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

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?

The Making of GKC is an exploration of 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 William Oddie draws extensively on Chesterton's unpublished letters and notebooks, his journalism, and his early classic writings, to reveal the writer in his own words.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.