GENERAL INTRODUCTION

This edition of the contributions of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (18741936) to the leading Liberal newspaper the Daily News1 between 1901 and 1913 has been made in response to a growing interest in Chestertons work among scholars and general readers alike. It is the first edition of its kind, comprising much of his best journalism on a range of subjects and interests. In responding to the issues of the day, he developed the ideas and beliefs that became central to his thought. It is inevitable that much of his journalism across three decades should bear the mark of haste; but in the essays reprinted here his creative vitality was rarely compromised by the pressure of deadlines. At the time they became collectors items; one albeit incomplete set is preserved in the British Library.2 This edition complements the volumes of Chestertons contributions to the Illustrated London News between 1905 and 1936, published by Ignatius Press in their Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton series. However, his Daily News articles provide greater insights into his political and spiritual views at a formative stage than the more lighthearted pieces he wrote for the Our Note Book column of the Illustrated London News. The contributions are also more varied, including book reviews and letters to the editor as well as his regular columns. The space devoted to readers letters in the Daily News provided Chesterton and his readers with opportunities to engage with one another that were not available in the Illustrated London News. The full run of the Daily News for the years in which Chesterton was associated with it is held by a small number of research libraries only. The eight volumes comprising this edition ensure that his contributions are more readily accessible. As well as obviating the need to search through microfilm of often poor newspaper copy, the volumes bring together the entirety of his output for the newspaper.3 Moreover, through cross-referencing between articles in the notes, the edition provides a perspective on Chestertons work for a prominent organ of the Liberal press that emphasizes its unity. This is in contrast to the impression of fragmentation made by reading individual essays.

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Previous Publishing History

A number of these pieces have been reprinted before in editions compiled by Chesterton himself while he was still with the paper, and by various editors after his death. Prominent among the latter was his last secretary, Dorothy Edith Collins (18951988). As Chestertons literary executrix, she edited five collections of his essays between 1949 and 1975; these were drawn from his voluminous work for other organs of the periodical and newspaper press as well as the Daily News, and were organized around broad themes. But though valuable in making Chestertons work more widely available, the selections were made from among the less contentious and what seemed the less dated parts of his output. Furthermore, those included were edited, sometimes substantially and always silently. This was not just to produce composite essays but also to remove all references to the context in which they were written. Absent from the Collins editions are the articles in which Chesterton engaged with the manoeuvrings of the political elite and with what he considered to be worrying trends in Edwardian public policy. Also absent are his numerous controversial pieces on influential contemporary thinkers, writers and movements. In different ways, other editors of Chestertons work have pared away the original copy to produce what often amounts to short extracts only.4 In contrast, the present edition reprints all Chestertons writing from the Daily News, and from the original text. In doing so, it emphasizes the richness and intensity of public debate in Edwardian England, with which Chestertons thought is tightly enmeshed.

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Annotation

The edition seeks to recover the context of the material and enhance understanding of its meaning and significance through extensive annotation. In this respect as in others it goes beyond existing collections of the essays that are reprinted as raw as well as expurgated text. Editorial notes are provided on a number of fronts. First, they give details of the persons and events at the centre of the articles. As a conscientious reader of the press as well as a leading columnist himself, Chestertons articles are often built around those who featured in the news, both public figures (usually in connection with a recent speech or address) and ordinary citizens (usually in connection with a recent injustice that had been visited upon them). Second, the notes identify the numerous literary, historical, and biblical quotations and resonances in his essays that Chesterton himself left unreferenced. On the whole he could assume a level of general knowledge of such things that the reader of today probably does not have.5 Third, the notes identify the sources of the articles in newspapers and periodicals with which he engaged and elaborate on their contents as necessary. Fourth, as mentioned

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above, the notes identify cross-currents between the various contributions. Fifth, the notes identify the various policies, Commissions, Bills and laws to which he refers. Finally, the notes give details of republication where the essays have been reproduced in complete or nearly complete form rather than in part.

Textual Variants
In addition to the notes, the edition includes all textual variants as between the original essays and those that were collected during the period in which Chesterton was employed on the newspaper. These appear at the end of each piece. They illustrate the sometimes substantial revision in which he engaged prior to republishing his work. For example, he enlarged a number of the literary essays that formed the basis of Twelve Types in 1902 and sharpened the already acute polemical edge of some of the later political essays in A Miscellany of Men in 1912. Increasingly, he took pains to remove references to the articles, letters to the editor and reviews in the Daily News and other organs of the press that had prompted the essays, no doubt in order to reduce their ephemeral appearance. However, as one reviewer of A Miscellany of Men noted, the missing context left some sentences scarcely intelligible.6 For this reason and also the wider interest that the original as well as the revised passages hold, both versions are reprinted here. The textual variants that occur in the essays collected by Dorothy Collins have mostly been summarized in the first footnote alongside details of the source of republication. In the few instances where a more detailed approach is warranted, the variants appear at the end of the piece.

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Letters to the Editor

Chestertons numerous letters to the editor have never been reproduced in anthologies of his work; nor have they featured in studies of his life and thought. Yet the letters were often equal in length to his columns, and show Chesterton at his most combative. Some were replies to critics on the correspondence page; others were responses to editorials in the newspaper or controversies on the letters page which others had initiated. Some of those with whom he engaged in this way were ordinary readers of the newspaper; others were well-known writers and activists, for example George Bernard Shaw, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, H. N. Brailsford, Henry Nevinson, Joseph McCabe, Henry Salt, Henry Hirst Hollowell and Cicely Hamilton. The letters covered a wide range of topics including the Fabian defence of empire (1901), the role of religion in state education (1902, 1905), Christianity versus agnosticism (1903), vegetarianism (1907), the treatment of prisoners (1908), womens suffrage (1909), the Ferrer controversy (1909), the Coronation Oath (1910), corporal punishment (1911), and the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911. In addition to Chestertons letters,

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those of his correspondents are also included; these reflect the concerns and opinions of some of the Liberal Partys ardent supporters. The readership of the newspaper was concentrated heavily in what has been aptly termed the amorphous suburban classes whose self-regard and dedication to self-improvement set the tone for the era.7 Often, the letters from readers emphasize Chestertons distance from their religious and political views. He differed especially from his Nonconformist readership, a readership whose convictions had been thrown into doubt by the same forces of unbelief that he had experienced in earlier years, and whose uncertainty was exacerbated by significant ideological changes within Liberalism itself towards the end of the nineteenth century.8 But there were also sympathetic letters from those who found his writing persuasive, and these are of as much interest to historians of British Liberal thought as those expressing disagreement.

Other Inclusions and Exclusions

In addition to Chestertons own work in the Daily News, the edition also contains two pieces about him written by colleagues on the paper: one by the parliamentary correspondent, Philip Whitwell Wilson, in 1907 and the other by the editor, A. G. Gardiner in the following year. These two items illustrate the impressions that Chesterton made on his contemporaries. For reasons of space, it has not been possible to include here another measure of Chestertons reception in Daily News circles: reviews of the many books he wrote during the period of his employment. However, a list of the reviews is provided as an appendix at the end of Volume 8.

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Editorial Principles

The material is reproduced in the form in which it first appeared. This includes period spelling of words such as for ever, worth while, any one, to-day, fulness, dulness, medieaval, ecstacies, and the hyphenation of road names, for example, Stanley-road; also variable spelling of civilization. Included as well are the headings and subheadings of the original articles, together with the lines and asterisks that divided them into sections. The edition reprints Chestertons earlier forms of authentication once he had ceased to write unsigned articles first as G. K. C. from 21 March9 to 31 May 1901 and then as G. K. Chesterton at the foot of each article. The byline (By G. K. Chesterton) appeared below the title(s) of his essays and reviews from 9 September 1901 onwards. In this edition his name is omitted from the essays that appear after that date. Details of books under review are reproduced as they appeared in the literary essays. In the early reviews such details were printed at the foot of the article, as signalled by an asterisk beside its main heading. In later reviews, bibliographic

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details appeared directly under the final subheading. In some instances it has been necessary to provide full details in a new note; in others, missing details have been inserted in the original format through the use of square brackets. Some silent editing of obvious typographical errors has been undertaken; also, occasional suggestions of alternative formulations in square brackets or an endnote have been provided where the sense has been lost either through a printers error or Chestertons own thoughts running ahead of his pen.

Chestertons Association with the Daily News

Chesterton began writing for the Daily News in January 1901 following six years as an assistant in various publishing offices.10 In the previous year he had made sporadic contributions to the Speaker, a weekly newspaper that had been captured by the forces of pro-Boer opinion in Liberal journalism in 1899. Towards the end of 1900, the Daily News went the same way; it was bought by George Cadbury and another wealthy Liberal businessman, Franklin Thomasson, at the instigation of David Lloyd George, and a new editor R. C. Lehmann was duly installed. Lehmann appointed Chestertons friend Archibald Marshall as literary editor, and in turn Marshall appointed Chesterton as a regular although not, as yet, a weekly contributor. This brought to the staff of the paper a writer who had experienced during the preceding decade the isolation to which many modern currents of thought led.11 Over much disparate territory political, religious and literary he sought to revitalize the tradition of Radicalism by directing it against these currents. The stages by which Chesterton came to occupy a regular Saturday position are markedly compressed in his Autobiography, and his biographers have followed suit;12 for a variety of reasons, it took two years before he was to assume that position. His first reviews were unsigned, as was common at the time. This poses a major obstacle to discerning a regular pattern in the appearance of his early work for the newspaper, if indeed there was one. Also, Chesterton was still experimenting with style, thus compounding the difficulty of identifying his work. Nevertheless, there are good grounds for believing that the unsigned articles included at the start of this edition are the work of his pen, as will become clear presently. There was a considerable gap between the first review on 16 January 1901 and the more frequent although still irregular contributions that flowed from 11 February. An obvious explanation for this is that his dbut was interrupted by the illness, death and funeral of Queen Victoria; extensive reporting of the events associated with the Queens passing meant that the literary and other recreational columns were substantially curtailed. Afterwards, Chestertons contributions appeared frequently though at irregular intervals until the end of February 1902, when there was a five-month hiatus; during this period

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the newspaper settled down under its new editor, A. G. Gardiner, after several changes of editor and disagreements within the new management concerning the direction of Liberal Party policy.13 As a regular feature of the paper they resumed again in July, although in January and February of 1903 they became more intermittent, presumably as he was completing his book on Browning.14 Their frequency increased in March and from April they occupied a regular Saturday spot his Saturday pulpit as he called it.15 From February 1904 his column moved to the editorial page of the Saturday edition where it remained with occasional absences until he left the paper in February 1913. While he contributed a mass of articles to a range of other newspapers and periodicals in these years, the highest concentration of his output by far was in the Daily News. This was during a period when sales of the paper rose substantially from a daily circulation of 80,000 following the Boer War to 151,000 in 1907 and 400,000 in 1909 with the simultaneous publication of a Manchester edition.16

Unsigned Articles

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Fifteen unsigned articles have been considered suitable for inclusion here, of which one was republished by Chesterton and two by Dorothy Collins.17 Chesterton moved rapidly to end the anonymity in which his association with the newspaper had begun. This was in keeping with his denunciation of secrecy in British public life, of which he regarded anonymous journalism and reviewing as part and parcel, along with the censorship of plays.18 However, he used his brief apprenticeship as an anonymous reviewer to develop a style and critical perspective that was unique to him. The presence of his personality is not quite so obvious in the first reviews, some of which are of a high scholarly calibre and lack the literary swagger that was soon to become his trademark. The grounds for suggesting that they are his will therefore repay consideration; this will also serve to introduce some prominent features of Chestertons writing for the newspaper before a more extended treatment later in the introduction. The article identified here as his first contribution, A History of Chinese Literature, was published on 16 January 1901 (pp. 15). The attention to dates in the review is unusual for Chesterton; however, the themes in the study that the reviewer chose to highlight were those close to his heart. One such theme is disorderly behaviour in the tradition of popular theatregoing in China;19 another is the obscurity of Chinese poets whom he felt justified in labelling the Chinese Brownings after the English poet whose oeuvre he championed unceasingly, against his admirers as much as his critics.20 The phrase happen to in the opening line of the review is one he used often,21 and the declaration of ignorance in the sentence in which it occurs is also in character. Further evidence that the reviewer was Chesterton lies in the bibliography compiled by a

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Chesterton scholar John Sullivan in close association with Dorothy Collins. He cites the first article as appearing on 6 January 1901. This was obviously a misprint since the 6 January 1901 was a Sunday when the newspaper was not published. 22 The next unsigned article, Ideals in Ireland (pp. 610) corresponds closely to Chestertons interest in Irish literature as a vehicle of Irish nationalism, and also his sympathy with the writers from the middle of the nineteenth century who sought to shift the focus of change away from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy to the Irish people themselves.23 The review of a book on Swinburne that follows employs paradox in a way that suggests few other candidates for authorship (pp. 1116). The reviewer upbraided the poet for his pessimism; pessimism, however, that in certain places turns out to be optimism in disguise; this is a familiar feature of Chestertons criticism.24 Furthermore, in questioning the books emphasis on Swinburne as a great revolutionist when he was really an arch conservative, the reviewer sounded a note that can be heard in Chestertons approach to other radical thinkers.25 The next review, of a book on Alfred the Great, is more problematic in terms of author identity (pp. 1721). It lacks the joie de vivre that is a feature of Chestertons style; also, it is markedly erudite, in contrast to many of his essays and reviews subsequently. Nevertheless, the topic was one he never made light of. The review highlights the crucial role of Alfred in saving Christian civilization from the resurgence of paganism in Europe; this is the leitmotif of Chestertons epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse published in 1911. The reviewers suggestion of a possible holiday excursion over the tracks of Alfreds battles westwards from White Horse Hill in Berkshire is also significant; for it was a journey that Chesterton himself was to make prior to the writing of The Ballad in 1910.26 Other aspects of the review accord with his later essays on Alfred, including the one he wrote the following autumn in response to the unveiling of the statue of Alfred in Winchester by Lord Rosebery as part of the Alfred Millenary; both there and in an essay of 1933, he insisted that Alfred was diametrically opposite in spirit to the conqueror and the imperialist of the modern age, echoing a point that was made in the unsigned review.27 Finally, a passing reference to the Norns in an essay on Kipling a week later (p. 30) adds weight to the case for his authorship, as does the use of the word utterance, a favourite of Chestertons. In a review the following day The English Character (pp. 224) the exuberance that is more characteristic of Chestertons early writing is apparent in references to the chief glories of English literature and the hundred and one things that bring the inhabitants of English villages together.28 The word thither is one of which he was fond, as were invocations of the penny dreadful.29 Finally, the reviews protest against the prevailing images of the English as

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a cold and diffident nation that the book reinforced strikes many Chestertonian chords. Immediately below this review appeared an unsigned review of a recent book of poems by Richard Le Gallienne (pp. 258). The reviewer delivered friendly but wounding blows at what he regarded as the inferior kind of literary dandyism represented by this poet of the Decadence relative to that of other literary epochs. Chestertons distinctive preoccupation with the damaging effects of the fin de sicle on literary and national culture suggests strongly that he was the author of the review. In a review of a recent anthology of Kiplings work the following week, the reviewer emphasized the crudity of the imperialist ethos in the writers recent work; this, he maintained, contrasted with Kiplings sensitivity to the primitive elements of human life in his earlier writings inspired by empire. Chestertons own extolling of such elements will be considered presently. He would soon become one of Kiplings stoutest contemporary critics (pp. 2931). Below this review appeared another, of a book about the natural world in Africa intended to spark the imaginations of boys (pp. 323). The enthusiasm of the reviewer suggests Chestertons love of such genres; of course, this was by no means exclusive to him, any more than was the exception the reviewer took to the authors dislike of the Boers. But the biblical quotation in the first sentence is one of his favourite literary tricks. His use of the same quotation in two later pieces points further to his authorship (p. 33, n. 2), overriding the care that the reviewer took over page referencing, which might suggest otherwise. There can be little doubt that the remaining unsigned reviews are the work of Chesterton. A democratic sensibility closely akin to his pervades a critique of the university extension lecturer Churton Collins; this centred on Collinss plea for the professionalization of the study of literature (pp. 3440). In a similar spirit, a review the next day upheld the right of the minor poet to exist against the disdain shown towards this figure by the literary elite (pp. 413). The subsequent review shared the same main heading as the Churton Collins review, The Wars of Literature (pp. 447). It centred on contemporary movements in poetry that were founded upon a rejection of the world the cult of Omar Khayym, especially. The reviewer emphasized the error of importing Eastern fatalism into English culture fundamentally a Christian culture, an aspect of Chestertons thought to which we shall return; this made him think twice about his earlier dismissal of Collinss case for introducing greater rigour into literary criticism. Once again, the snares of pessimism as embraced by an advanced literary culture were impressed upon Daily News readers. It was to become a familiar feature of Chestertons reviewing in the months ahead, for example, in his unfavourable review of an edition of Schopenhauers work;30

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also, his review of a collection of the best work of one of the few American authors who identified with the Decadent movement, Edgar Saltus.31 A final unsigned article of the early months of 1901 that has been attributed to Chesterton here is a review of a book on the preoccupation with virtue in eighteenth-century literature (pp. 637). This was a period which Chesterton often compared favourably to his own age.32 The reviewer concurred with the conception of the good man as lying at the heart of this period; but he concluded on a note of irony and with illustrations that suggest few others beside Chesterton as possible authors.

Subsequent Articles
The unsigned articles set the pattern of Chestertons contributions subsequently. He was chiefly employed on the literary page for the remainder of 1901. In this year and for the remainder of his time at the Daily News he engaged closely with the vibrant new influences in literature and thought, those associated with Nietzsche, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Shaw, Kipling, Whitman, Tolstoy and Wells, for example. It was with perspectives shaped by these encounters that he reviewed a stream of new editions, biographies, and memoirs pertaining to the literature, poetry and art of the previous two centuries: Scott, Thackeray, Wilde, Byron, Moore, Dickens, Shelley, Tennyson, Whistler, Mary Wollstonecraft, Macaulay, Trevelyan, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are among the many subjects of his literary reviews included in this edition. As he moved to a position of general columnist from 1902 onwards, his reviewing activity decreased; it was especially noticeable for its absence when he was engaged in writing a book himself. Towards the end of his employment with the newspaper it almost ceased entirely; presumably, this was as much due to his strained relations with the editor and general disenchantment with the Liberal press as other calls on his time. Nevertheless, the continuity between his reviews and his more general columns is striking; indeed, it was during the initial phase of his journalistic career as a reviewer and literary essayist that the political and religious perspectives that were to inform his later work crystallized. Some of these have been touched on already in connection with the unsigned articles attributed to him here. A fuller account will provide a more thorough preparation for the material that follows.

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The Common Themes of Chestertons Daily News Essays

i. Democracy All the essays that appear in this edition are inspired by the ideal of democracy. Chesterton did not defend democracy in a narrow political sense but

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more broadly as that which belonged to, or defined, the people. He invoked the democratic ideal in relation to common tastes, beliefs, instincts, emotions, interests and preferences, by which he generally meant those of the poor. He did so as much against the cultural and intellectual as the political elite; also, those further down the social scale who maintained the invasive machinery of a bureaucratic state that seemed to rival that of China in its indifference to human suffering.33 Foremost among the threats to democracy were mass education and de-Christianization, two processes which he regarded as tightly intertwined but whose adverse effect on democracy could also be seen at separate levels.34 He underlined the threat of mass education to democracy in an early essay on Shelley. This was a review of a new school primer on the poet that in Chestertons view was symptomatic of the trend towards drilling in education and an insult to the poetic impulse in those for whom it was intended. He underlined the threat of anti-Christian invective to democracy in the same essay and in later essays; he upbraided Shelley for mounting a crusade against priests and kings on the unfounded assumption that throughout history they had been held in universal contempt by mankind. Not only was this claim false, argued Chesterton, it obscured what would probably be the first target of popular revolt in modern society: reformers and philanthropists.35 In much the same vein, Chesterton used his columns to highlight what he regarded as the narrowness and superciliousness of the educated classes in their pursuit of cultural improvement. This was expressed in a range of ways, for example in the aristocratic spirit of modern mysticism that looked to the religions of the East for inspiration. It did so, he maintained, in conscious reaction against the democracy of Christianity that emphasized the equality of souls in the face of one all-embracing mystery, as well as a spirit of contempt for all things nearer to home.36 Chestertons account of a visit to the inaugural meeting of the Egypt Society of Bayswater in 1901 provides another illustration of what he regarded as the limited imagination of those in the vanguard of cultural change. The suggestion of a certain element of pretentiousness in the high seriousness of the venture was apparent in his article; more damaging, however, were the doubts he expressed as to the authenticity of the play being performed for the occasion, despite the earnest attempts to create such an effect by well-known figures on the London stage. Missing were those vital features of democracy that would have been as much present in Egyptian Society as they were in the early twentieth century, for instance fashion and slang and the presence of comedy to make tragedy pathetic.37 This was echoed in Chestertons other pieces on the contemporary theatre, for example when he aligned himself with critics such as Clement Scott in protesting against the heaviness and pessimism of the modern, Realist drama under the influence of among others Ibsen and, more recently, Arthur Wing

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Pinero.38 In doing so, Chesterton stood apart from the theatre critic of the Daily News, Edward Algernon Baughan, who frequently berated the conservatism of theatregoers and the response of theatre-managers in supplying an endless stream of melodramas.39 Chesterton analysed this stance in the same terms as support for noise abatement initiatives in cities. He emphasized that both street noise and the powerful sentiments that melodrama embodied were expressions of joy at being the sons of God, to which their opponents were deaf.40 Chesterton emphasized that democracy was rooted in the elemental and eternal forces of human life, the raw emotions and dispositions of humanity that embraced fear as well as delight, shyness as well as boisterousness, love as well as hate. In this he echoed those who had sided with the romantic revival in literature of the 1880s and 90s, for example the critic George Saintsbury and writers such as R. L. Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Rider Haggard and Hall Caine. They responded to new readerships which yearned for fantasy, adventure and idealism in fiction following the success of the penny dreadful; this was against the realist vogue of the life novel in the European literature of the nineteenth century, with all its cynicism, despair and dull introspectiveness.41 For Chesterton, the spirit of democracy that the New Romance embraced was well captured in the work of Walt Whitman and Charlotte Bronte.42 The influence of Whitman, in particular, ensured that his face was set against an alternative conception of democracy, that which was rooted in the rational and the modern, detached from the past.43 In this guise, democracy was simply an instrument of control and manipulation rather than liberty. On the one hand, it underpinned the visions of the future projected by a new breed of sociologist; typically, these visions were modelled upon the undifferentiated, instinct-driven life of insects rather than the mammalian world of love and comradeship.44 On the other, it had fuelled the scientific perspectives of intellectual Liberalism in the nineteenth century, for example, that of Goldwin Smith. Smiths love of liberty did not extend to liberty for the Irish people, Chesterton maintained. This was because he had no conception of the earthiness of democracy that found full expression in rural Ireland, only democracy as mere voting.45 ii. Liberty Chestertons defence of democracy was closely related to the premium he set on personal liberty. This was in accordance with his belief in the capacity of human beings to exercise agency, reflecting the will bestowed upon them by their Creator. This second theme of Chestertons Daily News contributions is particularly apparent in his attack on the vogue that utopias enjoyed in Edwardian Britain. He believed that satire was the only effective response to their fatuousness; not least their attention to detail concerning future models of society. However, he regarded their worst feature as the communal protection they afforded individu-

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als; in doing so they denied the expansiveness innate in humanity.46 A conception of the adventurous spirit of mankind as a peculiar feature of western societies is evident across a large number of the pieces in this edition. It was informed, Chesterton believed, by the promise of immortality held out by Christianity, and the liberation from circumstances tribe, environment, heredity this made possible.47 For Chesterton, the energy inherent in Christianity was turned outwards rather than inwards into self-contemplation, and was the force behind its survival in desperate times such as the fifteenth century.48 The level of Christian conviction at work here was a product of his engagement with a fatalism that was becoming widespread in his society, either among those who sought to revive paganism or who had become converts to Eastern religions through the Theosophist and other spiritual movements. It was also a product of his controversy with Secularists and atheists such as the socialist writer and journalist Robert Blatchford.49 Finally, Chestertons emphasis on personal liberty was a reaction against what he regarded as its betrayal by contemporary Liberalism, the third theme of his writing for the Daily News discussed here. iii. Liberalism

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Chesterton outlined what he regarded as the formative ideals of Liberalism in an essay of 1905. Liberalism did not consist, he maintained, as some appear to imagine, in a preference for broad mindedness, progress and thinking as one likes; it consists in a belief in certain doctrines, which are neither universal nor self-evident: the equality of man, the self-governing State, and among others this of religious liberty.50 The theme of equality and the self-governing state will be discussed presently. Turning first to his emphasis on religious liberty, the continuity it represents with classical Liberalism especially the concern for freedom of belief in the writings of John Stuart Mill is marked. Chesterton also remained close to that tradition in the importance he attached to engaging with the grounds on which different beliefs were held; to dismiss a persons beliefs in terms other than their wrongness was the mark of bigotry, not persecution, a label he reserved for reasoned intolerance. Bigotry, however, was the curse of the modern world, and Liberals, he believed, were fast becoming its chief proponents. Certainly this seemed true of Nonconformist Liberals, who exercised much influence over the Liberal Party in the early twentieth century.51 In resisting the provision in the Conservative Governments Education Bill of 1902 for state support of denominational education, this powerful lobby sought not only to enshrine its own beliefs in state schools in the form of undenominationalism; it also sought to discredit its opponents as servants of Rome and enemies of good citizenship at home. The cry of No Popery raised by the leading Baptist and Liberal activist John Clifford especially drew Chestertons ire. He attacked Cliffords sectarianism masquerading as the public interest; but he

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also denounced the focus of his opposition to the Bill on these ancillary matters, matters, moreover, of questionable validity. Cliffords campaign, he believed, could only redound to the disadvantage of Liberalism, clearly Chestertons principal concern at this time.52 That Liberalism was his principal concern in the education debate of 1902 says much about the looseness of Chestertons Anglican commitment in the early years of the twentieth century.53 The stance he took with Clifford also emphasizes his distance from many, although not all readers of the Daily News,54 whose Nonconformist identity was touched on earlier. His intervention in 1902 set the pattern for his contributions to the continuing debate on the role of religion in education: in 1905 just before the Liberals returned to office on a commitment to repeal the 1902 Act and in 1906 and 1908 as the new Government struggled to win support in Parliament for a replacement Act. The essence of his position was a plea for the secular solution to an issue on which, in his view, there was no other basis for agreement. That solution entailed the exclusion of religion from education altogether as serving the best interests of both.55 This concern separated Chesterton clearly from Secularist advocates of the secular solution to the educational impasse; in his view, secularism in education was the basis for strengthening Christian forces in readiness for the great spiritual battle that lay ahead.56 Secularism in education was also the key to maintaining freedom of religious belief. His conception of the interdependence of Christianity and Liberalism is most evident here. On a wider front, Chesterton used his Daily News columns to counteract the legacy of the Secularist movement in the nineteenth century, and the rationalism and materialism on which it had fed.57 He was sensitive to the vehement opposition to Christianity that had fuelled both that movement and its offshoot, the Humanist movement;58 but, as with Nonconformity, he was also concerned about their claims on Liberalism and the radicalism integral to that political creed. This was especially as the connections that had been forged between Secularism and Socialism in the 1880s began to break apart.59 One of his tactics in addressing what he believed to be the antiLiberal as well as anti-Christian forces within Secularism was to emphasize its inferiority to Christianity with regard to what it called freethought, and hence Christianitys greater proximity to the Liberal tradition. Unlike their Secularist foes, Christians continually doubted their creed and questioned its assumptions, which, he claimed, were all the more secure as result.60 Moreover, he made much of the parochial criteria that Secularists used when studying and invariably judging other societies in history; the Victorian anthropologists, imbued with rationalism, were cases in point.61 He maintained that Secularists were also unwilling to speculate on the place of their own epoch in the wider span of human history, past and future. By contrast, genuine free thought took possession of all human history and in a spirit of wonder rather than scepticism and

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condemnation; it was prepared to question things that had never been questioned before rather than continually questioning the same few old doctrines in the manner of modern freethought.62 The Christian subtext here is evident; but it is even more apparent in another imaginative piece written in 1907. This was cast in the form of a fable with a strong apocalyptic ring, one of his favourite modes of cultural and political criticism in his time at the Daily News. The fable concerned the obsession of a small boy with uprooting a plant in the garden, an act forbidden by his elders but for no good reason. He was determined to uproot it nevertheless. Yet although after repeated attempts he was unsuccessful, he caused untold harm and damage, plunging humanity into the marsh and the abyss.63 This was an allegory on the present predicament of Christianity, heavily under siege by Secularist thinkers and movements. The allegory has a familiar Burkean ring with its emphasis on the dangers of setting men to trade on their own private stock of reason rather than availing themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.64 Chesterton shared Burkes sensitivity to the pessimism and nihilism as well as the moral relativism connected with such tendencies in thought. This he chose to portray through dystopian fantasy. His account in 1907 of a nightmare world centred on the reconstruction of St Pauls Cathedral by architects who were free thinkers in the narrowest sense of the term provided a graphic illustration of his worst fears.65 However, against Burke, Chesterton regarded the intellectual currents of the modern age as a sharp deviation from, rather than the fulfilment of the Liberal ideal. He set the date of this ominous turn of events at 1870, the year that Dickens died and Paris fell to the might of Prussia. Dickenss vision of the English people as the masters of England had failed in the face of a far more limited concern to ameliorate the conditions of the poor;66 Liberty became a legend in the face of Bismarck; faith crumbled under the weight of Darwinism; and enthusiasm for a cause of any kind was at a large discount. The last gasp of Liberalism proper in Britain was the crusade for Home Rule before it too was abandoned in 1886. The all-encompassing void thereafter was filled by a master of levity on a grand scale: Oscar Wilde.67 Chestertons critical view of the fin de sicle to which Wilde was central and the large role he believed it had played in the death of Liberalism inspired many of the essays here. In his reviews and other columns he trained his sights on the writers and artists associated with the Decadence: Aubrey Beardsley, George Moore and Max Beerbohm as well as Wilde, and other contributors to the infamous Yellow Book. The Decadence injected a new freshness into the fin de sicle movement after the earlier phase of Aestheticism began to flag. To the emphasis of Aesthetes such as Walter Pater on beauty as its own end, the Decadents explored new fields of sensual and sexual variation.68 What most con-

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cerned Chesterton about the Decadence was the morbidity that underpinned its taste for sexual experiment. He believed that this reflected wider trends in the spiritual life of modern society that inoculated individuals against terror and fear, normally the counterpart of joy.69 This was linked in turn to the fragmentation of human interests as metaphysics and psychology, art and ethics became divorced from a wider creed and were cultivated for their own sakes.70 Gone was that architectonic view of public life and morals that Chesterton believed had informed the doctrine of the Rights of Man in the French Revolution and was the legacy of religion. It was a point he made in 1903 in connection with the recent deaths of the Impressionist artist James Abbot McNeil Whistler and the poet William Ernest Henley. Both led the movement of revolt of which the Decadence was the public face, severing the ties between art and delight in existence, on the one hand, and morals and fear, on the other.71 Subjectivism and solipsism were the natural concomitants of this process in art, literature and thought. The loss of the wider perspectives of philosophy and religion in human activity impacted heavily on politics as well. Although the result of what Chesterton termed a Tory revival in culture mirroring the oligarchic turn in national life,72 Liberalism was also affected. This can be seen in the fourth area that Chestertons Daily News articles cover: the transformation of the Liberal Party from an agent of liberty to that of regulation. iv. The Liberal Party

In his 1905 essay Bigotry versus Intolerance, Chesterton identified equality and the self-governing state as the defining ideals of Liberalism, alongside that of religious liberty. Equality was not to be confused with a static and inflexible society, as a previous generation of university Liberals, for example J. S. Mill, had assumed. It was instead the condition of creative energy among individuals, energy channelled by military discipline that was nonetheless able to bend yet spring back into place when required. This conception of equality was suggested to Chesterton in 1910 in contemplating the not-quite-straight but far from formless furrows that rippled across a wide landscape.73 In his view they enhanced rather than detracted from its appearance; they were an allegory of the rules that were central to Liberalism in guarding against the development of secret power on which oligarchies thrived and practised arbitrary government, power that endangered self-government in turn. This was a point that Chesterton levelled against contemporaries such as Edward Carpenter who sought to ground political democracy in the spiritual lawlessness of Eastern religions.74 For Chesterton, the maintenance of general rules by a democracy of equal citizens should have been the informing ideal of Liberal Party policy once it returned to power in 1906. However, it was an ideal that it seemed determined to ignore.

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From 1906 onwards, Chesterton grew increasingly critical of the Party which he claimed in one of the essays here to have joined a little while before he was born.75 He had been anxious about its preparedness for office even before its triumph in January 1906.76 He regarded the sectarianism of the Education Bill that the new Liberal Government sought to pass through Parliament in the spring of that year as ominous.77 However, it was the approach of the Government to the reform of the criminal justice system that most triggered his concern. The Prevention of Crime Act of 1908 empowered Courts to pass indeterminate sentences on those deemed to be habitual criminals.78 In the following year he protested against the erosion of regard for liberty. In strengthening this trend, the Liberal Government contravened a fundamental requirement of liberty: that citizens mould the state as much as they were moulded by it.79 The sweeping new powers that officials were acquiring rapidly under Liberal legislation affected the poor more than any other class in society. He found most disturbing the Mental Deficiency Bill of 1912 that sought to segregate from society those whom local authorities judged as mentally subnormal or defective.80 The concern with preventing the reproduction of the unfit in society that actuated supporters of the Bill suggested the same misguided policy of prevention that had informed the 1908 Act in relation to criminal punishment.81 The willingness of the Government to empower the state at the expense of its citizens was further reinforced by the Criminal Law Amendment Act that came into force at the end of that year; this gave police officers the power to arrest suspected white slavers without a warrant.82 The issue that Chesterton took with the Liberal Government over social reform was motivated in part by the backdrop of the industrial unrest in 1911 12. He condemned the various Commissions set up by the Government to resolve the dispute as being biased against the unions rank-and-file membership.83 His opposition to the Governments reforming agenda was played out also against the crisis over the House of Lords from 1909 until the passage of the Parliament Act of 1911. He rallied to the support of the Government in its attempt to tax unearned increment on land and introduce a new supertax on high incomes through Lloyd Georges Peoples budget of 1909.84 However, he became one of the Governments fiercest critics in the wake of its response to the Lords rejection of the budget. The series of Party conferences in the latter half of 1910 underlined the trend of Liberal government towards secrecy and the tyranny that secrecy made possible.85 The solution to the problem of the Lords set out in the Parliament Act of 1911 only reinforced his sense that Liberalism in Britain, unlike in France, was burdened by the weight of the past.86 Chesterton responded by urging his readers to revolt; he did so not by direct exhortation but once again through allegory.87 All his allegories of revolution were rooted

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in a fear for England, a fear that was central to his patriotism, the fifth and final theme of his writing to be considered here. v. Patriotism and England Across Chestertons writing for the Daily News lay the imprint of his patriotism, a patriotism focused intensely but not narrowly upon England. His English patriotism, like his consciousness of what it was to be English, was ancestral in origin, as he made clear in his Autobiography.88 However, it was sharpened and vitalized by his reaction against the Boer War and the legacy of distrust of government that the War bequeathed. Many of the essays here offer alternative perspectives on patriotism to the imperialistic version that dominated the Conservative press, perspectives with England at their heart. Some essays engage with prominent imperialist writers and politicians such as Rudyard Kipling, W. E. Henley, Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes; other essays launch attacks on the promotion of the cause of empire at a popular level, the celebration of Empire Day, for example, which Chesterton loathed.89 The England that he elevated in place of the Empire and Britain was located in the imagination rather than in territory; it was above all a loyalty, and one grounded in a sense of peril rather than a racial or an expansionist imperative.90 As emphasized already, he supported national independence for the small nations that Britain had oppressed, the Boers and the Irish especially; this extended to a sympathy for nations at the sharp end of other imperialist states, not least Turkey. Chesterton used his columns to berate the European powers for failing to aid the Balkan nations in expelling the Turk from Europe in 1912, a further indication, he believed, of the decline of Liberalism.91 But he was not only concerned to pitch patriotism against imperialism; he also used it to undermine cosmopolitan thinkers such as Norman Angell in his earlier guise as Ralph Lane and the Manx writer turned cosmopolitan campaigner Hall Caine.92 Against them he argued that true citizens of the world remained wedded to their localities; it was only through such means that sympathy with humanity could be nurtured. Chesterton explored English sensibilities in literature and culture in a large number of his Daily News essays; he found the contrast between Irish and English spirituality particularly revealing.93 Most of all, however, he used humour and satire to dispel any notion that the English were given to imperialism. Their entanglement in empire, he maintained, owed more to foreign than native influences.94 The anti-Semitic overtones that became increasingly present in his writing are evident in some of the Daily News essays in which he attacked imperialism. Those concerning individuals connected with the mining industry in South Africa, for example Alfred Beit and George Albu, are particularly relevant here.95 On the other hand, his opposition to imperialism was not limited to anti-

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Semitism, as can be seen in his denunciations of Cecil Rhodes as a master of the art of deception.96

The End of Chestertons association with the Daily News.

Chestertons relationship with the readership, the editor and the owner of the Daily News deteriorated from around 1907. At issue was his sense that increasingly, the Liberal Party was betraying Liberalism in becoming part of the plutocracy that now dominated British politics.97 This perception coloured his political attitudes and lent a petulance to some of his opinions certainly as expressed in the correspondence columns of which his readers grew weary. His first confrontation with the editor occurred in 1907 when he defended a backbench Liberal MP, Hugh Lea, for questioning the integrity of the prime minster, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in allegedly selling honours to boost party funds. The confrontation with Gardiner recurred in December 1911 over his opposition to the National Insurance Act. In both instances his regular column was censored.98 The silencing of Chesterton over the Act opened the way for his departure from the newspaper just over a year later. The trigger was a satirical poem entitled A Song of Strange Drinks that he published in the New Witness, a journal associated with his brother, Cecil Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, and dedicated to the exposure of hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness and corruption in public life. It included a reference to the caddishness of Cocoa, an obvious snub to the proprietor of the Daily News, George Cadbury. Invited by Gardiner to correct any misleading impressions to which the poem had given rise, Chesterton refused and left a newspaper he had served for twelve years.99 His few remaining contributions were ad hoc pieces bearing on particular controversies. They include a letter to the editor on the Marconi Scandal in June 1913, criticizing the newspapers endorsement of the report of the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the affair.100 Had there not been a breach between Gardiner and Chesterton earlier in the year over the Song of Strange Drinks, it is unlikely that Chestertons position on the Daily News could have survived their differences over Marconi.

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Conclusion

Any assessment of Chestertons significance as a contributor to the Daily News must take account of the context of cultural, political and intellectual change in which he wrote. His columns were a response primarily to the profound unsettling of belief at all levels, a general uncertainty that found a particular resonance in the newspaper. He was disturbed especially by what he considered to be the conservative implications of the attack on Christianity at the centre of this upheaval in thought. In coupling orthodoxy in religion with revolution in poli-

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tics, Chesterton struck a distinctive note in Britain in the years leading up to the First World War. It was one that sought to restore what he considered to be the democratic heart of Liberalism with its basis in Christianity.101 Among other things, this was against the reshaping of Liberal thought and practice in the nineteenth century by a new professional elite.102 However, while a distinctive presence in literature and journalism, he made common cause with a number of public figures of his own and recent times, for example, Lord Russell of Killowen, Sir William Butler, George Wyndham, and Josiah Wedgwood. To what extent might Chesterton be considered successful as a Daily News journalist? On the debit side, he clearly failed in his attempt to goad his compatriots into revolt against the plutocratic order that, in his view, threatened to engulf England in the years leading up to the First World War. On the debit side too are the tensions in the various positions he adopted and the problematic nature of some of those positions for Liberalism. For example, his opposition to the enfranchisement of women raised charges of a glaring inconsistency in his concern for liberty in modern society, to which he responded unconvincingly.103 He was prone to questioning the outrage expressed by his contemporaries at the inhumane practices of autocratic countries when the practices of their own country were less than perfect; although a detestation of smugness with regard to England was basic to his patriotism, this tendency raised questions about his judgement at times.104 He could sometimes miss the irony in statements by his opponents;105 or he could read into their remarks more than was warranted.106 In general, the more he was criticized, the more entrenched his position became. Nevertheless, through his columns at the Daily News Chesterton maintained the pressure on the Liberal Party both in and out of office to uphold the principles of liberty and democracy. This applied also to the assorted Secularists, radicals and Liberal progressives who vied for space on the paper and in other organs of the press. As both a columnist and reviewer, he did much to enrich Liberal thought at the beginning of the twentieth century, forcing some of its leading exponents onto the defensive. He pointed to the illusory England inhabited by many of his compatriots, confident of its strengths and blind to its weaknesses.107 Generally, his interventions were in tune with a wider movement of unease at the new authority enjoyed by experts.108 His concern to personalize politics, especially in the face of the draconian law of libel and a misplaced spirit of charity in British public life, exposed the special interests which often enjoyed their protection.109 Above all, Chestertons strategy in his Daily News years was to amuse his readers while at the same time impressing on them the ambiguities of the progress that Edwardian writers and thinkers celebrated. His essays from this period have retained their power both to entertain and challenge the shibboleths that remain integral to modern society.

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Notes
1. 2. After 13 May 1912, it became the Daily News and Leader. Chestertons Daily News regular columns from 19047 collected by James Denys Orpen is at Add. Mss. 7344073441 of the Chesterton Papers; another volume of cuttings representing Chestertons reviews for the paper, 19017, is missing from the collection. See The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts: The G. K. Chesterton Papers (London: British Museum, 2001), p. 151. Several of his essays included in other collections cite the Daily News as the original source of publication. However, these have not been found. They are Historical Novels (1901), Sherlock Holmes (1901), and The Spirit of Place in HA; Lunacy and Letters (1901), The Poetry of Cities (1901), The Library of the Nursery (1901), and The Sins of the Russian Princes (1906) in LL; and Books for Boys (date unknown), in CM. See A. L. Maycock (ed.), The Man Who Was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings of G. K. Chesterton (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963); and B. Hillier (ed.), The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (London: Continuum, 2010). This level of knowledge was a result of the strenuous autodidactic culture of the second half of the nineteenth century that was both strengthened and eclipsed by the 1870 Education Act. It was a culture that centred on a conservative canon of literature, although one that could still provide the stimulus to radical thought: see J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 12830. [Anon.], Mr. Chestertons Wrath, DN, 28 November 1912, p. 8. S. Koss, Fleet Street Radical: A. G. Gardiner and the Daily News (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 66. J. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984), pp. 678, and see the remainder of ch. 3 for a perceptive discussion of Chestertons interaction with his readers. For the disturbances in European thought that underpinned the shift from old to new Liberalism centred on state intervention, see G. Gerson, Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004). A final unsigned review appeared on 22 March, which, as a longer essay, had probably been held over from an earlier submission. See Reading the Riddle, 20 April 1907, Volume 4, pp. 2058, n. 2. (Here and henceforth in this Introduction, all articles by Chesterton refer to those that appeared in the Daily News and are reproduced in the eight volumes of this edition.) For Chestertons early intellectual development, see W. Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 18741908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 3. Chesterton, Autobiography, CW, 16, p. 119; I. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 74. Koss, Fleet Street Radical, pp. 427. See J. Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), p. 49, n. 26. Chesterton, Autobiography, CW, 16, p. 119. Koss, Fleet Street Radical, p. 66. The anonymous essay republished by Chesterton is The Mistake about Stevenson, 14 March 1901, pp. 527, below. The two pieces that were republished in a collection edited by Dorothy Collins appeared as editorials later in 1901; they are Walking Tours,

3.

4.

5.

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

6. 7.

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18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

23 September 1901, pp. 197200, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 24 September 1901, pp. 2014, below. For his dislike of anonymous reviewing and journalism, see Anonymity and Further Counsels, All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 1638; also Pseudonyms, DN, 4 December 1909, Volume 6, below. For his contribution in the Daily News to the controversy over censorship occasioned by Edward Garnetts play The Breaking Point (1907), see The Return of the Tyrant, 12 October 1907, Volume 4, pp. 3215. For his advocacy of peoples juries as the solution to the problem of censorship, see Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, p. 136. Compare with Mrs Craigie and the Crowds, 19 November 1904, Volume 2, pp. 320 3. See for example, Browning and his Ideal, 19 August 1901, pp. 16771, below; The Philosophy of Robert Buchanan, 28 October 1901, pp. 2458 below; and Robert Browning, 7 May 1912, Volume 8. See, for example, The Mistake about Stevenson, DN, 14 March 1901, p. 55 below. J. Sullivan, G. K. Chesterton: A Bibliography (London: University of London Press, 1958), p. 125. Although in The Poetry of Race, 10 July 1901, pp. 1204, he cautions against an alternative tendency among Irish poets to condemn all modern Irish nationalists such as Daniel OConnell and Charles Stewart Parnell as an inferior breed of Irishmen compared with their remote ancestors. See also A Book of the Day: Mr. Stephen Gwynn on Moore, 19 January 1905, Volume 3, pp. 1114; and The Pathos of Belfast, 20 January 1912, Volume 8. For other instances, see The Optimism of Byron, 2 December 1901, pp. 2827 below; also The Advantages of Having One Leg, 25 August 1906, Volume 4, pp. 413. For example, Charles Bradlaugh; see Iconoclast, 1 August 1906, Volume 4, pp. 215. He filed several Daily News items in the weeks that followed on the basis of his trip: see Ethandune, 27 August 1910; The High Plains, DN, 24 September 1910; and A Romance of the Marshes, 1 October 1910, all in Volume 7. See The Alfred Millenary, Speaker, 28 September 1901, pp. 71415, reprinted as Alfred the Great, Varied Types (New York; Dodd, Mead & Co., 1905); and Alfred the Great, in M. Ward (ed.), The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933), pp. 623. He uses the phrase chief glories in Penda and the Pantheists, 29 October 1910, Volume 7. See, respectively, A Wild Reconstruction, 13 December 1901, p. 292; and The Eulogy of Robin Hood, 6 June 1903, Volume 2, p. 74. The Great Pessimist, 7 June 1901, pp. 948 below. The Philosophy of Hair Dressers, 13 June 1903, Volume 2, pp. 7881. See, for example, A Glimpse of My Country, 9 March 1907, Volume 4, pp. 1747; and The Radicalism of Dr. Johnson, 18 September 1909, Volume 6. See The Insane Quiet, 18 February 1911, Volume 7. Of his many articles and letters on the role of religion in education, see especially On Dogma in Education, 20 May 1905, Volume 3, pp. 1069. This makes the point that religious education as currently conceived merely maintains the secular nature of modern society. See A Grammar of Shelley, DN, 12 September 1901, pp. 1859 below and see Sanity in the Slums, 3 June 1905, Volume 3, pp. 11922; for the inclusion of Swinburne and

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36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

44. 45.

54. 55.

Byron in his critique of Shelleys overestimation of the effect of rationalism in liberating humanity from tyranny, see The Soldier of Freedom, 28 November 1912, Volume 8. The Mystery of the Mystics, 30 August 1901, pp. 1725. See also his strictures on the contemporary poet Aleister Crowley, a type of the converted decadent, for succumbing to the lure of the East: The Conversion of the Poets, 16 June 1901, pp. 1048 below. Egypt in Bayswater, 20 November 1901, pp. 2747 below. The Meaning of the Theatre, 8 January 1902, pp. 3047; and The Meaning of the Theatre: Some Further Reflections, 17 January 1902, pp. 30811 below. Doubt and the Drama, 26 September 1908, Volume 5. The Beauty of Noise, 18 August 1906, Volume 4, pp. 3840. For the clash between romance and realism in late Victorian literary circles and the influence of the anthropological theory of primitive survivals in civilization that influenced those connected with the romantic revival see A. Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 18801914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), ch. 1. See Is There a School of Walt Whitman, 13 November 1901, pp. 25862; and The Wild Governess, 5 December 1901, pp. 28891, below. For what Chesterton regarded as the death of Radicalism in seeking to construct the future in abstraction from the past, see The Fear of the Past, 7 December 1907, Volume 4, pp. 3669. The Worship of the Insect, 7 March 1903, Volume 2, pp. 1821. The Tree of Liberty, 18 June 1910, Volume 6. See also his critical review of the recently republished verses of Sir George Trevelyan composed at Oxford against the background of political reform in the mid-nineteenth century: College Fireworks, 5 October 1905, Volume 3, pp. 2048. The Impropriety of Umbrella Stands, 7 March 1908, Volume 5. Expansiveness of spirit went hand in hand with limitation of the society of others; see In the Track of the Comet, 6 October 1906, Volume 4, pp. 636. See, for example, The God of the Tribe, 14 April 1906, Volume 3, pp. 3446; and On Making the World Small, 4 April 1903, Volume 2, pp. 412. See Morality and the Clown, 28 December 1907, Volume 4, pp. 38790. See On Calling a Spade a Spade, 11 July 1903, Volume 2, pp. 938; Loveliness and Electric Trams, 8 April 1905, Volume 3, pp. 736. Bigotry Versus Intolerance, 18 February 1905, Volume 3, pp. 3840. However, this influence did not translate into power after the Party returned to office in 1906; see C. Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 17801920 (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), pp. 2078. The failure of the Education Bill in 1906 and the Licensing Bill in 1908 are indicative here. See Chestertons letters to the editor Lord Halifax and Dr. Clifford, 20 September 1902; Dr. Clifford and the No Popery Cry, 24 September 1902; Dr. Clifford and the No Popery Cry, 27 September 1902; The Clifford-Chesterton Controversy, 4 October 1902, Volume 1, pp. 3848, 3914, 41014 below respectively. For that looseness, see S. Gilley, A New Chesterton Biography, Chesterton Review, 35 (Spring/Summer 2009), pp. 6976. For his identity as an Anglican, see The Secularity of England, 24 November 1906, Volume 4, p. 100. For the support that Chesterton received, see letter to the editor by W. Hicks, Fight for the Schools, 26 September 1902, pp. 399401, below. Something to Avoid, 28 April 1906, Volume 3, pp. 3547.

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56. The Secular Solution, letter to the editor, 12 May 1905, Volume 3, pp. 98101. The same argument applied to his opposition to the Blasphemy laws: see Anybody, 11 January 1908, Volume 5, below. For the Secularist opposition to religious education in schools following the 1902 Act, see E. Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 18661915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 31516. 57. For the momentum that rationalism and materialism gained in European thought in the nineteenth century, see J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of European Thought, 18481914 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 1. 58. For Chestertons engagement with some of the assumptions underlying the Humanist movement, see Shelley, Mr. Salt, and Humanity, 4 February 1902, pp. 3203; and The Logic of Cannibalism, 10 April 1906, Volume 3, pp. 3403. 59. Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans, pp. 23241. 60. See A Glimpse of Paganism, 17 March 1906, Volume 3, pp. 3246; also The Iconoclast, 1 August 1906, Volume 4, pp. 215. 61. See Lo, the Poor Indian, Whose Untutored Mind, 13 February 1904, Volume 2, pp. 1957; The Myth of Myths, 2 July 1910, Volume 6; Something, 9 July 1910, Volume 6; and The Sun of Easter, 15 April 1911, Volume 7. 62. On Thinking for Oneself , 30 September 1905, Volume 3, pp. 2003. 63. The Roots of the World, 17 August 1907, Volume 4, pp. 2868. 64. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 183. 65. A Nightmare, 21 September 1907, Volume 4, pp. 31113. 66. Dickens and England, 7 February 1912, Volume 8. 67. The Evil Day, 26 June 1909, Volume 5. 68. D. Denisoff, Decadence and Aestheticism, in G. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sicle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 39. 69. See The Red Angel, 21 December 1907, Volume 4, pp. 3836; on the centrality of morbidity to the Decadence, see Burrow, The Crisis of Reason, pp. 1834. 70. On Fragments, 31 March 1906, Volume 3, pp. 3346; the development of ethical societies was a case in point. 71. Two Great Tories, 1 August 1903, Volume 2, pp. 1037. 72. A Study in Oligarchy, 20 February 1903, Volume 2, pp. 913. 73. The Furrows, 25 June 1910, Volume 6. 74. The Rule of the Raid, 28 September 1907, Volume 4, pp. 31417. 75. An Open Letter to the Liberal Party, 24 August 1912, Volume 8. 76. The Horrors of Victory, 14 January 1905, Volume 3, pp. 810. 77. See note 55 above. 78. A Theory of Tyrants, 13 June 1908, Volume 5; see also one of his finest spoof pieces, A Dialogue on Justice, 4 February 1911, Volume 7. 79. Liberty, 21 August 1909, Volume 6. 80. See The Charter, 25 May 1912, Volume 8, for his initial attack on this Bill and several other recent Statutes that were infused with the same spirit of invasiveness and control. 81. The Witch-Smellers, 20 July 1912, Volume 8. 82. A Non-Party Issue, 14 December 1912, Volume 8. 83. See for example, The Kind of Man, 26 August 1911, Volume 7. 84. The Resurrection of a Common Radical, 14 August 1909; and Dukes, 30 October 1909, both Volume 6.

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G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, Volume 1

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85. The Peril of Conferences, 26 November 1910, Volume 7; and The Sham Fight, 14 September 1912, Volume 8. 86. The Case for Revolution, 15 July 1911, Volume 7. 87. See The April Fool, 8 April 1911; The Shy Town, 29 April 1911; The Marching Towers, 13 May 1911; The Two Fires, 1 July 1911; and The Love of Lead, 16 September 1911, all Volume 7. 88. Autobiography, CW, 16, pp. 23, 48. 89. What is It?, 29 May 1909, Volume 5. 90. The Peril of a People, 28 February 1903, Volume 2, pp. 1417. 91. See Impotence, 19 October 1912; and The Soldier of Freedom, 28 September 1912, Volume 8. 92. See respectively Patriotism under Three Flags, 27 June 1903, Volume 2, pp. 858; and Literature and an Island, 30 July 1904, Volume 2, pp. 2657. 93. See The Conservatism of Dickens, 5 March 1904, Volume 2, pp. 2046. 94. On Mr. Kipling, 21 March 1908, Volume 5. 95. Two Tales from Oxford, 3 December 1904, Volume 2, pp. 3358 below; The Fountain of Honour, 13 January 1912, Volume 8. 96. The Rich Man, 21 July 1906, Volume 4, pp. 913. 97. On the plutocratic nature of the Edwardian political elite, including the Liberal elite, see G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 18861914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 4368. 98. See respectively Peers and Privileges, letter to the editor, 15 July 1907, Volume 4, pp. 2513; and The Mad Millionaire, 18 December 1911, Volume 7, n. 1. 99. See Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, pp. 11213. 100. The Honour of Politics, 19 June 1913, Volume 8. 101. For his illustrations of the wrong turn that Liberalism had taken, see the essays referred to in n. 45, above. 102. See W. C. Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815 1914: Making Words Flesh (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010). 103. See A Final Word, 17 September 1909, Volume 6. 104. See the controversies he entered into regarding flogging in Russian prisons (letters entitled The Sin of Torture), AugustSeptember 1908; also the judicial murder of Francisco Ferrer (letters entitled Spanish Horror and English Humbug and The Spanish Crime), OctoberNovember 1909; Volumes 5 and 6 respectively. 105. See The Doors of Evil, 19 March 1910, n. 5; and The Renunciations of an Optimist, 9 April 1910, Volume 6. 106. The Hunting of Error, 17 July 1909; letter by K.D.F., 20 July 1909, and Chestertons response, 21 July 1909; and Nature and Other Nonsense, 11 September 1909, all in Volume 6. 107. See A Plea for Political Unreason, 24 June 1905, Volume 3, pp. 1348. 108. His role in the Stinie Morrison case of 1911 and the Eugenics controversy the following year are cases in point: see The Morrison Mystery, letter to the editor, 11 April 1911, Volume 7; and The Euphemists, 6 July 1912, Volume 8. See also De Auctoritate, 4 May 1912, Volume 8, for the misuse of the concept of authority when applied to experts. 109. See The Need of Personalities in Politics, 22 July 1905, Volume 3, pp. 1513; The Lie of the Photograph, 7 January 1911, Volume 7; The End of Parody, 18 March 1911, Volume 7; and Charity: A Dream, 5 August 1905, Volume 3, pp. 15760.