Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a poet who is also remembered as an essayist, a novelist and short-story writer, a literary critic, a playwright, and a religious controversialist. As the author of more than a hundred books and thousands of journalistic writings, he used all these literary forms as part of his everyday journalism. He belonged to that category of writer which used to be called the man of letters, and like the typical man of letters he wrote journalism which included a wide variety of literary forms and literature which possessed many of the characteristics of journalism. He was concerned with relating his writing to the world in which he lived and using imagination as a means of illuminating the events upon which he wished to comment.

As a literary journalist, Chesterton was very much in the tradition of the Victorian sage. He was at once a teacher...