ABSTRACT
As an introduction to this chapter, in which two of the major exemplars o f what was to become a minor literary genre are to be examined, let us take three statements, all by respected writers, made over the last fifty or so years, and examine them. In 1933 Hicks produced the pioneering study of the place of the school in English - and German - fiction. He wrote, ‘In England the school novel has no real literary ancestry. Tom Brown was a revoluionary phenomenon from which later school novels dated’ (Hicks, 1933: 7). Clearly, after the evidence of the last chapter, one cannot really agree with that. Eight years later Mack in another pathbreaking study, making extensive use of school stories, claimed that Thomas Hughes ‘single-handed . . . created a new literary genre’ (Mack, 1941: 91). Partly for the same reason this too seems extreme, but it also ignores any influence of Eric and we shall see that this was great. Finally, in her ‘Preface’ to the Penguin edition of Tom Brown (1971) Naomi Lewis wrote, ‘But not only did Tom Brown start a vast train of books about the wonderful myth of boarding school life it also influenced school life’ (1971: 7). The argument to be developed here is that no ‘vast train’ of the nature o f which Naomi Lewis hints followed. In this chapter the evidence will be set out about the writers, the contents and the reception of these two books, both extremely important in the ultimate development o f the genre.
