Heretics (1905)
Heretics is a 1905 criticism book written by Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
G. K. Chesterton picks fights on purpose. In these twenty essays from 1905 he takes on the reigning thinkers of his day, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Nietzsche and the fashionable skeptics, and argues that their grand modern ideas rest on shaky foundations. The title is a joke with a point: to Chesterton a heretic is anyone confident in a philosophy he has not examined. The tone stays cheerful and pugnacious, the paradoxes fly, and his affection for his rivals shows even as he dismantles them. It serves as a companion to his later Orthodoxy.
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A few thoughts on Heretics
Gilbert Keith Chesterton's delight in paradox and moral argument carries into the screen adaptations of his fiction. The long-running BBC series Father Brown, built from his detective stories, keeps that same genial, unfashionable wit.
Biopics of the writers who argued in public
Heretics reads like a public quarrel. Chesterton names Shaw, Wells and Kipling and takes them on by name, in print, while they could answer back. These films and series put the same kind of figure on screen: Marx drafting a manifesto, Wilde in exile, Waugh's set behaving badly. Watch them for the noise around the ideas.
Essay collections by critics who pick fights
Chesterton wrote twenty essays in 1905 and spent most of them disagreeing with someone. Orwell, Woolf, Ozick and Arendt work the same way, treating criticism as an argument with a named opponent rather than a survey of the field. Open any of these mid-book and you land in a fight already underway.
Chesterton past the essays, from Father Brown to the stage
Heretics is the first Chesterton many readers meet, and his fiction makes a good next step. He gave Father Brown a priest's ear for motive, built The Club of Queer Trades from absurd professions, and put a working conjuror on stage in Magic. His Browning study runs the same paradox habit at essay length, with Sherlock Holmes nearby.
Dickens and the England Chesterton defended on screen
Chesterton spent Heretics defending ordinary English life against writers who found it dull, then wrote a whole book on Dickens the year after. Two David Copperfields, Trollope's Pallisers and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda carry that world. The Winslow Boy adds the stubborn principle he prized, one family refusing to let a small injustice stand.