ABSTRACT
The novel might be said to have been at a high point during these years. Trollope, George Eliot and Meredith were at the height of their reputations and were writing for a large readership which expected their novels to be in the form of the ‘three decker’ and which in large part read these and many other less famous novelists by subscribing to such circulating libraries as Mudie’s. Often novels were brought out initially in periodicals as serials following the method popularised earlier by Dickens. Readers were beginning to hold a somewhat different opinion of the purpose of the novel. One view was that novels had a moral function and should be read with this in mind. For example, Trollope, writing in the Nineteenth Century in 1879 (January) in an article on ‘Novel-Reading’ felt that the novel had become ‘the former of our morals, the code by which we rule ourselves, the mirror in which we dress ourselves.’ But somewhat earlier a writer in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1869 (17 April) discussing ‘the Literary Profession’, admitted that some novels were works of art and that it was, therefore, possible that ‘the reading of a novel is perhaps as near an approach to complete idleness of mind and body as can possibly be attained by a waking man’. Whatever their purpose in writing, some of the great novelists
put children into their work and either implicitly or explicitly expressed a view about their places in society and their upbringing. George Eliot’s account o f the development of Maggie Tulliver and her brother, Tom, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), is a fine example of the implicit presentation of a position, whilst
George Meredith in a number of his novels, for example, The Egoist (1879), has characters express ideas on schooling. This was the period o f the great fame of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) and a number o f novels were published in the genre, later named success literature (Harrison, 1957). A fine example was Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks’s The Manchester Man (1872), the story of Jabez Clegg, an orphan, who received his schooling as a blue-coat boy at Chetham’s College and by strength o f character rose to become a master in his own right in early nineteenth-century Manchester when cotton was becoming king. Two out o f forty-seven chapters in Mrs Banks’s book were
about Jabez’s scholing at Chetham’s. Only two novelists o f any stature at this time appear to have written whole novels about schools. These were Trollope and Mrs Henry Wood. Trollope wrote Dr Worth’s School in 1881. This novel is about a very good private school, called Bowick School, run by Dr Jeffrey Wortle, a clergyman, where ‘No doubt a good deal was done to make the externals o f the place alluring to those parents who love to think that their boys shall be made happy at school’. (I). Trollope refers to this schooling as part o f ‘the old prescribed form of education for British aristocrats [which] must be followed - a t ’other school, namely, then Eton, and then Oxford’. A new master, Mr Peacock, is appointed who was a clergyman; as Trollope says ‘an assistant school master is not often in orders, and sometimes not a gentleman’ (II). This master, however, refuses to take services or in any way to act as a clergyman and keeps his wife very much in the background, declining to enter local society. Despite his success as a teacher doubts arise concerning himself and his wife. The truth ultimately comes out that there is some doubt about whether his wife’s first husband, whom she had married in the USA, is really dead. Although in the end he finds that he is not a bigamist he has to leave D r Wortle’s school. Although one or two boys are mentioned, the plot really focuses on the adults and their affairs. It is not a story about a school, although it is set in one. Furthermore, this novel has never, at the time or since, been considered one of Trollope’s best novels. He himself makes no mention o f it in his autobiography. Mrs Henry Wood was a successful popular novelist o f the
period, though her stature was not then and is not now rated equal to Trollope’s. In 1867 Bentley’s published her novel Orville College, in three volumes. There was some emphasis in the plot o f this novel on the boys at Dr Brabazon’s private school, but once
again the main focus was upon a master, Mr Henry, whose real name was Arthur Henry Paradine. His father had died in gaol of a heart attack at a time when he was accused of fraud. Mr Henry came from Germany to be a master, teaching French and German, at Orville College, within easy distance of London, where he found the sons of his father’s former partners, Loftus and Trace, were pupils. His young brother was also there, living with his mother nearby. The two sons o f his father’s old partners recognised George Paradine. Dr Brabazon was told of the matter, supported Mr Henry and asked that it be kept quiet. However, Loftus and Trace organised the persecution of George and of Mr Henry despite all the good qualities that both showed. Eventually the truth was discoverd that Trace’s father committed the fraud, but by this time Mr Henry had sickened and at the end of the novel himself died of a heart attack. Mrs Wood was a strictly orthodox church-woman and a conservative (D.N.B.) and throughout the book there are religious references and authorial asides addressed to ‘My Boys’. The novel seems to have been addressed to a dual readership o f boys and adults. It was not, however, a great success, gaining no mentions in works about Mrs Wood, though in 1899 Macmillan published an impression in which they indicate that 38,000 copies had been sold. One other work for adults that was certainly about a school,
Winchester, must be mentioned. Winchester has apparently escaped the fate o f almost all other major public schools in that no story has been written about it, but R.B. Mansfield, a family friend o f Thomas Hughes, did write an illustrated factual account of Winchester and its customs, called School Life and Winchester College or The Reminiscences o f a Winchester Junior. This was first published soon after Tom Brown in 1860; a second edition was published in 1870 and this was reprinted in 1893. There were a number o f authors who clearly wrote with dual
readership in mind: two of these need only a brief mention. R.D. Blackmore wrote her West Country story, Lorna Doone, in 1867, in which Chapter I, ‘Elements of Education’ tells of Jan Ridd’s time at Blundell’s School in Devon, and Rider Haggard in the 1880s wrote a number of adventure stories which became very popular with young persons. The best known is King Solomon's Mines, published in 1885. However, a third novel, Anstey’s Vice Versa, published in 1882 must be considered more fully, primarily because it was the first novel in which the schoolmaster is seen as
a nincompoop. Reviewers, as will be seen, read this book as a criticism of private schools. Thomas Anstey Guthrie was born in 1856, son of a successful
London tailor. He was at a private boarding school until 1872, when he became a day boy at King’s College in the Strand. In 1875 he went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to read Law. While an undergraduate in 1877 he wrote a school story ‘Turned Tables’ for an abortive journal, the Cambridge Tatler, with the idea o f ‘sending a father back to school in place o f his son’. The journal collapsed so that the story was not published. In 1880-1 whilst reading for the Bar, Anstey rewrote this tale as a short novel. It was refused by two journals as a serial. Bentley’s commented in their refusal note for Temple Bar that ‘the story itself is not one to find favour with grown-up people so much as with younger readers’. Anstey had written it with adults in mind. Despite some doubts Smith, Elder’s accepted the novel, now re-named Vice Versa or a Lesson to Fathers, and it was published in 1882 to become an instant success (Anstey, 1936). The new spirit abroad in regard to novels is seen clearly in Anstey’s Preface to Vice Versa: The author. . . . feels that in these days of philosophical fiction, metaphysical romance, and novels with a purpose, some apology may perhaps be needed for a tale which has the unambitious and frivolous aim o f mere amusement. In Vice Versa Paul Bultitude, a widower, with two sons and a
daughter, who is a colonial merchant in London, whilst wishing ‘good-bye’ to his elder son, Dick, on his return to school, says that he wishes he could change places with Dick. He is holding the Garuda Stone, an Indian relic, and no sooner wished than he does become Dick and Dick is transformed into his father. Mr Bultitude goes in Dick’s place to Dr Grimston’s Crichton House, modelled on Anstey’s own old private school. His problem is that he was an ardent believer in the Good Boy of a certain order o f school tales - the boy who is seized with a sudden conviction o f the intrinsic baseness o f boyhood, and does all in his power to get rid o f the horrible taint; the boy who renounces his old comrades and his natural tastes . . . to don a panoply of priggishness which is too often kick-proof. (I)
Dick, on the other hand, was a high spirited boy who was involved in much mischief at school. Not unexpectedly Mr Bultitude does many things in his role as Dick that cause much
surprise and difficulty for himself Eventually he runs away from school and arrives home to find Dick, slightly drunk, holding a huge party. The Garuda Stone is lost, but his younger son, Roly, finds it and under his father’s supervision uses his one wish to return things to normal. Dick goes back to Crichton House, but knowing that he is to go to Harrow next term, and Mr Bultitude returns to Mincing Lane to straighten out his business affairs which Dick had allowed to deteriorate.
