Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Napoleon of Notting Hill
    The Napoleon of Notting Hill
    The Napoleon of Notting Hill
    Ebook229 pages3 hours

    The Napoleon of Notting Hill

    By G. K. Chesterton and Madeline Ashby

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A satire set in a future England, in which a neomedievalist contest among London neighborhoods takes a disastrous turn.

    When Auberon Quin, a prankster nostalgic for Merrie Olde England, becomes king of that country in 1984, he mandates that each of London’s neighborhoods become an independent state, complete with unique local costumes. Everyone goes along with the conceit until young Adam Wayne, a born military tactician, takes the game too seriously . . . and becomes the Napoleon of Notting Hill. War ensues throughout the city—fought with sword and halberd!

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English author, poet, critic, and newspaper columnist known for his brilliant, epigrammatic paradoxes. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, featured in over fifty stories published between 1910 and 1936, who solves mysteries and crimes thanks to his understanding of spiritual and philosophic truths; and his best-known novel is The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a metaphysical thriller. In addition to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, he wrote several other near-future satires of England.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe MIT Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2023
    ISBN9780262376044
    Author

    G. K. Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a prolific English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He is best known in mystery circles as the creator of the fictional priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Often referred to as "the prince of paradox," Chesterton frequently made his points by turning familiar sayings and proverbs inside out. Chesterton attended the Slade School of Art, a department of University College London, where he took classes in illustration and literature, though he did not complete a degree in either subject. In 1895, at the age of twenty-one, he began working for the London publisher George Redway. A year later he moved to another publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, where he undertook his first work in journalism, illustration, and literary criticism. In addition to writing fifty-three Father Brown stories, Chesterton authored articles and books of social criticism, philosophy, theology, economics, literary criticism, biography, and poetry.

    Read more from G. K. Chesterton

    Related to The Napoleon of Notting Hill

    Related ebooks

    Alternative History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Napoleon of Notting Hill

    3.5/5

    221 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      A rather odd, but amusing novel set in a future London (1984, ironically, 80 years after the novel's publication), where democracy has given way to a cynical system whereby a random individual is chosen to be king for a period of time. The story is full of wry observations, reflecting the author's own views, but does get a bit dull and repetitive. Worth a look.
    • 3/5
      I didn't so much enjoy the story as the way Chesterton put words together. I'll try another book by Chesterton based on that, but can't wholeheartedly recommend this one.
    • 3/5
      I am ambivalent about Chesterton. He has great ideas and his stories begin with promise but somewhere along the line I lose interest. It is as though he promises insights and delivers the obvious.
    • 3/5
      This slim volume combines alternative history, satire, and fantasy. Written in 1904, it posits a future 100 years in the future in which there is no international strife. Everything is so stable that, essentially, nothing has changed – everyone goes about their life with no thought of change, progress, or conflict. Government is largely irrelevant, until a new English king is chosen (at random), an eccentric who mandates that each London borough become a city-state, complete with walls, heraldry, and provosts. Ultimately, conflicts arise between the towns, and war ensues.

      Written before the horrors of World War One, Chesterton appears to idealize the conflicts and carnage. Or is he writing a cautionary tale? One is never sure, and the typically dense Victorian verbiage Chesterton employs mutes the message to modern readers. Occasionally amusing, often tedious, it’s not a book I can recommend except to those who enjoy Victorian prose.
    • 4/5
      This is his 1st Novel, written in 1904 and I heartily enjoyed it.
      Set in 1984 in a world where nothing has changed & apathy has set in. A man who believes everything to be a joke is chosen by lottery to become the next king. For his own amusement he turns London into fiefdoms but still nothing changes until one petty ruler takes the idea seriously. I found it humorous and charming but dramatic with the juxtaposition of whimsy and the violence of war. The different ideas are fascinating (the two extremes, political apathy etc...). Plus it’s good for wondering what would happen in a fight in your city.
    • 3/5
      The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton's crack at a futuristic tale, even if he cheats. The 1984 London described in his story is much of the same London of the era of its writing in 1904. There are still horse-drawn hansom cabs and a few of the omnibuses make appearances. Men are wearing frock and nice hats. The main change is that the people have quieted down. England has most of the free world in its power, just having officially absorbed Nicaragua. The political structure is a sort of...I'm not sure. The Kings have their power, but they are not elected nor is the throne hereditary. It is described as a sort of 'jury duty' style selection, and when Auberon Quin is chosen, things go haywire.

      Quin is a man who fancies himself humourous, refusing (if it is indeed a conscious choice) to see anything in a serious light; the world, he believes, is a massive joke. Inasmuch he rules as he sees fit and upon taking a liking of the antics of a young, would-be soldier weilding a wooden sword one night, divides London into old fashioned kingdoms. There are provosts for ruling beneath him. Each has their own colour scheme, symbol and halberdier troupe. Things run as smoothly as can be for several years until some of the provosts, all randomly elected excusing Quin's friend Barker, come up against a brick wall in their efforts to build some road through several of the areas. Provost Wayne of Notting Hill stands against their efforts, choosing instead the love of his home.

      This book, as I expected, is an astounding look into a side of humanity that I cannot say I often seek to explore, though I am sure I think on it more than I note. Chesterton shows how, despite what any one person may think at the end of any one day, he or she will very likely end up becoming something that they do not desire or even blatantly dislike. In the world of this book, before Quin stirs things up, the population of London has become complacent. They feel no real attachment or loyalty to their homes, no real 'home-town pride,' and are, in fact, puzzled by the actions of the visiting Nicaraguan president. The man, in the midst of this dull atmosphere, seeks two things. He finds one in a piece of yellow paper he tears from a street sign and the other in his own blood drawn from his hand. They are the colors of his home and his love, even though it is no longer its own country. Such a love is found in the Notting Hill provost as he defends his home against the onslaught of businessmen and politicians.

      I cannot speak to much further as I do not wish to give up the ending of such a splendid novel, being a firm proponent of Reading Rainbow (but don't take my word for it) ethics. All I know is that, though there was a fabulous ending before the final chapter, Chesterton added his last chapter. It's a very philosophical conversation between two voices that is fascinating, but I am fairly sure that it went over my head. Still, fantabulous. I will leave you now with a quote from the novel itself (Forgive the lack of inclusive language, but Chesterton wasn't writing for the PC crowd, Politically Correct or Personal Computer...):

      'For you and me, and for all brave men, my brother,' said Wayne, in his strange chant, 'there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of the world.' 
    • 4/5
      Futurists fall into two categories: those who predict the collapse of civilization (Wells, Orwell, Atwood), and those who anticipate sunshine and lollipops (Kurzwiel, The Jetsons). Chesterton invented a new category. In 1904, he wrote a novel about a future eight decades later where everything remained the same. The only thing that increased was apathy.

      The two main characters in the narrative represented two elements that make the world go 'round: extreme humor and extreme seriousness. Their interplay (especially in the last chapter) is fascinating.

      This is one of Chesterton's first novels. It's not as polished as The Man Who Was Thursday or even The Club of Queer Trades. It is still well worth reading. There are quotable lines on almost every page that mark this as vintage Chesterton.
    • 5/5
      In my opinion, one ofthe greatest fantasy novels ever, and one of GKC's best books, much better than Man Who was Thursday whch many praise. The revolt of local feeling against a universal deadening bureaucracy is wonderfully vivid. It is also both heroic and funny. Adam Wayne is heroic, Auberon Quinn is funny, and together they remake Britain, or at least London, into a gorgeous --yet at times terrifying-- neomedieval culture.
    • 5/5
      I stayed up much later than I should have to finish this unexpected little book. The plot was quite good, but more compelling than that was Chesterton's distinct style of writing and the little gems he scatters liberally on every page.

      The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton's first novel and was published in 1904. In this story, he imagines a London eighty years hence (yes, 1984) in which nothing much has really changed. Horse-drawn hansom cabs still cruise the streets and the government has degenerated into a despotic democracy. A man is chosen from a list (just as one is called for jury duty) to be King. It is not a hereditary title, and the function of this King is to be a sort of national secretary. This systems is described as a despotic democracy because it is an ordinary man just like any other who is chosen off the list, and so he in his one person embodies the spirit of the masses — and yet he rules with an autocrat's power.

      Auberon Quin is one such young man, who is standing on his head in a public garden to mortify his friends when he receives word that he has been chosen as King. Auberon is a "dangerous man" because all he cares for are jokes. As King, he indulges a fancy of dividing London into respective sections and setting up a full medieval state, complete with flowing robes, contingents of halberdiers, and heraldic insignia for the Provosts of each small city. In the first flush of his joke, Auberon happens to meet a young boy in the vicinity of Pump Street, whom he laughingly admonishes to defend his Pump Street to the death.

      Ten years later, that young boy is ready to do just that. He is the Provost of Notting Hill, and he opposes a bill that would send a thoroughfare right through Pump Street, the heart of Notting Hill. At first Auberon cannot believe that Wayne is serious, but it soon becomes clear that Wayne is deadly serious. And bloody battle ensues.

      This book is full of poignant insights, and one of these that struck me was Chesterton's assertion that the smaller a country is, the prouder and more loyal its subjects will be. He says a young boy playing at kingdoms in the street will be all the prouder of his territory if it is so small it barely has room for his feet to stand. This didn't seem to make sense until I thought it through in terms of national identity. The smaller your national state, the more exclusive it is, the more special it makes you feel to belong to such an elite membership.

      In the end, this story is about the superiority of the small and localized over the large and cosmopolitan. And yet Chesterton is not bigoted; the grocer's store is described lovingly as a place where liquorice from the dark heart of Araby, tea from mystic China, and a whole host of other poetic items are brought to the heart of the local.

      One thing that my copy's introduction says is problematic for modern readers is Chesterton's alleged glorifcation of violence. As modern readers, we agree with the idea that "small is beautiful," but are not as comfortable with the portrayal of violence as essential to the survival of the small. Chesterton sees things in sharp polarity; the Small must always defend itself against the onrushing tide of the sprawling, monstrous, civilized, monotonous Large.

      There is another strong polarity in the book, between the Joker and the Fanatic. Auberon embodies the Joker, to whom nothing matters but the humor of things. Adam Wayne typifies the Fanatic, who has no sense of humor and whose loyalty never falters. Wayne takes everythings too seriously; Auberon is incapable of taking anything seriously. I love the end, where the two are finally one.

      It's hard to believe this is Chesterton's first novel. Of course he had been writing essays for some time, but the work has a very masterful feel. He knows exactly what he is doing, and follows his own rules. I'll leave this with a few choice quotes from the book.

      The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

      ...humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

      I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps growing again.

      I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.

      Who is more certainly the stay of the city, the swift chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer?

      Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age, as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wonder how many other people feel the oppression of this union between quietude and terror. I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and nothing happens; but to me it is a dream from which I might wake screaming.

      There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything else like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe but that God loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and unreplaceable.

      ...the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god... You have a halberd and I a sword; let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials.

      Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      A strange little idea. A lament about the dullness our civilised lives bring on, and a proposition put forth as an alternative. I'm sure there is much the author was trying to say that I do not understand, and some things which I think I understand, he may not have had in mind at all. For instance, I perceive teaching on the value of life because it exists and it is all individual. If you snuff out a life, for instance in the womb, what have you lost? None of us know, because that individual never had a chance to be known.
      There is a wonderful little paragraph on freedom of speech, what it should mean and what it is not allowed to be for fear of labels.

    Book preview

    The Napoleon of Notting Hill - G. K. Chesterton

    Cover Page for The Napoleon of Notting Hill

    The Napoleon of Notting Hill

    The Radium Age Book Series

    Joshua Glenn

    Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2022

    A World of Women, J. D. Beresford, 2022

    The World Set Free, H. G. Wells, 2022

    The Clockwork Man, E. V. Odle, 2022

    Nordenholt’s Million, J. J. Connington, 2022

    Of One Blood, Pauline Hopkins, 2022

    What Not, Rose Macaulay, 2022

    The Lost World and The Poison Belt, Arthur Conan Doyle, 2023

    Theodore Savage, Cicely Hamilton, 2023

    The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G. K. Chesterton, 2023

    The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson, 2023

    More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2023

    The Napoleon of Notting Hill

    G. K. Chesterton

    introduction by Madeline Ashby

    The MIT Press

    Cambridge, Massachusetts

    London, England

    © 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    This edition of The Napoleon of Notting Hill follows the text of the 1904 edition published by John Lane: The Bodley Head, which is in the public domain. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

    This book was set in Arnhem Pro and PF DIN Text Pro by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874–1936, author. | Ashby, Madeline, writer of introduction.

    Title: The Napoleon of Notting Hill / G. K. Chesterton ; introduction by Madeline Ashby.

    Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2023] | Series: The Radium Age book series

    Identifiers: LCCN 2022038733 (print) | LCCN 2022038734 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262546416 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262376044 (epub) | ISBN 9780262376037 (pdf)

    Subjects: LCSH: Notting Hill (London, England)—Fiction. | LCGFT: Political fiction. | Fantasy fiction.

    Classification: LCC PR4453.C4 N3 2023 (print) | LCC PR4453.C4 (ebook) | DDC 823/.8—dc23/eng/20220818

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038733

    LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038734

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    d_r0

    TO HILAIRE BELLOC

    For every tiny town or place

    God made the stars especially;

    Babies look up with owlish face

    And see them tangled in a tree:

    You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,

    A Sussex moon, untravelled still,

    I saw a moon that was the town’s,

    The largest lamp on Campden Hill.

    Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home

    The big blue cap that always fits,

    And so it is (be calm; they come

    To goal at last, my wandering wits),

    So is it with the heroic thing;

    This shall not end for the world’s end,

    And though the sullen engines swing,

    Be you not much afraid, my friend.

    This did not end by Nelson’s urn

    Where an immortal England sits—

    Nor where your tall young men in turn

    Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.

    And when the pedants bade us mark

    What cold mechanic happenings

    Must come; our souls said in the dark,

    Belike; but there are likelier things.

    Likelier across these flats afar

    These sulky levels smooth and free

    The drums shall crash a waltz of war

    And Death shall dance with Liberty;

    Likelier the barricades shall blare

    Slaughter below and smoke above,

    And death and hate and hell declare

    That men have found a thing to love.

    Far from your sunny uplands set

    I saw the dream; the streets I trod

    The lit straight streets shot out and met

    The starry streets that point to God.

    This legend of an epic hour

    A child I dreamed, and dream it still,

    Under the great grey water-tower

    That strikes the stars on Campden Hill.

    G. K. C.

    Contents

    Series Foreword

    Introduction: Dystopias Are Problems Plus Time

    Madeline Ashby

    Book I

    I Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy

    II The Man in Green

    III The Hill of Humour

    Book II

    I The Charter of the Cities

    II The Council of the Provosts

    III Enter a Lunatic

    Book III

    I The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne

    II The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull

    III The Experiment of Mr. Buck

    Book IV

    I The Battle of the Lamps

    II The Correspondent of the Court Journal

    III The Great Army of South Kensington

    Book V

    I The Empire of Notting Hill

    II The Last Battle

    III Two Voices

    Series Foreword

    Joshua Glenn

    Do we really know science fiction? There were the scientific romance years that stretched from the mid-nineteenth century to circa 1900. And there was the genre’s so-called golden age, from circa 1935 through the early 1960s. But between those periods, and overshadowed by them, was an era that has bequeathed us such tropes as the robot (berserk or benevolent), the tyrannical superman, the dystopia, the unfathomable extraterrestrial, the sinister telepath, and the eco-catastrophe. A dozen years ago, writing for the sf blog io9.com at the invitation of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, I became fascinated with the period during which the sf genre as we know it emerged. Inspired by the exactly contemporaneous career of Marie Curie, who shared a Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium in 1903, only to die of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934, I eventually dubbed this three-decade interregnum the Radium Age.

    Curie’s development of the theory of radioactivity, which led to the extraordinary, terrifying, awe-inspiring insight that the atom is, at least in part, a state of energy constantly in movement, is an apt metaphor for the twentieth century’s first three decades. These years were marked by rising sociocultural strife across various fronts: the founding of the women’s suffrage movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, socialist currents within the labor movement, anticolonial and revolutionary upheaval around the world . . . as well as the associated strengthening of reactionary movements that supported, for example, racial segregation, immigration restriction, eugenics, and sexist policies.

    Science—as a system of knowledge, a mode of experimenting, and a method of reasoning—accelerated the pace of change during these years in ways simultaneously liberating and terrifying. As sf author and historian Brian Stableford points out in his 1989 essay The Plausibility of the Impossible, the universe we discovered by means of the scientific method in the early twentieth century defies common sense: We are haunted by a sense of the impossibility of ultimately making sense of things. By playing host to certain far-out notions—time travel, faster-than-light travel, and ESP, for example—that we have every reason to judge impossible, science fiction serves as an instrument of negotiation, Stableford suggests, with which we strive to accomplish the difficult diplomacy of existence in a scientifically knowable but essentially unimaginable world. This is no less true today than during the Radium Age.

    The social, cultural, political, and technological upheavals of the 1900–1935 period are reflected in the proto-sf writings of authors such as Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Muriel Jaeger, Karel Čapek, G. K. Chesterton, Cicely Hamilton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E. V. Odle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pauline Hopkins, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Aldous Huxley, Gustave Le Rouge, A. Merritt, Rudyard Kipling, Rose Macaulay, J. D. Beresford, J. J. Connington, S. Fowler Wright, Jack London, Thea von Harbou, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, not to mention the late-period but still incredibly prolific H. G. Wells himself. More cynical than its Victorian precursor yet less hard-boiled than the sf that followed, in the writings of these visionaries we find acerbic social commentary, shock tactics, and also a sense of frustrated idealism—and reactionary cynicism, too—regarding humankind’s trajectory.

    The MIT Press’s Radium Age series represents a much-needed evolution of my own efforts to champion the best proto-sf novels and stories from 1900 to 1935 among scholars already engaged in the fields of utopian and speculative fiction studies, as well as general readers interested in science, technology, history, and thrills and chills. By reissuing literary productions from a time period that hasn’t received sufficient attention for its contribution to the emergence of science fiction as a recognizable form—one that exists and has meaning in relation to its own traditions and innovations, as well as within a broader ecosystem of literary genres, each of which, as John Rieder notes in Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), is itself a product of overlapping communities of practice—we hope not only to draw attention to key overlooked works but perhaps also to influence the way scholars and sf fans alike think about this crucial yet neglected and misunderstood moment in the emergence of the sf genre.

    John W. Campbell and other Cold War–era sf editors and propagandists dubbed a select group of writers and story types from the pulp era to be the golden age of science fiction. In doing so, they helped fix in the popular imagination a too-narrow understanding of what the sf genre can offer. (In his introduction to the 1974 collection Before the Golden Age, for example, Isaac Asimov notes that although it may have possessed a certain exuberance, in general sf from before the mid-1930s moment when Campbell assumed editorship of Astounding Stories seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive.) By returning to an international tradition of scientific speculation via fiction from after the Poe–Verne–Wells era and before sf’s Golden Age, the Radium Age series will demonstrate—contra Asimov et al.—the breadth, richness, and diversity of the literary works that were responding to a vertiginous historical period, and how they helped innovate a nascent genre (which wouldn’t be named until the mid-1920s, by Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories and namesake of the Hugo Awards) as a mode of speculative imagining.

    The MIT Press’s Noah J. Springer and I are grateful to the sf writers and scholars who have agreed to serve as this series’ advisory board. Aided by their guidance, we’ll endeavor to surface a rich variety of texts, along with introductions by a diverse group of sf scholars, sf writers, and others that will situate these remarkable, entertaining, forgotten works within their own social, political, and scientific contexts, while drawing out contemporary parallels.

    We hope that reading Radium Age writings, published in times as volatile as our own, will serve to remind us that our own era’s seemingly natural, eternal, and inevitable social, economic, and cultural forms and norms are—like Madame Curie’s atom—forever in flux.

    Introduction: Dystopias Are Problems Plus Time

    Madeline Ashby

    According to Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist’s lecture on the subject, in 1904, G. K. Chesterton spent his last ten shillings on a shave and a fortifying lunch that included a bottle of wine, then pitched his editor on a novel about the future of London in which nothing of any consequence will have changed in eighty years—except for how England comes by its kings. In his imagined future, all prospective monarchs would be chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. (Presumably, said rotation list contained no once or future queens.) Set in 1984, the book would focus not on the future of science or technology, but the future of power, society, and authority. Interested in the futures of his country, his career, and his marriage, not necessarily in that order, Chesterton asked for twenty pounds in advance—which he gave to his wife.

    What he produced is The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a satire of the future in which an owlish, unpleasant little man named Auberon Quin randomly wins England’s curious leadership lottery, then immediately uses his new position upon the throne to resurrect the romantic tradition of chivalric heraldry and pageantry. He establishes each neighborhood of London as its own fief or commonwealth: halberds are back, and so are the full richness of medieval garments, which means men in tights deciding if mustard is really their color. London becomes a theme park dedicated to the celebration of a glorious past which never truly existed outside books of myth and verse. Some tourists and even residents of the city today might find themselves in agreement that of Chesterton’s many speculations regarding London’s future, this one was especially prescient.

    By dividing London into commonwealths, Quin pits the neighborhoods against each other for his own amusement. This is short-sightedness on his part, but it’s also sheer carelessness. Early in the novel, he laughs long and loud while remembering the words of a Nicaraguan refugee who later commits suicide, mocking the man’s sincere belief in a leader that wants to do right by his people. It’s a private moment, which explains why Quin’s ministers are so surprised to discover that their leader is, in the parlance of our times, nothing but a troll doing it for teh lulz.

    This is cosplay taken to the level of governance, a utopia for one. Quin’s rule functions much as though a fan of C. S. Lewis’ works had gained the throne and decreed, as a new addition to the building regulations, that all wardrobes should function as secret passages into the next-door neighbor’s house; or as though a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s works had decided to abolish New Scotland Yard, in tribute to Holmes’ opinion on the uselessness of the Metropolitan Police.

    Quin’s fanboy devotion to another era would not have been unfamiliar to Chesterton’s readers. During the eighteenth century, trendy English gardens had become home to follies—so named for the cost of their development—which evoked visions of other centuries through decorative buildings. Greek temples, Chinese pagodas, Egyptian pyramids, medieval castles: all of these ruins were built brand-new and in miniature. Nor did the fad for neoclassical and neo-medieval design end there or then. Following his ascendancy to the Bavarian throne in 1864, Ludwig II oversaw the ongoing construction of multiple castles meant to evoke a medieval past that had never happened. Romantic and wildly impractical, the castles earned the young monarch the nickname Mad King Ludwig. After Germany fully unified as a country in 1871, Ludwig’s castles became part of the fledgling nation’s myth, which is why these structures are often referred to now as myth-castles. One of these, Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, would eventually inspire Walt Disney—who used it as the basis for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland.

    The strategy of architecture as retroactive continuity would continue past the nineteenth century. In 1934, Adolf Hitler appointed architect Albert Speer head of the Chief Office of Construction, and charged him with designing and building stadiums and rally grounds in a Stripped Classical style that would link Nazi Germany to the perceived legitimacy of ancient Rome. Speer was so good at this job that, in 1937, he was made Berlin’s General Building Inspector; in this role, his job was to remove Jews from their homes.

    Such is the practice of many dictators and tyrants. To shore up support, they create the illusion of a shared mythic past, then stoke a longing for it amongst their people. Against this backdrop, Auberon Quin’s neomedieval yearnings seem less quaint (if tiresome and fundamentally opposed to progress, like neomedievalism itself) than malevolent. It may also explain why Chesterton assumed that no one would seriously complain about Quin’s changes, until city planners propose a highway through Notting Hill: because he was giving the people what they wanted.

    After he published A Short History of England in 1917, Chesterton himself would be accused of a Quin-like nostalgic sentiment. To say that it exalts medievalism, deplores modernity, and lures the reader on from sparkling epigram to startling if at times strained paradox, noted the historian R. L. Schuyler in a review, is merely to report that Chesterton is still Chesterton. Chesterton’s first novel, that is to say, reveals the author’s own obsessions—which happen to be the same as Auberon Quin’s.

    Chesterton’s vision of a monarch chosen at random sounds absurd until you watch a Question Time, or learn that the House of Commons can only operate legally when an oak and silver mace from the period of Charles II is left on a table, or read a tabloid account of Prince Andrew’s alleged compulsion to have his teddy bear collection put in order—a headline which I promise you is not a euphemism. (Speaking of tabloids, by the way, Quin writes for them—like most tyrants and trolls, he craves publicity.) Like many other pieces of English satire and humor, from A Modest Proposal to The Thick of It, Chesterton’s novel plays with the joke at the core of England itself: this little country thinks it’s an empire! This little man thinks he’s a king! The change from primogeniture to a lottery system within the novel illuminates the absurdity inherent in the lottery of birthright itself.

    Among the many English stories of unlikely leaders springing from humble places—King Arthur, Prince Hal, Harry Potter—we must add this one, however grudgingly. Those other tales were inspired by the one story that fascinated Chesterton all his life: the story of Christ. This story is quite the opposite of that one. It’s not about a man wrestling with the burdens of leadership and enduring the suffering and sacrifice which that leadership demands, but about a fiend concerned with his own pleasure and amusement and little else. If there is any element of the underdog in this novel, it lies with Adam Wayne, the humble citizen of Pump Street (an imaginary road in Notting Hill) who challenges the Crown.

    Writing this novel in 1904, a scant few years before revolutions in Russia, Mexico, and Ireland, and ten years before the Great War, Chesterton would have the science fiction writer’s queasy-making experience of watching certain fictions pass into reality—in his case, the collapse of traditional power structures. In fact, the book may have helped inspire a revolution closer to home: Michael Collins, director of intelligence for the Irish Republican Army during the 1919–1921 War of Independence, was a lifelong fan of The Napoleon of

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1
    pFad - Phonifier reborn

    Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

    Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


    Alternative Proxies:

    Alternative Proxy

    pFad Proxy

    pFad v3 Proxy

    pFad v4 Proxy