Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He recently gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
In a review of the 1921 Distributist novel The Black Circle (by Cuthbert Baines], E.S.P. Haynes, writing in Cecil Chesterton's weekly The New Witness, recalled an earlier controversy between himself and H. G. Wells. Wells suggested that Baines had been unbalanced by listening to Belloc and the Chestertons. Baines disagreed with Wells, but complained when Belloc and the brothers Chesterton came to his defense. They "were always throwing mud," he wrote, and "their readers were perpetually misled by the mud-throwing campaign." [Fritto Misto, Kensington, 1924, pp. 143-44]
