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    The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)
    The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)
    The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)
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    The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)

    By G.K Chesterton

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    About this ebook

    This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘The Club of Queer Trades’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of G. K. Chesterton’.

    Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Chesterton includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

    eBook features:
    * The complete unabridged text of ‘The Club of Queer Trades’
    * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Chesterton’s works
    * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook
    * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPublishdrive
    Release dateJul 17, 2017
    ISBN9781786561367
    The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)
    Author

    G.K Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity’s most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy. 

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      Book preview

      The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated) - G.K Chesterton

      The Complete Works of

      G. K. CHESTERTON

      VOLUME 13 OF 79

      The Club of Queer Trades

      Parts Edition

      By Delphi Classics, 2014

      Version 2

      COPYRIGHT

      ‘The Club of Queer Trades’

      G. K. Chesterton: Parts Edition (in 79 parts)

      First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

      © Delphi Classics, 2017.

      All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

      ISBN: 978 1 78656 136 7

      Delphi Classics

      is an imprint of

      Delphi Publishing Ltd

      Hastings, East Sussex

      United Kingdom

      Contact: sales@delphiclassics.com

      www.delphiclassics.com

      G. K. Chesterton: Parts Edition

      This eBook is Part 13 of the Delphi Classics edition of G. K. Chesterton in 79 Parts. It features the unabridged text of The Club of Queer Trades from the bestselling edition of the author’s Complete Works. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. Our Parts Editions feature original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of G. K. Chesterton, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

      Visit here to buy the entire Parts Edition of G. K. Chesterton or the Complete Works of G. K. Chesterton in a single eBook.

      Learn more about our Parts Edition, with free downloads, via this link or browse our most popular Parts here.

      G. K. CHESTERTON

      IN 79 VOLUMES

      Parts Edition Contents

      Father Brown Stories

      1, The Innocence of Father Brown

      2, The Wisdom of Father Brown

      3, The Incredulity of Father Brown

      4, The Secret of Father Brown

      5, The Scandal of Father Brown

      6, Uncollected Father Brown Stories

      The Novels

      7, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

      8, The Man Who Was Thursday

      9, The Ball and the Cross

      10, Manalive

      11, The Flying Inn

      12, The Return of Don Quixote

      Short Story Collections

      13, The Club of Queer Trades

      14, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Other Stories

      15, Tales of the Long Bow

      16, The Poet and the Lunatics

      17, Four Faultless Felons

      18, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond

      19, Uncollected Short Stories

      The Plays

      20, Magic

      21, The Judgment of Dr. Johnson

      22, The Turkey and the Turk

      The Poetry Collections

      23, Greybeards at Play

      24, The Wild Knight and Other Poems

      25, The Ballad of the White Horse

      26, Poems

      27, Wine, Water and Song

      28, The Ballad of St. Barbara and Other Poems

      29, Gloria in Profundis

      30, Ubi Ecclesia

      31, The Grave of Arthur

      The Poems

      32, List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

      The Non-Fiction

      33, The Defendant

      34, Robert Browning

      35, Twelve Types

      36, Heretics

      37, Varied Types

      38, Charles Dickens

      39, All Things Considered

      40, Tremendous Trifles

      41, Orthodoxy

      42, What’s Wrong with the World

      43, George Bernard Shaw

      44, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

      45, Alarms and Discursions

      46, A Miscellany of Men

      47, The Victorian Age in Literature

      48, The Appetite of Tyranny

      49, The Crimes of England

      50, Lord Kitchener

      51, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

      52, A Short History of England

      53, Irish Impressions

      54, The Superstition of Divorce

      55, The New Jerusalem

      56, What I Saw in America

      57, Eugenics and Other Evils

      58, St. Francis

      59, Fancies Versus Fads

      60, The Everlasting Man

      61, William Cobbett

      62, The Catholic Church and Conversion

      63, The Outline of Sanity

      64, Robert Louis Stevenson

      65, Do We Agree?

      66, The Thing

      67, Come to Think of It

      68, All Is Grist

      69, St. Thomas Aquinas

      70, All I Survey: A Book of Essays

      71, The Well and the Shallows

      72, The Glass Walking Stick

      73, As I Was Saying

      74, The Common Man

      75, The Spice of Life

      76, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks and Other Essays

      77, Uncollected Essays

      The Criticism

      78, The Criticism

      The Biography

      79, Autobiography

      www.delphiclassics.com

      The Club of Queer Trades

      This collection of short stories was first published in 1905.  Each of the stories concerns a character that is making his living by some unusual means (i.e. a ‘queer trade’). To gain admittance to the titular club, a person must have invented a unique means of earning a living. The framing narrative by ‘Cherub’ Swinburne describes his quest for The Club of Queer Trades with his friend Basil Grant, a retired judge, and Rupert Grant, a private detective. Each story describes their encounter with one of the ‘queer trades’.

      The first edition

      CONTENTS

      The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

      The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

      The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit

      The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

      The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

      The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

      Chesterton, close to the time of publication

      The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

      Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something to do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers’ Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.

      The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men’s furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick’s own new trade was, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

      The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the doings of the Dead Man’s Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis call me facetiously ‘The King of Clubs’. They also call me ‘The Cherub’, in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.

      Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour — the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern — a powerful, legal face. And no one but I knew who he was.

      Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene that occurred in — , when one of the most acute and forcible of the English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all. For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something curious in the judge’s conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: I sentence you to three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside. He accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: Get a new soul. That thing’s not fit for a dog. Get a new soul. All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows:

      O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.

      He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.

      I was sitting there one evening, about six o’clock, over a glass of that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the great swords in his collection; the

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