The River and the Block

Algernon Charles Swinburne had turned twelve when he arrived at Eton on 24 April 1849. One of his cousins, Algernon Mitford, later Lord Redesdale, had entered the school in 1846 and was assigned to keep an eye on the new arrival. He told Powell the two things at Eton he would like to see again were the river and the block. Jerome McGann has suggested that ‘The Flogging Block’ can be seen as an ironic protest against the iniquities of the school system, or a way of laughing at adversity in which ‘the impulse to play is seized as the human alternative to a situation as grotesque as it is unalterable’. Swinburne told Sir Charles Dilke in the 1870s that the last time he was properly flogged at Eton it was for reading The Scarlet Letter instead of his Greek.