Chesterton’s world
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) lived through a critical historical time. The Great War represented the founding manifesto for a new age which saw the disappearance of world empires, the victory of the Russian Revolution, the expansion of authoritarianism and the reinforcement of modern culture in the face of a traditional one that for centuries had sustained agrarian and hierarchical societies.
A changing world (1715-1920)
From the late 18th century, the world undergoes a period of profound transformation which leads to an age of European and, from the end of the First World War (1914-1918), American global economic and cultural hegemony. The French (1789) and American (1775-1783) revolutions, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution left behind a world with shared traits such as the significance of agriculture and commerce, cultural and religious diversity and tribal or stratified communities. This collective earthquake was the result of social dynamics and processes both emancipatory and violent, and the fruit of the desire for change but also of resistance to the loss of ancestral values and identities.
Of the optimism of the will and a Europe in turmoil
Europe is being transformed. The French Revolution turned on its head the continent’s political and cultural structures. A better world beckons, more civilised, educated and based on science, which should bring about peace amongst peoples and more justice for the new citizens. Liberty, equality and fraternity are the pillars of the new world that is coming to the surface. But these transformations not only touch the world of culture and ideas, but also the economic and social spheres. The Industrial Revolution, imperialism, the consolidation of nationalism and the struggle of the labour movement highlight contradictions which lead to civil and military conflicts on a scale never seen before in Europe. The Crimean War (1853-1856), the Russian Revolution (1917) and the Great War (1914-1918) are clear examples of the level of violence precipitated by European modernity. Empires, nations, workers, suffragettes, laymen, clerics, children, scientists, soldiers, pacifists, democrats, authoritarians or anarchists: all want to play their part in the modern world.
Britain, the spearhead of the industrial world (1750-1920)
In the second half of the 18th century, a series of transformations were achieved in England and Scotland which reshaped the society of the age and the future of humanity. Scientific and technological advances, the demographic explosion, commercial expansion, colonialism and the accumulation of basic and financial resources will lead to the formation of urban and industrial societies in which traditional estates were replaced by social class (the bourgeoisie and the working class) and Ancien Régime powers by new political strategies, originating in the liberal ideal and manifested in bourgeois democracy and its counterpart, the working class’s socialism. England is the country of the Industrial Revolution, with its chimneys, its big cities, international commerce and social disputes. It’s the England of Dickens, Darwin and William Turner’s modernity, but also the traditional one of Alfred Tennyson,the Oxford Movement or William Holman Hunt.
Catalonia (1840-1936)
The 1888 Barcelona Universal Exhibition was the undisputable symbol of the Catalans’ intention of joining 19th century Europe’s cosmopolitan circuits. It’s the only territory in Spain which from 1830 carries out a robust process of industrialization and urbanization. In spite of its lack of raw materials and its situation in Southern Europe -far away from the European economic centres-, Catalonia took advantage of its commercial tradition and its artisans’ know-how to develop a manufacturing economy and an international trade network. While Paris was its cultural, political and financial benchmark, England became its economic model. The wish of not missing the train of modernity pushed the Catalan political and cultural elites to find new strategies; the Renaixença -as a cultural movement- and their participation in national politics to implement liberal reforms were examples of this. Urban poverty, rural exodus, class struggle or avant-garde art were other existing realities, be it in society as a whole or as exhibits of social or individual malaise when faced with a ruthless, and too often socially unfair, modern world.
The unfashionable Spain (1850-1931)
The 19th century in Spain signals the start of a profound political, economic and moral crisis, while relying on power structures which show themselves limited and impermeable to the changes going on where liberalism and the Industrial Revolution are successful. Halfway through the century, reformist periods are held back both by instability in the overseas colonies which are fighting for their independence and an endemic corruption which hinders Spain’s convergence with the modern age. The brief Democratic Sexennial (1868-1874) and subsequent proclamation of the First Republic (1873-1874) weren’t enough for it to take root. In 1874 the Bourbon monarchy under Alfonso XII is restored, but this Restauración period was also incapable of managing the increasing social upheaval due to an impoverished country with, after 1898, no remaining colonies. Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923-1930), supported by the king himself, demonstrated the prominent role of the military in Spanish politics. The 1929 economic crisis and the breakdown of the system lead to a popular and middle-class revolt, and they opted for the advent of a Second Republic amidst a historical time threatened by a profound crisis of liberalism and a strong expansion of authoritarianisms.
Spirituality, idealism and materialism
Chesterton is a man rooted to his country: England, or even more, “Little England”, which is going through a time of material and imperial splendour, of scientific and industrial progress, but at the same time, of democratic crisis and great inequality. He casts his critical eye on it all through a literary and journalistic work of great influence, due to growing number of newspaper and magazine readers who followed him. His reaction is of a romantic, antimaterialistic tone, drawing to a certain extent on the great Victorian authors who preceded him, like Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, William Morris or John Ruskin. From an idealistic optimism, he advocated for a spiritual revolution in the turn of the century England, presided by the centrality of art and culture, looking to the past and to tradition to conserve it with an eye to understanding and improving the present and pervaded, ever since his early works, by a Christian cosmovision.
Of art and literature from the 19th to the 20th century
Chesterton studied fine arts and made his debut in journalism as an art and literary critic. Chesterton’s entire work is submerged in a literary universe stretching from fairy tales to adventure stories, through Stevenson, Dickens or Walter Scott’s medievalism, as well as plenty of the ideas and the echo of the controversies and political and social debates of his time. Such an example is his first work of fiction, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a fantasy set in a medieval past which can be read as an antiimperialist condemnation of the Second Boer War. From this first work to the series of Father Brown stories, Chesterton develops a literature of ideas, incorporating subjects and concerns of the age and his own philosophy: a distinctive trait of Edwardian literature in a period of transition to the First World War. Chesterton, together with G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame, amongst others, helped bring fiction and literature to the heart of London’s boroughs and England’s suburbs.