Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy : Oxford University Press : 9780199551651 : 0199551650 : 06 Nov 2008 : On the publication of Orthodoxy in 1908, Wilfrid Ward hailed G. K. Chesterton as a prophetic figure whose thought was to be classed with that Burke, Butler, Coleridge, and John Henry Newman. When Chesterton died in 1936, T. S. Eliot pronounced that 'Chesterton's social and economic ideas were the ideas for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic'. But how did he come by these ideas? Eliot noted that Chesterton attached 'significance also to his development, to his beginnings as well as to his ends, and to the movement from one to the other'. It is on that development that this book is focused. Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is an exploration of G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Oddie draws extensively on Che