#248: SCHOOL DAYS.   I imagine that many of the readers who fell deliriously in love with the Harry Potter books have never realized that they are the tail end of a very long British tradition, of the public school story.  All the elements are there in Rowling’s books: the division into houses, the house loyalties, the prefects and head boys, sports, swotting, etc. etc., but with magic added in, which changes things not a little.  Rather as Tolkien ushered in the world of adult fantasy novels, the public school story has its original.  Thomas Hughes wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays hoping to prepare his son for going off to Rugby School, run at that time by the heroic and pioneering figure of Dr. Thomas Arnold (father of the poet Matthew); this opened the door for a long sub-genre of English publishing, running in popularity from the mid-nineteenth century until just after World War II, by which time it had turned into the sausage factory of the boy’s weekly magazines so nicely anatomized in a wonderful essay by George Orwell.  Isabel Quigley’s book The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story was published by Oxford in 1984; even now, getting on for forty years old, it still tells us some interesting, surprising and relevant things about the genre—and about British society.

      Reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays nowadays is a look backward into a distant and different universe, and I can’t see many children slogging through it any more.  It has a frankly moral and didactic purpose to it and an air of patriotic and evangelical high-mindedness.  One of the surprises of Quigley’s book is that Hughes’s feeling for the intellectual and moral seriousness of Dr. Arnold’s reforms got overlooked, and opened the door to its being an influence towards sports-worship and philistinism in the later school systems.  Hughes’s book is thickly, inevitably imbued with the class-consciousness of its time: Tom’s first encounter with East, at the beginning of Chapter Five, is as nice a little scene on the issue of Victorian class as a history book could ever give you.  And it’s earnest, earnest, earnest, to the point of inducing claustrophobia; instead of being charmed by its world, you just are glad you can escape it by closing the book.  It would be almost a decade before the suffocations of that world kicked the back of Lewis Carroll’s head open and the Alice stories dropped their anarchic silliness into the water supply.

      Perhaps being female allowed Quigley to poke her nose into the genre’s chief and most furtive taboo.  In 1917 Alec Waugh (yes, brother of Evelyn) published The Loom of Youth, which gave Aunt Agatha and everyone else the trembles by suggesting that some of the boys were tackling each other off the football field as well as on.  The suggestion of sexuality was as mild as could be, to our eyes—many yawns await anyone reading The Loom of Youth these days hoping for gay smut—but was sufficient to get him kicked out of Sherborne School’s old boys society.  At the risk of feeling superior, I’ve wondered what Waugh’s audience would have made of the most recent of public school stories, the Netflix series “Young Royals,” in which the Swedish prince’s decision to abdicate the throne to be with his boyfriend is met with all-but-audible applause from the scriptwriter and the background music score.  This is not to mention “Heartstopper,” not to mention Benjamin Alire Saenz’s beautifully written Aristotle and Dante stories, certainly not to mention the other Netflix series “Sex Education”.  In these new iterations, the tone ranges from soap opera to delicate observation to tearing-the-band-aid-off rude humor.  The times they are a-changing, thank you Jesus.

       The aforementioned sausage factory was where the genre ran down to, in boys’ weeklies like the Gem and Magnet, which raised the fantasy appeal of public schools to working-class kids who would never get into one, and the record-setting logorrhea of Frank Richards, the voluminously productive writer who created Billy Bunter.  Bunter (no relation to Lord Peter Wimsey’s valet, thank you very much) went from being a side character to a lead, and ended up as the hero of a floodtide of stories and a tv series that ran until 1961.  All now forgotten except by nostalgic (mostly British) males, these verbose and formulaic series were immortalized again with a sharp eye by George Orwell in his essay, “Boys’ Weeklies,” reprinted in the paperback selection A Collection of Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).  It’s priceless stuff, and should be accompanied by a reading of  “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his great memoir of his own public school days.  No one ever did it better; it’s vivid, insightful, and it leaves a welt.