Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and Sacraments in Chesterton's London

Author(s): MARK KNIGHT

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1/2, Literature and Religion (2009),
pp. 126-136
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and

Sacraments in Chesterton's London
MARK KNIGHT
Roehampton University

Reading signs does not seem to have become easier over time. Long-standing
questions about interpretative subjectivity and ambiguity were intensified in the
second half of the twentieth century by the rise of post-structuralism, and at the
start of the twenty-first century we are more aware than ever of the difficulty of

moving between the world of words and the world of things. We know that we
do not stand outside the texts we comment on, and we are well aware that our
readings owe as much to interpretative communities and prior linguistic traces
as they do to the 'things' that we wish to interpret. Yet our familiarity with such

predicaments does not stop us from dwelling on the limits of other people's
reading rather than admitting the deficiencies of our own interpretative efforts.
This is especially evident when it comes to reading religion. Secular critics can
sound unreasonably superior when they set out to expose the interpretative
assumptions practised by religious reading communities. Although many secular
literary critics possess a more sophisticated grasp of hermeneutics than the
general population of religious communities, this is not always the case, and
there are acute problems with non-religious accounts of religious interpretation.
Even those who seek to write sympathetically about religion can struggle to
register their own bias. Marina Warner, to take one striking example, speaks
warmly of the way that a Roman Catholic education led to her being 'wrapped
in stories, in signs and wonders, in fantasies, myths and dreams', before revert
ing to the use of a less productive binary between faith and rationality that casts

a dark shadow over religion: 'The education stamped me with an abiding,

irrepressible interest in the irrational, both as an expression of the mind in its
most mysterious mode, and as a terrifying force in history.'1

An implicit description of the forcefulness of religious ideology is common

among critics, and it this insistence on religion's monolithic tendency that I want
to call into question at the start of this essay. The prominence of fundamental
ism in the modern world makes it inevitable that we should want to examine the

broader religious base from which fundamentalism emerges; and although

fundamentalism may be said to represent an extreme form of religious belief,
there is an understandable concern that it might prove to be the result of a
1 Marina Warner, Signs Takenfor Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Ghatto & Windus, 2003), p. 3.

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MARK KNIGHT 127

general religious orientation to violent uniformity. For some critics, the
hermeneutic at work within the Christian faith seeks to replace the ambiguity
of signs with a single wonder that represents a fixed and inviolable presence.
Hermeneutic activity of this sort is a popular target for the wonders of decon

struction, as Homi Bhabha shows us in 'Signs Taken for Wonders' when he

explores what he sees as a dominant moment in colonial history and missionary
activity ? the discovery of the English book. Although Bhabha is more inter
ested in demonstrating how this recurring motif of cultural power gives way to
readings that challenge the claim to 'originality' and 'authority', the underlying

assumption is that religion, especially evangelical religion, is committed to a

written Word that is 'no less theocratic than logocentric'.2 The assumption that
the Christian religion is more interested in the one than it is in the many is not

peculiar to Bhabha. It also permeates the work of other literary theorists, such
as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, even if the relation
ship between religion and literary theory is now widely recognized as being more
complex and ambiguous than critics once thought.3
Secular reading brings with it its own potential for reductive modes of reading.

Having admitted the monolithic reading of God in parts of the Christian tradi
tion, Colin Gunton insists that modernity's 'displacement of God does not and
has not given freedom and dignity to the many, but has subjected us to new and

often unrecognized forms of slavery'.4 In the context of the late nineteenth

century, this secular tendency towards uniformity is evident in the reading under

taken by Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes

represents the ultimate modern professional, a figure who eschews religion and
brings a relendess scientific method to bear on every problem. But in spite of his

claims to pursue all lines of enquiry openly, Holmes's reading is remarkably

insistent and intransigent, with arbitrary deductions frequendy presented to

Watson as normative and unquestionable dogma. The rigid hermeneutic

employed by Holmes is symptomatic of a genre that is frequendy seen as
exemplifying the workings of a disciplinary society. Foucault's thinking on this
point has been influential for many of the critics who write about detective fiction,

and other figures have confirmed this generic orientation towards conformity.5

2 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Roudedge, 1994), p. 168.

3 For a more detailed exploration of the possibilities of religion and literary theory see Arthur Bradley,
Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London: Roudedge, 2004), John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of
Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), and Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, rev. edn
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
4 Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 29.
5 For two useful examples of the critical link between Foucault, discipline, and crime fiction see D. A. Miller,
The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and (in a less overtly theoretical style)
Heather Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave,

2005).

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128 Adverts and Sacrements in Chesterton's London

Most notably, Franco Moretti highlights the way that detective fiction originates
'at the same time as the trusts, the big banks, and monopolies'. He points out that

the genre is predicated on the idea that anyone proposing independence needs
to be criminalized and rooted out by the detective's universal method: 'detective
fiction treats every element of individual behaviour that desires secrecy as an

offence, even if there is no trace of crime (for example, "The Man with the
Twisted Lip", "The Yellow Face", "A Scandal in Bohemia")'. Moretti makes the
point more explicit when he describes the genre as 'a hymn to culture's coercive
abilities'.6 It is a compelling argument but there are problems with the language
used here. Holmes prefers to play the violin by himself rather than making music

with others, so it seems suspicious that Moretti should refer to a communal act
of religious worship when talking about Holmes's secular preference for the one
over the many.
Gunton draws on a range of theological resources from the Christian tradi
tion to articulate his critique of modernity's failure to find space for the one and

the many. Echoing this approach, the remainder of this essay will explore G. K.
Chesterton's sacramental reading of the world, which, in the words of Ian Boyd,

'is based on a belief in a divine presence hidden behind material reality and
discovered by an effort of the imagination'. As Boyd goes on to explain, this 'is
why the material world has a sacramental character for Chesterton: the whole
of creation is a divine theophany and therefore in a mystical sense the Word of
God'.7 Although Chesterton's theology was still in a formative state during the
first few years of the twentieth century, his sacramental reading is apparent in
his first published novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). William Oddie argues

that a Christian world view underlies the novel's 'quasi-sacramental local patri
otism'; however, I would go further, arguing that the theological basis of the
sacramental reading in the novel allows the plurality of signs within the modern
world to be read in a way that respects the needs of the local and the universal.8
By setting the novel within a modern metropolis that is itself at the centre of an

empire, Chesterton extends his interests beyond local patriotism and explores

the capacity of Christian theological resources to address the competing

demands of the one and the many in the modern world.
Given the difficulty that some of the early reviewers had in comprehending
The Napoleon of Notting Hill? 'what it is Mr Chesterton really wants to say [. . .]

we have failed to discover, but it seems to us to have no basis of intelligible

6 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1988),

pp. 136, 135-6, 143.

7 Ian Boyd, 'In Search of the Essential Chesterton', Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, 1 (1980), 28-46

(p. 41).

8 William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 268.

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MARK KNIGHT 129

narrative' ? it is worth summarizing briefly the events that occur.9 At the end
of the opening chapter ('Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy'), the
narrator concludes his survey of contemporary attempts at prophecy by telling
us that when the 'curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present
date, London is almost exactly like what it is now'.10 London is a place increas
ingly governed by big business, and democracy has given away to a system in
which the king of England is selected at random from the population: 'No one
cared how: no one cared who. He was merely a universal secretary' (p. 14). When
the humorist Auberon Quin is made king, he decides to reconstitute the ancient
charter of the cities and make all the London boroughs build city walls, wear
their borough's coat of arms, and raise a banner denoting their local identity.
For the majority, Quin's edict is no more than a wearisome joke; for the young
idealistic Adam Wayne, the idea of believing in and committing oneself to the
immediate locality is an idea to be taken with the utmost seriousness. Years later,
Wayne confronts the efforts of big business to redevelop Pump Street, a small
road in Notting Hill, by recruiting an army of shopkeepers to defend the street.

Events quickly escalate and war breaks out between the London boroughs.
Eventually, Adam Wayne wins a military victory for Notting Hill against
superior forces. But the story does not end here, and the revolution gives way to

a new instance of tyrannical rule, with the borough of Notting Hill becoming
an empire in its own right. One of the main characters in the novel, James
Barker, complains: 'they try to meddle with every one, and rule everyone, and
civilize everyone, and tell every one what is good for him' (p. 141). An uprising

takes place and Notting Hill is defeated. In the final chapter, the fighting
romance gives way to a surreal conversation between Wayne and Quin, which,
punctuated by metaphysical references, reflects on all that has taken place.
Inspired by Chesterton's opposition to the Boer War, the critique of empire
in The Napoleon of Notting Hill is based on imperialism's systemic failure to
acknowledge diversity and uniqueness. For much of the novel, this failure is
brought out by the attempts of the larger, more powerful, boroughs to ignore
the particularity of Notting Hill. The failure is also evident early on when three
government clerks (Quin, Barker, and Lambert) encounter Juan del Fuego, the
eccentric President of Nicaragua. Protesting against the conquest of his country
and the efforts to assimilate his cultural heritage, the President wears a striking
green uniform, tears off a piece of yellow paper, and soaks a handkerchief in
his own blood; by appearing in this way, he represents the colours of his national

flag. Asked to explain this unusually vivid testament, the President responds:
'Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colours? The Church has her
9 Anonymous review, Birmingham Post, 25 February 1904.
10 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 13. Further references
will be given in the text.

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130 Adverts and Sacrements in Chesterton's London

symbolic colours. And think of what colours mean to us' (p. 23). Colours are
used throughout Chesterton's work to represent the individuality and particu
larity of creation, and in The Napoleon of Notting Hill they provide a visual alter
native to the monotony and uniformity of the imperial project. When Barker

tries to defend the idea of empire as a modern phenomenon that seeks to

'include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples' (p. 24), the President counters:
Precisely [. . .] and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain
of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean
that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab
does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to
teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride
on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' [. . .] If you are going to include all the
talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always said, that something
went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized, (p. 24)

Chesterton's decision to think about the empire via the modern metropolis
reflects some of the intellectual currents of his period. Jonathan Schneer argues
that the importance of London to the British Empire reached its height at the
turn of the century, and that 'imperialism was central to the city's character in

1900, apparent in its workplace, its venues of entertainment, its physical geog

raphy [. . .] [and] in the attitudes of Londoners themselves'.11 Londoners'

awareness of the importance of their city to the empire was encouraged by
several factors that coalesced around 1900, including the exponential growth of
the London Stock Exchange and its accompanying shift from a domestic to a
foreign exchange, the importance of the Port of London as a 'nexus of empire',
and the expansion and opening of major department stores offering commodi
ties from around the world.12 The growing sense that London was at the heart
of the empire was evident throughout the literature of the period, as Joseph

McLaughlin, among others, points out. Highlighting works such as Arthur

Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and William Booth's In Darkest England and
The Way Out (1890), McLaughlin informs us that 'writers in the late nineteenth

century appropriated ways of thinking and talking about the colonies and
discursively transform the metropolis into a new borderland space: the urban
jungle'.13 The metaphor that McLaughlin both notes in the writing of the period
and employs in the tide of his study makes it clear that one of the main concerns
at the turn of the century was to domesticate the jungle and subordinate the
chaos of the many to the order of the one.14 Chesterton thought that such
11 Jonathan Schneer, London igoo: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 13.

12 Schneer, p. 39.

13 Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville:

University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 2.

14 Further discussion of the role of detective fiction in the attempt to domesticate a sprawling empire can
be found in Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Colombus: Ohio State

University Press, 2004).

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MARK KNIGHT I3I

homogenization ran counter to the Christian doctrine of Creation: if all things
are made and sustained by God, then they are endowed with inherent value.
This wonder at the world's variety, described in one early essay as a 'philosophy
of gratitude', finds expression in the final chapter of The Napoleon of Notting Hill

when Adam Wayne mounts a defence of particularity:

There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never
be anything quite like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that God
loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and unreplaceable [sic], (pp. 154-5)15

While Chesterton's alarm at the homogenizing tendency of globalization

found expression in his support for the economic theory of Distributism, the root

of Chesterton's thinking on this matter has more to do with theology than

economics. This is evident when Chesterton translates his wonder at the partic
ularity of creation into an analysis of the workings of the modern metropolis.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill may look back nostalgically to a pre-modern era but
it does not do so at the expense of the modern world. Chesterton's commitment
to the world that God has made encouraged him to defend the heterogeneity of
the city. In one of the best-known essays of The Defendant (1901), A Defence of

Detective Stories', Chesterton admits to finding 'some sense of the poetry of

modern life' in the city.16 He then proceeds to make the sort of claim that one
might typically expect to find in the writings of Walter Benjamin:
A city is, properly speaking, more poetic than a countryside, for while nature is a chaos
of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the
pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the
street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol ? a message from
some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard. The narrowest street possesses
in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long
in his grave, (p. 159)

The location of this observation within an essay on detective stories reminds us

how radically different Chesterton's reading of the city is from the one articu
lated by Holmes. Doyle's detective is perpetually trying to map the city and
assimilate cultural difference. In The Sign of Four, his trip through London's
streets is accompanied by the naming of all the streets through which he passes,
a piece of maniacal indexing that speaks of a desire to decode and control the

mysteries of the metropolis.17 Ronald Thomas tells us that Holmes's reading

depersonalizes life, with personhood finding itself imprinted on material objects
(for example, fingerprints) so that it can be subjected to dehumanizing and total

15 Originally published in the Daily News in 1903, 'The Philosophy of Gratitude' is reprinted in The Chester
ton Review, 14 (1988), 177-9.
16 G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant, new edn (London: Dent, 1922), p. 158. Further references will be given
in the text.
17 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, new edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), pp. 22-3.

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132 Adverts and Sacrements in Chesterton's London

izing methods of analysis.18 Unlike Holmes, Chesterton values the chaos of

conscious forces in London and secures this appreciation through the analogi

cal language and symbolism that a sacramental reading of the world makes
available. Conceiving of the city as a collection of conscious symbols imagines
an unlimited set of possibilities. Every symbol expresses a series of intended
associations, as well as multiple unconscious and unexpected significations. And
because symbols derive their meaning in relation to the units of language that
precede and follow them, the meaning of a symbol is never static. As a conse
quence, London's symbols open up the meaning of the city and resist interpre
tative closure. Chesterton's use of symbolism allows an imaginative account of
the city that cannot be dominated by a Holmes-like universal reading.
Chesterton's understanding of symbols places considerable emphasis on the
role of the interpreter. Symbols do not yield their meaning automatically and

this enables an interpretative conversation to take place. The role that this
creates for individual agency points to a more open-ended notion of cultural
interpretation than the one proposed by Theodor Adorno, whose interests in
modernity and popular culture coincide with Chesterton's. Overwhelmed by the
penetration of modern capitalism into everyday life, Adorno concludes that the

standardized works of the 'culture industry' replace the 'negative truths'

expressed by figures such as Mozart: 'By craftily sanctioning the demand for
rubbish it [the culture industry] inaugurates total harmony.'19 Passive consumers
are conditioned to accept the underlying uniformity of works, and all signs are
seen as pointing in the same direction. When Chesterton looks at the unvalued
elements of popular culture, he sees things differendy from Adorno. Writing in
The Defendant, Chesterton declares:
I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I
have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically
engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. (p. 16)

Led by his reflections on the doctrine of Creation, Chesterton thinks that the
wonders of God's own mystery extend to a surprising and adventurous world
that humans participate in. Recognizing the positive consequences of this view
for our understanding of the modern metropolis, Chesterton offers the follow
ing comment in his introductory essay to Elsie Lang's Literary London (1906): 'This

is the difficulty of the town: that personality is so compressed and packed into
it that we cannot realise its presence. The smallest street is too human for any

human being to realise.'20

18 Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

!999)> Chapter 12.

19 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans, by John Cumming (London: Verso,

1997), P- 134
20 G. K. Chesterton, 'Introduction', in Elsie M. Lang, Literary London (London: T. Wernie Laurie, 1906), p. x.

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MARK KNIGHT 133

Contrasting conceptions of the relationship between agency and popular

culture help explain the different attitudes of Adorno and Chesterton

towards advertisements. For Adorno, advertisements exemplify the complete
power of the culture industry over the individual consumer; for Chesterton,
advertisements invite readings that extend beyond their commercial intent.

By seeing the world as a series of signs that possess value and point to
infinite possibilities, sacramental reading provides space for human interpre

tation and ensures that advertisements do not have to be interpreted solely

as a threat to human particularity. Big business may seek to direct the sign
making power of advertising towards its own universal end, but the public
nature of advertisements ensures that there is always another way of reading.
Although it is tempting to accuse Chesterton of naivety on this point, The
Napoleon of Notting Hill does not ignore the power of big business. Indeed, the
moment in the novel when the Nicaraguan President complains about the
threat of cultural assimilation is the moment in which he explores the
meaning of advertisements. Immediately before stabbing his own palm to
redden his handkerchief, the President acquires something yellow to pin on
his green uniform:
He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of Colman's Mustard erected on a wooden
hoarding. His spectators almost held their breath.
He took from a small pocket in his uniform a penknife; with this he made a slash at
the stretched paper. Completing the rest of the operation with his fingers, he tore off a
strip or rag of paper, yellow in colour and wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first
time the great being addressed his adoring onlookers, (p. 20)

Because the symbolism of the advertising poster is public, it is open to appro

priation by the President, even if the slashing of the poster implies that the

alteration of the advertisement's original meaning requires some level of

violence. The references in this scene to audience ('spectators' and 'onlookers')

suggest that symbols call forth an active response, and the use of the ambiguous
phrase 'wholly irregular' (holey/altered; holy by virtue of a nonconformity to
corrupt cultural norms; and wholly/complete) reminds us that the signature of
advertisements is less determinate than one might think.

By openly staging the potential conflict between the one and the many,
between what is intended and what is read, advertisements exemplify the value
of thinking about ideas in the public realm. Arguing in The Defendant that
religious beliefs need to be thought about in this way, Chesterton insists: 'The
Christian martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertise

ments.' He continues:

It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has inaugurated this
notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars have never lost their sanctity,
and they are more shameless and naked and numerous than advertisements of Pears'

soap. (p. 59)

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134 Adverts and Sacrements in Chesterton's London

Advertisements propel ideas into the public realm. Securing a realm where the
plurality of ideas (including religious beliefs) can coexist peacefully may be diffi
cult, but Chesterton's reading of culture is committed to the importance of
public space. Equally, it is committed to the sense that a sacramental world view

allows our reading of culture to entertain diversity without retreating into

private and subjective belief systems. The sacramental world may point to one
God, but that God is believed to be infinite, relational, and revealed through the
language of the world that he has made, militating against a fixed and mono
lithic logocentrism.
Having described how Notting Hill's particularity collapses into a new impe
rialistic expression of the universal, Chesterton's novel acknowledges the need
for an intellectual framework that might break the revolutionary cycle in which
one empire inevitably gives way to another. An awareness of the difficulty of
establishing adequate relations between the one and the many lies behind the
strange conclusion to The Napoleon of Notting Hill Neither Wayne the fanatic nor
Quin the humorist is able to secure the needs of the many through their own
efforts. Wayne's defence of Notting Hill affirms the value of a particular place
but at the expense of particularity per se (the tyrannical conformity that results
from his fundamentalism is a problem that troubles our own efforts at sustain

ing true cultural plurality); Quin's humour creates space for the particular only
to undermine that space by leaving open the possibility that the affirmation of

the particular is based on 'a vulgar practical joke' (p. 156). The inadequacy of
Wayne and Quin's approaches explains why, at the end of a tale that becomes
increasingly predictable, we are presented with a surreal and unsettling final
chapter. Like the early reviewers of the novel, a number of readers find the final

scene puzzling, with complaints ranging from the narrative disjunction with the
rest of the book to the incongruity of such strongly metaphysical language in a
novel celebrating the material and commonplace. The simplest solution, and the
one taken by a number of critics over the years, suggests that the final chapter
be read as a psychological reconciliation between two extreme personality types.
Reading the final scene against the backdrop of Chesterton's personal struggles
during the 1890s, John Coates sees the two characters as 'a picture of the neces
sary tension [. . .] between the fantasist and the humorist, the two halves of a

man's brain', and Denis Conlon sees the ending as a resolution of Chesterton's

'split-personality crisis, a schizophrenic dream'.21 Yet reading the end of

Chesterton's novel in terms of mental unification is problematic, essentially
because the focus on the individual mind misses the importance of community
21 John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984), p. 104; Denis
Conlon, 'Introduction' to G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume VI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991),

P- 32.

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MARK KNIGHT 135

and cultural plurality throughout the preceding pages. Wayne's final speech
suggests that another reading is necessary:
When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure
satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities
into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more
common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us.
Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are
full of blasphemous grotesques, (pp. 157-8)

The reference to cities and cathedrals insists on a vision that is communal rather
than individual, and it is in this context that the importance of Wayne and Quin

can be seen to revolve around their contribution to other people's ability to

perceive the wonder of creation.
If the 'dark and dreary days' spoken of in the final chapter testify to a world
that is fallen, then extreme defences of Notting Hill are 'necessary'. According
to Ian Boyd, the conflict between 'earnestness and humour [. . .] can only be
resolved by the common man who possesses the balance which both Quin and
Wayne lack'. Boyd continues: 'What the novel suggests is that this division will
be remedied only when political power is given to the ordinary citizen.'22 While
this political reading acknowledges the communal vision of the novel, it misses
the precise theological impulse of the final chapter. Through the surreal quality
of the narrative, Chesterton points us beyond the world that we know or have
become familiar with, without losing sight of material creation. Wayne begins
his final speech by declaring: 'I know of something that will alter that antago
nism, something that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives
perhaps taken too litde account of. The equal and eternal human being will alter
that antagonism' (p. 157). Although he goes on to associate the eternal human
with the common man, such men are remarkably uncommon in the pages of
this novel. The non-appearance of an ideal common man encourages us to turn

to the divine as we interpret the 'eternal' quality that transforms our sense of
what the world is really like.23 As Gunton puts it, it is 'someone' rather than
'something' that 'holds things together', and it is a belief in the remnant of God's
image within humanity that enables Chesterton to find hope in the common

man.24

Christianity was a belief that Chesterton was only starting to articulate when
he wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Even so, his early work makes several
references to faith, most notably with the claim in The Defendant that: 'Religion
has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope ? the telescope through

22 Ian Boyd, The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (London: Paul Elek, 1975), p. 20.

23 In later years Chesterton would make the Christology of his eternal man more explicit; see

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).
24 Gunton, p. 179.

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136 Adverts and Sacrements in Chesterton's London

which we could see the star upon which we dwelt' (pp. 12-13). Chesterton's
Christian perspective on the world became clearer four years later when he
published Orthodoxy (1908). Acknowledging the paradoxical humour within his
writing and anticipating the possibility that his latest work might be seen as 'a
piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke', Chesterton admits:
if this book is a joke it is a joke against me. I am the man who with the utmost daring
discovered what had been discovered before. [. . .] I did try to found a heresy of my own;
and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.25

For Chesterton, it is the God of the Christian faith who makes possible a harmo

nious relation between the one and the many, and it is the Christian faith's
understanding of this God that enables one to read generously and see the
richness of culture in all its fullness. The doctrine of Creation provides an impor
tant basis for reading the world sacramentally but in the years that followed The
Napoleon of Notting Hill Chesterton would come to place this doctrine alongside

a plethora of other theological resources, believing, as he did so, that the

complexity and cohesion of a Christian hermeneutic enables one to take signs
for wonders without losing sight of culture's diversity and vitality.

25 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1927), pp. 16-17.

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