Chesterton, Cecil Edward (1879-1918)

English writer and journalist, the brother of G K Chesterton. He wrote antiliberal books, collaborated with the humorist Hilaire Belloc on The Party System (1911), and edited the antibureaucratic New Witness.

His first book, Gladstonian Ghosts (1905), was directed against traditional liberalism. In 1910 appeared Party and the People and in 1911 Nell Gwynne. During World War I he published The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart (1914) and The Perils of Peace (1916); his History of the United States was published in 1918.

Chesterton was on the executive of the Fabian Society 1905-07 and was first secretary of the Anti-Puritan League in 1907. He became a Roman Catholic 1912. His persistent criticism of the circumstances connected with a contract between the government and the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company led to the House of Commons appointing a committee of inquiry, and he was fined for criminal libel.