Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton

IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's ancestry. Chesterton, in his Browning, after some excellent foolery about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the aristocrat:

The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.

This may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head of the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death, Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. But when she died Gilbert threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his father's study, including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any sort of family tree. But it is possible to show the kind of family and the social atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born.

Some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of Chesterton—now merged into Cambridge, of which they were Lords of the Manor, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an introduction to a book called Life in Old Cambridge, he wrote:

I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor; I have never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness or from a faint superstitious feeling that I might be fulfilling a prophecy in the countryside. Anyone with a sense of the savour of the old English country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that the steeple might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller thing than the coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to Chesterton.

At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of the Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also those of another interesting relative, Captain George Laval Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter.

George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography, the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their overthrow. Darwin was writing his Origin of Species, which in some curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that made them so.

When by an odd confusion the Tribune described G. K. Chesterton as having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked:

I am not fond of anthropoids as such,
I never went to Mr. Darwin's school,
Old Tyndall's ether, that he liked so much
Leaves me, I fear, comparatively cool.
I cannot say my heart with hope is full
Because a donkey, by continual kicks,
Turns slowly into something like a mule—
I was not born in 1856.

Age of my fathers: truer at the touch
Than mine: Great age of Dickens, youth and yule:
Had your strong virtues stood without a crutch,
I might have deemed man had no need of rule,
But I was born when petty poets pule,
When madmen used your liberty to mix
Lucre and lust, bestial and beautiful,
I was not born in 1856.*

[* Quoted in G. K. Chesterton: A criticism. Aliston Rivers (1908) pp. 243-244.]

Both Autobiography and Prison Life are worth reading.* They breathe the "Great Gusto" seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not quote them in his Autobiography, but, just mentioning Captain Chesterton, dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who, while George Laval Chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had succeeded to the headship of a house agents' business in Kensington. (For, the family fortunes having been dissipated, Gilbert's great-grandfather had become first a coal merchant and then a house agent.) A few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain and they are interesting, confirming Gilbert's description in the Autobiography of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was something of a landmark in Kensington and that the family business was honourable and important.

[* See Appendix A.]

The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history, were by now established in that English middle-class respectability in which their son was to discover—or into which he was to bring—a glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder what young house-agent today, just entering the family business, would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted with your earnest co-operation."

Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three children. The family had long been English, but came originally from French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."*

[* Autobiography, pp. 11-12.]

When Edward became engaged to Marie Grosjean he complained that his "dearest girl" would not believe that he had any work to do, but he was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family business.

There is a flavour of a world very remote from ours in the packet of letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and sisters to one another during their engagement. Edward illuminates poems "for a certaln dear good little child," sketches the "look out from home" for her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in wandering into the garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the rest of the company for too long. He praises a friend of hers as "intellectual and unaffected, two excellent things in woman," describes a clerk sent to France with business papers who "lost them all, the careless dog, except the Illustrated London News."

A letter to Marie from her sister Harriette is amusing. She describes her efforts at entertaining in the absence of her mother. The company were "great swells" so that her brother "took all the covers of the chairs himself and had the wine iced and we dined in full dress—it was very awful—considering myself as hostess." Poor girl, it was a series of misfortunes. "The dinner was three-quarters of an hour late, the fish done to rags." She had hired three dozen wine-glasses to be sure of enough, but they were "brought in in twos and threes at a time and then a hiatus as if they were being washed which they were not."

In the letters from parents and older relatives religious observances are taken for granted and there is an obvious sincerity in the many allusions to God's will and God's guidance of human life. No one reading them could doubt that the description of a dying relative as "ready for the summons" and to "going home" is a sincere one. Other letters, notably Harriette's, do not lack a spice of malice in speaking of those whose religion was unreal and affected—a phenomenon that only appears in an age when real religion abounds.

Doubtless her generation was beginning to see Christianity with less than the simplicity of their parents. They were hearing of Darwin and Spencer, and the optimism which accompanied the idea of evolution was turning religion into a vague glow which would, they felt, survive the somewhat childish dogmas in which our rude ancestors had tried to formulate it. But with an increased vagueness went also, with the more liberal—and the Chestertons were essentially liberal both politically and theologically—an increased tolerance. In several of his letters, Edward Chesterton mentions the Catholic Church, and certainly with no dislike. He went on one occasion to hear Manning preach and much admired the sermon, although he notes too that he found in it "no distinctively Roman Catholic doctrine." He belonged, however, to an age that on the whole found the rest of life more exciting and interesting than religion, an age that had kept the Christian virtues and still believed that these virtues could stand alone, without the support of the Christian creed.

The temptation to describe dresses has always to be sternly resisted when dealing with any part of the Victorian era, so merely pausing to note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs. Grosjean to have cut a short skirt out of 8½ yards of material, I reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton and Marie were married and had set about living happily ever after.

These two had no fear of life: they belonged to a generation which cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. In doing it, they did a thousand other things, so that the home they made was full of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it. Gilbert recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies, his study as a place where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products, awakening youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint-box, satisfying youthful imagination by the production of a toy-theatre. His character, serene and humorous as his son describes him, is reflected in his letters. Edward Chesterton did not use up his mental powers in the family business. Taught by his father to be a good man of business, he was in his private life a man of a thousand other energies and ideas. "On the whole," says his son, "I am glad he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things be did so successfully."

Here, Gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of business men and the present in the use of leisure; he sees hobbies as superior to sport. "The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. A hobby is not merely a holiday. . . . It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing." Edward Chesterton practised "water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination." And, moreover, "knew all his English literature backwards."

It has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment. But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when pietas was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to his home for all that they had given him.

I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist.*

[* G. K. Chesterton. Autobiography, pp. 22-3.]