Volume 34, Number 20 · December 17, 1987
Fun While It Lasted
By John Bayley
The Neo-pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth
by Paul Delany
The Free Press, 270 pp., $24.95
The British public school, which as everyone knows is really a private school, grew out of the grammar schools, those admirable and ancient places where an excellent formal education was given to promising children of the locality, rich and poor alike. They were charitable institutions, endowed by local merchants and gentry. The young Shakespeare attended grammar school at Stratford, of which his father, who afterward went bankrupt, had been a minor benefactor. But in the nineteenth century, amid all the strains of a new industrial society, the status and function of these schools underwent a radical change. They became upwardly mobile, in the direst sense, extracting comparatively large fees from pupils no longer local and deserving, and at the same time they strove to give themselves a new and artificial image, patriotic, clean-limbed, and high-minded.
Review, 3085 words
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