The Young Chesterton and

a History of his Time

John Coates

J OHN C OATES (MA Cambridge, PhD Exeter) has written books on

Chesterton, Romantic Prose, Kipling, and Elizabeth Bowen, and numer-
ous articles mainly on late 19th and early 20th century subjects. Until his
retirement he lectured at the University of Hull. Mellen published his
study Social Discontinuity in the Novels of Elizabeth Bowen in 1998.

Not long before his death, Chesterton remarked that having littered
the world with thousands of essays for a living, he might naturally be
inclined to let the account of his own life stray into a sort of essay.
Given the vivid and multitudinous nature of existence, it could seem
natural to approach life through the medium of impressions, attempting
to catch its particular aspects without offering a general interpretation.
Nevertheless, he quickly added, his own life was not an essay but a
story (Autobiography, 55-6) 1. To be more specific, it was a police
novel in which the odd incidents, sights, sounds, or fragments of conver-
sation in the first chapters (the curates start of recognition, the cocka-
toos scream in the night, the burnt blotting-paper or the hasty avoidance
of the subject of onions (Autobiography, 56) ) were all to have a precise
meaning when the mystery was explained at the end. Although he set the
fragments of his first memories at the beginning of his account without
discussion of anything which they foreshadow Chesterton was convinced
that there were themes, coherent strands of narrative in his life and even-
tual satisfactory solution to the problems it had raised.
Beneath all its many pleasant anecdotes, the Autobiography was in-
tended to be the account of a spiritual quest and of its fulfilment. In this
respect, Chestertons book resembles many others in which the discovery

Elm Hill, Norwich

269
 The Chesterton Review

of religious truth or meaning binds together the changing scenes of life

and explains its most striking incidents. However, the Autobiography
differs from other well-known spiritual classics of self-examination. The
episodes and incidents of many works of this kind are vividly told, and
their characters and conversations live in the memory but, predominantly,
they record private experiences. It would, for example, be unfair but not
unthinkable to characterise Bunyans Grace Abounding as an almost
cloistral work, in which the introverted author dwells on his own guilt and
fears, and on the exact meaning of certain scriptural texts. Episodes, like
the overheard pious conversation of the group of poor women in Bedford,
which comforts Bunyan, refer back to his own inner state, rather than to
the events of his time. An unsympathetic reader (wrongly, but again, not
without show of reason) might see Newmans Apologia as a somewhat
inward turned narrative whose leading incidents were played out among a
coterie of Oxford dons, preoccupied with the minutiae of ecclesiastical
history. When Newman compared his position in the Anglican via media
to that of a Monophysite, they might ask, how many of his contem-
poraries would have understood what he meant?
With Chesterton, no such mistakes are possible. To a striking degree
his account of his spiritual journey is linked to the most significant events
and movements of his time. His discovery of religious truth grows in and
from his involvement with the central economic, social and political
conditions, the leading personalities and intellectual movements of the
age in which he lived. Continually active and enquiring, Chestertons
mind found the solution to its own problems through an interaction with
the common public condition. His spiritual growth cannot be separated
from the wider history of his period.
In some ways, the conditions of his early life fitted him for the role
of a special kind of observer, detaching him from structures and organisa-
tions which shaped others of his time and class. His fathers easy financial
position meant that the pressures of the workplace or the office were not
paramount in his own life. Attending St. Pauls as a day-boy, rather than
a boarder, kept him apart from some of the conditioning of the contem-
porary public school. Since his parents allowed him a free choice in his
career and did not press him to make a rapid decision regarding his future,
he was given plenty of time to read, think and to work out his philosophy
of life. Exposed at the Slade School of Art to the conditions of such
a place (Autobiography, 94) he was, he recalled, a very idle person.

270
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

Unlike the few students whose keen intelligence was narrowed to a

purely technical problem of artistic skills, Chesterton and most of his
contemporaries had ample time to be discursive and philosophical.
Chesterton had an appetite for argument and abstract ideas, nurtured in
endless, animated discussions with his brother and sharpened in the Junior
Debating Club at St. Pauls. What this appetite now encountered was the
negative and nihilistic ideas (Autobiography, 94) of the time, an 1890s
brew of pessimism, fatalism, artistic Impressionism, negative philosophy
perhaps decorated with tags from Schopenhauer, diabolism and the occult.
It is easy to say that Chesterton was an innocent from a sheltered back-
ground when he encountered the atmosphere at the Slade; that what he
described later in a powerful essay The Diabolist was what a more
sophisticated and detached Max Beerbohm presented as merely fatuous in
Enoch Soames. However, the innocent eye, shocked at its first impres-
sions, may catch a truth, denied to the amused and the worldly-wise.
The time Chesterton spent in the fantastic suburb of Bedford Park
where he spoke at another debating club and met his wife Frances, who
was acting as its secretary, confirmed and broadened his knowledge of
current avant-garde intellectual and aesthetic trends. The scepticism
Chesterton knew about, and himself dallied with in early life, went
far beyond the robust, morally upright atheism of Charles Bradlaugh or
Colonel Ingersoll, which he later represented, almost affectionately, in
the figure of Turnbull in The Ball and the Cross. Chesterton knew of, and
had experienced, doubts which anticipated those articulated by the most
radical of twentieth century philosophers, raising questions of the exis-
tence of objective external reality; of its relation to thought and language;
even of the continuity of personal identity.
Chestertons childhood and youth were spent in settings, unusual for
the time in their openness (or vulnerability) to new ideas and in the leisure
and opportunities they afforded for the examination of every kind of ques-
tion. Upbringing and background, as well as temperament and conscious
intellectual choice, fed in Chesterton an appetite for taking matters back
to first principles. He wanted and needed to look at the fundamental philo-
sophical and intellectual significance of ideas, institutions, social move-
ments, historical changes, and even of the eddying fads and froth of daily
life. He could not allow his intellect to be submerged in activities where
the primary questions of meaning and value either remained masked or
were (incorrectly) assumed to have been settled. As he remarked in late

271
 The Chesterton Review

life, he might disagree with revolutionaries on many specific political

points, but he preferred those who desired great and usually violent
changes to reformers who were so much a part of the world they
reformed (Autobiography, 255). whatever their faults or errors, the revo-
lutionaries did, in a sense, judge the world; not justly, like the saints,
but independently like the saints (Autobiography, 255). Judging the
world in this way, asking questions about the true meaning of public
affairs, seemed to Chesterton, an essential part of being fully human. He
was impatient of attempts to make asking those primary questions look
nave or irrelevant. At the beginning of his career as a journalist, he re-
jected current catch-phrases about the need for National Efficiency and
practical men as devices to avoid the first stages of an argument about
purposes. How could one usefully talk about efficiency or practicality
without defining what these qualities were intended to achieve? Increas-
ingly Chesterton came to see that arguments about essential purposes
could, almost invariably, only be answered within a religious context.

Given the way in which his personal consciousness was implicated in

the chief public events and major intellectual currents of his time, it is not
an optional extra to place Chesterton in his historical context or to con-
sider the nature of his steady, articulate commentary on the period
through which he lived. Clearly, the fact that someone commented
frequently and forcibly on his times would not, of itself, guarantee the
accuracy or relevance of his opinions. Even if his views were interesting
in themselves they might be marginal or eccentric. It is important to check
his commentary against external evidence and to see what facts, outside
his writings, exist to support it. Yet, we might be too ready to assume that,
in a comparison between Chesterton and a historical textbook, the text-
book would always be a more reliable witness. A synthesis of evidence
drawn from a past period might lend itself to over-cautious generalisation.
Seeking to strike a balance, to do equal justice to the many features of a
changing time, such an approach might miss the vividness and insight of a
particular testimony. Professor Searles recent distinguished addition to
the New Oxford History of England series, A New England? Peace and
War 1886-1918 (Clarendon Press, 2004) offers just such an opportunity to
set Chestertons early experiences and observations in a wider historical
context. Searle and Chesterton confirm, supplement and, at times, chal-
lenge each other.

272
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

In the early pages of his autobiography, Chesterton takes some care

to establish the exact social position of his rather old-fashioned English
middle-class (Autobiography, 22) family. Always sufficiently success-
ful and quite well-off, his family were uncompetitive and hardly in the
modern sense, enterprising. The clue to understanding their way of life
seems the word respectable, given its full substance and value. Chester-
ton remembered his childhood as being passed in a world where the term
respectability was not yet exclusively one of abuse, but retained some
dim philological connection with the idea of being respected (Autobiog-
raphy, 22). Searles account connects Chestertons family record with a
key point about the later nineteenth century English ethos: Social posi-
tion in Victorian England could be as much determined by how people
behaved as by the scale and source of their income. 2 On this subject,
Searle utilises and endorses the work of F.M.L. Thompson whose innova-
tive study, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian
Britain 1830-1900 (1988) has done much to revalue the ideal of re-
spectability. Thompson and Searle show that to be respectable offered a
way for relatively humble people to gain status or esteem. As well as the
material benefits of a well-conducted life (well-attested in working class
homes where the husband did not drink) respectability had worth and sig-
nificance up and down the social scale. It was a recognised value to set
against those of class and money and, in the England of Chestertons
childhood and youth, operated as one of the factors which drew society
together and gave it stability.
Searles account links respectability to substantial social improve-
ment. A rise in real wages by over a third between 1882 and 1899 was
accompanied by a marked decline in the consumption of alcohol, from
fifteen per cent to nine per cent of the average family budget between
1875 and 1910. During the same period, a huge increase in Post Office
Saving Accounts and in the membership of Friendly Societies testifies
to a growth of ideas of thrift, responsibility and of care for dependents.
Better policed and regulated, the England of Chestertons early days was
also healthier, longer lived and better educated than in any previous gen-
eration. In many ways, Searle portrays an energetic, hopeful society in
which civil servants, teachers and doctors were working hard and with
striking success to better the lives of their fellow citizens. Improved diet
and sanitation lead to a marked rise in life expectancy, from 41.9 years in
the early 1880s to 53.5 years by 1911. Throughout the period the crude
death rate steadily fell. The Education Acts of 1870, 1880 and 1891, pro-

273
 The Chesterton Review

ducing free and compulsory education up to the age of twelve, formed a

literate, numerate and increasingly well-informed society in which al-
most all working-class parents came to view schooling as normal and
natural (Searle, 50) and in which schoolmasters, were often being
accorded an exaggerated respect.
Long ago, De Tocqueville remarked that the French Revolution broke
out, not among a population living for the most part in abject misery
under Louis XIV, but in Louis XVIs time of improved living standards,
better education and of well-intentioned, if patchy, reform. Partial im-
provement in a society often leads to increased stress as a population
grows impatient at any delay in the realisation of its enhanced expecta-
tions. Some of Searles most interesting analysis exposes the unease pro-
duced in England from 1886 and 1918 by a collision between the rising
and changed expectations of the community and the tardy responses of its
social and political structure.
In his account of the world in which he grew up, Chesterton avoids
both nostalgia and revulsion. He recalls the decency and rectitude of those
who nurtured him and deliberately repudiates the vilification of Victorian-
ism in which Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells and even Bernard Shaw in-
dulged. Instead, he refuses to do his duty as a true modern, by cursing
everybody who made me whatever I am (Autobiography, 38). Yet, he
saw weaknesses in the society into which he was born. One of its chief
defects was an extraordinarily rigid system of class division. Both for
good and evil, and certainly often to excess his own milieu was sepa-
rated both from the class above it and the class below. Chestertons com-
ments suggest that he thought that the detrimental effects of this class
division had not fully declared themselves in his own time. The social
structure may have seemed stable, even natural. It may have only been
questioned by a small minority. Yet, there was a fracture in society and a
blindness in those who knew far too little of the working classes, to the
grave peril of a later generation (Autobiography, 25). Communication
between the different levels of society was often stifled by a sort of
silence and embarrassment.
Searle portrays a country whose inhabitants devoted considerable at-
tention to distinctions not merely between but within classes. Working
class life involved minute gradations between different social groups,
defined by dress, accent and manners (Searle, 112). Employers some-
times deliberately fostered such elaborate stratification and the hier-

274
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

archical vision of British society was encouraged by a contemporary

vogue for antiquarian trappings, such as town halls ornamented with
historic figures and local worthies, maces, regalia and armorial bearings.
In such a context, it is easy to understand the young Chestertons well-
advertised pleasure in cockney jokes, music halls and popular entertain-
ments, in the relaxed ease and friendliness of pubs, in holiday crowds,
penny-Dreadfuls, Punch and Judy shows and whatever else in English life
escaped official stuffiness and class consciousness.
Both Searle and Chesterton point to a more serious effect of extreme
stratification on English life at the end of the nineteenth century than an
incidental pomposity and concern with trivia. As the power government
assumed over the lives of individuals increased, it was often accompanied
by a well-intentioned curtailment of the freedom and responsibility of
(almost invariably) poor people. As Searle remarks though social policy
was becoming more humane in some respects, it was becoming harsher
in others (Searle, 201). Increasingly, there was a tendency to class weak,
vulnerable or even harmlessly eccentric people as misfits, deviants and
incompetents posing a problem of social administration that required
custodial care and treatment at the hands of the relevant expert (Searle,
201). Between 1890 and 1914, this change of attitude resulted in an
increase in the asylum population of more than fifty per cent.
The growing habit of benevolent interference in the lives of poor
people was sometimes dictated, and invariably coloured, by class incom-
prehension. Searle quotes the testimony of a district nurse who declared
her doubt as to whether an equal conversation was ever possible across
the class barrier (Searle, 115). In the young Chestertons view, philan-
thropists, social investigators and novelists who wrote of life in the slums
described the poor as speaking with a coarse or heavy, or husky enuncia-
tion. Rarely, if ever, did they imagine the impression they made on the
objects of their pity or interference who heard them speaking with some
absurdly shrill and affected voice, such as we only hear from a duchess in
a three act farce.
Undeniably, some of the effects of middle class interference were
beneficial: The rate of indictable crimes declined, by forty-three per cent
from the early 1860s to the 1890s (Searle, 198) and rowdiness, drunk-
enness and casual violence, too, had all probably abated since the 1870s.
This was the result not only of more efficient policing and of the ideal of
respectability but of a readiness to acknowledge the social causes of

275
 The Chesterton Review

crime. Instead of seeing criminals as highly dangerous men at war with

society (Searle, 199) as the mid-Victorian had done, the tendency by the
turn of the nineteenth century, was to view them as human wreckage.
In some cases, greater comparison might be brought at too high a
price. Theories which saw congenital weakness as the crucial factor in
criminality were dominant throughout the 1890s and the Edwardian
period. Such works as Havelock Elliss The Criminal (1890) popularised
the theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (Searle, 199) in
which malefactors were classified as hereditary degenerates, resembling
in physical and psychical characteristics the normal individuals of a
lower race. As Searle reminds us, when Sherlock Holmes described his
adversary Professor Moriarty as having hereditary tendencies of the most
diabolical kind (Searle, 199), Conon Doyle was putting into the mouth of
his creation the most advanced medical terminology of the day.
Here, Searle throws light on some of the young Chestertons preoccu-
pations and helps the reader to avoid misunderstanding them. The re-
peated references to the misuse of medical terminology in early novels
and essays, such as Manalive and The Criminal Head, or the scenarios
in which experts use their fantastic invented types of mental illness to
confine their victims might seem to point to personal obsessions. Coming
fresh from Chestertons account of his own adolescent morbidity in the
Autobiography, one might assume that these portraits of sinister doctors
or criminologists reflected his own fears. Searle proves that a combination
of middle class ignorance or assumptions about the poor, of increased
government interference and of medical theories which stressed heredi-
tary factors in crime and mental illness were real (and dangerous) factors
in the public life of the period. The causes of Chestertons preoccupations
lay there, rather than in his personal history.
Judging from the celebration of respectability in the early pages
of the Autobiography, Chesterton certainly valued the later nineteenth
centurys improved standard of orderliness and honesty. However, the
behaviour he valued rested on generally accepted moral norms, good up-
bringing and the effect of public opinion. He was deeply suspicious of
forms of social classification and control which denied moral responsibil-
ity (and hence human dignity) to individuals or groups of people. When
coupled with terminologies based on heredity and the denial of free-will,
terms like unfit and feeble-minded produced sinister results. Chester-
tons The Mad Official compared a womans imprisonment for having

276
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

a dirty house to the strange stilted rituals of Manchu China in which horri-
ble cruelties were performed to the accompaniment of arcane formulae.
The woman in the case he referred to was not arrested for cruelty to
children since hers were well and happy but for being the wrong sort of
unfit person or, in Chestertons view, merely for being ill and poor.
(Recent British cases, in which women, subsequently found to have
been innocent, have been imprisoned for murdering their children on the
basis of expert medical opinion, suggests the issues that alarmed
Chesterton are far from dead. Perhaps the doubtful psychological condi-
tion of Mnchausens Syndrome by proxy should be placed among the
terminologies invented by Dr. Warner in Manalive.)
Searle confirms other and happier impressions of the world Chester-
ton engaged with at the age of thirty. Many of those familiar with Edwar-
dian popular literature will have been struck by its air of high spirits,
cheerful readiness to embrace new ideas and alternative possibilities, its
love of fun, jokes and adventure. It is interesting then, to note that the
late Victorian and Edwardian population really did differ from that of
later decades in its youthfulness (Searle, 45). In the early twentieth cen-
tury, only one in 13.5 people was aged sixty or over. In age-distribution
late Victorian England more resembled a third world country such as
Egypt than it does a modern European state.
Such an age-balance would be bound to influence the spirit and
temper of a society. A youthful country might well be rebellious, at times
irreverent and rowdily disrespectful of the attitudes of the generation or
two before, seeing its elders as stuffy, pompous and boring. In his descrip-
tion of several significant incidents, Searle captures something of this
spirit. The young women involved in the Match Girls Strike of 1888,
one of the landmarks in the growth of Trade Union power, marched out of
the factory partly out of indignation at having a shilling compulsorily
deducted from their wages as a contribution to a statue of Gladstone
(Searle, 185). Whatever other factors led to the strike, high-spirited irrev-
erence played its part. One recalls Mr. Pooters bewilderment in The
Diary of a Nobody at his son Lupin finding Mr. Gladstone funny and
refusing to say why.
The fact that they were writing in and for a society in which the
young predominated does not explain Shaw, Wells and Chesterton but
it is a factor in the response to their work. Shaw parodying the pompous
Victorian agnostic as Roebuck Ramsden in Man and Superman. Wells

277
 The Chesterton Review

portraying the mean streets and stuffy attitudes of Mr. Pollys Fishbourne,
or Chesterton imitating the scholarship of The Hibbert Journal in The
Flying Inn or dismissing the mediocrity of late Victorian journals in The
Victorian Age in Literature are all speaking to a young society impatient
of one long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. 3 The youthfulness
of the world in which Chesterton grew up might explain a notable ideal-
ism and generosity of spirit in the atmosphere of the time. As Searle
points out, many of the social reforms of the Edwardian age grew out of
straightforward compassion rather than considerations of political advan-
tage. What prompted the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, for instance, was
simple humanitarianism without ulterior motives: After all, no one stood
in fear of the elderly poor or saw them as a decisive factor in military or
industrial efficiency (Searle, 371).
One characteristic note of Chesterton at thirty is an expression, in a
particular engaging form, of a reaction the young often have to their
elders. Young people dislike being fed a diet of weary inevitability; of
being told that an (often bleak and limited) way of looking at the world is
all there is; that science or history, heredity or economics mean that some
state of affairs is natural and inevitable and that, when they have grown
up enough, they will shed their illusions about any possible alternative.
Of course, it is appropriate to consider the young Chestertons quarrels
with Social Darwinism, with Nihilism and Pessimism, or with determinist
theories of criminology in intellectual terms. He opposed them, in specific
detail, as wrong philosophies. But, it is worth remarking, that these wrong
philosophies were being, in many cases, handed on by a somewhat stale
older generation. Many years later, Chesterton recalled a brief argument
he had with Thomas Hardy while both of them were waiting in a pub-
lishers office. Chesterton was impatient with the older mans remark that
life, with all its pain and pleasure, was not worthwhile and that non-
existence would be better. Apart from their intellectual weakness, Hardys
dismal utterances affronted the natural (and healthy) instincts of youth:
Honestly, if I had been quite simply a crude young man and nothing else,
I should have thought his whole argument either superficial or silly
(Autobiography, 262).
Given the youthfulness, energy and high spirits, the improvements in
health and education, the rise in real wages and the increasing compassion
and humanity of the Britain Chesterton knew as a boy and young man,
one is bound to ask the reasons for an undeniable malaise in 1890s and

278
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

Edwardian political and intellectual life. Searle offers some interesting

clues. Deliberately unsensational, he gives, by cumulative indications, the
impression of an impasse in which often inadequately understood forces
are blocked in their expression by an unresponsive political class and
establishment. The energies of a society were being held back and denied.
Searles comments on Lord Salisbury are suggestive: Calm, sar-
donic and pessimistic, Salisbury in many ways matched the spirit of the
times (Searle, 259). Recent historical work (notably Andrew Roberts
Salisbury: Victorian Titan (1999) ) has brought this great statesman,
Prime Minister for much of the late 1880s and 1890s, out of obscurity.
We have been reminded of his brilliant intellect, detached statecraft and
of the web of subtle diplomacy he spun. Searle portrays a man convinced
that the best he could do was to camouflage the decline of British power.
The rise of the United States and of Germany represented forces working
against British hegemony which this wily and elusive negotiator might
retard but could not in the end, defeat. Salisburys outlook was moulded
by deterministic concepts of history. In a famous speech delivered in May
1898 he declared that the world might be divided in living and dying
nations, with the weak nations becoming weaker and the stronger states
. . . stronger (Searle, 30).
Anyone exploring Chestertons early career is bound to be struck by
the prevalence, in the intellectual and political discourse of the period,
of ideas like those Salisbury expressed. Human affairs were thought to
be moving inevitably by irreversible and scientifically predictable laws.
The later nineteenth centurys most influential thinker, Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903) built a system, embracing biology, sociology, psychology,
education and ethics on the assumption that because evolution from
homogeneity to organised heterogeneity was inevitable and universal, it,
was also good and whatever furthered it was desirable. Evolutionary
metaphors pervaded thought at every level, determining, for example, the
way in which history was written. Searle mentions the popular textbooks
of Augustus Keane which gave scientific backing to age-old stereotypes
(Searle, 31). Man Past and Present (1899) and The Worlds Peoples
(1908) presented the inevitable triumph of the Caucasian race (brave,
imaginative, musical and richly endowed intellectually) as the conse-
quence of evolutionary law.
However, a belief in inevitable process, acting independently of
human choice, is a fragile foundation for hope. How if, as some scientists

279
 The Chesterton Review

believed, evolution might lead to degeneration rather than development?

The international bestseller, Degeneration (1895) by Max Nordan,
claimed to detect an irreversible spread of morbidity and decadence
in every contemporary manifestation of European culture. In The Time
Machine (1895) H.G. Wells foresaw the evolutionary development of the
human race ending in a bifurcation between the effete Eloi and the
brutish, cannibalistic Morlocks. In Hardys Jude the Obscure (1896), the
increased complexity of the human consciousness, in obedience to evolu-
tionary law, produces a mind whose sensitivity and emotional needs are
too great for its environment to be tolerable. Judes young son shows the
characteristics of a tired disillusioned old man, eventually hanging him-
self and his siblings.
One of the constant themes of Chestertons early writings is an attack
on this dominant paradigm of inevitable scientific laws determining the
lives of individuals and societies. That he returned to the subject so often
shows how strong he thought was the hold of the evolutionary paradigm
on the minds of his contemporaries. His response in an early Illustrated
London News article to G.S. Streets declaration that the human race was
growing gloomier is typical of the substance and spirit of many of
Chestertons comments: The human race has not been growing more and
more anything from the beginning. The human race has not been growing
less and less anything from the beginning. If there has been progress,
there has been no progress which can be expressed simply in terms of one
tendency or one thing. If there has been retrogression, there has been no
retrogression which can be clearly defined as retrogression in one respect.
If any tendency had gone on consistently from the beginning, the world
would not be as varied as it now is. 4 In this energetic appeal to what we
all know and can grasp, to the actual variety of the world as we experi-
ence it, one feels Chestertons wish to free others from the mental formu-
lae to which they have become habituated. He directs them to look at the
authentic nature of the world they see and to ask how its complexities
could be reconciled with pseudo-scientific laws of inevitable improve-
ment or decline. He has the air of a young man asking an awkward and
obvious question in a room full of his somewhat jaded elders. (The fresh-
ness of Chestertons approach is all the more striking when we recall that
Herbert Butterfields The Whig View of History (1931) and Karl Poppers
The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) attack the same targets of in-
evitable historical laws against which Chesterton set himself years be-
fore. The dragon clearly took a great deal of killing.)

280
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

Perhaps Chesterton was correct in seeing a loss of belief in free-will

and with it in the possibility and significance of human action as the cause
of a malaise other observers noticed. Searle evokes a contrast between the
surface of the 1890s, an age of pomp, plumes and vainglorious swagger
(Searle, 250) and inner despondency many felt. In the review at Spithead
to celebrate Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee in 1897, 165 British war-
ships stretched as far as the eye could see: This was the most powerful
naval force that had ever been assembled in one place. Yet, at this very
moment, Searle reminds us, pride was tinged with foreboding. Touching
the same melancholy chords as some of the late nineteenth century evolu-
tionary fantasies, while appealing to an older and truer law, Kipling
warned of the decay of all worldly power and the transcience of all polit-
ical dominion.
A New England? is meticulous in its account of institutions, of the
interplay of political parties and personalities, of the statistics of wealth,
health and labour. From the abundant information Searle offers, readers
can gather almost everything they would need to know about the physical
realities of British society between 1886 and 1918. Given Searles schol-
arly labour, any criticism must seem like cavilling, and, in a non-historian,
impertinent. However, a general reader might note that, throughout his
book, Professor Searle seeks to avoid what he presumably sees as the
over-dramatic or sensationalised. He takes issue with the influential theses
of George Dangerfields The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935).
It will be recalled that Dangerfield saw an underlying mood linking the
various movements which challenged the bourgeois Liberal virtues of
the Asquith government. The Irish Nationalists, the Ulster Loyalists, the
Suffragettes, the right-wing Conservatives, the Socialists and Trade
Unions who led the series of great strikes, all rejected compromise and
despised the conventions of Parliamentary discussion, the respectability of
the honest labourer or the codes of correct womanly behaviour. All these
revolts pointed to a moral upheaval, pushing society to a crisis which only
the outbreak of war prevented.
Searle rejects Dangerfields premises, arguing that the various move-
ments threatening the state on the eve of the Great War had little of any
substance in common and that, in any case, by the summer of 1914,
voices of moderation were beginning to reassert themselves (Searle,
472). This approach is typical of Searles handling of other aspects of the
period from 1886 to 1918. He points to an inner weariness behind the

281
 The Chesterton Review

grand faade of empire, a doubt, even as the British domain continued to

expand, that the country possessed the resources, or even the will-power
to defend the vast territories for which its government has assumed re-
sponsibility (Searle, 251). At the same time, he refrains from speculation
about the moral causes of the loss of will-power that he notes. Determined
on a level-headed, low-key approach, he does not attempt to grasp
the spiritual quality of the age, preferring instead formal documentation,
Blue-Books, statistics, government minutes, the recorded activities of
institutions and other evidence he sees as solid fact. The effect, at times, is
a little odd. Quoting a speech by Joseph Chamberlain in 1902 in which
Chamberlain spoke of Britain as a weary Titan stagge[ring] under the
too vast orb of its fate (Searle, 251) he does not seek to give the moral
context of so startling an image used by such a man. Perhaps Searle feels
that to pursue this enquiry is to enter the realm of the nebulous and un-
quantifiable, but it is precisely such a question about the past that we
would most like to have answered.

Neither in his youth nor in later life did Chesterton share the view
that in order to be true history had to be undramatic. He did not agree
with the notion that events were propelled by level-headed, moderate and
rationally self-interested people, acting in response to long-standing facts
and within the framework of existing institutions. At thirty, Chesterton
was convinced, as he remarked in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904),
that human beings have never from the beginning of the world done
what the wise men have seen as inevitable. 5 He was aware that the pre-
ponderate forces and established institutions of a society might be chal-
lenged or subverted by changes of belief and alterations in the spiritual
climate whose stray indications the sensible official mind had overlooked.
Speaking later of the course of the First World War, Chesterton noted
with approval an article in which his friend Belloc had reconstructed the
mind of a Byzantine bureaucrat at the beginning of the sixth century,
exploring the balance of forces and the possible areas of conflict in the
world: He noted how such a man might think he had accounted for all
the possibilities, the danger of a religious split between East and West, the
danger of barbarian raids on Gaul or Britain, the situation in Africa or
Spain, and so on; and then say he had in his hand all the material for
change. At that moment, far away in a little village of Arabia, Mahoret
was eighteen years old (Autobiography, 239).

282
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

In Searles account of the years during which Chesterton was begin-

ning his career, one is struck by a relative lack of interest in fugitive indi-
cations of change in moral temper or spiritual inclination; in those hints,
offered by eccentric groups, avante-garde movements, transitory publica-
tions and by the conversation of advanced intellectuals of the under-
currents which were to shape society or had already begun to threaten
some of its foundations. For example, Searle remarks that eugenics never
captured the allegiance of more than a vocal minority (Searle, 83) and
that as for eugenics, to this the Liberal government prudently gave a
wide berth (Searle, 384). This does not give enough significance to the
appearance of a new and poisonous idea, inimical to human dignity and
common decency, which was to provide the basis for some of the twen-
tieth centurys worst horrors and whose effects on the treatment of the
unborn and the elderly are still being felt. The fact the sterilization of the
unfit, or the elimination of the feeble-minded could now be calmly dis-
cussed marks a break with hitherto generally accepted ethical views
which itself is portentous. Of course, it is a matter of gratitude if, as Searle
suggests, the Liberal government gave a wide berth to eugenics, in avoid-
ing some of the movements more hair-raising proposals. (Perhaps we
sometimes owe more than we know to bureaucratic caution and the slow-
ness with which institutions react to exciting new thought.) However, as
Searle himself elsewhere indicates, attitudes to mental illness were alter-
ing, a change codified in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 under which
those now classified as feeble-minded could be put into custodial care.
For Chesterton, these new classifications, enhanced state powers and
seclusion, without judicial process, of those a coterie of experts thought
socially undesirable formed a sinister general background to the more
extreme proposals of eugenics. The movement did not represent the view
of a few isolated cranks, divorced from the mainstream. Rather, eugenics
was the militant expression of a general mood, the crystallization of a
more diffused cultural change. Recognising this, Chesterton began his
crusade against eugenics with an attack on Professor Karl Pearsons advo-
cacy of selected marriages to promote racial purity in 1901, and continued
it throughout and beyond the period covered by Searles book.
It is instructive to notice the difference between Searles dispassion-
ate summing up of the period in all its detail and the way in which
Chesterton experienced day-to-day as a journalist. The material with
which a newspaper writer must be in touch often seems light and

283
 The Chesterton Review

ephemeral to the academic mind, but it is often in such material that the
first echoes of the future begin to sound. One of the most outstanding
studies of the history of ideas, Paul Hazards The European Mind 1680 to
1715 shows how the stability of the classical edifice, the ideal of im-
mutable perfection embodied in the France of Louis XIV, was under-
mined from within, long before change appeared overtly in the French
Enlightenment. Much of the evidence for this movement of mind and
spirit is to be found in the work of figures little known in their own day,
eccentric, transient and seemingly marginal. Hazards seminal investiga-
tion should warn us not to concentrate too exclusively of the large scale
financial, political or institutional facts of a society at a given time. Idle
conversation, gossip, day-dreams, stray comments on the passing show
and proposals of odd but interesting intellectuals are worth recording
too.
Searle tells us that despite some doubts among the intelligentsia, the
doctrinal challenge to Christianity in 1886 was . . . weak (Searle, 535)
and that Sunday School membership embraced some eighty per cent of
the five to fourteen age group by 1906. It may be time that a certain
watering down of religious practice took place as churches sought
popularity by making their peace with an increasingly secular society
(Searle, 538). This did not represent an erosion of traditional religious
beliefs. Chestertons various vantage points exposed him to influences
which made him aware of much that Searles statistics do not quantify.
An examination of Chestertons early journalism in the context of other
contributions to The Daily News reveals something of the moral climate
his writings were intended to challenge. Through the pages of this mass
circulation newspaper blew the breezes of new thought, the speculations
and topics of conversation which worked towards moral or intellectual
change. The material which appeared in The Daily News alongside
Chestertons early articles testified to the retention of Victorian manner-
isms, propriety and verbal conventions together with a fundamental moral
uncertainty. In one issue one might encounter an article deploring the
prevalence of slang or incorrect spelling and a favourable review of a
book suggesting that the unfit should be painlessly exterminated. The
same contributor might attack the habit of cigarette-smoking and, then, a
few weeks later, proclaim that truth was relative, and perhaps unimpor-
tant, since the purpose of nature as revealed by evolution, was not the dis-
covery of truth but the maintenance of life. As the present writer has

284
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

remarked elsewhere: The Daily News of 1903 contained an odd mixture

of relics of a decayed Nonconformist culture, isolated fragments of preju-
dice, and a high-minded tone, no longer supported by any coherent system
of thought, together with foreshadowings of what became some of the
most evil attitudes of the twentieth century: attitudes the prevailing seri-
ousness showed no power to detect. 6
The young Chesterton was unusual in that his early experiences had
directed his attention away from what Searle sees as evidence of the con-
tinued hold of religion in the Edwardian age, the seemingly solid evidence
of church attendance, of institutional activities, and the social prestige of
church leaders. Early on, he had become aware that this impressive fabric
was being undermined. As he remarked, the general background of all
my boyhood was agnostic (Autobiography, 140). In their circle, his own
parents were unusual in believing in a personal god or in personal
immortality. When he looked back on the tired lessons in the Greek
testament at St. Pauls school, Chestertons friend Lucian Oldershaw
recalled that they had both been taught our religion by agnostics. Sud-
denly recalling the faces of all my schoolmasters, except one or two
eccentric clergymen (Autobiography, 140), Chesterton knew his friend
was right. Among the advanced, intellectual people Chesterton knew in
his youth there was an assumption that unbelief or agnosticism were
unanswerable intellectual positions, final answers to questions which no
longer needed to be discussed: The silence seemed to be one of religion
defeated; a descent of materialism (Autobiography, 140). In Bedford
Park, a colony for artists who were almost aliens (Autobiography, 136)
where he found himself, by chance, among the avant-garde of the day,
Chesterton inhabited an atmosphere where agnosticism was an estab-
lished church (Autobiography, 140). Among these, there was a unifor-
mity of unbelief, like the Elizabethan demand for uniformity of belief,
not among eccentric people, but simply among educated people (Auto-
biography, 141). It was the prevalent attitude, Chesterton found, among
the educated older than himself (Autobiography, 141). Unbelief was the
orthodox against which, as a young man, he revolted, questioning the
assumptions of older people, or rather their silence, the way in which
they took issues as settled or dismissed arguments as outmoded. For
Chesterton, who loved honest, logical discussion, there was something
provoking in the rejection of thought because it seemed old-fashioned to
a particular season or set or challenged what no emancipated mind is

285
 The Chesterton Review

entitled to question. 7 Such an attitude was snobbish and intellectually

lazy.
Chesterton noticed, too, that although the inhabitants of Bedford Park
saw themselves as a doomed, heroic minority, hiding their red-brick
catacombs or dying behind their red-brick barricades (Autobiography,
136), their aesthetic predilections and life-styles were profoundly influ-
ential: It is rather Bedford Park that has conquered the world (Auto-
biography, 136).
Before the age of thirty, Chestertons range of experience and ac-
quaintance had sharpened his sense of the way the world was going and
of the dangers which faced it. Unlike Bellocs imaginary Byzantine
official, he was able to see behind and beyond the weight and momentum
of existing institutions, the prestige of established figures and the range of
familiar habits and phrases. Where Searle sees the First World War as a
castastrophe which violently altered the still flourishing social and politi-
cal institutions of pre-1914 Britain, Chestertons experiences and reflec-
tions made him aware of forces which were sapping the edifice.
A disparity between the facts Searle scrupulously gathers and his in-
terpretation of them supports Chestertons view of the age in which he
lived. Searle sees the 1890s as on balance . . . a time of optimism
(Searle, 201) in which the respectable no longer feared an uprising of
the dispossessed and property seemed reasonably secure. He charac-
terises the Britain of Chestertons youth as a mature class society, in
which each class accepted the institutionalised role assigned to it and
sought to settle its differences with others through negotiation and com-
promise, not violence (Searle, 201). Yet, at the same time, the economic
data A New England? supplies evidence of a potentially explosive situa-
tion. In the late 1870s one quarter of land in England and Wales be-
longed to a mere 710 individuals, a concentration of ownership perhaps
more extreme than in other European country (Searle, 83) and a mere
ten per cent of the adult population owned ninety-two per cent of the
nations wealth. As Searle admits, this imbalance was the main fact
about the society he describes and its deepest problem: Much of the story
of England between 1886 and 1914 centres on attempts that were made at
justifying, defending, assailing and alleviating these injustices (Searle,
85).
Searle also endorses the conclusion reached by Chestertons friend,
the politician C.F.G. Masterman in his classic The Condition of England

286
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

(1909): Masterman was correct in his belief that rural society was in
crisis (Searle, 88). Changes, catastrophic for many communities, were
altering the economic balance of the country, as British farming was
undercut by cheap American grain: Between 1870 and 1911, some
2,500,00 acres in Great Britain went out of cereal production and, in some
counties such as Suffolk, large tracts of what had been farmland were
converted to field sports. For thousands of individuals, this meant the
loss of familiar localities and loved scenes, the erasing of memories, folk-
tales, songs and games, of the whole of an ancient culture which had
given their lives identity and meaning. It was in these years that Cecil
Sharp was collecting the English ballads and folk-songs, often from the
oldest inhabitant of a village, in a race against time, before they perished
from memory. Searles statistics will also recall the fields in which the
young Jude stands in Hardys Jude the Obscure, empty but haunted by the
labour, games, songs and courtships of a lost population.
This late nineteenth-century flight from the land destroyed whole
classes of cottagers, small traders and middlemen who often owning their
own homes or businesses, possessed a certain economic or social indepen-
dence. The changes recorded in A New England? or in Rider Haggards
poignant Rural England (1902) left only great landowners and landless
labourers in the English countryside.
Various factors blunted the effect of the huge inequalities of wealth
and of the loss by many of the rural poor of their homes and indepen-
dence. The rise in real wages and the availability of work in the towns,
long-standing habits of deference and the culture of respectability and,
after 1908, National Insurance and the beginning of the Welfare State.
Chesterton did not view the last development favourably. For him, the
conversion of the mass of the population into wage-earners who accepted
their status in exchange for the minimal security given by the Dole
represented a loss of human dignity, of freedom and the values of private
life and of opportunities for significant choice by individuals, families and
small communities.
There are some analogies between the spiritual awakening which the
young Chesterton experienced in the later 1890s and his finding, at the
same time, of a distinctive political position. In both cases he discovered,
or was dragged towards, beliefs which were set quite apart from the
powerful and opposing ideologies, the alternatives which seemed to many
to cover all the ground of the debate. To an intellectual young man the

287
 The Chesterton Review

choice in religion might appear to lie between the materialism of T.H.

Huxley and his (less attractive) followers on the one side and the spiritu-
ality of the fashionable Hegelian academic philosophy on the other. One
might opt for Positivism, evolution and heredity as the basis of ethics or
for the reconciliation of contraries in the Absolute. Chesterton rejected
both options. Instead, he found his bearings in joy and gratitude for the
life a personal God had created and in the fact of free-will which gave
life meaning and dignity. The development of hereditary tendencies, the
unfolding of evolutionary patterns or the blending of opposites through
synthesis toward a higher plane, whatever their rhetorical potential, could
never give individual life worth or significance.
In politics, Chesterton saw the ground of debate in the later 1890s
occupied by Imperialism and Socialism. One could choose between the
inevitable expansion of empire, in which smaller, less developed coun-
tries, races or communities were to be absorbed into larger wholes and the
inevitable expansion of the state which would take over smaller eco-
nomic units, businesses or farms. Imperialism and Socialism differed
about specific measures, or in their incidental trappings and terminology,
but, Chesterton perceived, both creeds shared fundamentally similar
attitudes. Imperialists and Socialists both believed in the unavoidable
necessity of the processes by which the state of affairs each desired would
eventuate. They both felt that they not merely understood but, in a manner
of speaking, owned history. Both, too, were on the side of the big battal-
ions, assuming that larger aggregations of power and wealth would neces-
sarily succeed and that, therefore, their victory was morally right.
For the young Chesterton, the answer to the social and political prob-
lems of the day lay in a redistribution of wealth and property which would
give the poor land and businesses of their own rather than the status of re-
cipients of small subsidies intended to keep them alive when unemployed.
The poor would not benefit by being absorbed into some vast Imperial
mission which often served shady financial interests. Nor would they find
a happy future in providing middle-class philanthropists and government
inspectors (many of whom had attitudes well adapted to a Socialist state)
with objects for their compassion and interference. Instead, the poor
needed a chance to reinvigorate their lives through their own choices and
A New England? provides a useful context for some of Chestertons other
early political preoccupations. Searle points to a widespread awareness at
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, that

288
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

the British governments and ruling class were not aligned with the
nations most significant economic and social forces: Contemporaries
puzzled over a state of affairs in which government seemed to be so out of
kilter with the countrys economic base (Searle, 131). (No more than a
handful of businessmen ever forced their way into the Cabinets of the
period. Working class figures in Parliaments or governments were virtu-
ally unknown. There was no disposition to reverse this situation: Indeed
the aristocratic flavour of the Cabinet actually grew more pronounced
during the 1890s, tempered only by the presence of a disproportionate
number of lawyers (Searle, 130). Snobbery coloured the choice of fig-
ures for high office. From 1868 to 1905, the Foreign secretary was always
a peer. When asked to accept a commoner, Edward VII was inclined to
refuse since he sincerely (but incorrectly) assumed that Noble rank was
required for the post.
Government by a narrow elite did not, of course, prevent its individ-
ual members from being figures of stature and ability. One could not say
that Salisbury, Balfour, Rosebery or Asquith lacked talent. They were all
highly cultured men who spoke and wrote with distinction. However, the
fact that Britain was being governed at the end of the nineteenth century
by a ruling class based on landed wealth and the ancient professions
(Searle, 132) almost inevitably produced government by coterie. Britain
was ruled by groups connected by blood or marriage or by having gone to
the same schools and universities. Whatever their nominal party alle-
giances, they often shared the same values and attitudes. Searles account
lends credence to Hilaire Bellocs and Cecil Chestertons The Party Sys-
tem (1911). G.K. Chesterton came to agree with his brothers and his
friends suggestion that debates in Parliament were performances or dra-
matic entertainments by people whose factitious passions, assumed for the
occasion, could not disguise the fact that they were often relatives or long-
standing friends frequenting the same clubs, dinner tables and country-
house parties. In any case, real decisions were taken by small groups who
surrounded the party-leaders. The young Gilbert Chesterton saw it as im-
peratively necessary to end what Gladstone in 1890 had called a disjunc-
tion between a nominal democracy with a popular basis and a hierarchy
of classes and establishments savouring in part of feudal times and princi-
ples (Searle, 129).
This discord between rulers and rulers may have had another more
insidious result. It might, in part, explain the pessimism figures like Salis-

289
 The Chesterton Review

bury and Rosebery invariably displayed in private and, at times. gave way
to in public. Out of sympathy with the aspirations of many of those whose
votes they needed, thery were compelled to manage the electorate rather
than expressing its wishes. Having bitterly opposed Disraelis granting of
the vote to working class householders in 1867, Salisbury remained con-
vinced that the widened electorate were a gullible, violently aggressive
mass, beyond the reach of moral or civilised values. The best that could
be done was, temporarily, to beguile and circumvent them. Since, in such
a situation, any change was bound to be for the worse, the less change of
any kind the better. Given that a long-standing Prime Minister held such
views, one could understand Chestertons complaint of a coincident col-
lapse of both religious and political idealism producing a curious cold air
of emptiness.
In spite of its deliberately unsensational tone, Searles excellent study
of the years between 1886 and 1918 awakens us to the complexities of the
world in which the young Chesterton grew up and began his journalistic
career. The energies and aspirations of a healthier, better-paid and better-
educated population were partly directed, partly frustrated by a ruling
elite, many of whom were out of sympathy with those to whom they had
reluctantly conceded a measure of power. A more literate and predomi-
nantly younger people, impatient of the stuffiness and proprieties of their
elders, were on the verge of exposure to disturbing, and sometimes
amoral, philosophies decked out in the formulae of science and philoso-
phy. One might say that Chesterton needed his time, that his curiosity had
high spirits, talent for surprising his readers, his ability to render the
familiar fresh and delightful and to make religious conviction joyful and
challenging were exactly what a particular audience appreciated. Perhaps
his early success cannot be divorced from its social, moral and religious
context. Whatever the truth of this proposition, however, it is certain,
given their problems, hopes and dangers, that his times needed Chester-
ton.
1 G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton, (1936 rept. San Fran-
cisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 55. Subsequent references in parenthesis are to this vol-
ume.
2 G.R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886-1918, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2004), p. 99. Subsequent references in parenthesis are to this volume.
3 G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, (1905 rept. in Heretics, Orthodoxy, Blatchford Con-
troversies, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 193.
4 G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, (1913 rept. London: Oxford
University Press, 1966), p. 98.

290
The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time

5 G.K. Chesterton, The London Illustrated News, February 10, 1906 rept. The
London Illustrated News 1905-1907 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), pp. 122-
123.
6 G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, (1904 rept. The Napoleon of
Notting Hill and Others, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 220.
7 John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, (Hull: Hull Univer-
sity Press, 1984), pp. 79-80.
8 G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn, (1914 rept. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958),
p. 94.

Trancept of the Great Exhibition (looking north), London - 1851

291