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Unit 31: G.K. Chesterton-On Lying In Bed ...

the essential character of all Chesterton’s work. In his verse, as in all his writings, his first aim was Notes
to comment on the political and social questions of the day.”
Chesterton’s first novel, the manuscript of which was discovered in a steamer trunk in 1989, was
published for the first time in 2001. Basil Howe was written in 1893, shortly after Chesterton
graduated from school. Although, as critics noted, the book is clearly the work of an inexperienced,
unformed writer, it shows hints of Chesterton’s future style—including the witticisms for which
he would later become famous—and provides insights into his frame of mind during this stage in
his life. It has long been known that Chesterton underwent a period of philosophical soul-searching
during his young adulthood that was so intense that some of his friends thought he was losing his
mind, and Basil Howe is assumed to have been written during that time. “Those familiar with
Chesterton’s teenage years will see much of the author in” the book, Mark Knight commented in
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, although he cautioned against reading the book as
autobiography rather than as a novel.
Although best known nowadays for his detective fiction, Chesterton first gained public attention
as a journalist and social philosopher; he actually wrote the popular, lucrative Father Brown
mysteries in part to bankroll his less financially rewarding work. Questions of religion and morality
were prominent in his writings. His book What’s Wrong with the World advocated Distributism,
a social philosophy that divided property holders into small communities, trying to foster
neighborliness. Chesterton viewed Distributism as a counter to Socialism and Capitalism, ideologies
that, he felt, reduced people to inhumane units. Stephen Metcalf, writing in the Times Literary
Supplement, pointed out that this philosophy, also expounded in the 1904 novel The Napoleon of
Notting Hill, more accurately reflects modern society’s problems than does George Orwell’s classic
1984: “It is not only . . . that Chesterton cared passionately for what ordinary humanity feels and
thinks,” Metcalf stated. “It is also that he had particular convictions about how one should
understand humanity.”
Much of Chesterton’s work reflected his social concern. Using literary devices such as parable and
allegory, he sought to bring about social changes that embodied his religious and political beliefs.
His novels, reported Brian Murray in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “are as frequently
called romances, extravaganzas, fantasies, parables, or allegories. For while they are thick with the
details of everyday life, Chesterton’s hastily written book-length fictions are outlandishly plotted
and, in the main, unabashedly didactic.”

Chesterton was raised in a theologically liberal family and did not convert to Catholicism
until the age of 48, more than a decade after the first Father Brown stories were published.

This didacticism has alienated modern readers from some of Chesterton’s fiction. His detective
stories, however, remain popular. Chesterton himself was very fond of the detective story and
recognized that much of his writing was pedantic and would probably not survive him. “Chesterton
assumed that he would never be considered a novelist of enormous importance,” asserted Murray;
“that, as a writer of fiction, he would always remain best known for the long series of Father
Brown stories he began with The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911—stories he sometimes tossed
off in a day or two.” Loosely based upon Chesterton’s friend, the Roman Catholic priest John
O’Connor, Father Brown “drops typical Chestertonian quips as he solves ghastly transgressions
not with Holmes-sharp logic but by ‘getting inside’ the criminal mind,” according to Murray.
Rather than using deductive methods to discover the perpetrator of a crime, Father Brown—
whom Chesterton depicted in his Autobiography as “shabby and shapeless [in appearance], his
face round and expressionless, his manners clumsy”—bases his conclusions on his knowledge of

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