The Chesterbelloc

  • Tom Villis

Abstract

George Bernard Shaw first unveiled his famous caricature of the Chesterbelloc in the New Age magazine in 1908. He described a comical pantomime creature conducting an assault on the evils of the modern world with the hind legs of G.K. Chesterton and the front legs of Hilaire Belloc. The image of the two writers thus linked has affected popular portrayals of them ever since. In his original article, however, Shaw intended to express the unnaturalness of this coupling: ‘Chesterton and Belloc are not the same sort of Christian, not the same sort of Pagan, not the same sort of Liberal, not the same sort of anything intellectual. And that is why the Chesterbelloc is an unnatural beast which must be torn asunder to release the two men who are trying to keep step inside its basket-work.’1

Keywords

French Revolution Parliamentary Democracy Majority Government Weekly Review Distributist Circle 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    See for example, J.P. Corrin (2002) Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press).Google Scholar
  2. 4.
    See T. Villis (2006) Reaction and the Avant-Garde: the revolt against liberal democracy in early twentieth-centuy Britain (London: Tauris Academic Studies).Google Scholar
  3. 5.
    J. Stapleton (2009), Christianity, P atriotism and N ationhood: the E ngland of G.K. Chesterton (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books).Google Scholar
  4. 6.
    R.P. Tombs (1998) “’Lesser breeds without the law” The British establishment and the Dreyfus Affair, 1894–1899’, Historical Journal, 41, 495–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. 7.
    A. N. Wilson (1986 edn.) Hilaire Belloc (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 90.Google Scholar
  6. 8.
    H. Belloc (1925) The Cruise of the ‘Nona’ (London: Constable), p. 215, ‘It is to the Dreyfus case that we owe the four years of war, 1914–1918; for it destroyed the French Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and Charleroi’.Google Scholar
  7. 20.
    G.K. Chesterton (1930), The Resurrection of Rome (London: Hodder and Stroughton), p. 346.Google Scholar
  8. 24.
    J.P. Corrin (1981), G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: the battle against modernity (Athens OH and London: Ohio University Press), p. 186–7.Google Scholar
  9. 102.
    M.B. Reckitt (1941) As it Happened: an autobiography (London: J.M. Dent), p. 185.Google Scholar
  10. 104.
    Belloc to Lady Phipps (September 15, 1937) in R. Speaight (ed.) (1958) Letters from Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis and Carter), p. 265.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Tom Villis 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tom Villis
    • 1
  1. 1.Regent’s CollegeLondonUK

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