Chesterton is today best known as a teller of tales. He would perhaps have been disappointed by this; or at least surprised. ‘I have never taken my novels or short stories very seriously, or imagined that I had any particular status in anything so serious as a novel’, he reveals in his Autobiography (CW 16:313). Without ‘vanity or mock modesty’, he describes having ‘spoilt a number of jolly good ideas’ in his fictional works:

The reason he could only ever be an accidental writer of fiction is that he preferred seeing ‘ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women.’ But the reverse suggestion seems more plausible. Given the harlequinade of metaphor and word-play to be found in his non-fiction, his fondness for parable, allegory and anecdotes, and his insouciance when readers uncovered factual errors in his ostensibly factual accounts, it seems more likely that he was unable to be a ‘real’ journalist because he always was a novelist. The matter is more complicated. He was led by his imagination and relied heavily on his memory. As will be seen in the subsequent chapters, this made him an unconventional writer of non-fiction – but that is not to say an unsuccessful one. As a writer of fiction, too, he was unconventional; and it is this, not unsuccess, that his disclaimer registers. For he had clear ideas on what he thought the novel was, and should be; and his novels were clearly not of that sort.