Between the two and quite unlike either the popular or the more individual, more ambitious stories came Stalky & Co.

Parallel with their books went a more literary, more seriously intentioned brand of school story, aiming to give a more realistic or more romantic, sometimes a more adult, view of public-school life. His many followers were undistinguished and mostly indistinguishable, and stuck closely to the conventions he laid down.

Twenty-five years later Talbot Baines Reed with The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s and other books gave the genre a recognizable popular form.

Tom Brown’s School Days started a literary industry which produced hundreds of school stories over the next century, all dealing with the self-contained, rule-ridden world of the Victorian – and later the Edwardian and Georgian – public school. The world it belonged to may have gone, but the points it makes still have relevance to ours, and the exuberance with which it makes them hammers this home.Īlthough it belongs to the school-story genre, it is unlike any other school story. That, and the fact that its outlook, its central characters, its ideals and ideas, still hold lessons for us today. is one of the most remarkable things about it. Intensity and exuberance in the hands of a writer like Kipling can hardly fail to arouse partisan attitudes, and the immediacy of Stalky & Co. Yet its supporters have been quite as fervent, and its popularity with the young, that only guarantee of a school story’s longevity, has never waned. If at this point one feels like saying, with Stalky, something like `Phew!’, there are more recent comments in much the same vein – Edmund Wilson’s, for instance: `a hair-raising picture of the sadism of the English public-school system’ – and even today the book can arouse passionate feelings of dislike, resentment, even disgust. … It is simply impossible to show by mere quotation the horrible vileness of the book describing these three small fiends in human likeness only a perusal of the whole work would convey to the reader its truly repulsive character … The vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery … reeks on every page.’ `Only the spoiled child of an utterly brutalised public could possibly have written Stalky & Co. `Mr Kipling obviously aims at verisimilitude the picture he draws is at any rate repulsive and disgusting enough to be true,’ wrote Robert Buchanan, his most virulent critic. Benson’s description of them as `little beasts’ to Maugham’s magisterial `a more odious picture of school life can seldom have been drawn’, the disapproval of Kipling’s contemporaries was made thunderously clear. From Wells’s condemnation of the heroes as self-righteous bullies and A. since the stories first appeared in book form in 1899. Ĭomments like this one of George Sampson’s have dogged Stalky & Co. ‘An unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school’.

Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling