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 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)
[With respect to the cause of] Gilbert Keith Chesterton, sincere consideration should be given to George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in 1921,
In the first half of his career, in defiance of the very order of nature, Chesterton began without a figure as a convivial immensity with vine leaves in his hair, deriding his own aspect, and in middle life slimmed down into a Catholic saint, thereby justifying my reminder to those who took him too lightly of old, that Thomas Aquinas began as a comically fat man and ended as The Divine Doctor.
See Shaw's Introduction to "A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklyn Barnabus," his dramatic caricature of Chesterton which had originally been intended to be part of Back to Methuselah.
