Chiefly Concerning Sources


THE MATERIAL FOR this book falls roughly into two parts: spoken and
written. Gilbert Chesterton was not an old man when he died and many
of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled
sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material
has been unusually rich and copious so that I could get a clearer
picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the
biographer.

The book has been in the making for six years and in three countries.
Several times I hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get
a fresh view of it. I talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts
of ideas, saw my subject from every side; I went to Paris to see one
old friend, to Indiana to see others, met for the first time in
lengthy talk Maurice Baring, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; went to
Kingsland to see Mr. Belloc; gathered Gilbert's boyhood friends of
the Junior Debating Club in London and visited "Father Brown" among
his Yorkshire moors.

Armed with a notebook, I tried to miss none who had known Gilbert
well, especially in his youth: E. C. Bentley, Lucian Oldershaw,
Lawrence Solomon, Edward Fordham. I had ten long letters from Annie
Firmin, my most valuable witness as to Gilbert's childhood. For
information on the next period of his life, I talked to Monsignor
O'Connor, to Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Baring, Charles Somers Cocks, F.
Y. Eccles and others, besides being now able to draw on my own
memories. Frances I had talked with on and off about their early
married years ever since I had first known them, but she was, alas,