Reviewed by John Peterson
The number of Chesterton's books that are in print and readily available is cause for rejoicing. Yet not everything by Chesterton is in print, far from it. That's why the latest volume of the Ignatius Press Collected Works is so welcome. Between its covers are four major books by Chesterton, all out of print for many years:
Christendom in Dublin
Irish Impressions
The New Jerusalem
A Short History of England
Several single essays round out the volume, and each is a collector's rarity: The Patriotic Idea (1904). Explaining the English (1935), London (1914), and What Are Reprisals? (1918).
During the First World War Chesterton visited Ireland and sent his observations home to The New Witness, the weekly newspaper he was editing for his brother Cecil who was at the front. The articles were collected in Irish Impressions, a book published just after the armistice. It provides the best and most focused exposition of Chesterton's view of what we are now calling “globalization” and which he called—with his characteristically superior insight—”denationalization.” Chesterton loved Ireland partly or largely because Ireland was an exemplary instance of what he meant when he uttered the word “Nation.”
He next traveled to Jerusalem, with expenses paid by a London publishing firm that had hopes for getting a book out of the arrangement. Chesterton was motivated partly by curiosity and partly by his wife's need to visit a warm and dry climate for her health. His observations on the Holy Land appeared in a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph and were collected in The New Jerusalem, which Maisie Ward (Chesterton's foremost biographer) called “a glorious book” and “a book of a man seeing a vision.” The vision was that of a man seeing Christianity once again but as if for the very first time.
In 1932 Gilbert and Frances returned to Ireland for the Eucharistic Congress. The articles he dispatched to The Universe were later collected in a small volume entitled Christendom in Dublin. Among their many fine qualities, these essays are remarkable for giving the reader the sense of being on the scene—attending the festivities, seeing the banners, hearing the excited throngs, and sensing the feeling of exhilaration in the air. On the last day, with ominous clouds threatening, Chesterton was delighted to overhear an anonymous old woman's warning that “If it rains now, He will have brought it on Himself.”
Christendom in Dublin was the last in a series of six marvelous travel books Chesterton published between 1919 and 1932. The three not included here, The Resurrection of Rome and the two occasioned by his visits to North America, What I Saw in America and Sidelights on New London and Newer York, were published in 1990 as Volume XXI of the Ignatius Press Collected Works. Thus the complete Travelling Chesterton is now readily available in these two volumes.
A Short History of England is the fourth book included in this addition to The Collected Works. It offers a coherent argument against the standard versions of English history taught in the schools of Chesterton's day. Or, for that matter against the prevailing ideas of our own day, now that we have given up on teaching history in any form. The book is no encyclopedic rehearsal of facts and figures (as anyone acquainted with Chesterton would readily predict). Instead, it offers its readers an epic moral lesson as it traces the main themes and periods of English history from Britain as a Roman province to the modern age of wage employment and socialism. Note that Chesterton's chapter heading for the last period is The Return of the Barbarian.
James V. Schall, S.J., has edited Volume XX and provides an insightful Introduction and helpful notes. Father Schall, of course, contributes a regular column to each issue of Gilbert!, and a collection of these essays was published as Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes by Catholic University of America Press in 2000.
(John Peterson writes courtesy of Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.)