ABSTRACT
Attendance at school for some years between the ages of 5 and 18 is a common experience, and one well within the comprehension of readers of children's books. Many books written for children have scenes set in, or references to, school, but the term ‘school story’ is generally used to describe a story in which most of the action centres on a school, usually a single-sex boarding school. In his essay, ‘Boys’ weeklies’, first published in 1940, George Orwell suggested that the school story is peculiar to England because in England education is mainly a matter of status (Orwell 1962:182). It is certainly true that the genre is dominated by British writers, who are responsible for most of the examples quoted in this essay.
