I hiss about id-fic yearnings for aristocracy, I offend my friends with my kneejerk antagonism towards what I think is the reconstruction of a gentry system in the US, but I certainly get the charm of the stories as a form of relaxation.
I can enjoy it in 's novels about public-school life, which are even more inane than his famous Jeeves novels, and try to be more serious. They partly fail to offend me because there are so few non-public-school-man characters in them to grovel. (A Matron speaks once; she doesn't grovel. Also, sometimes there are professional sportsmen.) I can't excuse my fondness for them, really; I can't explain it, since they're full of blow-by-blow cricket matches that I don't follow at all. They're very pleasantly soporific.
The Prefect's Uncle has the best connection to the Jeeves stories; there's a wizened, jaded-too-young, nephew-aged city slicker who turns up in the train of various robber-baron acquaintances of Wooster. A Head of Kay's is very faintly interesting for the psychology of the school Houses always run by and named for living, present men; the management-by-charisma system is of course still tried by your more thrusting, innovative change-management firms, though as far as I know illicit fistfights wth subordinates are not as often used. I expect those are more relevant to the prefect system as training for being a subaltern on some desolate stretch of The Great Hedge of India or wherever. Stalky & Co. is more fun in that line, though, and more plentiful.
The White Feather was my favorite of this weedy lot for three reasons. First, it has the most plot, because the protagonist makes such an embarrassment of himself and has to make several tries at saving his pride. Second, it has the boxing thing, as in ' Restoration crime novels or 's Amateur Gentleman. This seems to be an older foundation of English manly pride, and more class-permeable, than cricket.
"Since boxing is a manly game,
And Britain's recreation,
By boxing we will raise our fame
'Bove every other nation."
Third, there is science education, although mostly offscreen. The science and engineering sides are sort of respected by the literature/classics characters who get all the traditional praise. There isn't really any science or engineering in the story, excepting a fellow student who conveniently has an auto and can give lifts off school grounds. I had rather wondered how England managed as long as it did in the Industrial Revolution and sequelae without training any of its own engineers; apparently it did, but no-one else wanted to hear about it? Is there a subclass of Scots boarding-school Stinks novels? No wonder the Tom Swift stories were so popular.
Project Gutenberg etext #6877 (A Head of Kay's)
Project Gutenberg etext #6985 (A Prefect's Uncle)
Project Gutenberg etext #6927 (The White Feather)
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack