From Brown to Bunter

The Life and Death of the School Story

P. W. Musgrave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138953239
• eBook ISBN: 9781317365686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1985. This is a fascinating account of the life cycle of a minor literary genre, the boys' school story. It discusses early nineteenth-century precursors of the school story – didactic works with such revealing titles as The Parents' Assistant – and goes on to examine in detail the two major examples of the genre - Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days and Farrar's Eric. The slow development of the genre during the 1860s and 1870s is traced, and its institutionalisation by Talbot Baines Reed in, for example, The Fifth Form at St Dominic's, is described.

Many similar works were subsequently published for adults and adolescents, and the author shows how they differ from the originals in being critical in tone and written to a formula in plot and style. This development is discussed in relation to the changing social structure of Britain up to 1945, by which time to life of the genre was almost ended.

1

The problem and the approach

No book … has any meaning on its own, in a vacuum.
D. Lodge (1981:3)

Introduction

This book is a case study of the life and death of one minor literary genre, the boys’ school story. The genre was conceived around the middle of the last century and was almost dead before the Second World War. In this study an attempt will be made to discover the reasons why this literary form was born, flourished and had come near to death during that period; to describe the meaning of it for those alive then and, finally, to uncover its structure and the ways in which this was linked to the wider society.

Throughout history literature has had many forms and these have had changing popularity. In Greek times drama played a major part in society; for the cultivated Roman verse and oratory were given major prominence. For some centuries in the western world fiction has been growing in literary importance so that now one type of fiction, the novel, has come to be a predominant literary form and this is still true despite contemporary doubts about the health of this way of writing. Within this literary form there are a number of recognised choices of how works of fiction will be presented. There are, for example, romances, thrillers, and biographical novels. These genres have no necessary existence. They may die and new genres may be born. The Gothic novel of the Victorian time is now rarely read and never written, whilst science fiction is a major literary phenomenon. There is no study of the whole of the life-cycle of any literary genre, although Palmer (1978) has provided an excellent account of the birth and development of the thriller, a genre that is still thriving. Here the intention is to fill this gap by examining the whole biography of what will be claimed to be a minor genre, namely the boys’ school story.

There has been some criticism of the concept of genre because it is said to imply an essentialist approach by assuming a number of inherent characteristics in the literary works grouped in any given example. Romance, for example is marked by ‘the development of a love relationship, usually between a man and a woman’ (Cawelti, 1976:41). In this study, however, genre is seen to be defined socially. A set of characteristics comes to be seen by readers, writers, by publishers and by all the others who comprise the literary world, for example, critics, to constitute a recognised type of literary work. At any time people expect to be able to read literary productions of certain types. Although these types come and go those that have relative permanence are here seen as genres. The position taken may be presented provocatively by saying that genres have temporary essence, and it is to a conclusion of this nature that we shall come at the end of the consideration of this genre.

In order to provide something of the flavour of the conclusion that can be reached by this approach, which is sociological rather than literary critical, part of Palmer’s conclusion to his study of the thriller will be quoted:

Structural analysis revealed a dominant procedure composed of a competitive hero and a pathological conspiracy; literary historical analysis specified a date for the emergence of the genre, the mid-nineteenth century, and a set of contributing components; social historical/sociological analysis has ascribed reasons for this date – the emergence of a specific class structure in a laissez faire economy and the adoption of a new perspective in criminality. (Palmer, 1978:202)

Almost all the thrillers produced within the set of expectations for that genre have been of low quality in the eyes of literary critics, though many have been ‘best sellers’. The same is true of school boys’ stories, although at least two are considered classics – Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899).

This predominant lack of what is usually seen as literary quality highlights the problem to be tackled here; why did a number of literary productions, not necessarily marked by perceived literary quality, come to be commercially successful, grouped together and seen as a genre and why did this genre flourish for about fifty years before gradually sinking, so that today it occupies a totally different position? Indeed, there is some interest in speculating whether, if the genre was not a fact of recent history, those boys’ school stories that remain in circulation and any new school stories now written would be seen to form a group of works marked by common characteristics.

The production of genres

There is the danger in this approach either of treating any writer as completely determined by the social forces working upon him or of being accused of doing so. This is not in any way an inevitable implication of seeing genres as social productions. Writers take part in a complex set of relationships, more or less stable, but capable of change by any of the parties involved, all of whom have expectations for others and for themselves. This structure has been named ‘the relations of expectations’ (Sharrett, 1982:311). Even writers who are deemed to be very creative work within this framework. They have freedom over the content of what they write and they may even create new modes of expression or new ways of presenting their material, but, if they attempt to make a radical break away from current expectations, their writing will not be accepted or will only be accepted by a small minority – the position of, perhaps, Beckett today – or even may not be accepted till a much later date, as was the case of the novelist Jean Rhys, writing mainly before 1939, but accepted only in the 1950/60s – or even only accepted after the writer’s death.

Because of the constraints of these relations of expections ‘the writer always reveals or writes from a certain position … in relation to [the] ideological climate’ (Macherey, 1978:195). He will, knowingly or not, represent part of an ideology and he will be read, consciously or not, through ideological spectacles. Individual creativity can only operate within such a setting. Macherey has summed up these constraints on the creativity of a writer: ‘The way in which the conditions of its possibility precede the work (a fact which is so obvious, but which centuries of criticism have ignored) systematically consumes in advance any psychology of inspiration’ (Macherey, 1978). Inglis puts the same point in a less abstract and academic way: ‘Dickens was, of course, a genius; but he took his chances from Victorian society’ (Inglis, 1981:36). Furthermore, once a writer has written what he wishes, however much regard he pays to the expectations of others, as soon as his work is published it passes out of his control. His words will be read, worked on and made sense of by others in ways which he may not have intended.

Out of this interaction of authors and readers the meaning of what is written emerges. The relations of expectations at any time put pressure upon the action of those involved in any literary network. Well-accepted forms, genres, emerge. These are coherent responses to contemporary social circumstances or to the circumstances of the recent past, since change is often slow to come. In this connection Sharrett has compared genres to organisations in that both ‘are solutions to problems’ (Sharrett, 1982:313). Because of this the intentions of any writer become critical. What set of circumstances has he in mind when he is writing? An answer to this question will help us to understand the contemporary significance of his work.

Analysis is complicated by the fact that in capitalist societies there stands between writer and reader the publisher whose continuing existence depends upon financial success. As might be expected writers have felt different degrees of independence of publishers. In a study of writers who were born or died between 1860 and 1910 Laurenson (1969) studied their biographies in the Dictionary of National Biography, and then characterised those in her sample as either ‘institutionalised’ or ‘individualistic’, though within each overall category various modes were possible. Thus, amongst institutionalised writers Trollope was strongly influenced by his market situation, Dickens wrote primarily for an audience, and Wells took a ‘common sense approach’, whilst among the individualistic Katherine Mansfield showed lack of concern for the market, Joyce was unconcerned with any popular audience and Henry James was very introspective in his work.

Without publication of some form, even though this be but a public reading, writers can not meet readers and no public creation of meaning is possible. Publishers, usually working for profit in capitalist societies, ‘choose, manufacture and distribute’ (Escarpit, 1970:400). The process of selection is important, because, whereas publishers have to survive and, therefore, to choose what they believe the market to want, they do from time to time also make judgments about what the public ought or ought not to have. Such judgments may relate to the presentation of innovatory work or be governed by their own moral values or their view of what the public’s values should be. Sometimes they hope to produce a best seller to meet the wide and heterogeneous audience that makes up the market for popular work; sometimes they plan to sell to a more limited market, as would be the case with an academic work such as this book; and sometimes they aim to change the market either by presenting a new type of work which they hope will be acceptable in the future or by preventing work reaching the market that would strengthen the hold of presentations with which they do not agree. Publishers also clearly operate within and upon the relations of expectations.

In all societies, capitalist or otherwise, there are other middlemen who stand between author and reader and who operate within and upon the existing relations of expectations. Certainly since early in the last century the literary critic has played an important part as a mediator between the writer and his potential readers. The critic has used his own past experience to build up a critical apparatus with which he evaluates work coming forward and also from time to time he will revalue the work of times gone by. He makes judgments about the values that he sees to be represented in a work, on its craftsmanship and upon the apparent message contained in the work (Lang, 1958). The writings of such critics as Matthew Arnold in the last part of the nineteenth century and F.R. Leavis in the middle third of this century have been very influential upon their contemporaries, whether writers or readers, upon the development of young writers, and upon those studying to be teachers, who could have very wide influence upon future readers and writers. In specific fields, particular academic specialisms, critics have much power to make or mar the future of a book. This is more true when they are acting as publisher’s readers, advising upon the acceptance or not of a manuscript submitted for publication. The writings of critics can, therefore, both control what is published and also shape the tastes of readers, thus limiting both what is read and how it is read.

Thus far the words writer, reader and book have been used carefully but without any detailed explication; the words author and text have not been used at all. All these words are crucial and their exact usage in this study must be clarified. A writer writes a book, a material object, that is words on a page, but he does not become an author until that material is worked on by a reader. Furthermore, as soon as the reader works on a book he begins to construct a text which may or may not match either what the author thinks that he presented or the text constructed by any other reader. Readers impose different meanings on books according to the varying social positions they occupy. A very clear case of this is the different view taken by a student of a novel studied for an examination and by someone reading the same book for pleasure. The two texts that are constructed in these cases might well have been written by two very different authors.

Reading a book, then, can be seen as a construction by readers from varying social positions of a text, presented by an author, whose original intention may or may not be sustained in the process. This approach to literature forces an analysis of why a particular interpretation is made at one historical moment. In Chaney’s words the aim is to move ‘beyond fiction as something meaningful through purporting to be pictorial representation, to a group of narrative stories which are tellable’ and ‘to concentrate upon the milieu in which that performance becomes conceivable’ (1979:12–3). We must first ask the general question: what are the present relations of expectations? And then, following Chaney, within those expectations what stories can writers present that will be readable?

The relationships between author and readers are very complex, even before inserting any middlemen into the picture. Sharrett (1982:87–8) has shown how the word ‘author’ may be used in four senses: first, in an almost legal way to cover his contractual relationship with his publisher; next, as the one who writes the book; third, as the author of the text that he hopes will be constructed; and last, as the author of the text read by some reader. In a similar manner the word ‘reader’ may be seen to be used in three senses: first, as the one who constructs the text; next, the constructor of a text for himself; and last, the reader seen by the writer when writing the book. Oddly, perhaps, for an academic Sharrett omits one possibility, in a way the obverse of his first sense of ‘author’. A reader, particularly a student, may occupy an almost contractual position in constructing a text, as when preparing for an examination.

As if this situation were not sufficiently complicated, the text that results from any particular reading must not be seen as necessarily final and unchangeable. Common experience should remind us that, after re-reading some book or passage, we often make some such remark as ‘It seemed different the second time through’. Meaning changes through time – in the short term because we appreciate nuances not perceived in a first reading and in the longer term because we or later readers bring a different set of expectations to a second reading. Tom Brown read in 1857 resulted in one text; in 1910, after Stalky and Co. had been written and became public knowledge and after important political and economic changes, it was read in a totally different way; and today in a radically altered milieu the text is wholely different again.

Genres and change

The contemporary relations of expectations include within their structure those genres presently acceptable to authors, middlemen and readers – all know what a thriller is, though all may not hold the same view and such disagreement is one possible cause of change. There is some, but comparatively little room for manoeuvre within the present definition of any genre. Whatever changes will occur will be small and will not cause change to the groups involved in the particular genre concerned. Slow change may take place if all the acceptable minor changes occur at one end of the range of tolerance. This is what has happened over the last century in the case of the novel; there has rarely been a major change, but a whole series of minor changes, all acceptable within current expectations, has meant that Murdoch, Amis and Fowles have in some sense replaced Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope as contemporary literary exemplars. Styles used, material presented, and moral values upheld have all shifted totally over the period. But major and more sudden shifts have also occurred. For example, during the last part of the nineteenth century the influence of such French realist novelists as Zola affected writing throughout the western world. Quite major changes in content and manner were or became acceptable relatively quickly. The question to be answered really is: how much and what will the reading public tolerate? What are their bounds of tolerance?

This question can be considered using Williams’s (1977) terms: the ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’. The residual is that set of expectations formed in the past, but still active in the present; included here are the definitions of what various genres are. Inasmuch as those with political power succeed in preserving the residual hegemony exists and the place of any genre in ensuring hegemony merits attention, since those ruling a country may wish to support or eliminate a given genre because of their view about its political significance. This may particularly be the case where the genre under consideration is read by children, since political socialisation into the status quo is often seen as an important function of childhood. The resultant culture will not only be the dominant one, but will also influence the form of any counterculture, in that the latter will be presented as an attack on the former.

By ‘emergent’ Williams refers to the creation of new relations of expectations which challenge the residual. The term tends to be used to cover two situations. First, there is the emergence of new ideas that are acceptable within the present set of expectations without any major change, the situation referred to above, when change occurs within the present range of tolerance. Second, there is the creation of really new ideas that require some shift in the relations of expectations. In this study emergent will only be used to cover this second meaning. Once such emergent ideas have been accepted they do, however, become part of the normally learnt expectations. In short, they become residual. Brecht’s dramatic innovations, developed in the 1930s, imported to Britain in the 1950s, are now no longer emergent.

Such changes, rooted in literature, can, as was the intention with Brecht and as was perhaps the case, lead to questioning of the political status quo. ‘Literature, to a greater or lesser degree, “rocks” the solidity of ideology, revealing the fault lines or fissures’ (Bennett, 1979:126). This may be because of the invention of new forms or because a writer uses the old forms to mock at the status quo. Satire is, indeed, a very strong instrument for change, since revolutionary ideas can be presented in a form that has some chance of being acceptable. Yet new ideas and new forms have still to be accepted into the operative relations of expectations if change, whether hegemonic or anti-hegemonic in nature, is to result. What makes for this acceptability is little explored and in this case study attention must be given to what may be called prefigurative authors, those authors whose ideas or forms, though new in themselves, were yet not too far different from the residual that they had no chance of becoming emergent. A case will be made out here that such authors play a very real part in creating and standardising a genre.

Method

Genres come and go. In Elizabethan times drama took the form of verse plays. This has not been the case for more than two centuries, despite attempts by a number of writers, including Eliot and Fry, to revive this genre. The picaresque story, born in seventeenth-century Spain, has also disappeared, though elements of this genre appear in contemporary works. In the nineteenth-century narrative poems, for example, those by Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson, were popular; today poems tend to be short, metaphoric and without any particular story. In other words, genres are born, live – well or with difficulty – and die. They have biographies.

In this study we shall examine the birth, life and death, that is, the biography of the boys’ school story. The accepted version of the biography of this minor literary genre is that it was born, suddenly and apparently without parents, with the publication in 1857 of Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, following which there was a flood of similar school stories. Ultimately, this popular view holds, these stories became much more easily available in such weekly magazines as the Magnet and the Gem. According to this version of the biography of the genre there is no end, although there is no doubt that school stories for boys are rarely published today, and that the Magnet and the Gem ceased publication by 1940 and no similar magazine has taken their place.

Briefly, then, the historical picture will be presented in some detail in five stages. First, the roots of Tom Brown’s Schooldays will be sought in previous literature for adults and children; because there we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The problem and the approach
• 2 Precursors of Tom Brown and Eric
• 3 Tom Brown and Eric
• 4 The 1860s to the early 1880s
• 5 Talbot Baines Reed: the genre defined
• 6 Social structural supports
• 7 Exemplars of change
• 8 Change, 1890–1930
• 9 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index