Fr om Morality to Mayhem, by Julian Lovelock reviewed by David Warnes

You’re an awful preacher, Matron…

David Warnes reviews …. From Morality to Mayhem: The Fall and Rise of the English School Story by Julian Lovelock The Lutterworth Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-7188-9540-2

From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, boarding school stories have attracted a readership well beyond the minority of children who have experienced boarding education. In From Morality to Mayhem: the Fall and Rise of the English School Story, Julian Lovelock identifies the tropes that have sustained the genre and the innovations which have refreshed it. The title of this review, a remark made without ironic intent by a pupil in Enid Blyton’s Last Term at Malory Towers, raises the question of why fiction characterised by ‘…repeated pronouncements of how children should behave and life should be lived’ proved so popular. As Matron’s interlocutor adds: ‘…I can’t think why I like you.’ Yet like them children did and still do. The extensive output of Elinor Brent-Dyer, Angela Brazil, Frank Richards, Anthony Buckeridge and Blyton herself, and the massive sales of J.K. Rowling’s books attest to their popularity.

The preachiness of Blyton’s writing is much more obvious to adult readers than to children, and far less explicit than some of the school stories of the high Victorian era. F.W. Farrar’s Eric or Little by Little (1858) had a short-lived vogue but by 1899, when Stalky & Co was published, Kipling has Beetle, the character through whom he speaks most directly to the reader, insisting that ‘…we ain’t goin’ to have any beastly Erickin’. Lovelock writes perceptively about Farrar’s novel, in which he discerns writing of ‘extraordinary power’. He suggests that the book is ‘…a glorious failure…What remains problematic is how far a school story, written initially for children, is a suitable setting for a cosmic tug of war’; a challenge which J.K. Rowling took up in the late 20th century, only to be condemned by conservative evangelicals who could not see beyond the broomsticks and spells to the themes of love, sacrifice, redemption and forgiveness.

The Stalky stories are an interesting mix of mayhem and an imperial code very different from the Evangelical theology of Farrar or the Muscular Christianity advocated by Thomas Hughes, though not by Dr Arnold. Lovelock makes clear that the rise in the popularity of the school story in the first half of the 20th century was in part possible because writers were no

longer trying to convey a religious message. God is absent from the worlds of Billy and Bessy Bunter and ‘…is only allowed a single embarrassed appearance’ in Dorita Fairlie-Bruce’s 1921 novel Dimsie Moves Up .

The appeal of boarding school stories to those with no experience of boarding school life is difficult to pin down. They may, as in the fiction of Brent-Dyer and Buckeridge, afford opportunities for children to imagine life away from their parents and to see it as an attractive prospect. Both the Chalet School and Linbury Court are pleasant and predictable environments, where friendships are formed and mishaps are safely navigated. In contrast to that, the ‘distancing journey from home to the different world of school’ is a prelude to adventure and serious challenges both for Tom Brown in the Tally-Ho coach to Rugby and for Harry Potter in the Hogwarts Express.

Lovelock’s coverage is near-comprehensive and includes the relatively small number of stories set in day schools and some mention of books intended for adults that are wholly or partly set in schools. Given the vast numbers of school stories published in the past century and a half, he wisely gives the reader an overview of the various sub-genres he identifies and writes in greater detail about a relatively small number of works. One of the sub-genres is the Anti-School Story, and he perceptively explores William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Giles Cooper’s Unman, Wittering and Zigo.

He finds merit in books whose titles sound unpromising, including Dimsie Moves Up. Dimsie and her friends are in revolt against Soppism, the sentimentality that abounds at their school. Josephine Elder went further. Her 1929 novel Evelyn Finds Herself is characterised by Lovelock as ‘an antiSoppist story’ in which the ‘raves’ and ‘grand passions’ to be found in some of the novels of Angela Brazil are eschewed. The Labouchere Amendment of 1885 meant that Alec Waugh’s allusions to the fleeting homosexual relationships between pupils in a boys’ boarding school in The Loom of Youth (1917) caused considerable outrage, whereas Brazil’s inclusion of two romantically attached girls named Lesbia and Regina in Loyal to the School (1921) was more acceptable, a reviewer in

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The Times Literary Supplement judging that ‘Lesbia’s struggles to subdue her ardent impulses are sympathetically handled.’ Feminists deplored Brazil’s work. In 1936 the High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School threatened to burn her entire output.

The Loom of Youth ends conventionally enough with its hero enjoying a triumphant innings in the house match final. In the majority of school stories, games (whether Rugby, Cricket, Hockey or Quidditch) feature far more prominently than learning in the classroom or the laboratory. The absorption of knowledge and its relationship to the development of character are harder to capture, though Kipling managed it in his short story Regulus (1917) in which, at the end of a Latin lesson, Beetle, who has hitherto regarded the teacher Mr King as an authority figure to be mocked, observes: ‘When King’s really on tap he’s an interestin’ dog.’

One of the strengths of Lovelock’s book is that he links the fall and rise of the school story to changes in society and developments in education. Improvements in secondary education in the second half of the twentieth century and the transformation of boarding schools into more civilized and humane places might have meant the end of the school story, but this has turned out to be ‘not quite the case’ and ‘what has undoubtedly been lost in quantity has more than been made up for in quality.’

Some recent examples have been firmly rooted in the real world, notably Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer (1970) by K.M. Peyton, whose anti-hero ‘comes from a dysfunctional working-class family’. Others, notably Jill Murphy and J.K. Rowling, introduced elements of magic and fantasy and were able to write engagingly about teaching and learning because they describe a curriculum very different from that experienced by their readers. Though Rowling’s writing is, as Lovelock says, ‘very much in the tradition of the conventional school story’, it is not as conservative as critics, including Anthony Holden, have suggested. Rowling questions the privileges conferred by

Feature private education to a greater extent than her predecessors. Her wizards and witches have powers denied to the rest of the population, the Muggles, and the ethical issues this raises are central to the stories. Hermione Granger, herself Muggle-born, is an outspoken champion of the underprivileged and quick to condemn racism and elitism.

Dream fulfilled

Talented artist Anya Butler from Bromsgrove School is over the moon after receiving an offer from the University she has always dreamed of attending.

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‘I discovered the school after finding out about alumnus Alex Hirsch, the creator of my favourite TV show, Gravity Falls’ said Anya. ‘In the future I’d love to create my own animated TV show for kids. My ultimate goal is to inspire a generation of children to be kind and creative. It’s been five years since I’ve wanted to go to CalArts and it looks like my hard work has paid off. California here I come!’

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Others have used the school story to question current assumptions about the purpose of education. Andy Mulligan’s Ribblestrop (2009) challenges ‘…the idea of one-of-a-kind schools, ruled more and more by a nationally imposed curriculum’. At this point Lovelock, who taught at Dulwich College Preparatory School and Stowe before twenty-seven years as Head of Akeley Wood and a second career in higher education which culminated in his serving as Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, reveals his own views.

‘There are national examinations in which the ability to reproduce the ‘correct’ response has become more important than creativity and the unconventional answer risks failure.’

The best school stories are Bildungsromane in which children and young people achieve self-awareness by facing challenges and building relationships. Schools provide a context for that but, as Lovelock shows, educators encounter the unavoidable tension between the need for pupils to accept authority and the importance of sustaining and developing their vitality and creativity. Readers of From Morality to Mayhem will enjoy rediscovering, in Lovelock’s humanely critical company, the books that they read in their youth. They will also be encouraged to seek out the stories they missed and to explore the school fiction of recent years, not least the inventively subversive Ribblestrop, which he sees as ‘in many ways…the most enlightened school story of them all’. David Warnes is a former member of the Conference & Common Room editorial board

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