While Chesterton wrote for countless journals and newspapers during his lifetime, G.K.’s Weekly was plainly the journal most immediately associated with him as a journalist.
Luca Fumagalli, an Italian-born writer who now teaches literature and history in an American high school, has produced a fascinating and thoroughly researched article on the significant though precarious history of G.K.’s Weekly. It was first published in the May- June 2024 edition of St Austin Review (popularly known as StAR and edited by Joseph Pearce). It is reprinted with his kind permission – in a shortened form for reasons of space.
To learn the history of G. K.’s Weekly, the famous periodical edited by G. K. Chesterton and official organ of the Distributist League, the main source is G. K.’s Weekly. An Appraisal (1990), a slim volume written by Father Brocard Sewell, a Catholic convert who became a Carmelite, and worked for about a year on the editorial staff of G. K.’s Weekly.
In general, judgments regarding G. K.’s Weekly have always been ambivalent. Many, in fact, have questioned its value, considering it a waste of time, energy and money or, even worse, a distraction that prevented Chesterton from dedicating himself to his books, which were far more important.
Gregory Macdonald, a former member of the editorial team, and others with him, have widely denied this assumption; after all, Chesterton himself was proud of being a journalist and willingly followed the tradition of British intellectuals such as Defoe, Johnson, Cobbett and William Morris, who edited a periodical on their own to give public expression to their minority views. Numerous letters from Chesterton, including those addressed to Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring, underline this purpose.
Another erroneous idea shared by Maisie Ward and several subsequent Chestertonian biographers, is that Chesterton never wanted to start a paper, but did so, and kept it going, out of a misplaced loyalty to his brother Cecil, who died in France at the end of World War I. The latter had in fact been the combative editor of The New Witness, successor to Belloc’s weekly The Eye-Witness.
Even Frances Blogg and Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s wife and secretary respectively, had mixed feelings about G. K.’s Weekly. While contributing to it with poems and book reviews, both were worried about the stress and tension it caused their beloved Gilbert, who was involved in a heavy burden of work and financial responsibility.
The sense of duty towards his brother was certainly an important aspect that
influenced Chesterton’s choice to take over the editorship of the New Witness, but it was not the only one: the management of a periodical guaranteed him the freedom he would not have in the other papers for which he wrote.
However, if he certainly wasn’t the “world’s worst editor” as he stated, Chesterton lacked his brother’s qualities in this role. He wasn’t well-equipped to be the editor of a weekly paper of national circulation, partly because he had so much other work to do – articles, books and lectures – and partly because he had not Cecil’s political instinct nor his talent for detecting and exposing political corruption.
With the end of the New Witness in 1923 due to poor circulation, the following year G. K.’s Weekly Limited was founded. Chesterton agreed to act as editor for a decade with a salary of £500 a year but probably he never received it.
In November 1924 a trial number of G. K.’s Weekly had been issued, and in an article, significantly titled “Apologia”, Chesterton committed it to Distributism.
Due to the difficulty in raising the necessary funds, the first official issue appeared only several months later, on 21 March 1925. This delay was amaging: the trial number had in fact aroused great enthusiasm and thus potential writers and subscribers were lost. G. K.’s Weekly could not be adequately advertised, and this situation did not improve even later, only partially buffered by occasional donations.
In summer 1926 a crisis point was reached. It was therefore thought to establish some sort of organization to promote both the periodical and Distributism. The Distributist League was founded, and G. K.’s Weekly come to be the official organ of the League.
In November 1926 G. K.’s Weekly was reduced, for the first time, both in size and price. The effect was a rapid increase in sales but the hopes of reaching a circulation of 15,000 copies, the minimum not to require further funds, were never achieved.
Compared to Cecil, full-time editor, busy seven days a week, his brother was a non-resident editor: after all, he did not live in London but in Beaconsfield, about twenty miles from the capital. Consequently, an assistant editor handled the daily administration. The first was Ada Elizabeth Jones, widow of Cecil Chesterton and a highly experienced journalist. After the fifth or sixth number, William Reginald Titterton – who had for a time been assistant editor of the New Witness – replaced her and was at the helm during perhaps G. K. ‘s Weekly’s best period.
Following some misunderstandings concerning the paper’s very bad finances, Titterton abandoned the assistant editorship in 1927 and a semi-official editorial board was formed. In this period Frances Chesterton and Dorothy Collins tried unsuccessfully to convince Chesterton to abandon a project which, at least according to them, was inevitably destined to fail.
The editorial board, which met on Friday evenings, before the Distributists’ weekly meeting at The Devereux, a pub just off Fleet Street, continued in being only for four years. During that period G. K.’s Weekly published many important articles on Distributist policy and economy written, among others, by Eric Gill, by the famous Dominican Vincent McNabb and by Ezra Pound, who also contributed a poem with the title “Usura”. Chesterton also wrote several articles on economy, later published in the volume The Outline of Sanity (1928).
In 1936, after Chesterton’s death, the periodical changed ownership and editor: Hilary Pepler, the founder and director of the Saint Dominic’s Press at Ditchling in East Sussex, was determined that the Weekly should not be allowed to disappear and bought it.
The paper was renamed The Weekly Review and Belloc acted as editor for the next few months; but a good deal of the editorial work was done by his son-in-law, Reginald Jebb, who soon took over the editorship. The Weekly Review continued until 1948, when it changed to a monthly magazine, which, however, did not last long.
G. K.’s Weekly had several strengths, first and foremost its columnists. Literary contributions – stories, essays, poems – were written, apart from Chesterton and Belloc, by talented novelists such as Walter de la Mare and J. C. Squire. In December 1925 the Weekly began serializing Chesterton’s new novel, The Return of Don Quixote, but the serial was broken off at the time of the General Strike in 1926, and was never resumed.
George Orwell and G.K.’s Weekly
A highlight was the humorous cartoons, drawn by, among others, the Australian Will Dyson, as well as satirical articles. Few people would remember that George Orwell also made his journalistic debut in the Weekly.
Chesterton contributed every week with a full-page article under the heading “Straws in the Wind”. For a long time he also wrote two unsigned half-page articles, headed respectively “Top” “And Tail”, and sometimes he wrote book reviews and unsigned current affairs articles for the “Notes of the Week” column. It has been constantly repeated that his later writing in G. K.’s Weekly was tired and repetitive. Of course, sometimes the charge is justified; yet the latest numbers of the paper contain a great deal of good prose by him.
Under Titterton’s assistant editorship, G. K.’s Weekly had a liveliness which was never quite regained after he had left. Titterton’s own articles, characterised by a vehement anti-capitalism, were always amusing and not without pungency.
For a time he ran a series on contemporary politicians, and because he, like Chesterton, attacked the wealthy, dishonest Jewish financiers of the time, G. K.’s Weekly was labelled by them and their supporters as an anti-Semite paper. It was obviously a false accusation, demonstrated among other things by the Weekly’s stance against Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Worst of all, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express were ordered never to mention either Chesterton or Belloc, causing further damage to the paper.
The last number of G. K.’s Weekly under its founder’s editorship was the one of June 18, 1936. Chesterton had died at his home, “Top Meadow”, a few days earlier, on June 14.
Inside the paper for June 18 were articles on him by friends and admirers who praised his spirit, his wit and his undoubted journalistic qualities.
Although it was a small periodical with few financial resources, G. K.’s Weekly had its niche of influence. From the tiny editorial office in London, an attempt was made to conduct a romantic attack on the heart of the corrupt British
political and economic system.
If even today the name of the paper Chesterton edited is not forgotten, it is because the Weekly, despite the limitations, gave the hope that a new David could arise to definitively overthrow the Goliath of foolish modernity.