ABSTRACT
A more detailed examination of G. K. Chesterton’s use of sartorial travesty to perform cultural outlawry in the Edwardian era will reveal just how far he took his sense of identification with this criminal archetype. Chesterton’s urge to invest buffoonery with moral heft is illustrated by the existential ethics of materialism that he began to construct in the Edwardian era as a further justification of the fool-figure. Chesterton, the exemplary model of the half-conscious eccentric is a Shakespearean figure to whom he was frequently compared: when John Falstaff cries out in desperate bravado, “They hate us youth,” the incongruity between the speech and the corpulent old humbug of a speaker is present to his own mind. Despite Chesterton’s stress upon the populist sympathies that enable him to make such leaps of critical distance, his knack for identifying bathos in Wilde was substantially inspired by a figure whom Chesterton considered to possess ‘every merit except democracy’: Max Beerbohm.
