ABSTRACT
Eric: Or, Little By Little (1858) by F.W. Farrar (1831-1903) is usually written off as artistically and pedagogically worthless, a position summarized by Hugh Kingsmill’s remark that it was ‘the sort of story Dr Arnold would have written if he’d taken to drink’.1 Farrar’s other fictional works for young readers, such as St Winifred’s: Or, the World of School (1862) and Julian Home: A Tale of College Life (1859), rarely attract any critical attention whatsoever. However, even though the twentieth century seems to have appreciated Farrar only in his capacity to be lampooned, this does not reduce his social and pedagogical significance, or negate the fact that many earlier readers found his writing compelling. As editor of Essays on a Liberal Education (1867), a response to the Taunton Commission’s report on endowed grammar schools, Farrar worked alongside leading thinkers in the movement for liberal education such as Henry Sidgwick and Edward Bowen.2 At the same time, his fictional work proved highly marketable. When Eric was first published, reviews were, as Eric Anstruther points out, on the whole positive, with the exception of The Saturday Review which objected to its ‘lacrimosity’.3 When the book’s fifth edition appeared The Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s criticized its lack of realism and excessive tragedy,4 but this did not stop it from going through more than thirty reprintings between 1858 and 1902. My own copy of Eric has ‘Pat. From Ethel. Xmas 1928’ scrawled in childish pencil on the flyleaf, which shows that children were still giving it to each other seventy years after its first publication. During the nineteenth century, Farrar was, seemingly, appreciated by teenagers from widely differing backgrounds. One recent graduate from Shrewsbury wrote to Farrar that ‘it was through reading “Eric” that I first learned to hate sin, and ever since that time, about four years ago, I have tried to
a letter from the curate of Hunslet (at that time a deprived area of Leeds), who remarked that ‘both among the very poor of London, and among the better sort of working folk here, boys have always been enthusiastic in praise of “Eric” and “St Winifred’s”’. In no way was this letter an attempt at flattery or false praise. The curate admitted that the enthusiasm for Eric had ‘surprised’ him, since he had worried that ‘the clothing of the stories would make them somewhat difficult for the less educated’ (a tactful way of saying he thought the Evangelical rhetoric would be alienating).6 The biography cites a number of similar letters.
