![]() Belloc and Chesterton were “Little Englanders”-opposed to British colonialism and imperialism-whose essays in the Speaker had infuriated many Londoners by the authors’ opposition to Britain’s imperial designs on South Africa and the nation’s participation in the Boer War. ![]() Both, according to Shaw and other adverse critics, had a passion for lost causes. ![]() Anti-industrial and anti-modern in much of their advocacy, the two were jointly caricatured in print by George Bernard Shaw as “the Chesterbelloc,” an absurd pantomime beast of elephantine appearance and outmoded beliefs. In Chesterton, Belloc found a talented illustrator of his books, a friend, and a man who shared and publicly advocated many of his own religious and political views. Chesterton, whom Belloc had met around 1900 when each was a contributor to the radical journal the Speaker. Throughout these years Belloc’s name and reputation were frequently linked in the public mind with G.K. The period between the century’s turn and the mid-1920s was the time of Belloc’s widest fame and influence. In addition to its infusion of Catholic thought, the work contains what later became acknowledged as typically Bellocian elements: rich, earthy humor an eye for natural beauty and a meditative spirit-all of which appear in the author’s later travel books, which include Esto Perpetua (1906), The Four Men (1912), and The Cruise of the “Nona”(1925). Belloc’s career as an advocate of Catholicism first attracted wide public attention in 1902 with The Path to Rome, perhaps his most famous single book, in which he recorded the thoughts and impressions that came to him during a walking trip through France and Italy to Rome. But, embracing Cardinal Edward Henry Manning’s dictum that “all human conflict is ultimately theological,” he perceived his primary role as that of polemicist and reformer, whose every work must reflect his desire for Europe’s spiritual, social, and political return to its monarchist, Catholic heritage. An impulsive man who seldom lived in any one place for more than a few weeks and whose frequent trips to the continent proved a constant drain on his financial resources, Belloc welcomed the popular success of his verse collections. Blackwood, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, according to critics, contains much of the author’s best light verse, as do such later collections as More Beasts (for Worse Children) (1897), The Modern Traveller (1898), and Cautionary Tales for Children (1908). Illustrated with superb complementary effect by Belloc’s friend Basil T. His first book, Verses and Sonnets, appeared in 1896, followed in the same year by The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, which satirized moralistic verse for children and proved immensely popular. Although the estate was eventually restored and made habitable, the evidence of destruction witnessed by Belloc’s parents and later recounted to their children made a deep impression on Hilaire throughout his life and through the two world wars, he habitually referred to Germany as Prussia” and considered the “Prussians” a barbaric people worthy only of utter contempt.īy the mid-1890s Belloc had married and, through the influence of his sister Marie Belloc Lowndes, begun writing for various London newspapers and magazines. The family fled to England at the news of the French army’s collapse, returning after the war’s end to discover that the Belloc home had been looted and vandalized by Prussian soldiers. ![]() Cloud, France, a few days before the Franco-Prussian War broke out. The son of a wealthy French father and English mother, Belloc was born in La Celle St. An author whose writings continue to draw either the deep admiration or bitter contempt of readers, he was an outspoken proponent of radical social and economic reforms, all grounded in his vision of Europe as a “Catholic society.” Although many critics have attacked Belloc’s prescriptive polemical works for their tone of truculence and intolerance-and, especially, for recurrent elements of anti-Semitism-they have also joined in praise of his humor and poetic skill, hailing Belloc as the greatest English writer of light verse since Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Hilaire Belloc is considered one of the most controversial and accomplished men of letters of early 20th-century England.
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