From Brown to Bunter

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 Ta