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Gilbert Keith Chesterton, journalist, essayist, master ideologue of religion and politics, and a seminal figure in the development of the modern detective story, was born on 29 May 1874 in Campden Hill, in the Kensington neighborhood of London. Chesterton's father, Edward Chesterton, was a Unitarian bourgeois whom his son memorialized in his posthumously published Autobiography (1936) for his devotion to his many hobbies; his mother, Marie Louise Grosjean Chesterton, had roots in French Switzerland but came from an Aberdeen family of Keiths. Chesterton was educated at Colet Court, St. Paul's School, and the Slade School of Art (1892-1895). Chesterton's clearest legacy from his parents, as his younger friend and biographer Maisie Ward has pointed out, is a sense of the romantic possibilities of the middle class. Chesterton himself observed in his study of Robert Browning that "it is in the middle classes that we find the poetry and genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime." The whole range of Chesterton's work, including his detective fiction, may be described as an attempt to discover and dramatize the poetry, and indeed the melodrama, implicit in everyday middle-class life.
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