Free The Life and Words of GK Chesterton by Wyatt North Page A

own way; nevertheless, there is reason to believe that he was not without certain fugitive mental gifts.”
     
    Let us learn, then, what those mental gifts were, whence they came, and how they developed.

Childhood
     
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874, in Kensington, a district of central and western London. The Victorian Era prior had been good to the city. Although a large portion of the city's inhabitants were still living in poverty, London was overflowing with wealth. Communications had improved under the great queen, as had the standard of living and public health. Not everyone could read, but literacy had greatly increased, and with no competing media, people were hungering for literature. It was an increasingly secular period. The piety of the early Victorian Era, with the family at its center, was quickly going out of fashion.
     
    G. K. Chesterton's father was Edward Chesterton, a man who Gilbert himself described in his Autobiography as “serene, humorous, and full of hobbies.” Gilbert's mother was Marie Louise Chesterton, née Grosjean. A childhood friend of Gilbert's described her thus: “I never met with such a parental devotion or conjugal sympathy more strong than they were in the exceptional woman who was his mother, or with greater kindliness.” At the time of Gilbert's birth, the Chestertons already had one daughter, Beatrice, aged five.
     
    Despite some mixed Swiss and Scottish ancestry, the Chestertons were a quintessentially English family who belonged to that peculiar section of society that was the 19th century middle class. Gilbert's great grandfather, Charles, had started his career as a poultry merchant, then a coal merchant, and finally an estate agent with the Phillimore Real Estate Agency. He eventually started his own real estate firm, which at the time of Gilbert's birth, was run by his father Edward and his uncle Sidney. Gilbert’s maternal grandfather, Pierre Grosjean, had been a master tailor with nearly two dozen people in his employ.
     
    As neither truly the upper nor at all the lower echelon of society, the middle class was very much a class of its own. The middle classes were separated from the lower classes who served in their homes through literacy, culture, accent, and, most importantly, knowledge. The separation of the classes was such that the middle classes knew very little of the lower classes’ struggles. Gilbert’s father, Edward, reputedly “knew all of his English literature backwards.” Being able to make cultured conversation was the domain of the middle and upper classes. Coming from a self-made family, it was probably all the more important to the Chestertons, and Edward started teaching Gilbert poetry by heart long before the young boy had the capacity to fully understand it.
     
    At the same time, the middle classes were separated also from the true upper classes in their estates. Although the tables of a middle class household might be set by a servant and groan under the weight of a lavish supper every bit as much as in an upper class estate, the middle class man was very careful not to mimic certain, to our modern eyes seemingly random, behaviors of aristocracy that he found vulgar. The Chestertons would rather wait in the rain for a streetcar than take a cab, as the aristocracy were prone to do, although they could well afford to.
     
    Young Gilbert was baptized in the Church of England, although the family could hardly be considered religious. The Chestertons attended service very irregularly, and when they did go to sermons, it was almost exclusively those of one of their favored Unitarian preachers, Reverend Stopford Brooke. Gilbert’s Scottish grandfather, who often captured his imagination, however, had been a Wesleyan Methodist lay-preacher at a time when the Methodist movement was controversial and often judged as an “infidelity” by contemporaries.
     
    When Gilbert was three years old, his sister, Beatrice, fell ill and died