![]()
I first encountered Isabel Quigly's name, and a reference to this book, many years ago in the introduction she wrote to Kipling's "Stalky & Co." After many years of searching in vain for a copy, one finally came to me through the miracle of inter-library loan. As someone who always had a general and somewhat uninformed interest in this genre, I now have a much more complete picture of the rise and decline of the British school story. For all I know, this may be the definitive work on the genre. What I can say that it is about as definitive as a non-specialist like me will probably ever need.
From her vast reading of nearly a century's worth of novels, serials, and short stories set in British public schools, Isabel Quigly here focuses on the most significant, most representative, and best-written, as well as early works by otherwise notable authors, particularly P.G. Wodehouse. The aforementioned "Stalky & Co.," reviled in its day but now seen as one of the most memorable of all school stories, gets an entire chapter of its own.
Quigly traces the school story from the founding text of the genre, "Tom Brown's Schooldays," up to the collapse of the school story along about World War II. She reveals an interesting parallelism, in that the stories imitated, exaggerated, parodied, and abandoned the "Tom Brown" model while British public schools themselves did much the same with the example of Dr. Arnold's Rugby, the school at which "Tom Brown" was set.
Though the author's understanding of the genre seems nearly encyclopedic, it is far from uncritical. Both in her overview of school stories generally and her discussion of specific titles, she is clear-eyed and unsentimental, giving praise or criticism where it's deserved. Given the apparently overwhelming number of bad "pop" school stories, I was hoping she would indulge in something along the lines of Bill Pronzini's "Gun in Cheek" books, giving us a chapter or two of so-bad-its-good hilarity. Unfortunately, she restrained herself here.
Even in the absence of such an entertaining, if unprofessional, diversion, there's enough personality in the author's writing to keep the reader entertained. Far from a dull survey of a dead genre, this was a useful and interesting guide to a once-popular but now extinct class of literature. Readers interested in the school story, the British public school, or even British upper-class culture generally circa 1840-1940 would do well to find a copy of this book. I'm sorry it took me so long to do so, but at least it was worth the wait.
Wildflowers (World of Nature) Overviews
In their heyday, the English public schools inspired an astonishing effusion of novels and stories about school life, of which Tom Brown's Schooldays is perhaps still the best known, and was certainly the most influential. Continually counterpointing school life as it really was with its fictional image, Isabel Quigly discusses her chosen stories in relation to those themes which recur in the genre: the cult of games, the love story, the boarding school as a training ground for the Empire, schoolboy heroics and an extraordinary preoccupation with death. Her range is wide: from classics like Stalky & Co, Anstey's Vice Versa, and P. G. Wodehouse's school stories, to the schoolgirl tales of Angela Brazil: from nostalgic and snobbish accounts of Eton to Alec Waugh's daring and precocious novel, The Loom of Youth. The Heirs of Tom Brown is an entertaining and original investigation into the literary, social and cultural history of the English school story. 'An excellent guide to this curious but interesting chapter in social and literary history' John Rae, Listener
Related Products
dolce gabbana pour homme light blue perfume Cheap Earth's Best Organic
