A clever caricature depicts Dickens in one corner, his arms full of bricks, hammers and jagged objects, labelled "American Notes." The rest of the picture is an immense drawing of a smiling Chesterton, his arms full of roses, labelled "Kind Words for America." He is pointing at Dickens and saying: "America must have changed a great deal since then."
Not only Gilbert but also Frances was constantly interviewed. "I tell them," one interviewer quotes her as saying, "that I didn't know I was the wife of a great man till I came to America. It never bothered me before."
This, coming from one of those English wives, so popularly portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. A slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily dispelled, the wife of this delightful Englishman of letters presented a very intimate Chestertonian paradox.
Frances kept a Diary of which almost the first entry is "So far my feelings towards this country are entirely hostile, but it would be unfair to judge too soon. We have refused all invitations; it's the only thing to do." This idea they must have abandoned, for one paper after Gilbert's death describes him as an immense success socially but "a big bland failure" as a lecturer. As the tour proceeds the entries in the Diary become more favorable but unlike her letters from Poland—where what she liked best was anything really Polish—the Diary shows Frances as singling out for approval those things approximately English—e.g., houses where she stayed in Boston and Philadelphia. She hated hustle, heat and crowds, and the Diary is full of remarks about her exhaustion.
G.K. commented in one interview on the different conception of a Club in England and in America. While groups of men entertained him, Women's Clubs were entertaining his wife. But an English Club "is really a promoter of unsociability. . . . And while the English woman in her Club does not, perhaps, stare into vacancy with the same fervour, fixity and ferocity as the English man, still there is something of the sort, you know." After a lecture in Philadelphia a lady asked him, "Mr. Chesterton, what makes women talk so much?" Heaving himself out of his chair, he answered only "God, Madam."
Two further caricatures were an impression drawn by Will Coyne for the New York Evening Post of Chesterton as Porthos of the Pen, and another, drawn for the New York Herald by Stewart Davis, of Chesterton supplying "Paradoxygen to the World." This was accompanied by a poem called Paradoxygen, by Edward Anthony:
O Gilbert I know there are many who like
Your talks on the darkness of light,
The shortness of length and the weakness of strength
And the one on the lowness of height.
My neighbour keeps telling me "How I adore
His legality of the illicit
And I've also a liking intense for his striking
Obscurity of the explicit."
But I am unmoved. What's the reason? 0, well,
The same I intend to expound
Some evening next week, when I'm going to speak
On the shallowness of the profound.
"Everyone who goes to America for a short time," said G.K., "is expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does." In accordance with this convention he wrote What I Saw in America. He did see a great deal. The same imagination that had found the mediaeval aspect of Jerusalem saw many elements missed not only by the ordinary tourist but by the people themselves who live nearest to them. Thus he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore: