At Christmas, this mouse likes to remember the great G K Chesterton (1874-1936), poet, writer of detective fiction, spinner of paradox, essayist and old Catholic grumbler. A speciality of his was Christmas. Every year, it seems, he wrote a new essay on the subject. His mission was to attack the way Christmas was celebrated in the modern world. For Chesterton – and for everyone else who lived at the time – the 1910s and ’20s, with their tramcars, aeroplanes, electricity and wireless telegraphy, were exhaustingly modern. Many of his moans and whinges are familiar to us today. He hated the way Christmas celebrations started months before the festival itself, reserving peculiar scorn for magazines: ‘The editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
