Classic Ghost Story Writers: Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson (1957)

I used to feel a bit ashamed of reading books by Colin Wilson. They definitely fall into the 'guilty pleasures' category. As you can see from the list below, I collected his fiction fairly assiduously up until the end of the 1970s, but then let the habit lapse.

I do have most of them, though - with the exception of the late 'Spider World' series (1987-2002), and a few others such as The Janus Murder Case (1984), The Personality Surgeon (1985), and the posthumous Lulu: an unfinished novel (2017).

The first one I encountered - and it's still my favourite - was The Mind Parasites (along with, to a slightly lesser extent, its successors The Return of the Lloigor and The Philosopher's Stone).

I'm not quite sure why I liked it so much at the time. True, it was full of bookish information, and ended with one of those characteristic Campbell-era Sci-fi Man-plus resolutions, but there was an unmistakable zest about it.

Colin Wilson: The Mind Parasites (1967)

Fiction:


1. Ritual in the Dark. 1960. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1976.


2. Adrift in Soho. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.


3. The World of Violence. 1963. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.


4. Man Without a Shadow. 1963. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.


5. Necessary Doubt. 1964. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1966.


6. The Glass Cage: An Unconventional Detective Story. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.


7. The Mind Parasites. 1967. Berkeley, California: Oneiric Press, 1983.


8. 'The Return of the Lloigor.' In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Ed. August Derleth. 1969. London: Grafton, 1988. 439-501.


9. The Philosopher's Stone. 1969. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.


10. The God of the Labyrinth. 1970. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


11. The Killer. 1970. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


12. The Black Room. 1971. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1977.


13. The Schoolgirl Murder Case. 1974. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


14. The Space Vampires. Granada Publishing Limited. Frogmore, St Albans, Hertfordshire: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd., 1976.


15. 'A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin.' In Tales of the Uncanny. New York: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1983. 487-606.

Colin Wilson: The Philosopher's Stone (1969)

Already, though, I could see some of the features of Wilsonian fiction in general: the weird lack of affect, of any attempt to convey an atmosphere of reality - an atmosphere of anything, really, except people reading books and meeting other people to plan meeting more people to talk about the books and the ideas in them.

One might charitably call it Shavian, after one of his greatest influences, George Bernard Shaw. He too, eschews stylistic and tonal effects in favour of raw ratiocination.

Colin Wilson: Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969)

The thing about Shaw, though, is that he makes difficult ideas sound simple. He has a lot of sensible things to say about a great many features of the world around him. Colin Wilson really only has one idea, dished up again and again in slightly different forms.

That idea is (in its simplest form) that we don't use our brains to the uttermost - that if there were some way in which we could protract and/or artificially induce what psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences," then mankind could be transformed.

Now whether or not this is a good idea is beside the point. Maslow denied the possibility that the euphoria of peak experiences could be brought on in such a way, but Wilson was convinced that he was wrong. Most of his - very extensive - work on the occult was concerned with whether or not certain mystics and clairvoyants had succeeded in doing so.

His interest in H. P. Lovecraft was mainly to denounce him as an enemy of this "positive" vision of life. That is, until he started writing Lovecraftian fiction himself, after which he used the mechanics of the Cthulhu Mythos to promote the idea of - guess what? - peak experiences, only by now he'd started calling them "faculty x."

Colin Wilson: Peak Experiences and the New Human (1993)

Wilson was an appallingly prolific writer. There were, no doubt, many reasons for this: the need to make a living on book advances must have constituted a considerable temptation to pitch an endless series of books to his publishers (many of them thinly disguised re-hashes of what had gone before).

Colin Wilson: The Outsider (1956)

In critical terms, however, this is what doomed him to the literary fringes. The reviewers who'd hailed his first work The Outsider (1956) as an amazing piece of cultural insight, written by a 24-year-old working-class genius, were somewhat disconcerted to see Religion and the Rebel come thumping down the book-chute the very next year. They began to suspect they'd been had.

In reality, of course, The Outsider was not nearly as original and ground-breaking as they'd thought. It's a sign of the shallowness of British book culture of the time that names such as Dostoyevsky and Hamsun and Rilke, mentioned by a man who'd clearly actually read them, seemed unduly impressive to a great many of these half-educated bigmouths. But then, its successors weren't nearly as bad as they claimed either.

Wilson's first six books, known collectively as "The Outsider Cycle": Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat (1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider (1965) and the summary volume Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966) may sound a bit monotonous at times, but they did introduce readers to one of his most considerable virtues: the ability to summarize other people's books and ideas clearly and interestingly - albeit at great length.

You may see this as a journalistic rather than a strictly writerly skill - but it does explain why even Wilson's more reluctant fans (such as myself) are prepared to lend shelf room to so many of his tomes.

Speaking personally, I could give a shit about 'faculty x'. None of the stuff he says about it seems to me to make it sound more than an agreeable fairy tale. He always cranks round to it sooner or later, though - except, perhaps, in some of his later, more unabashedly commercial, compilations, such as the 1991 Mammoth Book of the Supernatural, 'edited' by his son Damon Wilson, who also co-wrote a number of these late works. That particular tome, despite its considerable size, didn't even make it to the (admittedly rather flawed) listings on Wikpedia's Colin Wilson Bibliography page).

Colin Wilson: The Occult: A History (1971)

His bestselling book The Occult (1971) and its sequels Mysteries (1978) and Beyond the Occult (1988), as well the host of others on telemetry, past lives, poltergeists, After-death experiences, etc. etc. consist mainly of retellings of classic ghost stories and other strange happenings. That's why they're so very entertaining to read.

The Essential T. C. Lethbridge (1980)

If you've tried the experiment of going from Wilson's version to the actual published work it was based on (as I have in the case of T. C. Lethbridge), you find just how grossly he simplifies, and how blatantly he bends their insights to fit in with his vision of a 'faculty x' dominated universe. This is bad.

Catherine Crowe: The Night-Side of Nature (1848)

On the other hand, however, I would probably never have encountered T. C. Lethbridge, or Catherine Crowe, or Atlantis theorist Rand Flem-Ath, or a host of other fascinating people and writers without the nudge given me by Colin Wilson's many, many works of summary and synthesis. It may not make him a great mind, but it certainly makes him a benefactor of a sort.

Harry Ritchie: Success Stories (1988)

Of course, there will always be mockers and scoffers who see Colin Wilson as a bit of a fraud or even (what's worse) a joke. If you'd like to read the case for the prosecution, I do recommend the very amusing chapter on Wilson and his acolytes (principally novelist Bill Hopkins and pop philosopher Stuart Holroyd) in Harry Ritchie's 1988 book Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959 (conveniently summarised in this 2006 article):

[When he] handed his journals over to the Daily Mail [in December 1956] ... Wilson's private thoughts made for juicy copy. "The day must come when I am hailed as a major prophet," was one quote. "I must live on, longer than anyone else has ever lived ... to be eventually Plato's ideal sage and king ..."

Harry Ritchie is okay in my book. I met him once in a pub, and he insisted on shaking me by the hand when he discovered that I was the only other human being he'd ever met who'd actually heard of, let along read Kingsley Amis's first book of poems Bright November (1947). I'm not sure if I dared to admit to him that I actually had a xeroxed copy of the book shelved with all my other Amis-iana at home in New Zealand ...

Is Ritchie right about Wilson? Objectively, I fear he may well be. But that doesn't really account for the fact that I've had so much pleasure reading about obscure supernatural events in the endless pages of Wilson's stream-of-consciousness reading-notebooks-in-the-form-of-individually-titled-volumes. As one of G. K. Chesterton's characters once remarked (in his first novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill):

Next to authentic goodness in a book ... we desire a rich badness.

Wilson may be, in many ways, a bad writer, but it is a rich badness - and, really, who, even (I was about to write 'especially') among geniuses, isn't a bad writer at times?

So here it is, then, in all its glory, my own private library of Colin Wilsoniana. You'll note that it even includes a few of his many books on murder and serial killers, but that aspect of his interests I don't share at all. It's the occult and paranormal investigation stuff that really fascinates me:

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A Colin Wilson library

Colin Henry Wilson
(1931-2013)

Non-fiction:


1. The Outsider. 1956. Pan Piper. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1963.


2. Religion and the Rebel. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1957.


3. [with Patricia Pitman]: Encyclopedia of Murder. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.


4. The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination. 1962. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1982.


5. Origins of the Sexual Impulse. 1963. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1966.


6. Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs. 1964. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


7. Colin Wilson On Music (Brandy of the Damned). 1964. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.


8. Beyond the Outsider. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.


9. Voyage to a Beginning: A Preliminary Autobiography. Introduction by Brocard Sewell. London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1969.


10. The Occult: A History. 1971. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.


11. Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder. 1972. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1975.


12. Strange Powers. 1973. London: Abacus, 1975.


13. Tree by Tolkien. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1974.


14. Mysteries: An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal and the Supernatural. 1978. London: Granada Publishing, 1979.


15. Starseekers. 1980. London: Granada Books, 1982


16. Poltergeist! A Study in Destructive Haunting. London: New English Library, 1981.


17. The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection. London & Sydney: Pan Books, 1984.


18. Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence for Life after Death. London: Harrap, 1985.


19. Beyond the Occult. London: Guild Publishing, 1988.


20. The Mammoth Book of the Supernatural. Ed. Damon Wilson. London: Robinson Publishing, 1991.


21. [with Damon Wilson]: World Famous Strange Tales & Weird Mysteries. London: Magpie Books Ltd., 1992.


22. [with Damon Wilson & Rowan Wilson]: World Famous Scandals. London: Magpie Books Ltd., 1992.


23. From Atlantis to the Sphinx. London: Virgin Books, 1996.


24. Ghost Sightings. Strange But True. Sydney: The Book Company, 1997.


25. [with Rand Flem-Ath]: The Atlantis Blueprint. 2000. London: Warner Books, 2001.

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Colin Wilson (2006)

The Fiction of G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

For a long time now I've been trying to collect all the miscellaneous fiction of G. K. Chesterton. I was brought up on the Father Brown stories, and read The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill when I was a teenager. Beyond that, there seemed to be a bewildering variety of other books and collections I knew nothing at all about.

"Telle est la vie des hommes," as Marcel Pagnol puts it in Le Château de ma mère: "such is the life of bibliophiles." Gradually I chipped away at my list, until I realised recently that I actually now owned all the items on it.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922)

So for the past few weeks I've been sitting around enjoying the ridiculous antics of some of Chesterton's less likely heroes: the crime-solving poet Gabriel Gale of The Poet and the Lunatics, the terrifying Innocent Smith of Manalive, the insouciant Horne Fisher of The Man Who Knew too Much - all the way up to the last of his heroes, the paradoxical Mr. Pond.

I don't think there's much doubt that the best of them come from the epoch of the Edwardian swoon, before the First World War came along to bust the whole of the settled order apart. He wrote a great deal afterwards, too, but there's a cranky, polemical tone to a lot of it, unfortunately.

One also finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate his blatant anti-semitism and the rather smug religiosity which became ever more prominent after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.

Martin Gardner: The Annotated Thursday (1908 / 1999)

So why read a bunch of books by a cranky old antisemite? Put like that, it's a bit difficult to explain, really. But I defy anyone to start reading The Man Who Was Thursday and then put it down again without feeling an irresistible urge to follow his characters through their various mad antics.

He was a superb writer, I'm afraid - though certainly he did, at times, write too much and too fast. How does W. H. Auden put it?

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

It's true that the person referred to in these verses is actually W. B. Yeats, and that Auden subsequently cut these three stanzas out of his famous elegy for the Irish poet, but I think they could be said to apply pretty well to G. K. Chesterton.

In any case, let's begin with a list of all his actual works of fiction:

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E. H. Mills: G. K. C. (1909)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
(1874-1936)

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

1. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) - novel.
2. The Club of Queer Trades (1905) - linked stories.
3. The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) - novel.
4. The Ball and the Cross (1910) - novel.
5. The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) - linked stories.
6. Manalive (1912) - novel.
7. The Flying Inn (1914) - novel.
8. The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) - linked stories.
9. The Man Who Knew Too Much and Other Stories (1922) - linked stories.
10. Tales of the Long Bow. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1925) - linked stories.
11. The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926) - linked stories.
12. The Secret of Father Brown (1927) - linked stories.
13. The Return of Don Quixote (1927) - novel.
14. The Sword of Wood (1928) - short story.
15. The Father Brown Omnibus (1929) - linked stories.
16. The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (1929) - linked stories.
17. Four Faultless Felons (1930) - linked stories.
18. The Scandal of Father Brown (1935) - linked stories.
19. The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937) - linked stories.

The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937)

To break it down a little, there are five volumes of Father Brown stories (together with three extra, uncollected stories); six novels, and six (or seven, depending on how you count) volumes of more-or-less linked short stories.

In the somewhat daunting array of volumes (37 to date) which go to make up Ignatius Press's edition of The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, no fewer than six (with, presumably, a seventh still to come) are devoted solely to fiction.

Here's a list of the volumes that have appeared since the series started in 1986:

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Short Stories, Fairy Tales, Mystery Stories (1993)

The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. 37 vols. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986-2011.

1. Orthodoxy / Heretics / Blatchford Controversies
2. St. Francis of Assisi / The Everlasting Man / St. Thomas Aquinas
3. The Catholic Church and Conversion / The Thing: Why I am a Catholic / The Way of the Cross / The Well and the Shallows - and others
4. What's Wrong with the World / Superstition of Divorce / Eugenics and Other Evils – and others
5. The Outline of Sanity / The End of The Armistice / The Appetite of Tyranny / Utopia of Usurers – and others
6. The Man Who Was Thursday / The Club of Queer Trades / The Napoleon of Notting Hill, ed. Denis J. Conlon (1991)
7. The Ball and the Cross / Manalive / The Flying Inn, ed. Iain T. Benson (2004)
8. The Return of Don Quixote / Tales of the Long Bow / The Man Who Knew Too Much, ed. George Marlin (1999)
9. [The Poet and the Lunatics / Four Faultless Felons / The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond] (?)
10. Collected Poetry, 3 vols, ed. Aidan Mackey & Denis J. Conlon (1994, 2008 & 2010)
11. Collected Plays and Chesterton on Shaw, ed. Denis J. Conlon (1989)
12. Father Brown Stories, Part 1 - The Innocence of Father Brown / The Wisdom of Father Brown / The Donnington Affair, ed. John Peterson (2005)
13. Father Brown Stories, Part 2 - The Incredulity of Father Brown / The Secret of Father Brown / The Scandal of Father Brown / The Vampire of the Village / The Mask of Midas, ed. John Peterson (2006)
14. Short Stories, Fairy Tales, Mystery Stories – Illustrations, ed. Denis J. Conlon (1993)
15. Chesterton on Dickens, ed. Denis J. Conlon (1993)
16. The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (1988)
17. [ - ] (?)
18. Thomas Carlyle / Leo Tolstoy / Robert Louis Stevenson / Chaucer, ed. Denis J. Conlon (1993)
19. [ - ] (?)
20. Christendom in Dublin / Irish Impressions / The New Jerusalem / A Short History of England
21. What I Saw in America / The Resurrection of Rome / Sidelights
22. [ - ] (?)
23. [ - ] (?)
24. [ - ] (?)
25. [ - ] (?)
26. [ - ] (?)
27. Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 (1986)
28. Illustrated London News, 1908-1910 (1987)
29. Illustrated London News, 1911-1913 (1988)
30. Illustrated London News, 1914-1916 (1988)
31. Illustrated London News, 1917-1919 (1989)
32. Illustrated London News, 1920-1922 (1989)
33. Illustrated London News, 1923-1925 (1990)
34. Illustrated London News, 1926-1928 (1991)
35. Illustrated London News, 1929-1931 (1991)
36. Illustrated London News, 1932-1934 (2011)
37. Illustrated London News, 1935-1936 / Subject Index (2012)

Collected Poetry, Part III (2010)

Mind you, I suppose there will always be those who rate him highest as a poet - and certainly he had an amazing facility for turning out stirring verse at the drop of a hat - or as an essayist and polemicist. For the most part, though, it's his novels and stories which seem most likely to carry on his name.

GKC as 'Fiddlers Green' in Neil Gaiman's The Doll's House (1990)

Neil Gaiman is probably more directly influenced by Chesterton than most modern fantasy writers (witness the panels above, from his immensely influential Sandman comic), but actually his oblique and paradoxical way of looking at things has had a huge effect on detective fiction as well. Father Brown alone must be responsible for a huge number of quirky amateur investigators, more expert in human psychology than in police procedure.

Actually, the more closely you look, the more pervasive he seems to be - in movies and television as well as writers as disparate as Kingsley Amis (who edited a selection of his stories in the 1970s); Ursula Le Guin (who followed his lead in such fantasies as Threshold (1980) - The Beginning Place in America); and - of course - Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Stephen King, Peter Straub, and a host of other writers who inhabit that debatable border land between the prosaic everyday and the uncanny and marvellous.

I'll conclude, then, with a list of my own Chestertoniana:

Chestertoniana

Poetry & Plays:


1. Magic: A Fantastic Comedy. 1913. The New Adephi Library. London: martin Secker (Ltd.), 1928.


2. Wine, Water & Song: Poems. 1915. Illustrated by Sillince. Introduction by L. A. G. Strong. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1945.


3. Poems. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1923.


4. The Collected Poems. 1927. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1954.


5. Essays and Poems. Ed. Wilfrid Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958.


6. Collected Nonsense and Light Verse. Ed. Marie Smith. 1987. Methuen Humour Classics. London: Methuen, 1988.


7. Collected Poems, Part I. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 10 (i). Ed. Aidan Mackey. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994.


8. Collected Poetry, Part II. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 10 (ii). Ed. Denis J. Conlon. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008.


9. Collected Poetry, Part III. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 10 (iii). Ed. Denis J. Conlon. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010.

Fiction:


10. The Napoleon of Notting Hill. 1904. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.


11. The Club of Queer Trades. 1905. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.


12. The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare. 1908. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.


13. The Annotated Thursday: G. K. Chesterton’s Masterpiece The Man Who Was Thursday. 1908. Ed. Martin Gardner. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.


14. The Ball and the Cross. London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd., 1910.


15. Manalive. 1912. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947.


16. The Flying Inn. 1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958.


17. The Man Who Knew Too Much and Other Stories. 1922. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1923.


18. Tales of the Long Bow. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1925.


19. The Return of Don Quixote. 1927. G. K. Chesterton Reprint Series, 7. London: Darwen Finlayson, 1963.


20. The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale. 1929. G. K. Chesterton Reprint Series, 5. London: Darwen Finlayson, 1962.


21. The Father Brown Stories: The Innocence of Father Brown; The Wisdom of Father Brown; The Incredulity of Father Brown; The Secret of Father Brown; The Scandal of Father Brown & The Vampire of the Village. 1911, 1914, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1935, & 1936. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1974.


22. Four Faultless Felons. 1930. G. K. Chesterton Reprint Series, 4. A Delta Book. Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964.


23. A G. K. Chesterton Omnibus: The Napoleon of Notting Hill; The Man Who was Thursday; The Flying Inn. 1904, 1908, 1914, & 1932. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1958.


24. Stories, Essays and Poems. 1935. Introduction by Maisie Ward. 1957. Everyman’s Library, 1913. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1965.


25. The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond. 1937. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., n.d.


26. Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis. London: Faber, 1972.


27. Short Stories, Fairy Tales, Mystery Stories – Illustrations. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 14. Ed. Denis J. Conlon. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.

Non-Fiction:


28. The Defendant. 1902. The Wayfarer’s Library. 1914. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1922.


29. Robert Browning. 1903. English Men of Letters. London: Macmillan & Co, Limited, 1905.


30. Charles Dickens. 1906. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1919.


31. George Bernard Shaw. 1909. Guild Books, 253. London: The British Publishers Guild Ltd. / John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1949.


32. Tremendous Trifles. 1909. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920.


33. William Blake. The Popular Library of Art. London: Duckworth & Co. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., [1910].


34. Criticisms and Appreciations of Charles Dickens’ Works. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1911.


35. The Victorian Age in Literature. Home University Library of Modern Knowledge. London: Williams & Norgate, / New York: Henry Holt and Company, [1913].


36. Orthodoxy. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head / New York: John Lane Company, 1915.


37. A Short History of England. 1917. Phoenix Library. London: Chatto and Windus, 1938.


38. The Uses of Adversity: A Book of Essays. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920.


39. The Everlasting Man. 1925. People’s Library Edition. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1927.


40. The Thing. 1929. London: Sheed & Ward, 1946.


41. Chaucer. 1932. London: Faber, 1965.


42. St. Thomas Aquinas. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1933.


43. Autobiography. 1936. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books, 1959.

Secondary:

44. Ward, Maisie. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. 1944. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958.

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J. L. Carstairs: A Chestertonian Still Life