Chesterton and Children

Mr Pearce looks at Gilbert Keith Chesterton's relationship with children and looks at a new book, a biography of him written for them.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Considering Chesterton’s childlike relationship with children, it seems somehow apt that a new biography of him has been written for children.

One of the great and almost secret regrets of G.K. Chesterton and his wife Frances was the sad fact that they were never able to have children. Frances had undergone an operation to help with conception, which had proved unsuccessful, and the couple resigned themselves to a childless marriage. It had not been easy, especially for Frances, to accept the absence of children. When her sister visited with her first child, it had been almost too hard to bear. Many years later she confessed to one of her husband’s secretaries that she had “wanted to have seven beautiful children”.

Frances and Gilbert found consolation in opening their home in Beaconsfield to other people’s children. They held regular Christmas parties at which children, unrestrained by parents or nurses, hung on Chesterton’s neck in anarchic affection, much to his delight. A highlight of these parties was the toy theatre that Gilbert had created and for which he devised elaborate plots, two or the most popular being “St. George and the Dragon” and “The Seven Champions of Christendom”. Eleanor Jebb, the daughter of Chesterton’s great friend Hilarie Belloc, remembered Gilbert “making his puppets come to life for us in the nursery, sitting perilously on a chair far too small for his vast form and rumbling out romances and feuds, at which he laughed almost more than we did”. As for Frances, Eleanor Jebb recalled that she had “a deep tenderness of heart for children and a great understanding of them”.

Chesterton’s relationship with children was encapsulated by Monsignor Ronald Knox, whose own conversion to Catholicism had been greatly influenced by Chesterton:

To be sure there was always a childlike element in his character. I like the story of a small guest at a children’s party in Beaconsfield, who was asked when he got home whether Mr Chesterton had been very clever. “I don’t know about clever,” was the reply, “but you should see him catch buns in his mouf.” He did not, like many grown-ups who are reputedly “fond of children”, exploit the simplicity of childhood for his own amusement. He entered, with tremendous gravity, into the tremendous gravity of the child.

Chesterton gave a charming account of his engagement with children in an article he wrote in 1910 for the Daily News. Writing of himself in the third person, he spoke of “a monstrously lazy man” living in Buckinghamshire whose house is “unexpectedly invaded by infants of all shapes and sizes”. Although playing with children was “a glorious thing”, it reminded him, “not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils”:

Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lighted match.

Chesterton’s childlike charm in the company of children was present to a delightful degree in the poem he inscribed in a picture book given as a gift to a young child:

This is the sort of book we like

            (For you and I are very small),

With pictures stuck in any how,

            And hardly any words at all.

You will not understand a word

            Of all the words, including mine;

Never you trouble; you can see,

            And all directness is divine –

Stand up and keep your childishness:

            Read all the pedants’ screed and strictures;

But don’t believe in anything

            That can’t be told in coloured pictures.

Considering Chesterton’s childlike relationship with children, it seems somehow apt that a new biography of him has been written for children, complete with numerous illustrations, albeit that they are pencil drawings in black and white, not “coloured pictures”.

The Life of Chesterton: The Man Who Carried a Swordstick and a Pen, written by Holly Geiger Lee and illustrated by Nellie Buchanan, presents Chesterton’s life with a youthful focus on the youthful Chesterton. The first six of the slim volume’s ten chapters cover the period of his life prior to his achieving fame as a journalist. The first chapter, “The Very Beginning” (a very good place to start!) is followed by chapters on “Boyhood and Imagination” and “Schooldays and Friendship” covering Chesterton’s childhood. The next two chapters, “Art School and Darkness” and “Gratitude and the Light”, tell of Chesterton’s descent into philosophical skepticism and pessimism and his subsequent ascent from the darkness into light through his clutching at the one thin thread of thanks for his own existence. It was clinging to this lifeline of gratitude which rescued him from despair and enabled him to become the childlike prophet of wisdom and wonder who loved children because he was himself a child.

One of the strengths of this new life of Chesterton for children is the manner in which the complexities of Chesterton’s philosophical grappling are rendered with succinct clarity and simplicity:

G.K. was discouraged. If things were truly only what he perceived them to be, did things really exist at all? He sighed. These ideas were dangerous. If true, it meant that nothing was real. Nothing mattered. Nothing had meaning. Confronted with these thoughts, Gilbert’s mind plunged into an abyss of darkness.

Needless to say, like all good children’s stories, the life of Chesterton ends happily. The final chapter of this wonderful little book, “Stepping out into the Light”, ends with Chesterton’s death without really ending with his death at all. It ends instead with the paradox of life itself: “The Prince of Paradox had gone to be with his savior, the Man with the Golden Key.” As a reflection of his youthful philosophical struggles, the dying Chesterton was not descending into darkness but “stepping out into the light”.