A Belloc Revival

As one who has admired Hilaire Belloc for almost half a century, it is gratifying indeed to see such a revival of interest in this great and under-appreciated man of genius. For too long, he has walked in G.K. Chesterton’s shadow. Now, at last, he is emerging in his own right, basking in the light that he brings to a gloomy world.

Many years ago, in 1980 to be precise, I first discovered the writing of G. K. Chesterton. As a naïve nineteen-year-old, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Chesterton’s influence would by life-changing. Through my love of Chesterton, I also discovered the works of his great friend Hilaire Belloc. These two writers were comrades in arms, warriors for the cause of Christendom, whom George Bernard Shaw had dubbed the Chesterbelloc, melding them in his imagination as two halves of “a very amusing pantomime elephant”.

I became an unabashed disciple of the Chesterbelloc, spending hours in second-hand bookshops on the quest to discover new tomes by both men. At the time they were decidedly out of fashion. The spirit of theological modernism and the rising tide of relativism had made their robust Christian orthodoxy anathema, not merely in the wider secular culture but even in the Church. Their works were removed from libraries and were dumped unceremoniously onto the market for used books. It was not unusual to see an ex libris bookplate on the inside cover of volumes by Belloc and Chesterton indicating that they had once been part of a convent library, or the library of a Catholic school. They were no longer recommended reading and were therefore no longer read. Deemed obsolete, they were purged in favour of books on fashionable spirituality, reflective of the spirit of the age, the titles and authors of which are long since forgotten.

The glut of books by Belloc and Chesterton in the second-hand book market made it very easy to build a collection of the works of both men without paying very much. I would trawl through the shelves, discovering gem after gem, which were being practically given away for as little as 20 pence each. I could come away from a successful day’s hunting with a dozen or more books without spending more than a few pounds. These books have remained my companions through life and adorn the shelves of my office as I write.

It is no longer possible to build a Belloc and Chesterton library as cheaply. This is good news because it reflects a revival of interest in the works of both writers.

The Chesterton revival began first. During the 1990s, the Chesterton Society began to grow by leaps and bounds; by the new millennium its annual conference was attracting hundreds of Chestertonians of all ages. Major Catholic publishers, such as Ignatius Press, began to champion Chesterton, publishing new editions of some of his better known works and embarking on the multivolume series of his Collected Works.

Now, at last, we are beginning to see the beginning of a Belloc revival. This has been made manifest to me personally by the number of requests that I’m receiving to write forewords to new editions of Belloc’s works. I’ve written forewords to both the Ignatius Press and Os Justi Press editions of The Path to Rome, the latter of which was published this year, and have also penned the foreword to the Os Justi Press edition of The Cruise of the Nona, published last year. I was asked by the American Chesterton Society to write the introduction to its edition of Belloc’s The Four Men and this year the monks at Silverstream Priory in Ireland asked me to write the foreword to the Cenacle Press edition of Belloc’s fine volume, Essays of a Catholic.

A new publishing house in England, Mysterium Press, has just published very handsome new hardcover editions of two of Belloc’s historical biographies, Wolsey and Cranmer, the latter of which had been scandalously out of print for over half a century. These two titles, published earlier this month and therefore hot off the press, are intended to be the initial releases in an array of further Belloc books. There are plans to publish new editions of other historical biographies, including Charles the First, Cromwell, The Last Rally: A Study of Charles II, and James the Second.

Belloc’s influence on contemporary scholarship is evident in a newly published biography by Justine Brown, The Private Life of James II, which mirrors Belloc’s biography in significant ways, and also in another newly published volume which explicates Belloc’s importance as an economist. The Economic Thought of Hilaire Belloc: A Christian Alternative to the Servile State by Spanish scholar, Alfonso Díaz Vera, was published this year by Routledge as part of its “Routledge Studies in the History of Economics” series. This volume is an adaptation of the author’s doctoral thesis, Servidumbre o Cristianismo: El Pensamiento Económico de Hilaire Belloc, which was also published this year by the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid.

Dr. Díaz Vera’s work follows closely on the heels of another positive appraisal of Belloc’s economic thinking, The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good, published last year by the American economist, Alexander William Salter. Whereas Díaz Vera focuses solely on Belloc, Dr. Salter considers the economic thought of both Belloc and Chesterton in the light of the great German economist, Wilhelm Röpke.

As one who has admired Belloc for almost half a century, it is gratifying indeed to see such a revival of interest in this great and under-appreciated man of genius. For too long, he has walked in Chesterton’s shadow. Now, at last, he is emerging in his own right, basking in the light that he brings to a gloomy world.

We’ll conclude with a quip by the great man himself: “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.” We might hope and pray that his sins are forgiven and we may rejoice that his books are read.

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The featured image is a photograph of Hilaire Belloc taken no later than 1914, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.