Wednesday

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)

During the War, James Joyce formed a theater company to produce English plays in Switzerland. One of the productions was to be Chesterton's Magic, which went into rehearsal in May of 1918. When, however, the British consulate deemed the play unpatriotic, two of the actors resigned, and so Joyce scrubbed Magic in favor of less controversial material. [Richard Ellman, James Joyce, Oxford, 1982 (revised), pp. 439-40]