Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas and festive apologies to all followers of this blog!

I guess the Chesterton Society has been dormant for a while, but be assured it's not dead. Hopefully the recent creation of an Irish Hilaire Belloc Society will be an impetus to a more active 2014.

I haven't been reading a great deal of Chesterton recently. He's had such a massive effect on me that I hardly even have to read him anymore-- I've absorbed his ideas so thoroughly. Nevertheless, I'm sure he will return to the forefront of my mind before long.

Watching this space, Irish Chestertonians! And best wishes of the season!

The Poor and the Proletariat

When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as ‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or ‘the poor’, as Chesterton would have put it).

--from "Charles Dickens", an essay by George Orwell

I couldn't help smiling when I read these words today, during my lunch-break. Poor Chesterton, not knowing the scientific term for the poor! But he seems rather less befogged today, when the proletariat has vanished (if it ever really existed) but the poor, as someone once predicted, are still with us.