His Books, and Where to Start

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. ECCLESIASTES 12:12–13

Chesterton wrote some eighty books, and it is not always easy to know where to begin. Two of the best are in the Ochorus library. Many others are in the public domain and freely available elsewhere; a few of his later works remain in copyright in some countries and are available from their publishers. What follows is a short guide, arranged for usefulness rather than chronology, with a suggested order of reading, and a note on the friend he most influenced.

Begin here

Orthodoxy (1908). The natural starting point, and in the Ochorus library. His account of how he came to believe, from the fairy tales of the nursery to the creed. It is the book behind chapters three to eleven of this companion. Read it a chapter at a sitting, and do not worry if some of the jokes are about people you have never heard of; the argument carries through.

The Everlasting Man (1925). His greatest book, also in the Ochorus library. The whole human story, from the cave painters to Christ, told to show that man is no mere animal and Christ no mere man. It is the book behind chapters thirteen to sixteen. Read it after Orthodoxy; it is longer and denser, and the second part, on Christ, is the summit.

His other Christian books

Heretics (1905). The book that provoked Orthodoxy: essays on the leading thinkers of his day, from Kipling to Shaw, each found wanting. It is in the public domain. Read it after Orthodoxy to see the argument from the other side.

St Francis of Assisi (1923). A short, glowing portrait of the saint he loved best, written soon after his reception into the Catholic Church. See chapter seventeen of this book.

St Thomas Aquinas (1933). A short, lively introduction to the great medieval theologian, admired by scholars of Aquinas. It remains in copyright in some countries.

The Thing (1929) and The Well and the Shallows (1935). Later collections of essays, mostly defending the Catholic faith; they include the famous parable of the fence described in chapter ten. The second remains in copyright in some countries. Evangelical readers will find much to enjoy and much to weigh.

His stories

The Father Brown stories (from 1911). Five collections of detective stories about the small, shabby priest who solves crimes because he understands the human heart. The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) are the best places to begin, and are in the public domain.

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). A wild, funny and finally awe-inspiring novel about a poet who infiltrates a council of anarchists, each named after a day of the week. Written in the same year as Orthodoxy, and best read alongside it.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). A comic fantasy about a London borough that goes to war for its independence, and a celebration of local loyalty.

His poems

The Ballad of the White Horse (1911). A long ballad about King Alfred and his victory over the Danes, full of the Christian hope that holds on when everything seems lost. Lepanto (1911), a stirring shorter poem about the great sea battle of 1571, is also much loved. Both are in the public domain.

His life and opinions

What’s Wrong with the World (1910). His case for the family and the home against the reformers of his day; see chapter twelve. The Outline of Sanity (1926) sets out his distributism.

Charles Dickens (1906). One of the finest books on Dickens ever written, and a good introduction to his love of the common man.

Autobiography (1936). His own account of his life, finished shortly before his death. It remains in copyright in some countries.

For his life, Maisie Ward’s Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1943) was written by a friend who knew the family; Ian Ker’s G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (2011) is the fullest modern account. Readers who want to understand the charges of antisemitism discussed in the introduction will find them examined in detail in Simon Mayers’s Chesterton’s Jews (2013). The Ochorus author page carries a shorter biography.

A suggested order

For a first year with Chesterton: Orthodoxy; a volume of Father Brown; The Everlasting Man; The Man Who Was Thursday; St Francis of Assisi; Heretics; and then, as the appetite grows, The Ballad of the White Horse and his essays. Read Orthodoxy twice. Nearly everyone who loves it has.

Chesterton and C. S. Lewis

No account of Chesterton’s influence would be complete without the friend he never met. C. S. Lewis first read a volume of Chesterton’s essays in 1918, as a young soldier in a military hospital in France, and liked him at once, while still a convinced atheist. A few years later, in his twenties and still an unbeliever, he read The Everlasting Man, and he later described it as the first book that let him see the Christian account of history as one coherent whole. He counted it among the books that brought him to faith. The shape of some of Lewis’s best-known arguments — the claim of Christ that leaves no room for a merely good teacher, the longing that points beyond the world, the conviction that old books guard us against the errors of our own age — can be traced in Chesterton before him, though Lewis made each of them his own. Lewis’s books remain in copyright, and are not quoted here; the Ochorus library holds The Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis and Portraits of Courage – C. S. Lewis, which tell his story and describe his teaching.

Chesterton himself was influenced by George MacDonald, whose fairy story The Princess and the Goblin, read in childhood, he said had changed the way he saw everything. MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons are in the Ochorus library. Readers should know that MacDonald hoped for the final salvation of all, and rejected the teaching that Christ bore the penalty of sin in our place; evangelical readers will want to weigh both.

Three counsels for reading him

Read him with the Bible open. Chesterton was a journalist, not an apostle, and he would have been the first to say so. Where he is plainly scriptural, receive it with joy. Where he goes beyond Scripture, weigh it.

Read him slowly. His paradoxes come so fast that they are easily skimmed. Stop at the ones that strike you, and turn them over until you see what they mean.

And read him as he would have wanted: not as an end in himself, but as a signpost. Close the book, look at the world with new eyes, and give thanks to the One who made it and came into it to save it.

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. JOHN 14:6