easier when he joins his older brother at Crofton School; alas, his high expectations are
disappointed. These school stories by Fielding, the Lambs and Martineau are still
remembered because of their distinguished authorship; there were others, now long
forgotten.
In the 1850s, Thomas Hughes set the pattern for what came to be regarded as the
traditional school story. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), which became a children’s
classic, grew out of Hughes’s admiration for Dr Arnold, the Headmaster of Rugby
School, an important figure in the development of the English ‘public’ (that is, private)
school system. Preaching the doctrine of muscular Christianity, in vogue in the mid-
nineteenth century, the book follows Tom Brown and his friends through their
schooldays: Tom arrives as a new boy, passes through a period when he makes the
headmaster ‘very uneasy’ and eventually becomes the most senior boy, a credit to the
school. The book has survived because of the fresh, lively style, its concern with
everyday school activities, the convincing characters, including the archetypal bully,
Flashman, and the still relevant themes.
Published in the following year, Dean Farrar’s Eric, or, Little by Little (1858) was also
based on the author’s own schooldays at King William’s College on the Isle of Man, but
it has dated badly. The author was more interested in his hero’s moral development, and
Eric, through a series of disastrous misunderstandings, gradually changes from an
appealing, basically honest, schoolboy to a sad runaway approaching death. Happily for
the school story, Hughes proved to be the more influential writer of the two.
The 1870 Education Act, as well as marking the start of the move towards universal
literacy, helped to create a larger market for children’s books and magazines; the latter,
being cheaper and more accessible, were widely read. Most famous of the many
launched in the late nineteenth century were the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) (1879) and the
Girl’s Own Paper (GOP) (1880).
Talbot Baines Reed, whose story, ‘My first football match’, appeared in the first issue of
the BOP, quickly established himself as a successful writer of school stories; his most
famous, The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s (1887), was serialised in the BOP in 1881–1882.
Although the world it portrays has long since disappeared, the characters, their feelings
and attitudes, still ring true. Baines Reed was an excellent story-teller; he even manages
to make the Nightingale Scholarship examination, described in great detail, sound as
exciting as a football match. The themes and incidents which he used were to become
the staple ingredients of school stories; the arrival of the new boy and his adjustment to
school ways, school matches, the school magazine, conflict between juniors and seniors,
concerts, friendships and rivalries, and villainies and blackmail.
The GOP, although it contained stories set in girls’ boarding schools, did not produce a
woman author of the status of Baines Reed. The female equivalents of Rugby’s Dr Arnold
were Miss Beale and Miss Buss, whose ideas on the education of girls led to the
foundation of schools such as Cheltenham Ladies College (1853) and Roedean (1885),
which were modelled on boys’ public schools, and the high schools, which provided a
good, academic education for girls on a daily basis. It was, however, some time before
fictional versions of these schools appeared in print. Late nineteenth-century writers for
girls wrote from their own experience which was of girls being taught at home or in
small schools which were an extension of home. Fictional versions of the latter can be
346 SCHOOL STORIES