Gilded Youth

Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School

James Brooke-Smith

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781789140668
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789140927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last 300 years in Gilded Youth. He uncovers armed mutinies in the late-eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day.
Drawing on personal experience, extensive research and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counter-culture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals – from Percy Shelley and George Orwell, to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson – who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humour, this is a highly original cultural history in the tradition of Owen Jones's The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It.

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION: PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE

1 Leslie Stephen, ‘Thoughts of an Outsider: Public Schools’, Cornhill Magazine, 27 (1873), p. 283.

2 Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the Public School (New York, 1977), p. 49.

3 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in A Collection of Essays (Orlando, FL, 1981), p. 239.

4 ‘Elitist Britain?’, www.gov.uk, 28 August 2014.

5 The case against public school education has been made with great clarity and force in recent years by both David Kynaston and Alan Bennett. David Kynaston, ‘What Should We Do with Private Schools?’, The Guardian, 5 December 2014; Alan Bennett in ‘Fair Play’, London Review of Books, 19 June 2014, pp. 29–30.

6 Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Chicago, IL, 2008), p. 253.

7 Isabel Quigly, The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story (London, 1982) ; Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (Manchester, 1988).

8 Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of our National Imagination (London, 2015).

9 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London, 2011).

10 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (New York, 2008), p. 99.

11 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984). The most up-to-date application of the concept of ‘habitus’ to elite education has been in the American context of St Paul’s School in Connecticut: Shamus RahmanKhan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul’s School (Princeton, NJ, 2013).

12 Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning: An Autobiography (Boston, MA, 1964), p. 84.

13 Alex Renton, ‘Abuse in Britain’s Boarding Schools’, www.guardian.com, 4 May 2014.

14 Joy Shaverien, Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child (London, 2015).

15 Alex Renton, ‘The Damage Boarding Schools Do’, www.guardian.com, 20 July 2014.

16 Nick Duffell, Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion (London, 2014).

17 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London, 2000), p. 36.

1 Floreat Seditio

1 My principal source for the details of Winchester’s great rebellion of 1793 is Arthur F. Leach, A History of Winchester College (London, 1899), pp. 396–407. Leach gives a detailed and spirited account of the 1793 rebellion, as well as shorter accounts of similar uprisings that took place at the school around that time. The report of the Usher who found the boys ‘metamorphosed into serpents’ is on p. 399. The 1793 rebellion is also discussed in more recent histories of the public schools. These include Edward Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion, 1780–1860 (London, 1938), pp. 79–89; Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the Public School (New York, 1977), p. 57; John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1864 (New Haven, CT, 1984), pp. 176–91. The background on the revolutionary symbolism of the red cap of liberty comes from Jennifer Harris, ‘The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789–94’, Eighteenth-century Studies, XIV/3 (1981), pp. 283–312.

2 Quoted in Leach, A...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Permanent Adolescence
• ONE Floreat Seditio
• TWO Thomas Arnold’s Schooldays
• THREE The Secret Life of the Victorian Schoolboy
• FOUR Classics and Nonsense
• FIVE Athletes and Aesthetes
• SIX Red Menace
• SEVEN Going Underground
• EIGHT The Ordinary Elite
• Afterword
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX