essays by gk chesterton

10 Classic G. K. Chesterton Books Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The English novelist, poet, essayist, and Christian apologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is revered by many readers – and fellow writers – for his wit, his insight into human nature, and his brilliant storytelling. His Father Brown stories are often compared with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, while he remains one of the most quotable English writers of the last century or so.

Chesterton was greatly admired by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, and like Borges (who famously never wrote a novel), Chesterton was at his best with the short format: essays, short stories, and poems. However, any list of Chesterton’s best books should include at least a couple of his novels, as well as collections of shorter works.

Below, I have picked out some of his most important and representative works, but I’d be keen to hear from other Chesterton enthusiasts. What’s his best book?

1. The Napoleon of Notting Hill .

What’s the greatest work of speculative fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century but set in the year 1984? Orwell’s classic novel will usually take the laurel, but Chesterton’s 1904 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill , which is set eighty years in the future, surely deserves the honour of second place.

Chesterton’s book is – characteristically – much more humorous and light-hearted than Orwell’s later dystopian novel, and sees an insignificant London clerk crowned as King of England. He turns London into a vast carnival for his own amusement – thereby prefiguring the real Notting Hill Carnival! – and a young man named Adam Wayne raises an army to defend his fiefdom.

Although Chesterton doesn’t make any striking technological predictions about his future London – that isn’t the point of the book, which is essentially a kind of satirical fantasy – he does posit a future world governed by deadening bureaucracy, so we can safely allow him a success on that front.

2. Heretics .

Chesterton was, along with Orwell, one of the finest English essayists of the first half of the twentieth century. This collection of essays, published in 1905, is a good place to begin exploring Chesterton’s flair for the essay form.

Here we find meditations on fellow writers such as Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells, as well as essays on such subjects as Christmas, novelists writing about poverty in the slums, and writers on the institution of the family. The unifying theme is people who believe they are superior to Christian values, although Chesterton points out the flimsy basis on which their superiority often rests.

3. The Club of Queer Trades .

Chesterton excelled in the short-story form, and this little collection, published in 1905, is a wonderful showcase for his talents. The five tales feature the eponymous club in which members have invented some wholly new and innovative way to earn a living: hence ‘queer trades’.

Even reading a description of these curious metiers is enough to want one to read about them: a man who runs an agency dealing with Adventure and Romance, an author who has devised a new language in order to test his theory of language acquisition, and an ‘Organiser of Repartee’ or banter.

4. The Man Who Was Thursday .

Subtitled A Nightmare , this 1908 book is surely Chesterton’s best-known novel. The centrepiece is the meeting of the Council of the New Anarchists, each of whose seven members is named after a day of the week (hence the novel’s title).

Gabriel Syme, a detective at odds with the anarchist values of Lucian Gregory (who runs an unruly community of artists), goes undercover as ‘Thursday’ to infiltrate the group. The novel has a delicious (and rightly famous) comic twist which unfolds gradually as the novel’s farce develops.

5. Orthodoxy .

‘The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.’ So Chesterton begins this non-fiction work, which was conceived in response to hostile criticism Chesterton received for Heretics , his earlier essay collection. It’s one of Chesterton’s finest works of Christian apologetics.

6. The Everlasting Man .

Another work of Christian non-fiction from Chesterton, The Everlasting Man is concerned above all with one question: what makes us human, or, to put it another way, what does it mean to be ‘human’?

Here we get another intellectual battle with H. G. Wells (an atheist and proponent of evolutionary biology), whose coldly rational view of humanity is countered by Chesterton’s theology.

7. The Ballad of the White Horse .

This 1911 poem is an epic ballad about the Saxon King Alfred the Great, and is sometimes viewed as one of the last great traditional epic poems in the English language. Chesterton describes how the ninth-century King Alfred was able to defeat the Vikings in order to defend his homeland of Wessex from invaders.

8. Charles Dickens .

Has there ever been a better pairing of critic and their subject? Chesterton was ideally, perhaps even uniquely, placed to write this critical study of Charles Dickens, given his own flair for the comic while also exploring social issues in his fiction.

The book, first published in 1911, is packed full of rare and valuable insights into Dickens’s work, but it is also a wonderfully amusing and witty read, too.

9. The Innocence of Father Brown .

Chesterton created his mild-mannered, round-faced priest-turned-detective Father Brown in response to the cold scientific rationalism of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Where Holmes solves a case through his well-known ‘deductions’ and forensic attention to physical detail, Father Brown is more intuitive, using his time spent listening to penitents’ confessions in the Roman Catholic confessional box to help him get to the bottom of the mystery.

This does mean that some of the Father Brown stories are less than satisfying as puzzles for the reader to grapple with and attempt to solve, but it’s still great fun to see Chesterton the plotter at work, as an apparent paradox is unravelled and resolved with ingenuity and a flair for storytelling.

10. The Wisdom of Father Brown .

I decided to include two of the Father Brown collections on this list, because Chesterton wrote a good number of Father Brown stories, and they are among his most enjoyable and accessible work. This second collection builds on the first, and there’s a definite sense of Chesterton building up the title character since the first volume (this one came out in 1914, three years after the first).

So, in ‘The Absence of Mr Glass’, Chesterton establishes Father Brown’s peculiar ‘wisdom’ in contrast to the methods employed by a scientific criminologist, Dr Orion Hood (Chesterton had a real gift for names). There are also cases involving Italian criminals (who may not be all they first seem) and foreign intrigue aplenty.

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3 thoughts on “10 Classic G. K. Chesterton Books Everyone Should Read”

Your essay this week led me to take copious notes and swear to read Chesterton’s texts. Thank you for your illuminating writing.

Your essay truly helped me understand Chesterson and choose where to dive into his works. Thank you!

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G.K. Chesterton (born May 29, 1874, London , England—died June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield , Buckinghamshire) was an English critic and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories, known also for his exuberant personality and rotund figure.

(Read Chesterton’s 1929 Britannica essay on Dickens.)

Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s School and later studied art at the Slade School and literature at University College, London. His writings to 1910 were of three kinds. First, his social criticism , largely in his voluminous journalism , was gathered in The Defendant (1901), Twelve Types (1902), and Heretics (1905). In it he expressed strongly pro-Boer views in the South African War . Politically, he began as a Liberal but after a brief radical period became, with his Christian and medievalist friend Hilaire Belloc , a Distributist, favouring the distribution of land. This phase of his thinking is exemplified by What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

His second preoccupation was literary criticism . Robert Browning (1903) was followed by Charles Dickens (1906) and Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), prefaces to the individual novels, which are among his finest contributions to criticism. His George Bernard Shaw (1909) and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) together with William Blake (1910) and the later monographs William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1927) have a spontaneity that places them above the works of many academic critics.

Chesterton’s third major concern was theology and religious argument. He was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Although he had written on Christianity earlier, as in his book Orthodoxy (1909), his conversion added edge to his controversial writing, notably The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), his writings in G.K.’s Weekly , and Avowals and Denials (1934). Other works arising from his conversion were St. Francis of Assisi (1923), the essay in historical theology The Everlasting Man (1925), The Thing (1929; also published as The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic ), and St. Thomas Aquinas (1933).

In his verse Chesterton was a master of ballad forms, as shown in the stirring “ Lepanto” (1911). When it was not uproariously comic, his verse was frankly partisan and didactic . His essays developed his shrewd, paradoxical irreverence to its ultimate point of real seriousness. He is seen at his happiest in such essays as “On Running After One’s Hat” (1908) and “A Defence of Nonsense” (1901), in which he says that nonsense and faith are “the two supreme symbolic assertions of truth” and “to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.”

Many readers value Chesterton’s fiction most highly. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a romance of civil war in suburban London, was followed by the loosely knit collection of short stories, The Club of Queer Trades (1905), and the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). But the most successful association of fiction with social judgment is in Chesterton’s series on the priest-sleuth Father Brown : The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), followed by The Wisdom… (1914), The Incredulity… (1926), The Secret… (1927), and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935).

Chesterton’s friendships were with men as diverse as H.G. Wells , Shaw , Belloc, and Max Beerbohm . His Autobiography was published in 1936.

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Rare G.K. Chesterton essay on mystery writing is itself a mystery

AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — When he wasn’t working on mystery stories, and he completed hundreds, G.K. Chesterton liked to think of new ways to tell them. Detective fiction had grown a little dull, the British author wrote in a rarely seen letter from the 1930s published this week in The Strand, which has released obscure works by Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote and many others. Suppose, he suggested, that you take an unsolved death from the past, like that of the 17th century magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and come up with a novel that explores how he might have been murdered?

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