“Literature he would discuss by the hour, especially poetry. He hated the fashionable decadence of that time ... say 1890–1900 ... as may be seen from the dedication to ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ He delighted in pictorial art, above all in the generous idealism of G. F. Watts.
“As to books, G. K. C. never gave any attention to those which constituted school-work. He was passionately fond of Scott and of course, Dickens. He knew Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne by heart, and had enjoyed every other English poet in large degree. He did not care in those days for lighter reading.
“There was a school library, but it was reserved for the use of the highest class in the school, which G. K. C. never attained. There was a popular fiction library also, but he did not, I think, make use of it. G. K. C. was too amiable to get into fights, but he would use his strength occasionally in standing between a small boy and others who were badgering him. He honored religion, but had none whatever of a doctrinal kind until years later.”
“Chesterton, as I knew him in 1889,” writes Mr. E. W. Fordham, another old schoolmate, “was utterly unlike the average English schoolboy. He took no part in games. He showed no particular brilliance as a scholar, and yet far from being looked down upon, he was, I think, always regarded as one who lived in a different mental world from the rest of us, a world that many of us admired from afar but would never expect, or, it may be, ever hope to enter. We felt, though we never alluded to, his mental pre-eminence. Thus when the Junior Debating Club was formed, G. K. became Chairman without question and without a rival. It was obvious that he alone was fitted for the post, and most admirably he filled it. The teas at the houses of the various members of the Club which preceded the debates were often tempestuous to the last degree, but Gilbert, although he took no share in the more physical aspects of our revelry, was very far from playing the part of a wet blanket.
“His laugh was the loudest and the most infectious of all. There were times when the boisterous manifestations of some of us overflowed into, and tended to overpower, the Debates. Then, with the utmost good temper, G. K. would assert himself, and order would be restored.
“I remember once, after I myself had been particularly noisy and troublesome, Gilbert explained to me that the throwing of buns and slices of cake did not really help in the production of good debates, and he hinted, very kindly and seriously, that some restraining action might have to be taken if the rioting did not diminish. I hope, indeed, I believe, I took the hint. This occasion was thereafter referred to as the day ‘when the Chairman spoke seriously to Mr. F.’
“G. K. was the mainspring of the Junior Debating Club. He was valiantly supported by Oldershaw, Bentley, and others, but without him neither the Club itself, nor that strange little magazine, ‘The Debater’ could have flourished as each of them did. Like boy, like man. That which he believed in he put his whole heart into, and never spared himself in furthering its interests. He gave the Junior Debating Club his eager and inspiring support for the two very good reasons, that it gave great enjoyment to himself and a few of his friends, and that he thought it a widening and humanizing influence—completely outside the range of ordinary school affairs. The Chairman loved the Junior Debating Club, and most certainly the J. D. C. loved the Chairman.”
Mr. Fordham pins further recollections around the “Autobiography”:
“I am a prejudiced person. Fifty years of friendship and admiration are an insuperable bar to impartiality.
“G. K. C. and I were at school together: we were fellow members of the Junior Debating Club of which he was Chairman. We both contributed to our Club’s magazine, ‘The Debater.’ I wrote rubbish; he wrote articles and verses of a very different quality. In this book he speaks almost with contempt of his ‘juvenilia.’ They were in fact such as very few boys of his age could have produced. Even then, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, he had a sense of style and a command of language which the High Master of St. Paul’s and other authorities did not fail to recognize. ‘The Dragon,’ one article begins, ‘the Dragon is the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities.’