the napoleon of notting hill · chesterton

G. K. Chesterton's first novel, from 1904, imagines a London eighty years on where a joker king revives medieval pageantry for the boroughs and one man, Adam Wayne, takes it seriously enough to fight for Notting Hill. It is a comic fable about local patriotism, the sanity of the small, and the need for both the humorist and the fanatic.

G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Dover Publications, 1991). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.