The man who was Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton enjoyed a happy childhood within his family, full of imagination, fantasy and wonders thanks to the fairy tales his father Edward represented on a toy puppet theatre they had at home. While studying at St Paul’s School he became a shy, short-sighted teenager, clumsy when it came to sports, but a friend to his friends. He wasn’t a particularly good student, but on the walk to school he would repeat from memory fragments from classic English works he had read in his father’s library. During his university years at the Slade School of Art he was already a tall and lean young man, meditating on the choice between his artistic or his literary capabilities. Definitely committed to literature and journalism and used to the Fleet Street lifestyle, which revolved around taverns, discussions, pubs, newsrooms and restaurants, he became a popular and likeable figure, not least because of his slipups and his physical appearance (he was 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 21 stones). Hard-working and with a great capacity for abstraction, he was constantly involved in events, lectures and debates both in England and during his trips abroad. He was an excellent conversationalist and a great polemicist with a remarkable sense of humour and a lively wit. As a defender of the common man, of family and of tradition he opposed the vision of the modern world of his contemporaries G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. He was an active social reformer and denounced the Marconi scandal, the sale of nobility titles and the illegal financing of political parties. Together with his brother Cecil he opposed several laws, such as the ones on education, on birth control and on eugenics. Amongst many anecdotes, it is worth mentioning that, during his trip to Poland, his generosity made a hotel manager in Warsaw ask him to leave through the back door because the city’s beggars were waiting for him at the front. In addition, the construction of St Theresa’s Catholic Church in Beaconsfield was made possible by his economic contribution.