GKC 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)
What did author Henry James really think of Chesterton? On November 18, 1906, he wrote his brother (William James] that H.G. Wells was "the only one of the younger literary generation here presenting any interest whatever, except Lowes Dickenson and to some extent the too tricky and journalistic Chesterton, who has reduced to a science the putting of everything a rebours." [Letters, IV, Harvard, 1984, p. 425]
["The old French word rebours has no equivalent noun in English; it refers to the opposite direction of a fabric's nap. Today rebours survives only in the expression à rebours, which literally means 'against the nap,' but is also used figuratively to mean 'backwards, wrong way.']
