Perhaps one of the most quotable writers of all time, Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s size and body of work are hard to match. His work included about 4,000 essays, 200 short stories, hundreds of poems, eighty books, and five plays. He engaged with many of the intellectuals of his day and continues to shape the readers’ thoughts almost a hundred years after his death.
Although I’ve read many of his books, I had little familiarity with Chesterton’s life. Holly Geiger Lee has written an accessible and delightful biography, The Life of Chesterton: The Man Who Carried a Swordstick and a Pen, introducing readers to the adventures, education, and people who helped form a man of incomparable wit, imagination, and mind. I’m glad to have read it and will have my children read it as an introduction to Chesterton before reading any of his works.
The Life of Chesterton is valuable not just because it’s a well-written biography, but also because it communicates to readers what Chesterton valued and how his life prepared him to be such an influential thinker. Here are a few key themes that stood out to me:
Words
Gilbert Chesterton’s childhood was the best sort: a bookish one. Lee mentions Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, George MacDonald’s fairy tales, and W.S. Gilbert’s poems as staples in his literary diet. When Chesterton recited some lines from The Tempest, his father challenged him to become familiar with King Lear. Chesterton also loved The Princess and the Goblin and imagined that his house was transformed into the palace with goblins lurking about. He never tired of reading Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, especially the tale of Horatius at the Bridge. Horatius’s heroism captured his imagination and gave him a vision of courage and sacrifice. As he grew, so did the list of authors he loved—Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, and Scott. A lifetime of reading the best writers fed the mind of the man known as the Prince of Paradox.
Play
Chesterton spent his childhood playing as every boy should. Not only did he play out the tales he read, he also spent many days fighting the pirates around his London neighborhood. If there were no pirates on a particular day, then he fought off Vikings. This important play, Lee writes, is nothing less than boys “pretending to be men.” His mom wisely knew the value of his play adventures and let him run around their neighborhood to seek out enemies he needed to defeat. His father’s study was full of interesting things and projects for him to marvel at. Mr. Ed, as Chesterton’s father was affectionately known, also built a toy theater for the Chestertons to “entertain guests with their imaginative plays and comedies.” As a grown man, Chesterton’s playfulness stayed with him, and he enjoyed playing with the beloved children who were a part of his life.
Community
People who loved Chesterton and helped sharpen his thinking and writing were a mainstay throughout his life. His loving parents taught him the importance of family, and as a man, he believed that family “was one of God’s ways to shower the world in grace.” But it wasn’t just family that gave him beautiful community. His childhood friends, Edmund Bentley and Lucian Overshaw, also became published writers as adults. The three were part of a larger Junior Debating Club where Chesterton “continued to grow and thrive, as they shared their love of ideas, good literature, and good tea.” When he visited another lively debating club as an adult, he met a woman he determined to marry after their first introduction. Frances proved to be a woman who would love him until death parted them, all the while seeking Chesterton’s good and encouraging him as he wrote.
There are more central ideas that stood out to me from The Life of Chesterton—his commitment to the truth, his faith, his love for his wife, the hope one can find in the midst of spiritual depression—but for those and more, you’ll have to read this book. In doing so, you’ll become better acquainted with a man who was and is a giant—in size and intellectual legacy—yet “never left behind his imagination.”
The Burkes lived overseas for three years and have been to almost 20 countries together, surviving some adventures they will never speak of to the grandparents.
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