Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908

by William Oddie

Overview

On the publication of Orthodoxy in 1908, Wilfrid Ward hailed G. K. Chesterton as a prophetic figure whose thought was to be classed with that Burke, Butler, Coleridge, and John Henry Newman. When Chesterton died in 1936, T. S. Eliot pronounced that 'Chesterton's social and economic ideas were the ideas for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic'. But how did he come by these ideas? Eliot noted that Chesterton attached 'significance also to his development, to his beginnings as well as to his ends, and to the movement from one to the other'. It is on that development that this book is focused.

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is an exploration of G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Oddie draws extensively on Chesterton's unpublished letters and notebooks, his journalism, and his early classic writings, to reveal the writer in his own words. In the first major study of Chesterton to draw on this source material, Oddie charts the progression of Chesterton's ideas from his first story (composed at the age of three and dictated to his aunt Rose) to his apologetic masterpiece Orthodoxy, in which he openly established the intellectual foundations on which the prolific writing of his last three decades would build.

Part One explores the years of Chesterton's obscurity; his childhood, his adolescence, his years as a student and a young adult. Part Two examines Chesterton's emergence on to the public stage, his success as one of the leading journalists of his day, and his growing renown as a man of letters. Written to engage all with an interest in Chesterton's life and times, Oddie's accessible style ably conveys the warmth and subtlety of thought that delighted the first readership of the enigmatic GKC.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199551651
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Dr William Oddie is a former editor of The Catholic Herald and author of a number of books on literary and theological themes.

Table of Contents

IntroductionPart One1. The Man with the Golden Key, 1874-18832. School Days: St Paul's and the JDC, 1883-18923. Nightmare at the Slade: Digging for the Sunrise of Wonder, 1892-18944. Beginning the Journey Round the World, 1894-1899Part Two5. Who is GKC? 1900-19026. The Man of Letters as Defender of the Faith, 1903-1904: i Robert Browning/i; Blatchford I; iThe Napoleon of Notting Hill/i7. The Critic as Polemicist, 1904-1906: iG. F. Watts/i; Blatchford II; iHeretics/i; iThe Ball and the Cross/i; iCharles Dickens/i8. Battles in the Last Crusade, 1907-1908: iThe Man Who Was Thursday/i and iOrthodoxy/iEpilogueBibliography

Editorial Reviews

"William Oddie's fine account of Chesterton's early intellectual formation—as he moved from a life-shaking skepticism to a convinced and self-critical faith—is a helpful corrective to the notion that, like a latter-day Athena, GKC sprang from the godhead as a full-blown defensor fidei . ...Oddie [has] tunneled deep into the Chesterton archives at the British Library to give us fresh access, via unpublished notebooks and uncollected journal articles, to the makign of the great man's mind. In so doing, [he] has made crucial corrections and modifications to prior interpretations of Chesterton." —Christian Century

"In his brilliant study Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, William Oddie revisits Chesterton's formative years to show how his critique of the modern culminated in Orthodoxy (1908) one of his finest books... Whether familiar or unfamiliar with Chesterton, readers will benefit from Oddie's insightful researches." —Books & Culture

"Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is the most ground-breaking work on Chesterton since Maisie Ward's seminal 1944 biography. ...It should be on the shelf of everyone interested in Chesterton." —Catholic World Report

"This volume is the first part of what promises to be the definitive intellectual biography of Chesterton ... Oddie thoroughly and convincingly plumbs Chesterton's intellectual development." —Culture Wars

From the Publisher