considering this question and its deep connection with both the imaginative and the material world, I want to explore what I think yields a more nuanced complexity in Chesterton’s writing than further analysis of a mechanistic binary (paradox) or an aesthetic dualism (double-writing).

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For this reason, it is important to recognize the intrinsic flexibility within each element of the single/plural idea. Despite their apparent conceptual and semantic separateness, the boundaries of the plural and the single are permeable; they exchange and include each other’s significance. As we have seen, the passage of time (or long history) accumulatively highlights the distinctiveness of the single object when detached from its framing historical narrative while also drawing attention to the fact that singular wonders are embedded in a plural reality. Similarly, what may appear in the present to be a monolithic single can be synecdotally unravelled to recover the multiple singles that comprise the plural world (Syme’s garden fence/Saffron Park, King Alfred’s harp/ England, Water Tower/ Notting Hill). In the novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday, the social structures of the contemporary city are subjected to this process allowing the city to be seen ‘for the first time’.5 Adam Wayne, euphoric with his love of Notting Hill ‘felt the curbstones and gas-lamps as things ancient as the sky’ and observing a little ‘front garden’, he comments, ‘“How those railings stir one’s blood”’ (89). Syme, waking from his nightmare to the pleasures of Saffron Park in The Man Who Was Thursday, ‘felt he was in possession of . . . an adorable triviality’ and experiences a feeling of ‘simple surprise’ to see ‘the red, irregular buildings’(184). On the other hand, the apparently sharply defined focus and simplicity of the single is actually inclusive, able to assume multiple meanings of mythical and symbolic significance which bring the immediacy of the material world and the timeless past into association. In fact, if the single and plural become divorced from their essentially complementary meanings, both can be dangerously slippery states of understanding. For Chesterton, the single can be conceptualized as bigotry or ideological rigidity, or acted out as terrorism ‘because the man who throws a bomb . . . prefers a great moment to everything’ (12). The plural may be a glorious world of singular wonders but it can also be a dull and muddled manifestation of chaos. I argue that Chesterton’s understanding of the single/plural paradigm and of the nexus of possibilities it reveals gave him a way of addressing the complexity of the contemporary city. An untidy conglomeration (‘London was already unthinkably large’, he comments in his Autobiography, ‘And that huge thing was a hideous thing, as a whole’), the idea of ‘London’ appeared to defy description or understanding.6 By the end of the 1890s, London had witnessed

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radical social changes and become not so much a topographical location as a sprawling space beset by an extraordinary and troubling set of social problems. Chesterton wanted to excavate the ‘hideous thing’ that is the ‘whole’ of London, to break up its apparent intractability and return it to a human scale. However, what he most wanted to expose were the specious forces of modernity that he believed had taken hold of the city’s material and cultural identity. ‘London’, a site of the rapid acceleration of history-making at the turn of the century, was, he felt, in crisis and directionless. Instead of being the crowning achievement of the modern world that many claimed, Chesterton felt that it was fast becoming an undifferentiated rubbish heap from which both past and present meaning had been stripped. He was acutely aware that the pace of change meant that not only did each day see a new version of modernity emerge (a new idea to catch up on, a new fashion) but that the past was correspondingly only as far away as the day before. In his novels, he invites his readers to reject the idea of the urban as pregnant with ever-proliferating and significant new meanings and to recognize the modern condition as sclerotic, the channels to memory, tradition and self-actualization blocked. Running on the spot is a phrase that comes to mind as descriptive of the banality of London’s modernity which Chesterton depicts. In his evocation of the nature of the urban, Chesterton seeks to discover necessary points of equilibrium between citizen and city in the exchange of meanings not only between the single (subjective and a/historical) and the plural (material and historical), but also their counterbalancing negatives, the single (monolithic) and the plural (chaos). He attempts to allow the past to perforate the present with its imaginative and mythical vigour, balancing individual memory and social myth with the material solidity of ‘the incorrigibly plural’ in the present.7 He opposes the drive of the contemporary intellect to draw that plural world into any one single system of moral, political or social organization. The monolithic single is essentially anti-democratic in the way it denies the legitimacy of the past and/or threatens to depersonalize and suffocate the individual imagination which revels in diversity and difference. Rather, he consistently privileges what is distinctively single within the plurality of the material world because such objects/ images have the power to carry meaning in history as well as create meaning outside history. But he was also concerned to expose what he perceived as the moral and political confusion implicit in a

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failure of shared values. ‘Chaos is dull’, comments Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday, ‘because’, he continues, ‘in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or Bagdad’ (13). Chesterton was passionately concerned that social and personal identity should come from somewhere and go somewhere, not as in a ‘scientific’ claim of evolutionary progress or a triumphalist narrative of imperialism, but in the enduring enhancement of the contemporary world by the continuity of human experience and imagination. Through a discussion of The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), the first two Father Brown volumes (1911ff ) and The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), I want to explore the different ways in which Chesterton gave literary form to his view that meaning in the contemporary city can best be discovered through the singular nature of human experience garnered in a plural world. Although an apparently unlikely literary coupling, Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and his long narrative poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, both demonstrate the importance of the single/plural paradigm in understanding how the past might help to re-imagine contemporary London.8 In The Ballad of the White Horse, we see this idea worked through with remarkable transparency in both its consistency and its protean flexibility. This is partly because there are no distracting verbal games, diverting delights or provocative puzzles so characteristic of Chesterton’s novels, essays and journalism. Instead he chose the traditional ballad as the most appropriate popular form to tell the story of the medieval King Alfred, a story that he felt both forged and sustained English identity and sensibility. It is tempting to speculate that the confidence of style and diction in The Ballad of the White Horse comes not only from his evident existential empathy with the material but with a clear sense of audience, the community of the ordinary man who, in earlier days, had passed down such stories to their families and communities. This is Chesterton unmasked; the poem, his articulation of heroism, faith and patriotism in simple, stirring language. Not published until 1911, it provides a kind of ontological template of both earlier and later writings in that it reveals most fully the workings of his imagination and because, for Chesterton, what he creates in the poem is what he believes has been lost to contemporary civilization. The poem itself suggests a triangular belief structure, with the Virgin Mary at its heavenly apex, and Alfred, the chief protagonist, and its plural audience

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at the two earthly points. Although the poem is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it is written in the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition of Beowulf or ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (although not in their poetic form), to pass on to the next generation or to those ready to listen. In his Prefatory Note, Chesterton emphasizes the legendary/mythical features of what he has written, firmly differentiating his material from evidenced history. Perhaps he over-emphasizes this point, since the historical King Alfred was indeed responsible for stability in Wessex, the reintroduction of learning and the rule of law. But Chesterton’s concern was not to praise a king, however great his achievement and Alfred’s later title, rex Anglorum et Saxorum, only confirms what he has already achieved. For Chesterton, Alfred’s identity as a Christian hero is forged at the point of possible defeat and the possible extinction of a Christian people by pagan warriors. His story is grounded in history but its survival depends on its power to connect with the human emotions of despair, hope, comradeship and love of home so that ordinary people made his story, the story of a ‘common king’, their own (122). Chesterton’s concern was to reawaken the contemporary imagination to forgotten traditions and shared memories which would act as an informing power on the direction of urbanization. To do this, he needed to work outside history, to search for England ‘. . . beneath what he perceived as multiple layers of concealment, denial, and mistaken identity in the early twentieth century’.9 Within the poem itself, the blurring of history and myth is vital for establishing the plural nature of Alfred’s heroic status. Chesterton makes the point strongly that ‘I have . . . given to a fictitious Roman, Celt and Saxon, a part in the glory of Ethandune’(v). The whole of Book 2, ‘The Gathering of the Chiefs’, one of the most powerful in the poem, is devoted to locating Eldred, Marcus and Colan as representative of the diverse strands of England’s past. Eldred, a Saxon farmer, his land devastated by Danish incursions, has been reduced to apathy. ‘Friend’, he says to Alfred, in a touching confession of humble despair in which only fragments of his life retain meaning, ‘. . . I will watch certain things,/ Swine, and slow moons like silver rings,/And the ripening of the plums’(19). Stirred by Alfred’s call to action, he does not speak again but line by line begins to emerge from stasis into the mythological dimensions of a hero. Note how Chesterton suggests Eldred’s own pre-settlement history in ‘sea-land lord’, his subsequent loss of honour in the ‘cobwebbed nail on high’

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on which his sword is hanging, and his regained physical stature as ‘He filled . . . the sky’: Then silence sank. And slowly Arose the sea-land lord Like some vast beast for mystery, He filled the room and porch and sky, And from a cobwebbed nail on high Unhooked his heavy sword. (20)

Marcus, a Romano-British settler, is strikingly different. His ‘soul remembered Rome’ and the sophistications and beauties of his affluent life in Britain under the pre-Saxon Roman Empire (22). He is surrounded by vestiges of a fallen Empire, ‘the coloured pavements’ which ‘sink and fade’ and ‘the windy colonnade’, a world destroyed by the Saxons, whom Alfred is now calling him to join in arms (21). He is reluctant to leave the life he has struggled to recover, the ‘strange stiff olives’ and ‘the vines be ropes that drag me hard’, but he too is drawn into Alfred’s mission (23). Finally honouring his military ancestry, he ‘shouldered his spear at morning/And laughed to lay it on’ (24). The third warrior to respond to Alfred’s call is initially the most resistant of all, the Celt, Colan: ‘Last of a race in ruin –/ He spoke the speech of the Gaels;/ His kin were in holy Ireland/ Or up in the crags of Wales’ (25). His resistance is shaped by the conquest of his ancient race, now driven to the margins of the land by waves of invaders. His inheritance is from ‘men that God made mad’, who ‘had unreason in his heart/Because of the gods that were’ (26). He seals his pact with Alfred with a poetic flourish characteristic of his tribe: ‘And if the sea and sky be foes/ We will tame the sea and sky’ (28). The Ballad of the White Horse is a war poem but Alfred follows unfamiliar military strategies of respect and co-operation to build his army. Chesterton portrays him, not as a king of conquest, but of conservation and creation. He includes in his singular identity as leader the identities of all the peoples of free England – Angles, Saxons, Celts, Romans and Britons. With each distinctive contribution, Alfred’s strength increases and Wessex’s future is assured through the unity of difference. As individuals their distinctiveness is maintained throughout the poem; as members of a race, they bring their peoples’ histories with them, fight according to their old methods, and when they die, their minds return to their old lives. Of Eldred the farmer/warrior,

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Chesterton writes: ‘But while he moved like a massacre/ He murmured as in sleep/ And his words were all of low hedges/ And little fields and sheep’ (84). Together the formerly warring tribes expand Alfred’s heroic singularity and create the foundations of the English nation. The eponymous White Horse, whose description opens Book 1, ‘The Vision of the King’, offers a different version of singleness. Its vast size and distinctive shape makes it literally of the landscape. Its age, ‘Before the gods that made the gods/ Had seen their sunrise pass,/ The White Horse of the White Horse Vale/ Was cut out of the grass’, links it with the eternal and the immutable (3). Even so, King Guthrum of the Danes, a pagan warrior confronting a pagan image, does not have the eyes to see it. When he climbs the hill of the White Horse, his mind is bent on violence and the Chalk uplands and Hampshire beacons are little more than suitable battle grounds. More surprisingly perhaps, Alfred, the king whose poem Chesterton dedicated to the Virgin Mary, is moved by the image. In a lone moment of reflection as he wanders the hills, he grieves the loss of the knowledge that the White Horse carries from the past. It is ‘scrawled on the hill-side’ but he and his people cannot read it (32). However, now detached from its culture, time and specificity, the phenomenon of the White Horse is freed to become the source of mythical/ magical wonderment for Alfred. The ‘fading memorial’ of the pagan White Horse is revived by the Christian imagination.10 This process is not a disguised form of cultural assimilation, for, as Chesterton argues in Orthodoxy (1908), accepting mystery without fretting after certainty is an essential catalyst to spiritual growth.11 Whatever the White Horse may mean to any particular generation, the sense of mystery and wonder it inspires offers a channel of continuity from unknown people in the past to unknown future generations – a unifying emblem that comprises a nation’s history. Alfred dimly recognizes this before he is interrupted by Danish revellers. Later, he realizes more fully that the mystery that the White Horse embodies will be rediscovered and reinterpreted by successive cultures and that each society must take responsibility to protect it. The message of the White Horse that Alfred passes on to his warriors is one of watchfulness, of constant effort to keep the image always visible and its openness to meaning alive: ‘Will ye part with weeds forever?/ Or show daisies to the door?/ Or will you bid the bold grass/ Go, and return no more?’ (124). This intervention of the timeless within

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time enables Alfred to assume the pagan into his multiple identities, and the White Horse becomes, for his time, a Christian emblem, and for all time an enduring spirit of the English landscape. The more we examine singleness, as in the figure of Alfred or the image of the White Horse, the more it appears to comprise plurality even while remaining a unified and unifying identity. Similarly, the plural elements of ordinary life generate the need for collective coherence: as we have seen, it requires Alfred’s harp, Eldred’s sword, Marcus’ spear and Colan’s bow to redefine kingship and to create a nation of companions. Chesterton’s evocation of the beauty of an English landscape, finely evoked in a wealth of observed detail, demonstrates this point most powerfully. The emotions aroused by the flowers, hills, sunsets and woodlands of Chesterton’s poem, together with melancholy memories of devastated farms and ransacked buildings are transferred to and eternalized in the image of the White Horse. Chesterton would surely agree with the analysis of his contemporary W. B. Yeats of the process by which the plural may assume a single symbolic weight: All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions . . . and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion.12

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is best understood as an existential sequel to The Ballad within Chesterton’s writings although it was, of course, published several years earlier and its public context is specifically contemporary. It is also a story of war, medievalism and heroism but whereas the battle in The Ballad of the White Horse is a struggle to create what is single and unified from multiple disparate and fractured elements, The Napoleon of Notting Hill works in reverse. The battle is to break down a sense of a monolithic city and rediscover the vital elements that comprise it. Chesterton excavates a fantasy of history for an imagined London of the future (which is ‘very like it is now’), reaching back to a perceived foundation of individual heroism, patriotism and faith, the as-yet unwritten story of The Ballad of the White Horse, and realized in the discovery of a symbolic unity.

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Chesterton’s first novel was relatively late on the scene of fiction about London. In a well-known and somewhat disingenuous passage, he tells in his Autobiography about an idea for the novel suddenly bursting into his imagination after ‘something irrationally arrested and pleased my eye’.13 In fact, when evaluated in its literary context, it is not as startlingly original (or as artless) as he would have us believe. Well before The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, London had been the setting of a wave of novels concerned with a variety of social issues written from diverse political and religious perspectives and many of the novelistic elements that shape Notting Hill were already familiar to the growing reading public.14 Medievalism was in the air towards the end of the nineteenth century as were questions about the future: in Richard Jefferies futuristic After London (1885) the doomed city is rescued by chivalric love and in News from Nowhere (1891), William Morris borrows from the middle ages to create a world of colour that would transform the dirty city and its uniform dullness. Even Chesterton’s stylistic flamboyance in this novel, veering between the absurdist, the heroic and a kind of anticipatory surrealism, was par for the course in an Edwardian period when the novel was characterized by ‘its sheer generic diversity’.15 I argue that the originality of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is found elsewhere, in its refusal to limit the variable possibilities of change, a refusal to which he gives literary form by refusing or resisting any one literary mode. The source of the narrative is a simple question, ‘What would happen if . . . ?’ Many Edwardian writers would offer an answer to that question in their novels – Chesterton’s friends, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells among them – but Chesterton does not. The colossal joke Auberon Quin plays on his fellow Londoners unravels in a city-wide drama; by the end of the novel the reader is none the wiser, except in experience. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Chesterton evokes a different kind of medievalism from the nation-making world of King Alfred in The Ballad of the White Horse. He cannot express Quin’s desire for change through legend and myth to a contemporary readership for their value has been lost. Instead he draws on the spirit of medieval carnival with its costumes and play acting, parody and humour to evoke a counter-culture for a future London of 1984 where a ‘vague and depressing reliance upon things happening as they always happened . . . had become an assumed condition’ (21). What we witness as Quin’s experiment unfolds is a version of the carnivalesque in the Bahktinian

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sense of ‘. . . a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order. . . . Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.’16 Parody in the modern world, as Bahktin points out, may carry a cynical intonation, but the parody of social organization that Quin sets in motion recaptures its medieval purpose, its sense of careless and irreverent interrogation and its teasing images of a different reality. The amiable, if irritating, chaos that ensues when the clown, Auberon Quin, is crowned king as a result of an atrophied voting system does indeed explode ‘London’ as a monolithic entity and is the catalyst for the re-emergence of the plurality of the old villages and districts as colourful playgrounds for their citizens. Ordinary people gradually rediscover their individuality and freedom. From the fragments of discredited identities, long forgotten memories are aroused, of lavender and primroses on Lavender Hill and Primrose Hill, of sheep and fields at Shepherds’ Bush. Fantastic etymologies begin to flourish, creating bird songs for Kensington and the legendary Blacksmith for Hammersmith. Contemporary phenomena are divested of their modernity and, like the Water Tower of Notting Hill, reclaimed as enduring symbols of unity. By ‘mixing up the centuries’ in what Chesterton would later call in his Prefatory Note to The Ballad ‘a sort of splendid foreshortening’, he interrogates chronological history and celebrates instead the stories, myths and legends that spring up around the city, sustaining memory and therefore, continuity and community (v). The second part of the novel investigates another question: ‘What happens when the carnival stops?’, as it inevitably will. This is a dangerous moment, Chesterton suggests, and one that is fertile for the emergence of a Napoleon. It was not until after the battle when King Alfred sits peacefully in his orchard, that he comes to realize the vigilance required to sustain visionary vigour. In symbolic terms, he knows that the White Horse must be scoured each year to keep the spirit of England and its constituent elements alive. Such coherent vigilance seems to be impossible in the fragmented city. After the battle of Notting Hill, King Auberon Quin stays in his palace and when he emerges, Adam Wayne has somehow been transformed into a (reluctant) Napoleon and Notting Hill has become an Empire; ‘London’, by another name, is being reconstituted. The implication appears to be that the struggle for equilibrium between the wonders of a plural world and the human drive to limit and contain them is a permanent state of being and thinking. Quin’s and Wayne’s

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consummate achievement is to recognize that they, and Notting Hill, must, unlike Alfred, lose the final battle in order to dismantle the Empire they have inadvertently allowed to emerge. The displacement of the dangerous singleness of Empire is achieved through recognition of the importance of plurality, but, disappointingly, Chesterton does not sustain the debate. The final chapter, ‘Two Voices’ undercuts this shared revelation. It acts as a kind of coda with a shift to a dialogic form as Quin and Wayne, now dead, share their perspectives on the experience of the previous 20 years. Although they agree that Quin’s joke and Wayne’s patriotism had different causes and outcomes, they decide that both their perspectives were necessary for creating a spirit of change. ‘We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman’, Wayne and Quin glibly agree, and went ‘away together into the unknown world’ (191). Although it is clear that Chesterton is suggesting, as he was later to do in The Ballad of the White Horse, that the plural comes to rest in the insights of each individual human personality, the point here seems too neat or forced (too paradoxical perhaps), and diminishes the readers’ ability to grasp the nature of a productive equilibrium relevant to the complexity of the contemporary city. In The Ballad of the White Horse and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the interplay of the single/plural paradigm understood as creative exchanges between subjective and objective apprehensions of reality fosters a sense of mystery and wonder. In The Man Who Was Thursday and in the two pre-war Father Brown volumes, The Innocence of Father Brown and The Wisdom of Father Brown, Chesterton explores mystery, not as wonder, but as a state of not-knowing. Evidence of any kind of historical/legendary back story or social cohesion is absent in these works as tradition proves inadequate to the task of unlocking or interrogating an urban condition which legitimizes spurious forms of individualistic modernity but denies the possibility of community of thought and experience. Instead, Chesterton appears to recognize that the potential of an inclusive, unifying resolution, realized with heroic beauty in The Ballad of the White Horse but already severely tested at the end of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, seems to be threatened to the point of existential despair. He turned for his literary solution to mystery writing. Whether in thriller or detective mode, mystery writing was ideal for Chesterton’s purposes offering both an appropriate psychology and symbolic narrative for an urban

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society in which Chesterton felt ignorance was deliberately cultivated. Neither character nor reader can ever be sure what they know or what they are being asked to understand and the discovery process – where there’s a mystery, follow the clues – reveals such a chaotic plurality of messages, oddities, mistaken identities and misunderstandings that characters and readers can only grope towards any possibility of clarity. As we have seen, Chesterton was never slow to adapt popular taste to his own literary purposes; the text of The Man Who Was Thursday is a whirligig demonstration of contemporary cultural diversity. In the novel’s tale of terrorism, there are thematic echoes of Henry James (The Princess Casamassima, 1886) and Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent, 1907), and of thriller spy writers such as Erskine Childers (The Riddle of the Sands, 1903) and Le Queux (The Invasion of 1910, 1906) in which fears of terrorism are replaced by fears of a German invasion. However, the urban dangers in The Man Who Was Thursday are not the plots of politically motivated terrorists or German (or any other) soldiers, but the purveyors of vacuous art – the exquisite artifice of Art for Art’s Sake, poets who are ‘always in revolt’ and the destabilizing perceptions of those who are only capable of ‘impressions’. These ‘artists’ intend to shock, to disorientate, to destroy their cultural inheritance and, in cultivating a grotesque form of not-understanding as a criterion for sophistication, blind themselves and their audiences to the fact that they are playing with psychological and moral dynamite. They are the creators of The Nightmare of the novel’s sub-title. ‘An artist is identical with an anarchist’ claims Gregory. ‘There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there [a tree] is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself ’ (17). As the novel gathers pace, ‘clues’ which are supposed to lead to the anarchists’ cell, lead only into an imploding centre of what might be reality if just one object, person or idea could be identified for certain. One of Chesterton’s most effective devices for realizing a defamiliarized urban world in which the comprehensible continues to exist but is rendered incomprehensible is his use of the names of the days of the week. Functional words which organize the infrastructure of daily life, they are also semantically enriched by their heroic associations with ancient gods and distant planets. Each day is quite distinctive in itself; Monday cannot be Wednesday, Friday cannot begin the week, and Thursday is always the fifth day. In the days of the

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week we have a clear example of the collective plural within a unifying single. However, this simplicity is rapidly called into question. Initially, Chesterton’s title simply suggests a predictable mystery: Is Thursday a nickname? Since he ‘was’ Thursday, what happened to him? The reader soon learns that the days of the week are indeed nicknames for members a terrorist cell, but as the narrative develops so the list of names becomes increasingly problematic. The man who carries the name Sunday, the day dedicated to rest, does not appear, but his non-appearance stirs up anxiety and restlessness. Gregory, a self-confessed terrorist, stands for election for the name of Thursday but is out-voted by Syme, an ordinary man unwittingly present at the meeting. Together they are possible aspects of what it might mean to be Thursday (echoes of Wayne and Quin here, I think). The plot of the novel becomes a hunt for Sunday and concludes with a frantic chase to catch the man who appears to be anything other than representative of peace and rest. The naming device is an amusing, at times ridiculous, comic book gag, but the important fact is that by the end of the novel, the reader has completely forgotten that the names are simply names of the days of the week. Transformed by their role in deception and disguise, their practical, organizational and historic/mythical importance has been hollowed out, and the structured life of the city demonstrably takes one fractional step further towards chaos. The messages that Sunday throws at his pursuers towards the end of the novel work in reverse to make a similar point about language as noncommunication. The messages are apparently worthless, misleading and jokey nonsense intended simply to mock and belittle those who read them. In plot terms (although by this point of the novel it is hard to know what the plot is in Chesterton’s parody of modernist disorientation), the messages appear to offer Sunday’s pursuers even more incomprehensible (but possibly crucial) clues or further (completely irrelevant) irritations. The scattering of the messages sums up a London well on its way to recreating Babel. It is collapsing into its own rubbish, where the plurality of phenomena leads only to boring and hopeless chaos. It is worth discussing some of the messages in detail, however, because I suggest that their meaninglessness is delusory. The fact that the pursuers cannot recuperate their meaning is part of the nightmare of the modernist cultural plot to refuse meaning to fallible human beings in search of an answer; in terrorist terms, to bomb hope. On the other hand, I would argue

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that Chesterton stresses just as vigorously the role of individual responsibility in ‘scouring’ language and sustaining its vigour. Any significance in the first message to Dr Bull, ‘What about Martin Tupper now?’ is jokingly cancelled out or made irrelevant by the fact the message is shorter than the letters after Dr Bull’s name. A man of such great learning, it is implied, need not concern himself with lesser mortals such as Martin Tupper. Syme’s message is longer and initially loftier, but its apparently coherent meaning is undermined by bathos. The style mimics a letter from father to son but juxtaposes the high seriousness of a moral discussion with an adult and the banality of a formula intended for young children, ‘It is too bad, especially after what uncle said’. The third message falls to Inspector Ratcliffe as he is about to catch up with the President’s cab. The message suggests personal humiliation of the most ridiculous kind is imminent if instant action isn’t taken about his ‘trouser-stretchers’; the words ‘Truth’ and the signature ‘A Friend’ exacerbate his fear of exposure. The fourth message falls to Gogol, the timid non-spy spy whose pass-the-parcel package finally reveals, ‘The word, I fancy, should be “pink”’. Perhaps Chesterton is suggesting that these messages are fragments of the past which, like the White Horse, will be interpreted, imaginatively recreated or wondered at. Perhaps they decorate the text to enhance the distracting modernist game Chesterton is exposing, but perhaps they are a simple call to common sense and, above all, to self-knowledge. Chesterton, I would argue, is saying ‘Forget your inflated ego’ to Dr Bull; ‘Grow up’ to Syme; ‘Forget your self-importance’ to Inspector Ratcliffe and, ‘Ask a question that deserves an answer’ to Gogol. The messages speak collectively about the responsibilities of the ordinary person although, not yet at this point of the novel, to those who can hear. I have discussed the messages at some length because, despite the pursuers’ reactions to them, they signal that the mad and chaotic world of the nightmare has begun to recede. The ‘anarchists/detectives’ have experienced their modern world as nightmare and have emerged wiser although still clueless (or over-clued). Many questions are left unanswered but there is a sense in which Syme at least has recognized that, like understanding the messages, ending the nightmare is simply a matter of changing the perspective: ‘We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. . . . If we could only get round in front –’ (170). As the detectives gather around Sunday, Syme notices that they have

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refound themselves, and that he ‘seemed to be himself for the first time, and no one else’. So far, this suggests a reborn self, a unified personality that has drawn terror and wonder together into a rich experience. However, this growth in self-knowledge takes place inside the nightmare as does the final conversation with Sunday. Their experiences remain stubbornly detached from reality, as the detectives’ doubts and fears and Gregory’s violent hatred stand alongside Syme’s utopian dream. Within the logic of the text, it is hard not to agree with Ratcliffe who protests that ‘It seems so silly that you [Sunday] should have been on both sides and fought yourself ’ (180). That recognition takes the reader to a position, as in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, more suggestive of a specious dualism than of a unified vision emerging from plural perspectives. The novels ends only when Syme wakes from the nightmare and psychologically reawakens to the glorious ordinariness of a plural reality which he can see ‘with the eyes in his head’17 – ‘the early birds, ‘the lilac’, ‘the country lane’ and again ‘the red, irregular buildings’ he had noticed on his first visit to Saffron Park (184). Is Chesterton suggesting that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for the individual to engage with and that the time for heroism and shared values embodied in a White Horse or a Notting Hill Water Tower has passed? The calm, simple description of Saffron Park in the final paragraph takes the reader by surprise after the nightmare’s dark hallucinatory experiences. Humanity’s scope for resisting misleading social influences or sustaining grand visions appears to be severely limited. Imagination and emotion are most powerfully and enduringly inspired by the small and tangible, capable of transforming Gregory’s despised ‘iron lamp, ugly and barren’ into one whose ‘gleam gilded the leaves of the trees’. The novel’s final stylistic shift is into the mode of suburban romance as Syme seeks out ‘the girl with the gold-red hair’ and finds a ‘small’ unity in love of what is around him, and ‘her unconscious gravity’ (184). For Chesterton, ‘small’ is not a demeaning term, although it seems, perhaps, inadequate as a philosophical resolution to the disorientating nightmare of the contemporary city. The early Father Brown stories focus on this aspect of mystery through the apparently casual sleuthing activities of a Roman Catholic priest. In these short stories, the small is both the quintessence of a plural reality and a unifying idea. Like ‘a grain of sand’ in William Blake’s philosophy, it has an infinite capacity to contain a ‘world’. Chesterton acknowledges Father

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Brown’s great predecessor Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin while contrasting his ratiocination with Father Brown’s ‘radiant rationality’, and humorously mocks his great contemporary Sherlock Holmes in the figure of Dr Hood (although he challenges Holmes’ return from the dead in ‘The Resurrection of Father Brown’ [1923] more seriously).18 These stories are probably Chesterton’s best-known works and have found their place in the history of the perennially popular detective genre in yet another example of Chesterton’s magpie raiding of popular genres reinvented with his characteristic originality. It is perhaps coincidental but nevertheless interesting to note that The Ballad of the White Horse and The Innocence of Father Brown were first published in the same year, 1911, with the sequel, The Wisdom of Father Brown, following in 1913.19 The publication history of Chesterton’s work from 1904 to 1911 reveals his attempts to find the most appropriate literary form to articulate his political, social and religious concerns and, indeed, the variety of perspectives he felt they demanded. However, towards the end of this short but crucial period, he seems to be recuperating his own certainties after the carnivalesque revolution of The Napoleon of Notting Hill and the phantasmagoria of The Man Who Was Thursday. I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that The Ballad serves as a kind of moral and spiritual excavation from which we can more confidently evaluate Chesterton’s view of the contemporary world. The poem is not only Alfred’s stand against the pagans but Chesterton’s stand against spiritual and emotional loss. In his detective stories, light-hearted and unashamedly formulaic entertainment at the heart of popular culture, he finds the perfect contemporary vehicle for realizing the power of the ‘small’. The stories are a series of small allegories in which the progress of a priest/detective through the streets and homes of London and from mystery to clarity via a multiplicity of small clues represents the process of recovering wisdom from the confusion of the city. His own growing inclination to convert to Catholicism, not as an absolute system of truth but as a version of Christianity in which mystery and tradition were, for him, satisfactorily blended, must have suggested a priest as an appropriate hero. The nature of mystery is at the heart of the Father Brown stories. ‘The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas’, Father Brown tells his friend Flambeau, ‘mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated’.20 ‘Complicated’ mystery, the mystery that nearly

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destroys Syme and did destroy Gregory, is thoroughly demystified. There is no room in these tales for the disorientating terrors of The Man Who Was Thursday. Father Brown is immediately alerted to signs of cultural uncertainty, for instance, by a north London house on ‘a sort of attenuated and interrupted spectre of a street’ and its over-wrought interiors in ‘The Wrong Shape’ (89). Its owner, Quinton, it seems, has ‘indulged his lust for colour somewhat to the neglect of form’. The result is ‘bewildering carpets and blinding embroideries in which all colours seem to have fallen into a fortunate chaos’; a savagely curved knife that has no ‘heart or plain purpose’ because the blade is the wrong shape for cutting; a stack of writing paper, clipped across the corner spoiling it for correspondence (90). Recognizing Quinton’s vulnerability, Father Brown sits outside the house in a garden open to the natural elements of rain, thunder and lightning contemplating the ‘twisted, ugly, complex quality’ of the crime against him. The murderer of the deluded Quinton, the doctor who was supposed to be caring for him, finally confesses of his own free will because he realizes Father Brown has seen through him: ‘Damn your eyes, which are very penetrating ones’, he writes in his suicide note. ‘Seeing’ is the key to inhabiting the wonder of mystery and resisting ‘complicated’ mystery. ‘The Blue Cross’, the first Father Brown story, established the formula which was to shape another 48 stories written between 1911 and 1935.21 Father Brown sees London through ‘blinking’ (but not blinkered) eyes, observing in detail every aspect of his environment and the vagaries of human behaviour. As a result, he is always one step ahead of the criminal. The world is apparently full of ‘facts’ – a salt-cellar with sugar in it, a dirty stain on a wall, an upset apple-cart and a ‘big, black smash like a star in the ice’ in the window of a restaurant (16). But, like the messages in The Man Who Was Thursday, the plural world has become confusing and these ‘clues’ need to be understood. They are not ‘inevitable’ or ‘incomplete’ as Dr Hood claims in a later story, but ‘rather common place and comic’, as Father Brown replies.22 The need to be simultaneously a part of the urban world and able to observe it dispassionately supplants the confusions and uncertainties of The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday in the work-a-day London of Father Brown. Father Brown is Chesterton’s realization of the singular hero for the modern world. The man who successfully sees clearly through ‘complicated’ mysteries to restore harmony from disharmony, is himself a ‘marvellous’ mystery,

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extraordinary in his ordinariness. Father Brown’s clerical garb is a public statement of identity and perspective but it acts as a disguise in a society which cannot see the obvious.23 This obtuseness enables him to see everything without being seen. In some ways another version of Auberon Quin, the absurd ‘small clerk’ who starts a revolution, and Syme, the man who prefers to read a train timetable rather than a poem, I suggest that he is closer to the spirit of King Alfred. In a series of small-scale urban battles, the ancient threat of the pagan Danes is translated into secular dilemmas of theft, adultery and murder that threaten to fragment society. Flambeau, the famous criminal who comes to recognize the power of Father Brown’s humble omniscience, does not stand in a dualistic opposition to Father Brown as Wayne does to Quin or Gregory does to Syme. Rather his role as detective assistant highlights his inclusion in and cooperation with Father Brown’s vision. Despite the change of mood in the Father Brown stories, the formulaic structure, the light-heartedness and the simply sketched realism of the locations, there is considerable continuity in Chesterton’s thinking. What changes between 1904 and 1911 is literary strategy rather than philosophical position. Popular stories about subtle detective work which encourages, demonstrates and underlines truth while a maze created by criminal activities is gradually unravelled, replaces his need to attack, to confront head-on those systems of thought he challenged in virtuoso literary productions. However, there seems to be an acknowledgement on Chesterton’s part that the hero figure from the past must necessarily be reinvented rather than recreated to accommodate the modern world. More importantly, the Father Brown stories address the philosophical problems that mar the conclusion of two very different novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday and which arise from Chesterton’s imaginative failure to sustain his brave vision of a singularly plural world full of limitless potential. Instead, as we have seen, he binds up the novels’ mysteries in a good/evil dualism uncomfortably attached to character oppositions. A Father Brown story conveniently escapes the literary problem of a satisfactory denouement or the urge to philosophical completion through the simple expedient of being part of a series. Although each story solves a crime, the series of stories continues to pursue the larger mystery of human nature and society. The plural clues in one story lead to enlightenment but there is always another set of clues in their infinite multiplicity to consider,

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and there is always the singular figure of Father Brown to provide continuity. It is possible to argue that the Father Brown stories offer the most convincing answer to the question I posed earlier about Chesterton’s angle of perception. In these stories, the reader finally discovers Chesterton’s angle of repose. The ‘scouring’ of one’s own culture, language and practice as demonstrated by the vigilance of King Alfred and the labours of Father Brown, remains the paramount responsibility of the ordinary person whose delight, Chesterton believes, in the observed and plural reality of contemporary London will inform the possibility of a unified and unifying urban future.

Notes 1 P. B. Shelley, ‘Love’s Philosophy’, in Thomas Hutchinson (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 583 (line 5). 2 It is important to differentiate between Chesterton’s evocation of an individual’s pleasure in the changing phenomena of the urban scene from Impressionism, an aesthetics of seeing of which Chesterton was extremely suspicious. The Impressionists, he felt, defamiliarized the observed world for mere visual affect in an act of ‘final scepticism’. See G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 126–7. First published 1908. 3 G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (1909) cited in M. Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1977), p. 64. 4 R. Caserio, ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism’, in L. Hapgood and N. L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 63–84 (p. 66). 5 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London: Capuchin Classics, 2008), p. 21. First published in 1908. 6 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1936), p. 136. 7 A happy phrase which I have borrowed from ‘Snow’ by L. Macneice, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 26. 8 G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse (New York: Dover Publications, 2010). First published in 1911. 9 J. Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (New York and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2009), p. 8.

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10 P. Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002), p. xix, in which Ackroyd links the white horses of the southern downs with the ‘elemental giant’, Albion. 11 See Keats’s musings on Shakespeare’s genius: Letter 32, 1817 (53). J. Keats, Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). ‘A Man of Achievement . . . is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ 12 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, in Ideas of Good and Evil (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., Ltd, 1905), pp. 237–56 (p. 243). 13 Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 110. 14 The popularity of social problem novels set in London increased significantly from1880. By the 1890s, there was a general acceptance that the novel was the way to address a large readership about social, religious and political issues. Even priests took to writing novels during this period because ‘modern philosophers are telling us now that our best chance of getting a hearing is to preach fiction as if it were fact . . .’ (Adderley, Rev J., In Slums and Society (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916), p. 153). 15 S. Kemp, C. Mitchell and D. Trotter, Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. x–xi. 16 M. Bahktin, Rabelais and His World translated by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), p. 10. 17 G. K. Chesterton, William Cobbett (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), p. 146. 18 G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 172. 19 The first Father Brown story was published in 1910 in the Saturday Evening Post, so it is very likely that Chesterton was writing The Ballad of the White Horse and ‘Valentin follows a curious trail’, as ‘The Blue Cross’ was then titled, and subsequent stories at the same time. The final three volumes were all published after World War 1 between 1923 and 1935. Only the first two volumes of Father Brown stories are located solely in London. 20 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Wrong Shape’, in The Innocence of Father Brown, pp. 89–102 (p. 99). 21 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Blue Cross’, in The Innocence of Father Brown, pp. 9–22. 22 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Absence of Mr Glass’, in The Wisdom of Father Brown, pp. 171–82 (p. 180). 23 The three post-war volumes of Father Brown stories follow the same formula as the earlier stories but many of the locations are in foreign countries, and the plots and Father Brown’s own pronouncements bring theological issues to the foreground.

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Bibliography Ackroyd, P., Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002). Bahktin, M., Rabelais and his World translated by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). Canovan, M., G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist. (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1977). Caserio, R., ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God outside Modernism’, in L. Hapgood and N. L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 63–84. Chesterton, G. K., William Cobbett (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925). —, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1936). —, The Complete Father Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1981). —, The Man Who Was Thursday (London: Penguin Books, 1986). First published 1908. —, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London: Capuchin Classics, 2008). First published 1904. —, The Ballad of the White Horse (New York: Dover Publications, 2010). First published in 1911. Keats, J., Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). Kemp, S., Charlotte, M. and Trotter, D., Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Macneice, L., Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1964). Stapleton, J., Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (New York and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2009). Yeats, W. B., ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ in W. B. Yeats (1905) (ed.), Ideas of Good and Evil (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., Ltd, 1905), pp. 237–56.

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3

Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and Sacraments in Chesterton’s London1 Mark Knight

In a multitude of imaginative works from the nineteenth century to the present, the city finds itself threatened by disorder. One thinks of the dust which signs Dickens’s fragmented and entropic London in Bleak House (1852–3), George Gissing’s appropriately named The Nether World (1889), the anarchist Professor who wants to blow up London in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and, across the Atlantic, the more recent figure of a Joker who terrorizes Gotham City and seeks to plunge urban America into chaos. In his most recent motion picture incarnation, the unpredictably violent Joker mirrors the extreme life of his nemesis: the (anti-) heroic double who goes by the names of Batman and Bruce Wayne. Although Batman is sometimes seen to express our contemporary cultural anxiety about the disorder of the modern metropolis, such anxieties have a long history. This history includes G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), even if the light-hearted tone and colourful visual tableau of Chesterton’s novel stands in sharp contrast to the shadowy world of the Dark Knight. In place of the Joker and Bruce Wayne we have Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne, the latter a character whose radical willingness to fight for a cause provides the novel’s central drama. When the ‘curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present date’, London is a place governed by big business, and democracy has given way to a system in which the king of England is selected at random from the population: ‘No one cared how: no one cared who. He was merely a universal secretary.’2 Years after the humourist

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Auberon Quin is made king and decides to reconstitute the ancient charter of the cities by making everyone wear their local colours, he finds that the idealistic Adam Wayne has taken seriously his symbolic championing of the particular and is willing to go to war on this basis against the rest of London. Adam Wayne may be treated as a ridiculous outsider when he comes to the king’s court and announces his intent to fight for Notting Hill but his beliefs carry with them the chilling earnestness of religious extremism: ‘There were never any just wars but the religious wars’ (64). Many recent literary and cultural critics take it as an article of faith that religion is dangerous to others because it invites people to believe one thing too strongly. To take one example, Marina Warner speaks warmly of the way in which a Roman Catholic education led to her being ‘wrapped in stories, in signs and wonders, in fantasies, myths and dreams’ before reverting to a more negative view of religious training: ‘The education stamped me with an abiding, irrepressible interest in the irrational, both as an expression of the mind in its most mysterious mode, and as a terrifying force in history.’3 Warner is not alone in her sense of the dangerous forcefulness of religious ideology and I want to question this critical consensus regarding religion’s monolithic tendency as I lift up my own curtain up on our reading of Chesterton’s London. The prominence of fundamentalism in the modern world makes it inevitable that we should want to examine the broader religious base from which fundamentalism emerges, and although fundamentalism may be said to represent an extreme form of religious belief, there is an understandable concern that it might prove to be the result of a general religious orientation to violent uniformity.4 For many secular-minded critics, the hermeneutic at work within the Christian faith seeks to replace the ambiguity of signs with a single wonder that represents a fixed and inviolable presence. Hermeneutic activity of this sort is a popular target for deconstruction, as Homi Bhabha shows us in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ when he explores what he sees as a dominant moment in colonial history and missionary activity: the discovery of the English book. Although Bhabha is more interested in demonstrating how this recurring motif of cultural power gives way to readings that challenge the claim to ‘originality’ and ‘authority’, the underlying assumption is that religion, especially evangelical religion, is committed to a written Word that is ‘no less theocratic than logocentric’.5 The assumption that the Christian

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religion is more interested in the one than it is in the many is not peculiar to Bhabha. It also permeates the work of other literary theorists, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, even if the relationship between religion and literary theory is now rightly recognized as being more complex and ambiguous than critics once thought.6 A religious preference for the interests of the one over the interests of the many provides one explanation of the history of suspicion towards the city that we find among so many religious commentators. If religion is concerned with order then the heterogeneity and difference of the city can easily be mistaken for sinfulness. Yet Chesterton’s novel prompts another perspective, one that reminds us that the Christian reading of the city does not have to proceed on this basis.7 Although Chesterton’s novel features a religious zealot who ends up imposing his will on others, Wayne’s actions are motivated by a love of the city’s particularity rather than its universality and the Napoleonic rise of Notting Hill is marked as a problem by the narrator rather than being seen as the inevitable end of religious thought. As Anna Vaninskaya observes: ‘In The Napoleon of Notting Hill patriotism is condemned as soon as it turns aggressive and grasping, as soon as it turns into imperialism in other words, but the two are assumed to be separate to being with.’8 Rather than thinking that religion is the only system of thought that struggles to find room for the many, Colin Gunton insists that modernity’s ‘displacement of God does not and has not given freedom and dignity to the many, but has subjected us to new and often unrecognized forms of slavery.’9 In the context of the late nineteenth century, this secular tendency towards uniformity is evident in the reading undertaken by Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes represents the ultimate modern professional, a figure who eschews religion and brings a relentless scientific method to bear on every problem. But in spite of his claims to pursue all lines of enquiry openly, Holmes’s reading is remarkably insistent and intransigent, with arbitrary deductions frequently presented to Watson as normative and unquestionable dogma. The rigid hermeneutic employed by Holmes is symptomatic of a genre that is frequently seen as exemplifying the workings of a disciplinary society. Foucault’s thinking on this point has been influential for many of the critics who write about detective fiction, and other figures have confirmed this generic orientation towards conformity.10 Most

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notably, Franco Moretti highlights the way that detective fiction originates ‘at the same time as the trusts, the big banks, and monopolies’. He points out that the genre is predicated on the idea that anyone proposing independence needs to be criminalized and rooted out by the detective’s universal method: ‘detective fiction treats every element of individual behaviour that desires secrecy as an offence, even if there is no trace of crime (for example, “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, “The Yellow Face”, “A Scandal in Bohemia”).’ Moretti makes the point more explicit when he describes the genre as ‘a hymn to culture’s coercive abilities’.11 It is a plausible argument but there are problems with the language used here. Holmes prefers to play the violin himself rather than making music with others so it seems suspicious that Moretti should refer to a communal act of religious worship when talking about Holmes’s secular preference for the one over the many, leading one to wonder whether the slip is a deliberate attempt to misdirect blame for culture’s coercive tendencies. Gunton draws on a range of theological resources from the Christian tradition to articulate his critique of modernity’s failure to find space for the one and the many, including the doctrine of creation that was so important to Chesterton. Echoing this approach, I turn now to Chesterton’s sacramental reading of the world, which, in the words of Ian Boyd, ‘is based on a belief in a divine presence hidden behind material reality and discovered by an effort of the imagination.’ As Boyd goes on to explain, this ‘is why the material world has a sacramental character for Chesterton: the whole of creation is a divine theophany and therefore in a mystical sense the Word of God.’12 Although Chesterton’s theology was still in a formative state during the first few years of the twentieth century, his sacramental reading is apparent in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. William Oddie argues that a Christian world view underlies the novel’s ‘quasi-sacramental local patriotism’; however, I would go further, arguing that the theological basis of the sacramental reading in the novel allows the plurality of signs within the modern world to be read in a way that respects the needs of the local and the universal.13 By setting the novel within a modern metropolis that is itself at the centre of an empire, Chesterton extends his interests beyond local patriotism and explores the capacity of Christian theological resources to address the competing demands of the one and the many in the modern world.

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Inspired by Chesterton’s opposition to the Boer War, the critique of empire in The Napoleon of Notting Hill is based on imperialism’s systemic failure to acknowledge diversity and uniqueness. For much of the novel, this failure is brought out by the attempts of the larger, more powerful, boroughs to ignore the particularity of Notting Hill. The failure is also evident early on when three government clerks (Quin, Barker and Lambert) encounter Juan del Fuego, the eccentric President of Nicaragua. Protesting against the conquest of his country and the efforts to assimilate his cultural heritage, the President wears a striking green uniform, tears off a piece of yellow paper and soaks a handkerchief in his own blood; by appearing in this way, he represents the colours of his national flag. Asked to explain this unusually vivid testament, the President responds: ‘Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of what colours mean to us’ (23). Colours are used throughout Chesterton’s work to represent the individuality and particularity of creation, and in The Napoleon of Notting Hill they provide a visual alternative to the monotony and uniformity of the imperial project. When Barker tries to defend the idea of empire as a modern phenomenon that seeks to ‘include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples’ (24), the President counters: Precisely [. . .] and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.’ [. . .] If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized. (24)

Chesterton’s decision to think about the empire via the modern metropolis reflects some of the intellectual currents of his period. Jonathan Schneer argues that the importance of London to the British Empire reached its height at the turn of the century, and that ‘imperialism was central to the city’s character in 1900, apparent in its workplace, its venues of entertainment, its physical geography [. . .] [and] in the attitudes of Londoners themselves.’14 Londoners’ awareness of the importance of their city to the empire was encouraged by

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several factors that coalesced around 1900, including the exponential growth of the London Stock Exchange and its accompanying shift from a domestic to a foreign exchange, the importance of the Port of London as a ‘nexus of empire’, and the expansion and opening of major department stores offering commodities from around the world.15 The growing sense that London was at the heart of the empire was evident throughout the literature of the period, as Joseph McLaughlin, among others, points out. Highlighting works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890) and William Booth’s In Darkest England and The Way Out (1890), McLaughlin informs us that ‘writers in the late nineteenth century appropriated ways of thinking and talking about the colonies and discursively transform the metropolis into a new borderland space: the urban jungle.’16 The metaphor that McLaughlin both notes in the writing of the period and employs in the title of his study makes it clear that one of the main concerns at the turn of the century was to domesticate the jungle and subordinate the chaos of the many to the order of the one.17 Chesterton thought that such homogenization ran counter to the Christian doctrine of Creation: if all things are made and sustained by God, he reasoned, they are endowed with inherent value. This wonder at the world’s variety, described in one early essay as a ‘philosophy of gratitude’, finds expression in the final chapter of The Napoleon of Notting Hill when Adam Wayne mounts a defence of particularity: There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that God loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and unreplaceable [sic]. (154–5)18

While Chesterton’s alarm at the homogenizing tendency of globalization found expression in his support for an economic theory of Distributism, the root of Chesterton’s thinking on this matter has more to do with theology than economics.19 This is evident when Chesterton translates his wonder at the particularity of creation into an analysis of the workings of the modern metropolis. The Napoleon of Notting Hill may look back nostalgically to a pre-modern era but it does not do so at the expense of the modern world.20 Chesterton’s commitment to the world that God has made encouraged him to defend the heterogeneity of the city. In one of the best-known essays of The Defendant (1901), ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, Chesterton admits to

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finding ‘some sense of the poetry of modern life’ in the city.21 He then proceeds to make the sort of claim that one might expect to find in the writings of Walter Benjamin: A city is, properly speaking, more poetic than a countryside, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard. The narrowest street possesses in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. (159)

The location of this observation within an essay on detective stories reminds us how radically different Chesterton’s reading of the city is from the one articulated by Holmes. Conan Doyle’s detective is perpetually trying to map the city and assimilate cultural difference. In The Sign of Four, his trip through London’s streets is accompanied by the naming of all the streets through which he passes, a piece of maniacal indexing that speaks of a desire to decode and control the mysteries of the metropolis.22 Ronald Thomas tells us that Holmes’s reading depersonalizes life, with personhood finding itself imprinted on material objects (e.g. fingerprints) so that it can be subjected to dehumanizing and totalizing methods of analysis.23 Unlike Holmes, Chesterton values the chaos of conscious forces in London and secures this appreciation through the analogical language and symbolism that a sacramental reading of the world makes available. Conceiving of the city as a collection of conscious symbols imagines an unlimited set of possibilities. Every symbol expresses a series of intended associations, as well as multiple unconscious and unexpected significations. And because symbols derive their meaning in relation to the units of language that precede and follow them, the meaning of a symbol is never static. As a consequence, London’s symbols open up the meaning of the city and resist interpretative closure. Chesterton’s use of symbolism allows an imaginative account of the city that cannot be dominated by a Holmes-like universal reading. Chesterton’s understanding of symbols places considerable emphasis on the role of the interpreter. Symbols do not yield their meaning automatically and this enables an interpretative conversation to take place. The role that this

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creates for individual agency points to a more open-ended notion of cultural interpretation than the one proposed by Theodor Adorno, whose interests in modernity and popular culture coincide with Chesterton’s. Overwhelmed by the penetration of modern capitalism into everyday life, Adorno concludes that the standardized works of the ‘culture industry’ replace the ‘negative truths’ expressed by figures such as Mozart: ‘By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it [the culture industry] inaugurates total harmony.’24 Passive consumers are conditioned to accept the underlying uniformity of works, and all signs are seen as pointing in the same direction. When Chesterton looks at the unvalued elements of popular culture, he sees things differently from Adorno. Writing in The Defendant, Chesterton declares: ‘I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea’ (16). Led by his reflections on the doctrine of Creation, Chesterton thinks that the wonders of God’s own mystery extend to a surprising and adventurous world that humans participate in. Recognizing the positive consequences of this view for our understanding of the modern metropolis, Chesterton offers the following comment in his introductory essay to Elsie Lang’s Literary London (1906): ‘This is the difficulty of the town: that personality is so compressed and packed into it that we cannot realise its presence. The smallest street is too human for any human being to realise.’25 Contrasting conceptions of the relationship between agency and popular culture help explain the different attitudes of Adorno and Chesterton towards advertisements. For Adorno, advertisements exemplify the complete power of the culture industry over the individual consumer; for Chesterton, advertisements invite readings that extend beyond their commercial intent. By seeing the world as a series of signs that possess value and point to infinite possibilities, sacramental reading provides space for human interpretation and ensures that advertisements do not have to be interpreted solely as a threat to human particularity. Big business may seek to direct the sign-making power of advertising towards its own universal end, but the public nature of advertisements ensures that there is always another way of reading. Although it is tempting and not completely unjustified to accuse Chesterton of naivety on this point, The Napoleon of Notting Hill does not ignore the power of big

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business altogether. Indeed, the moment in the novel when the Nicaraguan President complains about the threat of cultural assimilation is the moment in which he explores the meaning of advertisements. Immediately before stabbing his own palm to redden his handkerchief, the President acquires something yellow to pin on his green uniform: He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of Colman’s Mustard erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost held their breath. He took from a small pocket in his uniform a penknife; with this he made a slash at the stretched paper. Completing the rest of the operation with his fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper, yellow in colour and wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first time the great being addressed his adoring onlookers. (20)

Because the symbolism of the advertising poster is public, it is open to appropriation by the President, even if the slashing of the poster implies that the alteration of the advertisement’s original meaning requires some level of violence. The references in this scene to audience (‘spectators’ and ‘onlookers’) suggest that symbols call forth an active response, and the use of the ambiguous phrase ‘wholly irregular’ (holey/altered; holy by virtue of a nonconformity to corrupt cultural norms; and wholly/complete) reminds us that the signature of advertisements is less determinate than one might think. By openly staging the potential conflict between the one and the many, between what is intended and what is read, advertisements exemplify the value of thinking about ideas in the public realm. Arguing in The Defendant that religious beliefs need to be thought about in this way, Chesterton insists: ‘The Christian martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements.’ He continues: It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked and numerous than advertisements of Pears’ soap. (59)

Advertisements propel ideas into the public realm. Securing a realm where the plurality of ideas (including religious beliefs) can coexist peacefully may be difficult, but Chesterton’s reading of culture is committed to the importance of public space and this helps account for his love of the city. He is committed

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to the sense that a sacramental world-view allows our reading of culture to entertain diversity without retreating into private and subjective belief systems. The sacramental world may point to one God, but that God is believed to be infinite, relational, and revealed through the language of the world that he has made, militating against a fixed and monolithic logocentrism. Having described how Notting Hill’s particularity collapses into a new imperialistic expression of the universal, Chesterton’s novel acknowledges the need for an intellectual framework that might break the revolutionary cycle in which one empire inevitably gives way to another. An awareness of the difficulty of establishing adequate relations between the one and the many lies behind the strange conclusion to The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Neither Wayne the fanatic nor Quin the humourist is able to secure the needs of the many through their own efforts. Wayne’s defence of Notting Hill affirms the value of a particular place but at the expense of particularity per se (the tyrannical conformity that results from his fundamentalism is a problem that troubles our own efforts at sustaining true cultural plurality); Quin’s humour creates space for the particular only to undermine that space by leaving open the possibility that the affirmation of the particular is based on ‘a vulgar practical joke’ (156). The inadequacy of Wayne and Quin’s approaches explains why, at the end of a tale that becomes increasingly predictable, we are presented with a surreal and unsettling final chapter. Like the early reviewers of the novel, a number of readers find the final scene puzzling, with complaints ranging from the narrative disjunction with the rest of the book to the incongruity of such strongly metaphysical language in a novel celebrating the material and commonplace. The most convenient solution, and the one taken by a number of critics over the years, suggests that the final chapter be read as a psychological reconciliation between two extreme personality types. Reading the final scene against the backdrop of Chesterton’s personal struggles during the 1890s, John Coates sees the two characters as ‘a picture of the necessary tension [. . .] between the fantasist and the humourist, the two halves of a man’s brain’, and Denis Conlon sees the ending as a resolution of Chesterton’s ‘split-personality crisis, a schizophrenic dream’.26 Yet reading the end of Chesterton’s novel in terms of mental unification is problematic: partly because the Joker in Batman suggests that combining humour and fanaticism is just as likely to result in

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a psychopath as a balanced individual, and partly because the focus on the individual mind misses the importance of community and cultural plurality throughout the preceding pages of Chesterton’s novel. Wayne’s final speech suggests that another reading is necessary: When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. (157–8)

The reference to cities and cathedrals insists on a vision that is communal rather than individual, and it is in this context that the importance of Wayne and Quin can be seen to revolve around their contribution to other people’s ability to perceive the wonder of creation. If the ‘dark and dreary days’ spoken of in the final chapter testify to a world that is fallen, then extreme defences of Notting Hill are ‘necessary’. According to Ian Boyd, the conflict between ‘earnestness and humour [. . .] can only be resolved by the common man who possesses the balance which both Quin and Wayne lack’. Boyd continues: ‘What the novel suggests is that this division will be remedied only when political power is given to the ordinary citizen.’27 While this political reading acknowledges the communal vision of the novel, it misses the precise theological orientation of the final chapter. Through the surreal quality of the narrative, Chesterton points us beyond the world that we know or have become familiar with, without losing sight of material creation. Wayne begins his final speech by declaring: ‘I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism’ (157). Although he goes on to associate the eternal human with the common man, such men are remarkably uncommon in the pages of this novel. The non-appearance of an ideal common man encourages us to turn to the divine as we interpret the ‘eternal’ quality that transforms our sense of what the world is really like.28 As Gunton puts it, it is ‘someone’ rather than ‘something’ that ‘holds things together’, and it is a belief in the remnant of God’s image within humanity and the restitution of that

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humanity through Christ that enables Chesterton to find hope in the common man.29 Christianity was a belief that Chesterton was only starting to articulate when he wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Even so, his early work makes several references to faith, most notably with the claim in The Defendant that: ‘Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope – the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt’ (12–13). Chesterton’s Christian perspective on the world became clearer four years later when he published Orthodoxy (1908). Acknowledging the paradoxical humour within his writing and anticipating the possibility that his latest work might be seen as ‘a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke’, Chesterton admits: if this book is a joke it is a joke against me. I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. [. . .] I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.30

For Chesterton, it is the God of the Christian faith who makes possible a harmonious relation between the one and the many, and it is the Christian faith’s understanding of this God that enables one to read generously and see the richness of culture in all its fullness. The doctrine of Creation provides an important basis for reading the world sacramentally, but in the years that followed The Napoleon of Notting Hill Chesterton would come to place this doctrine alongside a plethora of other theological resources, believing, as he did so, that the complexity and cohesion of a Christian hermeneutic enables one to take signs for wonders without losing sight of culture’s diversity and vitality. Like Adam Wayne, Chesterton’s beliefs are not without their difficulties, and the charge of anti-Semitism, exaggerated though it sometimes is in relation to his work as a whole, offers a troubling reminder of a failure to consistently defend the needs of the many. Yet for all the limitations in Chesterton’s theological reading of London, The Napoleon of Notting Hill has something to offer our modern (secular) questions about the ways in which our cities are understood. As the flawed figure of Adam Wayne insists: ‘So has the soul of Notting Hill gone forth and made men realize what it is to live in a city’ (144).

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Notes 1 This is a revised version of an essay first published as ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and Sacraments in Chesterton’s London’, in The Yearbook of English Studies (2009), 39(1–2), 126–36. Reprinted with permission. 2 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (new edn) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 13, 14. All further references will be given in the text. 3 M. Warner, Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p. 3. 4 For an intelligent and thoughtful reading of the violence to which monotheistic belief can be prone, see R. M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 5 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 168. 6 For a more detailed exploration of the possibilities of religion and French literary theory, see A. Bradley, Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004); J. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000); J. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); K. Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (revised edn) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007) and Y. Sherwood and K. Hart (eds), Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7 It is worth recalling that the eschatological vision described at the end of the Book of Revelation ushers in an eternal city rather than a second Eden, and also that recent decades have seen more positive readings of the city among the theological community. See, for example, G. Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000). 8 A. Vaninskaya, ‘“My Mother, Drunk or Sober”: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-imperialism’, History of European Ideas, 2008, 34, p. 542. For further consideration of the political implications of Chesterton’s patriotism, see J. Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). 9 C. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 29. 10 For two useful examples of the critical link between Foucault, discipline, and crime fiction see D. A., Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and (in a less overtly theoretical style) H. Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 11 F. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (revised edn) (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 136, 135–6, 143. 12 I. Boyd, ‘In Search of the Essential Chesterton’, Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review (1980), 1, 28–46 (41).

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13 W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874– 1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 268. 14 J. Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 13. 15 Schneer, London 1900, p. 39. 16 J. McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Elio. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 2. 17 Further discussion of the role of detective fiction in the attempt to domesticate a sprawling empire can be found in C. Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 18 Originally published in the Daily News in 1903, ‘The Philosophy of Gratitude’ is reprinted in The Chesterton Review (1988), 14, 177–9. 19 In making this observation I do not wish to divorce Chesterton’s understanding of Distributism from his theology. My point, rather, is that Chesterton’s theology is the centre of his intellectual energy, whether he is thinking about economics or the competing demands of the one and the many. 20 Vaninskaya is right to take issue with Patrick White’s assessment of Chesterton’s patriotism and highlight the modern geography of Chesterton’s thought: the ‘favored locales in his fiction and essays – Clapham, Kensington, Notting Hill, Bedford Park – were urban, and his metaphors more often than not London-based’ (p. 546). 21 G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (new edn) (London: Dent, 1922), p. 158. Further references will be given in the text. 22 A. Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (new edn) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), pp. 22–3. 23 R. R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chapter 12. 24 T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), p. 134. 25 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Introduction’, in E. M. Lang, Literary London (London: T. Wernie Laurie, 1906), p. x. 26 J. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984), p. 104; D. Conlon, ‘Introduction’ to G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 32. 27 I. Boyd, The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (London: Paul Elek, 1975), p. 20. 28 In later years Chesterton would make the Christology of his eternal man more explicit; see G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (new edn) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). 29 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 179. 30 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (new edn) (London: John Lane, 1927), pp. 16–17.

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Bibliography Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997). Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Boyd, I., The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (London: Paul Elek, 1975). —, ‘In Search of the Essential Chesterton’, Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review (1980), 1, 28–46. Bradley, A., Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004). Caputo, J., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Carrette, J., Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000). Chesterton, G. K., ‘Introduction’, in Elsie M. Lang (ed.), Literary London (London: T. Wernie Laurie, 1906). The Defendant (new edn) (London: Dent, 1922). —, Orthodoxy (new edn) (London: John Lane, 1927). —, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (new edn) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). —, ‘The Philosophy of Gratitude’ (new edn), The Chesterton Review (1988), 14, 177–9. —, The Everlasting Man (new edn) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). Coates, J., Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984). Conlon, D., ‘Introduction’ to G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991). Doyle, A. C., The Sign of Four (new edn) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). Gunton, C., The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Hart, K., The Trespass of the Sign (revised edn) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). McLaughlin, J., Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). Miller, D. A., The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Morretti, F., Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (revised edn) (London: Verso, 1988). Oddie, W., Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Reitz, C., Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). Schneer, J., London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Schwartz, R. M., The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Sherwood, Y. and Hart, K. (eds), Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2004). Stapleton, J., Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). Thomas, R. R., Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Vaninskaya, A., ‘“My Mother, Drunk or Sober”: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Antiimperialism’, History of European Ideas (2008), 34, 535–47. Ward, G., Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000). Warner, M., Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Chatto&Windus, 2003). Worthington, H., The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).

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4

Chesterton, Machen and the Invisible City Nick Freeman

Phillipps had lost all count of direction, and as by degrees the region of faded respectability gave place to the squalid, and dirty stucco offended the eye of the artistic observer, he merely ventured the remark that he had never seen a neighbourhood more unpleasant or more commonplace. ‘More mysterious, you mean’, said Dyson. ‘I warn you, Phillipps, we are now hot upon the scent.’ Arthur Machen, ‘The Red Hand’ (1895) It is not only necessary to hide a secret, it is also necessary to have a secret; and to have a secret worth hiding. G. K. Chesterton, ‘How to Write a Detective Story’ (1925)

A city of initiates From the Fenian dynamiters of the 1880s to the anarchist bombers of the 1890s, from the controversy surrounding the Sidney Street Siege of 1911 to the more general panic concerning the ‘hidden hand’ during the First World War, fin de siècle London was a city preoccupied by thoughts of conspiracy. In fiction, if not necessarily in fact, secret plotters were everywhere; a grocer with a dachshund might be sending coded messages to the Kaiser, an apparently friendly young typist was a suffragette plotting an ‘outrage’, a man whose face was ‘a sebaceous trickle of long features’ (Morrison, 1983, p. 106) might encourage his fellow drinkers to blow up a gasometer. London was alive with

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rumour and mystery, and its fictional detectives were frequently summoned to allay the populace’s fears, with the great Sherlock Holmes coming out of retirement in 1914 and his enigmatic brother, Mycroft, being forever vigilant in his armchair at the Diogenes Club.1 It is clear that while some genuinely believed that agents of foreign powers or subversive and/or criminal ‘types’ were engaged in a furtive assault upon Britannia, it is also the case that writers of what might loosely be termed ‘adventure fiction’ fed off such rumours and used them to inform all manner of at once richly entertaining and thoroughly preposterous yarns. Some, H. G. Wells in ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ (1894) for example, or Joseph Conrad, whose terrifying ‘Professor’ stalks the London streets with a bomb in his coat pocket in The Secret Agent (1907) created believable figures, others were less constrained by the obligations of realism. However, all the writers who utilized the trope of conspiracy in this period, from Henry James in The Princess Casamassima (1886) to William Le Queux, shared a common belief, namely that surface realities concealed the truth rather than exhibiting it. In such fiction, London becomes a city of initiates, men and women who have passed through tests, ceremonies and rituals in order to provide them with the secret knowledge that now marks them apart from the multitude. For a writer with a strong mystical sense, such as G. K. Chesterton or Arthur Machen (1863–1947), such an atmosphere was richly suggestive. Both men understood very well that the notion of a mystery as merely an unsolved puzzle or an unresolved narrative was a modern one, and when they used the term, they brought to it sensibilities shaped by a mixture of classicism, the medieval and the Celtic church.2 Each belonged to a loose aggregation of writers, artists and savants who beheld the metropolis in symbolist terms. Like Charles Baudelaire, they believed that man ‘walks within these groves of symbols’ (Baudelaire, 1993, pp. 18–19), the meanings of which can only be understood by a very particular type of observer or urban reader.3 In this sense, Chesterton, Machen, even at times, Joseph Conrad, more usually allied with impressionism, were at odds with the transience and materiality of that style, with its reverence for the subjective and corresponding emphasis on what Browning had termed ‘the instant made eternity’ (Browning, 1975, p. 74). The impressionist depicted the city as it appeared to him or her at a particular moment, whereas the symbolist had a personal epiphany of its deeper significance in which the moment was merely the gateway to the everlasting.

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As a student at the Slade during the 1890s, Chesterton had flirted with but ultimately rejected impressionist painting as solipsistic rather than profound, and in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) he termed impressionism ‘another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe’ – when Gabriel Syme is momentarily seduced by such thoughts they are akin to ‘an evil dream [. . .] the last and worst of his fancies’ (Chesterton, 1908, p. 131). ‘All art is at once surface and symbol’, wrote Oscar Wilde in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). ‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril’ (Wilde, 1891, p. 3). Machen and Chesterton extended this conceit to urban space, perceiving London as being at once a living metropolis that was also the screen or veil of a higher, eternal reality. Fiction such as Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) or Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades (1905) demonstrated that going beneath the surface or reading the symbol could prove bizarre, and on occasion, dangerous, but elsewhere in their work lifting the veil could bring simple comfort and even, rapturous joy. The official centre of the world after the establishment of the Greenwich Meridian in 1884, London was a multivalent symbol, standing for Empire, Nation, Tradition, History, Ingenuity and Inhumanity, depending upon the ideological perspective of those seeking to deploy its symbolic associations. Within it lurked millions of smaller symbols, from individual buildings or statues to pub-signs and street names, which could confuse and disorient those untutored in deciphering their significance. In Bleak House (1853), the illiterate crossing-sweeper and hapless semiotician, Jo, is ‘unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets’ and Dickens’ narrator ventriloquizes his incomprehension and bewilderment. ‘[W]hat does it all mean’, he asks, ‘and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?’ (Dickens, 1853, p. 257). Leaving aside the issue of basic literacy – the ability to read and/or write English – Jo’s question throws up several answers. One is that to understand these symbols requires the learning of skills or techniques that he and many others do not have, although one assumes they could be taught in time. Another is that the symbols are essentially codes or ciphers for which Jo does not have the key; again, if the key could be found, the symbols could be properly interpreted and their meaning revealed. The third and most disturbing response is the suggestion that those

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symbols lack any referent and are thus, strictly speaking, not symbols at all but merely signs that allude to nothing but themselves. ‘If it means anything to anybody’ – an uninterpretable, incomprehensible London, a human creation beyond the understanding of human beings, remains profoundly troubling. Which is worse, asks Kelly Hurley, ‘London as a chaosmos – a space of meaningless noise, activity, sensation in which narratives indiscriminately crowd one another and no one narrative has any more significance than the next’ or ‘the paranoid fantasy of a London whose seeming indifferentiation masks a network of deeply-laid and infernal designs’? (Hurley, 1996, p. 185). In ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ (1901), Chesterton posited a world strikingly reminiscent of Jo’s and Hurley’s, but with the important qualification that in a fictional universe, the writer exercises a control of the reader through the possession of knowledge which is gradually revealed as the needs of the narrative dictate. Chesterton’s city is not quite a ‘chaosmos’, but it remains very difficult for those who have not been initiated into its mysteries to comprehend. The detective was, he argued, the hero of a modern form of epic, a dauntless knight venturing into strange and bewildering regions governed by interpretive conventions very few properly understand: Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signaling the meaning of the mystery. This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. (Chesterton, 1902, pp. 80–1)

Chesterton’s language is here notably reminiscent of Conan Doyle and John Davidson’s The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (1895), in which the hero, baffled by an incomprehensible image on a pub’s sign, complains, ‘There is not

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a vein upon a leaf, not a scratch upon a pebble, not a torn word on a scrap of paper, without a message for me, and I am in despair because I cannot read the meaning here’ (Davidson, 1895, p. 250). At first sight, Chesterton appears as rooted in material reality as Sherlock Holmes or Earl Lavender, but he is distinct from them in his belief that behind ‘the soul of the man who built’ the city lies the God who created the soul itself. Mysteries can be solved, but only if they are first recognized for what they are. This is one reason why Chesterton’s detective is first, a Catholic priest and second, an amateur, a man untrammelled by professional obligation who is able to understand the events he investigates in theological as well as more pragmatic terms. Father Brown is always open to the miraculous, the narrator of ‘The Blue Cross’ (1911) observing that ‘The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen’ (Chesterton, 1911, p. 11). Machen too saw the numinous in the quotidian, but although his biographers observe that ‘[h]is controversial style, at least, is extraordinarily like Chesterton’s’, notably in Tom O’ Bedlam and His Song (1930) (Reynolds and Charlton, 1963, p. 104), his more overt accounts of epiphanic awakening are far more poetic, even sensual, in expression. The now-dominant vision of the metropolis either side of the First World War, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a poem informed by Dante, Baudelaire and (more covertly) James Thomson, pictures the capital, and the condition of modernity that it exemplifies, as a vast theatre of alienation, paranoia, sterility and hopelessness, peopled by ghosts and littered with the now-fragmented glories of the past, but Chesterton and Machen offered something quite different. From the 1890s to the 1930s, they drew upon Blake, Dickens and Stevenson, their versions of Christian faith, robust good humour and openness to mystical experience to conjure a city whose profane surfaces concealed the enduring reality of the divine.

Kindred spirits? Chesterton and Machen seem rarely to be spoken of in the same breath: there is no reference to the latter in Ian Ker’s G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (2011), a tome of over 700 pages, while Machen’s biographers give similarly scant attention to Chesterton. Machen is unfairly regarded as a ‘Gothic’ novelist, largely on the basis of his notorious ‘shocker’ The Great God Pan and ‘The Inmost

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Light’ (1894), while Chesterton is seen in the multifarious guises of whimsical essayist, social commentator, detective story writer and secular saint, a bluff Edwardian outflanked by the technical innovations of modernism either side of the First World War. These characterizations appear to be antithetical, but on closer inspection numerous points of contact emerge. Both men were eccentric, larger-than-life figures who revered and occasionally impersonated Samuel Johnson, doubtless endorsing his famous remark about men who are tired of London being tired of life. They regarded many aspects of the modern world with scepticism, toiled in the offices of London newspapers, and wrote fiction which imbued popular forms with unexpected spiritual intensity. Both worked for the occult publisher and bookseller George Redway early in their careers, encountering all manner of esoteric and arcane literature. They drank in the same London taverns, Machen at one stage belonging to the New Bohemians, an informal, beer-fuelled debating society that listed among its members Chesterton’s brother, Cecil, and his close friend, Hilaire Belloc. This is surely the fraternity referred to as ‘The Moderns’ in the seventh chapter of Chesterton’s Autobiography (1936). It is a shame that we know so little of Machen and Chesterton’s social encounters or indeed, the Bohemians’ arguments. That the two men had beliefs in common is shown by Chesterton’s reaction to Machen’s aesthetic manifesto, Hieroglyphics, published in 1902 at a time when Machen’s reputation was still tainted by his perceived affiliations with the ‘yellow nineties’. Maintaining that ‘ecstasy’ and its related qualities, ‘rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown’ were the basis of ‘fine literature’, Machen went on to attack the realist fiction of ‘dreary, draggle-tailed George Eliot’ and Thomas Hardy, promoting instead the writing of Stevenson which contained ‘ecstasy and imagination’ by the bucketful (Machen, 1960, pp. 21, 64, 86).4 In an era when, as George Gissing had said, ‘So great a change has come over the theory and practice of fiction in the England of our times that we must needs treat of Dickens as, in many respects, antiquated’ (Gissing, 1903, p. 63), Machen insisted on Dickens’s relevance and transcendent genius. The Pickwick Papers (1837) was England’s version of, and answer to, the Odyssey, he argued, since ‘It is a book of wandering: you start from your own doorstep and you stray into the unknown’. The reader of it, he went on, became ‘withdrawn from the common

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ways of life; and in that withdrawal is the beginning of ecstasy’ (Machen, 1960, pp. 56–7). In a 1902 review for The Speaker, Chesterton particularly approved of the attack on realism and the celebration of Dickens. In due time, his conception of the numinous would echo Machen’s conception of great art; Machen’s theory was ‘absolutely right’, he wrote, particularly in the way that it identified Pickwick as ‘a mystical work, celebrating like the Odyssey, the wanderings of a man amid the unknown.’ He also endorsed the recognition of Dickens as ‘essentially a poet’, a point he would reiterate in his own study of the novelist four years later (qtd. in Gawsworth, 2005, p. 173). Though less concerned with the Celtic faith than his Welsh contemporary, Chesterton shared Machen’s belief in Providence (which Dickens usually trusts in) and his view that ‘the holy things’ ‘lie everywhere about us’ (Machen, 1997, p. 50), the recognition of this truth being the first step on the path to everlasting joy. He also much admired Stevenson, on whom he published a critical study in 1927. The fantastical city of New Arabian Nights (1885) in which the bizarre and extravagant lurks around every corner was an enduring influence on him, and he strongly approved the Scot’s ‘belief in the ultimate decency of things’ (Chesterton, 1936, p. 94). Machen mourned how Coleridge’s visionary poetic engagement with the world was supplanted by a systematic one in his late prose works, and this disapproval and regret might be extended to encounters with London. These had to be unsystematic and always ready to recognize that, as Machen said, ‘great things can be and are before the eyes of men for countless ages, and yet are not perceived’ (Machen, 1925, p. 130), or as Chesterton remarked in his study of Dickens when speaking of the fantastical aspects of everyday life, ‘A man sees them because he does not look at them’ (Chesterton, 1986b, p. 85). It is likely that Chesterton and Machen would have recognized themselves as Davidson’s ‘unmethodical man’ (Davidson, 1893, p. 85), the rare being who can approach London unencumbered by any ambition for schematic delineation. ‘Want of method, when rightly considered, is really a kind of faculty, and not the absence of one’, Davidson maintained (88), an approach exemplified by many of Chesterton’s essays and articles, as well as by Machen’s autobiographical volume, The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering (1924). The two men drew water from similar wells. Both had written novels dealing with elements of conspiracy, though the occult society at the heart of Machen’s

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The Three Impostors was rather more crudely materialistic in its aims and methods than the workings of the divine in The Man Who Was Thursday. Both had created unconventional detectives, even if Father Brown was a far more successful sleuth than the Dyson and Vaughan pairing in The Three Impostors or ‘The Shining Pyramid’ (1895). Each writer had dabbled with initiatory groups or societies. After the death of his first wife in 1899, a depressed and confused Machen joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. ‘The Order of the Twilight Star’, as he called it in Things Near and Far (1923), appealed to his sense of mystery and theatre, but he found its revelations disappointing – ‘pure foolishness concerned with impotent and imbecile Abracadabras’ (Machen, 1951, p. 286) – and abandoning it, was drawn instead to the Grail legends and the practices of the Celtic church (see Freeman, 2010). Chesterton never went as far along the occult path as Machen had done, but ‘groping and groaning and travailing with an inchoate and half-baked philosophy’ (Chesterton, 1936, pp. 150–1) he joined a Bedford Park ‘debating-club’ called the I.D.K. (‘I Don’t Know’) which offered a somewhat parodic initiation ritual. The I.D.K. saw him agonize over the choice between theosophy, paganism, agnosticism and mysticism before beginning his movement towards Anglo-Catholicism and eventual conversion to the Church of Rome.5 It would be overstating the case to say that Chesterton and Machen were kindred spirits, but their communalities shaped a vision of London that was often strikingly similar. In ‘The Sins of Saradine’ (1911), Father Brown observes that humanity is ‘on the wrong side of the tapestry’ (Chesterton, 1929, p. 110) while Machen’s writing on London is filled with references to the lifting of the veil, a favourite symbolist trope (Freeman, 2007, pp. 186–8). In The London Adventure, he drew upon Plato’s Analogy of the Cave to reinforce the sense that reality lay beyond surface details. ‘[W]e can no more see anything real than we can take our afternoon tea in the white, central heat of a blast furnace’, he wrote, his phrasing recalling some of Chesterton’s more provocative overstatements. ‘We see the shadows cast by reality [. . .] though poets catch strange glimpses of reality, now and then, out of the corners of their eyes’ (Machen, 1974, pp. 70–1). ‘There may be a borderland and a world beyond’, wrote Chesterton in ‘The Protestant Superstitions’ (1929), ‘but we can only catch hints of it as they come’ (Chesterton, 1935, p. 236). The Man Who Was Thursday, whose Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme are poets who catch

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glimpses of such reality, is a novel which shows us first the outward London, then its veiling through imagery in descriptions of the Thames as Acheron and so forth, before pulling away the veils to reveal first the apparent hidden order of things, the anarchist conspiracy, and finally, the true order of them, in the miraculous revelations of the final chapters. Here, Chesterton shows how the divine order of the world is concealed first and foremost through the falsifying tendencies of language – a contemporary of Saussure, Chesterton shared his view that the relationship between words and things was at once wonderfully convenient and purely arbitrary. Drawing on work by Roger Luckhurst, Tim Armstrong notes how spiritualist texts tend to ‘imply a totality of meaning “behind the veil”’ (Armstrong, 2005, p. 126). In more sophisticated Christian writers such as Machen and Chesterton, however, revelation may be preceded by the lifting of the veil, but what lies behind it is at once omniscient and unique: no two souls can apprehend it in the same way. This applies equally well to God or to London, the city He has inspired humanity to create.

Finding London In ‘London’, an essay of 1888, Henry James suggested that, ‘One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. [. . .] it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak?’ (James, 1905, p. 30). Chesterton was equally aware that ‘London’ was a collective noun, describing in the first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’ how an omnibus crossing the capital passes through ‘thirteen separate vulgar cities all just touching each other’ (Chesterton, 1911, pp. 15–16), but as so often in his work, an insight is tossed aside rather than being developed at length, its purpose being to prompt thought rather than to exhaust it. James, who never made significant progress with his own study of the city, the tentatively yet grandly entitled London Town, recognized the difficulties of definition and focus with which urban writing needed to grapple if it was to be anything other than purely personal, but at the same time, he understood that an artist such as himself could only produce a personal response to his surroundings. Given that both were representations rather than realities, which got closer to the ‘real’ London, the

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elaborately colour-coded charts drawn by Charles Booth and his researchers in delineating the distribution of the capital’s capital, or James’ avowedly personal essays, which mapped his own impressions and recollections onto selected areas of the cityscape such as Hyde Park and Piccadilly? Until he got entangled in the abortive London Town, James did not need to answer such questions; they could be left to Walter Besant and his plodding histories of individual boroughs.6 The London essays collected in James’s English Hours (1905) proclaimed that ‘the spirit of the great city is not analytic, and as they come up, subjects rarely receive at its hands a treatment drearily earnest or tastelessly thorough’ (James, 1905, p. 9). One could never apply these terms to Chesterton or Machen, and their search for London was never conducted on analytical principles. They explored instead the gulf between the apparent and the actual in an attempt at what Lothar Hönnighausen has called ‘transcending the tangible’ (Hönnighausen, 1988, p. 213). ‘I yet have sight beyond the smoke’, cried Francis Thompson, envisioning Jacob’s Ladder being ‘Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross’ (Thompson, 1937, pp. 215, 349–50). ‘There are two solutions of existence’, Machen wrote in Hieroglyphics. ‘One is the materialistic or rationalistic, the other, the spiritual or mystic’ (Machen, 1960, p. 71). The final chapter of Chesterton’s Autobiography, ‘The God with the Golden Key’, makes a similar case. Yet, mystical though they may have been, Chesterton and Machen were far more practical than an opium-addicted rhapsodist such as Thompson. Their London would be described not in oracular pseudometaphysical verse but in newspaper articles, detective stories, autobiography, adventure fiction and even comedy. Machen is one of Ackroyd’s ‘great London visionaries’, a figure attuned to the city’s historical and mythic pasts who is able to appreciate – a key Chestertonian term – their co-existence within the modern city.7 For him, the ‘real’ London – the city apprehended by the soul rather than simply through the senses or the rationalizing intellect – exists beneath, behind, beyond or within the London of outward ‘reality’. His novella, ‘A Fragment of Life’ (1904), details how Darnell, a Pooteresque clerk, awakens to the wonder of God’s creation in the London suburbs and comes to believe that ‘the world is but a great ceremony or sacrament, which teaches under visible forms a hidden and transcendent doctrine’ (Machen, 1988a, p. 81). Machen believed this doctrine

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was that of the Celtic Church, ‘a wonderful mystery language, which spoke at once more secretly and more directly than formal creeds’ (81); despite strong Catholic sympathies, he never converted to the Roman faith, in part because he refused to accept the Reformation. William Cowper’s influential formulation in The Task (1785), ‘God made the country, and man made the town’ may have underpinned the beliefs of Romantic poets and social reformers alike, but Chesterton and Machen took a more sympathetic view of urban living. While conspiracy theorists feared the hidden hand, Chesterton and Machen were more inclined to see God moving in a mysterious way, and his wonders being Clerkenwell or Brentford or indeed, what the unilluminated chose to regard as ‘ordinary life’. Machen contrasts light-hearted everyday events – the kind found frequently in the novels of W. Pett Ridge or the stories of W. W. Jacobs – with much more serious and personal ideas of enlightenment. Darnell owes his epiphany in part to the inscrutable workings of the Divine, in part to his personality, and, in a typically fin de siècle touch, in part to his heredity: he is descended from Welsh mystics, and their blood flows in his veins even as he catches his tram along the Goldhawk Road. Because of his heritage, Darnell is open to the miraculous (initially without even realizing it), and it is able to enter his soul instead of being kept out by stout walls of cynical materialism, meaning that he can behold London in the light of God’s glory. ‘[F]reed from the bondage of Shepherd’s Bush, freed to wander in that undisfigured, undefiled world that lies beyond the walls’, he and his wife ‘awoke from the dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things’ (Machen, 1988a, pp. 73–4, 88). Needless to say, this London, or this way of perceiving London, was markedly uncommon. Evangelical writers often tended to regard London as profane, and the devil feels thoroughly at home there in Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and George Sims’ The Devil in London (1908). A place of moral abandon and temptation, the capital staged ‘the struggle between the hateful right and the delicious wrong’ that torments the protagonist of John Buchan’s 1896 story, ‘A Captain of Salvation’ (Buchan, 1896, p. 157). More significantly, what Matthew Arnold had called in ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ (1853) the ‘strange disease of modern life, | With its sick hurry, its divided aims’ combined with or helped to prompt a steady decline in Christian observance if not necessarily belief, and an increasingly secularized and self-consciously ‘modern’ populace

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had, in Machen’s view at least, little sense of the glory of its surroundings. As first developers, then zeppelins and Gothas, and then a second wave of developers razed the older London streets, landmarks and the accretion of history, folklore and personal meaning that they contained, disappeared. The city existed in flux, with new buildings appearing even faster than older ones were destroyed or, in a fate that both Machen and James felt was even worse, ‘modernized’. Machen’s ‘N’ (1936) considers the city’s changing face since the late-Victorian era, but his backward-looking and elegiac view of the metropolis was established long before that late story. James’s notebooks meanwhile refer to ‘the ghostly sense, the disembodied presences of the old London’ and reiterate his profound dismay at the ‘modernized desolation’ afflicting Change Alley in October 1907 (James, 1961, pp. 6, 333). Chesterton did not weep over the loss of this London to anything like the same extent, but in a brief essay of 1914, written as an accompaniment to London, a collection of photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, he did claim that ‘It is very hard to find London in London’ (Chesterton, 1914, p. 10). Perhaps this was because the palimpsestic nature of the city has seen it erased, re-inscribed and re-emerge so many times that any sense of its ‘soul’ has been ‘sunk deeper under other things than any other town that remembers medievalism at all’, perhaps because Coburn’s pictures depopulate the city and render the busy, human metropolis Chesterton loved a ghostly mirage. In 1905, Ford Madox Ford had been annoyed when his publisher chose to lumber his impressionistic evocation of the capital with the ‘old-fashioned title’ The Soul of London, but the idea that cities have, or should have, souls remains deeply rooted in contemporary culture (Ford, 1905, p. xix). ‘Soulless’ is, after all, the adjective of choice for condemning the Everytowns foreseen by Wells in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the clone-towns and etiolated high streets that characterize the Britain of the early twenty-first century. At such moments, Chesterton appears to be both of his time – similar questions were being posed by Machen, Ford, Davidson, James and Arthur Symons, among others – and to look forward to the sociological work of Jonathan Raban’s Soft City (1974) and the gnomic ruminations of Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller. The early twentieth century saw a profusion of books about London. Chesterton and Machen were well equipped to follow the likes of Besant or Edwin Pugh in penning accounts of their walks around the city, dramatizing

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its history, legends and folklore while discoursing upon the treasures of the National Gallery or the waterfowl to be admired in St James’s Park. Such books would probably not have paid substantially better than the journalism both men were engaged in during the Edwardian and Georgian periods, but their reasons for not offering something akin to E. V. Lucas’s A Wanderer in London (1906) or Pugh’s The City of the World (1912) are probably more aesthetic and spiritual than commercial. Put simply, both men saw the capital in terms far removed from the everyday and their versions of it cannot be easily divided into ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’. Chesterton’s satirical fantasy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), conjectured the London of 1984 as a grouping of city states caught up in a ruinous war, and though The Man Who Was Thursday begins in the London suburbs, it could never be considered as simply a ‘London book’ – instead of charting the city, retelling historical anecdotes or offering a series of perambulations encrusted with personal observation, it somehow combines topical intrigue with provocative theology and farce. The pell-mell nature of its plotting prevents awkward moments of ratiocination, but it soon shifts its focus from London to earthly life itself and does not, therefore answer the question of how to find London in London except in the most oblique terms. Both books however were rich in Chestertonian opinion, from the claim that the London of 2004 will not be substantially different from that of 1904 in The Napoleon of Notting Hill to the thinly disguised account of his beloved Bedford Park as ‘Saffron Park’ in The Man Who Was Thursday. Even Machen’s The London Adventure, which seems at first sight to fit the stereotype of a ‘treasures and pleasures’ guide or another popular form, the metropolitan reminiscence, turns slowly into a meditation on the impossibility of fulfilling such a commission, collapsing eventually into the journalistic trick of the article concerning the difficulty of writing an article on the required theme and positing London as a fantastical space in which nothing is quite as it appears. The notion that the city’s soul is deeply buried, and that this made London much harder to find than road-signs suggested, is a resonant but somewhat mystifying claim, scarcely clarified by what follows. ‘Crowded and noisy as it is’, Chesterton writes, ‘there is something shy about London: it is full of secrets and anomalies; and it does not like to be asked what it is for’ (Chesterton, 1914, p. 13). Here, his essay links with two important currents in early twentiethcentury urban writing. One of these is that basic question, ‘what is any city

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for?’, an issue addressed by everyone from radicals such as William Morris and Edward Carpenter to the bureaucrats of London County Council. The other concerns how might we find ‘London in London’. What, precisely, would this entail? How would we know what we were looking for? Is there an essential, a Platonic, ‘real’ London, an ‘Ur-London’, or is the city a subjective construction whose meaning and even reality are determined by individual experience and taste? What might be termed Machen’s ‘Inner London’, the city of holy things, revealed itself through the workings of the Divine on a sensibility pre-attuned to accept its influence, but Chesterton tended to prefer parable and essay to such accounts of spiritual experience. Lacking the patience to write the sort of novel in which spiritual experience could be delineated at length, and having no wish to offer his readers a twentieth-century version of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), Chesterton tended to express his ideas most effectively in concerted form such as his newspaper columns, where he could offer intellectual (and spiritual) provocation without having to work through the full implications of his insights. Although it was written for a privately printed photographic folio, the London essay operates in typical style with ‘secrets’ and ‘anomalies’ resonant rather than pedantic terms. The former suggests deliberate concealment, even the overtones of conspiracy: what are the secrets? from whom and by whom are they kept, and for what purpose? ‘Anomalies’ in turn signifies a deviation from the normal or usual, but this raises the questions of what is ‘normal’ or ‘usual’ about London, and whether it can be totalized in such a way as to make such terms meaningful. The more prosaic or practical might seek the answer to this question in the many guides to the city issued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but in many respects, guidebooks to what Geoffrey Fletcher called The London Nobody Knows (1962) are as misleading as the claim that Columbus ‘discovered’ America. A guidebook may tell the stranger something new, but every supposedly ‘hidden’ or ‘out of the way’ public house is someone else’s local. A street atlas is useful, but a guidebook is a subjective prescription – as John Davidson said, ‘the itinerant never buys guide books’ (Davidson, 1894, p. 22). Besides, finding where a particular business, shop or music hall might be is not the same as understanding what it might mean when one gets to it. Chesterton and Machen were mystical archaeologists who attempted to

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burrow down through the layers of cultural accretion while, in an irony they would doubtless have chuckled over, adding further layers of their own. This vision of London and indeed, the wider world, was rooted in a religiosymbolist aesthetic. In his Autobiography, Chesterton recalls an incident when he was a young journalist on the Daily News and tried to proclaim to his disbelieving superiors that the apparently commonplace suburb of Clapham was actually ‘Thunderclapham [. . .] epical and elemental and founded in the holy flame.’ This ‘visionary Clapham’ as he called it, was, unfortunately, ‘utterly veiled’ from his fellow scribes, and it was this encounter which typified Chesterton’s mission to make men ‘realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.’ They were, he said ‘men who had resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities’ rather than the Tarsus of St Paul. The ‘great city’ had unfortunately become ‘a journalistic generalisation, no longer imaginative and very nearly imaginary’ (Chesterton, 1936, pp. 133–4). As an aside in a newspaper article, ‘Thunderclapham’ was at once more comic and less overtly Christian than ‘A Fragment of Life’ (which was collected in the significantly titled The House of Souls in 1906), but the ‘fantastic suburb’, as Chesterton calls it in his Autobiography was an idea both writers revisited throughout their careers. As late as 1936, the year Chesterton died, Machen’s ‘N’ depicted a ‘perichoresis, an interpenetration’ in which the Victorian cleric, the Reverend Thomas Hampole, looks out of his window in Canon’s Park, Stoke Newington and beholds not the familiar streets but ‘a panorama of unearthly, of astounding beauty’ that leaves his soul all-but ravished (Machen, 1988b, pp. 321, 314). The vision is, inevitably, fleeting, but suggests that divine majesty can be made manifest in the most quotidian surroundings and that, unsurprisingly, such experiences can be powerfully transformative. The same year, Chesterton’s memoirs concluded with his account of ‘the strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day’ shining on the Crystal Palace from Campden Hill. ‘[W]hen a Catholic comes from Confession’, Chesterton wrote, ‘he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal’ (Chesterton, 1936, p. 329). Encounters with the numinous, whether ritualized or seemingly accidental, transfigure both the landscape and the self.

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An unfulfilled quest In the years before the First World War, the quest for London in London ultimately took two distinct forms. For the compilers of the Thomas Cook, Black or Baedekar guides, London was a selection of routes and sites which could be mapped, visited and ticked off (in both senses of the term). This view found echoes in fiction, as when in ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1892) Sherlock Holmes makes the casual but preposterous boast, ‘it is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London’ (Conan Doyle, 1981, p. 185). This ‘knowledge’ is that of the taxi driver in being essentially topographical and associative. The second approach however was altogether subtler, since it dealt less with London than with the ways in which London was viewed: the telescope, and the eye applied to the telescope, became more important than what was seen through its lens. Writers such as Ford and Davidson argued that to see London properly required a set of mutually contradictory qualities. Open-minded, whimsical, artistically trained and fundamentally generous of spirit, Chesterton was well equipped to be the ‘unmethodical man’, but whereas Davidson became almost demented in his adherence to materialism, Chesterton had a more sympathetic understanding of Augustine and saw the earthly city less as an emblem of man’s distance from the kingdom of heaven than as an indication of his potential to return to it. This is not to say that Chesterton or Machen were blind to the dangers, injustices and pollution of twentieth-century London, merely to point out that their optimistic outlook allowed them to entertain ideas that Davidson and Symons could not. In his In Memoriam, A. H. H. (1850), Tennyson called faith ‘believing where we cannot prove’; it was a sacred trust that transcended the best efforts of scientific empiricism. Swinburne floated naked in the North Sea, believing that as the sea was his mother, She would never drown him. Machen and Chesterton had faith in God and faith in London, wandering its streets for miles, often in states of intoxication, yet never becoming victims of crime or being run down by taxis or omnibuses. In The Secret Glory (1922), Machen’s mystical hero, the Grail guardian Ambrose Meyrick, ‘carefully lost himself within a few minutes of Oxford Street’ in order to induce ‘the most satisfactory condition of bewilderment’ and enjoy ‘an adventure in a trackless desert, in the Australian bush, but on safer ground and in an infinitely more entertaining scene’ (Machen, 2006, p. 108). In short, Machen and Chesterton

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were the beneficiaries of a sort of metropolitan providence, which allowed them to enjoy the city even as it ground down many of their contemporaries. There are, as a consequence, few suggestions in their writings on London that it is the waste land Eliot divined through obsessive reading of Dante, or the blind and brutal juggernaut found in the atheistic or stoic writings of James Thomson or George Gissing.8 It is instead a theatre of varieties and palace of delights. In his controversial ‘Stella Maris’ (1894), Arthur Symons had hymned the joys of ‘the chance romances of the streets’, the casual sexual adventures the city offered (Symons, p. 129). Chesterton and Machen by contrast took ‘romance’ in its medieval sense, offering a mixture of entertainment and occasional incidental didacticism (Cuddon, 1999, pp. 758–62). Here they were guided by Dickens and Stevenson, the former, Chesterton remarked in his study of the novelist, drawing his inspiration ‘from some splendid hint in the streets’ that ‘set off his fancy galloping’ (Chesterton, 1986b, p. 107). Fancy, whimsy, imagination, the ability to sense the workings of the Divine in the most quotidian, even profane surroundings, these were the qualities needed in the search for the capital. Ultimately however, there was no single way to find London in London; no prescription or map that might be followed. London would only ever reveal itself to the seeker who possessed the contradictory qualities of the ‘unmethodical man’ and Coburn’s ‘opened eye of the artist’ (Coburn, 1924, p. 159) but was also temperamentally attuned to what London could offer – to appreciate the mystery that lay beyond its diverting surfaces. A fixed scheme or inflexible method for finding London would have struck both men as pedantic and preposterous, a contradiction in terms that failed to acknowledge either the singularity of the city or the perceiving consciousnesses of its inhabitants.

Notes 1 For an excellent investigation of such conspiracies, see Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (2011). 2 For the complexities of the term, see Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (1967), pp. 1–6. See also Chesterton’s poem, ‘The Mystery’ in The Ballad of Saint Barbara (1922). For a lengthy discussion of Symbolist London, see Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870–1914 (2007), pp. 147–95.

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3 ‘L’homme y passé à travers des forêts des symboles’, ‘Correspondences’. 4 Machen had partly modelled The Three Impostors on Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1885), an impertinence which was one reason for the book’s critical drubbing. See his rueful scrapbook of press cuttings, Precious Balms (1924). 5 Potential members of the I.D.K. were asked what the initials stood for. If they said, ‘I Don’t Know’ they were considered to have been admitted to the club. 6 James signed a contract with Macmillan for a book on London in 1903, but although he did some introductory reading and note-taking, the project never came close to completion. See Kimmey, ‘The London Book’ (1979), 65–78. 7 For Chesterton and ‘appreciation’, see his Autobiography, pp. 333–4. 8 Although Machen described the alienation and loneliness of London life quite brilliantly in The Hill of Dreams (1907), a book he termed ‘A Robinson Crusoe of the soul’.

Bibliography Ackroyd, P., London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2000). Armstrong, T., Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). Arnold, M., ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, in T. Peltason (ed.), Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 141–7. Baudelaire, C., The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Browning, R., ‘The Last Ride Together’, in J. W. Harper (ed.), Men and Women and Other Poems (Harper, London: Dent, 1975), pp. 72–4. Buchan, J., ‘A Captain of Salvation’, The Yellow Book (January 1896), VIII, 143–62. Chesterton, G. K., London with 10 Photogravures by A. D. Coburn (Minneapolis: Edmund D. Brookes, 1914). —, The Ballad of Saint Barbara and Other Verses (London: C. Palmer, 1922). —, The Father Brown Stories (London: Cassell, 1929). —, Stories, Essays, and Poems (London: Dent, 1935). —, The Man Who Was Thursday (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1944). —, ‘How to Write a Detective Story’, orig. publ. G. K.’s Weekly, 17 October 1925. Reprinted in Dorothy Collins (ed.), The Spice of Life and Other Essays (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964), pp. 7–10. —, Autobiography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986a). —, Charles Dickens in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 15 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986b). —, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, in The Defendant (1902) (Fairford: The Echo Library, 2006), pp. 79–84.

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Coburn, A. L., ‘Photography and the Quest of Beauty’, The Photographic Journal (April 1924), 64(48), 159–67. Cuddon, J. A., ‘Romance’, in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 758–62. Davidson, J., Sentences and Paragraphs (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893). —, A Random Itinerary (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894). —, A Full and True Account of The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (London: Ward and Downey, 1895). Dickens, C., Bleak House, ed. N. Bradbury (London: Penguin, 1996). Doyle, A. C., The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981). Ford, F. M., The Soul of London, ed. A. G. Hill (London: Dent, 1995). Freeman, N., Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). — ‘Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany’, Literature and Theology (September 2010), 24(3), 242–56. Gawsworth, J., The Life of Arthur Machen, ed. R. Dobson (Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2005). Gissing, G., Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London: Gresham, 1903). Hönnighausen, L., The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of PreRaphaelitism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Hurley, K., The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). James, H., English Hours (London: William Heinemann, 1905). —, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and K. B. Murdock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). Kimmey, J. L., ‘The London Book’, Henry James Review (1979), 65–78. Machen, A., ‘The Mystic Speech’, in The Shining Pyramid (London: Martin Secker, 1925), pp. 129–54. —, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen (London: The Richards Press, 1951). —, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (London: The Unicorn Press, 1960). —, The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering (London: The Village Press, 1974). —, ‘A Fragment of Life’, in C. Palmer (ed.), The Collected Arthur Machen (London: Duckworth, 1988a), pp. 23–88. —, ‘N’, in C. Palmer (ed.), The Collected Arthur Machen (London: Duckworth, 1988b), pp. 303–21. —, ‘The Holy Things’, in Ornaments of Jade (Horam: Tartarus Press, 1997), pp. 50–1. —, The Secret Glory (Hollywood, CA: Ægypan Press, 2006).

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Morrison, A., ‘The Red Cow Group’, Tales of Mean Streets (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1983). Ó Donghaile, D., Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Reynolds, A. and Charlton, W., Arthur Machen: A Biography (London: The Richards Press, 1963). Symons, A., ‘Stella Maris’, Yellow Book (April 1894), I, 129–34. Thompson, F., The Poems of Francis Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937). Wilde, O., The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. J. Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Wind, E., Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1967).

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The Knight Errant in the Street: Chesterton, Childe Roland and the City Matthew Beaumont

In the autumn of 1893 G. K. Chesterton enrolled at University College, London, in order to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, dominated at the time by the baleful influence, as he perceived it, of J. M. Whistler. This was undoubtedly the unhappiest period of Chesterton’s life, as he testified both in his Autobiography (1936) and, far more obliquely, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a baroque allegory of the diabolism by which he felt beset when he was a student. For he had experienced something like a spiritual or psychological collapse in the mid-1890s, one inseparable from his recoil from the aesthetic then fashionable at the Slade, Impressionism; and from the relativist philosophical implications it seemed to entail. Impressionism, declares the narrator of The Man Who Was Thursday, ‘is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe’.1 Existential and epistemological doubts are intertwined. This novel’s Dedication, inscribed to his friend E. C. Bentley, recalls in Ruskinian rhetoric the storm-cloud of the late nineteenth century, and evokes an atmosphere of ‘aimless gloom’ illuminated only by the sickly luminescence of the white streak that famously surmounted Whistler’s dark hair.2 Chesterton’s collapse, in the precincts of the Slade, was something like an abreaction to decadent art and literature as Whistler embodied them. In the Autobiography – the testament of an apologist, as he put it, though ‘the reverse of apologetic’ – he emphasized that, during the early 1890s, when decadence was in its ascendancy, ‘the whole mood was overpowered

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and oppressed with a sort of congestion of the imagination’, one with which he too was briefly inflicted: ‘As Bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.’3 He suffered, that is, from the aesthetic equivalent of Tourette’s, or that variant of the syndrome, at least, that is characterized by the tendency to blurt out blasphemies or obscenities. The monstrous ideas and images of The Man Who Was Thursday, subtitled A Nightmare, are traces of this apparent inability to repress the impulse to represent a state of incipient spiritual suicide. His time at University College wasn’t completely despondent, however, as William Oddie has recently demonstrated. The ‘dark side of his undergraduate years’, notes Oddie, ‘was the obverse of an intellectually more productive and generally more cheerful aspect of the same period’, which pivoted on the courses that he took in both French and English Literature.4 Most importantly, he attended the lectures of W. P. Ker, the first Quain Professor of English Literature, and one of the pioneering architects of English Literature as a university subject, who exercised an important intellectual influence on him. In the Introduction to Ker’s Collected Essays (1925), Charles Whibley commented that Ker was ‘at once scholar and wanderer’: ‘The word “adventure” was always on his tongue or at the point of his pen.’5 And the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography confirms that he ‘always kept the spirit of an adventurer, wandering far afield when the spirit really prompted, carrying his students with him by his power of mind and temper.’6 In the Autobiography, Chesterton expresses his gratitude for ‘the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning of Professor W. P. Ker’. He attended the Quain Professor’s lectures so loyally, in fact, that on one occasion he ‘had the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience’.7 Ker was a polymath, but his most significant contribution to scholarship was probably in the field of mediaeval literature. His first book, Epic and Romance (1897), which consisted in part of material used in lectures that he had delivered at University College, was a panoramic survey of Teutonic, Icelandic and French epic which identified the rise of mediaeval romance, and its ‘wandering champions’, with the decline of the heroic age – ‘a change involving the whole world, and going far beyond the compass of literature

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and literary history.’8 In another of his lectures there, Ker emphasized that ‘the enormous and unfair advantage over other writers’ that Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes all possessed, apart from their abilities, was their relationship to the Middle Ages: [T]hey had the whole abandoned region of medieval thought and imagination to take over and appropriate. Of course they saw the absurdity of it, but that was only one charm the more in their inheritance. They had all the profusion and complexity, all the strength and all the wealth of the Middle Ages to draw upon.9

It is this image of the ‘whole abandoned region of medieval thought and imagination’ that interests me in the present context, because just such an abandoned region interested Chesterton, too, in all its absurdity, complexity and strength. ‘Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages’, Chesterton complained in 1910, ‘rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout’.10 Even more bluntly, in the introduction to Alarms and Discursions, also published in 1910, where he celebrates his love of the grotesque, he makes ‘the high boast that I am a mediaevalist and not a modern’.11

II Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a thought experiment that, perhaps rather too programmatically, imagines ‘a revival of the arrogance of the old mediaeval cities applied to our glorious suburbs’, offers a revealing instance of this mediaevalism.12 In his Autobiography he describes the incident that inspired this strange romance: ‘I was one day wandering about the streets in part of North Kensington’, he begins, ‘telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me.’ At this point, he continues, his eye was suddenly arrested by a block of ‘lighted shops’, and he fantasized that ‘they contained the essentials of civilisation’ – a chemist’s, a bookshop, a shop for provisions, a public house, and, at the end, ‘a curiosity shop bristling with swords and halberds’. Finally, he looked up and glimpsed, ‘grey with distance, but still seemingly immense in altitude’, the Waterworks Tower that overlooked Notting Hill and Holland Park. ‘It suddenly occurred

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to me’, he concludes, with a last flourish of his mediaevalist imagination, ‘that capturing the Waterworks might really mean the military stroke of flooding the valley; and with that torrent and cataract of visionary waters, the first fantastic notion of a tale called The Napoleon of Notting Hill rushed over my mind.’13 In the book’s Dedication to his friend Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton characterized it as the ‘legend of an epic hour’, dreamed up ‘Under the great grey water-tower / That strikes the stars on Campden Hill’.14 It is this industrial tower that, set against an apocalyptic sunset printed in red and black, illustrates W. Graham Robertson’s imposing cover for the first edition of the novel. The Grand Junction Water Works Company, which had built a reservoir on the elevated ground at Campden Hill in the early 1840s, subsequently constructed both a pumping station and the tower to which Chesterton alludes. This tower, designed in a loosely Italianate style by Alexander Fraser in 1857 and 1858, played a significant part in the ‘social landscape’ of Chesterton’s childhood, to use one of his formulations – at least according to his mythopoeic account of it in the opening chapter of the Autobiography.15 This memoir opens with a self-conscious, half-Shandean reference to his baptism, which took place ‘in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge’. ‘I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings’, he continued, in a slightly laborious joke, ‘and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’16 The church of St George, Campden Hill, built in the so-called eclectic Gothic style with variegated patterns of brick and stone, was consecrated in 1864, as if to rebuke the hubristic Waterworks Tower. These two neo-mediaeval constructions – one religious, the other secular; one picturesque, the other an instance perhaps of the industrial sublime – were the totemic forms that shaped Chesterton’s metropolitan imagination as an infant. Chesterton confirms as much at the end of this chapter of the Autobiography when he explains that it was these structures that imparted ‘a visionary and symbolic character’ to the cityscape of his childhood: In one way and another, those things have come to stand for so many other things, in the acted allegory of a human existence; the little church of my baptism and the waterworks, the bare, blind, dizzy tower of brick that seemed, to my first upward starings, to take hold upon the stars. Perhaps

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there was something in the confused and chaotic notion of a tower of water; as if the sea itself could stand on one end like a water-spout. Certainly later, though I hardly know how late, there came into my mind some fancy of a colossal water-snake that might be the Great Sea Serpent, and had something of the nightmare nearness of a dragon in a dream. And, over against it, the small church rose in a spire like a spear; and I have always been pleased to remember that it was dedicated to St. George.17

In this account of his childhood, Chesterton is thinking of two chivalric legends. First, explicitly, he has the example of St George and the Dragon in mind. Chesterton alludes to this legend in The Man Who Was Thursday, too, in the passage where Syme scrambles through London in an attempt to evade the sinister figure of Professor de Worms – in the end finding the courage to wait for him to catch up ‘as St. George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or for death’.18 In the Old English language the word wyrm signified a serpent or dragon, so Chesterton deliberately identifies the Professor, a dessicated old rationalist whose intellect alone resists ‘the last dissolution of senile decay’, with the legendary knight’s monstrous antagonist.19 Chesterton also mentions St George in ‘The Red Angel’, a defence of fairy tales first printed in the Daily News and then collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909). In this piece, impatiently refuting the pious notion that they corrupt children, Chesterton insists that it is not fairy tales that ‘give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly’, but the very world into which he or she is born: ‘The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.’20 St George embodies the affirmation of faith that, according to Chesterton, might ultimately defeat those forces that, in the aftermath of the nineteenth century, are allied to death – including rationalism. In ‘The Red Angel’, Chesterton offers a neat graphic representation of the role of the imagination in combating the rampant scepticism of the time: ‘At the four corners of a child’s bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.’21 The second chivalric tale of which Chesterton is thinking in the first chapter of the Autobiography, though it is an implicit presence rather than an explicit one, is that of Childe Rowland and the Tower, a Scottish ballad in which King Arthur’s son rescues his sister from the

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King of Elfland’s castle. When Chesterton was a young man the most popular variant of this fairy tale was the one included in Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales (1890). According to Jacobs, Rowland is the youngest of three brothers who attempt to interrupt the spell that confines their sister Burd Ellen – who has been carried off by fairies because she foolishly circled round the church in the opposite direction to the sun – to the Dark Tower. Rowland eventually penetrates this Tower, which contains a vast, ornately decorated hall, and there battles with the King of Elfland, before eventually freeing his captivated sister and brothers: ‘[They] turned their back on the Dark Tower, never to return again.’22 It is a version of the legend of Rowland that Shakespeare’s Edgar invokes at the end of Act III, Scene IV of King Lear. There, in the form of Poor Tom, he conflates it with the story of Jack the Giant-Killer, to sinister effect: ‘Child Roland to the dark tower came; / His word was still, “Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man”.’23 And it is this allusion to the ballad that Robert Browning appropriated for both the title and the concluding line of ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. Browning’s poem, first published in Men and Women (1855), is a dramatic monologue of insidious psychological power that details the apprentice knight’s hopeless journey through a nightmarish landscape to the Tower – which he happens upon ‘in the very nick / Of giving up, one time more’. I will offer a more detailed discussion of the importance to Chesterton of this remarkable quest-romance in the next section of this chapter. For the moment, it is enough to note that the tower that Browning’s almost suicidal knight seeks in his unsettling iteration of the legend is described as having a ‘round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart’.24 Staring up at ‘the bare, blind, dizzy tower’ on Campden Hill, to cite the Autobiography again, the child Chesterton is a Childe Roland confronting his spiritual quest. In this retrospect, the Waterworks Tower features both as a Great Sea Serpent and the turreted castle of the King of Fairyland. It represents at the same time damnation and, as a monument to the imagination, some form of redemption. It is thus a central symbol in the ideological battle that Chesterton fought in the opening years of the twentieth century, which pitted ‘the ethics of elfland’, as he put it in Orthodoxy (1908), against ‘the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind’.25 This ideological battle is also allegorized in Chesterton’s account in 1909 of Jack the Giant-Killer (another story

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included in Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales). Jack is so terrified when he confronts the giant, according to Chesterton, that he finds his intellect is ‘utterly gone’, and he has been left with no resources for fighting him except ‘a kind of cold chivalry’. This is what saves him. He rushes at ‘one of the colossal feet of this human tower’ and plunges his sword into the giant’s foot, delivering the tiny prick that will eventually destroy him.26 At the turn of the twentieth century, a contemporary knight errant must penetrate the apparently indomitable tower of materialism. The image of a tower recurs again and again in Chesterton’s writings during the 1900s (this too is a kind of tourette’s syndrome, if the pun can be excused). In Orthodoxy, for instance, in the course of what can be classified as an antienlightenment defence of reason, he evokes a ‘modern world’ that, beset by rampant scepticism, is paradoxically ‘at war with reason’; and concludes by declaring that ‘the tower already reels’.27 And in ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’ (1909), reflecting on the relationship between singularity and universality, he suggests rather more enigmatically that ‘if you wish to symbolise human building draw one dark tower on the horizon’. ‘The poetry of art’, he goes on, ‘is in beholding the single tower’.28 Most strikingly, as I have already indicated, The Napoleon of Notting Hill describes a battle that centres on the Waterworks Tower on top of Campden Hill – it forms ‘a sombre and awful background’ against which those engaged in fighting for their neighbourhood are relieved.29 Subsequently, it is plated with gold in order to commemorate the battle. In the ‘wilderness of bricks and mortar’ that are the streets around which he ambled when he dreamed up the narrative of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an abandoned region that lies open to the imagination, to appropriate Ker’s formulation, Chesterton is himself a kind of knight errant. That is, he is both a knight that travels or adventures and one that deviates or wanders. The adjective errant, as the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, originally comprised ‘two distinct words, which, however, were to some extent confused in French’. The first of these words is derived from the Old French errer, meaning to journey, the second from the Latin errare, meaning to stray. Chesterton, in effect, glorifies this confusion. For him, to travel is to deviate and to deviate is to travel. Indeed, the truth can only be attained by celebrating that which is subtly errant – the eccentric element that, in Orthodoxy, he characterizes as ‘this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element

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in everything’. Nothing is absolutely symmetrical in the universe, and it is the slight deviations that matter to Chesterton. ‘Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable’, he writes, ‘It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment.’30 This is Chesterton’s dialectic. Reality lies in Elfland; and Elfland is to be located, like a second, hidden city, in the streets of the modern metropolis. As the narrator of The Napoleon of Notting Hill comments, ‘the boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city’.31

III The allegorical form of the chivalric quest, which seemed to Chesterton to encode the promise of spiritual emancipation, was for him one of the most significant legacies of the abandoned region of the Middle Ages. The knight’s quest is a recurrent motif in Chesterton’s work: ‘But I, by God, would sooner be / Some knight in shattering wars of old’, he writes in ‘“Vulgarised”’, a poem from 1900.32 In the space that remains I want to contend that, influenced by the poetry of Browning, and especially ‘Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, he attempts both in his first published poems and in The Man Who Was Thursday to rethink the relevance of the quest to metropolitan modernity, and to relocate its heroics to the terrain of the city’s streets. In a review of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), the anonymous critic in the Observer brilliantly intuited that Chesterton’s detective fiction was indebted to ‘Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. Chesterton’s ‘mind is so swift and sententious’, he remarked, ‘his incidents are so apocalyptic, his characters such monstrous creatures of shadow, his scenery so reminiscent of Roland and the Dark Tower, that it is an intellectual adventure to follow the bewildering mazes of his imagination.’33 Like Chesterton, Browning had enrolled as a student at University College, London. In the autumn of 1828, when he was 16, his father moved him into accommodation in Bedford Square so that he could commence his studies in Classics; but, for all his intellectual precociousness, the boy felt acutely homesick and quickly retreated to his parents’ house in Camberwell. He had lasted approximately six months. Chesterton, in his scintillating little monograph on Browning, published in 1903 as part of Macmillan’s English

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Men of Letters series, noted in the most neutral of tones that his subject ‘attended classes at University College’, and added merely that ‘beyond this there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of his own family’.34 This precedent must however have reinforced Chesterton’s sense of identification with Browning, whose almost pantheistic optimism he profoundly admired. Along with Stevenson and Whitman, Browning is singled out in the Autobiography for representing a literary and spiritual alternative to the decadent movement – in so far as these optimists instilled in Chesterton ‘a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude’ for existence. I suspect that in this instance, too, the intellectual influence of Professor Ker can be perceived. Lecturing in 1910, Ker recalled that, 30 years earlier, he had caused consternation among his contemporaries by asserting that Browning, then living in exile in Italy, was ‘the greatest man in the world’.35 He presumably espoused the same opinion of the poet in the mid-1890s, when Chesterton attended his lectures so assiduously. Browning’s poems are studded with more or less minatory towers, as Daniel Karlin has demonstrated. A solitary tower, reclaimed by animal and vegetable life, is all that remains of the barbaric warlord Alberic’s castle in Sordello (1840). And there are a number of towers in his depictions of the Roman Campagna, one ‘strange’, another ‘malicious’, all of them enigmatic, resistant to meaning, and oddly threatening.36 ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (1852), for example, a poem composed two days before ‘Childe Roland’, features a solitary turret on the plains that ‘Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time / Sprang sublime’.37 These ruined erections, traces of an imperial past, are suffixes of what Henri Lefebvre classified as ‘the phallic formant’. For Lefebvre, the phallic formant is one of the basic permutations of abstract space: ‘Metaphorically, it symbolizes force, male fertility, masculine violence.’38 Browning’s ruined towers, often in retreat from the profusion of organic life, are monuments to a regimen of political violence that, once omnipotent, has been fatally eroded by time – like the shattered statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem of that name. Bristling with abandoned towers, then, Browning’s poems are built on ‘ruined quests’ as well as ‘good moments’, to use Harold Bloom’s celebrated terms. The epiphanies he portrays are what Bloom calls ‘vastations of quest’; and his ‘darkest visions of failure’, conversely, are ‘celebrations’.39

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‘Childe Roland’, with its enigmatic and ambiguous conclusion, is the supreme example of this. In Browning’s treatment of the theme, the chivalric quest so closely resembles no more than a desperate struggle to escape the horror of meaninglessness that it also appears to constitute the ruination of all quests. It is only by confronting the failure of his quest, in the events narrated in the final stanzas, that Roland grasps the promise of success – although the fact that the final line of the poem loops the reader back to its title implies the possibility that this almost ruined knight is trapped in a cyclical structure from which he cannot ultimately escape. Perhaps, like the ancient mariner, he is doomed endlessly to repeat a description of this pointless quest to anyone prepared to stop and listen to his guilt-ridden monologue. ‘Childe Roland’ is the point at which the epic tradition meets a lyric impulse so intense that the latter threatens to ‘snatch[ ] fragments out of the atomised chaos which is the outside world and melt[ ] them down . . . into a newly created, lyrical cosmos of pure interiority’: it appears at least to dramatize what Georg Lukács called ‘the abandonment of any struggle to realise the soul in the outside world, a struggle which is seen a priori as hopeless and merely humiliating.’40 It reconfigures the heroic form as an expression of psychosis: psychotic epic. Replete with ‘horrible ideas and images’, to repeat Chesterton’s account of Bunyan ‘in his morbid period’, ‘Childe Roland’ might be described as a fairy tale about the dangers of ‘plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide’.41 But according to Chesterton it refutes precisely this admission of defeat. The poem not only reflected the metaphysical doubt he had experienced in the 1890s, but it also offered a scarcely decipherable image of faith. If for Bloom ‘Childe Roland’ is the ultimate instance of the quest form emptying itself out, then for Chesterton it is an example of it being restored to its full significance. It is a kind of test case of the reader’s temperament or spiritual condition. When he discusses the poem in the monograph on Browning, Chesterton pointedly expresses his frustration with readers who ask what it means. ‘The only genuine answer to this’, he expostulates, is ‘What does anything mean?’: Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added – that everything means nothing.42

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The echoes of King Lear in these sentences are a tribute to the debt that Childe Roland owes Poor Tom; and that Browning’s horrific landscape owes to Shakespeare’s heath. Nothing will come of nothing, according to Chesterton. The existential or spiritual challenge, he implies, is to make these ‘nothings’, perhaps even to make nothing itself, mean everything. This was the problem he had himself confronted in the mid-1890s: to transmute the pessimism of the time, sub specie aeternitatis, into optimism. For Chesterton, then, Browning’s poem sets a sort of trap for the reader (rather as the reader of Paradise Lost, in Stanley Fish’s fascinating book on Milton’s epic, reproduces the Fall at the level of the individual line): if the reader assumes it is nihilistic, then he is himself a nihilist, poised at the point of a spiritual suicide.43 Perhaps it is because rather than in spite of the fact that ‘Childe Roland’ superficially appears to be Browning’s most pessimistic poem that it appealed to Chesterton. ‘Childe Roland’, according to him, affirms the meaningfulness of the quest only by an abrupt and implausible leap of faith. ‘All pessimism’, Chesterton once wrote, ‘has a secret optimism for its object’.44 At the end of his chapter on ‘Browning as a Literary Artist’, from which I have been quoting, Chesterton praises ‘Childe Roland’ for being ‘the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth’. Chesterton proposes in effect that it represents the first truly post-Romantic poetry. For, unlike those poets who celebrated ‘the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes’, Browning ‘insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes’. The shift or displacement his poem describes – an incomplete one, to be sure – is from the sublime to the grotesque. Chesterton perceives in ‘Childe Roland’ the emergence of a poetics of the grotesque. Implicitly, the grotesque constitutes the first genuinely post-Romantic aesthetic. Composed a couple of years after the death of Wordsworth, and standing in blunt contrast to Tennyson’s contemporaneous Arthurian poems, Browning’s poem, festering as it does with images of corruption, triumphs in the demise of Romanticism. ‘Childe Roland’, Chesterton concludes with relish, is ‘the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it’.45 Perhaps Chesterton liked to think that he was the second to sing it. A number of the poems collected in The Wild Knight and Other Poems, a volume published with his father’s financial assistance in 1900, are indebted to ‘Childe Roland’. ‘The Mirror of Madmen’, in which the poet recalls a dream in which

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he ‘cowered like one that in a tower doth bide, / Shut in by mirrors upon every side’, probably invokes Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1833) rather than Browning’s nightmarish dramatic monologue. But ‘The Pessimist’, another intemperate attack on the ethics of the 1890s, echoes ‘Childe Roland’ more clearly. ‘You that have snarled through the ages, take your answer and go –’, it begins, ‘I know your hoary question, the riddle that all men know’.46 The second of these lines alludes to the opening lines of ‘Childe Roland’: ‘My first thought was, he lied in every word, / That hoary cripple . . .’.47 Chesterton’s poet is identified with Browning’s knight; and this poet’s pessimistic antagonist is implicitly identified with Browning’s cripple, an accursed cynic standing at the roadside apparently attempting to deceive him and deter him from the quest. At the end of the volume, Chesterton’s poet reappears as a chivalric hero in its title poem. In ‘The Wild Knight’, the speaker carries a ‘blazon of wild faith’, in addition to a spear upon which ‘barren grasses blow’, across an apocalyptic landscape where a cold wind ‘blows across the plains, / And all the shrines stand empty’. The object of his quest is not in fact a dark tower but a ‘twisted path / Under a twisted pear-tree’. He believes that there, in spite or because of the ‘Strange-visaged blunders’ and ‘mystic cruelties’ he has suffered, he will finally come to know God. But, in the concluding lines, he admits in spite of his optimism that this might be a dream: ‘the grey clouds come down / In hail upon the icy plains’; and he rides ‘Burning for ever in consuming fire’.48 Chesterton’s poem finally seems to catalogue the poet’s failure to redeem the darker ambiguities of Browning’s dramatic monologue and so affirm the Christian God to whom he longed to accommodate himself. ‘The Wild Knight’ thus charts the same territory as parts of The Waste Land (1922) – a poem that, to incomparably more powerful effect, of course, is also shaped by the apocalyptic landscape of ‘Childe Roland’. The final section of Eliot’s anti-romance offers febrile glimpses of ‘the approach to the Chapel Perilous’, as the Notes to the poem summarize it, in terms that recall both Browning and, no doubt not intentionally, Chesterton. The ‘empty chapel’ itself, which the desolate poet discovers beside ‘tumbled graves’ where ‘the grass is singing’, is in the end ‘only the wind’s home’. This section is steepled with images of shattered towers that stand out against the plains – from the ‘Falling towers’ of the great cities of Western civilization in the sixth stanza to the towers that are ‘upside down in air’ and toll ‘reminiscent bells’ in the

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seventh. Ruined towers are one of Eliot’s central emblems for the collapse of contemporary Europe. The final fragment of ‘What the Thunder said’ quotes from Gérard de Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’: ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’: ‘The prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruins.’49 If Chesterton is keen to demonstrate that ‘Childe Roland’ is a ‘new and curious type of poetry’, then his interpretation of it arguably renders it even newer and more curious; and it does so by deliberately urbanizing it. The ‘mean landscapes’ that Chesterton has in mind are in the first instance those strange rural zones that are neither picturesque nor sublime, and that don’t as a result fit into the categories of aesthetics. They are, so to speak, subrural. ‘That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved’, Chesterton comments in relation to Browning’s poem, ‘had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.’50 This is an extraordinary and unexpected anthropomorphization. It brilliantly evokes the dishevelled, morally questionable atmosphere of the landscape described by Browning. And it has an oddly modernizing effect. This becomes more apparent when Chesterton cites the twelfth stanza of ‘Childe Roland’: If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk All hope of greenness? ’tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.51

Commenting on this stanza, and its tone of pinched, repetitious desperation, Chesterton notes that ‘this is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street.’52 Roland’s landscape is a profoundly sinister but at the same time perfectly unsensational one. And it metamorphoses, in the course of the Chesterton’s comment, into a cityscape. Bloom cleverly notes in one of his commentaries on the poem that ‘Roland describes his landscape like Zola describing an urban scene’.53 Chesterton too draws attention to this hidden urban dimension, relocating Childe Roland’s quest to the nastier, more impoverished streets of the city. In his interpretation of Browning he thus experiments with the idea of transposing epic to a

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naturalist setting. Then, in the first half of The Man Who Was Thursday, an allegorical romance whose enigmatic goings-on unfold in the pubs and streets of a familiar London, he applies the same formula. In Chapter 4, the poet and detective Gabriel Syme, who has been elected to the Central Council of Anarchists at a secret meeting convened beneath a tavern, boards a steamboat and travels up the Thames under moonlight that is like ‘dead daylight’. The more conscious he becomes of the ‘glittering desolation’ of this cityscape, which is characterized by ‘a luminous and unnatural discoloration’ evocative of ‘Childe Roland’, ‘the more his own chivalric folly glow[s] in the night like a great fire’: Even the common things he carried with him – the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol – took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really human. (37)

The Man Who Was Thursday is an elaborate celebration, in a cultural climate poisoned by morbid conspirators, of healthy romance. It pits a solitary, sane and humane adventurer against the dehumanized modern fantasies that Chesterton associates with the 1890s – like Jack ranged against the Giant or St George against the Dragon. Or like Childe Roland confronting the Tower. In formal terms, this entails pitting epic against naturalism. Remnants of the romance form, embedded in the streets of the naturalist cityscape, become the expression of something that might transform and transfigure this setting. In ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ (1901), Chesterton had identified ‘the agent of social justice’, that is, the detective, as a romantic archetype whom he praises as ‘the original and poetic figure’.54 Syme is just such an emblematic figure of the romance tradition. He is an errant knight reincarnated in the form of a detective desperately attempting to redeem the threat of damnation in the conditions of metropolitan modernity.

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IV In the chapter on ‘Browning in Later Life’ in his monograph on the poet, Chesterton observes that ‘Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news’, before adding that ‘a great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories.’ ‘Childe Roland’ is one of these detective stories. Indeed, I am almost tempted to claim in conclusion that, according to Chesterton’s interpretation, ‘Childe Roland’ anticipates the form of noir fiction. Chesterton is of course far from some proto-noir novelist himself, as the ‘Father Brown’ stories indicate clearly enough; but in his interpretation of ‘Childe Roland’, with its brilliantly disconcerting emphasis on the eerie feeling of ‘walking down some grey mean street’, he implicitly identifies the configuration of generic influences that, half a century later, will shape the evolution of noir – epic, lyric and naturalism. The unshaved man that Chesterton pictures in trying to evoke the seediness of the landscape described in ‘Childe Roland’ – ‘That sense of scrubbiness in nature’, he writes, ‘as of a man unshaved’ – is in the context of Browning’s poem implicitly identified with the ‘brute’ that walks about crushing the patchy, scrubby vegetation beneath its, or his, feet. And the effect of this association, in Chesterton’s deft détournement, as it might be called, is to evoke a brutish, unshaved man haunting the pavements of the city. Roland, according to the logic of Chesterton’s reading, is effectively transposed to the ‘grey mean street’, where the brute confronts him as antagonist and double. In this interpretation, Roland is like no heroic archetype – perhaps anti-heroic archetype is the more appropriate formulation – so much as the noir detective that Raymond Chandler famously sketched in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944): But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

‘The story’, Chandler concludes, ‘is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth’.55 The detective featured in noir fiction of the 1940s has long been regarded as an extremely belated chivalric knight, pursuing a perverse moral quest in the

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nocturnal city and attempting to vanquish evil.56 In his reading of Browning, and in fragments of his own strange, uncategorizable fiction, Chesterton offers us another, urgent glimpse of this tradition – that of the knight errant in the street. In a detective story, he reflected, ‘the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland.’57 It is this chivalric romance that Chesterton excavated from what Ker had once characterized as the abandoned region of the mediaeval imagination – re-embedding it in the modern metropolis.

Notes 1 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 108. 2 Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p. xxxix. 3 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (Cornwall: Stratus, 2001), pp. 49, 57. 4 W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874– 1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 94. 5 C. Whibley, ‘Introduction’, in Collected Essays of W. P. Ker. Vol. 1, ed. C. Whibley (London: Macmillan, 1925), p. ix. 6 R. W. Chambers rev. A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Ker, William Paton (1855–1923)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34298). 7 Chesterton, Autobiography, pp. 61, 62. 8 W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 6–7. See also W. P. Ker, English Literature: Medieval (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), passim. 9 This passage, reproduced by B. Ifor Evans, another of Ker’s students, in W. P. Ker as a Critic of Literature (1955) is cited in W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, p. 94. Oddie asserts on the same page that ‘it is surely inexplicable that no biographer or commentator on Chesterton has ever suggested that in W. P. Ker . . . he had a model for his own future work as a literary critic’; or, it might be added, as a poet and novelist. 10 G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World? (New York: Dover, 2007), p. 29. 11 G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions (London: Methuen, 1910), p. 7. 12 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 39. 13 Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 68. 14 Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, p. 4.

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15 For this phrase, see Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 14. The tower was abolished in 1970. 16 Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 1. 17 Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 14. Note that in the allegorical account of the ‘three great stages of art’ with which he introduces Alarms and Discursions. Chesterton dramatizes Greek aesthetics in terms of ‘a great tower’ comprised of ‘a tower of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain’ (pp. 1–2). 18 Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p. 63. 19 Ibid., p. 46. 20 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Red Angel’, in Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1909), p. 102. 21 Chesterton, ‘The Red Angel’, p. 104. 22 J. Jacobs, English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase (Santa Barbara: AC-CLIO, 2002), p. 94. 23 W. Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. G. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 128. 24 R. Browning, Selected Poems, ed. D. Karlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 98, 99. 25 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Filiquarian, 2007), pp. 51, 68. 26 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Giant’, in Tremendous Trifles, p. 128. 27 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 34. ‘Chesterton’s aim’, Slavoj Žižek has commented, is ‘to save reason through sticking to its founding exception: deprived of this, reason degenerates into a blind self-destructive scepticism – in short: into total irrationalism. This was Chesterton’s basic insight and conviction: that the irrationalism of the late nineteenth century was the necessary consequence of the Enlightenment rationalist attack on religion.’ See The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 47. 28 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’, in Tremendous Trifles, p. 40. 29 Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, p. 131. Note that, slightly earlier in this chapter (p. 122), in an almost anagrammatic game with the word ‘waterworks’, the tower is characterized as ‘swart’ – a richly suggestive Anglo-Saxon word signifying blackish, gloomy or malignant. 30 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 97, 98. 31 Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, pp. 122, 131. 32 G. K. Chesterton, The Wild Knight and Other Poems. 4th edn (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), p. 104. 33 See D. J. Conlon (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976), p. 402. 34 G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006), p. 7. Chesterton professed that this book was more about ‘my boyhood than Browning’s

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35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity biography’ (p. 27). I’m not convinced that it is as simple as this. Michael Maar’s recent assessment of Nabokov’s book on Gogol seems to me to be relevant to understanding Chesterton’s book on Browning: ‘An author can certainly write about things other than himself, but he cannot turn off his inner sensors and smoke detectors while reading. And time and again it will happen that the outlines of his own conceptions burn so intensely in him that they are reflected back from the pages in front of him.’ See Speak, Nabokov, trans. R. Benjamin (London: Verso, 2009), p. 101. W. P. Ker, ‘Browning’, in Collected Essays of W. P. Ker. Vol. 1, p. 278. On the same page, Ker rather movingly describes seeing Browning in the London streets: ‘I never met Mr. Browning to speak to, yet I cannot help thinking of him as I saw him when he was still on this side of the picture, when he might be passed, any day, in London, walking in the crowd, perhaps quicker and more observant than most, yet one of the crowd of mortal men.’ See D. Karlin, Browning’s Hatreds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 119–20n., 241. Browning, The Poems, Volume I, p. 50. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 287. H. Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 175. G. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. A. Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 114. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 57. Chesterton, Robert Browning, pp. 81–2. See S. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), passim. Chesterton, ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’, p. 42. Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 81. Chesterton, The Wild Knight, p. 83. Browning, ‘Childe Roland’, p. 93. Chesterton, The Wild Knight, p. 115–17. See T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 73, 75; and G. de Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. R. Sieburth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 363. Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 81. Browning, ‘Childe Roland’, p. 95. Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 81. H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 110. G. K. Chesterton, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, in The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901), p. 123. ‘The whole noiseless and unnoticeable police

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management by which we are ruled and protected’, he adds in the concluding sentence of the article, in a slightly different proposition, ‘is only a successful knight-errantry’. 55 R. Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay’, in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 18. Chandler’s essay does not refer to Chesterton, but it does refer to his friend E. C. Bentley, the author of Trent’s Last Case (1913), the dedicatee of The Man Who Was Thursday. 56 On the disenchantment of this ideal in Chandler’s fiction, see E. Fontana, ‘Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep’, in J. K. Van Dover (ed.), The Critical Response to Raymond Chandler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 159–75. 57 Chesterton, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, pp. 119–20.

Bibliography Bloom, H., A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). —, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Browning, R., Selected Poems, ed. Daniel Karlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). Chesterton, G. K., The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901). —, Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1909). —, Alarms and Discursions (London: Methuen, 1910). —, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). —, Autobiography (Cornwall: Stratus, 2001). —, Robert Browning (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006). —, Orthodoxy (London: Filiquarian, 2007a). —, What’s Wrong with the World? (New York: Dover, 2007b). —, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Conlon, D. J. (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976). Eliot, T. S., The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969). Fish, S., Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Fontana, E., ‘Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep’, in J. K. Van Dover (ed.), The Critical Response to Raymond Chandler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 159–75.

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Jacobs, J., English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase (Santa Barbara: AC-CLIO, 2002). Karlin, D., Browning’s Hatreds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ker, W. P., Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Macmillan, 1897). —, English Literature: Medieval (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912). —, Collected Essays of W. P. Ker, Vol. 1, ed. Charles Whibley (London: Macmillan, 1925). Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Lukács, G., The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Maar, M., Speak, Nabokov, trans. Ross Benjamin (London: Verso, 2009). Nerval, G. de, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Sieburth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). Oddie, W., Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Shakespeare, W., King Lear, ed. G. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Žižek, S., The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

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Queer Clubs and Queer Trades: G. K. Chesterton, Homosociality and the City Merrick Burrow

‘And the Green Carnation withered’ G. K. Chesterton, ‘To Edmund Clerihew Bentley’ ‘No one can have failed to notice’, writes Chesterton in his ‘Defence of Detective Stories’, ‘that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland.’1 For the detective, he suggests, the metropolis is an enchanted landscape in which even ‘the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship’.2 And, Chesterton insists, it was above all in this low-status form of popular romance, the detective story, that such enchantment was to be found at the end of the nineteenth century because it ‘declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace’.3 The fictional detective, for Chesterton, pursues a ‘queer trade’ and the aim of the present discussion is to unpick what that means. I am interested in why, for Chesterton, such a quintessentially modern, urban and, indeed, disenchanted genre as detective fiction becomes the privileged locus for such an ‘elvish’ vision.4 In seeking to answer this I pursue the hypothesis that the ‘queer trade’ of the detective serves to distance another, more troubling sense of queerness that Chesterton experienced while he was a student during the 1890s, to which his writings return over and over – that bohemian subculture of the fin de siècle that he sometimes alluded to via the Wildean motif of the Green Carnation.

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The notion of the ‘queer’ at work here is thus already divided between identities that are variously fantastical or proscribed. Rather than treating this as an accident of idiomatic usage, I want to suggest that Chestertonian queerness points towards a fundamental disturbance within his treatment of male homosociality and that this in turn has a shaping effect upon the kinds of detective narratives he wrote. I follow David Halperin here in taking queerness to denote an effect by means of which the stability of gender and sexual norms is disturbed rather than designating a fixed category of identity.5 My claim is that Chesterton’s fiction seeks to counter this effect, un-queering the metropolis and populating it instead with eccentricities that merely baffle and amuse. The ‘irrealist’ strand in Chesterton’s fiction serves a conservative – even, perhaps, defensive – tendency to disavow a queerness that nonetheless remains at all times proximate.6 This also accounts for Chesterton’s recourse to detective fiction, marking a retreat from the moral ambiguity and pathologized sexuality of the fin de siècle metropolis into boyishly benign fairy-tales of adventure romance. In contrast to detective fiction, the so-called Decadent art of the fin de siècle was emphatically queer precisely because it was preoccupied with artifice and the possibilities this suggested for new forms of identity – what Chesterton refers to in ‘A Defence of Rash Vows’ as ‘the horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men’, and ‘the soul of the decadence’.7 In The Man Who Was Thursday – a novel in which men are constantly changing into other men – Chesterton describes such bohemian art as a ‘shuddering veil’, a ‘chaos of chiaroscuro’ that ‘can find no floor to the universe’.8 In contrast, the detective story strives to make sense of human character. It asserts the ‘romance of detail in civilization’ and, ‘even under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes’, endows the urban landscape with an ‘unfathomably human character’.9 The Impressionist painting, on the other hand, registers the world as a variegated and fluctuating field of shapes and colours. In contrast to the elvish gaze of the detective, the Impressionist’s eye manifests a disregard for truths that lie beyond the world as it appears before the senses. The Man Who Was Thursday is a detective story in which decadent queerness is resolved into elvish eccentricity. The hero of the novel, Gabriel Syme, finds himself on the track of the truth behind a world of unreliable impressions, in which ‘men took off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and

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turned into other people’ (107). It is also an oneiric narrative, as the reader discovers close to the end of the story when Syme undergoes a ‘psychologically strange’ (158) awakening from a dream – or rather, according to the novel’s subtitle, ‘nightmare’. It is thus both a fantasy tale and an investigation of Syme’s unconscious as well as a detective story – a synthesis that is alluded to in J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay on ‘Fairy Tales’, in which he describes ‘Chestertonian Fantasy’ in terms of its close attention to the ordinary and a way of looking that illuminates the ‘queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle’.10 In both The Man Who Was Thursday and The Club of Queer Trades (1905) Chesterton’s heroes are engaged in the pursuit of such queerness, whether in the form of a council of anarchists made up entirely of disguised policemen or the bewildering urban scenarios conjured up by the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited. These Chestertonian fantasies could thus fittingly be described as a fusion of the detective story and the fairy tale, in which the marvellous and the mundane conspire together to transfigure the queerness of the city into a magical rebus. Chesterton identifies this vision of the city as ‘elfland’ not only in detective fiction but also in the way that Dickens bestows ‘demoniac life’ upon the details of the everyday world and grasps ‘the shining riddle of the street’.11 In Charles Dickens (1906), Chesterton cites an anecdote in which Dickens shows how such ‘nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction’ (34). He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin’s Lane, ‘of which I only recollect it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with “COFFEE ROOM” painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.’ (34)

For Chesterton, ‘MOOR EEFFOC’, with its attendant sense of astonishment, becomes ‘the motto’ of an ‘elvish kind of realism’ in which ‘the most fantastic thing of all is often a precise fact’ (34). It is a method Chesterton practiced in his own romances, in which the hero possesses the ability to discover an eccentric fact behind the appearance of queerness. In The Man Who Was Thursday Syme is a ‘philosophical policeman’ who engages in a battle against the forces of anarchy by himself posing as an anarchist, only to discover that

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each of the anarchists is a policeman too (32). In The Club of Queer Trades Basil Grant is a judge who ‘went mad on the bench’ and who turns out in the end to be the president of the Club of Queer Trades that provides the innocent explanation for mysteries that originally appear to be darkly sinister.12 The key to the queer trades in each of these narratives – philosopher-policeman, Organiser of Repartee, Professional Detainer, Agent for Arboreal Villas, and so forth – is discovered through the application of a ‘moor eeffocish’ derangement of vision, an ‘elvish realism’ that sees through such opaque formations as Major Brown’s summary of his case in the first tale of The Club of Queer Trades: ‘Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me. Something. Preposterous’ (13, 34). London itself, as it is rendered in Chesterton’s early fiction, is an agglomeration of queer things. But it is also the site of a conflict between queer clubs and queer trades; or, to use the Chesterton’s preferred contrastive terminology, between heresy and the ‘romance of orthodoxy’.13 His detectives inhabit and, indeed, seek to exorcize a city replete with heresies whose character is defined, however, not in religious terms but in relation to homosocial formations. Thus, when Chesterton invokes Christian orthodoxy he does so in order to contrast it with cultural tendencies that disturbed his youthful sense of identity in the 1890s. Heresy is bohemia, Impressionism, anarchism, the Green Carnation; it is Shaw’s Socialism, or else it is a ‘new toryism’ that Chesterton detects within the detachment of art from society in Aestheticism; it is the preciousness of Whistler, the ‘dusty egoism’ of George Moore; and, above all, it is the attitudinizing of Oscar Wilde.14 The role of the detective in these tales is as the eccentric agent of orthodoxy, traversing the heretical ‘elfland’ of fin de siècle London in order to redeem it through a kind of homeopathic treatment – un-queering the city through the practice of a queer trade, dispelling insanity by way of eccentricity and, as Syme discovers in The Man Who Was Thursday, finding the cockeyed angle by means of which a truthful vision can be discovered of ‘the capsized universe’ (67). Chesterton’s early collection of deranged detective stories, The Club of Queer Trades, in many ways foreshadows the conflict between anarchy and common sense in The Man Who Was Thursday and the more explicitly Catholic orthodoxy that infuses the Father Brown detective stories, beginning with ‘The Blue Cross’ (1910). However, rather than looking for evidence in The

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Club of Queer Trades of Chesterton’s developing spiritual trajectory I intend instead to situate his ‘revolt into respectability’ in terms of his reaction to the queer clubs of the fin de siècle, which, as Matthew Beaumont remarks in his introduction to The Man Who Was Thursday, took on ‘an almost psychotic significance’ in the wake of Chesterton’s psychological crisis on the cusp of adulthood.15 Chesterton published The Club of Queer Trades at the age of 31, a decade after Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency and nearly 5 years after his death. Notwithstanding the passage of time and the decline of the Aesthetic movement, Wilde continued to haunt Chesterton long after his name had become publicly unmentionable. William Oddie points to the coincidence of Chesterton’s formative years with those of Wilde’s greatest fame and subsequent disgrace in 1895, the year Chesterton reached the age of 21. One reason for Chesterton’s ongoing preoccupation with ‘the Green Carnation’ may be that, as Oddie puts it, the fin de siècle was ‘the furnace that forged him’.16 Decadence had not, however, formed the backdrop to his early formative years at St Paul’s school, where he enjoyed close friendships with a circle of male friends, foremost among whom was Edmund Clerihew Bentley, himself a detective novelist and humourist in later life. The eternal conflict in Chesterton’s writings between the queer clubs of Decadent London and the queer trades of his eccentric heroes maps adventure romance and Decadence onto these two phases of his youth with their distinct cultures and ethos. The pivotal moment when this nexus of genre, philosophy and homosociality was fixed seems to have come with the onset of early adulthood, during the period from 1892–5, when Chesterton was a student at Slade School of Fine Art, at that time part of University College London. During this period Chesterton had a deeply troubling encounter with philosophical pessimism and artistic bohemianism, which he alludes to in the autobiographical sketch, ‘The Diabolist’.17 According to Chesterton, his experience as an art student at Slade produced in him an ‘overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging in deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.’18 He censors the content of these thoughts. But it is clear enough that Chesterton’s encounter with bohemia aroused powerful feelings that conflicted with his moral sensibilities, opening up a hinterland of perverse desire within him that brought him to the point of psychological breakdown.

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This crisis marked Chesterton for the rest of his life, shaping not only his attitude towards political and religious doctrines but also his adoption of Stevenson, Dickens, toy theatre and sensational fiction as the stars of his literary firmament. But the source of Chesterton’s thematic treatment of queer clubs may also been seen in the context of less immediately personal experiences. Demonic representations of urban masculinity and sinister clubs had already been given shape and substance in late-Victorian popular culture.19 Campaigning by The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts had highlighted male hypocrisy surrounding sexual conduct throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This conception of a pathologized male sexuality was amplified in late-Victorian sensationalist journalism, from the paedophile ‘minotaurs’ of ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ and the murderous sadism of Jack the Ripper, to the revelations of homosexual transactions across class boundaries in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 and the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.20 As Judith R. Walkowitz points out, it was London above all that provided the ‘fitting imaginative landscape for sensational narratives of sexual danger’.21 A strand of urban Gothic and adventure romance rose to prominence alongside the newspaper reports of crimes and scandals. The fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, often contains at its heart a preoccupation with the secret world of men’s transgressive pleasures and the geography of a shadow metropolis of clubs and coteries that tinted respectable masculinity with shades of submerged, pathological queerness. Running through much of this was a strand of proscribed sexuality. But what seems to have been more generally unsettling was the broader cultural erosion of confidence in the transparency of masculinity, which had been manifest in the qualities of plain speaking and contempt for affectation that typified the dominant muscular Christianity of the mid-nineteenth century. But in the 1880s and 1890s salient images of Gothic and comic masculinity alike emphasized instead the opacity of personality, from the concealment of the monstrous appetites of Edward Hyde behind the genial persona of Henry Jekyll to the social deceptions of Bunburying – without which, Algernon tells Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘A man who marries . . . has a very tedious time of it’.22 Stevenson’s gothic tale registered the pull of desire underlying Jekyll’s attempt to circumvent moral scrutiny of his ‘furtive and embarrassed vices’.23 For Chesterton, however, the didactic point ‘is not that

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a man can cut himself off from his conscience, but that he cannot’ (22). In contrast, Chesterton’s perception of Wilde was that he actively embraced the opacity of personality through a celebration of artifice, and thus abrogated the connection between morality and personality – the nihilistic apogee of Decadence that was symbolized above all by Wilde’s signifier of an empty enigma: the Green Carnation.

The Green Carnation In his prefatory poem to The Man Who Was Thursday Chesterton mulls over the ‘sick cloud’ on the minds and souls of men when he and Bentley ‘were boys together’ and the likes of Wilde ‘twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named’ (xxxix). The poem indicates that Chesterton and Bentley withstood these ‘crippled vices’, aided by literary and moral inspiration from Whitman, Stevenson and Bunyan, until ‘the Green Carnation withered’ and the threat it posed had passed. One might wonder precisely what the threat was that Chesterton and Bentley ‘held the fort’ against together, and which was ultimately resolved by the discovery of ‘common things at last, and marriage and a creed’ (xl). The possibility of reading a homoerotic aspect to this transition from boyhood friendship, with its ‘doubts that drove us through the night’ (xl), is clearly available, though it would represent a simplistic reduction of the complex interplay of moral, aesthetic, religious and, indeed, sexual feelings that are at stake in Chesterton’s handling of queerness – a term which, in any case, has more to do with the unsettling of certitudes than it does with any particular configuration of sexuality. Even so, the possibility remains suggestive. In his Autobiography Chesterton, perhaps a little defensively, plays down any suggestion that his own flirtation with the Green Carnation comprised a homoerotic element: I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination.24

This circumvention (and circumlocution) of homosexuality is consistent with what G. K. Clipper describes as Chesterton’s general ‘Puritanical hostility to the subject of man’s sexuality’.25 What was it in Chesterton’s conscience from

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which, like Jekyll, he could not cut himself off ? William Oddie acknowledges that ‘Chesterton was horrified by what Wilde stood for’, but insists that this was not simply a manifestation of homophobia: It was the active subversion not simply of sexual morality but of all morality that was seen at the time as one of the decadent movement’s most frightening ambitions . . . The decadents were seen as being not simply unacceptably unconventional, but as embodying a threat to social and even personal moral stability.26

This view is consistent with Chesterton’s disdain for the disconnection of morality from personality that he perceived in Wilde. But Chesterton’s displacement of Wilde’s sexuality into the image of ‘congested imagination’ points beyond this, suggesting the possibility that his own obsessive reworking, ten or more years later, of the crisis of ‘the young half-pessimist of the ‘90s’ was perhaps channelling submerged desires all the time, whose force had been gradually redirected into passionate opposition.27 ‘You know he’s been tempted by these things’, Jonathan Letham insists in the introduction to his edition of The Man Who Was Thursday, ‘you feel it in how adoringly he loathes them’.28 In Letham’s reading, Chesterton’s repressed libidinal energies are directed into the belligerent confrontation with the Green Carnation that is worked out through the conflict between Syme and the red-haired poet Lucian Gregory, in which, Letham suggests, Chesterton’s ‘arguers are lovers, or at least entwined souls’.29 Oddie, on the other hand, is inclined to accept Chesterton’s self-assessment at face value. The antagonism towards the Green Carnation, he insists, was due to Wilde’s prominence ‘as the centre and figurehead of an artistic and literary subculture that was not only pervasively homoerotic but also expressly subversive.’30 There was about Wilde, Oddie insists, ‘something distinctly scary’; a fear arising from Chesterton’s conviction that Wilde ‘really did believe, not only in the irrelevance of morality but in the corruption of virtue’.31 There is in this an obvious effort to play down the political incorrectness of Chesterton’s attitude towards ‘the simple question of Wilde’s personal “sexual preference”’.32 There is perhaps also an unwillingness to confront the possibility of a queerness secreted at the heart of Chestertonian orthodoxy, that ‘overwhelming impulse’ that Chesterton discovered, to his shock, within himself. It is interesting in this light to note that, in the end, Chesterton finds redemption for Wilde after

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his passage through ‘horror’ and subsequent ‘expiation’: ‘as my conscience goes at least, no man should say one word that could weaken the horror – or the pardon.’33 Still more interesting is Chesterton’s approval of Wilde’s occasional ‘coarseness’; it was, Chesterton suggests, ‘proper to the one good thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler – a fighter’ (loc. cit.). Even the Green Carnation, it seems, can be un-queered by that trick of finding a ‘new angle’. Chesterton recasts Wilde, like Stevenson, as a bohemian who ultimately rejects the antinomian standpoint and embraces the juvenile homosociality of swashbuckling romance. It is interesting to note, therefore, that Chesterton’s rare praise for ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ – ‘the one real thing [Wilde] ever wrote’ – is grounded in his perception of the truthfulness of its ‘cry for common justice and brotherhood’ (103). The repentant Wilde, it seems, can be accommodated within the milieu of a Chestertonian fraternity, whose heroes follow this characteristic passage out of the temptations of queer clubs by means of which they are purged of desire.

Queer clubs The clubs of the fin de siècle provided raw material for redemption in no short supply. Barbara J. Black writes of ‘the tense and exhilarating decades of the 1880s and ‘90s’ in which ‘London’s clubland became the arena of urgent and vexing reconstructions of late-Victorian masculinity in crisis.34 The homosocial milieus of Chesterton’s fiction, as exemplified in the anarchist council of The Man Who Was Thursday as well as the Club of Queer Trades itself, reflect a tendency within late-Victorian culture that has been designated by the historian John Tosh as the male ‘flight from domesticity’.35 The signature of this historical development is to be found in the fact that men of marriageable age increasingly chose to remain bachelors and to seek out social fulfilment in predominantly homosocial associations. Men’s clubs thus increasingly provided an alternative, rather than a supplementary, social habitat to the home, providing them with access to networks of power, leisure and, of course, pleasure. As such they symbolized the privileged agency and entitlement of men to inhabit the spaces of the city, an ambivalent passage between the private interiority of the home and the impersonal liberty of the flâneur. This passage also removed scrutiny of men’s inner lives from the nurturing privacy

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of married life to the secrecy associated with homosocial exclusivity – a shift that is perfectly captured in Wilde’s story of Dorian Gray’s portrait. Stevenson exploits such connotations of unsurveyed viciousness too, from the selfdestructive denizens of The Suicide Club to Jekyll’s creation of Edward Hyde as his externalized agent of moral debauchery. The association of clubland with nightlife and secrecy suggested a ‘threshold for adventure’, Black observes, whose ‘generic excesses’ opened the possibilities of ‘excesses of other sorts’, a ‘club imaginary within the urban fantastic that enabled immersions and submersions in desire’.36 Black argues that clubland and masculine romance fiction both tended towards queerness insofar as they ran counter to bourgeois models of respectable and productive masculinity. This can be seen not only in The Suicide Club but also in the Diogenes Club in Conan Doyle’s ‘Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, in which clubland becomes associated with an ethos that is eccentric and anti-social, and a fraternity based upon elective perversity and intrigue, if not outright conspiracy. The alignment of clubland to London’s night-time practices of leisure and secrecy linked it also to those fin de siècle romances in which the opacity of urban masculinity facilitates double lives and unbridled pursuit of desire. In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91), for example, Dorian’s recourse to opium den and brothel parallels his attendance at White’s where he dines with Harry Wotton. It is at one such club dinner that Harry tells him ‘about the search for beauty being the true secret of life’ – a sentiment that sends Dorian ‘in search of some adventure’ in ‘this grey, monstrous London of ours’.37 Departing eastwards from his club, Dorian loses himself ‘in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares’ until he finds himself outside the theatre in which he will become infatuated by Sybil Vane, ‘disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet’ (49, 51). Thus begins his headlong descent into self-degradation and horror. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) also explore the consequences of unbinding men’s desires from their social visibility. But whereas Stevenson and Wells’s tales explore strangely unrepresentable forms of monstrosity, Wilde’s novel situates Dorian’s excesses in the highly ostentatious form of the dandy, whose opacity is a consequence of his cultivation of artifice. For Chesterton, this is the key to the horrifying queerness of the Green Carnation, from which he recoils not only towards the domesticity of ‘marriage and a creed’, but also to

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the literary and homosocial formations of boyhood. His model and exemplar in this regard was to be found in Robert Louis Stevenson. For Chesterton, the story of Stevenson’s reaction against his own youthful bohemianism validated, and was validated by, a regression to the values of boyhood. In his book on The Victorian Age in Literature, Chesterton cites a letter by Stevenson in which he wrote that ‘“Our civilization is a dingy ungentlemanly business: it drops so much out of a man”’, to which Chesterton added that ‘what had been dropped out of the man was the boy’.38 Chesterton’s recoil from Decadence towards the ‘romance of orthodoxy’ was also a regression to boyhood, manifested in his polemical preference for penny dreadfuls and detective stories over the ‘preciosity’ of Art, and for the boyhood friendships of St Paul’s over the bohemianism of Slade. In The Club of Queer Trades and The Man Who Was Thursday Chesterton pursues this same trajectory, turning the queerness of lunatics, criminals and anarchists into a fraternity of boy-men, whose respectability is guaranteed by their attachment both to fantasy and to ‘common things’. Stevenson provided Chesterton with a template for his own experience; or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Chesterton reproduced the pattern of his own experience in the biography he wrote of Stevenson, published in 1927 – some 32 years after his own ‘revolt into respectability’. Chesterton discusses Stevenson’s transition from bohemian student to author of the New Arabian Nights in terms of ‘the shock of Stevenson going sane’.39 He thus once again returns to the familiar topos of the queer club – ‘that cheerful lunatic asylum’ – and the romantic heroism of ‘the way in which [Stevenson] did actually react against the surroundings’ and ‘refused to run with the crowd’ (loc. cit.). Crucially, Chesterton’s account of this episode places emphasis not only on Stevenson’s turn away from ‘romantic ruffianism’ but also upon his compensatory embrace of the same imaginative resources that Chesterton chose in preference to the art of Decadence: a landscape of fantasy and romance, and characters derived from cardboard cut-out Theatre (loc. cit.). Chesterton dramatizes this as an experience of epiphany, pushing his own identification with Stevenson to the point of ventriloquism as he addresses a speech to the ‘semi-suicides drooping round him at the café tables; drinking absinthe and discussing atheism’: A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured was an art more worthy of living men than the art you are all professing. Painting pasteboard figures of pirates

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and admirals was better worth doing than all this; it was fun; it was fighting; it was life and a lark; and if I can’t do anything else, dang me but I will try to do that again! (29)

Stevenson’s first published story, ‘A Lodging for the Night’ (1877), is a fictionalized reworking of his biographical essay ‘François Villon: Student, Poet, and Housebreaker’, published two months earlier.40 In the story, Stevenson depicts with disdain the amorality of Villon – the medieval forerunner of nineteenth-century bohemianism – who, at the end of the tale, having been denounced by a noble old knight as ‘a black-hearted rogue and vagabond’, merely yawns and ‘wonders what his goblets may be worth’.41 In 1878 Stevenson published the stories gathered together under the title of The Suicide Club, which begin with Prince Florizel of Bohemia pursuing a ‘taste for ways of life more adventurous and eccentric than that to which he was destined by his birth.’42 Unlike Villon, however, Florizel eventually repents when he is plunged into the nightmarish underworld of the Suicide Club, a secret society in which men carouse the night away before drawing lots to see which of them shall be tasked with murdering one of the others. The Suicide Club functions, in effect, as the urtext for Chesterton’s image of the queer clubs of Decadence, synthesizing despair and hedonism into a totalizing moral nihilism. On the occasion of being rescued from his own murder, Florizel overturns his own hedonistic sensibilities to become both the detective and the avenging hero of romance in his pursuit of the President of the Suicide Club to a duel to the death. The other major precursor to Chesterton’s queer clubs is Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, in which is featured the Diogenes Club, founded by Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft, and described as ‘the queerest club in London’.43 The defining principle is that ‘No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one’, thus pursuing solipsism through a social institution (294). The Diogenes Club is eccentric, to say the least, and perhaps in its deviation from bourgeois gender norms of masculine directness it is actually rather queer, like the Green Carnation, precisely because of its foregrounded opacity. At the same time this opacity paradoxically demystifies clubland because it crystallizes the function of all gentlemen’s clubs as conduits of power and desire that are sustained quite independently of the professional and leisure interests that ostensibly define their place within the homosocial

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continuum. Clubs in general thus begin to look sinister, not because they can be ascribed a transgressive content, but because they lie beyond the scope of scrutiny. When the Holmes brothers sit together in the bow-window of the Diogenes club, Mycroft exclaims that ‘“To anyone who wishes to study mankind this is the spot”’ (295). It shows a profound and ironic insight into the culture of late-Victorian clubland that both he and Sherlock seek to demonstrate this point by turning their penetrating gaze away from the milieu they themselves inhabit and instead direct it outwards onto the metropolis.

Queer trades In The Club of Queer Trades Basil Grant is the brother of the detective Rupert, and thus the counterpart to Mycroft Holmes. He is also the President of the Club of Queer Trades and thus, in another sense, corresponds to the President of the Suicide Club. But he is also something else – a ‘mad’ judge, a dispenser of justice, a purveyor of truths that are not reducible to facts: ‘Facts’, murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off animals, ‘how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly – in fact, I’m off my head – but I never could believe in that man – what’s his name, in those capital stories?’ – Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. It’s only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up – only the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars. (22)

Basil Grant’s insight derives from the same source as his madness, a luminous gaze that differs from that of Holmes by ignoring the myriad details of ‘facts’, discovering instead the living truth by a kind of deranged inspiration. It is, indeed, a very queer trade. The eponymous Club is described in the opening chapter as ‘eccentric and Bohemian’, signalling a debt both to Stevenson’s Prince Florizel and to the Diogenes club in the bizarre principle upon which it is founded (7). For, membership of the Club is granted on condition that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition is given in the two

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principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade . . . Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. (7–8)

These conditions of membership become the point of departure for Chesterton’s reworking of detective fiction, fin de siècle clubland and bohemianism all at once. He counters the sequestered elitism of clubland with an eccentric secrecy relating to lower middle-class ‘trades’. He overturns the mystical materialism of Sherlock Holmes with an appeal to the truth of ‘immediate impressions’ (39). And he defuses the sinister bohemianism of the President of the Suicide Club with the genial figure of Basil Grant, ‘the maddest in this world of madmen’, who nonetheless is capable of illuminating the opacity of the queer club, rendering it transparent with his elvish realism (153). The first of the stories in The Club of Queer Trades, ‘The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown’, begins with a strange encounter in which a certain Major Brown is accosted by a stranger and encouraged to climb on top of a garden wall to view the ‘Finest show of yellow pansies in England’ (15). Upon doing so, however, the Major discovers evidence of a seemingly malevolent conspiracy; for, ‘the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the sentence: DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN’ (15). Further sinister and inexplicable events ensue: an old man tells him ‘with a face of apoplectic terror’ not to mention jackals; a ‘graceful’ woman ‘with fiery red hair and a flavour of Bedford Park’ speaks to him of ‘hateful title-deeds’, while stating that she must keep her face turned to the street every afternoon until the stroke of six (17). A man thrusts his head through the coal-hole in the pavement, calling out ‘“Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?”’ (18). Upon entering the coal cellar Major Brown is seized by ‘great slimy hands’ and after a tussle with the assailant, emerges from the cellar to find the house abandoned and all the furniture and draperies gone (19, 20). Basil Grant’s brother, Rupert, approaches the mystery through the facts, after the manner of Sherlock Holmes, but it is Basil who perceives the truth from the ‘spiritual atmosphere’ of the case, which he insists is not criminal. In the event, he is proven correct (22). The whole business is explained as a case of mistaken identity involving the ‘queer trade’ of ‘The Adventure and Romance Agency’, which surrounds its subscribers with ‘startling and weird events’ in order to satisfy the ‘great modern desire . . . for a varied life’ (31). The sinister and baffling plot turns

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out to be a role-playing game arranged by request of a different man with a similar name in order to stimulate his fancy. Such diversions, unlike those of the queer clubs of bohemia, were in Chesterton’s eyes part of the romance of everyday life. Like the ‘drivelling literature’ of penny dreadfuls such romances were for him unsophisticated and commonplace but nevertheless filled with ‘the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built’.44 Chesterton insisted that such popular romances ‘have nothing essentially evil about them’, unlike the ‘modern literature of the educated’, but simply convey ‘the foolish and valiant heart of man’, which is ‘always on the side of life’ (14–16). Likewise, Major Brown’s experience of the city as a web of malign intrigue turns out to be a romance whose essential innocence is explained by the proprietor as the restoration of childhood, ‘that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream’ (32). Boyhood romance, Chesterton claimed, was a more authentic form of philosophical revolt than Decadence because it rejected the ephemera of fashionable attitudes in favour of values which seemed to him less transient because they were commonplace, even if they were not strictly virtuous. Thus both detectives and highwaymen could be recuperated for orthodoxy, while bohemia remained heretical. This position is further developed over the second and third stories in The Club of Queer Trades, ‘The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation’ and ‘The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit’, both of which result in the uncovering of a ‘queer trade’ that is based upon social imposture and which at first suggests evidence of some insidious crime or conspiracy. In ‘The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation’, a man earns a living by scripting repartee in which his client, Wimpole, is made to appear witty in society gatherings; a profession which, as Basil Grant admits is a ‘trifle immoral . . . but still great, like piracy’ (54). However, while the ‘Organiser of Repartee’ may be a romantic figure entitled to a place in the Club of Queer Trades, there is contempt for Wimpole’s artifice. Basil Grant describes Wimpole, who possesses a hat with ‘those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase’, as ‘the wickedest man in England’ (38). Wimpole’s dandyism gives Basil cause to designate him ‘a humbug and a villain’ (40), while his reputation as a ‘great modern wit’ turns out to be a fraud. Wimpole unmistakably evokes the figure of Wilde, whose dandyism and renowned wit displaced the ‘direct realistic’ speech esteemed

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by Grant (49) and supplanted it with an exquisite art of conversation, ‘like the statuary of Michael Angelo – an art of masterpieces’ (45). When Basil Grant sabotages Wimpole’s social artifice by effectively kidnapping the Organiser of Repartee, he is enacting symbolic violence upon Wilde, whose own ‘painful fall’ is likewise recalled and who, like Wimpole, ‘“will not be an intellectual rival in the future”’ (55). In ‘The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit’ a man arrives at the narrator’s flat with a convoluted tale of how he, the vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex, was abducted by a gang of violent criminals disguised as, of all things, a charitable society of spinsters. In this case, however, the deception is not that of the alleged transvestite criminals but of the vicar himself, who turns out to be a ‘Professional Detainer’ sent to prevent the narrator attending a dinner engagement so that one of the other guests could spend two hours alone with ‘the romance of his life’ (76). The story forms the counterpart to the unmasking of Wimpole, in which the Decadent dandy is revealed to be a charlatan, while the innocent cleric turns out to be a wily and perspicacious savant of the human heart – a motif that is most fully developed in Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. It is also polemically reiterated in Chesterton’s Autobiography, in which he concluded that ‘the despised curates’ he encountered in his youth ‘were rather more intelligent than anybody else’ and that ‘they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects’.45 In contrast to this, he wrote, the ‘Intelligentsia of the artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs’ of the fin de siècle ‘thought a great deal about thinking’ but ‘did not think’ (156). The final chapter, ‘The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady’, lays out the mystery from which the truth of Basil’s own queer trade emerges. At the outset Rupert, the private detective, is described going about London with a ‘mad logic in his brain, seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident and a special providence in a falling fusee’ (127). In the course of a walk through Brompton, Rupert becomes suspicious of a milkman and, while in pursuit of him, discovers an old woman who is apparently being held prisoner in a basement. Rupert enlists Basil’s assistance and they talk their way into the house in order to rescue the captive. However, upon being liberated by Rupert the old woman in the basement refuses to leave. When Basil appears at the cellar door, however, the old woman bows reverently before him and, when he tells her that she may leave, gratefully departs. It transpires that, after quitting the bench, Basil

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had set up his own ‘queer trade’ as the presiding judge over ‘unofficial courts of honour’, judging the moral condition of others at their own request and imposing appropriate penances (155). The woman in the basement had been ‘the means of breaking off an engagement through backbiting’ and so Basil had judged and condemned her to solitary confinement (155–6). His ‘queer trade’ is that of a detective of the human heart. Basil’s role in the whole cycle of stories, including his identity as the President of the Club of Queer Trades, is disclosed in a coda to the final story, which is the destination towards which all of the preceding tales have been leading in terms of the reinscription of the concept of queerness from the opaque masculinities of clubland to Basil’s elvish illumination of the profane heart of the metropolis. Basil is described in the first story as ‘a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic’, having retired from his position as ‘one of the most acute and forcible of the English judges’ after he ‘suddenly went mad on the bench’ (9–10). In the coda, Grant explains this apparent bout of insanity as an epiphany of insight: Daily there passed before me taut and passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. (154)

The queerness of Basil’s trade is signified by his withdrawal from the wider world to the confines of his garret in Lambeth, but its real significance lies in his capacity to see through the chaos of the city to some astonishing truth at the heart of its everyday appearance. At the outset of ‘The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation’, the most direct evocation of the Green Carnation in the whole collection, the narrator and Basil Grant find themselves gazing across North London from ‘the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar’: [W]e felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice . . . But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilisation, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony . . . there was one thing we knew we should not see – anything really great, central, of the first class, anything that humanity

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had adored. And with revulsion indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt. (36–7)

This looks in one sense like an assertion that religious authority trumps the facts of the material conditions of life. But the thing that rescues such a vision for a secular critical perspective is the limit that Chesterton himself imposes on it, locating his polemic not in theological abstractions but in the culture of the city. As he writes in ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, ‘A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones.’46 Chesterton’s intimations of the sublime arise not from nature but from the architecture of London. The image of the cross of St Paul’s glimpsed down a row of slums combines divine admonition with an affirmation of the earthy verities of urban life, while evoking Chesterton’s own boyhood experience at St Paul’s school prior to his encounter with the Green Carnation. Likewise, he did not merely reject this emblem of Wildean artifice as abstractly ‘evil’. On the contrary, he insisted on interpreting its opacity as a symbol of something. If that ‘something’ was an absence, a ‘sphinx without a secret’, Chesterton recognized that it was nonetheless a determinate negation, one that was still purposive, provocative, powerful and, for him, terrifying because it awoke the ‘overwhelming impulse’ that drove him to the brink of madness.47 His application of elvish realism – recuperating a ‘swashbuckling’ truth from Wilde’s queerness, for example – demonstrates once again the vital importance Chesterton’s mystical vision laid upon the contest between the two fin de siècle cultures of Decadence and romance. The limitations of this approach lay in his need for truth, however eccentric, always to be orthodox, which is to say reassuring, familiar – and assuredly not queer. The city as it is rendered in The Club of Queer Trades is, precisely, a chaos of conscious forces and ‘moor eeffocish’ riddles, whose solution is identified by Basil Grant’s elvish gaze. Chesterton reinvented his mystical detective a few years later in the figure of Father Brown, in whom this same quality is firmly annexed to the theological orthodoxy that increasingly dominated Chesterton’s thinking. The interest of The Club of Queer Trades is due in part, therefore, to

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the absence of an explicitly religious hero or purely theological allegory. In the figure of Father Brown, the detective’s humane judgement is predicated upon his ability to see through the ‘chaos of conscious forces’ to the heart of spiritual truth. However, The Club of Queer Trades indicates the lever by which this hegemony of the divine over the profane landscape the city might itself be overturned. Chesterton’s romance of orthodoxy invites the reader to a boyish identification with the queer trades of the philosopher-policeman and priest-detective. But readers may demur, preferring instead to situate these narratives in relation to the homosocial culture of the metropolis they seek to enchant, and to detect the origin of Chesterton’s eccentric projections in his own disavowal of queerness.

Notes 1 G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902). Available at: http://archive.org/details/defendant00chesgoog. pp. 119–20. 2 Ibid., p. 120. 3 Ibid., p. 121. 4 On the disenchantment of detective fiction see F. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 155. 5 D. M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 62. 6 Matthew Beaumont, suggests ‘irrealist’ to describe Chesterton’s ‘modernist romance’: ‘Introduction’ to G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. xvii, xxviii. 7 Chesterton, The Defendant, p. 21. 8 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, ed. M. Beaumont (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 107–8. All subsequent references, unless otherwise stated, are to this edition and appear in the text. 9 Chesterton, The Defendant, p. 121. 10 J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia (London: HarperCollins UK, 2001), p. 58. 11 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Burns & Oates, 1975), pp. 32, 34. 12 G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (New York: Penguin, 1946), p. 10. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text. 13 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1963), pp. 123–39. 14 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Two Great Tories’. Daily News. 1 August 1903. Available at: www. cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Man_1903; 1905, p. 131.

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15 G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: House of Stratus, 2000), p. 28; M. Beaumont, p. xix. 16 W. Oddie, ‘Chesterton at the Fin de Siècle: Orthodoxy and the Perception of Evil’. Chesterton Review (1999), 25(3), 329–43 (330). 17 Oddie, ‘Chesterton at the Fin de Siècle’, 340–2. 18 G. K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, R. Paine (ed.) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 98. 19 See A. Smith, Victorian Demons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 67–94 and S. Joyce, ‘Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties’. ELH (2002), 69(2), 501–23 (501–3). 20 R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 266, 409 ff. 21 J. R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (London: Virago, 1992), p. 10. 22 O. Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1988), p. 327. 23 Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 21. 24 Chesterton, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, p. 98. 25 L. J. Clipper, G. K. Chesterton (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), p. 39. 26 Oddie, ‘Chesterton at the Fin de Siècle’, 337, 338. 27 Chesterton, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, p. 105. 28 J. Lethem, ‘Introduction’, in The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (New York: Random House, 2001), p. xiv. 29 Ibid. 30 Oddie, ‘Chesterton at the Fin de Siècle’, p. 334. 31 Ibid., p. 338. 32 Ibid., p. 334. 33 G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 102. 34 B. J. Black, ‘The Pleasure of Your Company in Late Victorian Clubland’. Nineteenth Century Contexts (2010), 32(4), 281–304 (282). 35 J. Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 170–94. 36 Black, ‘The Pleasure of Your Company in Late Victorian Clubland’, 282. 37 Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 49. 38 Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 110. 39 Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 28. 40 R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Everleigh Nash & Grayson Limited, 1877/1926), pp. 173–212. 41 R. L. Stevenson, The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales, B. Menikoff (ed.) (New York: Modern Library, 1877/2002), pp. 203, 204.

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42 Stevenson, The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 3. 43 A. C. Doyle, The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books 1976), p. 293. 44 Chesterton, The Defendant, pp. 14, 17. 45 Chesterton, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, pp. 157–8. 46 Chesterton, The Defendant, p. 120. 47 Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, pp. 215–18.

Bibliography Black, B. J., ‘The Pleasure of Your Company in Late Victorian Clubland’. Nineteenth Century Contexts (2010), 32(4), 281–304. Chesterton, G. K., The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902). Available at: http://archive.org/details/defendant00chesgoog. —, ‘Two Great Tories’, Daily News. 1 August 1903. Available at: www.cse.dmu. ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Man_Orthodox.html#tories [Accessed 20 October 2012]. —, Heretics (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1905). —, The Club of Queer Trades (New York: Penguin, 1946). —, Orthodoxy (London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1963). —, The Victorian Age in Literature (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966). —, Charles Dickens (London: Burns & Oates, 1975). —, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: House of Stratus, 2000). —, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. R. Paine (ed.) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). —, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. M. Beaumont (ed.) (London: Penguin, 2011). Clipper, L. J., G. K. Chesterton (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974). Doyle, A. C., The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1976). Ellmann, R., Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987). Halperin, D. M., Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Joyce, S., ‘Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties’. ELH (2002), 69(2), 501–23. Lethem, J., Introduction in The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (New York: Random House, Inc, 2001).

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Moretti, F., Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London and New York: Verso, 2005). Oddie, W., ‘Chesterton at the Fin de Siècle: Orthodoxy and the Perception of Evil’. Chesterton Review (1999), 25(3), 329–43. Smith, A., Victorian Demons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Stevenson, R. L., Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Everleigh Nash & Grayson Limited, 1926). —, The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales. B. Menikoff (ed.) (New York: Modern Library, 2002). Tolkien, J. R. R., Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia (London: HarperCollins UK, 2001). Tosh, J., A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999). Walkowitz, J. R., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (London: Virago, 1992). Wilde, O., Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1988).

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7

Chesterton and the Romance of Burglary Matthew Ingleby

When we shut out anything, we are shut out of that thing. When we shut out the street, we are shut out of the street. Few of us understand the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only – the street-walker or the streetArab, the nomads who, generation after generation, have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know even less. The street at night is a great house locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man had, the key to the street; his stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in the street. He could open the inmost door of his house – the door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed with stars.1 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens This paean to Dickens the democrat, the disciple of the man in the street, entertains a collapse of public into private, so that the way outwards to the urban scene becomes invested with a sense of the fantasies usually reserved in our cultural imagination for the locked door leading inwards. Creatively interpreting the earlier novelist, Chesterton suggests that Dickens rejects the conventional novelistic fetishization of the home’s self-sufficiency and impermeableness to the street, perceiving that the fetish functions not as a protection for but a stricture upon and delimitation of the domiciled self. Locking oneself in – and others out – forecloses potential relationships that might otherwise have developed between the self and the stranger, the home and the street, the soul and the universe. Chesterton finds in Dickens a desire to turn the street inside out, imaginatively recasting his literary hero as a

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carnivalesque figure with a skeleton key able to find his way out of any locked space in order to invade the ‘great house locked up’ – the city and the sky – which lies just beyond the door-step of domesticity. In so reading Dickens, Chesterton imagines a kind of cosmic burglary. Burglary also appears explicitly in the earlier writer’s fiction. One of Dickens’s most enduringly popular novels and a huge favourite of Chesterton’s, The Pickwick Papers (1836) plays with the burglary motif for comic purposes.2 In one episode, the innocent Pickwick is tricked by the villainous Jingle into seeming to perform the role of burglar, without even realizing that he is doing so. Having been helped roughly over the wall of a female boarding school by Sam Weller in order to deliver a message – crushing ‘three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-tree’ in the process – he is discovered by a party of women in hair curlers who, not unreasonably, accuse him of attempting some sort of terrible crime. Pickwick’s reply initially prolongs the comedy of misapprehension, provoking the response ‘ferocious monster’ when he unintentionally invokes the possibility of a sexual motivation: ‘I am no robber. I want the lady of the house.’3 As Holly Furneaux has underlined, Pickwick is an inveterate marriage-avoider, and that he could be mistaken for a greedy sexual predator, falling over a wall and knocking over plants in pursuit of sex, could hardly be further from the truth.4 The accidental innuendo makes a joke, but it also points us to the way in which the signifier of the intrepid housebreaker might be more unstable and ambivalent than we customarily think. It is in some ways appropriate that Pickwick unconsciously provokes sexual anxiety in the female inmates of the school he appears to burgle, for his burglary is indeed an act of attempted communication rather than simple acquisition, aspiring to the condition of romance proper and not merely ‘detective romance’, when the happy ending is only the solution of the crime and the punishment of its perpetrator. Remembering the ascendant Romeo at Juliet’s window, there are many reasons one might wish to enter a house unconventionally. Burglary, Pickwick’s example suggests, has something potentially romantic about it.5 While in his most influential piece of literary criticism he celebrates Dickens’s romantically burglarious attitude to street-life, in his own fiction Chesterton pursues further a deconstruction of the city/home dichotomy. Like and yet unlike the spaces of sensation novels, which are structured around the fact that outward respectability conceals an inward vice, the suburban

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houses of Chesterton’s fiction, when opened up, often elicit a potential virtue that has hitherto remained hidden. His narratives, moreover, often show the physical house to be itself less concrete and secure than it seems, by demonstrating and even celebrating its permeability. His tales often break into the apparently locked-up spaces of suburban domesticity, finding in walls, windows, chimneys, alternative entrances to the front door, to suggest that the home might be more than the bourgeois house, as it is conventionally ordered. In ‘The Mirror of the Magistrate’ (1927), for instance, Father Brown guesses correctly that a man caught at a murder scene is innocent precisely ‘Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion . . . All the best people seem to get over garden walls nowadays.’6 In ‘The Singular Speculation of the House Agent’ (1905), the assorted members of the club of queer trades climb a tree in order unexpectedly to enter an ‘arboreal villa’ whose address is ‘The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley’, a delightful literalist subversion of the suburban tendency to use house-names to signify a more symbiotic relation with nature than reality bears out: ‘If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written “The Elms” over it, you wouldn’t have thought there was anything fantastic about that.’7 Chesterton seems to have been interested in the idea of entering suburban houses vertically. As he says in Heretics (1905), ‘The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.’8 Being able to walk around the outside of a house, moreover, seems to have also struck his fancy, as it does here in ‘The Point of a Pin’ (1935): ‘I rather wish all houses would stop while they still have the scaffolding up. It seems almost a pity that houses are ever finished. They look so fresh and hopeful with all that fairy filigree of white wood, all light and bright in the sun; and a man so often finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.’9 The complete and securely impermeable suburban house is here cast as the house of the dead. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), when one character ‘swings himself up and over the fence’ he says he might ‘manage to be a sort of fourthrate burglar’.10 Behind both Chesterton’s critical reading of the relation of street and home in Dickens and his repeated focus on heterodox means of domestic

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ingress in his own fiction is an overt nod to the idea of burglary. As we shall explore, Chesterton displayed a persistent interest in the burglar throughout his career. Sometimes the theme of burglary serves as the precondition of a story that is really about something else. Thus in Four Faultless Felons (1930) a man breaks into his brother’s house only to expose the rotten moral foundations of his supposedly respectable company, Nadoway and Son’s, exclaiming that ‘“the name of Nadoway stinks to the ends of the earth! Because the business was founded on every sort of swindling and sweating and grinding the faces of the poor and cheating the widow and orphan. And above all, on robbery – on robbing rivals and partners and everybody else, exactly as I have robbed that safe!”’11 Burglary here appears to be just one part of a whole nexus of unjust and exploitative exchanges. Acquisitive crime in an acquisitive economy can be seen as a form of redistribution, we infer. At one point in The Club of Queer Trades the narrator tells us that someone enunciates the word ‘house-agent’ as if it was ‘burglar’.12 The connection entertained in both these cases between business-man and criminal is not an entirely casual one, though neither does the narrator endorse it clearly, it must be noted. Elsewhere, Chesterton subverts the more conservative conflation of communist and burglar. In an article titled ‘How Not To Do It’, which appeared in G. K.’s Weekly on 16 May 1935, Chesterton warns against mistaking political thinkers for common thieves: ‘The Capitalist says to the Communist, “You shall not enter my house, for I know you would burn it down. . .”.’ This kind of rudeness is wrong Chesterton argues, for the author ‘does not like talking like that to Bolshevist; because [he] should not like talking like that to a burglar.’13 Chesterton’s interest in burglary, as we shall see, is thoroughly tied up with his broader social and political concerns about property in a modern capitalist economy, and when he mentions the crime, he also implicitly engages with its social causes and ramifications. As Matthew Taunton’s chapter in this volume elucidates, Chesterton’s thinking about property, wealth inequality and distribution, was highly conflicted, and thus it should not come as a surprise that his engagement with the cultural politics of burglary is ambivalent.14 Without outright excusing the burglars in his fiction, his work continually pressurizes the connection between unequal wealth distribution and acquisitive crime. In ‘The Man with Two Beards’ (1927), the ‘heroic rascality’ of Michael Moonshine, a convicted

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burglar who has settled in the London suburb of the story, is compared by the narrator to that of Rob Roy and Robin Hood. As in the earlier story, ‘The Salad of Colonel Cray’ (1914), in which a murderer fakes the theft of silverware receptacles of emetics in order to prevent his poison victim recovering, burglary is used as a cover for murder, and is in the process rhetorically rendered relatively harmless.15 Whereas Moonshine is called a saint by Father Brown, his murderer John Bankes is a ‘brutal sort of business man’, who ‘seemed always to be in the act of selling one car and buying another; and by some process, hard for the economic theorist to follow, it was always possible to buy a much better article by selling the one that was damaged or discredited’ – less honest work, the narrative implies, than burglary.16 When in ‘The Flying Stars’ (1911), Mr Crook, a radical journalist, tells us placidly that he was ‘meant to be a burglar’, his placidity puts a distancing spin upon his elaboration of the statement: ‘and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it anyhow . . . Well . . . if you’re born on the wrong side of the wall, I can’t see that it’s wrong to climb over it.’17 Nevertheless the image of climbing over the wall has a Chestertonian air to it, being an action we intuit the physically corpulent but intellectually light-footed author approves, and so its sentiment cannot be dismissed entirely. Crook’s alternative vocation never comes to fruition, but the next year, in Manalive (1912), the author would test out more fully the idea of redistributive burglary as a career option, concentrating on the sociological, moral and theological aspects of the crime, but via a comic mode which verges on the surreal. Chesterton’s attention to the social aspects of burglary was shared by many of his contemporaries, and his burglary narratives contribute to a historically specific moment of cultural anxiety about this urban and suburban crime. Chesterton’s burglars need to be read as responses both to sensational crime panics fuelled by the popular press and to recent fictional representations of burglars, by writers such as Hornung, Cather, Nesbit and Barrie, portrayals that extend sympathy or admiration to the agent of acquisitive crime. In the context of unprecedented public awareness of social inequality and the ascendancy of the concept of redistribution within the political imaginary as a morally just solution to society’s wrongs, the figure of the burglar becomes overlaid with feelings of liberal guilt as much as conservative fear. As the next

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part of this chapter will explore, the burglar in fiction of this period is a cipher for worries simultaneously about bourgeois suburban security and social inequality. In a number of depictions from the late 1890s to the 1910s, the burglar is recognized not only as an explicit victim of society but, implicitly, also as an agent of just redistribution, a role whose validity Chesterton tests in Manalive.

Suburban burglary and redistributionism: 1890–1910 The burglary Chesterton writes about in Manalive and elsewhere is a product of a particular variety of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metropolitan existence: London suburbia. The early 1900s was a high point in the history of London’s urban sprawl, when, before the Green-belt regulations, the city’s borders seemed capable of endless revision outwards. Throughout his life Chesterton would have been used to seeing unfinished houses with scaffolding still around in speculative developments built into the Middlesex or Surrey countryside. While its burglary episode occurs in Islington near Hoxton, Manalive is set in Swiss Cottage, another part of North London whose name, as the author notes, is decidedly more rural-sounding than the place’s actuality. Chesterton’s attention to the onomastic juxtaposition of the ideal and the real in this place name is of a piece with the other ways in which this novel defamiliarizes circumstances of suburban living that initially appear merely mundane, another of which is the relative susceptibility of houses to burglary. Of the many careers to profit from urban sprawl, professional burglary featured heavily in the newspapers in this period, and was the cause of much anxiety. A number of articles in the periodical press suggested that there was something of a spike in burglary in the Edwardian era, and connected this tendency in one way or other to the newly enlarged form of modern London. Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard in the 1880s and 1890s – famous for his mistakes in the Jack the Ripper investigation – called the policeability of the expanded city into question in an article titled ‘The Crusade against Professional Criminals’: Now an increase by nearly 50 per cent. of burglaries in a single year is serious enough to call for action. But what action shall be taken? ‘Increase the Police Force’, it will be said. But every 1,000 constable added to the Force means an

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addition of 100,000l. a year to the rates. And 1,000 more constables would not be of much account in this huge ‘province of brick’, in which upwards of 600 miles of new houses have been built since I became officially connected with Scotland Yard . . .18

There was a security lag in the Modern Babylon, between the construction of new suburban streets and the provision of either adequate lighting or bobbies on the beat, a lag which only played into the burglar’s dextrous hands: ‘There are nothing like enough police in the London streets to ensure the safety of the public. Of the 10,000 Metropolitan and City police, only about 4,380 are on duty at one time. And, according to the National Burglary Insurance Company, there are 70,000 thieves known to the police.’19 Other features of modern London suburban living were recognized as contributing to the problem. An article called ‘The Burglar: Are Those of his Craft Increasing?’ (1904), which appeared in the London Journal, worried about how easy it was for professionals to discover when suburban families were on holiday through the mountain of ‘circulars and scraps of paper’ that accumulated around unswept forecourts: Nothing is more easy than to remove the most valuable portion of the household furniture, and then to dispose of it as if seized for rent or under a bill of sale. If the neighbours observe, it would hardly occur to them to suspect robbery, the affair is done so openly.20

The wasteful circulation of advertising bumpf would provide clues for the enterprising burglar to ply his own nefarious trade. Moreover, as Chesterton points out in ‘The Man with Two Beards’, a professional burglar might retire from crime and settle in a suburb himself without any inquiry from his neighbours. Counter to the cliché of twitching curtains and Neighbourhood Watch, suburbanites are unlikely to observe their local vicinity acutely, being overwhelmingly engrossed instead in what the newspapers say of the goings on of a more exotic elsewhere: . . . the curious culture of the modern suburb will believe anything it is told in the papers . . . and in the excitement of these topics, never knows what is happening next door.21

In the absence of the kind of mutual interdependence supposedly fostered by the more densely populated urban housing models of the past, a new financial

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product aimed at atomized suburbanites, burglary insurance served as a compensatory if abstracted form of social security. As Eloise Moss has shown, this new product marketed its panacea to the proprietorial anxieties of the bourgeoisie precisely through stirring these same anxieties. Advertising for new insurance deals preyed on suburban insecurities about the permeability of their houses, trading in the professional ease with which the omnipresent burglar could break into and plunder them, and thus contributing to a moment of cultural fascination with the figure.22 In addition to the interested party of the insurance broker, fiction writers also raised the profile of the suburban burglar, though their interest in the phenomenon has often a more ambivalent character. As Richard Marsh’s occult thriller The Beetle (1897) insists, a suburban house in an unfinished part of Hammersmith might play host to all kinds of foreign devilry without the neighbours making a fuss about it.23 The novel begins with a burglary. Opening with the narrative voice of Robert Holt, we witness an unemployed homeless man climb in through an open window on a cold wet night, only to become ensnared by the horrifying mesmeric powers of a gigantic supernatural insect, which we discover has been living there all along. Nobody notices the event, and the beetle recruits the unfortunate to be a burglar on its behalf, to break into the house of the radical MP Paul Lessingham. Holt does this inexpertly, by clambering onto the window-ledge next to the front door, and smashing a pane of glass with a stone: ‘Certainly no professional burglar, nor indeed, any creature in his senses, would have ventured to emulate my surprising rashness.’24 While newspapers and periodicals concerned themselves about the increasing professionalization of ‘cracksmen’, and wondered whether the police force would be up to the job of countering them, a number of literary representations of the burglar from the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian period complicate the reader’s normatively antipathetic relationship with the criminal. Marsh’s novel, for example, contrasts the plight of the cold, wet, opportunistic house-breaker with the evil designs of the suburban resident beetle. In addition to mounting anxiety about the crime itself, there was a marked anxiety too about the causes of crime, prime of which was relative poverty. Sympathetic portrayals of burglars from this period, which acknowledged the social factors of crime, could be found in diverse sectors of the literary field, and on both sides of the Atlantic. A short story by Willa Cather titled

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‘A Burglar’s Christmas’ (1896), narrated the poignant reunion of two people through the accident of the one desperately reduced by circumstance burgling the house of the other. A play by J. M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows (1908), meanwhile, staged the discovery of an impoverished young scholar burgling a library in order to study the otherwise unread books contained within it. The new genre of children’s fiction participated in the cultural moment too. Edith Nesbit, the socialist campaigner and children’s writer, who, as Julia Stapleton points out, published one of Chesterton’s poem’s, ‘The Secret People’, in her magazine The Neolith, introduced a friendly burglar to the adventurous children of her 1904 novel, The Phoenix and the Carpet, who at one point says, mournfully, ‘“It’s ‘ard to get a ‘onest living anywheres nowadays . . .”’25 Here, the young protagonist is plucking up her courage to say hello to the intruder, on first encountering him. If you had been stood in Jane’s shoes you would no doubt have run away in them, appealing to the police and neighbours with horrid screams. But Jane knew better. She had read a great many nice stories about burglars, as well as some affecting pieces of poetry, and she knew that no burglar will ever hurt a little girl if he meets her when burgling. Indeed, in all the cases Jane had read of, his burglarishness was almost at once forgotten in the interest he felt in the little girl’s artless prattle. So if Jane hesitated for a moment before addressing the burglar, it was only because she could not at once think of any remark sufficiently prattling and artless to make a beginning with.26

This child is extremely well read in ‘burglarishness’ and burglars, and is fully primed in how to react to one, so fully indeed that she is stumped with what to say that could compete with the ‘prattling and artless’ words of the burgled infants she has met with in fiction. Nesbit’s satire has a specific target here, and represents a dig at one of her key rivals in children’s literature: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Editha’s Burglar (1888) had narrated a preposterously soppy encounter between a burglar and a little girl, the latter leading the former to the location of valuables within the child’s London house in exchange for the criminal’s silence so as to not waken her sleeping mother: ‘“. . . if you are going to burgle, would you please burgle as quietly as you can, so that you won’t disturb her?”’27 Nesbit’s intertextual joke about the anxiety caused by Jane’s burglar-literacy clearly has Hodgson Burnett’s sentimentalized form of children’s writing in mind, but is also evidence of the much wide dissemination

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of ‘nice stories about burglars’, as Nesbit puts it, in the cultural imagination at this particular moment in history. The most recognizable figure in this discourse, for both adults and children, was Raffles. Ernest Hornung’s stories about a public-school educated thief first appeared to great success in Cassell’s Magazine in June 1898, before becoming extremely popular as a book series, beginning with Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1898). The Raffles tales established a formula that proved very popular, in print and at the cinema, of the lovable gentleman burglar, who avoids violence, plays a superb game of cricket, and only robs the rich. Here Bunny, Raffles’s old fag at public school, describes the romantic thrill he experiences at the thought of committing to their partnership in crime: The truth is that I was entering into our nefarious undertaking with an involuntary zeal of which I was myself quite unconscious at the time. The romance and the peril of the whole proceeding held me spellbound and entranced. My moral sense and my sense of fear were stricken by a common paralysis. And there I stood, shining my light and holding my phial with a keener interest than I had ever brought to any honest avocation. And there knelt A. J. Raffles, with his black hair tumbled, and the same watchful, quiet, determined half-smile with which I have seen him send down over after over in a county match!28

As Eloise Moss has shown, socially diverse readers (and film-goers) participated in a historically specific ‘culture of pleasure’ surrounding burglary in this period by identifying with the glamorous Raffles despite the disapproval of police commissioners and sensational journalists.29 But in addition to encouraging the vicarious enjoyment of transgressive behaviour, à la carnivalesque, the Raffles stories draw also upon on discourses of inequality and wealth redistribution that position them within more concrete debates in the public sphere. While Marsh, Cather, Barrie and Nesbit all cast the burglar as a social victim, worthy of our sympathy, the Raffles stories, for all their pleasurable capriciousness, also entertain explicitly the more radical idea of the burglar as an agent of social justice. Both in the original text and in some of the subsequent film adaptations, a political redistributionist motivation is mooted. The original Raffles excuses himself thus – ‘Of course it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with’, while his 1917 cinematic equivalent actually identifies himself as a kind of Robin

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Hood figure: ‘I’ve never stolen a farthing for personal gain, Bunny. I’ve robbed the rich and given to the poor, and yet – God knows why – I’m just a thief.’30 When on 20 July 1908, Evelyn Baring, the First Earl of Cromer, connected burglary and redistribution in a debate in the House of Lords about the Old Age Pensions Bill, he was appropriating for the conservative position a cultural trope that was an implicit feature of a number of sympathetic and implicitly liberal burglary narratives: ‘If the Bill becomes law we shall all await next spring with the greatest interest to know, in language which was, I think, used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on what hen-roost his burglarious hand will descend.’31 These years that constituted the lead up to the People’s Budget, which enshrined the Fabian Society’s principle of redistribution in legislation and announced the first fruits of the social democratic consensus, were a time in which both intransigent conservatives and progressive radicals linked burglary to the requisition of wealth by the poor, or their statutory proxies.32 Chesterton’s Manalive is notable among adjacent cultural artefacts from contemporary burglary discourse because it makes explicit what is elsewhere only a vague or rhetorical connection between a particular kind of crime and developments in the political sphere concerning statutory policy on inequality. Taking the Fabianism of burglary as a premise, Chesterton uses his narrative to explore the ethical implications of such an equation.

Manalive and the Fabian Permeator As Lynne Hapgood says, ‘The suburbs get their most flamboyant and their most affectionate treatment in The Napoleon of Notting Hill’,33 but Chesterton’s later Manalive rivals it in setting the suburban normative at a very eccentric tilt. A lesser-known work than Chesterton’s first London-based fantasy, its lack of a readership today must be partly attributed to its racist portrait of the minor character Mr Moses ‘Nosey’ Gould, the virulent anti-Semitism of which Brian Cheyette has highlighted.34 Beyond this, the plot so uncompromisingly prioritizes ideas over verisimilitude that it was found by some (otherwise fairly positive) reviewers more of a ‘grotesque’ parable than a species of realist fiction.35 The novel is divided into two halves, the first of which introduces Innocent Smith, who enters a Swiss Cottage lodging-house’s garden by flying

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over the wall in pursuit of his hat. Innocent then proceeds to create what the novel calls an ‘atmosphere of comic crisis’:36 he climbs up trees, picnics on the roof and match-makes, seemingly unstoppably. The second half of the novel is structured as a kind of trial, with competing pieces of evidence presented as to whether the man is mad, bad or, as his name suggests, innocent of all charges. Episodes in Smith’s past are brought up and discussed, including one which connects burglary and redistributive politics. During the said retrospective, we learn this vignette from Smith’s burglarious past: on one occasion borne witness to, he beckons a socialistically inclined but upper-class curate away from a radical labour meeting in Hoxton, at which the words ‘Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration’ (124) are the order of the day, up to the roofs for a spell of seeing the city through the burglar’s eyes. Unlike the other tales of sympathetic burglars, the connection to redistributive politics could not be more plainly made. As Smith says in his own words: I am a burglar . . . I am a member of the Fabian Society. I take back the wealth stolen by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform fitted to the special occasion – here and there a little. (127)

Chesterton’s burglar, notwithstanding the redistributive imperative he avows, is ironically suited to the very English suburban landscape he infiltrates. Eschewing revolutionary measures, he prefers a kind of everyday ‘give and take’ reformism, which downplays even as it declares its radicalism. On the other hand, this burglar does not vaguely reference a political imperative, like Raffles, but actively identifies with the most prominent and influential intellectual force on the English left in this period.37 ‘I have a way with me. I’m a Permeator’ (126) Smith says mysteriously, as he leads his gentleman divine, Raymond Percy, along an ancient ‘right-ofway’ that turns out to be a garden wall (127), and then up a ladder. ‘Tramping along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as forts’ (132), Percy is introduced to a rooftop heterotopia and exposed to an alternative urban consciousness there, in which differentiation between separate houses disappears.38 What beneath them had been private property becomes transfigured into a new public realm, as yet unchartered, because its value has not been recognized. In ‘reading the writing of the smoke’ that is emitted from

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the ‘forest of chimney-pots’ around him, Percy experiences an epiphany of ecological awareness that triggers a kind of theological revelation: Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our strength that put such a rich refuse in the sky. These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind. Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals could still ascend like angels. (134)

As John Coates puts it: The rooftops [in Manalive] are a place where the dulled perceptions and habitual ways of seeing are challenged. The strange vision of the coloured smoke of London awakens the curate Mr Percy to the unnatural quality of modern civilisation; something as fantastic as an illustration to The Arabian Nights and essentially wrong.39

Descending one of these poetic chimneys into a house, which reminds the curate of Santa Claus, the pair emerge in a book-lined room, furnished with, among other things, a decanter, from which Innocent pours out two measures, and drinks. This act provokes Percy to put into words, albeit ‘incoherently’, his moral qualms about the escapade, which have been pressing themselves upon his conscience since the descent from the roof. ‘All stealing is toy-stealing. That’s why it’s really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be respected because of their worthlessness’ (139). Endeavouring to communicate this newly learnt lesson about the strange worthless value of the material world as object of play to his companion in burglary, the curate begins to articulate an idiosyncratically Chestertonian defence of private property. An important influence on Chesterton’s early thinking, William Morris had in News from Nowhere (1890) imagined a utopian future in which the things of a future un-alienated society could attain a secular kind of grace by virtue of the loving work put into their creation by free artisans.40 In Manalive, however, Chesterton suggests that it is precisely as a consequence of the fallen insufficiency of urban capitalist modernity that the particular things owned by the ‘unhappy children of men’ appear to possess the quality of the toy. Here, the clergyman, on Chesterton’s behalf, wants us to differentiate the toy from

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the commodity, differing with utilitarian political economy by locating the sin of stealing not in the way it subverts the legitimate circulation of goods and capital in a free market but in the callous disturbance of a fragile child by the removal of his playthings. This story, like so many of Chesterton’s, has a ‘false bottom’. Potential conflict between burglar and re-moralized curate disappears when the burglar himself vanishes, categorically speaking. Innocent reveals that the Islington terrace into which they have descended is his own home, so that rather than a daring burglar he is an unconventional host. In luring Reverend Percy on this odd kind of super-urban pilgrimage, Innocent had announced his redistributive aims, but by the end of the story, nothing has changed hands, and yet he appears to have succeeded in turning the clergyman’s attitudes inside out. Chesterton begins by assuming on the part of readers a liberal sympathy for the burglar then moves beyond this to the solidification of an axiom equating burglary with economic redistribution, an axiom that lies behind all the other contemporaneous sympathetic burglary fictions, but which is never quite spelled out. Subsequently, however, the author performs an about turn, and extracts what he perceives to be another equally important, equally stringent virtue, of recognition and care of the vanities and follies of strangers. Having treated the radical trainee priest and the reader to a thrilling role-play adventure, enacting Fabian burglary in its pure form, the story prompts us to reconsider the ethical fallout of excusing one individual crime in the light of a much greater social crime. Is this an ideological fudge? The magical transformation of burglar into host might be seen to muffle our memory of Hoxton, the novel’s site of material conflict, bathing the chapter in a cosy Christmassy nostalgia. Nonetheless, Chesterton’s ethical argument in parable form about how not to do redistribution deserves admiration for its rhetorical ingenuity, at least. In any case, the return to the private domestic realm, when we realize that Innocent is actually no burglar but an unconventional host, does not erase the rooftop epiphany.41 Rather the episode is surely intended to be radically unsettling, transfiguring both the city and the home – Percy calls the whole burglary experience a ‘benediction’ (145). Indeed, there are many hints in the writing at a metaphysical allegory which aims to transcend Chesterton’s intervention into the contemporaneous discourse about burglary and redistribution. (In this almost medieval semantic

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layering, Manalive mirrors much of Chesterton’s fictions set in the modern city, not least The Man Who Was Thursday.42) Through his role as the burglarhost Innocent can be seen to direct an early twentieth-century miracle play on the incarnation.43 As ‘New Heaven, New War’, a poem by Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell, insists, Christ’s Christmas entrance into the material world through his birth is, within Christian theology, a violent incursion into the territory Satan occupies, a burglarious ‘rifling’ through his ‘fold’ to claim back what Sin and Death had taken possession of after the fall of Man: This little babe, so few days old, Is come to rifle Satan’s fold; All hell doth at his presence quake. Though he himself for cold do shake, For in this weak unarmèd wise The gates of hell he will surprise.44

While Manalive intervenes in a topical cultural political discourse upon the burglar in an unequal society, it also seeks finally to distract its readers from the present world of bricks and mortar, in which one man’s gain is another’s loss, and to point them towards a more terminal romance ending: the return of another more perfect Innocent, Christ, at the end of time.45 In ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ (1901), Chesterton had found a cosmic and implicitly theological significance in the pitch between police and burglars, imagining them fighting out a quasi-spiritual battle over the soul of the city. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.46

Here the police are the pioneering agents of idealistic virtue, making redress to the socially wronged, while the burglars are atavistic dullards. In Manalive, Chesterton acknowledges – like Hornung and other literary burglarsympathizers – that there are other senses of ‘social justice’ in play, and

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that inequality is indeed a more serious crime than stealing from the rich. Experimenting with the possibility of making a burglar the agent rather than the enemy of social justice himself, Chesterton participates in the Edwardian romanticization of the suburban burglar, though in such a way that leaves the reader not a little uncertain as to how he should be apprehended. For Chesterton, at home himself most of all in paradox, the ‘conspiracy’ of morality – that is the ‘whole romance of man’ – at once trumps and also includes the romance of burglary.

Notes 1 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2007), p. 24. 2 Chesterton pays homage to the novel in one of his stories thus, having the nomadic Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who appears in The Club of Queer Trades, carry around with him from one set of lodgings to another these basic necessities: ‘Two odd-looking, large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine.’ G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), p. 48. See W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 319–21, for a discussion of the Pickwickian Dickens of Chesterton’s criticism. 3 C. Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 198–203. 4 ‘In . . . The Pickwick Papers . . . Dickens explicitly considers marital resistance as an expression of heteroerotic repugnance, developing this theme variously throughout his career.’ H. Furneaux, Queer Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 80. See pp. 92–101. 5 Ian Ker’s biography connects this crime in question and romantic endeavour when he relates the episode from Chesterton’s life in which he ‘committed [his] first and last crime which was burglary’, when he broke into a closed London railway station to retrieve his future wife Frances’s parasol from its waiting room. I. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), p. 51. 6 G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2006), p. 504. 7 G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), p. 64. 8 G. K. Chesterton, ‘On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family’, originally in Heretics (1905), reprinted in Essays and Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), pp. 168–78 (pp. 174–5).

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9 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 721. 10 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Kelly Bray: Stratus Books Ltd, 2008), p. 15. 11 G. K. Chesterton, Four Faultless Felons (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2007), p. 78. 12 Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades, p. 52. 13 G. K. Chesterton, ‘How Not to Do It’, G. K.’s Weekly. 16 May 1935. [Accessed online 28 March 2013]. www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/how-not-to-do-it.html. 14 See also Julia Stapleton’s contextualisation of Chesterton’s support of domestic land reform within his broader conflicted engagement with political Liberalism in this period, in Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), pp. 79–102. 15 In ‘The Salad of Colonel Cray’, Brown is walking home from Mass in the suburbs when he hears a shot followed by a sneeze – the eponymous military man and intended victim of a murder plot intuits that the burglary of various pieces of silver tableware, including, significantly, a cruet stand with mustard, vinegar and pepper in it, is ‘simply a blind’. Though he is wrong about the specifics, thinking his life is in danger because of an ancient curse that originated in colonial India, Cray is right to suspect something more serious than a burglary in play: his host, Major Puttnam, has planned a meal for the purposes of poisoning him. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 307. 16 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 518. 17 Ibid., p. 66. 18 R. Anderson, ‘The Crusade against Professional Criminals’, Nineteenth-Century and After: A Monthly Review (March 1903), 496–508 (504). 19 ‘The Streets of London’, Review of Reviews (November 1905), 32(191), 52. 20 ‘The Burglar: Are Those of His Craft Increasing?’ London Journal (3 September 1904), 42(1081), p. 209. 21 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 517. 22 E. Moss, ‘Burglary Insurance and the Culture of Fear in Britain c. 1889–1939’, The Historical Journal (2011), 54, 1039–64. 23 For more about this novel’s interest in the permeability of suburban houses, see my article, ‘Building Plots: Metropolitan Fiction, 1848–1897, and the Conception of Urban Sprawl’, in Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (2010), KLIII 2/3 127–41. 24 R. Marsh, The Beetle (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 39–40. 25 E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), p. 173; Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood, p. 105. 26 E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet, p. 155. 27 F. Hodgson Burnett, Editha’s Burglar: A Story for Children (Boston: Jordan, Marsh & Company, 1890), p. 35. I am indebted to Charlotte Mitchell for alerting me to this earlier children’s burglary narrative. 28 E. Hornung, Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 17.

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29 E. Moss, unpublished paper titled ‘“How I Had Liked This Villain! How I Had Admired Him!”: A. J. Raffles and the Burglar as Popular British Hero, 1899–1939.’ Given at the ‘Modern British History Network Conference’, University of St Andrews, 21–23 June 2010. Kindly sent to me by the author. 30 Hornung, Raffles, p. 21; Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman (USA: Hyclass Producing Co., 1917), BFI, online at http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/325746 (visited 6 February 2010). Directed by George Irving, this was a successful full-length film that appeared in 1917, in which the viewer is invited to celebrate the athletic agility of the criminal as he runs rings round his aristocratic victims. 31 Lords Sitting of Monday, 20 July 1908. Hansard. Accessed via ProQuest House of Commons Parliamentary Papers online, 15 November 2012. 32 For more on the People’s Budget and the testy lead up to its being passed, in which Lords and Commons clashed with unprecedented fierceness – leading to reforms of the Lords – see B. K. Murray, The People’s Budget, 1909–1910: Lloyd George and Liberal politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 33 L. Hapgood, Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1925 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 235. 34 B. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 185–9. 35 Review of Manalive in Bookman (May 1912), 42(248), 63. ‘There is no direct holding the mirror up to nature, but you have some of the fundamental truths of life embodied in a grotesque allegory.’ 36 G. K. Chesterton, Manalive (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947), p. 23. Hereafter, page references to this novel will be found within the text. 37 For more on the place of Fabianism within the British political landscape at this time, see A. M. McBriar’s Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 38 See M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics (1986), 16(1), 22–7. 39 J. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984), p. 228. 40 For more on Chesterton’s relation to the utopian socialism of Morris and his literary heirs, including the Fabian Society member, Robert Blatchford, see W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, pp. 95–103. See also A. Vaninskaya, ‘“My Mother, Drunk or Sober”: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-imperialism’, History of European Ideas (2008), 34(4), 535–47. 41 As Ian Boyd says, ‘Although the meeting with Smith does not weaken [Percy’s] revolutionary spirit, it gives it a somewhat different meaning. What the meeting teaches him is a paradoxical respect for property which is based on a kind of contemptuous pity for property owners. The suggestion is that the reform which

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requires the redistribution of property also requires a sense of compassion for those to whom property is everything. Nothing is said about the stability and virtues of the property classes whose absurdity and venality are more or less taken for granted.’ I. Boyd, The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (London: Elek Books Ltd, 1975), p. 58. See R. Caserio, ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism’, in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 63–84, for a discussion of the way this very materially situated London novel’s complex symbolic patterning includes also a self-reflexive commentary on the role and status of literature in the light of the challenge of modernism’s profound scepticism. In the same year of 1912, Chesterton uses the analogy explicitly himself, perceiving in ‘each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built boxes [London houses] the rickety stage erected for the acting of a real miracle play’ – G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 87. R. Southwell, ‘New Heaven, New War’, in William B. Turnbull (ed.), The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1859), pp. 100–2. For a theologically informed discussion of the novel, see M. Knight, Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 63–7. Knight emphasizes Innocent Smith’s practical educative role in opening the eyes of the other characters to the doctrine of Creation. G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904), p. 123.

Bibliography Anderson, R., ‘The Crusade against Professional Criminals’, Nineteenth-Century and After: A Monthly Review (March 1903), 53(313), 496–508. Anonymous, ‘Review of Manalive’, Bookman (May 1912), 42(248), 63. Anonymous, ‘The Burglar: Are Those of His Craft Increasing?’ London Journal (3 September 1904), 42(1081), 209. Anonymous, ‘The Streets of London’, Review of Reviews (November 1905), 32(191), 52. Boyd, I., The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (London: Elek Books Ltd, 1975). Caserio, R., ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God outside Modernism’, in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 63–84. Chesterton, G. K., The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904), p. 123.

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—, A Miscellany of Men (London: Methuen, 1927). —, ‘How Not to Do It’, G. K.’s Weekly (16 May 1935). [Accessed online 28 March 2013]. http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/how-not-to-do-it.html —, Manalive (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947). —, ‘On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family’, originally in Heretics (1905), reprinted in Essays and Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), pp. 168–78. —, The Club of Queer Trades (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), p. 48. —, The Complete Father Brown Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2006). —, Charles Dickens (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2007). —, Four Faultless Felons (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2007). —, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Kelly Bray: Stratus Books Ltd, 2008). Cheyette, B., Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Coates, J., Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984). Dickens, C., The Pickwick Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Foucault, M., ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics (1986), 16(1) 22–7. Furneaux, H., Queer Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Hapgood, L., Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1925 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). Hodgson Burnett, F., Editha’s Burglar: A Story for Children (Boston: Jordan, Marsh & Company, 1890). Hornung, E., Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (London: Penguin, 2003). Ingleby, M., ‘Building Plots: Metropolitan Fiction, 1848–1897, and the Conception of Urban Sprawl’, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (2010), KLIII 2(3), 127–41. Ker, I., G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Knight, M., Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Lords Sitting of Monday, 20th July, 1908. Hansard. [Accessed via ProQuest House of Commons Parliamentary Papers online, 15 November 2012]. Marsh, R., The Beetle (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 39–40. McBriar, A. M., Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Moss, E., ‘Burglary Insurance and the Culture of Fear in Britain c. 1889–1939’, The Historical Journal (2011), 54, 1039–64. Moss, E., Unpublished paper titled ‘“How I had liked this villain! How I had admired him!”: A. J. Raffles and the Burglar as Popular British Hero, 1899–1939.’ Given at the ‘Modern British History Network Conference’, University of St Andrews, 21–23 June 2010.

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Murray, B. K., The People’s Budget, 1909–1910: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Nesbit, E., The Phoenix and the Carpet (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995). Oddie, W., Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman (USA: Hyclass Producing Co., 1917), BFI, online at http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/325746 (visited 6 February 2010). Southwell, R., ‘New Heaven, New War’, in William B. Turnbull (ed.), The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1859), pp. 100–2. Stapleton, J., Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009). Vaninskaya, A., ‘“My Mother, Drunk or Sober”: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Antiimperialism’, History of European Ideas (2008), 34(4), 535–47.

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A Playground for Adults: Urban Recreation in Chesterton’s Detective Fiction Michael Shallcross

In ‘Thomas Carlyle’ (1902), G. K. Chesterton argues that the ‘man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword.’1 Two aspects of Chesterton’s social thought and aesthetic practice particularly exemplify this balancing act between critical disputation and imaginative reconstruction. The first is the imaginative recreation of the modern metropolis that Chesterton undertook from his earliest steps upon the public stage; the second, the imaginative recreation of detective fiction through which he expressed this urban vision. The sword and trowel of Nehemiah were employed in the task of rebuilding Jerusalem, an appropriate context given that Chesterton’s project, like Blake’s before him, was to restore his personal vision of Jerusalem to England. To this end, Chesterton’s detective fiction takes up the trowel to enact an imaginative excavation of the hidden London, while employing satire – which he refers to elsewhere as ‘the sword of the spirit’ – to deconstruct the truth-claims of rivalling approaches to urban reform.2 In view of Chesterton’s famous emphasis upon the analogic possibilities of the pun, it is appropriate that his project of urban and aesthetic recreation should centre upon an exposition of the restorative benefits of recreational play. Chesterton’s detective fiction challenges the rationalist methodology of both the urban reform movement and Holmesian detection, through the

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development of an alternative model of investigation which reconfigures the cityscape as a giant anti-rational playground. Chesterton posits this model as a means of restoring the mental balance of the intellectual through an enforced reengagement with the cultural heritage of the city, an action also intended to safeguard the city’s social and architectural structure from the dangers of unsympathetic redevelopment. In explaining how Chesterton conveys this vision I begin by contrasting his principles of urban detection with those of the reform movement, as exemplified by the work of Charles Booth. I then turn to a detailed analysis of the proto-Bakhtinian recreation of the city as a festive arena that Chesterton accomplishes in his inaugural Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’ (1910).

The value and danger of detection Chesterton’s sense of the reciprocity of urban investigation and literary detection finds earliest expression in his essay, ‘The Value of Detective Stories’ (The Speaker, 22 June 1901).3 Here, he discusses the collective, inter-generational enterprise manifested in the tiniest minutia of the city: ‘The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has a human hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon.’ Chesterton goes on to argue that Conan Doyle’s generic archetype is particularly effective in impressing this vision upon the reader, since ‘the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes [tends] to assert this romance in the detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in flints and tiles.’4 However, while Conan Doyle’s attentiveness to material objects possesses revelatory value in this sense, his prioritization of the collation of material data over psychological insight also reflects the essential flaw of his hero – Holmes’s chronic empathy deficit. Consequently, it is interesting to consider that while Chesterton’s article has long been recognized as a pioneering aesthetic revaluation of the genre, it has passed without notice that he produced a complementary article on ‘The Danger of Detective Stories’ (The Speaker, 13 July 1901) three weeks later. Here Chesterton argues that the genre is most ‘likely to do [. . .] the harm of spreading that worship of the intellect which

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now makes the educated classes so foolish a spectacle.’ He notes that in much post-Holmesian detective fiction ‘[i]t is strangely difficult to sympathize with any figure in the scene. The criminal seems as cold as the law, the law seems as bestial as the criminal.’ Chesterton considers the resulting ‘arid’ atmosphere to derive from the combination of adversarial antagonism and deterministic materialism encouraged by the genre’s structural predication upon perpetual contest: it is bound to attach [too] much importance to that somewhat trifling incident of human life which is called success. [. . . This illustrates] the supreme danger of the growth of [. . .] an uneducated and almost innocent materialism – a materialism which has not studied the long chronicle of the vanity and fall of kings, which has not learned from history that there is nothing that fails like success.5

A prioritization of intellectual victory was first encoded within the genre by Edgar Allen Poe, whose story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), begins with an exposition of whist and chess as analytic battlegrounds in which ‘mind struggles with mind’ in pursuit of ‘perfection in the game’.6 Thus, Poe locates adversarial game-playing as the conceptual basis of the genre, an agonistic model that found its apogee in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, in which the modern metropolis operates as the site of play wherein Holmes relentlessly pursues victory over Moriarty in a never-ending logical battle of wills. Chesterton’s reasons for challenging this generic orthodoxy extend beyond aesthetic critique to a concern over the literary propagation of wider social fallacies, since he considered that social thinkers were ‘probably really influenced, mad as it may seem, by contemporary detective fiction’ (‘Detectives and Detective Fictions’, Illustrated London News, 4 November 1905).7 Specifically, he believed that the unreflective materialism of the prevalent generic model both mirrored and encouraged an analogous social threat, located in the tendency of contemporary social reformers to associate worldly achievement with moral rectitude. Similarly, he considered the reformers’ tendency to apply a detached rationalism to the social and architectural conceptualization of the city to reflect an over-prioritization of abstract logic, and a dangerous ahistoricism. As Mark Knight argues, while Chesterton embraced the city as a chaos of conscious forces, ‘Doyle’s detective is perpetually trying to map the city and

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assimilate cultural difference.’8 The same was true of urban reformers such as Beatrice Webb (nee Potter), who began mapping the city in Conan Doyle’s time, and subsequently joined Chesterton’s ideological nemesis, George Bernard Shaw, as a leading figure in the Fabian movement. Tellingly, Chesterton’s editor at The Daily News, Alfred George Gardiner, chose the issue of urban reform as the context through which to explain the essential distinction between Chesterton and Shaw to his readers. In ‘A Character Study’ (Daily News, 18 July 1908), Gardiner notes that Shaw would prefer to ‘raze the whole fabric to the ground, and build all anew upon an ordered and symmetrical plan. Mr Chesterton has none of this impatience with the external garment of society. He enjoys disorder and loves the haphazard.’9 As this account begins to suggest, Chesterton was writing at a pivotal moment in the history of the capital, in which the overwhelmingly ‘arbitrary and unplanned’ cycle of construction and demolition that had hitherto dictated urban development was yielding to the dogma of rationalist interventionism, which eventually achieved schematic realization in the modernist architectural putsch of the mid-twentieth century.10 In many ways, the pioneer of this movement was Charles Booth, the conservative businessman-cum-philanthropic sociologist whose spatial survey of the class-breakdown of the city found pictorial representation in the colour-coded ‘poverty maps’ which accompanied his ambitious attempt to socially map the city, Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–7).11 Booth’s innovative plan to ‘formalize a method of impersonal inquiry’, in Raymond Williams’s terms, was borne of a desire to establish a rigorous empiricism to clear the ‘fog of fear, sensationalism and guesswork’ that surrounded the conditions of the urban poor.12 However, his rationalistic premises ultimately resulted in a failure to sympathize with either the landscape or its inhabitants. Of the landscape, he complained ‘[l]et anyone now design a place of residence for our four or five million inhabitants, and how greatly it would differ in plan and structure from London.’13 Booth’s maps offered the blueprint for a new plan conducted along strictly rationalistic and paternalistic lines. By literally illustrating the neighbouring coexistence of poverty and relative wealth, and thus producing a disorganized chaos of colours, Booth’s survey implied that this situation was both morally unsanitary and philosophically irrational, encouraging the inference of later planners that

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a segregation enabled by radical architectural redesign might ultimately result in a more orderly, logical colour scheme. Booth’s plan to achieve a radical spatial re-organization of the city was simultaneously a plan to tidy up its inhabitants. To this end, he proposed the expulsion of an entire section of the populace, in line with his belief that the ‘deserving poor must be separated from the idle loafers’, as Margaret Canovan puts it.14 While Booth denied that a considerable percentage of the urban poor belonged to what he termed ‘Class A’ – ‘“the vicious and semi-criminal”’ – he felt that the ‘deserving poor’ were being demoralized by a second distinct underclass: ‘Class B’.15 As Gareth Stedman Jones explains, for Booth this class ‘was not so much vicious as feckless. These were the failures in the industrial race.’16 Booth’s rhetoric is more forthright – these people ‘degrade whatever they touch, and as individuals are perhaps incapable of improvement’, because their condition is apparently ‘hereditary’.17 Booth argues that ‘[e]very other class takes care of itself, or could do so if Class B were out of the way. These unfortunate people form a sort of quagmire underlying the social structure.’18 This Spencerian vision of society as an agonistic game – ‘“the competition of the very poor”’ – underpins his argument for the ‘“entire removal”’ of this section of society from the field of play.19 As Stedman Jones explains, Booth’s solution was ‘a policy of relentless “dispersion” for class “A” and the provision of labour colonies for class “B”’.20 Fried and Elman summarize the latter plan thus: ‘if the poor failed in their special camps, they would be sent to poorhouses and their children taken from them. If they succeeded, they would be allowed to re-enter civilization.’21 As Chesterton surmised, ‘[a]pparently, progress means being moved on – by the police’.22

Some urgent reforms In view of Chesterton’s belief that detective fiction played a significant part in encouraging social materialism, it is telling that his earliest fictional critique of the structural changes wrought upon the city by social reformers occurs in his first collection of satires of Holmesian detection, The Club of Queer Trades (1905). The second story in the collection, ‘The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation’, relates a bus journey through the new working-class housing

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developments that increasingly populated the ‘vast blank space of North London’.23 As the narrator explains, the panoptic view from the top deck gave a sense of [the scheme’s] immensity and its meanness. [. . .] In a narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilisation, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilisation, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony.24

In attempting to account for the architectural poverty of the new projects, the narrator concludes that the philanthropist possesses ‘contempt for the people’.25 Chesterton’s loathing of philanthropists was not only inspired by the cold functionalism of these architectural schemes, but also the assumption that the worldly success of the rich constituted a qualification to interfere in the lives of others – to move people around the city like pieces on a giant chessboard. The authoritarian rationalism underpinning Booth’s philanthropic endeavours is illustrated by the context that seems to have brought his work to Chesterton’s attention – his influence upon the social theories of the Fabians, perhaps most notably Beatrice Webb, who was Booth’s wife’s cousin, and an assistant in the early stages of his project.26 In a series of journalistic essays, published in the same year as his articles on detective fiction, Chesterton deconstructs the presumptions of this new wave of social reformers via a series of parodies of social pamphleteering – ‘Some Urgent Reforms’ – in which he develops various apparently fantastical conceits in order to turn the urge for reform back upon the reformer. The final article in the series, ‘Missions to the Cultivated’ (The Speaker, 7 December 1901), sets out to overturn the complacent notion that the philanthropist carries de facto authority to carry out missionary work: The real problem of the present day is the problem of the educated classes. [. . . The] suburban pessimist [is] a type far lower than the hooligan [. . .] And any attempt on their part to teach and preach to the poor is as sensational a piece of impudence as a thief in Holloway Gaol preaching piety to the chaplain.27

The first article in the series, ‘The Human Circulating Library’ (The Speaker, 2 November 1901), advances a possible solution to this ‘problem of the educated classes’. Chesterton proposes that adapting the model of the lending library to

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human interaction might operate as a means of encouraging the mingling of different social sectors, so as to inculcate in the ‘vast herds of suburban citizens living perpetually among people like themselves’ a salutary understanding of the diversity of human experience.28 The second of his proposals, ‘Playgrounds for Adults’ (The Speaker, 16 November 1901), builds upon this motif of engagement. In a burlesque parallel of Booth’s projected labour colonies, Chesterton advances the concept of nurseries for the intelligentsia, arguing that such a policy might serve to reconnect the educated classes to their cultural heritage: What is needed is nurseries for the adult, nurseries in which stockbrokers can be instructed in ‘Puss in the Corner’, and those who have a more grave and aesthetic order of intellect in the more solemn ritual of bells and fruit which is called ‘Oranges and Lemons’.29

The communal ethos of Chesterton’s reforms is particularly salient in view of Booth’s assumption of detached impersonality in his investigations, a conceit which arises in part from his failure to recognize his activities as a form of recreational play. Booth’s project effectively began as a hobby, arising from his habit of taking constitutionals around the city, as a means of ameliorating the periodic breakdowns to which he was prone.30 In this sense, he was engaged in a personal leisure activity masquerading as public work, much as Holmes’s detection hobby offers relief from the ennui that manifests itself in his drug addiction. However, while Booth’s preferred mode of play involved circulating among different classes, he never thought to lend himself out, in the manner of Chesterton’s human library. As Fried and Elman note, Booth’s lack of engagement arises from the fact that he ‘truly believed that between himself and the poor there was an unbridgeable gap of class and culture’.31 In a later essay, ‘The Anti-Liberal’ (Daily News, 7 September 1912), Chesterton employs the rhetoric of detection to challenge such assumptions of benevolent distance, refiguring the philanthropist as one of a number of potentially villainous detective story characters: There is a great deal in my plumber’s or my cab man’s life that I do not know; and, stranger still, I think there ought to be. I am not ambitious to possess that particular sort of knowledge of domestic life which is possessed by spies, informers, blackmailers, and philanthropists.32

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This gesture of implication is particularly interesting in light of Booth’s lessguarded observations on his activities, in which he comes to resemble the wide-eyed reader of a sensational detective novel. In one notable instance, he describes his fascination with the clash of contest, man against man, and men against fate – the absorbing interest of a battle-field [. . .] this excitement of life which can accept murder as a dramatic incident, and drunkenness as the buffoonery of the stage . . . looked it in this way, what a drama it is!33

If Booth’s theatrical conception of city life as a detection ‘drama’ unfolding before his eyes superficially resembles the play-reconfiguration of Chesterton’s ‘Playgrounds for Adults’, it also possesses the vital distinction that Booth considers himself uncomplicatedly shielded by the footlights. In contrast, the communal element of Chesterton’s vision of play is particularly evoked by a sequel to the ‘Playgrounds for Adults’ piece, which he composed a fortnight later (‘Some Urgent Reforms: Playgrounds for Adults II’, The Speaker, 30 November 1901). Here, he develops a distinction between the benign games conducted by children, and the more agonistic adult version of play, which corresponds to the ‘clash of contest’ invoked both in Booth’s rhetoric and in Holmesian detection: ‘Games as ordinarily understood do not constitute play, they constitute sport. In a game, as the adult understands a game, the essential is competition, and the aim victory.’ By way of contrast, Chesterton advances ‘the great and Royal game of “Hide and Seek”, the noblest of all earthly games’. He explains that the particular beauty of this game is that it has the whole earth for its chess-board. Every object of the landscape, tree or hole or hedge, has, like a huge chess-man, its own peculiar powers and functions in the game. [. . .] The game includes planning, thinking, remembering, inventing, running, climbing, jumping, seeing, hearing, and waiting. The player has the emotions of all the outlaws since the world began.34

Chesterton’s account figures hide and seek as a real-life version of detective fiction, in which the intellectual combat of Poe’s chess analogy, and Booth’s detached observation of the ‘battle-field’, are transmuted into a liberating physical engagement with topography and an emotional engagement with human history, in which the player becomes a self-determining piece in

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the game, rather than the omnipotent hand guiding play. The location of Chesterton’s panegyric to hide and seek within his series of ‘urgent reforms’ reflects his sense that in order to fully counter the reformer’s dubious combination of rigid rationalism and solipsistic tourism, a direct challenge to the literary archetype of detection would also be necessary. The form that this challenge would ultimately take is first hinted at in ‘Missions to the Cultivated’, in which Chesterton’s conviction that ‘[t]he great need of the age is philanthropy to the rich’ inspires him to produce a brilliant parody of the language of the reformist tract: It is not enough for the person of limited means merely to think charitably of millionaires at Christmas, to bestow a word on them now and then, to support institutions designed for their improvement. The real philanthropist must go down and live among these people. He must take the rough-andtumble of their gloomy, cynical, and lawless life. He must not be put off by the exhibition of many grossnesses and vulgarities [. . .] I do not think it is any good merely to preach and prose to these people. A little merriment and geniality, a little sympathy with their amusements, would go much further towards converting the millionaires and really attaching them to us by ties of affection.35

This is where a small Catholic priest steps in.

Urban play and structural disorientation in ‘The Blue Cross’ The themes discussed so far come together in a striking manner in Chesterton’s inaugural Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, in which his concept of the city as a ‘playground for adults’ achieves fictional realization through the initiation of a game of hide and seek. The story directly challenges Conan Doyle’s agonistic model in its portrayal of the Holmesian investigator, Aristide Valentin, who is discovered wandering alone through the city in pursuit of the criminal mastermind, Flambeau, only to be taken in hand by the childlike Father Brown, and given a lesson in the more benign recreational possibilities of the city.36 Simultaneously, the putative remove of the social reformer is challenged by Brown’s carnivalesque modus operandi, which marshals the submerged festive spirit of the city to draw the intellectual into an enforced communality,

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designed to recover a capacity for empathetic engagement. Meanwhile, the various acts of urban disruption that Brown perpetrates in order to achieve this resolution illustrate his identification with the ‘undeserving’ poor who Booth sought to expel from the city, while simultaneously teaching the systematizing intellectual a lesson in the positive applications of urban disorder. ‘The Blue Cross’ is, ostensibly, the story of Valentin’s attempt to apprehend Flambeau before he can steal a valuable item of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, which is being carried across London to a religious conference by Father Brown. From their entry to the capital at Liverpool Street station to the end of the pursuit on Hampstead Heath it appears that Flambeau has been leading Father Brown out of town in order to rob him in an isolated spot. A series of bizarre disturbances along the way confuse Valentin as to Flambeau’s strategy, while providing the trail which enables him to maintain his pursuit. On the Heath it transpires that Brown has been orchestrating these disturbances himself in order to help Valentin along, and that he has, as it were, doublecrossed Flambeau en route, by swapping the package containing the cross and posting it to its destination. Thus, Chesterton uses various structurally disruptive motifs to toy with both the fixity of the characters’ roles and the reader’s epistemological bearings. For example, the narrator’s introductory assertion that Valentin is ‘the most famous investigator of the world’ encourages the inference that an infallible detective hero, modelled upon the Holmes archetype, has been introduced, a conception gradually undermined throughout the following action, in which Valentin fumbles his way to the conclusion, increasingly exasperated by the apparently irrational nature of events.37 Since the reader is compelled to follow Valentin as the focus of narrative perplexity, both occupy a ‘naked state of nescience’ which enables Chesterton to induct a new approach to detection, since the detective must attempt to empathize with the mind of the criminal in order to successfully second-guess the next move in the game.38 The criminal minds that Valentin and the reader must attempt to comprehend are those of Father Brown and Chesterton, since, as Priestman notes, Brown occupies ‘the structural space that would belong to the criminal in a normal detective story’.39 This structural displacement enables Brown to overturn Valentin’s complacent segregation of the detective and the criminal, as illustrated at the outset by his assertion that the ‘“criminal is the creative artist;

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the detective only the critic”’.40 Valentin’s categorical epigram is immediately challenged by the first of the practical jokes that punctuate the story, in which the ‘sour smile’ that accompanies the bon mot – a symbol of the unconstructive nature of Valentin’s inward-facing, superior sense of humour at the outset – is parodied by the surprise absence of sweetness in his coffee: ‘He had put salt in it’, because the condiments have been swapped by Brown.41 The priest’s joke subverts what Chesterton terms, elsewhere, ‘the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it’, engendering an enforced communality that initiates Valentin into the disorientating conditions of the game.42 As Susan Stewart explains, [i]n children’s games, the formation of a boundary is intrinsic to getting in or out of the game. The way to form such a boundary is to make a play gesture, a movement that sends the message ‘this is play’ and marks off the particularly space and time that will characterize the game. This movement may take the form of a mock attack or stunt.43

In this case the swapping of the salt and sugar is the stunt that signals the beginning of the game.

Recreating the carnivalesque city Brown’s strategic promotion of a topsy-turvy game atmosphere also offers the first suggestion of the applicability of a carnivalesque reading of the story, in which the priest’s anarchic actions parody the conventional intellectual riddles of mystery writing. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, in medieval Europe a ‘carnival atmosphere reigned on days when mysteries and soties [broad satires] were produced’.44 Bakhtin goes on to argue that in carnival ‘the images of games, prophecies (as parodies), and riddles are combined with folk elements to form an organic whole.’45 Brown’s subversion of Valentin’s private joke not only delivers the first riddle to be solved, but also corroborates Bakhtin’s assertion that carnival laughter ‘is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants [. . .] he who is laughing also belongs to it.’46 This corresponds to the communal ethos of Chesterton’s ‘reforms’ articles, as exemplified by his account of the resemblance of children’s play to the origins of theatre: ‘the theatre was originally what children’s play is, a festival, a strictly

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ceremonial rejoicing. Children merely reproduce the theatre in a more human, direct, and powerful manner, by being [themselves] both the spectators and the actors.’47 Again, Bakhtin’s view of carnival is strikingly comparable – it is ‘life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play. In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators.’48 Bakhtin explains that the ‘common denominator’ of carnival is the establishment of a period of ‘gay time’, which he terms a ‘“hiatus between two moments of biographical time [. . .] a pure digression from the normal course of life”’.49 The central section of ‘The Blue Cross’, which begins with Brown’s first practical joke, operates as just such a demonstration of ‘gay time’, bookended by the introductory biographical description of the protagonists and the closing explanation of events on the Heath. In this respect, Stewart’s account of the realm of play is again relevant: ‘Once the world of everyday life and realism is cut off from the fiction, there is a concurrent movement toward play time.’50 Significantly, this results in ‘the removal of hierarchical order and privileged signification’, an action which divests Valentin of the worldly prestige of his investigator status and opens up a carnivalesque space, which temporarily privileges the unofficial figure, the ‘“wise fool”’, Father Brown.51 ‘The Blue Cross’ simultaneously enacts a burlesque parody of the traditional mystery play, as we pursue a follower of Christ, temporarily reimagined as a carnivalesque ‘Abbot of Unreason’, who carries a miniature cross on a mad dash across the city.52 The last detail is significant, since the symbolism of the cross is central to the story’s principle of urban recreation. In Orthodoxy (1908), Chesterton discusses ‘the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. [. . .] The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.’53 In the cityscape Chesterton finds a physical correlative for this symbolism in the streets that link each block of housing, civic square and area of public parkland in the form of a crossroads. As Gabrielle Dean has noted, in Chesterton’s essay on the value of detective fiction ‘[t]he city is [. . .] rather remarkably described by Chesterton as the incarnation of the visualtextual grid’.54 However, Dean does not account for the subversive intent of this apparently rationalistic vision, which is located in Chesterton’s reorganization of the city on the principle of a game-board, configured, like the children’s game of hide and seek, in 1:1 scale. In the crossroads that link every square

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of the urban game-board, Chesterton discovers a connective design which encourages ‘free-travel’ to a vast grid of new playgrounds. As Hayes and Tololyan have noted, the progress of the protagonists in ‘The Blue Cross’ also sketches a cross upon the city, since the pursuit follows an axis ‘east to west, and south to north, Liverpool Street Station to Scotland Yard and on to Victoria Station, then north to Camden Town and Hampstead Heath.’55 Thus, Brown compels his fellow players to follow a route which enacts a benediction of the city; an appropriate image, since the pedagogic play that Brown engages in along the way is intended to safeguard the city’s structure, by exposing the investigator to a process of festive re-education. This motif of benediction is prefigured in ‘The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation’, in which the narrator contrasts the enervated landscape of the new projects with the crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.56

It is almost as though the city’s very structure proceeds organically from the focal nexus of St Paul’s, with the thunderbolts projected from the dome blasting crossroads into the landscape at every turning. This image of the church as a benevolent guardian of vibrant disorder is interestingly complemented by Chesterton’s account, in London (1914), of the iconoclasm of the city’s inhabitants, a trait that he directly associates with the capital’s happenstance structure: [a] rather surly love of liberty (or rather of independence) is written in the straggling map of London, and proclaimed in its patchwork architecture. There is in it something that every Englishman feels in himself [. . .]; something of the amateur; something of the eccentric. The nearest phrase is the negative one of ‘unofficial’ [my emphasis].57

This invocation of an ‘unofficial’ spirit again recalls Bakhtin’s account of the destabilization of official life that took place during the medieval carnival, within which the church would temporarily collaborate in subverting the very authority that it conventionally embodied. Chesterton’s connection of this anti-authoritarian ethos to the city’s ‘patchwork architecture’ also helps to explain his use of the squares of London as the locus of much of the action in

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‘The Blue Cross’. The narrator directly refers to the ‘patchwork’ quality of the city’s layout, while building a chiming refrain upon the word ‘square’ itself: Valentin ‘was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint and quiet square, very typical of London, full of an accidental stillness [. . . with a] square of shrubbery in the centre.’58 When Valentin begins his active pursuit, Chesterton again employs collapsed repetition to draw attention to the significance of the symbol: ‘Which way did these parsons go?’ asked Valentin. ‘Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the square’, said the other promptly. ‘Thanks’, said Valentin, and vanished like a fairy. On the other side of the second square he found a policeman.59

Helmut Heissenbuttel has argued that in the conventional detective story ‘the reconstruction of the trace of the unnarrated [. . .] does not happen in a merely psychological, sociological, or even ethnological humanization; it happens, remarkably enough, topographically.’60 Still more remarkably, in ‘The Blue Cross’ Chesterton’s ‘reconstruction’ is principally concerned with detecting the hidden narrative of the topography itself, the original purposes of which he seeks to excavate, as a means of renovating the past to perpetually revitalize the present. In this respect, the square refrain not only evokes the concept of a 1:1 board-game, but also a proto-Bakhtinian recovery of the communal public market square as a festive space. As Bakhtin notes, ‘[t]he main arena for carnival acts was the square and the streets adjoining it [. . . Therefore in] carnivalized literature the square, as a setting for the action of the plot, becomes twolevelled and ambivalent.’61 Correspondingly, Valentin passes through streets which ‘seemed built out of the blank backs of everything and everywhere’, a vision of spatial/temporal heterogeneity which accords with the ‘heterogeneous architectural sources’ of the typical post-1660 London square.62 The almost hallucinatory imagery of Valentin’s passage through the city evokes a sense of the old city shining through the new, a conceit similar to the visual trick achieved in Chesterton’s beloved pantomimes: ‘the Transformation Scene when the front scene is still there, but the back scene begins to glow through it’ (‘The Peasant’, Daily News, 8 July 1911).63 As Chesterton observes in his essay on London, it ‘is a mediaeval town [. . .] but its soul has been sunk deeper under other things than any other town that remembers mediaevalism at

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all. It is very hard indeed to find London in London.’64 This rhetoric of detection posits the submersion of the true city not so much as structural, but rather conceptual – the overground landscape of London invites the possibilities of play, yet the scales of convention cause these possibilities to remain concealed in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter. In London, Chesterton illustrates this conceptual submersion through a discussion of the original meanings of the names of various tube stations, particularly focusing upon Blackfriars.65 In view of this example, if we adopt L. P. Hartley’s adage that the past is a foreign country, the disruptive presence of ‘“foreign parsons [. . .] running about”’ in the form of Brown and Flambeau, each dressed as Catholic priests, begins to look peculiarly like a return of the culturally repressed in poltergeist form.66 The disorderly conduct of Chesterton’s avatars of carnivalesque tradition is also significant in view of the recurrent occlusion, by representatives of urban officialdom, of the purpose of the city square as a site of play. For example, in the early eighteenth century a reformation of open squares such as Lincoln’s Inn Fields was urged on the grounds that in these spaces ‘disorderly Persons have frequented and met together therein, using unlawful Sports and Games, and drawing in and enticing young persons into Gaming, Idleness and other vicious Courses.’67 This account strikingly prefigures Brown’s enticement of Valentin into his unlawful games, a motif of disruption that forms a point of intersection between Chesterton’s critique of architectural rationalization and social authoritarianism. As McKellar explains, such pleas for reform operated as the pretext for these spaces to become ‘more regularized and privatized. It was this trend which led towards the enclosing and railing in of squares resulting in the more contained and socially segregated spaces of the 1720s onwards.’68 Mark Knight is correct to argue that ‘Chesterton’s reading of culture is committed to the importance of public space’, a commitment that leads Chesterton to perceive the diminution of free public land as a psychologically demoralizing act of repression upon the populace.69 To this end, his first urgent reform, ‘The Human Circulating Library’, is calculated to overturn the status of the modern city as the site of the ‘last and darkest of Cosmic jests, whereby a desert can be made of houses’.70 Similarly, Bakhtin’s valorization of the public square partially operates as a critique of early twentieth-century capitalist society’s figuring of the domestic space as a safe-haven, ostensibly offering protection from a forbidding world lying beyond the door, while actually

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screening the individual from a politically empowering connection with his/ her cultural heritage. As Hirschkop notes, in Bakhtin ‘the marvelously open expanses of the public square are not only literally but metaphorically spacious, allowing history a room for movement which it is denied in the bourgeois parlour or home.’71 In a comparable spirit, Chesterton’s fiction not only emphasizes the psychological benefits of communal urban spaces, but also their political facility. This is perhaps best illustrated by his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), which details the revolt of the citizens of Notting Hill against city planners who intend to build a large arterial road through their district. The streets and squares of Campden Hill form the stronghold of the dissenters, a significant detail since McKellar describes the public square itself as arising ‘out of a long history of open land in towns [which] formed part of a struggle to maintain common land against private interests.’72 Life began to imitate art shortly after the novel’s publication, as Chesterton later recalled in ‘The Break’ (Daily News, 13 July 1912), in an account which again turns upon a compulsive repetition of ‘square’: I wrote it in a small square in Kensington [. . .] and when I had left this square to live in more barbaric places, the inhabitants of that very square did in fact barricade themselves in it against similar capitalistic improvements – and, I am happy to say, won.73

This event occurred in May 1910, and consequently would have been fresh in Chesterton’s memory when he composed ‘The Blue Cross’ a month later.74 In this light, it seems plausible that this revelation of the symbiosis of fiction and reality, and the political efficacy of urban disruption, influenced Chesterton in the conceptualization of his new story. In ‘The Blue Cross’, he again depicts the public square as a space in which ideological schemes can be disrupted, although on this occasion his attention turns from subverting the utilitarian spatial demands of commercial interests to the utilitarian social demands of the philanthropic reformer.

Father Brown and ‘Class B’ In London, Chesterton conjures an anthropomorphic vision of the city as an uncooperative suspect, evading utilitarian demands to justify its conduct:

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‘there is something shy about London: it is full of secrets and anomalies; and it does not like to be asked what it is for.’ It has been ‘a sort of half-rebel through [. . .] many centuries. Hence it is a city of side streets that only lead into side streets; a city of short-cuts that take a long time.’75 Chesterton’s account posits the entire metropolis as a metaphor for the anti-utilitarian class anathematized by Booth, a conceit which reflects the particular existential urgency that Chesterton attached to the question of social utility. This urgency can be partially explained by the fact that Chesterton identified so readily with the ‘class’ of people who the reformer sought to expel. Booth’s complaint that ‘Class B’ ‘cannot stand the regularity and dulness of civilized existence, and find the excitement they need in the life of the streets’ could be seamlessly applied to Chesterton, and he was acutely aware of the fact that only the accident of his birth into the middle-class rendered the vagaries of his temperament socially acceptable.76 For example, in a later essay, ‘The Witch-Smellers’ (Daily News, 20 July 1912), Chesterton discusses his mental deficiencies in reliably charting time, before concluding that ‘[i]f any tramp were as vague as I am about what happened last Tuesday he would be segregated before you could say Saleeby’.77 Interestingly, Chesterton’s sense of affinity with obdurately anti-utilitarian members of society was later echoed by Shaw. In a somewhat ambivalent introduction to Beatrice Webb’s memoirs, Shaw recalled that he considered himself ‘highly obnoxious to Beatrice for the technical reason that I could not be classified’. Because ‘[a]ll her interest was in social organisation’, Webb ‘had no use for exceptional people: degrees of ability and efficiency she could deal with; but the complications introduced by artists, Irishmen and [. . .] eccentric and anarchic individuals [. . .] were, in her business of social definition and classification, simply nuisances.’78 In view of the utilitarian demands of Webb and Booth, Father Brown’s disruption of Valentin’s belief that ‘[t]he criminal is the creative artist’ would seem to convey a particularly pointed message. Significantly, Brown’s modus operandi conflates the spirit of the creative artist with that of the occupants of ‘Class B’, who Booth considered ‘du trop’, a term that translates as both unwelcome, and excessive or unreasonable.79 As the narrator explains, in attempting to understand the actions of his apparent adversaries, Valentin ‘coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable [. . .] he systematically went to the wrong places’.80 Valentin’s success in pursuing this policy lends

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a satirical dimension to Brown’s status as an abbot of unreason, insofar as it challenges Booth’s conception of the degeneracy of aimless itinerancy. In his Autobiography (1936), Chesterton expressed delight at a correspondent’s description of Brown as a ‘“loafer”’, a term that identifies the priest with the ‘loafers and semi-criminals’ of Booth’s underclass, and which Chesterton considered an ‘appropriate compliment’ for his hero.81 In this respect it is notable that when Valentin first encounters Brown he considers him ‘helpless’, since this is precisely the term used by Booth to characterize ‘Class B’, when he bemoans the ‘shiftlessness, helplessness, [and] idleness’ of that group.82 Given the apparent ‘shiftlessness’ attendant to Brown’s traversal of the capital, he succeeds in embodying the full trinity of Booth’s negative traits within a single story, a detail which serves to promote a sense of Brown’s correspondence with increasingly maligned social groups. Indeed, Brown is not only depicted as an aimless loafer, but also as a semicriminal vandal. In addition to throwing a cup of soup against a café wall, and, somewhat metaphorically, upsetting an apple cart in a greengrocers, his penchant for public disorder is encapsulated by the account of his actions in a pub, in which he smashes a window with his umbrella. The latter act identifies him with ‘Class A’ in Booth’s terms: ‘the worst class of corner men who hang round the doors of public-houses [. . . and supply] the ready materials for disorder when occasion serves.’83 It is notable in this context that not only is Valentin being given a holiday from his usual investigative framework by Father Brown, but Flambeau’s desire to steal the cross also affords Brown an opportunity to extend his social actions beyond normally acceptable bounds. He effectively gets away with a series of acts of vandalism – the only crimes which, as it turns out, objectively occur in the story, since the cross is never stolen – and the manner in which his behaviour is related suggests that he enjoys proceedings rather more than is strictly necessary. However, this disorderly behaviour is not merely undertaken for fun, nor purely to assist Valentin’s detective work, but is enacted in a deeper pedagogic context, the satirical purpose of which is directly related to the notion that the occupants of ‘Class B’ possess the capacity to demoralize those around them. In a pristine reversal, the purpose of Brown’s vandalism is to re-moralize his companions. First, the priest’s actions introduce Flambeau to a new perspective on the creative possibilities of detection, which eventually convinces him to

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repent his life of crime. Thus, Brown effects the regeneration of a representative of ‘Class A’ – the ‘semi-criminal’ – who Booth considered so far beyond redemption that they should simply be ‘gradually harried out of existence’.84 Simultaneously, Brown attempts to re-moralize Valentin, as a member of the investigating class, via a lesson in the importance of imaginative empathy. The success of Brown’s methodology, which replaces the rational materialism of the conventional Holmesian clue with the empathetic lateral thinking of the joke, is demonstrated when Valentin not only successfully reaches his destination, but also suspends his authority upon discovering the truth of the mystery. The dramatis personae are put in such good humour by the carnivalesque gameplot that Valentin forgets to bother arresting Flambeau, and Flambeau forgets to run away, they merely stand applauding Brown’s ingenuity, while exchanging expressions of respect and friendship – Flambeau sweeps ‘Valentin a great bow’, and Valentin terms his erstwhile foe, ‘mon ami’.85 This denouement solves the puzzle of Brown’s purpose in leading Valentin on his bracing cross-city jaunt, as well as Chesterton’s purpose in constructing this play-reorientation of the detection genre. As he explains in Orthodoxy, if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.86

Father Brown’s raucous constitutional frees the Holmesian detective story from the suffocation of a single argument, applying some urgent reforms to the game of detection in an attempt to purge the morbidity of the logiciandetective and the social reformer alike, via an excavation of the repressed play-spirit of the city. It is appropriate, then, that the game should finally be brought to an end when the city evaporates into the ‘Vale of Health’ that leads on to the communal leisure space of Hampstead Heath.87 This final touch brings Chesterton’s re-creation of the city as a playground for adults to an appropriately literal resolution, in a context that again suggests a critique of social segregation. Seven years earlier, in ‘The Gate of Town and Country’ (Daily News, 8 August 1903), Chesterton had written in praise of the success of a movement to prevent Eton College building upon the Heath. In summarizing the importance of this victory, Chesterton explains that ‘Hampstead Heath is

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beautiful, but it is something more than beautiful [. . .] It is a real playground of the poor’.88

Notes 1 G. K. Chesterton, Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902), p. 125. 2 G. K. Chesterton, The Spice of Life and Other Essays (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964), p. 23. 3 Later republished as ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ in The Defendant (1901). 4 G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008b), p. 58. 5 BL MS Add. 73381 ff.57. All BL MS references occur because the article has not been published elsewhere. The manuscript referred to here contains clippings of all of Chesterton’s articles for The Speaker. 6 E. A. Poe, Selected Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 119. 7 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume 27: The Illustrated London News, 1905–1907 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), p. 53. 8 M. Knight, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and Sacraments in Chesterton’s London’. Yearbook of English Studies (2009), 39(1–2), 131. 9 G. K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 5: Columns, Reviews and Letters, January 1908– June 1909 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012c), pp. 104–5. 10 G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 159. 11 C. Booth, Charles Booth’s London: A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His ‘Life and Labour of the People of London’ (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. xxxi. 12 Ibid., p. xi; S. Inwood, City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London (London: Macmillan, 2005), p. 48. 13 C. Booth, Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 123. 14 M. Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 43. 15 Booth cited in Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. 320. 16 Ibid., p. 321. 17 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, pp. 11–12. 18 Booth, Charles Booth on the City, p. 30. 19 Booth cited in Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. 307. 20 Ibid., p. 321. 21 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. xxix.

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22 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume 4: What’s Wrong with the World – and Others (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), p. 209. 23 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume 6: The Napoleon of Notting Hill – and Others (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), p. 83. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 In ‘Mr. Shaw’s Escape’ (Daily News, 20 July 1907), Chesterton quotes Shaw’s discussion of Booth’s work among other reformist tracts. See G. K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 4: Columns, Reviews and Letters, July 1906–December 1907 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012b), p. 263. 27 BL MS Add. 73381 ff.78. 28 Ibid., ff.75. 29 Ibid., ff.76. 30 Booth, Charles Booth on the City, p. 10. 31 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. xxvii. 32 G. K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 8: Columns, Reviews and Letters, January 1912– February 1913; Items from 1916 and 1928; Appendix: Reviews of Chesterton’s Books in the Daily News, 1901–1913; Index (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012e), p. 152. 33 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. xx. 34 BL MS Add. 73381 ff.77. 35 Ibid., ff.78. 36 Brown’s childlike qualities are repeatedly emphasized in the series, as in the narrator’s account of his ‘high and almost childish voice’. G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2012f), p. 14. 37 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 3. 38 Ibid., p. 6. 39 M. Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 126. 40 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 7. 41 Ibid., p. 7. 42 G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008a), p. 95–6. 43 S. Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 91. 44 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 5. 45 Ibid., pp. 233, 236–7. 46 Ibid., pp. 11–12.

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47 BL MS Add. 73381 ff.77. 48 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 7. 49 Ibid., p. 237; cited in K. Clark and M. Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 281. 50 Stewart, Nonsense, p. 118. 51 Ibid., p. 118; M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 150. 52 E. Rozik, Comedy: A Critical Introduction (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), p. 160. 53 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 21. 54 G. Dean, ‘Grid Games: Gertrude Stein’s Diagrams and Detectives’. Modernism/ Modernity (2008), p. 328. 55 A. W. Hayes and K. Tololyan, ‘The Cross and the Compass: Patterns of Order in Chesterton and Borges’. Hispanic Review (1981), p. 398. 56 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume 6: The Napoleon of Notting Hill – and Others (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), pp. 83–4. 57 G. K. Chesterton, London (London: Privately Printed for Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edmund D. Brooks and their friends, 1914), p. 12. 58 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 5. 59 Ibid., p. 9. 60 G. W. Most and W. W. Stowe (eds), The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 85. 61 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 128. 62 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, pp. 11–12; E. McKellar, The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City 1660–1720 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 193. 63 G. K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 7: Columns, Reviews and Letters, October 1910– December 1911 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012d), p. 163. 64 Chesterton, London, p. 10. 65 Ibid., p. 8. 66 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 11. 67 Act of 1735, cited in McKellar, The Birth of Modern London, pp. 204–5. 68 Ibid., p. 205. 69 Knight, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, p. 134. 70 BL MS Add. 73381 ff.75 71 K. Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 249. 72 McKellar, The Birth of Modern London, p. 198.

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73 Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, p. 121. See H. Hobhouse, Survey of London, Vol. 42: Kensington Square to Earl’s Court (London: English Heritage, 1986), ch. 17, for an account of this event. 74 The story was first published as ‘Valentin Follows a Curious Trail’ in The Saturday Evening Post on 23 June 1910. 75 Chesterton, London, p. 13. 76 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. 14. 77 Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, p. 127. Caleb Saleeby was the founder of the Eugenics Education Society, and a particular focus of Chesterton’s disdain. 78 http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700201.txt. 79 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. 293. 80 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 6. 81 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1936), p. 328; Booth cited in S. Inwood, City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London (London: Macmillan, 2005), p. 54. 82 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 5; Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. 14. 83 Booth, Charles Booth’s London, p. 11. 84 Ibid., p. 299. 85 Ibid., p. 18. 86 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 12. 87 Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, p. 13. 88 G. K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 2: Columns, Reviews and Letters, 1903–1904 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012a), p. 110.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. (trans. H. Iswolsky), Rabelais and His World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984). — (ed. and trans. C. Emerson), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Booth, C. (ed. H. W. Pfautz), Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967). — (ed. A. Fried and R. M. Elman), Charles Booth’s London: A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His ‘Life and Labour of the People of London’ (London: Hutchinson, 1969).

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Canovan, M., G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Chesterton, G. K., Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902). —, London (London: Privately Printed for Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edmund D. Brooks and their friends, 1914). —, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1936). — (ed. Dorothy Collins), The Spice of Life and Other Essays (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964). —, Collected Works, Volume 27: The Illustrated London News, 1905–1907 (San Fransisco: Ignatius, 1986). —, Collected Works, Volume 4: What’s Wrong with the World – and Others (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987). —, Collected Works, Volume 6: The Napoleon of Notting Hill – and Others (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991). —, Orthodoxy (Mineola: Dover, 2004). —, Alarms and Discursions (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008a). —, The Defendant (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008b). — (ed. J. Stapleton), G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 2: Columns, Reviews and Letters, 1903–1904 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012a). — (ed. J. Stapleton), G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 4: Columns, Reviews and Letters, July 1906– December 1907 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012b). — (ed. J. Stapleton), G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 5: Columns, Reviews and Letters, January 1908– June 1909 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012c). — (ed. J. Stapleton), G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 7: Columns, Reviews and Letters, October 1910– December 1911 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012d). — (ed. J. Stapleton), G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913. Volume 8: Columns, Reviews and Letters, January 1912– February 1913; Items from 1916 and 1928; Appendix: Reviews of Chesterton’s Books in the Daily News, 1901–1913; Index (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012e). — (ed. M. D. Hurley), The Complete Father Brown Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2012f). Clark, K. and Holquist, M., Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1984). Dean, G., ‘Grid Games: Gertrude Stein’s Diagrams and Detectives’. Modernism/ Modernity (2008), 15(2), 317–41.

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Hayes, A. W. and Tololyan, K., ‘The Cross and the Compass: Patterns of Order in Chesterton and Borges’. Hispanic Review (1981), 49(4), 395–405. Hirschkop, K., Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Hobhouse, H. (ed.), Survey of London, vol. 42: Kensington Square to Earl’s Court (London: English Heritage, 1986). Inwood, S., City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London (London: Macmillan, 2005). Knight, M., ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and Sacraments in Chesterton’s London’. Yearbook of English Studies (2009), 39(1–2), 126–36. McKellar, E., The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City 1660 – 1720 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). Most, G. W. and Stowe, W. W. (eds), The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). Poe, E. A., Selected Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1994). Priestman, M., Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). Rozik, E., Comedy: A Critical Introduction (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). Stedman Jones, G., Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Stewart, S., Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989). Webb, B., My Apprenticeship: Volume One (London: Penguin, 1938).

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9

Estranging the Everyday: G. K. Chesterton’s Urban Modernism Colin Cavendish-Jones

An essay on G. K. Chesterton and Modernism, one might think, ought to be a very succinct document indeed. Four words should suffice: He was against it; though one could always push the word count into double figures by remarking that the Modernists were none too fond of Chesterton either.1 ‘I have said much against a mere modernism’, Chesterton wrote in ‘The Case for the Ephemeral’ (1908): When I use the word modernism, I am not alluding specially to the current quarrel in the Roman Catholic Church, though I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group accepting so weak and unphilosophical a name. It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.2

The conclusion of this passage, in which Chesterton writes off modernism as a form of snobbery, incidentally provides us with a very clear definition of what he means by the term: The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly ‘in the know’. To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age. It is caddish because it

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is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.3

The mental habit Chesterton attacks here is a familiar one, and probably deserves all the epigrams he can throw at it. In the second section of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell describes the machine-worship and blind devotion to ‘progress’ that so often accompany Socialism in very similar terms.4 Orwell, however, did not imagine that he was attacking Modernism, or Socialism for that matter. He was criticizing a way of thinking, or of failing to think, common among modern-minded people. This is just what Chesterton does. He characterizes Modernism not as a multi-faceted artistic response to modernity, but as a simple expression or glorification of the new, the slavish assumption that whatever is modern must be better than whatever is old. Elsewhere in his writing, Chesterton does use the word Modernism (with a capital ‘M’) to allude to the quarrel in the Roman Catholic Church. In his essay, ‘The Appetite of Earth’ (1910), he writes: ‘Somebody staring into the sky . . . declared that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter.’5 Chesterton’s understanding of ‘Modernism’ as a theological term is quite different from, almost the opposite of, his use of ‘modernism’ in a more general philosophic and cultural sense. In the former case he means a sceptical approach to established doctrine; in the latter, an unquestioning acceptance of new ideas. I am not concerned here with Chesterton’s theology, but his criticism of theological Modernism, though characteristically heavy-handed, is reasonably well-informed. The attitude he attacks under the name of ‘modernism’ in ‘The Case for the Ephemeral’, however, is clearly not what we mean when we refer to Modernism. It is not even one of a constellation of possible meanings for the term. One might well accuse the titans of literary Modernism, Proust, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Woolf, of snobbery, but one could scarcely charge any of them with a simple-minded acceptance of everything new. The Waste Land and Ulysses, for instance, far from celebrating or championing modernity, are principally concerned with exploring its horror and bleakness. In his 1979 lecture, ‘Modern and Postmodern’, Clement Greenberg amended his former definitions of Modernism to emphasize this reaction against ‘the temper of the times’: Modernism has to be understood as a holding operation, a continuing endeavor to maintain aesthetic standards in the face of threats – not just

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as a reaction against romanticism. As the response, in effect, to an ongoing emergency. Artists in all times, despite some appearances to the contrary, have sought aesthetic excellence. What singles Modernism out and gives it its place and identity more than anything else is its response to a heightened sense of threats to aesthetic value: threats from the social and material ambience, from the temper of the times, all conveyed through the demands of a new and open cultural market, middlebrow demands. Modernism dates from the time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when that market became not only established – it had been there long before – but entrenched and dominant, without significant competition. . . . Thus the whole enterprise of Modernism, for all its outward aspects, can be seen as backwardlooking. That seems paradoxical, but reality is shot through with paradox, is practically constituted by it.6

Although one can easily imagine Chesterton responding to the elitist element in Greenberg’s definition with a spirited defence of the middlebrow, the fact remains that he, like the Modernists, was responding to the ongoing emergency of modernity by looking back beyond the era which immediately preceded it.7 Recent commentators, such as Roger Griffin in Modernism and Fascism (2007) and Shane Weller in Modernism and Nihilism (2011), have agreed with Greenberg in seeing Modernism primarily as a revolt against decadence, both in contemporary culture and the fin-de-siècle nihilism which had infected it; but they have gone further in considering Modernism as a political and philosophical movement as well as an aesthetic phenomenon. This analysis does much to align the Modernist agenda with Chesterton’s – since it is clear, particularly in Chesterton’s autobiographical and apologetic writing, that he too was reacting against the Romantic and Aesthetic movements, and that his primary quarrel with them was political and philosophical rather than stylistic. It is interesting to compare Chesterton’s casual disparagement of modernism as a term with his far more devastating critique of a movement whose name he regarded as similarly weak and unphilosophical: Futurism. In ‘The Futurists’ (1911), he admits that he does not know what Futurism is (‘even the Futurists themselves seem a little doubtful. Perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out’) but goes on to criticize Marinetti’s ‘Declaration of Futurism’ in some detail, quoting directly from 7 of its 11 sections.8 One might say the same of his criticism of ‘evolution’, a word Chesterton instinctively disliked but also a theory with which he frequently attempted to engage philosophically (however

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unsuccessful we might think these attempts). Modernism, to Chesterton, was merely a word. He never made the slightest attempt to understand the aims and ideas of the Modernist movement, and his dismissal of it is no more to the purpose than Dr Johnson’s attempt to refute Bishop Berkeley by kicking a stone. I have said that Chesterton’s quarrel with Romanticism and Aestheticism is philosophical, rather than stylistic. It is equally true that Chesterton’s apparent separation from Modernism is almost entirely a matter of style. His verse, in particular, like that of Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Frost and Edward Thomas, seems to carry Victorian poetic conventions well into the twentieth century, and even the most enthusiastic aficionado of Chesterton’s prose would probably feel that, by mentioning him alongside these poets, let alone Yeats or Eliot, I am placing him in rather exalted company. This is not because Chesterton lacked talent as a poet but because, as Nigel Forde notes, a Chesterton poem is ‘nearly always an argument’, often about some controversy that has now been dead and buried for the best part of a century.9 One of his best-known pieces of comic verse, for instance: Men don’t think it half so hard if Islam burns their kin and kith, Since a curate lives in Cardiff Saved by Smith.10

And is very satirical at the expense of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill of 1912. In this sense, Chesterton’s occasional verse suffers from the problem he erroneously identified as Modernist: it was once up-to-date and is now out-ofdate, too temporally specific to be focused on the eternal verities. He also kept largely to the traditional forms, especially the ballad, and employed a somewhat antiquated diction and quaint vocabulary (Kipling noticed ‘a bad attack of “aureoles”’ and an over-reliance on the word ‘wan’ in The Wild Knight, and recommended ‘a severe course of Walt Whitman’).11 Chesterton occasionally wrote in the Modernist mode of free verse, but his forays were generally facetious, as in his scathing parody ‘To a Modern Poet’, or his rewriting of a nursery rhyme in the style of Whitman. The epigraph to ‘A Curse in Free Verse’ comments satirically on the jingling rhyme in the title: ‘This is the only rhyme admitted: otherwise the enchanting lyric is all that the most fastidious fashionable taste could require.’12

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Chesterton’s more serious attempts at free verse were not generally published in his lifetime and most of them are to be found in his notebooks. Maisie Ward gives several in her biography, including the following, ‘North Berwick’: On the sands I romped with children Do you blame me that I did not improve myself By bottling anemones? But I say that these children will be men and women And I say that the anemones will not be men and women (Not just yet, at least, let us say). And I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with children And that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children And Browning and Darwin romping with children And Mr. Gladstone romping with children And Professor Huxley romping with children And all the Bishops romping with children; And I say that if a man had climbed to the stars And found the secrets of the angels, The best thing and the most useful thing he could do Would be to come back and romp with children.13

The images Chesterton evokes here have some of the studied incongruousness of Modernist poetry, and their absurdity increases as they approach the Victorian era. Shakespeare romping with children does not seem nearly so ludicrous as Gladstone or Huxley engaged in the same activity. So far as form is concerned, however, if one were selecting a poem to illustrate the argument that modernist poetry and free verse are not by any means synonymous, one could scarcely choose better than this. Without rhyme or metre, Chesterton’s poem falls immediately into the well-worn grooves of liturgy and litany. It has more in common with Christopher Smart (or, for that matter, the Book of Common Prayer) than any poem by Pound or Eliot. Eliot and Chesterton both wrote essays on free verse, and it is instructive to compare their views. Eliot argues emphatically that there is no such thing: Vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so-called vers libre, which is good is anything but ‘free’, it can better be defended under some other label . . . If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can

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define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.14

This comment is clearly applicable to Eliot’s own work. He writes rhymed, metred verse fairly frequently, but the poems that do not obey these rules seldom seem any freer than those that do. Indeed, rhyme and metre in Eliot are often a sign of comparative frivolity. Chesterton, on the other hand, does not question the existence of free verse, but objects that it is not sufficiently free: It seems founded on one subconscious idea; that talk is freer than verse; and that verse, therefore, should claim the freedom of talk. But talk, especially in our time, is not free at all. It is tripped up by trivialities, tamed by conventions, loaded with dead words, thwarted by a thousand meaningless things.15

He imagines instead a world where talk claims the freedom of verse: I have always had the fancy that if a man were really free, he would talk in rhythm and even in rhyme. His most hurried postcard would be a sonnet; and his most hasty wires like harp-strings . . . He would express his preference among the dishes at dinner in short impromptu poems, combining the more mystical gratitude of grace with a certain epigrammatic terseness, more convenient for domestic good feeling. If Mr. Yeats can say, in exquisite verse, the exact number of bean rows he would like on his plantation, why not the number of beans he would like on his plate? If he can issue a rhymed request to procure the honey-bee, why not to pass the honey?16

Eliot says that there is no freedom in art. Chesterton says that there is no freedom outside it, and that the perfection of freedom would be for life itself to become entirely artistic, for poetry to spill over into every area of existence. This is perhaps why the characters in Chesterton’s novels and stories frequently sound so artificial and rhetorical, why they talk, in the colloquial phrase, ‘like a book’. Admittedly, they do not sound like modern people. They do not sound like any people who have ever lived. Victorian realism, however, is one of the many things Modernism reacts against. If we now feel more catachresis in Chesterton’s orotund robbers and philosophical policemen than in Eliot’s method of estranging us from such characters with ironic distance, it is perhaps because the latter approach has spawned so many more imitators.

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While the didactic, argumentative nature of Chesterton’s verse often makes it seem prosaic, his prose-writing is even more frequently poetical. At first glance there is nothing particularly Modernist about ‘the pastille dawns and twilights’ that Fitzgerald singled out as Chesterton’s most admirable effects.17 If we consider Modernism as a narrowly stylistic phenomenon, Chesterton’s prose, like his verse, evidently stands outside it. If, however, we regard Modernism as a movement in which aesthetics are intertwined with politics and philosophy, certain aspects of his writing demonstrate that, however much he disliked the word, Chesterton did share some of the core values of Modernism. One, his backward-looking revolt against decadence in the present and immediate past, has already been mentioned. Another is perhaps best expressed in the way he wrote about urban environments, most often his native London. In his autobiography, Chesterton records an encounter with a prosaic Clapham journalist who refused to believe ‘that any remark about Clapham could be anything but a sneer at Clapham’: ‘There was utterly veiled from his sight the visionary Clapham, the volcanic Clapham, what I may be allowed to put upon the cosmic map as Thunderclapham.’18 Although Chesterton’s use of portmanteau words is more likely to derive directly from Lewis Carroll than from James Joyce, his primary aim, like that of Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, or Eliot in The Waste Land, is to estrange the reader from his or her habitat. In the vocabulary of Russian Formalism, this is the project of ostranenie, usually rendered in English as ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘estrangement’. In his manifesto for the Formalist method, ‘Art as Technique’, Viktor Shklovsky describes the artistic purpose of ostranenie as a response to the ennui of modernity: Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.19

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In the prefatory story to The Secret of Father Brown (1927), Chesterton objects to this technique when applied to human beings, and has the priest speak scornfully of those who say, for instance, that a man has a proboscis between his eyes, or that he falls into a fit of insensibility once every 24 hours, categorizing this as the precise opposite of his own sympathetic and intuitive method.20 When describing the urban environment, however, Chesterton’s use of estrangement is continual. It was the complacent Clapham journalist, he writes, against whom he marshalled ‘the silly pantomime halberdiers of Notting Hill’, and he goes on to describe the inertia exemplified by the journalist as the primary problem of his work: ‘It was the problem of how men could be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.’21 In The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), the two protagonists, Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne, are both poets, each of whom has published a volume of lyrics about London. Quin, reviewing both volumes anonymously, prefers the Modernism of Wayne’s poems to the hackneyed conceits of his own Victorian verse (published under the intentionally revolting pseudonym ‘Daisy Daydream’), pointing out that, while Daisy Daydream’s poems use the natural world to evoke the city, comparing a hansom cab, for instance, with a seashell, Wayne adopts a more original, defamiliarizing stance by comparing nature to the streetlamps and omnibuses of London, a position Quin explicitly identifies as Modernist.22 Quin comes to share Wayne’s appreciation of the city’s poetry, declaring that even the names of London boroughs are more beautiful and evocative than the vernal woods of the Romantics: Shallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called Hugmyin-the-Hole or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John’s Wood. I have never been to St. John’s Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.23

Both Quin’s and Wayne’s verses are parodies, and Chesterton calls Wayne a bad poet but insists that he is a poet nonetheless (just as a bad man is nonetheless a man); and his description of Wayne’s aesthetic appreciation for London’s

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‘violet roofs and lemon lamps, the chiaroscuro of the town’ recalls Fitzgerald’s praise for Chesterton’s own writing.24 Immediately before becoming King, Quin tells a series of absurd stories to his companions as they walk across Kensington Gardens. When one of them pretends to see the point, Quin cheerfully admits their nonsensical nature, then stands on his head, behaviour so nearly approaching lunacy that his friends think the two policemen who approach and announce Quin’s ascension to the throne have come to arrest him as a madman.25 As soon as he hears of his appointment, Quin begins to turn the entire country on its head with a curious juxtaposition of Mediaevalism and Modernism. He begins by sitting on the top hat of his friend Barker, a conventional politician and apologist for modernity. ‘A quaint old custom’, he explained, smiling above the ruins. ‘When the King receives the representatives of the House of Barker, the hat of the latter is immediately destroyed in this manner. It represents the absolute finality of the act of homage expressed in the removal of it. It declares that never until that hat shall once more appear upon your head (a contingency which I firmly believe to be remote) shall the House of Barker rebel against the Crown of England.’26

He later refers to this ritual, and to the feudal loyalty of the House of Barker, as ‘the tradition of ten centuries’.27 In fact, it is not even the tradition of ten minutes. The solidity of age-old custom is claimed for an idea dreamed up on the spur of the moment, a Modernist method for arriving at a mediaeval notion. This will be Quin’s modus operandi throughout the book. A chance encounter with a child inspires his fantastic scheme to turn the London suburbs into mediaeval citadels. Announcing his intentions to the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities, the King scatters his new and nonsensical traditions with a liberal hand: How many there were who had never heard of the true origin of the Wink of Wandsworth! What a large proportion of the younger generation in Chelsea neglected to perform the old Chelsea Chuff ! Pimlico no longer pumped the Pimlies. Battersea had forgotten the name of Blick.28

Quin’s identification with the principle of estrangement, established in the second chapter when he sees men in frock coats as dragons walking backwards,

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is intensified in this address by his invented etymologies. If one thinks of Notting Hill as the Earthy Paradise, ‘Nothing-ill’, one’s vision of the borough is transformed, perhaps even to the point of seeing it as Adam Wayne does. For Wayne’s estrangement from the everyday is even more complete than Quin’s, because it is consistent and serious. He discourses at some length to Mr Mead on the glory of being a grocer: ‘No Eastern king ever had such argosies or such cargoes coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and Solomon in all his glory was not enriched like one of you. India is at your elbow’, he cried, lifting his voice and pointing his stick at a drawer of rice, the grocer making a movement of some alarm, ‘China is before you, Demerara is behind you, America is above your head, and at this very moment, like some old Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in your hands.’29

Wayne’s rhetoric is very similar to Quin’s. One can imagine the King making just such a speech facetiously. Yet Wayne takes Notting Hill seriously and is genuinely entranced by the magic and mystery of its grocers’ shops where Mr Mead and his kind, like Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, gather infinite riches in a little room. Wayne has never been out of London and, as a ‘genuine natural mystic’, has no need of Quin’s defamiliarizing humour to see ‘how often the boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city’.30 At the end of the book, he explains to Quin the mission on which they have both been engaged: ‘We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace.’31 Chesterton habitually describes the function of poets in terms of defamiliarization and palingenesis. In Manalive (1912) he recognizes the poet’s task as being of more immediate use in the modern age than the priest’s. ‘I don’t deny’, he said, ‘that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.’32

This may be why, although his most famous character is a priest, Chesterton’s works are far more prodigally populated with poets.33 Two more of them open The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) with a debate between anarchy

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and order in a London suburb of modern design, constructed in imitation of some ill-defined earlier epoch. Lucian Gregory, a Wildean anarchist recycling ‘the old cant of the lawlessness of art’ argues that a poet of law and order is a contradiction in terms: ‘The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.’34 His opponent, Gabriel Syme, replies (just as Adam Wayne would have done) that the Underground Railway is poetical. If the clerks on the trains look sad and tired, as Gregory says they do, it is because they are as prosaic and unimaginative as Gregory’s idea of poetry. They cannot see the beauty that surrounds them because they imagine true beauty to be located elsewhere; in a rural idyll like the Romantics, or in Persian palace like the Aesthetes. Syme then makes a convincing case for the poetry of order: The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria . . . And when I hear the guard shout out the word ‘Victoria’, it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.35

Chesterton makes a similar assertion in propria persona in Orthodoxy (1908), that what scientists call order, law or necessity is really a kind of magic, and should be regarded as stranger and more wonderful than anarchy: ‘A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.’36 Syme’s emphasis, however, is on the order created by man in the urban environment, the extension of this magical principle to cities and railway stations. If the tree is a magic tree then the iron lamp, by the light of which one sees the tree, is even more magical. More thoroughly (because more consciously) than Adam Wayne, Syme is in reaction against rural Romanticism, and has little use for impulses from vernal woods. Syme’s (and Chesterton’s) ‘blessed rage for order’ anticipates that of Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot, who continually insisted on the rigorous structure underlying Modernist works of art, not only denying the very existence of free verse but arguing that similar restrictions applied to Modernist prose.37

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Joyce’s method in Ulysses is not simply a stream of consciousness but ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.38 This panorama of futility and anarchy is amply presented in The Man Who Was Thursday. The book is subtitled A Nightmare and, throughout his adventure, Syme is accompanied by a sense of estrangement, ‘the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world’.39 Having pulled off the nose of the Marquis de St Eustache to reveal the rather commonplace features of a fellow policeman, Syme begins to wonder wildly: Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men’s faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and turned into other people . . . Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.40

Later, Professor de Worms, reverting to his role as a German nihilist, quotes the closing lines of Pope’s Dunciad: Nor public flame; nor private, dares to shine; Nor human light is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos, is restored; Light dies before thine uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.41

For Chesterton, the imposition of order is more than a holding operation against a decline in aesthetic standards. It is a matter of life and death. In The Man Who Was Thursday, as in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, we are in a city that is identifiably London, with all the specificity of London geography, but we are continually whisked away by Moorish cupolas in Leicester Square

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and elephants stampeding down the Edgware Road.42 In a similar juxtaposition, The Ball and the Cross (1910) opens with a white steel airship gleaming incongruously above the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. At the end of The Man Who Was Thursday, Syme believes he sees a reason behind all the ludicrous juxtapositions and apparent anarchy: ‘So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.’43 This explanation brings us back to the poetry of order with which Syme began. Sunday, whether he is intended to represent God or Nature or neither, is ultimately not an Anarch. He is, like all his followers, a faultless felon, a policeman in disguise, and though he plunges everything temporarily into darkness, that darkness is finally dispelled and the novel that began with the sunset ends with the dawn. Like Eliot in The Waste Land, Chesterton has shown us a chaotic, decaying city, and like Eliot, he knows that there are crowds of the dead streaming over London Bridge; but unlike Eliot, he does not conclude his narrative with London Bridge falling down. Perhaps this is an evasion on Chesterton’s part. His novels do not conclude with the neat solutions that characterize the Father Brown stories. Like all his writings, in every genre, they are full of paradoxes, but the paradoxes here are more troubling and less mechanical than in Father Brown and the apologetic writing. Like Greenberg, Chesterton regards reality as ‘practically constituted’ by paradox, and uses it more often in an attempt to express a confusing truth than to provide a clear solution. People expect George Bernard Shaw to say what they do not expect him to say, he asserts in Heretics (1905): ‘It may be a paradox, but that is because paradoxes are true.’44 In Tremendous Trifles (1926), he connects the principle of estrangement with paradox, remarking to a friend as he departs on a journey: The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and heavy, and that if you utter that word ‘paradox’ I shall hurl it at your head. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It is not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is to go away from it.45

It is noteworthy that Robert Scholes, in The Paradoxy of Modernism, writes of paradox as a remedy for paradoxy, which he defines as ‘a kind of confusion

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generated by a terminology that seems to make clear distinctions where clear distinctions cannot – and should not – be made.’46 Scholes’s, and Chesterton’s, use of paradox to cut through the confusion of paradoxy reflects Modernism’s reaction against muddled modernity. Although The Paradoxy of Modernism contains only one reference to Chesterton (a negative one – Scholes merely compares the Father Brown stories unfavourably with Simenon’s Maigret books in terms of interest and durability), the paradoxical chapter headings which refer to ‘durable fluff ’, ‘iridescent mediocrity’ and ‘formulaic creativity’ are clearly in the Chestertonian tradition of Tremendous Trifles and Four Faultless Felons. The paradoxes of Chesterton’s own life and beliefs make it tempting to apply such terms to him: the Mediaeval Modernist, perhaps; or the Middlebrow Aesthete. Like Walt Whitman, Chesterton is large, he contains multitudes, and he contradicts himself, a quality we are inclined to ascribe to Postmodernism rather than Modernism.47 Often, however, the contradiction is more apparent than real, as is the case when he attacks Modernism, while espousing some of its central principles: the ‘modernism’ he abominates is a chimera. The same is true of his frequent, unconvincing pose of philistinism. ‘Higher culture’, he writes, ‘is sad, cheap, impudent, unkind, without honesty and without ease.’48 But this is only true if higher culture means ‘thinking the smallest poet in Belgium greater than the greatest poet of England’.49 In other words, Chesterton’s middlebrow aestheticism consists of condemning pretension while championing art – not an especially paradoxical position. His remarks in ‘The Slavery of Free Verse’ (1923) quoted above make it very clear that Chesterton is just as committed to approaching life in the spirit of art as any nineteenth-century aesthete. He demonstrates that approach, as George Bernard Shaw remarks, by giving to ordinary events and suburban people ‘a monstrous and strange and gigantic outline’.50 Chesterton’s allergic reaction to Nietzsche would have prevented him from identifying his position here with that of the notes edited as The Will to Power (1901), in which art is ‘the great means of making life possible’, the only superior counterforce to the nihilism of modernity.51 Even when he sympathized with Nietzsche and his disciples, he always regarded them as philosophical antagonists.52 Yet Chesterton’s books are full of opponents who are far closer to one another than the apathetic and conventional figures who

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surround them. Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne eventually discover that they are two lobes of the same brain, and this might also be said of Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme, Turnbull and MacIan in The Ball and the Cross, or Father Brown and Flambeau.53 These antagonists always end up as friends, and it is a neat artistic coincidence that the names of both Chesterton and his polar opposite, Bernard Shaw, the Nietzschean author of Man and Superman, are commemorated in those of two London-based performance artists who have taken this notion of everyday life transfigured into works of work to its farthest extreme: Gilbert and George. At this point, a neat and predictable conclusion offers itself. I could end this chapter by pointing out that, in the words of Hebrews 13:14, here we have no abiding city but seek one to come. Chesterton’s gaze was focused not merely on the earthly city of London, but on Bunyan’s city of Mansoul or Augustine’s City of God. It is unfortunate that so much critical writing on Chesterton concludes in these terms, for it suggests that Chesterton’s role as a writer is solely that of a Christian apologist, whose literary gifts have nothing to offer the secular reader but an enticement along the road to Rome. Of course, it is possible to read even the early works, before Chesterton was properly a Christian, let alone a Catholic, as though they were merely steps on the road to an inevitable conversion experience, but this is far from being the only way to understand Chesterton. T. S. Eliot, whose religious journey ran parallel to Chesterton’s, has never been lumped into the ‘Christian writer’ category alongside C. S. Lewis and Philip Yancey, and there is clearly one sense in which Chesterton’s inclusiveness, his catholicity with a small ‘c’, renders him more modern with a small ‘m’ than Eliot. The dry, dead land of The Hollow Men concludes with the lines: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.54

Chesterton’s response is characteristic and telling: Some sneer; some snigger; some simper; In the youth where we laughed, and sang. And they may end with a whimper But we will end with a bang.55

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For Eliot, life, death and the end of the world are empirically a certain way. Rhetorical repetition hectors the reader into accepting his conclusion (‘What I tell you three times is true!’).56 For Chesterton, as for William James, one can change the world by altering one’s attitude. The facetious style, aesthetically anything but Modernist, conceals a radical message. Whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper is a matter of choice, and Chesterton thought that too many people were not making or even discerning the choice before them, but meandering onto the path of pessimism through a failure to think clearly. In 1934, Chesterton wrote in The Listener: Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life . . . Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan Civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.57

Maisie Ward quotes this passage at the end of her biography and interprets it as ‘the sound of a trumpet calling us to Resurrection’, an exhortation to ‘go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis’. It is certainly, in the parlance of our times, a wake-up call, but it is one that resounds just as clearly without any supernatural element. Modern town populations think life dull because, like Lucian Gregory’s clerks on the underground railway, or the Clapham journalist deaf to the roar of Thunderclapham, they have not really looked at, listened to, or thought about, the strangeness of the modern town. To persuade them to step outside it, to realize the unlikeliness of this highly artificial human project, the complex culmination of thousands of years of civilization, and to exclaim ‘Victoria!’ when their train arrives with epic orderliness at the right station, this is not a narrowly religious project and does not need to end with the acceptance of any particular dogma. The aim of such estrangement is enlightenment, and enlightenment, like the process of perception, is an end in itself.

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Notes 1 George Orwell, whose complex relationship with Chesterton certainly merits an essay of its own, remarks in a review of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter: ‘I imagine that one major objective of young English Catholic writers is not to resemble Chesterton’ (The New Yorker, 17 July 1948, pp. 61–3). Greene, while he certainly did not imitate Chesterton, read his work regularly and often, comparing it favourably with that of the Modernist masters and remarking: ‘Put The Ballad of the White Horse against The Waste Land. If I had to lose one of them, I’m not sure that . . . well anyhow, let’s just say I re-read The Ballad more often!’ (quoted in Pearce (2005), p. 42). 2 G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908), p. 3. 3 Ibid., p. 4. 4 Chesterton’s Distributism, though it retains an element of private property, might be succinctly described as Luddite or Regressive Socialism; in other words, as Socialism minus the machine. 5 G. K. Chesterton, A Motley Wisdom (ed. N. Forde) (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), p. 133. 6 William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, 31 October 1979, later published in Arts 54. No. 6 (February 1980). 7 Ian Ker responds in just such a fashion on Chesterton’s behalf: I. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 90–2, referring to the elitist component in the thought of Nietzsche, Yeats, Shaw, Gissing and Wells as ‘more or less evil nonsense’. 8 G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911), p. 119. 9 Chesterton, A Motley Wisdom, p. 99. 10 Ibid., p. 116. 11 Letter from Rudyard Kipling to Brimley Johnson, 28 November 1901, quoted in M. Ward, G. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), pp. 143–4. Chesterton had already taken his course of Whitman, whose work influenced both his writing and his personal philosophy as early as 1894. 12 Chesterton, A Motley Wisdom, p. 118. 13 Ward, G. K. Chesterton, p. 259. 14 Reflections on Vers Libre. New Statesman VIII 204 (3 March 1917), p. 518. 15 Chesterton, A Motley Wisdom, p. 127. 16 Ibid., p. 127. 17 M. J. Bruccoli and J. S. Bauman (eds), F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 34. Chesterton’s sunsets are more numerous and memorable than his dawns and often occur at the beginning of

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23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity a story rather than the end, from the ‘long bands of burning crimson across the purple desolation’ of the Egyptian desert, which leads the mysterious figure at the beginning of ‘The Moderate Murderer’ to exclaim that the sun is setting in blood, to the ‘tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green’ which envelop Saffron Park (which ‘lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset’) in the opening lines of The Man Who Was Thursday. Perhaps Fitzgerald was influenced by Chesterton’s blood-red sunsets in ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ where ‘The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky.’ G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2001), pp. 83–4. V. Shklovsky, trans. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis in D. Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), p. 12. G. K. Chesterton, The Father Brown Stories (London: Cassell and Company, 1949), p. 465. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 84. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 68. ‘We have no space to speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the mastery.’ Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, p. 44. Ibid., p. 69. This sort of inversion occurs several times in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. The wise men in Chapter I speculate as to whether Londoners of the future will walk on their hands or live in upside down houses and Adam Wayne connects inversion with modernity when he observes: ‘Peter was crucified, and crucified head downwards. What could be funnier than the idea of a respectable old Apostle upside down? What could be more in the style of your modern humour?’ (Chesterton, 1994, p. 62). The Father Brown story ‘The Vanishing of Vaudrey’ also explores the theme of looking at things upside down to see them more clearly. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, p. 35. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., pp. 69–70. Ibid., p. 163. Chesterton (1947) II, ‘The Two Curates or The Burglary Charge’, p. 61. In the Father Brown stories alone we have Leonard Quinton (‘The Wrong Shape’), Muscari (‘The Paradise of Thieves’), Osric Orm (‘The Mirror of the Magistrate’) and Rudel Romanes (‘The Scandal of Father Brown’). With the exception of

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39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

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Muscari, they say very little, and are not particularly impressive figures, but then all the other characters talk poetically. Poetry, in Chesterton, is far too vital a thing to be left to the poets. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996a), pp. 8, 10. Ibid., p. 10. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1996b), p. 302. Stevens, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, Line 51. T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth. published in The Dial, Vol. 74 (1923). When Joyce founded a theatre company to stage English drama in Zurich during the First World War, one of the first plays he selected was Chesterton’s Magic. The same play later attracted the attention of Ingmar Bergman, who translated it into Swedish and used it as the basis for his 1958 film, Ansiktet. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1996a), p. 47. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Ibid., p. 130. The Moorish cupolas were actually there when The Man Who Was Thursday was written, in the elaborate structure of the Alhambra theatre, which was demolished in 1936, the year of Chesterton’s death. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1996a), p. 162. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane Company, 1919), Section XVI ‘On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity’, p. 130. G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1926) Section XXXI, ‘The Riddle of the Ivy’, pp. 55–6. R. Scholes, The Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. xi. W. Whitman, ‘Song of Myself ’, in Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1993), p. 113, Stanza 51. Chesterton, All Things Considered, p. 105. Ibid. G. K. Chesterton and G. B. Shaw, Do We Agree? (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), p. 3. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (tr. Kaufmann and Hollingdale) (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 452. Nietzsche, predictably, occupies a prominent place in Heretics, where Chesterton describes him, inter alia, as Bernard Shaw’s new master. The visual contrast between these characters is generally striking, as it was between Chesterton and Shaw. The gaunt figure of Wayne towers over the plump little King Auberon. Flambeau is a massive and dynamic figure compared to the short and stumpy Essex priest. T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men. Stanza V, Lines 28–31.

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55 Ward, G. K. Chesterton, p. 644. 56 L. Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the First, Line 8. 57 The Listener. 31 January 1934, quoted in Ward, G. K. Chesterton, p. 645.

Bibliography Bruccoli, M. J. and Bauman, J. S. (eds), F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996). Chesterton, G. K., All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908). —, The Ball and the Cross (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton & Company, 1910). —, Alarms and Discursions (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911). —, Heretics (New York: John Lane Company, 1919). —, The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925). —, Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1926). —, Four Faultless Felons (London: Cassell and Company, 1930). —, Manalive (London: Penguin, 1946). —, The Father Brown Stories (London: Cassell and Company, 1949). —, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). —, A Motley Wisdom (ed. N. Forde) (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). —, The Man Who Was Thursday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996a). —, Orthodoxy (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1996b). —, Autobiography (Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2001). Chesterton, G. K. and Shaw, G. B., Do We Agree? (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928). Griffin, R., Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Josipovici, G., What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Ker, I., G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Lodge, D. (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988). Nietzsche, F., The Will to Power (tr. Kaufmann and Hollingdale) (New York: Vintage, 1968). Orwell, G., The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001). Pearce, J., Literary Giants, Literary Catholics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). Scholes, R., The Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Ward, M., G. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943). Weller, S., Modernism and Nihilism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Whitman, W., Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1993).

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Distributism and the City1 Matthew Taunton

One of the results of the recent revival of critical interest in Chesterton has been to raise the question of his relationship to modernism, and this has in turn affected considerations of his representations of urban life. Matthew Beaumont has argued that Chesterton’s fiction hymns the metropolis; like the bizarre poetry of Adam Wayne in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), it ‘channel[s] all the spiritual passion of Romanticism from the countryside to the city’. For Beaumont, Chesterton ‘is one of the great modernist poets of the city, even though he is generally classed neither as a modernist nor as a poet’. Beaumont’s is one of several attempts to position Chesterton at least partly within modernism.2 The particular novelty of Beaumont’s argument, however, is its emphasis on the specifically urban dimension of Chesterton’s putative modernism. The Man Who Was Thursday is an example of a ‘purer modernism’ because it ‘jams the most incongruous urban images up against one another in order to evoke the glorious chaos of being in a metropolitan city’.3 This is worthy of exploration, and indeed it must immediately be conceded that Chesterton’s writing (especially that of the Edwardian period) displays a deep fascination with the modern metropolis, and with London in particular. In his ‘Defence of Detective Stories’, an essay from 1901, Chesterton claimed that it was the ‘realization of the poetry of London’ that made detective stories great. He went on: A city is, properly speaking, more poetic than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The

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crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard.

In defending detective fiction, Chesterton sought to ‘give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace.’4 Chesterton’s fiction of this period in various ways fulfils this programme for a popular literature dedicated to discovering the fantastic in the metropolitan mundane. Nevertheless, I am hesitant to follow Beaumont in ascribing Chesterton’s particular take on urban life to ‘modernism’, and hope to provide an alternative perspective by emphasizing the importance of his political thought, and in particular his Distributism. This chapter thus hopes to produce a complex picture of Chesterton’s original and somewhat cranky thinking about the city, rather than seeking to make him safe for the canon by pointing to affinities with literary modernism. In doing so it will emphasize the importance of Chesterton’s journalistic and non-fictional writing, and in particular his political theorizing, for understanding his work, as well as pointing to some of his lesser-known later fiction. Distributism is, I will argue, an important aspect of Chesterton’s thinking about the city that has seldom featured in recent literary critical accounts of his work.5 Indeed, a somewhat tendentious view of Chesterton’s writing appears if he is to be assimilated to the accepted canons of modernist literature and its default critical counterpart in the modernist sociology of Benjamin, Simmel and Kracauer. These sociological accounts of urban life place a priority on individual experience at street level, and in so doing reflect some of the characteristic concerns of literary modernism.6 But there are other sociological perspectives on the modern city that have a greater relevance to Chesterton’s urban visions. I will show how Distributism and its thinking about the metropolis can be illuminated by the classical political economy of J. S. Mill and the work of more recent sociologists and geographers of networks and urban infrastructure. Such theorists understand the modern city as producing not primarily an ever greater individualization but a greater necessity for collective effort and – disastrously from Chesterton’s perspective – concentrations of infrastructural sunk capital, whether in the hands of the state or of powerful individuals.

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Chesterton’s political philosophy crystallized into a political party, a creed and a manifesto of sorts in 1926, when the Distributist League held its inaugural meeting. Chesterton was president of the League and editor of its organ, G. K.’s Weekly, and at this meeting he explained the League’s principles by adapting a maxim of Francis Bacon’s: ‘Property is like muck, it is good only if it be spread’.7 The central tenets of Distributism were the defence of small property and the rehabilitation of peasant smallholding, a radical egalitarianism coupled with a fierce opposition to socialist collectivism and to monopoly capitalism.8 ‘The basic position of Distributism’, as Morag Shiach explains, ‘was that property should be divided up among the largest possible number of people, since the ownership of property is a basic right and its concentration the greatest possible threat to liberty.’9 Distributism was peasant-orientated and articulated primarily in rural terms, in relation to the ownership of agricultural land. This chapter seeks to explore the apparent tension between Chesterton’s ruralist Distributism and his early assertion that a city is ‘more poetic than a countryside’. It would be a mistake to look for a coherence and consistency in Chesterton’s view of the city that could cut across his fictional and non-fictional writings, and span the entire length of his career: doubtless his views changed, perhaps they were self-contradictory. But we need some way of mapping these inconsistencies in order to come to a better understanding of Chesterton’s political and utopian thinking and its relationship with the city. There are two obvious hypotheses which would allow literary critics to push aside the question of Distributism. The first is categorically false, and the second carries some merit but only in a weakened form. The first is that Chesterton celebrates the city (or at least produces a more nuanced and complex picture of it) in his fiction, while pursuing an anti-urban Distributist agenda in his nonfiction. This can be discounted because at least some of his fictional writings (as demonstrated below) are outright Distributist propaganda, and share Distributism’s radically oppositional attitude to the metropolis. A hypothesis such as this would seem to stem from a familiar literary-critical prejudice that would elevate fictional writing to the status of a ‘literature’ that is ineffable, complex and susceptible to multiple interpretations, in contrast to the dull certitude that is supposed to prevail in the drab realm of non-fiction and journalism. We need consider it no further.

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The second hypothesis deserves a fuller hearing, however: it is the idea that Chesterton changed his mind over the course of his career, that the ‘modernist poet of the city’ of the Edwardian period gave way to the polemical Distributist critic of urban modernity of the 1920s and 1930s. This idea gains some support from Chesterton’s biography, since the early urban fictions coincide with his residence in London, while his explicitly Distributist writings postdate his rustication following his move from Battersea to Beaconsfield in 1909.10 However, in both Margret Canovan’s G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist and William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy – probably the two most complete and compelling accounts of Chesterton’s political thought – Chesterton’s Distributism is seen as a set of positions that had animated his writing from the beginning.11 If it only got its name and started issuing membership cards at a relatively late stage of Chesterton’s career, in 1926, its core tenets – egalitarianism, the advocacy of peasant smallholding and the dual resistance to collectivism and monopoly capitalism – were present in his work from the Edwardian period. This is discernible in his essay ‘Why I am not a Socialist’ from the New Age in 1908, when Chesterton puts himself on the side of the people, arguing that they would, if given their way in a true democracy, crush Socialism with one hand and landlordism with the other. They will destroy landlordism, not because it is property, but because it is the negation of property. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Westminster should own whole streets and squares of London . . . If ever the actual poor move to destroy this evil, they will do it with the object not only of giving every man private property, but very specially private property; they will probably exaggerate in that direction; for in that direction is the whole humour and poetry of their own lives.

Here is, in 1908, the essential basis of what would later be called Distributism, a political philosophy that starts from the precept that ‘an Englishman’s house is his castle’.12 Yet while the fundamentals of his Distributism were in place by 1908, Chesterton had perhaps not yet followed them to their logical conclusion. The sense of the city’s romance and poetry had tempered and occasionally confused his underlying peasant ruralism in his early work. This urban poetics seems to fade into the background in his later career as he

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focused on his involvement in the Distributist League and his editorship of its organ. Mark Knight may well be right about ‘the decline of Chesterton’s literary work after 1914’; but my argument is not about literary value, it is about understanding the political project that underpins much of Chesterton’s writing about the city.13 This project may have been more clearly articulated and more rigorously pursued in Chesterton’s later career, but it was there in outline from very early on. The question of how Distributism might be applied to modern England is tackled in Tales of the Long Bow (1925), a fictional narrative that I hesitate to call a novel; it more closely resembles a utopian romance such as Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890), and – despite a continuous narrative and a consistent cast of characters – it is usually and somewhat confusingly referred to by critics as a short story collection. The story revolves around the League of the Long Bow – a ‘strange organization [that] originated in certain wild bets or foolish practical jokes indulged in by a small group of eccentrics’ – who, with the help of an American millionaire, initiate an agrarian revolution in order to ‘establish a yeomanry’, just as Distributists wanted to do.14 Chesterton in one sense evades the tricky questions about the future of the city by giving the story a predominantly rural setting. The book depicts no tricky negotiations about how to return Trafalgar Square to arable cultivation, or to pull down densely packed residential streets to make way for single-family subsistence farms. But there is never any doubt that Chesterton’s revolution is a revolution of the country against the town. Towards the end of the book one of the Leaguers, given the suitably revolutionary name of Robert Owen Hood, reads out a history of the revolution to his confreres: ‘The recent success of the agrarian protest’, remarked Hood in authoritative tones, ‘is doubtless to be attributed largely to the economic advantage belonging to an agrarian population. It can feed the town or refuse to feed the town; and this question appeared quite early in the politics of the peasantry that had arisen in the western counties. Nobody will forget the scene at Paddington Station in the first days of the rebellion. Men who had grown used to seeing on innumerable mornings the innumerable ranks and rows of great milk-cans, looking leaden in a grey and greasy light, found themselves faced with a blank, in which those neglected things shone in the memory like stolen silver.’15

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These agrarian rebellions, staged in defence of the landowning yeomanry (recently established by fiat of the American millionaire), are ‘the result of the attempt to enforce on the farmers certain regulations and precautions about their daily habit, dress and diet’ and ‘the sending of inspectors from London to see that these rules were enforced’.16 London is perceived here as an oppressive and autocratic centre that exerts undue power in the countryside. Chesterton viewed Westminster politics with contempt, along the lines set out in Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912), and Belloc’s collaboration with Cecil Chesterton (brother of G. K.) The Party System (1911).17 And yet conversely Chesterton emphasizes the paralysing state of dependency in which city dwellers find themselves, at the mercy here, not of some distant bureaucrat but the farmers who supply their vital needs. True freedom – which for Chesterton always means independence – is available only to the free peasant proprietor, who can grow food for himself and his family. The fundamental motto of this book is ‘Three Acres and a Cow’. In this book, at least, the loss of the city is not regretted. Indeed, the policy of the League of the Long Bow is developed out of a deep aversion to urban life. As with other revolutionary movements, the revolutionaries need an inclusive moniker they can call each other in order to indicate both solidarity and equality. ‘Citizen’ is proposed, but Pierce, one of the Leaguers, objects: Rather rum to call ourselves citizens when we’re all so glad to be out of the city. We really need some term suitable to rural equality. The Socialists have spoilt ‘Comrade’; you can’t be a comrade without a Liberty tie and a pointed beard. Morris had a good notion of one man calling another Neighbour. That sounds a little more rustic.18

‘Citizen’ is not right for the peasant yeomanry that Distributism aims to create because it is tied etymologically to the concept of membership of a city, and the word ‘comrade’ has been sullied by its association with the pointybearded, metropolitan intelligentsia. ‘Neighbour’ is settled upon as the most ‘rustic’ title. Tales of the Long Bow confirms that Chesterton’s Distributism is a fundamentally anti-urban political philosophy. We do not need to turn to Chesterton’s more obscure late fiction to find evidence for the idea that Distributism is hostile to the modern metropolis, however. It is stated programmatically and repeatedly in his journalistic writings. Chesterton contributed a strident article to G. K.’s Weekly in 1927,

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and I quote at length since the passage is important and difficult to access elsewhere: Distributists should keep constantly in mind the fact that we are not out to improve the present industrial system, but to destroy it. We want to shift the centre of gravity from the machine to the craftsman, from the factory to the farm. We want to decentralize production, so that each district may tend to be self-supporting, we want to have little knots of craftsmen everywhere supplying the needs of the district which feeds them. While we admit the existence of certain exceptional forms of ownership, as in a mine or factory, we insist that they are exceptions, and even here we make a distinction between a mine, which we must have, and a factory, which perhaps we need not have. We may find it useful to prepare definite plans for the Distributist working of mines. There is no sense in preparing detailed plans for the Distributist working of a factory. . . . We are accused of being vague, of having nothing to offer the vast army of people employed in factories and offices. Well, we have nothing to offer them – except a way out. We do not intend to devise schemes for making life in a factory or an office tolerable; that is what the monopolists intend to do, and no doubt they will do it. Our business, so far as the factory and office employés are concerned, is to make them desire freedom and to show them how they may be free. Our hopes are at once very bold and very modest. We hope to turn back the tide of monopoly, we hope to change England from a nation of machineminers, clerks and carriers to a nation of farmers and craftsmen. . . . The one thing needful is to preach steadily and work steadily for small ownership and the localization of production and consumption, while refusing to consider the irrelevant problem of the big town.19

Distributism did often try to ignore the ‘irrelevant problem of the big town’, as Chesterton had done to an extent in Tales of the Long Bow, which largely confines itself to the resurgence of peasant smallholding in the countryside. But the question of what to do with the cities refused to go away, and it was inevitably debated within the League and in Chesterton’s own writing. The relationship between the modern city and the monopolistic concentration of capital is investigated in a story, ‘The Paradise of Human Fishes’ (1925), that appeared in G. K.’s Weekly, the first in a series called ‘Utopias Unlimited’.20 The story is unsigned, but it seems reasonable to presume that it is Chesterton’s

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work. In the story, Mr Peter Paul Smith of Brompton, West London, has a dream in which he goes deep-sea diving in the Atlantic. He finds at the bottom of the ocean a city of 75,000 inhabitants called Gubbins City. On arrival he meets a native who explains the origins of the city to him in an American accent: You must be about the only guy that don’t know how Old Man Gubbins bought all the bottom of the Atlantic dirt cheap, because all the other boobs thought it was only dirt with nothing to it. He’s planted his factories here; and I tell you, Sir, this is going to be the new civilization.

Smith is not convinced, and his response is revealing in terms of the way Chesterton thought about the city. ‘What an awful life’, he says, ‘to live and die breathing air that’s only pumped down to you by the favour of somebody miles away.’21 The problem with Gubbins City, in this story, is that it makes you dependent on Old Man Gubbins for your air. ‘Of course in our situation’, the resident explains, ‘we have to do pretty much as we’re told by the headquarters on land; and the old man likes to keep his finger on the string.’ The story then goes on to suggest that this is not unique to Gubbins City – that really any city, by virtue of its size, is reliant on the favour of some distant person or authority. When Smith challenges him, the native of Gubbins City responds: Are there many brooks in Brompton? . . . or have you a well in your front garden, or do you go out and drink the rain? No, you have all your water pumped to you by the favour of somebody miles away. I don’t see there’s much difference between us. You are surrounded by air and have water pumped to you. We are surrounded by water and have air pumped to us. But we should both die if anything went wrong.

This goes to the heart of the problem of the city as Chesterton saw it. The sheer scale of the modern metropolis puts it out of the grasp of the ‘ordinary man’ – a common touchstone in Chesterton’s political writing. London, Chesterton’s story says, is analogous to Gubbins city in this respect; it makes its citizens dependant for their livelihood on ‘the favour of somebody miles away’. Smith is appalled to see that the inhabitants of Gubbins City are attached to their air supply by a tube to their diving helmets, ‘like marionettes’. But again his interlocutor draws a parallel with London: ‘I fancy you people are hung on wires, too; telephone wires; telegraph wires; all sorts of wires.’22 The effect of

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the story is to make us aware of the networked infrastructure upon which metropolitan man has become dependent, and to alert us to the dangers of this dependence. To understand the significance of this, it will now be necessary to put Chesterton’s writing about the city in the context of a tradition of thinking about urban infrastructure or urban networks. The terms of the modern debate are set out in J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, first published in 1848, and interesting work is being done in this field today, from sociological, geographical and other perspectives. For Mill, the networks and infrastructures that make urban living possible – water, gas, electricity, sewerage, transportation systems and so on – are ‘practical monopolies’ (or ‘natural monopolies’).23 These are elements of infrastructure in any large human settlement that, by dint of their size and the extent of capital investment required, normally preclude any meaningful market competition, creating an inevitable monopoly. Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer described the metropolis primarily through the individual and his interactions with the crowd, but such work – so important now to our understanding of literary modernism – seems beside the point when considering the Distributist analysis of the city. Instead we need a theory of the metropolis that foregrounds infrastructure, like that outlined by Herman and Ausubel: Cities are the summation and densest expressions of infrastructure, or more accurately a set of infrastructures, working sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frustrating discord, to provide us with shelter, contact, energy, water and means to meet other human needs. The infrastructure is a reflection of our social and historical evolution. It is a symbol of what we are collectively, and its forms and functions sharpen our understanding of the similarities and differences among regions, groups and cultures. The physical infrastructure consists of various structures, buildings, pipes, roads, rail, bridges, tunnels and wires.24

Much work on urban networked infrastructure has gone on in the social sciences, sometimes on the quantitative side of those disciplines, and has been couched in a technical language that may be off-putting to humanities scholars and students. Yet important work is being done, and some of it is increasingly accessible to the non-specialist. Such work could supply a useful impetus to humanities scholars to rethink the theories of the city prevalent in

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their own disciplines. Matthew Gandy, for example, has given a central place to infrastructure in his stimulating and accessible work on modern cities, and has worked in particular on waste disposal, water and sewerage systems.25 In a similar vein, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin have persuasively argued that the discussion of ‘networked urban infrastructures’ needs to be rescued from ‘the dry, technocratic and closed professional discourses of the ‘technical’ bodies which tend to run and manage them’, because of the vital political importance of these questions to the modern city.26 Chesterton would certainly have agreed. ‘The Paradise of Human Fishes’, seen in this light, asks us to see the city primarily from the perspective of its infrastructure. It encourages us to think about the ‘buildings, pipes, roads, rail, bridges, tunnels and wires’ that hold a city together, and raises the problem of who owns and controls them. Mill’s solution to this problem started from his general rule of thumb, that government should interfere as little as possible in the economy. But he conceded that there must be exceptions in cases such as the ‘gas and water companies’, roads, canals and highways. These are natural monopolies, Mill goes on, and therefore they are services ‘better performed by the municipal authorities of the town, and the expense defrayed . . . by a local rate.’27 While adopting the general principle that large-scale state ownership should be kept to a minimum, then, Mill also concedes that there are some things that should not be allowed to fall into private hands. The networked infrastructure that is essential to the running of the metropolis must needs be nationalized, or at least municipalized. A minimal degree of collectivism – that is, socialism – is preferable to a situation where infrastructure is owned by private capitalists, who would effectively, as Mill argues, be in a position to levy taxes on the general populace without accountability or mandate. It must again be emphasized that Distributism explicitly positioned itself as an alternative to socialism. It saw any attempt to nationalize land, industries or other forms of property as the consolidation of capital in the hands of the few, regardless of the fact that this ‘few’ claimed the legitimacy of being the state and operating on behalf of the people. Distributism in its most extreme formulations wanted to find a way out of this problem of practical monopolies not by nationalizing them but by working towards a less networked society with less infrastructure. This often meant a society without cities. It must be

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said, however, that beyond the basic principle of small property for all there was much disagreement within the League. As Margaret Canovan records: Some members were fanatical medievalists in homespun garments, who wished to dismantle industrial civilization lock, stock and barrel; others opposed this, and furious passions arose over such issues as whether a dentist’s drill was a machine for the purposes of utopia.28

Such debates may well have been symptomatic of the League’s degeneration into ‘a talking shop for middle-class idealists’, but they were also in a sense unavoidable if the practicalities of applying Distributism – to cities in particular – were to be thought through. In G. K.’s Weekly, for example, there was a longstanding debate about how Distributists should approach large-scale industry, which had an important bearing on the question of the city. This was conducted at a rather more serious level than the fractious fancy-dress party Canovan describes. Purists, like A. J. Penty, argued that when it comes to machinery we must ‘see the need of abolishing most of it, if not all’, while others, like Maurice Reckitt, argued that we ought not to ‘turn our back on modern technique’ and that ‘a distribution of shares, [or] what I would rather describe as a universalization of dividends, is the clue to an effective Distributivism today.’29 In industries such as coal mining – which provided a raw material that was thought indispensable even in a predominantly peasant society and could not be done on a small scale – Distributists frequently favoured various ways of ensuring that companies were jointly owned between their employees and the profits shared, opening the door to a sort of de-centralized collectivism.30 Chesterton’s own take was that ‘we accept the principle of profit-sharing, or share-holding in a workshop or machine, as a second best where absolute private ownership is clearly impossible.’31 One of the practical monopolies that interested Distributists, and Chesterton in particular, was the railway, closely associated with the growth of nineteenth-century London and a sticking point in Distibutist debates about the metropolis. Given their combined opposition to monopoly capitalism and state collectivism, Distributists were set to ponder several interconnected questions: Could railways be run on anything but a monopolistic basis, for example through the sort of participatory shareholding democracy that Reckitt argued for? Or would the Distributist utopia, after the more radical manner of Penty, do away with railways altogether? Or, finally, should some

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minimal concession to state-owned infrastructure be made in the case of the railway and a limited number of other practical monopolies? These questions were addressed increasingly directly in the 1920s and 1930s, but I want to keep them in the background as I begin with a memorable incident in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) when the anarchist poet Lucian Gregory debates the London Underground with the ‘poet of law’ Gabriel Syme. Gregory asks: Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains looks so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for, that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture . . . if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!32

The anarchist has generally, and with good reason, been read as a representative of the fashionable Nietzschean, Whistlerian scepticism that Chesterton had encountered at the Slade School of Art in the 1890s and denounced in Heretics.33 For this anarchist and sceptic, urban life is boring and alienating, it runs along familiar lines, familiar rails. Only a revolutionary – nay, metaphysical – disruption of the city and its infrastructure can make it romantic and interesting. Gregory’s interlocutor, Syme, seems on first inspection to be occupying the Chestertonian position by making a claim as a ‘poet of order’ for the romance of the highly ordered industrial metropolis and its predictable, reliable networked infrastructure: Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a time-table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!34

There can be little doubt that Chesterton takes impish delight here in the paradoxical and counter-intuitive nature of Syme’s argument: Bradshaw, the publisher of the train timetables that made Victorian London tick, is a greater poet than Byron. Slavoj Žižek thinks that this is ‘the archetypal Chestertonian discovery of how order is the greatest miracle and orthodoxy the greatest of all rebellions’.35 This view of Chesterton, as a poet like Syme who rhapsodizes

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about trains that run to a strict timetable and arrive with precision at the correct destination, implies an acceptance of centralized urban infrastructure and therefore, if we accept Mill’s argument, an acceptance of monopolistic concentrations of property either in the hands of private individuals or of the state. As such it would tend to contradict not only what we know of Chesterton as a Distributist, but also the mood of a novel like The Napoleon of Notting Hill, whose utopia of decentralized infrastructure is discussed below. Chesterton sets out the Distributist view of the railway in an editorial in G. K.’s Weekly, using it to exemplify his argument that socialism and monopoly capitalism are essentially the same, reliant on big cities with monopolistic infrastructures. Chesterton paints a picture of the suburban clerk: from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep again, his whole life is run in grooves made by other people, exactly as if he were in the most bureaucratic hive of the social reformers. . . . As if to emphasise the allegory that he goes always in ruts, he goes always up to work on rails. He has forgotten what his fathers, the hunters and the pilgrims and the wandering minstrels, meant by finding their way to a place. The way is already found; everything is already found.36

The clerk arrives, with sickening predictability, at Victoria. Just like the anarchist poet Gregory, Chesterton pours scorn here on the centralization and standardization that the commuter railway brings to the metropolis. The railway – a natural monopoly centrally owned by a private corporation or by the state – denies the individual his independence, placing him at the mercy of a distant bureaucrat. It is like the air supply to Gubbins City. Now, it is possible to find Distributists, in a pragmatic mood, conceding that certain practical monopolies like this might continue to exist in a Distributist society, and in some cases to accept that they should be owned publicly, by the state. Chesterton’s close collaborator and fellow Distributist Hilaire Belloc argues in The Restoration of Property (1936), a series of Distributed essays that originally appeared in the English Review, that there are fewer practical monopolies than socialists and plutocrats would claim, but he does acknowledge the existence of a few: ‘There is the railway; there is the post office, including telephones and telegraphs; there is the road system of the country.’ In these cases, Belloc concedes, ‘[s]tate control for the purpose of preventing irresponsible monopoly is essential’.37 This question of the state

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control of industries was on the agenda during the General Strike of 1926, and Chesterton – strongly sympathetic to the miners – campaigned in G. K.’s Weekly against the nationalization of coal, arguing instead for the miners themselves to acquire ‘a certain status in the management of the mines’ such that they ‘would sooner or later become the true owners, and there would be no place in the industry for the mere financier and his operations.’38 But – again demonstrating the sense that these issues were not settled within the movement – an unsigned account of a meeting of the Distributed League printed in G. K.’s the following year (after the failure of the General Strike to achieve either its own goals or Chesterton’s) suggested a different view: ‘We concede that coal may have to be nationally owned because mining is an exceptional thing, and an individual cannot own a mine as he can own a farm.’39 What is clear from all of these debates is that Distributism wanted to minimize the number of practical monopolies and so minimize the extent of collectivist state ownership. In this respect, Distributism differs radically in its view of urban infrastructure from, for example, social democracy. In his 2010 book, Ill Fares the Land, the historian Tony Judt sets out a passionate defence of social democracy in which he sees railways as ‘a collective project for individual benefit’, and symbolic of the power of collective human enterprise. They are, for Judt, a classic example of a public utility that must needs be owned publicly, by the state.40 Judt does not advocate socialism in its maximal sense – defined by Martin Malia as ‘the end of private property and the market’ and achieved in the erstwhile command economies of the Communist bloc – but the Keynesian compromise, with a mixed economy consisting of a private sector and a stateowned one.41 Unlike Chesterton and Mill, however, he sees state ownership as a good in itself, and he therefore embraces practical monopolies because, when in the hands of a democratic state, they provide opportunities for a ‘collective project’. The railways are the very embodiment of public-spirited enterprise: If we cannot see the case for expending our collective resources on trains, it will not be because we have all joined gated communities and no longer need anything but private cars to move around between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who do not know how to share public space to common advantage. The implications of such a loss would far transcend the decline or demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life itself.42

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Judt’s evident admiration for the railway echoes Syme’s ‘Give me Bradshaw, I say!’, although he might not have seen the need to choose between Bradshaw and Byron. Judt places nationalized transport infrastructure – of the kind that Distributists wanted to minimize – at the heart of a certain social-democratic vision of civil society. And he puts ‘private cars’ on a par with gated communities as the enemy of this ideal. Distributists, on the other hand, were more open to the rise of the motorcar, and even saw it as a way of reducing the urbanite’s dependence on the inherently monopolistic railway. Take Chesterton’s article ‘The Free Man and the Ford Car’, from 1925. The ‘popularization of motoring’, Chesterton argues, represents a complete contradiction to the fatalistic talk about inevitable combination and concentration. The railway is fading before our eyes . . . And the railway really was a communal and concentrated mode of travel like that in a Utopia of the Socialists. The free and solitary traveller is returning before our very eyes . . . having recovered to some extent the freedom of the King’s highway in the manner of Merry England. . . . To that limited extent the Ford motor is already a reversion to the free man. If he has not three acres and a cow, he has the very inadequate substitute of three hundred miles and a car. I do not mean that this development satisfies my theories. But I do say that it destroys other people’s theories; all the theories about the collective thing as a thing of the future and the individual thing as a thing of the past.43

Similarly, Belloc writes: it is not true that the machine is necessarily a centralizer of effort; in some cases it is, in others it is not. The railway worked in favour of those who desired to centralize effort for an already founded capitalist system. But the internal combustion engine works the other way. It transports men and things in decentralized fashion, and it is at the command of small man.44

Against the ‘centralizer of effort’ that is the railway, Distributists counterposed the motorcar as a form of transport that made the independence of the peasant yeoman possible within an industrial, and perhaps a metropolitan, society. Belloc stressed that it is ‘part of our policy to favour the new road transport against the railway, because road transport can be worked in small units and the railway cannot.’45 These Distributist engagements with urban transport are ahead of their time in sociological terms, seeming to pre-empt models of

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decentralized urban networks that were not to gain currency until the Internet age. Distributism seized on the motorcar as its avatar not as a way of negating the city but as a way of adapting and changing the city, restoring to the railwaybound clerk his lost independence. The observation that mechanical progress need not always lead towards centralization and collectivism is an important one for Distributism, and suggests a more nuanced perspective on the modern city than the resolutely anti-metropolitan views I have been discussing. In a debate with George Bernard Shaw in 1928, Chesterton suggests that practical monopolies may not be a necessary feature of metropolitan life: It is quite false to say you must have a centralised machinery, even in towns. It is quite false to say that all forces must be used, as they are in monopolies, from the centre. It is absurd to say that because the wind is a central thing you cannot separate windmills.46

In the same debate Chesterton distanced himself – and Distributism – from the idea of simply dismantling London and returning it to cultivation by peasant smallholders: ‘at no time did I say that we must make the whole community a community of agricultural peasants’, he said; ‘It is absurd’.47 As we have seen, Chesterton did at times say this, or something similar. But if he wanted to encourage peasant smallholding, he could also be quite scathing of the ambition of Morris’s medievalist followers to ‘turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress ball’.48 The implication of the windmill analogy is that cities can exist in the Distributist utopia, and that this might not even involve compromising with collectivism in the way that Belloc had suggested. It implies, in other words, that it will be possible to have large, high-density agglomerations of people who are not dependent on infrastructural monopolies of one kind or another. Urban railways will give way to the proliferation of private cars. Belloc wrote, in a similar vein, that ‘much of the centralized mechanical production of our time could be decentralized through the now widely distributed use of electrical power.’49 Distributism undoubtedly involved at times nostalgia for a (no doubt partly imaginary) version of the Middle-Ages.50 But intriguingly the medievalist quest for a decentralization of power and property, as in the case of electricity and the motorcar, found its impetus in the most up-to-date technology, and in many ways prefigured later developments both in the fabric of the metropolis and in the theories that apply to it. This invocation of modern

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technologies in the service of a counter-reformation has some suggestive parallels with the media theory of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, and indeed both were devout Catholics and readers of Chesterton.51 More recently, Graham and Marvin have written that the era of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ was characterized by the ‘growth of regulated network monopolies’, a period during which, ‘across the urban world, small, fragmented islands of infrastructure were joined up, integrated and consolidated towards standardized, regulated networks designed to deliver predictable, dependable services across (and increasingly beyond) the metropolis.’ For Graham and Marvin, this period is now over, and we have entered a period of ‘splintering urbanism’, as cities become less reliant on big, centralized infrastructure networks. They attribute this to ‘privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation and the application of new technologies’, and begin to weigh the ‘risks of urban fragmentation’ against the ‘benefits that come from recognizing and addressing the needs of urban diversity’.52 Some of the splintering effects of this postinfrastructural age are already a reality, while some remain speculations, and the extent of cities’ continued reliance on networked infrastructure should not be understated. In terms of telecommunications networks, as Steven Connor notes, ‘the dream of dispensing with wires is an old and recurrent one’, part of a utopian wish to ‘live as the angels had once been thought to live, in a world of instantly transmitted thoughts and impulses’.53 Connor shows how just how wiry the modern world stubbornly continues to be. The challenge of adapting modern technologies to move cities into a post-infrastructural age has recently been taken up by the Gates Foundation, which has funded research that aims ‘to reinvent the toilet as a stand-alone unit without pipedin water, a sewer connection, or outside electricity – all for less than 5 cents a day’.54 From the perspective of Distributism, the Gates Foundation’s coveted stand-alone toilet relates to the great sewerage systems of the nineteenth century in the same way as the motorcar relates to the train. Yet Londoners are still bound to their nineteenth-century sewers, and receive quarterly reminders of the monopoly currently held by Thames Water. In ‘The Paradise of Human Fishes’, water supply was a central concern, and the Gubbins City inhabitant tells Smith that ‘[y]ou cannot go back to the peasant owning his own well’: an increasingly networked world of increasingly centralized infrastructure was an inevitable reality.55 But initiatives like the stand-alone

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toilet suggest that modern technologies are enabling a move away from largescale, homogeneous networked infrastructure towards decentralized, local, informal and in short distributed amenities. Viewing Chesterton’s writing about the city through the lens of his Distributism clarifies for us his resistance to the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’, which gained its fullest expression in the modernist urbanism of Le Corbusier. With this notion of ‘urban diversity’ in mind, I now turn to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which can also be seen as developing a Distributist critique of the metropolis, as early as 1904. Chesterton’s debut novel imagines a future London where small localities gain their autonomy and become independent citystates. It imagines a retreat from industrial, metropolitan modernity into what Chesterton thought of as the more settled communities of the medieval period: ‘A revival of the arrogance of the old medieval cities applied to our glorious suburbs’, as the eccentric King Auberon Quin puts it.56 This is explicitly set up in the novel as a rebellion against large-scale networked infrastructure. The war between Notting Hill and its neighbouring principalities is triggered by a dispute about the building of the ‘Hammersmith to Maida Vale thoroughfare’, which would necessitate the demolition of Pump Street, Notting Hill. The road is a large piece of infrastructure, initiated by ‘modern improvers with their boards and inspectors and surveyors and all the rest of it’ – the descendants of Haussmann and (though Chesterton could not have known it in 1904) Le Corbusier.57 Adam Wayne, the earnest Provost of Notting Hill, will have none of it, and goes to war to defend Pump Street and the ‘League of the Free Cities’ against this attempt to impose the modern infrastructural ideal. This ideal is also at stake later in the novel, when it is embodied in the Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. The tower plays an interesting part in the final war depicted by the novel, when the other boroughs fight back against the now imperialistic ambitions of Adam Wayne’s Notting Hill. Wayne is able to extract a surrender from the armies of South Kensington and Bayswater – despite their vastly superior numbers – because he has captured the Waterworks Tower, and threatens to ‘open the great reservoir and flood the whole valley where you stand in thirty feet of water’. Following this victory, ‘the Empire of Notting Hill began’, and thus Wayne’s popular revolution enters its imperial, Napoleonic phase and loses Chesterton’s sympathy.58 Wayne now becomes an Emperor and he orders the Waterworks Tower to be ‘plated with gold’, reinforcing the connection

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between large-scale urban infrastructure and the imperialistic centralization of power and property. As with Old Man Gubbins, Adam Wayne’s control of a vital piece of infrastructure allows him to ‘keep his finger on the string’, holding unaccountable power over the inhabitants of the city. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is not a celebration of the metropolis as it is embodied in the modern infrastructural ideal. Instead it gleefully imagines London’s splintering into a decentralized network of separate and parochial village communities. The novel then sees Adam Wayne achieves his imperialistic ambitions by using the power of urban infrastructure against his rivals, and the Waterworks Tower becomes the symbol as well as the mechanism of his victory. It seems to me, then, that Chesterton’s urban fictions are not examples of literary modernism in the sense that Beaumont suggests. Chesterton’s approach to the city was not that of the modernist flâneur or dandy. He approached the metropolis not as a modernist artist but as a reformer, albeit one who wrote novels (among other things). The aims of that reform were clear from an early stage of his career, long before they became part of the official Distributist programme. Chesterton was perhaps best known in his time as a polemicist, and in this chapter I have explored a sometimes neglected polemical side to his writing about – indeed, often writing against – the modern city. Distributism is a crucial aspect of his thinking that has tended to be neglected by literary critics who wish to recuperate him for the canon, perhaps because it lends weight to the view that Chesterton was a crank. Nevertheless, it can help us better to understand what is at stake in Chesterton’s representations of the city. I have argued that Chesterton needs to be understood as a writer deeply engaged with the city primarily on the level of its infrastructure rather than the experience of the streets. For him, this raises questions in particular about private property and collectivism, and the presence of these questions can be felt in both his fictional and non-fictional work. His responses to the city range from the blatantly medievalist rejection of it, to more nuanced and interesting speculations – in The Napoleon of Notting Hill and ‘The Free Man and the Ford Car’, for example – about whether and how certain technologies or social arrangements might allow the city to subsist with a massively reduced dependence on networked infrastructure. These latter concerns lie outside the normal territory of literary modernism, yet they fascinate because of their continued relevance to our own time.

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Notes 1 I would like to thank the Leverhulme trust for funding the research project of which this chapter forms a part. 2 John Coates muddies the distinction between literary modernism and its cultural contexts, but argues that Chesterton’s engagements with contemporary scepticism, solipsism and ‘cultural fracture’ create continuities between his work and that of writers more conventionally thought of as modernists. See J. Coates, G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2002), pp. 28–9. Robert L. Caserio, meanwhile, focuses on what he calls ‘double writing’ in The Man Who Was Thursday, a tension between linguistic certainty and ambiguity which positions Chesterton simultaneously within outside modernism. See R. L. Caserio, ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism’, in Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 63–82 (p. 67). I incline towards Mark Knight’s assessment in Chesterton and Evil that ‘[a]lthough modernism has come to be seen in more fluid terms of late, it remains difficult to accommodate Chesterton within this paradigm’. Knight emphasises instead the importance of religion, which has been ‘frequently written out of literary histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ in M. Knight, Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 2, 8. 3 M. Beaumont, ‘Introduction’, in The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. xi–xxx (p. xxvi). 4 G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901), pp. 120–1. 5 This Distributist writing has received some attention from political theorists, notably in M. Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (London; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1977), pp. 80–111. Morag Shiach has explored its relevance to a wider discourse about labour, in which modernist writers were also involved, in M. Shiach, Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 224–5. It has also inspired political imitators from the racists of the National Front (see D. Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 44–5) to the in-house philosopher of David Cameron’s Tories, Philip Blond (see J. Raban, ‘Cameron’s Crank’, London Review of Books (22 April 2010), 32(8), pp. 22–3), right through to the communitarian pacifists of the Catholic Worker Movement (see M. Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005). 6 A typical account of the connections between the urban sociology of Simmel and Benjamin and the development of literary modernism can be found in R. Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 71–82.

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Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist, p. 89. Ibid., p. 18. Shiach, Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood, p. 224. I. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 251. W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874– 1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 372; Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist, pp. 81–99. G. K. Chesterton, ‘Why I Am Not a Socialist’, The New Age (1908), 2(10), 189–90 (190). Knight, Chesterton and Evil, p. 12. G. K. Chesterton, Tales of the Long Bow (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1925), pp. 201, 288–9. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 283. H. Belloc and C. Chesterton, The Party System (London: Latimer, 1911); H. Belloc, The Servile State (London; Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1912). Chesterton, Tales of the Long Bow, p. 204. G. K. Chesterton, ‘What We’re Getting at’, G. K.’s Weekly (2 April 1927), 5(107), 320. Ibid. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., pp. 16, 17. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1965), vol. 2, p. 995. J. Ausubel and R. Herman, Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), p. 1. M. Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste (London: Earthscan, 1994); M. Gandy, ‘The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. New Series (1999), 24(1), 23–44; M. Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT, 2002); S. Frank and M. Gandy, Hydropolis: Wasser Und Die Stadt Der Moderne (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006). S. Graham and S. Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 34. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, pp. 955–6. Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist, p. 89. A. J. Penty, ‘The Line of Least Resistance’, G. K.’s Weekly (23 May 1925), 1(10), 200–1 (201); M. B. Reckitt,‘Machinery and the Distributive State’, G. K.’s Weekly (6 June 1925), 1(12), 247–8 (247, 248). Unsigned, ‘The Land’, G. K.’s Weekly (1927), 4(95), 188.

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31 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Straws in the Wind: An Explanation in Brackets’, G. K.’s Weekly (1927), 4(96), 197. 32 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 4. 33 See Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, pp. 89–90. 34 Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p. 4. 35 S. Žižek, ‘Hegel – Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity’, The Symptom, 7 (2006). 36 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Utopia’, G. K.’s Weekly (2 May 1925), 1(7), 121–2 (121). 37 H. Belloc, ‘The Restoration of Property: IV’, English Review (July 1933), 57(1), 24–36 (29). 38 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Way to the Servile State’, G. K.’s Weekly (26 June 1926), 3(67), 248. 39 Unsigned, ‘The Land’, p. 188. 40 T. Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2010), p. 215. 41 M. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney: The Free Press, 1994), p. 34. 42 Judt, Ill Fares the Land, p. 216. 43 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Found Wandering: The Free Man and the Ford Car’, G. K.’s Weekly (25 April 1925), 1(6), 106–7 (106). 44 H. Belloc, ‘The Restoration of Property: II – the Handicap against Restoration’, English Review (February 1933), 56(2), 169–82, (172). 45 Belloc, ‘The Restoration of Property: IV’, p. 30. 46 G. K. Chesterton, and G. B. Shaw, Do We Agree? (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), p. 44. 47 Ibid., p. 45. 48 G. K. Chesterton, Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902), p. 24. 49 Belloc, ‘The Restoration of Property: IV’, p. 27. 50 As Belloc writes in the same essay: ‘During the Dark Ages well-distributed property in land gradually reappeared; during the Middle-Ages it was the universal rule. Even in the early part thereof the serf might still be constrained to work for his Lord, but he was secure in the ownership of a portion of his native land not subject to competitive rent, inalienable so long as the customary dues were paid, and his land passed on from him to his descendants. In most countries this state of affairs developed after the Middle Ages into the establishment of a free peasantry, that is, of citizens possessing, in numbers sufficient to determine the character of their society, land of their own, coupled with political as well as economic freedom.’ Ibid., pp. 415–16. 51 The link between Chesterton and Belloc on the one hand and McLuhan and Ong on the other has not been comprehensively explored elsewhere and is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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52 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, pp. 40, 91, 136. 53 S. Connor, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011), p. 206. 54 Gates Foundation, ‘Gates Foundation Launches Effort to Reinvent the Toilet’, (2011). www.gatesfoundation.org/press-releases/Pages/safe-affordable-sanitation110719.aspx [Accessed 2 June 2012]. 55 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Paradise of Human Fishes’, G. K.’s Weekly (28 March 1925), 1(2), 16–17, (17). 56 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 39–40. 57 Ibid., p. 60. 58 Ibid., pp. 134, 135. Chesterton had always been a critic of imperialism in and of the British Empire in particular. He was pro-Boer during the Boer War because of his belief in their right to political self-determination. See Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, pp. 210–15.

Bibliography Ausubel, J. and Herman, R., Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988). Beaumont, M., ‘Introduction’, in The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. xi–xxx. Belloc, H., The Servile State (London: Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1912). —, ‘The Restoration of Property: II – the Handicap against Restoration’, English Review (February 1933), 56(2), 169–82. —, ‘The Restoration of Property: IV’, English Review (July 1933), 57(1), 24–36. Belloc, H. and Chesterton, C., The Party System (London: Latimer, 1911). Canovan, M., G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (London; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1977). Caserio, R. L., ‘G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism’, in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 63–82. Chesterton, G. K., The Defendant (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901). —, Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902). —, ‘Why I Am Not a Socialist’, The New Age (1908), 2(10), 189–90. —, ‘Found Wandering: The Free Man and the Ford Car’, G. K.’s Weekly (25 April 1925), 1(6), 106–7. —, ‘The Paradise of Human Fishes’, G. K.’s Weekly (28 March 1925), 1(2), 16–17. —, Tales of the Long Bow (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1925).

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—, ‘Utopia’, G. K.’s Weekly (2 May 1925), 1(7), 121–2. —, ‘The Way to the Servile State’, G. K.’s Weekly (26 June 1926), 3(67), 248. —, ‘Straws in the Wind: An Explanation in Brackets’, G. K.’s Weekly (1927), 4(96), 197. —, ‘What We’re Getting at’, G. K.’s Weekly (2 April 1927), 5(107), 320. —, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). —, Heretics (Peabody, MS: Hendrickson, 2007). —, The Man Who Was Thursday : A Nightmare (London: Penguin, 2011). Chesterton, G. K. and Shaw, G. B., Do We Agree? (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928). Coates, J., G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2002). Connor, S., Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011). Frank, S., and Gandy, M., Hydropolis: Wasser Und Die Stadt Der Moderne (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006). Gandy, M., Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste (London: Earthscan, 1994). —, ‘The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series (1999), 24(1), 23–44. —, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT, 2002). Gates Foundation, ‘Gates Foundation Launches Effort to Reinvent the Toilet’, (2011). Graham, S. and Marvin, S., Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures. Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). Judt, T., Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2010). Ker, I., G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Knight, M., Chesterton and Evil (New York; [Great Britain]: Fordham University Press, 2004). Lehan, R., The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 1998). Malia, M., The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney: The Free Press, 1994). Mill, J. S., Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosopy. Vol. 2 (Toronto; London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1965). Oddie, W., Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Penty, A. J., ‘The Line of Least Resistance’, G. K.’s Weekly (23 May 1925), 1(10), 200–1. Raban, J., ‘Cameron’s Crank’, London Review of Books (22 April 2010), 32(8), 22–3. Reckitt, M. B., ‘Machinery and the Distributive State’, G. K.’s Weekly (6 June 1925), 1(12), 247–8.

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Shiach, M., Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Trilling, D., Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right (London: Verso, 2012). Unsigned, ‘The Land’, G. K.’s Weekly (1927), 4(95), 188. Žižek, S., ‘Hegel – Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity’, The Symptom, 7 (2006). Zwick, M., The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005).

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Afterword The Unremarkable Chesterton Julian Wolfreys

. . . what it is Mr Chesterton really wants to say [. . .] we have failed to discover, but it seems to us to have no basis of intelligible narrative. Anon, 25 February 1904 There are subsidiary aspects of modern England wherein the activity of Gilbert Chesterton may be specially judged . . . English humour, and [the] English visual imagination. Hilaire Belloc ‘It’s all atmospheres.’ Basil Grant, The Club of Queer Trades . . . a town must be more poetical than the country, since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret. A street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill The impression left, many years after having last read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, is one of anxiety, watchfulness, the perception of surveillance, the potential for violence and anarchy to erupt at any moment, from every fog shrouded street corner. Conrad’s London in this novel at least, is, it seems from memory, threatening, febrile, a place not far removed from the streets of the capital found in Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Marsh, Robert Louis Stevenson or Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Conversely, the London of

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Arnold Bennett’s novels is memorable for its suburban comfort, occasionally made more piquant by brief outbursts of whimsy or eccentric romance, while the centre leaves an impressionistic dazzle, all light and reflection but not quite given over to the reflective subjective perception of Woolf ’s urban inhabitants. T. S. Eliot’s city is fragmentary, haunted, occasionally terrifying or monotonous by turns; Forster’s, well, everything ebbs and flows, there is an oceanic sussuration beneath the material weightiness of the capital’s solidity; and as for Patrick Hamilton’s London, well that is quite unspeakable. But what of the London, or Londons – for we should never assume that there is simply one city, steady, stable or unchanging – of G. K. Chesterton? What of the urban landscape remains after The Club of Queer Trades, The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Man Who was Thursday have been put down? (Does anyone read Chesterton, again? A friend had asked, perhaps uncharitably, on my mentioning this Afterword.) But if the various cityscapes that Chesterton sketches in his witty fictional bagatelles remain unremembered, this might just be to the point. Would not a parallel city comprised of anarchists, criminals and members of secret societies want to remain obscure, hidden among the urban rock faces, secreted within anonymous and disguised boltholes, or ‘in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils’?1 Would the very face of the city itself, or that city which, existing in the same place and yet belonging, it might be said, to an entirely different universe, be best served by being unmemorable, unremarkable? If it appears difficult to say much, if anything, on first sight or the slightest of recollections, about the appearance, the representation, the nature of Chesterton’s Londons, save for a vague sense on the part of the reader of slightly comical, decidedly wry extravagance and quirky fantasy, perhaps this is precisely the effect, the perception intended. It would, of course, be very easy, too easy, to work one’s way through each of the texts mentioned, or others, to seek out in a committed and scholarly fashion any material or contemporary historical references, signs, locations, proper names, all to be researched, annotated, contextualized and scrupulously defined. Such activity, as worthwhile and laudable as it is, would though miss the spirit of Chesterton’s alternative cities. It would be precisely – or analogically – to insinuate oneself into a secret society, under an assumed name; and from there to seek out each of the other members belonging to some organization, company or council, who have taken as their code names the

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days of the week, only to find that the principal subject of one’s investigation turned out to be, like oneself, another investigator, and not some mastermind, not the personification of a shibboleth which, once realized, provides the key to all Chestertonian urban mythologies. All such work, worthy as it is, misses precisely what Chesterton, in ‘The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown’, calls the ‘colour and poetry of London’ (1984, 20). The problem with scholarship and what it misses is that the scholar, the researcher, has to be wide-awake, alert and attentive. Looking for everything, he, or she, sees all that there is and yet does not perceive, is not open to that which can always arrive but which cannot be looked for; to see the colour and poetry, one has to have at least the ‘look of a somnambulist’ (1984, 20). Facts, those things for which footnotes often exist, finding in them their sole raison d’être, often ‘obscure the truth’ (1984, 18), as Basil sums it up in the same short story, beginning his critique of Conan Doyle’s detective tales. Facts, he continues are only the twigs on the tree, not the life of the organism, existence or spirit, not being seen through the accumulation of facts. London is not in its facts, not for some, its life; its strangeness and charm, however occasionally threatening in Chesterton that might seem, is in what comes to pass, perceived in a moment or not at all between the materiality of place and the perception of the subject open to chance, alterity and the apperception of difference. Everything in Chesterton’s London, everything irreducible to facts that is, is that which suspends habitual and objective or empirical modes of observation, and comes, if it comes at all, to be perceived in the interstices of reality and the quotidian. Not everyone can see as Chesterton desires we see though, for not everyone has the ‘boyish [sic] appetite’ (1984, 20) that Basil Grant is observed to have in ‘The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown’. Of course, with the appropriate income, anyone can live ‘in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth’ (1984, 9), invisible and unnoticed to Somerset Maugham’s Liza (1967) or an office clerk not unlike Leonard Bast, living in the cellar flat of a purpose-built block on Camelia Road in the same borough (2000, 39–40).2 And equally it would be all too easy to criticize from some specious sociological or historicist impulse born out of some compromised ideological impulse the vision of a London of queer garrets and obscure, though comfortable boltholes because Chesterton’s London is not that of a Maugham, a Morrison, or even a Gissing. But that’s literature for you; and cities; to criticize what is not there

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as a fault in the writer has long been practiced by those resentful of Hardy’s Wessex or Woolf ’s rural visions of the South Downs for not being grim and northern (as though the authors in question were speaking of all England, or the North had exclusive rights on grimness or that the division between ‘north’ and ‘south’ were definable in quite so facile a manner). The critic looking only for facts ‘hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective’.3 But, as the example of Leonard Bast should tell us, not everyone can see the ‘colour and poetry’, and this is not a matter of income or class (though these can help, undeniably, but only so far). Those who believe that vision does come down to materialist or cultural concerns might do well to acquaint themselves with Marcel’s visit to Venice, copy of The Stones of Venice in hand. The question of seeing poetically as Kant has it (that is to say precognitively), of seeing what goes otherwise unremarked, is irreducible to merely materialist or historicist concerns; perception, as Chesterton is aware, is not only a chance occurrence, it is also singular. While education and income allows the subject to speak of ‘Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Doré’ as the proper names that most aptly summon an aesthetic analogy in the definition of ‘flats in England’, but the possibility of perceiving the relation, of only connecting is not, as the male Wilcoxes demonstrate with quite comically stunning obtuseness. Chesterton makes the point in the opening paragraph of ‘Major Brown’ that pedestrians in London do not tend to see because, whatever they do see, they are primarily looking only for a particular destination (1984, 7). The question of receiving the vision of another London, of other Londons would have been familiar to Chesterton not least because of an intimate knowledge of Dickens’s modes of urban representation, from which he appears to apprehend that the alternative vision and of seeing poetically is a matter, ‘by the power of the written word’, to make the reader ‘hear . . . feel’ and ‘before all to make you see. That and no more, and it is everything’. In this, as Joseph Conrad knows, resides the truth of literature, for it is ‘that glimpse of truth’ irreducible to facts, to history, ‘for which you have forgotten to ask’.4 The particular truth of literature for Chesterton, is the truth of the city. Accepting this, without seeking for the failure of another’s vision or definition of vision as a failure of a given, a singular representation, it has to be reiterated that vision is not monolithic. If it is not given to everyone in the same way,

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and then only to some, on different, unpredictable occasions or in different manners, then it has to be said that vision admits that there is more than one London; vision admits more than one London to appear. Here is the truth of the city that literature, that Chesterton’s otherwise unremarkable city can make available. Thus ‘North London’, different in its being a ‘vast blank space’ through which the rapidity of passage gives to the subject the apprehension, the ‘sense of its immensity and its meanness’, the very qualities of which, felt intimately, are suggestive of a ‘base infinitude, a squalid eternity . . .’ . . . we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den of vice you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony. (1984, 30)

Implicitly, one feels, there resides in this abject image of the lower-middleclass and middle-class suburbs of the north, a critique of Gissing and Morrison. In that sense of misrepresentation, I am tempted to hear an echo of Oscar Wilde from ‘The Decay of Lying’ and his familiar hypothesis that the climate of London is an invention of a particular school of art (1905, 40–1). Misrepresentation for both Wilde and Chesterton is an invention, fog-like filth and criminality or vice, an aesthetic effect as much as a concatenation of historical and sociological facts, by which fact becomes mistaken not only as truth, but as the only truth to be represented, and the sole truth to be addressed in the assessment of aesthetic representation. Any omission of such factual detail is pounced on as error; and yet, as Chesterton says in the same passage, ‘[n]o one would say, in going through a criminal slum, “I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals”’ (1984, 30). Indeed before Chesterton conceived Basil Grant, Wilde had allowed Vivian to voice the opinion, apropos of Stevenson, that ‘even’ this ‘delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice’ of ‘our monstrous worship of facts’, in novels and other fictional forms, which ‘are so life like that no one can possibly believe in their probability’ (1905, 10). Pace literary, critical and academic Gradgrindism, what we want is not facts. A little more vision is required, a different way of seeing, seeing through the merely material to something else, something within and

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other. Chesterton’s unremarkable visions, visions which defy the conventional critical discourse and leave the critic without anything to say, illuminate both the vision and the need for it. The monstrous and the sublime of the city is captured here, if at all. It would be misleading though, not to say a mistake, to stay with The Club of Queer Trades. Reflecting on coming to terms with critical thought in an article looking back at his career, and first published in translation in diacritics in 1972, Georges Poulet comments on the realization that ‘each literary work, of no matter what kind, implies, for the writer, an act of self-discovery. Writing does not mean simply to allow an unstemmed rush of thoughts to flow onto the paper; writing means rather to construe oneself as the subject of those thoughts!’5 As obvious as this might appear, it does no harm to remind ourselves that there is something more radical at work in the act of writing that, perhaps initially drawing on facts and realities of a certain order, nevertheless has the possibility of moving beyond the factual. The point, pedantry aside, is that the mind of the writer makes of reality a different reality (obviously) and in the process, becomes the subject of that other reality, experiencing and perceiving it as if it were real; at this point a different mode of existence comes into being for both place and subject, and however similar mimetically the created existence is to the material existence, the former is always a conceptual analogue, not simply a copy. As both critic and writer of fiction Chesterton understood this, even if he would not have expressed it in quite the manner of Poulet. And that Chesterton apprehended the nature of writing’s ability to manifest this other reality, otherwise unremarkable, unavailable to the factual and empirical eye, is attested to in his study of Dickens. However ‘untheoretical’ a critic Chesterton may have been in any modern, accepted, narrowly academic sense, the good reader of Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) will notice the conceptual level at which the author often strives to work, as he strains after a language to stand in for the inchoate perception of the other subject’s experience of the city we find in the novels of Dickens. It is perhaps for such reasons that Walter Benjamin cites Chesterton on Dickens’s London more frequently than Dickens himself. If, Poulet argues, ‘the writer creates initially his own cogito, the critic finds his point of departure in the cogito of another’ (1972, 48). The ‘cogito would reveal itself not only as a primary experience [I see this experience; I am in this

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experience; I am the experience; the experience makes me its subject for the duration of the experience, whether that is the encounter with the city or the writer] but also, in an involuted form, as a principle of multiple developments which arranged themselves within a time line [such as a narrative, the reading of a novel, a walk through the streets]’ (1972, 48). From his reading of Dickens, Chesterton likes to imagine a text of the city never written by Dickens, a ‘huge serial scheme’ and an ‘endless periodical called The Street’ divided into shops, one narrative after another beginning with a title, like the entrance to both shop and story, being the generic type of store. Clearly, when Chesterton reads Dickens, his own ‘fancy’ or phantasy comes to life, from the most mundane of circumstances, and in this, the reader in the Dickensian text and the reader of the Dickensian text merge for a time, as the quotidian dissolves into – opening itself onto – the romantic and fantastic, with an apprehension, just beyond words, of an urban sublime. Put differently, or taking a slightly different path, the city as text makes manifest or gives materiality to the idea of the urban as allegory, or that the city can be expressed in allegorical terms. Chesterton realizes, if not in his criticism, in his appreciation of Dickens, then in his own novels, how allegory can name that which ‘has the potential’, to cite Jeremy Tambling, ‘to make the city a text, with a system and a defiance of any system of reading built into it . . . compelling reading to become allegorical, seeing that which is “other”, it makes the writer produce a script.’6 Such a script, giving shape to the otherwise unremarkable in both senses is captured by Chesterton the critic of Dickens, in the understanding that ‘effective realism’ comes down to a ‘principle that the most fantastic thing of all is the precise fact’.7 Chesterton pinpoints the relation between the real and the fantastic, or phantastic, reading, as he does, the excess, the exotic, in verisimilitude, in the everyday. In short, Chesterton reads that which Dickens reads: the other within the self-same, Dickens being the name for a reading that becomes transformed into a writing of the other, which opens the other, and remains open to the other, rather than seeking to master or control that. What is at work here, what Dickens puts into play, is not, therefore, a question of the allegorical simply, but a more radical subject-effect historically and materially enabled by modernity, if not a phenomenologically inflected proto-modernism. And it is this which Chesterton champions, and which in turn informs his own passing apprehensions of the cityscape, little

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moments of urban vision and realization, illumination and revelation, at the corner of the eye, so to speak. It is, I think, arguable that Chesterton notices in the formal play of Dickens’s acts of reading and writing London that which subsequent commentators, usually of a historicist bent, have lost sight of to a degree, if not completely, in the desire for ‘facts’. For all the many problems or limits of Chesterton’s analysis, there remains none the less a sympathetic apprehension in his analysis, a resonance between the Dickensian text and his reading (however couched in authorial and biographical terms), which is a sign of Chesterton’s own historicity. A near contemporary of Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster and Arnold Bennett (he worked with Ford, Belloc and Bennett, among others, for the War Propaganda Bureau during the First World War), Chesterton’s appreciation of Dickens is marked, at moments such as that just cited, or in the image of Dickens having the key to the London street, ‘in the most sacred and serious sense of the term’; 1942, 34–5), with that kind of sensate quasi-mystical ‘channelling’ of London that marks Ford’s The Soul of London. In the example of the key trope, there is even a move from the mundane to the messianic: ‘He [Dickens] did not look at Charing Cross to improve his mind or count the lamp-posts in Holborn to practise his arithmetic . . . He walked in darkness under the lamps of Holborn, and was crucified at Charing Cross.’ Again, the ‘fact’ is rejected in favour of another reality. Importantly, for our understanding of that which Chesterton catches in Dickens, the former continues: ‘our memory never fixes the facts which we have merely observed . . . the scenes we see [in recollection] are the scenes at which we did not look at all – the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else. . . .’ We can see the background now because we did not see it then . . . Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions – a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door – which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. (1942, 35–6)

From this, Chesterton, produces an access to the unremarkable, captured in that idea of ‘eerie realism’, which touches closely on that uncanny power of

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evoking a sense of place that has, in Dickens, the power to make one feel and see in the sense accorded these terms by Conrad. And it might just be that what Chesterton calls the ‘eerie realism’ or ‘demoniac life’ of the Dickensian text is just the authentic historicity of being revealing itself; it might also be just that we find, if we observe properly, becoming the good readers Chesterton desires, is there already, speaking silently to us in his acts of reading and writing unremarkable London. In conclusion, we might just alight on one passage from The Man Who Was Thursday (the subtitle of which is A Nightmare, thereby announcing the visionary and that for which words can often find themselves failing). The novel’s very first passage is a vision of the city, or a suburb thereof, Saffron Park. Its register, its tropes and rhetorical flourishes, announce its literary kinship with Dickens, Ford and perhaps Elizabeth Bowen also (certainly the Bowen of her earlier short stories): 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 a bright brick throughout; its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though 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. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not ‘artists’, the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face – that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat – that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it

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had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy. More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit.8

There is in this extraordinary rendering of the absolutely ordinary, with its movement from the general to the specific, the vague to the singular, the material to the conceptual, the work of ‘a mental activity profoundly engaged in objective forms; [but equally] at another level . . . a subject which reveals itself . . . in its transcendence over all that is reflected in it . . . it is exposed in its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy.’9 ‘Chesterton’, author or narrator – and who the narrator of any Chestertonian entertainment is remains absolutely hidden, an enigma not to be resolved – disappears almost immediately into the perception of suburb at sunset; everything remains though, before me, before the good reader, as this slightly discomfiting if apparently benign moment of suspension and vision, a tiny urban example of phenomenological époché. Ordinary modes of perception and understanding are put on hold, transformed from within, one vision emerging from within, while exceeding, the merely visible, making precise definition both impossible and redundant in the process. And, Chesterton’s unremarkable vision hints, the ‘situation is even more astonishing’ because I find myself perceiving as the other perceives; mine is the perception, memories that have never been mine arriving as if for a first time, as I come to apprehend myself the alienated subject of this place, and with ‘a congeries of mental objects in close rapport with my own consciousness’ (Poulet 1969, 55). Though I see it, I am at a loss to explain; for, there simply are no words adequate to G. K. Chesterton’s unremarkable London.

Notes 1 G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 7. All further references will appear in the text.

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2 For those interested in facts, there is no Camelia Road in Lambeth; there is however a Camellia Street, just under two miles from St Thomas’ Hospital. Forster indicates Leonard ‘pushed on for another mile beyond the tunnel ‘that passes under the South-Western main line at Vauxhall’, which would suggest the two streets, fictional and real, are not dissimilar. 3 O. Wilde, Intentions (New York: Brentano’s, 1905), p. 11. 4 Conrad, J., The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus, ed. and int. Cedric Watts (London: Penguin, 1988), p. xlix. 5 G. Poulet, ‘The Self and the Other in Critical Consciousness’, trans. Marilyn S. Sibley, Diacritics (Spring 1972), 2(1), 46–50 (48). All further references will appear in the text. 6 J. Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London (Harlow: London, 2009), p. 9. 7 Foreword by Alexander Woolcott. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men. (New York: Press of the Readers’ Club, 1942), p. 36. All further references will appear in the text. 8 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, int. Kingsley Amis (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 9. 9 G. Poulet, ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, New Literary History (October 1969), 1(1) 53–68. All further references will appear in the text.

Bibliography Chesterton, G. K., Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men (New York: Press of the Readers’ Club, 1942). —, The Club of Queer Trades (London: Penguin, 1984). —, The Man Who was Thursday, int. Kingsley Amis (London: Penguin, 1986). Conrad, J., ‘Preface’. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ed. and int. C. Watts (London: Penguin, 1988). Forster, E. M., Howards End, int. D. Lodge (London: Penguin, 2000). Maugham, W. Somerset, Liza of Lambeth (London: Penguin, 1967). Poulet, G., ‘Phenomenology of Reading’. New Literary History (October 1969), 1:1, 53–68. —, ‘The Self and the Other in Critical Consciousness’, trans. Marilyn S. Sibley, Diacritics (Spring 1972), 2(1), 46–50. Tambling, J., Going Astray: Dickens and London (Harlow: London, 2009). Wilde, O., Intentions (New York: Brentano’s, 1905).

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Index Ackroyd, Peter 9, 82, 84 Adorno, T. W. 9, 64 ‘Advantages of Having One Leg, The’ 99 aestheticism 47, 116–17, 185–6, 193, 196 Alarms and Discursions 95 anarchism 4, 47, 49, 73, 115, 194–5, 214, 230 Anderson, Robert 140 ‘Anti-Liberal, The’ 163 anti-semitism 68, 145 ‘Appetite of Earth, The’ 184 Armstrong, Tim 81 Arnold, Matthew 83 Augustine 9, 88, 197 Autobiography 23, 27, 37, 44, 78, 87, 93–8, 119, 128, 174, 189 Bacon, Francis 205 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10, 44–5, 158, 167–72 Ball and the Cross, The 195, 197 Ballad of the White Horse, The 39–46, 51 Baring, Evelyn 145 Barrie, J. M. 139, 143–4 Barthes, Roland 59 Batman 57, 66 ‘Battle of Maldon, The’ 40 Baudelaire, Charles 74, 77 BBC 1–3 Beaconsfield 2, 24, 206 Beaumont, Matthew 117, 203–4, 221 Belloc, Hilaire 3, 27, 78, 96, 208, 215, 217–18, 229 Benjamin, Walter 2, 63, 204, 211, 234 Bennett, Arnold 44, 229, 236 Bentley, E. C. 93, 113, 117, 119 Beowulf 40 Bergman, Ingmar 201 Berkeley, Bishop 186 Besant, Walter 82, 84 Bhabha, Homi 58–9 Black, Barbara J. 121–2 Blake, William 4–5, 18, 24, 50, 77, 157 Bloom, Harold 101–2

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‘Blue Cross, The’ 10, 52, 77, 81, 116, 158, 165–70, 172–5 Boer War 61 bohemianism 117, 121, 125 Booth, Charles 82, 158, 160–5, 173–5 Booth, William 62 Borges, J. L. 12 Bowen, Elizabeth 237 Boyd, Ian 60, 67, 152–3 Bradlaugh, Charles 5 Bradshaw’s Railway Guide 214, 217 ‘Break, The’ 172 Brooke, Rev. Stopford 3 Browning, Robert 4, 10, 25, 74, 98, 100–8, 187 Buchan, John 83, 197 Bunyan, John 94, 102, 119 Byron, George 214, 217 Canovan, Margaret 161, 206, 213 Carpenter, Edward 86 Carroll, Lewis 189 Caserio, Robert 36, 153 Cather, Willa 139, 142–4 Catholicism 2, 7, 9, 13, 25, 40, 42–3, 50–1, 57–68, 77, 80–1, 83, 87, 116, 149, 165, 171, 183–4, 197, 199, 219 Cervantes, Miguel de 95 Chandler, Raymond 107–8 Charles Dickens 135 Chesterton, Cecil 208 Cheyette, Brian 145 Childers, Erskine 47 Cleveland Street Scandal 118 Clipper, G. K. 119 Club of Queer Trades, The 4, 10, 26, 75, 115–17, 119, 121, 123, 125–31, 137–8, 161, 229–31, 234 Coates, John 66, 147 Cobbett, William 4, 31 Coburn, A. L. 84, 89 Coleridge, S. T. 79

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242 Conan Doyle, Arthur 59, 62–3, 74, 76–7, 88, 114, 118, 122, 124–6, 157–61, 163–6, 175, 229, 231, 233 Conlon, Denis 66 Connor, Steven 219 Conrad, Joseph 4, 11, 47, 57, 74, 229, 232, 237 Corelli, Marie 83 Cowper, William 83 Daily News 3 ‘Danger of Detective Stories, The’ 158 Dante 19, 29, 77, 89 Darwin, Charles 187 Davidson, John 76, 79, 84, 86, 88 Dean, Gabrielle 168 ‘Defence of Detective Stories, A’ 62–3, 76, 106, 108, 113, 130, 149, 203 ‘Defence of Rash Vows, A’ 114 Defendant, The 62–5, 68 Derrida, Jacques 59 ‘Detectives and Detective Fictions’ 159 ‘Diabolist, The’ 117 Dickens, Charles 4, 6, 8, 11, 25–7, 57, 75, 77–9, 89, 115, 118, 135–6, 232–7 distributism 11, 62, 70, 203–22 Distributist League 205, 207, 213, 216 Doré, Gustave 232 Eliot, George 78, 189 Eliot, T. S. 8, 11, 19, 23, 29, 31, 77, 104–5, 184, 186–8, 193, 195, 197–8, 230 Eton College 175 Fabian Society 145–6, 148, 160, 162 Father Brown stories 1, 4, 6, 10, 25, 46, 50–4, 77, 80–1, 107, 130–1, 137, 165–6, 174, 195, 197 fenianism 73 Fish, Stanley 103 Fisher Unwin 3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 189, 191 Fletcher, Geoffrey 86 ‘Flying Stars, The’ 1, 139 Ford, Ford Madox 84, 88, 236–7 Ford, Henry 217 Forde, Nigel 186 formalism 189 Forster, E. M. 230, 236

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Index Four Faultless Felons 138, 196 Fraser, Alexander 96 ‘Free Man and the Ford Car, The’ 217, 221 Frost, Robert 186 Foucault, Michel 59, 146 fundamentalism 58, 66 Furneaux, Holly 136 futurism 185 Gandy, Matthew 212 Gardiner, Alfred George 160 ‘Gate of Town and Country, The’ 175 Gates Foundation 219 General Strike 216 Gissing, George 17, 57, 78, 89, 231, 233 Gladstone, William 187 globalisation 219 Gopnik, Adam 12–13 Graham Robertson, W. 96 Graham, Stephen 212, 219 Gramsci, Antonio 12 Grand Junction Water Works Company 96 Greenberg, Clement 184–5, 195 Greene, Graham 199 Griffin, Roger 185 Gunton, Colin 59–60, 67 Hall of Science 5 Halperin, David 114 Hamilton, Patrick 230 Hapgood, Lynne 145 Hardy, Thomas 78, 186, 232 Harriman, Lucas 6 Hartley L. P. 171 Haussmann, Baron 220 Hayes A. W. 169 Heissenbuttel, Helmut 170 Heretics 137, 195, 214 Hitchens, Christopher 7 Hodgson Burnett, Frances 143 Holloway Gaol 162 Hönnighausen, Lothar 82 Hornung, E. W. 139, 144, 146, 149 House of Lords, 145 Housman, A. E. 186 ‘How Not To Do It’ 138 ‘How to Write a Detective Story’ 73 ‘Human Circulating Library, The’ 162, 171 Hurley, Kelly 76

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Index Hurley, Michael D. 6 Huxley, T. H. 187 impressionism 84, 93, 114, 116, 194 Innocence of Father Brown, The 25, 46, 51 Irving, George 152 ITV 1 Jack the Ripper 118, 140 Jacobs, Joseph 98–9 Jacobs, W. W. 83 James, Henry 4, 47, 74, 81–2, 84 James, William 198 Jefferies, Richard 27, 44 Jerome, Jerome K. 27 Johnson, Samuel 78, 186 Joyce, James 184, 189, 194 Judt, Tony 216–17 Kant, Immanuel 232 Karlin, Daniel 101 Keats, John 5, 55 Keiller, Patrick 9, 84 Ker, Ian 77, 150 Ker, W. P. 9, 94–5, 101, 108, 110 Keynes, J. M. 216 King Alfred 39–46, 53–4 Kipling, Rudyard 186 Knight, Mark 6, 153, 159, 171, 207 Kracauer, Siegfried 204, 211 Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, The 118 Lang, Elsie 64 Lawson, Mark 1 Le Corbusier 220 Le Queux, William 47, 74 Lefebvre, Henri 101 Letham, Jonathan 120 Lewis, C. S. 197 London, Baker Street 39, 214 Battersea 191, 206 Bayswater 220 Bedford Park 35, 80, 126 Blackfriars 171 Brentford 83 Brompton 210

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Camberwell 100 Camden Town 169 Campden Hill 2, 96, 98–9, 172, 220 Canon’s Park 87 Charing Cross 236 Chelsea 191 Clapham 87, 189–90, 198 Clerkenwell 83 Crystal Palace 87 Edgware Road 195 Fleet Street 4, 24 Hammersmith 45, 142, 220 Hampstead Heath 35, 166, 168–9, 175 Holborn 3, 236 Holland Park 95 Hoxton 140, 146, 148 Hyde Park 82 Kensington 2, 45, 191 Kingsway 30 Lambeth 129, 231 Lavender Hill 45 Leicester Square 194 Lincoln’s Inn Fields 171 Liverpool Street 166, 169 London Bridge 8, 20, 28–30 Maida Vale 220 Notting Hill 35, 37, 44–5, 50, 58–9, 61, 66–8, 95, 172, 190–1, 220 Old Street 5 Paddington 207 Piccadilly 82 Pimlico 191 Primrose Hill 45 Putney 1 St. James’s Park 85 St. John’s Wood 190 St. Martin’s Lane 115 St. Paul’s 3, 87, 130, 169, 195 Shepherd’s Bush 83 Sloane Square 214 South Kensington 220 Swiss Cottage 140, 145 Trafalgar Square 207 Victoria 169–70, 198, 214–15 Wandsworth 191 London 19, 169, 171–2 Lucas, E. V. 85 Luckhurst, Roger 81 Lukács, Georg 102

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Index

McBriar, A. M. 152 McLaughlin, Joseph 62 McLuhan, Marshall 219 Machen, Arthur 9, 73–89 Malia, Martin 216 Man Who Knew Too Much, The 30, 100, 137 Man Who Was Thursday, The 4, 6, 9, 26–7, 36, 39, 46–9, 51–3, 75, 80, 85, 93, 97, 100, 106, 114–17, 119–21, 123, 149, 192–5, 203, 214, 230, 237 ‘Man with Two Beards, The’ 138, 141 Manalive 4, 23, 139–40, 145–50, 192 Marinetti, F. T. 185 Marlowe, Christopher 191 Marsh, Richard 142, 144, 229 Marvin, Simon 212, 219 materialism 20, 98–9 Maugham, Somerset 231 mediaevalism 44, 93–108, 191, 196, 218, 220 Milbank, John 6 Mill, J. S. 204, 211–12, 215–16 Milton, John 103 ‘Mirror of the Magistrate, The’ 137 Miscellany of Men, A 153 ‘Missions to the Cultivated’ 162, 165 ‘Mr. Shaw’s Escape’ 177 Mitchell, Charlotte 151 modernism 6, 11, 48, 78, 183–91, 193, 195–6, 198–9, 203–4, 211, 221, 235 Moore, George 116 Moretti, Franco 60 Morris, William 6, 44, 86, 147, 207, 218 Morrison, Arthur 231, 233 Moss, Eloise 142, 144 Mozart, W. A. 64 Murray, B. K. 152 Napoleon 220 Napoleon of Notting Hill, The 4, 9, 18, 25–6, 39, 43–4, 46, 50–3, 57–62, 64–8, 85, 95–6, 99–100, 145, 172, 190–2, 194, 197, 203, 215, 220–1, 229–30 naturalism 106 nazism 7 Nerval, Gérard de 105 Nesbit, E. 139, 143–4 New Age 206

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Newman, J. H. 7 Nichols, Aidan 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 196–7, 214 nihilism 194, 196 ‘North Berwick’ 187 Oddie, William 6, 60, 94, 117, 120, 152, 206 ‘Old Song, The’ 27, 30–1 Ong, Walter 219 Order of the Golden Dawn 80 Orthodoxy 42, 68, 98–9, 168, 175, 193 Orwell, George 6, 20, 183, 199 ‘Painful Fall of a Great Reputation, The’ 169 ‘Paradise of Human Fishes, The’ 209, 212, 219 patriotism 60 ‘Peasant, The’ 170 Pentry, A. J. 213 Pett Ridge, William 83 ‘Playgrounds for Adults’ 163–4 Poe, E. A. 51, 159, 164, 171 ‘Point of a Pin, The’ 137 Pope, Alexander 194 postmodernism 196 Poulet, Georges 234, 238 Pound, Ezra 184, 187 Priestman, M. 166 ‘Protestant Superstitions, The’ 80 Proust, Marcel 184 Pugh, Edwin 84–5 Raban, Jonathan 84 Rabelais, François 95, 232 Reckitt, Maurice 213 ‘Red Angel, The’ 97 redistribution 140, 144, 146, 148–50, 206 Redway, George 78 ‘Resurrection of Father Brown, The’ 51 Resurrection of Rome, The 19 Robert Browning 102–3, 107 Robert Louis Stevenson 22, 123 romanticism 103, 185–6, 190, 193 Ruskin, John 25, 93, 232 St. Paul’s school 117, 123, 130 ‘Salad of Colonel Cray, The’ 139 Santa Claus 147

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Index Saussure, Ferdinand de 81 Schneer, Jonathan 61 Scholes, Robert 195 Scotland Yard 140–1 Scott, Walter 95 Seaber, Luke 6 Secret of Father Brown, The 190 ‘Secret People, The’ 30, 143 Shakespeare, William 95, 98, 103, 136, 186 Shaw, G. B. 3, 116, 160, 173, 195–7, 218 Shelley, P. B. 18, 35, 101 Shiach, Morag 205 Shklovsky, Viktor 189 Sim, George 83 Simeon, Georges 196 Simmel, Georg 204, 211 Sinclair, Iain 9, 84 ‘Sins of Saradine, The’ 80 Slade School of Art 3, 93, 117, 123, 214 ‘Slavery of Free Verse, The’ 196 Smart, Christopher 187 socialism 116, 184, 212, 215–17 Southwell, Robert 149 Speaker, the 79 Spencer, Herbert 161 Stapleton, Julia 6, 143, 151 Stedman Jones, Gareth 161 Stevens, Wallace 193 Stevenson, R. L. 4, 6, 22–3, 77, 79, 89, 101, 118–19, 122–6, 229, 233 Stewart, Susan 167–8 Stock Exchange (London) 62 Swinburne, A. C. 88 Symons, Arthur 84, 88–9 Tales of the Long Bow 207–8 Tambling, Jeremy 235 Taunton, Matthew 138 Tennyson, Alfred 88, 103–4 terrorism 4, 47 Thackeray, W. M. 4 ‘Thomas Carlyle’ 157 Thomas, Edward 186 Thomas, Ronald 63 Thompson, Francis 82 Thomson, James 17, 77, 89 ‘To a Modern Poet’ 186 Tolkien, J. R. R. 115 Tololyan, K. 169

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toryism 116 Tosh, John 121 Tremendous Trifles 97, 195–6 Turner, J. M. W. 27 University College London 3, 93–5, 100–1, 117 utilitarianism 173 ‘Value of Detective Stories, The’ 158 Vaninskaya, Anna 6, 59, 70, 152 Victorian Age in Literature, The 123 Virgin Mary 39–40, 42 Walkowitz, Judith R. 118 War Propaganda Bureau 236 Ward, Maisie 187, 189 Ward, Mrs Humphry 86 Warner, Marina 58 Webb (nee Potter), Beatrice 160, 162, 173 Weller, Shane 185 Wells, H. G. 27–31, 44, 74, 84, 122 Welsh Disestablishment Bill (1912) 186 What’s Wrong with the World 17 Whibley, Charles 94 Whistler, J. M. 93, 116, 214 Whitman, Walt 101, 119, 186, 196 ‘Why I am not a Socialist’ 206 Widdecombe, Ann 7 Wild Knight and Other Poems, The 100, 103–4, 186 Wilde, Oscar 10, 75, 113, 116–22, 130, 193, 229, 233 William Blake 5 Williams, Raymond 17, 160 Wisdom of Father Brown, The 46, 51 ‘Witch-Smellers, The’ 173 Wodehouse, P. G. 1–2 Wolfreys, Julian 31 Woolf, Virginia 11, 184, 230, 232 Wordsworth, William 15–18, 20–1, 24, 29, 31, 103 ‘Wrong Shape, The’ 52 Yancey, Philip 197 Yeats, W. B. 43, 186, 188 Žižek, Slavoj 6, 109, 214 Zola, Emile 105

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