the ancestry of the
aristocrat:

The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of
pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their
principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life,
there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting
studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of
the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the
poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop
door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive
suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.

This may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a
biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups
and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of
fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head
of the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death,
Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. But when she died
Gilbert threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his
father's study, including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any
sort of family tree. But it is possible to show the kind of family
and the social atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born.

Some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of
Chesterton--now merged into Cambridge, of which they were Lords of
the Manor, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an
introduction to a book called _Life in Old Cambridge_, he wrote:

I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor; I have
never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness
or from a faint superstitious feeling that I might be fulfilling a
prophecy in the countryside. Anyone with a sense of the savour of the
old English country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that
the steeple might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller
thing than the coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to
Chesterton.

At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of
the Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his
fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment
for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years
later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also
those of another interesting relative, Captain George Lav