The Man Who Was Thursday is set in London, England in the early Edwardian period. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were fraught with tension and rife with economic, social, political, and technological change. Beginning in the 1880s, fears of terrorist anarchism spread across Europe, including England. For brief moments in the novel, the setting also includes a trip to the French countryside and eventually a journey to an otherworldly, fantastical heavenly realm. For the most part, however, the duration of the novel’s events take place in the streets and parks and restaurants of London:
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable.
The idyllic scene depicted in the passage above is intimate and familiar. Chesterton’s concerns regarding the chaos and disorder threatened by the anarchist movement permeate The Man Who Was Thursday. By setting the main portion of the novel in London, a common and populous area—and the capital of the country—Chesterton invokes the latent fears in his own audience that an anarchist plot (such as the kind concocted by the novel’s Supreme Anarchist Council) could be planned right under their own noses.
