Wednesday, November 22, 2017

What's wrong with The Nation

Probably a lot, but here I just wanted to say that I have just added the rest of the letters in The Nation between 1911 and 1913. It's all controversies on politics and religion. IMO the best bit is not by GKC but by one Richard Mudie-Smith (1877-1916, editor of The Religious Life of London) in Mr. Chesterton and “Little Bethel”:
The boy who breaks a window and, when caught “red-handed,” exclaims: “It was that other boy what did it,” is a familiar figure; but I little thought that Mr. G. K. Chesterton would play this part, and with Dickens as “that other boy”! My letter was headed “Mr. Chesterton and “Little Bethel’”; Mr. Chesterton’s reply is headed “Dickens and ‘Little Bethel’”; but, vast as Dickens is, he is not big enough to hide Mr. Chesterton.