Chesterton, London & Modernity

Chesterton, London & Modernity Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby, eds. G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. ix + 245 pp. $110.00

THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS, appearing in the Bloomsbury Studies in the City series, has its origins in a daylong symposium, "G. K. Chesterton and the Paradox of the City," held at University College, London in September 2011 to mark the 75th anniversary of Chesterton's death. The book is not simply an expansion into published conference proceedings of those talks: three of the authors were not on the conference program, and three who were on the program are not represented in the volume. The essays brought together here deftly overcome the circumstantial arbitrariness often governing the relationship between constituent parts of conference panels, the editors having ordered them into a clear sequential-or at least associative-logic. Matthew Ingleby's introduction acknowledges the inevitable disparateness in focus- "a variety of approaches ... a range of literary critical and historical practices"-while sketching in the outline of a commonality: "all represent responses to Chesterton's material encounters and intellectual engagement with metropolitan modernity." Despite the nonspecific ca- paciousness of that alliterative coinage, the metropolis in question in each case is, of course, as the book's title reflects, London.

In the seventy-nine years since his death, Chesterton as a writer of London-author of The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday, city-based editor, journalist, and man of letters-has increasingly stood in the shadow of Chesterton as Christian. His most popular works, the Father Brown stories (which probably remain popular more for their protagonist's skills as an amateur detective than for his professional priestly grasp of arcane Catholic apologetics, much as the one informs the other), have even, in their television reincarnation, been relocated out of their original urban and suburban settings to the kind of rustic village beloved by devotees of period English crime stories: in effect, Miss Marple goes to church. It tends not to be journals devoted primarily to modernism per se, or to literary London, that provide academic articles on Chesterton with their most receptive homes, but rather the period-specific ELT or the Christian-oriented journal Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review (Chesterton's six co-religionists being George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R....