Before Tom Brown: The Origins of the School Story

The use of school life as a closed narrative environment is welldocumented, and modern examples such as Malory Towers and HarryPotter show the genre's continued appeal. While there have been severalhistories of the school story, especially in children's literature, almost allof them take as their starting point Tom Brown's Schooldays. Althoughoccasionally acknowledged in passing, there has never been a complete study ofearlier school stories, or of other fictional portrayals of school life beforethe middle of the eighteenth century.

In Before Tom Brown, Robert Kirkpatrick traces the roots of theschool story back to 2500BC, when school life was a feature of Sumerian,Egyptian and Graeco-Roman texts written as teaching aids for children. FromChaucer's Canterbury Tales to Shakesperean comedies, he explores for thefirst time the use of school dialogues in the classroom, in print and on stage,and presents new evidence that the first school novel appeared in 1607.Finally, he examines the role of the school story in the broader development ofthe novel as the genre became established through the eighteenth century.Readers will be rewarded with a whole new perspective on the history ofchildren's literature.